#sailor lead crow aluminum seiren you will always be famous

[ladyloveandjustice]

I heard that the 90s version of sailor moon made the villains more sympathetic do you think it was a benefit and if so which villain would you say benefits for being more sympathetic

The minibosses definitely benefit from this the most, the first one that jumped to mind was the Ayakashi sisters. They exist to kidnap the girls and be killed off in the manga, but in the 90's anime they have their own arc where the girls help them find redemption and fix their bond as sisters. It really both highlighted how compassionate the Senshi are and some nice solidarity between women. Lead Crow and Aluminum Seiren are my absolute favorite examples of minbosses who are way more sympathetic and don't exist just to kill some Senshi and then be killed. In the anime, they're hilarous, definitely in love with each other, and parallel Usagi and Rei's relationship really strongly. I'm actually still pretty pissed they gave Lead Crow the only death where she couldn't concievably be revived when Galaxia gave back the Star Seeds. In my mind she's okay though. somehow. Iron Mouse was also fantastic, not like, MUCH more sympathetic than her manga counterpart, though you definitely feel her fear of Galaxia a lot more, but soooo funny.

(And of course, there's Kunzite and Zoisite, icons. I guess you could argue the manga was equally-possibly-more sympathetic to them though, since it actually let them be unbrainwashed and redeemed, but the anime def gave them infinitely more characterization and made the relationship very tragic)

I'd say largely being sympathetic did work for the villains, yeah. It meant they were fleshed out a lot more. There were some that didn't work for me, giving Dimande a tragically redemptive death after repeated attempts at sexually assaulting a teenager was like. what. good. die. i don't feel bad. And Nephrite's whole plot was...eh.

I also kind of like the idea of Tomoe just being a horrible father who stopped caring after the death of his wife like in the manga, rather than possessed. His "villain" self isn't actually given much sympathy in the 90s anime, as they just decide the actual quirky villain was the thing possessing him and they were definitely not sympathetic to that. But Tomoe being a bad dad makes Hotaru being raised by the outers meaningful, rather than like, kidnapping.

For the "main" villains, they tend to be equivalently sympathetic in the manga, which is to say, not very much- except for Nehelenia, deffo more sympathetic in the anime thanks to the little season five arc and I liked it quite a bit. Galaxia is arguably more sympathetic in the 90's anime, but the manga showed her a decent amount of sympathy and didn't handwave her actions as "oh bad chaos magic made her do it".

I think Naoko likely had a set quota of villains she needed to create for the anime, or just an order to create "a lot", in twelve chapters, which is why many of them just show up to die. The anime has a lot more time to explore them, and sometimes clearly picks favorites. So it isn't really her fault, but largely I think the anime's version of the villains, and the focus on redemption, was better.