Women to Admire: Sailor Moon
Sailor Moon is a ’90s heroine who still holds up even today, enough to inspire fans 25 years later to fight evil and win love all at once.
If you ask a person of a certain age to sing the Sailor Moon English theme song, they’ll probably come up with at least the first lines: “Fighting evil by moonlight/Winning love by daylight.” (Apologies if you now have the song stuck in your head.) Usagi Tsukino — or Serena Tsukino as some fans might know her — is a Woman to Admire because even now, so many years after her debut, she’s still able to inspire us to reach for more.
Usagi doesn’t just allow her fellow Sailor Scouts to help her in her superhero life, though. In fact, she genuinely wants to build relationships with them. They become her friends, not just her co-heroes.
Granted, it’s impossible for her to be the token girl superhero (looking at you, Justice League) because the other Sailor Scouts are all women, but the five main characters generally get along outside of the cosmic nonsense they have to deal with on a regular basis.
They’re such a good team that Sailor Moon can say things like this and completely sell it:
However, our heroine here is not perfect all of the time. She’s ludicrously lazy, doesn’t want to be a hero at first, and deeply loves to eat and play video games. That just makes her more relatable, and she’s proven to us over and over that it’s possible to do good and not have to be completely perfect at the same time.
But beyond these major steps of good feminist theory, Usagi is literally a reincarnated princess of the moon turned into a crime fighter who battles the forces of darkness. She does not sit back behind Tuxedo Mask and let him do all the work. Instead, he mostly shows up to inspire her for about 30 seconds, usually accompanied by a rose throw or two. (Tuxedo Mask is a stylish gentleman.)
Sailor Moon looks at nigh-immortal demons and malevolent forces who would like to kill or capture her, then fights back, saving the planet countless times. Even when it scares her, even when she cries that she wants to go home, she finds the courage to fight — either from her friends or from within herself.
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And because both are important — because she has endured for over 20 years at this point — Usagi Tsukino, the Soldier of Love and Justice and Sailor Moon, is a Woman to Admire.