Sailor Love (GLBT March mini-challenge)

For the March mini-challenge of the GLBT Challenge instead of reading and reviewing a manga dealing with that subject I've decided to talk about one of my favorite series of all time, Sailor Moon, and the relationship between Sailor Neptune and Sailor Urnaus.

In both the anime and the manga, as civilians Mirchiru (Michelle US) is a very girly and beautiful musician and Haruka (Amara US) is an androgynous race car driver.  Everyone who meets Haruka thinks she is a boy and it leads to some confusion and hilarity especially when Usagi (Serena) and Minako first meet them.  In the manga and in the Japanese anime, it is established that they are in a relationship with each other.  There are many moments, some funny, some very touching, to establish their relationship.  It is taken as natural and normal.  They obviously love each other and they have the most mature of the relationships shown in Sailor Moon.

When it came time to dub their episodes in the United States in 2000, however, their relationship was changed to "cousins" since it was believed that a lesbian relationship would not be acceptable for a children's cartoon even though there is nothing overt about their relationship other than some hand holding and a little "couple" talk.  This made for some very interesting changes especially in the episode with the love challenge which was changed to the friendship challenge with only male/female couples besides Michelle and Amara.  It also made the animation seem off since they would talk about one thing, but the images invoked a different sort of tone.  There were also many changes of Haruka flirting with Usagi where Amara would say something about flirting with Darien (Mamoru) in order to make her "straight."  It was a ridiculous change.  I doubt that they would include the relationship if they re-dubbed the series, but I would hope they wouldn't make them cousins because it is just creepy.

The Dreaming

When twins Jeanie and Amber are sent to Greenwich Private College in Australia, they expect it will be a regular school. Things quickly turn creepy as the sisters are told to pretend they are not twins and start dreaming the same dreams.  As they delved further into the history of the school and the rumors of haunting and missing girls, the twins start to realize that the key might be in their dreams.

Bought to my attention by Amanda who did not like the first one

I went ahead and read all three since manga are short and it's only a three part series.  This is some creepy stuff right here.  The first volume is the introduction to the story with one of the twins getting weirded out right away at their new boarding school.  Then they have the same dream about the bushland that surrounds the school and girls with knifes.  The second and third volume give more history of the school and the disappearances that have happened over the years with the very creepy back story of the vice-principal.  At first, it seemed that the story was going to devolve into some lame fairy tale, but then it takes a sharp turn at what? and then stops at nightmarish so I was actually somewhat surprised at the end.  Though there was a storyline that feels like it was dropped somewhere along the way and I'm not quite sure what happened there at the end.

As far the artwork, it is typical manga style although with more creepy eyes than I have read before.  I had some trouble with who was who until I realized that Jeanie always has a ponytail and then I got it.  I think it is hard to draw twins and not have confusion though.  The art really did add to the overall effect the story was going for and the paintings inside of the school were majorly horrible (like in scary, not in poorly drawn or anything).