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sailormoonProject complete! This also fills the "hostages" prompt on my card for hc_bingo.
The whole thing was inspired during Otakon, where I heard people on two completely unrelated panels say, "Sailor Moon isn't a strong female character because she always needs her boyfriend to save her!" (I swear, that hurts just to type.)
Anyone who's in the fandom at all will have noticed that Tuxedo Mask gets kidnapped constantly. I'm a long-time fan, and when I started writing the actual list down, even I was surprised how long it got. Between the anime and the manga, there's not a single arc of the story where he doesn't spend some time as a hostage of the bad guys. That's not even counting the live-action series. Or the musicals.
(Although even if you've only caught an episode here and there, there's no excuse for not noticing that—while Tuxedo Mask is good for distracting the mooks-of-the-day—it's always a sailor senshi who casts the finishing move.)
So have a picspam of Sailor Moon's erstwhile caped crusader, in all his hostage-being, brainwash-suffering, reverse-manpain-fueling, never-giving-up-anyway glory. If this doesn't drive the point home, nothing will.
"Tuxedo Mask was made in my image of an ideal man, because I like men that I can't rely on."
After staggering around for most of the season without much of a clue as to what they're doing or why, our heroes have stumbled into a sudden vault of truth, memories, and knowledge about their own inheritance. Most notably: Usagi has unlocked her true inheritance, as the Silver-Crystal-wielding Princess Serenity of the Moon.
Pity it took Tuxedo Mask being stabbed in the chest to trigger it, but that's hardly the worst he'll be put through.
Zoicite (the miniboss who supervised the stabbing) attacks again, aiming to finish them off. Usagi's having none of it. She shields her man, whips out her crystal, and lets out a blast of energy that flings Zoicite into a wall.
Mamoru (alias Prince Endymion of the Earth) wakes up briefly, then passes out again without doing much. Usagi, wiped out from doing all the work, keels over too.
Zoicite's boyfriend decides now would be a good time to step in, blast the still-conscious heroes, teleport Mamoru's body away, and follow in its wake.
While the sailors hunt for the way out (they're trapped in a Dark Kingdom building, whose decorator evidently had a thing for caves), Usagi wakes back up. When they track down the exit, Zoicite has been offed in the meantime and Kunzite is hopping mad, so he takes it out on them. With lightning.
Usagi responds by doing this:
(The building subsequently explodes.)
Mamoru, meanwhile, doesn't even wake up. To be fair, final boss Queen Beryl and force-of-chaos-in-residence Metallia are mindwiping him at the time. And he does manage to stir and mumble in his sleep a bit.
A similar sequence happens in the manga, although it takes place while they're levitating against the night sky over Tokyo Tower, and Kunzite simply grabs Mamoru and yanks him away.
Usagi doesn't take it well.
Here, Beryl rewires Mamoru's head and sends him back out into the world in civilian guise, to flirt with and creep out Usagi.
When Beryl refuses to give him up, Usagi takes the stabby way out.
Back in the anime, Mamoru/Endymion is doing unto others with great efficiency, zipping around the world to kidnap a series of Dark Kingdom minibosses otherwise locked in human (and, in one case, cat) forms.
Creeper:
The other sailors track him down, punch him out a few times, distract, bluff, and eventually rescue (most of) the hostages. Now it's down to Mamoru.
Usagi whips out the Power of Love and blasts him with it. It hurts—she knew it would—but that's a price she's willing to pay.
It even works. Briefly. Then the Dark Kingdom snatches him back, and Beryl sticks him in the brainwashing chamber for a fresh round of mindwiping. Such is life, when you're Mamoru.
(He'll get better. Eventually.)
In a disturbingly Oedipal tale of jealousy, manipulation, and time travel, Chibiusa gets aged up and power-boosted by the forces of evil...and for her first act, decides she's going to kidnap and hypnotize Mamoru.
It's almost as if this has already become routine; his rescue barely gets any attention. I had to read carefully to find the panels. It's pretty much an afterthought to the more pressing drama of Sailor Pluto's choice to stop time, and everything that is saved and lost as a result.
The anime steers around this conflict, only to bring us to The Movie, where jealous childhood friend (and wayward space-elf) Fiore accidentally stabs Mamoru in the chest, and decides, quite naturally, that the only thing to do is kidnap him and take him back to home-sweet-asteroid for healing purposes. Yes, that's it. Healing. Nothing else. No matter how much he was giving Usagi the evil eye earlier.
Trapped in a handy giant crystal, Mamoru tries to talk Fiore down. But Fiore himself is being influenced by the Xenian Flower, and having none of it. He's going to use Mamoru to lure Usagi and company to the asteroid, then kill them and have Mamoru all to himself forever and ever.
(Eventually Mamoru's love for Usagi helps snap Fiore out of it, although it's Usagi herself, as always, who casts the purifying blow. And then, with her friends' help, navigates a meteor through the atmosphere. Such is the life of Usagi.)
The season premiere gets an honorable mention in this list, because Mamoru gets shot by a mook-of-the-day's ropes, and then presumably spends the rest of the episode wriggling helplessly on the ground. Poor guy.
He's back in good form by the middle of the series, where he breaks out a special technique (lots of roses!) to distract the enemy for longer than usual. Only problem: Usagi's brooch has been stolen. She can't transform.
They promptly start running.
The daimon, and local hot redhead miniboss Kaolinite, corner them in a parking garage, where we watch Mamoru slowly but steadily lose a swordfight.
The daimon then paralyzes him with spit.
Sucks to be Tuxedo Mask sometimes.
Kaolinite then whisks him off to Tokyo Tower, ordering Usagi to show up there if she ever wants to see her brooch—or her boyfriend—again.
(I love Usagi's expression in this first cap. "Dammit, Mamo-chan, not again! I have enough civilians to rescue without you getting kidnapped all the time!")
After being tricked by a complicated masquerade, Kaolinite tosses aside the brooch and swans off. Usagi promptly transforms and blasts the daimon with her princess wand, shattering it and ending the spit-spell.
Even though it was Mamoru who got to be the hostage here, note that Usagi's distress and relief take center stage. (For the creators, I mean, not in her own mind.) No matter what happens to the token guy of this series, it's not about taking time and plot attention away from the heroine; it's all about furthering her emotional arc.
Another honorable mention to an episode later in the series. You would think Mamoru would have some kind of weapon-class advantage over a rose monster, but nope, he gets tied up like everyone else.
(When people create gender-flipped AUs for this series, Mamoru usually ends up as some version of Sailor Earth. Personally, I think he'd turn out more like Empowered.)
Once more, an honorable mention to the Mamoru bondage in the season premiere. Sure, it's around his shadow rather than him, but it still holds him down.
Our latest feminine ponytailed drag-wearing member of the miniboss squad is Fish Eye, who somewhere along the line develops a crush on Mamoru. He flirts; he sidles up; he goes in for a kiss; he demands to know why he isn't good enough, and what's so great about Usagi, anyway.
Well, for one thing, Usagi doesn't normally react to being turned down with surprise!manacles.
Fish Eye has Mamoru vulnerable for quite a bit, while the mook-of-the-day keeps Usagi and Chibiusa busy. If he had been a little more tsun and a little less dere, Mamoru might not have made it out, at least not without a stab wound.
Instead, for once, Mamoru gets released voluntarily. Fish Eye's "keep him prisoner until Usagi promises to surrender him to me" plan dies in committee. (Though he does sneak a kiss before undoing the manacles.)
The first half-dozen episodes of Stars are pretty much an epilogue to SuperS: Neherenia's last hurrah. She shatters a mirror that sends fragments in the eyes of people across Tokyo, one of them being Mamoru. All the victims start to behave erratically and spend too much time looking at mirrors. By the time the sailors work out what's going on, Mamoru's almost gone.
When Usagi finally bursts in, it's too late. Neherenia drags Mamoru into the mirror-world and hauls his limp body away.
(She's got this thing here, and it's f@#king golden, and she's not just giving it up for f@#king nothing.)
He then spends the rest of the arc as part hostage, part dead-eyed decoration in Neherenia's throne room. (Chibiusa gets there first, but fades away as the danger gets high enough to threaten the timeline. She reappears after he's rescued, to the dismay of many a Chibiusa hater.)
The manga has Neherenia wiped out and done with pretty quickly, and moves straight on to Galaxia. Her first move: murdering Mamoru in front of Usagi's eyes. When you're a galaxy-conquering supervillain, you don't mess around.
She later brings him back, along with other Sol-system sailors her cronies have murdered, as a doll under her control. (I'm not sure whether these are the actual people, or just puppets in their shape. The language used is similar to the descriptions of Beryl's kidnapping way back when, or at least it's translated that way.) For once, Galaxia isn't attracted to Mamoru. She just makes him lick her boots to freak Usagi out. And boy, does it work.
At least, in the short term.
After pulling herself together, Usagi gathers the powers of love and friendship and sacrifice, pwns the incarnation of Chaos itself, restores the lives of sailor senshi across the galaxy, and saves all her friends. Boyfriend included. And with the last great evil dispersed, dare we hope that his hostage days are through?
Okay, realistically, probably not. But let them have their moment.
Meanwhile, In The Live-Action Versions...
No screencaps for these, but for completeness' sake I'm going to list them here anyway.
In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, which retells the first arc of the story, Mamoru is held hostage by Beryl. He's almost rescued in the end, only to make the not-too-bright decision to try sealing Metallia within his body. Now Usagi not only has to fight the big bad, but has to do so while it looks and sounds just like her boyfriend. Whoops.
In the musicals, Gaien Dark Kingdom Fukkatsu Hen is another rehash of the first arc, with him as a hostage of Beryl's.
In both Eien Densetsu and Shin Densetsu Kourin, which tell similar mashups of the first and last arcs, he gets kidnapped by Galaxia for Beryl, whom she revived to help her out. It's a fascinating dynamic, if pretty rough on poor Mamoru, who's being used by Galaxia to exert control over both Beryl and Usagi.
(Beryl is outclassed anyway, though, and knows it. There's a delightful scene in which Galaxia and Eternal Sailor Moon face off, when Beryl speaks up: "Would you mind holding off for a bit while I get out of here? Because if you two start seriously going at it, I won't last five seconds.")
Finally, in Last Dracul Jokyoku, Mamoru gets turned into a vampire.
(There's an explanation, but it's long. Just trust me that it makes sense in context. Sort of.)
ZIP of the full picspam: Tuxedo Mask, Hostage Extraordinaire
Screencap sources: SM Stars: The Oracle / SMR Movie: TinyStar
Thanks to everyone here and at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sailormoonfans who helped me come up with the full list!
hc_bingo.The whole thing was inspired during Otakon, where I heard people on two completely unrelated panels say, "Sailor Moon isn't a strong female character because she always needs her boyfriend to save her!" (I swear, that hurts just to type.)
Anyone who's in the fandom at all will have noticed that Tuxedo Mask gets kidnapped constantly. I'm a long-time fan, and when I started writing the actual list down, even I was surprised how long it got. Between the anime and the manga, there's not a single arc of the story where he doesn't spend some time as a hostage of the bad guys. That's not even counting the live-action series. Or the musicals.
(Although even if you've only caught an episode here and there, there's no excuse for not noticing that—while Tuxedo Mask is good for distracting the mooks-of-the-day—it's always a sailor senshi who casts the finishing move.)
So have a picspam of Sailor Moon's erstwhile caped crusader, in all his hostage-being, brainwash-suffering, reverse-manpain-fueling, never-giving-up-anyway glory. If this doesn't drive the point home, nothing will.
"Tuxedo Mask was made in my image of an ideal man, because I like men that I can't rely on."
Sailor Moon Classic
After staggering around for most of the season without much of a clue as to what they're doing or why, our heroes have stumbled into a sudden vault of truth, memories, and knowledge about their own inheritance. Most notably: Usagi has unlocked her true inheritance, as the Silver-Crystal-wielding Princess Serenity of the Moon.
Pity it took Tuxedo Mask being stabbed in the chest to trigger it, but that's hardly the worst he'll be put through.
Zoicite (the miniboss who supervised the stabbing) attacks again, aiming to finish them off. Usagi's having none of it. She shields her man, whips out her crystal, and lets out a blast of energy that flings Zoicite into a wall.
Mamoru (alias Prince Endymion of the Earth) wakes up briefly, then passes out again without doing much. Usagi, wiped out from doing all the work, keels over too.
Zoicite's boyfriend decides now would be a good time to step in, blast the still-conscious heroes, teleport Mamoru's body away, and follow in its wake.
While the sailors hunt for the way out (they're trapped in a Dark Kingdom building, whose decorator evidently had a thing for caves), Usagi wakes back up. When they track down the exit, Zoicite has been offed in the meantime and Kunzite is hopping mad, so he takes it out on them. With lightning.
Usagi responds by doing this:
(The building subsequently explodes.)
Mamoru, meanwhile, doesn't even wake up. To be fair, final boss Queen Beryl and force-of-chaos-in-residence Metallia are mindwiping him at the time. And he does manage to stir and mumble in his sleep a bit.
A similar sequence happens in the manga, although it takes place while they're levitating against the night sky over Tokyo Tower, and Kunzite simply grabs Mamoru and yanks him away.
Usagi doesn't take it well.
Here, Beryl rewires Mamoru's head and sends him back out into the world in civilian guise, to flirt with and creep out Usagi.
When Beryl refuses to give him up, Usagi takes the stabby way out.
Back in the anime, Mamoru/Endymion is doing unto others with great efficiency, zipping around the world to kidnap a series of Dark Kingdom minibosses otherwise locked in human (and, in one case, cat) forms.
Creeper:
The other sailors track him down, punch him out a few times, distract, bluff, and eventually rescue (most of) the hostages. Now it's down to Mamoru.
Usagi whips out the Power of Love and blasts him with it. It hurts—she knew it would—but that's a price she's willing to pay.
It even works. Briefly. Then the Dark Kingdom snatches him back, and Beryl sticks him in the brainwashing chamber for a fresh round of mindwiping. Such is life, when you're Mamoru.
(He'll get better. Eventually.)
Sailor Moon R
In a disturbingly Oedipal tale of jealousy, manipulation, and time travel, Chibiusa gets aged up and power-boosted by the forces of evil...and for her first act, decides she's going to kidnap and hypnotize Mamoru.
It's almost as if this has already become routine; his rescue barely gets any attention. I had to read carefully to find the panels. It's pretty much an afterthought to the more pressing drama of Sailor Pluto's choice to stop time, and everything that is saved and lost as a result.
The anime steers around this conflict, only to bring us to The Movie, where jealous childhood friend (and wayward space-elf) Fiore accidentally stabs Mamoru in the chest, and decides, quite naturally, that the only thing to do is kidnap him and take him back to home-sweet-asteroid for healing purposes. Yes, that's it. Healing. Nothing else. No matter how much he was giving Usagi the evil eye earlier.
Trapped in a handy giant crystal, Mamoru tries to talk Fiore down. But Fiore himself is being influenced by the Xenian Flower, and having none of it. He's going to use Mamoru to lure Usagi and company to the asteroid, then kill them and have Mamoru all to himself forever and ever.
(Eventually Mamoru's love for Usagi helps snap Fiore out of it, although it's Usagi herself, as always, who casts the purifying blow. And then, with her friends' help, navigates a meteor through the atmosphere. Such is the life of Usagi.)
Sailor Moon S
The season premiere gets an honorable mention in this list, because Mamoru gets shot by a mook-of-the-day's ropes, and then presumably spends the rest of the episode wriggling helplessly on the ground. Poor guy.
He's back in good form by the middle of the series, where he breaks out a special technique (lots of roses!) to distract the enemy for longer than usual. Only problem: Usagi's brooch has been stolen. She can't transform.
They promptly start running.
The daimon, and local hot redhead miniboss Kaolinite, corner them in a parking garage, where we watch Mamoru slowly but steadily lose a swordfight.
The daimon then paralyzes him with spit.
Sucks to be Tuxedo Mask sometimes.
Kaolinite then whisks him off to Tokyo Tower, ordering Usagi to show up there if she ever wants to see her brooch—or her boyfriend—again.
(I love Usagi's expression in this first cap. "Dammit, Mamo-chan, not again! I have enough civilians to rescue without you getting kidnapped all the time!")
After being tricked by a complicated masquerade, Kaolinite tosses aside the brooch and swans off. Usagi promptly transforms and blasts the daimon with her princess wand, shattering it and ending the spit-spell.
Even though it was Mamoru who got to be the hostage here, note that Usagi's distress and relief take center stage. (For the creators, I mean, not in her own mind.) No matter what happens to the token guy of this series, it's not about taking time and plot attention away from the heroine; it's all about furthering her emotional arc.
Another honorable mention to an episode later in the series. You would think Mamoru would have some kind of weapon-class advantage over a rose monster, but nope, he gets tied up like everyone else.
(When people create gender-flipped AUs for this series, Mamoru usually ends up as some version of Sailor Earth. Personally, I think he'd turn out more like Empowered.)
Sailor Moon SuperS
Once more, an honorable mention to the Mamoru bondage in the season premiere. Sure, it's around his shadow rather than him, but it still holds him down.
Our latest feminine ponytailed drag-wearing member of the miniboss squad is Fish Eye, who somewhere along the line develops a crush on Mamoru. He flirts; he sidles up; he goes in for a kiss; he demands to know why he isn't good enough, and what's so great about Usagi, anyway.
Well, for one thing, Usagi doesn't normally react to being turned down with surprise!manacles.
Fish Eye has Mamoru vulnerable for quite a bit, while the mook-of-the-day keeps Usagi and Chibiusa busy. If he had been a little more tsun and a little less dere, Mamoru might not have made it out, at least not without a stab wound.
Instead, for once, Mamoru gets released voluntarily. Fish Eye's "keep him prisoner until Usagi promises to surrender him to me" plan dies in committee. (Though he does sneak a kiss before undoing the manacles.)
Sailor Moon Sailor Stars
The first half-dozen episodes of Stars are pretty much an epilogue to SuperS: Neherenia's last hurrah. She shatters a mirror that sends fragments in the eyes of people across Tokyo, one of them being Mamoru. All the victims start to behave erratically and spend too much time looking at mirrors. By the time the sailors work out what's going on, Mamoru's almost gone.
When Usagi finally bursts in, it's too late. Neherenia drags Mamoru into the mirror-world and hauls his limp body away.
(She's got this thing here, and it's f@#king golden, and she's not just giving it up for f@#king nothing.)
He then spends the rest of the arc as part hostage, part dead-eyed decoration in Neherenia's throne room. (Chibiusa gets there first, but fades away as the danger gets high enough to threaten the timeline. She reappears after he's rescued, to the dismay of many a Chibiusa hater.)
The manga has Neherenia wiped out and done with pretty quickly, and moves straight on to Galaxia. Her first move: murdering Mamoru in front of Usagi's eyes. When you're a galaxy-conquering supervillain, you don't mess around.
She later brings him back, along with other Sol-system sailors her cronies have murdered, as a doll under her control. (I'm not sure whether these are the actual people, or just puppets in their shape. The language used is similar to the descriptions of Beryl's kidnapping way back when, or at least it's translated that way.) For once, Galaxia isn't attracted to Mamoru. She just makes him lick her boots to freak Usagi out. And boy, does it work.
At least, in the short term.
After pulling herself together, Usagi gathers the powers of love and friendship and sacrifice, pwns the incarnation of Chaos itself, restores the lives of sailor senshi across the galaxy, and saves all her friends. Boyfriend included. And with the last great evil dispersed, dare we hope that his hostage days are through?
Okay, realistically, probably not. But let them have their moment.
Meanwhile, In The Live-Action Versions...
No screencaps for these, but for completeness' sake I'm going to list them here anyway.
In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, which retells the first arc of the story, Mamoru is held hostage by Beryl. He's almost rescued in the end, only to make the not-too-bright decision to try sealing Metallia within his body. Now Usagi not only has to fight the big bad, but has to do so while it looks and sounds just like her boyfriend. Whoops.
In the musicals, Gaien Dark Kingdom Fukkatsu Hen is another rehash of the first arc, with him as a hostage of Beryl's.
In both Eien Densetsu and Shin Densetsu Kourin, which tell similar mashups of the first and last arcs, he gets kidnapped by Galaxia for Beryl, whom she revived to help her out. It's a fascinating dynamic, if pretty rough on poor Mamoru, who's being used by Galaxia to exert control over both Beryl and Usagi.
(Beryl is outclassed anyway, though, and knows it. There's a delightful scene in which Galaxia and Eternal Sailor Moon face off, when Beryl speaks up: "Would you mind holding off for a bit while I get out of here? Because if you two start seriously going at it, I won't last five seconds.")
Finally, in Last Dracul Jokyoku, Mamoru gets turned into a vampire.
(There's an explanation, but it's long. Just trust me that it makes sense in context. Sort of.)
ZIP of the full picspam: Tuxedo Mask, Hostage Extraordinaire
Screencap sources: SM Stars: The Oracle / SMR Movie: TinyStar
Thanks to everyone here and at
sailormoonfans who helped me come up with the full list!
no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 07:15 am (UTC)I find Mamoru pretty annoying, but there is a certain comfort in that. It is so easy to get annoyed with female characters that never really get to do anything. It's good to know that a kidnapped character with a penis can create the same negative reaction.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 08:57 am (UTC)but yeah, exactly.