scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/3alrrv.md

Has anyone considered what it would take to write rational!Sailor Moon?

• Author: u/Sailor_Vulcan Champion of Justice and Reason*

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3alrrv/has_anyone_considered_what_it_would_take_to_write/

• Score: 8

• Created: 2015-06-21T13:45:18

Post:

I've thought of it before, but I haven't really hit any inspiration for how to do it. Here are the obstacles I've thought of so far:

1. reincarnation
2. uniforms
3. Explaining how or why all of the sailor senshi are female.
4. explaining how all of them are human, including the ones from very VERY far away (like all the way across the galaxy)
5. the sailor senshis' powers, and why those powers are sorta kinda based on the "5 elements" (Earth/Air, Water, Fire, Soul/Heart/Spirit etc, another Water, energy/power, death/rebirth, TIME, Light, galaxy?, "Chaos"?, "Cosmos"? and presumably many more from across the galaxy that were never mentioned.)
6. the fact that there seems to be some sort of connection between their powers and their outfits.
7. It was kind of glossed over in the first anime, but...Spoiler Ridiculous.
8. the whole roman pantheon/zodiac-ish theme going on with the sailor senshi. In fact, I wonder if it might not make more sense for a rational!sailor moon to be a crossover/sequel/rebuttal to The Percy Jackson series.

Both the manga and the show seem to have a significant amount of transhumanist undertones. For instance, in the second season of the reboot anime (which more closely follows the manga), spoiler

spoiler

It would be nice to read or write a rational!sailor moon fic. What do you guys think?

Comments:

u/ToaKraka [+12] https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png (an hour later)

Sailor Nothing isn't strictly a fanfiction of Sailor Moon, but it's in the same genre, and therefore very similar.

u/arromdee [+3] (2 hours later)

I wrote this long ago (when Sailor Moon was current), and it's unfinished, but in hindsight I was anticipating some modern rationality-fic ideas by having Sailor Moon try to use intelligence. Time travel passwords, meeting in Makoto's apartment (the one place they actually can meet away from prying ears), searching for Senshi based on their last name.... http://www.rahul.net/arromdee/fanfic.html

Edit: And I would like comments on it here. Given the upsurge in rationality fic interest, I might continue it someday.

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (10 hours later)

I just read through it, it's pretty good. You really should continue it.

u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)

Intelligence is an interesting place to seek rationalist-esque techniques in common use. Take this training pamphlet, for example, detailing cognitive biases in intelligence analysis and other analytical tools.

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (8 days later)

Now that I think of it, it reminds me a little of Harry Potter and the Natural 20. Also your sailor moon fanfic is awesome please continue it!

u/None [+3] (7 hours later)

reincarnation

Always a tough one. You can go for some sort of dualism, with some people having souls strong enough to survive a body's death, seek out another body, and slowly manipulate it to make it more similar to its previous incarnations. You can do the same but technologically -- Usagi has an implant in her head that is altering her personality slowly over time.

Probably the least squicky involves finding and taking over a moribund fetus, altering it so that it will survive and at the same time replacing the nerve cluster that would have become its brain.

Explaining how or why all of the sailor senshi are female.

I don't recall Inviolate spending even one line pondering why so many capes were male. Just roll with it.

explaining how all of them are human, including the ones from very VERY far away (like all the way across the galaxy)

Your version of them doesn't even have to look vaguely human. It does make some sense to try to blend in with the locals if you intend to work with them a lot, though.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (19 hours later)

"I'm so glad it's just us Sailors here, and I can finally get out and stretch my tentacles."

"OMG, what's happening to your head!"

"Just opening up the cockpit."

FX: * schlorp *

"SO much better."

FX: * screams *

u/traverseda [+3] With dread but cautious optimism (10 hours later)

Dungeon keeper ami?

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+2] Champion of Justice and Reason (10 hours later)

well yes, but that's a crossover with the dungeon keeper videogames. I was thinking of something whose premise is a bit closer to the premise of the source material, even if the characters' choices completely derail the plot anyway.

u/ThatDamnSJW [+3] (16 hours later)

Reincarnation is clearly a thing in SM-verse. We know that it exists, it has to exist to make the story work. So the question is, why wouldn't the Moon Queen have reincarnated everyone?

Maybe she put a magic shield around the Senshi's souls when sending them forward. It might be actually normal to reincarnate, with more magic increasing how much you remember from your past lives. Metallia ate all the magic around, so most of the Moon Kingdom got reincarnated badly. After M gets defeated, people suddenly start recalling bizarre memories of lives they never lived...

Uniforms are clearly some sort of weird alien artifact. It turns out that sailor suits are the optimal form for magical defense, according to Moon Kingdom wizards. Still uncomfortable with them? You have a genius on your team, make better ones! (Or, more likely, fail to make better ones, because magic is complex and you're a 16-year old just starting to remember your goddess-wizard life.)

Maybe women are better at conducting magical energy, across species? WoG says every Senshi in the galaxy is female. Maybe something to do with how to be able to carry children needs the ability to hold the child's magic, meaning that women have to be better magically, which ties it into Tuxedo Kamen not being a Senshi.

Or maybe the Moon Kingdom was just a matriarchy, although that doesn't explain why they all reincarnated as girls. Make some of them magically trans, going from FtM reincarnating or trying to get back to female? Although it might be difficult to handle that well.

Since magic exists, there's no reason for elements not to. Given that the main characters are all Elemental, Elements are probably important. Maybe the metaphysics of the universe mean that the more powerful you are, the more you need to use a particular defined concept. Concepts have to be defined clearly, to make it so that no no-name punk can just summon Evil out of nowhere. Interesting idea: nobody's actually managed to make mages tied to Good or Evil; things that come close end up fucked up in a very strong AI-ish way.

Pluto could have been an experiment with timeline manipulation, but ended up so powerful she could only change time as much as she did in canon.

Divine right to rule is completely reasonable when you can revive everyone on a planet and are apparently the life-support system for the entire government. If that's uncomfortable, you can make it so that the Moon Kingdom refined the idea of Good or Law or Love&Justice or something similarly impressive, that Neo-Queen Serenity is literally powered by Goodness, so of course she's ruler.

A PJ cross would be interesting, since we hear that the Greeks are mainly active in the West.

u/ThatDamnSJW [+3] (a day later)

Also, experiment idea: A Senshi needs a concept and an accumulated amount of mass, at least a certain amount. Create artificial asteroids/ meteors, tie a concept to it, you're now producing goddess-AI on the same scale as Silver Millenium.

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+2] Champion of Justice and Reason (a day later)

Yeah. Problem is I haven't ready the Percy Jackson series, and not sure if or when I'll get around to it

u/PeridexisErrant [+2] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (an hour later)

Yep, I'd love to read one. I think it would be important to keep it within the solar system,though there's a variety of ways the rest could go - it's one of my favourite settings for this kind of rebuilding.

For fic recs, I can't praise Et sidera propagantur ex caldariam highly enough.

u/Empiricist_or_not [+2] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (5 hours later)

Diving right to rule: she's the private key to the prototype Omni-benevolent Omega AI that Queen serenity, who was the private key to the near Omega AI. Though that does lend to a few idiot balls.

u/derefr [+2] (a day later)

I always interpreted the Serenity line as a series of avatar-bodies for a Friendly AI distributed-system (which exists within its present avatar, the Silver Crystal, and the Silver Millenium city, and may bootstrap back into existence from the loss of any two of the three.)

The human being is still there, with its own personality (Usagi), but the exoself/overmind is someone entirely else, much longer-lived. Kind of like a Trill symbiont.

So, it's not really that the Serenity line has a divine right to rule passed maternally or anything like that. It's just one continuous being (Serenity the FAI) possessing a sequence of people who happen to be descendants of one-another. Presumably, if the genetic lineage were terminated, Serenity could bootstrap-reincarnate its avatar with completely different genetics. (Though there might be a fair bit of dedicated gene-code for the latent powers of the avatar that Serenity "plugs into", so any arbitrary successor avatar might have a strong phenotypic resemblance to the current avatar, even starting from a separate base.)

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (3 days later)

This idea seems to have promise, but then what about the relationship between princess serenity and prince endymion, and the relationship between usagi and mamoru? Is mamoru also part of an FAI? Are all the sailor senshi part of an FAI?

And why would the FAI choose to use Sailor Senshi in the first place, rather than some other means of protecting civilizaiton?

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+2] Champion of Justice and Reason (9 hours later)

I'm wondering if the order of the timeline should be changed a bit. Make it so that it takes place in the distant future, after a time when it would be more realistic for humanity to have colonized the solar system and then got wiped out except for the population on Earth. Or I could just make it so that only the Earth has human sailor senshi, and then there are other non-human senshi on other planets. After all, it doesn't really make sense to only have ONE guardian per planet. Also, I don't think Tuxedo Mask should be the pseudo-senshi of Earth. Either make him a real senshi with actual senshi powers and a transformation, or just make him an ordinary person who helps behind the scenes, like Naru should have been.

I don't like how Sailor Moon treats Naru. Usagi basically abandons her best friend to go fight evil in the moonlight with all her superpowered friends of DESTINY. The least she could do is spend some time with Naru and not avoid or worry her so much. Naru was introduced as Usagi's best friend in the beginning, and yet she played almost no role at all in the story whatsoever. I know that in the anime at least, Naru liked to gossip. That could have been played up a bit, making Naru a good source of information for the heroes.

u/None [+3] (13 hours later)

when it would be more realistic for humanity to have colonized the solar system and then got wiped out except for the population on Earth.

After all, it doesn't really make sense to only have ONE guardian per planet.

When reimagining fiction, it's always my preference to build and expand on the world to make canon more coherent, instead of just changing something in canon to become coherent.

Obviously Sailor Moon is a world filled with magic and souls. Teenaged girls are given massive elemental powers, provocatively dressed demons suck spirit energy from random civilians to revive an evil queen, and everything interesting in an interstellar story is localized to one small region of Japan.

So how does a solar system-wide civilization that got wiped out while sparing Earth make sense? Rather than supertech, my preferred answer would be magitech. Soul engines and advanced spellcrafting. And why did all this vanish? Well, canon does provide us with an all-devouring superdemon that exterminated everything. And now we just make it actually eat magic itself.

Why is there only one guardian per planet? Well, obviously planets aren't just big chunks of space rock in Sailor Moon. They're important metaphysical concepts that resonate with certain elements. While they're dead, drained husks of rock when the story begins, they can be assumed to have been very different in ancient times. And due to (asspulled) magical law, only one individual can become a planet's guardian by embodying its element.

Although, of course, all of the above is pretty much just pulled out of my ass. First draft ideas.

u/KarlitoHomes [+2] (15 hours later)

Of the Stars is a sensible reimagining of the first two(ish) plot arcs of Sailor Moon. Definitely worth a read if you're a fan of the show.

u/nolrai [+2] (a day later)

I think the best way to do it would be to have the fic be from /Luna/'s point of view.

u/SkeevePlowse [+1] (23 minutes later)

I'd be incredibly interested in that, but I know I don't have the chops to make it happen in a satisfying fashion.

u/andor3333 [+1] (8 days later)

Have you read saga of soul already?

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (8 days later)

Of course. And it hasn't updated in...how long now?

I'm pretty sure it's dead.

u/AlgaeNymph [+0] (a month later)

The closest I've seen to a rational!Sailor Moon fic is Beautiful Destroyer Sailor Moon, though that's mainly because this Usagi's crazy-awesome genre-savvy.

u/ArgentStonecutter [-1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (4 hours later)

I think it would be harder than rational!Beatrix Potter.

u/PeridexisErrant [+1] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (11 hours later)

I think it'd be easier; there's enough in Sailor Moon that you can go pretty far AU without problems if the characters and themes are recognisable.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (19 hours later)

That Perry Bible Fellowship link in the previous thread is a pretty good start.

And there's always Watership Down.

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