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And the kind of media that attracts fandoms lends itself well (normally) to those kinds of analysis. Mainly, you're supposed to LIKE and AGREE with the main characters. Themes are built around agreeing with the protagonists and condemning the antagonists, and taking the protagonists at their word.

Which is fine if you're looking at, like, 99% of popular anime and YA fiction and Marvel movies.

But it can completely fall apart with certain kinds of media. If someone who has only ever analyzed media this way is all of a sudden handed Lolita or 1984 or Gatsby, which deal in shitty unreliable narrators; or even books like Beloved or Catcher in the Rye (VERY different books) that have narrators dealing with and reacting to challenging situations- well... that's how you get some hilariously bad literary analysis.

If I sit around and hem and haw about whether or not Usagi is actually the villain because she is destined to reinstate a magical absolute monarchy on Earth in the future, then I'm not interpreting it correctly. I can write a cool fanfic about it, but it wont be a successful analysis of the original work.

Specifically, I remember when we read The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. We had special editions of the book where the first half of it was the novel itself, and the last half was like five or six different critical analyses of the book from different schools of theory. The two I remember specifically were a Marxist interpretation and a feminist interpretation. I remember reading both of those and thinking “wow, these people are really reaching for some of this”, but the more I read into the analysis and the history of those schools of thought, the more I got it. So for my final paper for that class, I wrote an essay that basically had the thesis of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. If you have trained yourself to view every piece of media through a single specific critical lens - well, you’re going to be only viewing it through that lens, and that means you’re going to read or watch it in such a way that you’re looking for the themes you’ve trained yourself to look for.

My teacher didn’t like that, by the way; she’d wanted each of us to pick one of these schools of thought we’d been learning about and make it “our” school of thought. She wanted us to grab the a hammer, or a screwdriver, or a spanner, and carry that with us for the rest of our lives. She somehow didn’t expect me to pack a toolbox.

They wouldn’t survive something like Lolita because I swear they’re being taught to turn their brains OFF and be spoon fed all their thoughts by someone else.

Now, Lolita is generally reserved for college classes. But a lot of the rationale behind continuing to teach the "classics" in high school (beyond the belief that a shared literary foundation promotes a better understanding of allusions and references) is that a lot of the classics are built on these kinds of complex readings and unreliable narrators and using historical and cultural context helps in their analysis. (I do think that we should be incorporating more diverse and modern lit into these classes, please understand)

Do all schools or individual teachers do this *well*? No, of course not. Do all students always really apply themselves to the development of deep critical thinking skills when their teacher pulls out A Tale of Two Cities? Also no.

Is the breakdown of monarchy actually relevant to the themes and messages presented in Sailor Moon? No, not really.

So focusing on the Moon Kingdom monarchy and the ethics there of is sort of... besides the point. The Moon Kingdom is a fairy tale, not a reflection of reality.

I’m not actually interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom, you know?

Now, is it *cool* to look at works in various ways? Sure! Are some people interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom and want to explore what that would look like? Sure! And honestly if you want to explore the ramifications of idyllic fairy tale monarchies on the real world, then that’s really cool too! 

But if you are looking at a work to understand what it is trying to say with the text itself, then you need to take some of its premises at face value. Usagi and the Sailor Scouts being the Good Guys is one of those premises. 

And really the “Usagi is secretly a princess from the moon” is just a part of the escapist fantasy for most little kids watching more than it has anything to do with actual themes of monarchy.

There is a lot of value in being able to look at a text from various angles. And it’s perfectly okay to use a text and concept as a jumping off point for other explorations.

But the problem comes when people say that Usagi was definitively a villain in Sailor Moon, or that say Steven Universe with themes of family and conflict resolution is excusing genocide by not destroying the Diamonds. It misses the point of the fantasy. It misses the important themes, the lessons and point of the show to look at it like that.

The idea of a cute talking cat granting girls magical powers to turn them into warriors against evil and getting them killed being evil? Not a good take on Luna, but Kyuubei in Madoka? Exactly this. That's like, the point of Kyuubei- to riff on the trope that Luna, and Kero, and Mokona represent.

just think of the gender spectrum. women dont have "more gender" than men. (agender ppl are livid rn i bet lol)

PTE occupied a full show’s timeslot, but each “episode” was the same half-length episode run twice back-to-back.

One run had the leads voiced by female voice actors, and the other run by male voice actors.

The second run could feature additional or alternate gags.

The voice actors for Popuko and Pipimi changed every episode.

It may be obvious, but remember that it was intended to air on TV, not just online streams. PTE’s first episode starts with a bait and switch, starting with a intro teaser and a full OP for a made-up romcom magical girl idol show called “Hoshiiro Girldrop”. Viewers just picking it up wouldn’t know it was indeed Pop Team Epic until Popuko angrily interrupted the OP by tearing through the screen.

Every episode preview was for Hoshiiro Girldrop.

Literally any of AC-bu’s Bob Epic Team/Bobunimimimi segments.

They got a French animator to create his own set of segments. Thibault Tresca had never read Pop Team Epic before and was encouraged to NOT research it while working on it.

This resulted in the JAPON MiGNON segments, where Popuko and Pipimi visit France and speak French. Japanese subtitles were not provided until the repeat run.

JAPON MiGNON segments were the only sketches where Popuko and PIpimi were shown blinking.

Hellshake Yano

Male pop idol star Shouta Aoi appeared as himself. Also he’s a time traveler tasked with saving Popuko and Pipimi from some great conspiracy.

Earth, Wind, and Fire music video but it’s stop motion felt puppets.

In one episode, they put sound effects over the OP.

The show frequently takes shots at King Records, its publisher and one of the biggest record labels in Japan.

University student Makoto Yamashita was invited to do segments in his specialty of video game pixel art and effects. It was also counted as his senior thesis.

He put in an Undertale segment.

Producer Kotaro Sudo had trouble convincing King Records to greenlight the show. His department head told him every producer gets a sort of free greenlight in their career, but only one. Sudo cashed his in.

Many anime are funded by a production committee made up of various other companies, in order to spread cost and defer risk. PTE was produced solely under King Records, meaning if it flopped, they’d bear the full loss. Nothing a top record label can’t stomach, but TV shows still ain’t cheap.