#germatoid

Three cases where the Sailor Moon 90's anime totally went against the point of what Naoko Takeuchi's manga. One case I like, one I'm mixed about, and one I loathe with every fiber of my being.

Black Lady in R: I already mentioned the thing with Luna-P in another post, but even beyond that one factor, the way Black Lady behaves in the anime compared to how she did in the manga & Crystal has a huge core difference - Takeuchi's Black Lady put her childish ways completely behind her, while Toei's Black Lady did not. The entire point of Chibi Usa's corruption into Black Lady is that it's the dark extreme end point of why she took the Silver Crystal to begin with: she wanted to stop being treated like a child and instead be a mature grown-up lady like her mother. Which is why she punted Luna-P away when it came back for her, and also why she...well, did the thing she did with her daddy Mamoru. But in the R anime, Black Lady is a Psychopathic Womanchild who still carries about her that sense of child-like mischief, still loves games and trickery, still uses Luna-P and does stuff like weaponize playing badminton against the Sailor Senshi, and is more prone to lashing out at her former family and friends in tantrums. She feels like a kid in an older girl's body, and....I honestly really dig that. 'Cause now it's less that this is Chibi Usa's ideal of a grown-up and more like this is how Chibi Usa would turn out if she was raised by a different family - the Black Moon Clan in this case. As Rubeus said, "love does not exist in the Black Moon Clan", and thanks to Wiseman's mental manipulation and the influence of the Malefic Black Crystal, Black Lady believes that love exists in no family, including her original one, so she might as well just live for herself, embrace the darkness and have fun with it. And this also ties into how she's turned back to the light by the family she'd been decieved into rejecting. It's a different but just as nuanced and interesting take on the character and her time in the story.

Professor Tomoe in S: I'm mixed on this because it works on one end but not at all on another. On the end of Souichi's character itself, the change comes off perfectly. We got to know and like the professor through all the little quirks, eccentricities and humanizing personality traits displayed by Germatoid!Tomoe throughout the season, so when it's revealed that he once was a good man who truly does love his daughter and had turned to extremes to protect her but is now remorseful for what he'd ended up bringing about, it checked out. It's completely against the point of Takeuchi's Tomoe, an irredeemable monster who was never a truly caring, loving father to Hotaru and who willingly threw away his humanity in pursuit of godhood, but it works on its own merits. But on the end of the Outer Senshi, this change works in tandem with their own misues and Flanderization to derail so much about their part in all this. In Takeuchi's narrative, Haruka, Michiru, and Setsuna end up becoming Hotaru's real family, as her father had never been a good parent to her. It's important to Hotaru's story that she gets another chance at life to be raised by people who actually love and care about her, and it's important to the other three Outers as a show of growth, how they accept to become the guardians of the girl they know to be the reincarnation of Sailor Saturn, who they'd been fearful of and set to kill beforehand. In S? Haruka and Michiru want to murder Hotaru for completely inane and unsympathetic reasons, do not gain custody of Hotaru since Souichi is alive and around to raise her up himself, and when they do take Hotaru off Souichi's hands for a time in Stars, they prove how much worse off with them Hotaru is because they fucking get her killed by Sailor Galaxia! Moreover, it robs Haruka and Michiru of yet another chance to have an argument with some ideological high ground that even Usagi ends up having to cede to, as in the manga and Crystal Usagi does not want to take any life that is or was human, but Tomoe is too far gone into inhumanity and end up needing to die by her hand just as Uranus and Neptune said. By having him alive and redeemed, Usagi doesn't need to make any hard decisions. and Haruka and Michiru end up not being right about one single thing by the end. And lastly, nothing more is done with Souichi in Stars anyway, so I have to wonder if maybe they should've gone the direction Sera Myu went and had Pharaoh 90 kill the man.

Before Germatoid became an abomination, he was a rogue demonic general and genetic engineer on his home planet in the Tau Nebula, who dabbled in wildly immoral experiments with the intent of creating supersoldiers who would overthrow his fellow generals... Namely, a certain 'General & Head of State.'

"Free"? What about a crossover between the four antagonist organizations of the series?