(transliterations taken from Wiki, as doing the Chinese-to-Japanese-to-English transliteration is a bit beyond me)
Do I even need to do a plot summary for this? Anyway. Tsukino Usagi is your normal 14-year-old girl: perpetually late for school, not too studious, and a bit of a klutz. Until one day she finds a talking cat, who then informs her that she is Sailor Moon, defender of love and justice, or some such.
I read bits of this back in eighth grade in the dentist's office when I was getting my braces tightened; the dentist only had pieces of the series, so all I remember is picking up whatever volume had the prettiest cover and reading it that way. I also used to watch episodes when they were on right after school. Even though my sister and I made terrible fun of the Chinese dub, how much of a cry baby Usagi was, and how boring the monsters of the week were, there was still enough to it to make me look up fanfiction back in high school.
Now that I've read the entire thing, I think it is a flawed series, but I can also see why it had such a following. The characterization is nearly non-existent; the inner guardian sailors outside of Usagi and Chibi Usagi are basically collections of random traits. Ami is smart and likes blue, Makoto loves baking, and etc. When we meet the outer guardians, things are much more interesting, although they still don't get as much time as I remember them getting in the anime.
And yet. Takeuchi has created an extremely compelling world and not fully filled it in (which is why I think it is so great for fic). There's reincarnation and flash forwards, and each additional story arc continues to expand the universe, both in terms of what we know of the past and what will happen in the future. I also forget how female-centric the series is when I'm reading; there are extremely few male characters, so much so that you don't even notice how female-centric it is because female is so much the default. There's also remarkably little about romance and much, much more about wanting to protect your most important people and the world.
( Spoilers for the first three arcs of the anime and the manga even though I feel a bit silly spoiler protecting for something this well known )Overall, the series is both cool and frustrating; cool for all the ideas and concepts, and frustrating because I keep wanting characters and situations to be explored much more than they are.
