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 Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 10:27 am
I found a great article that shows the differences and similarities between Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach. I think you guys will enjoy the article so please enjoy.
Here are the similarities and the differences between Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach. First here is the The Similarities
On many a Wedding Peach website you’ll find an essay, article, rant, or at least a comment on why the author of the website thinks Wedding Peach is not a “blatant Sailor Moon rip-off” like some other sites (and magazines) sometimes say. And so I feel obliged to give my own article on this matter, and here it is. Before we get started let me say the following…
I like both Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach a lot. (magical girl anime happen to be my favourite type of anime)
If it weren’t for Sailor Moon I wouldn’t be into anime an I wouldn’t have a Wedding Peach website.
I actually prefer Sailor Moon but I like Wedding Peach a lot and I think it is under represented on the internet and there are plenty of non-static, good Sailor Moon sites out there – the same cannot be said unfortunately for Wedding Peach.
..okay lets get on with the article. Many people will have noticed that Wedding Peach seems rather similar to Sailor Moon, especially to the Dark Kingdom storyline of Sailor Moon’s first series. I don’t know if I’d be able to collate a list of their similarities with out missing something out, but on the other hand I don’t think I’d be able to make a list of there differences without people e-mailing me reminding me that I’d forgotten something either, so here are lists of the similarities and differences between the two titles, this is all I can think of at the moment.
The Similarities:
The lead is a cute, clumsy; girl in her Junior High years who gets poor marks at school and has strikingly odd hair and blue eyes.
She dreams of getting married one day and fantasises about her future wedding.
She finds out she can use a compact transform into a magically powered warrior and fight evil.
Both series feature similar themes
She is helped by a mysterious man who seems to show up almost every time she has to fight.
At least once one-or-more of her best friends’ lives are put in peril and she has to save them.
She is joined later by other girls who have similar powers to her, much later in the series a girl who has had her powers long than she has also appears and joins them.
She is told she must look for some item/items of great magical power that can help defeat the enemy.
She is fighting on behalf of a kingdom lead by a beautiful woman against another lead by another woman with lots of dark hair and a great hatred of something.
One of the things she defends is the idea of love (The Ai Tenshi (Wedding Peach), and the Ai no Senshi (Sailor Moon))
She falls in love with a boy who she bickers a lot with; he is turned into an enemy later in the series.
The leader of her enemy has five ‘important’ underlings; this later becomes six when the above boy joins them.
She fights “monsters of the day” she defeats approximately one-per-battle.
She learns her mother/past life mother is/was very powerful magically.
All her team mates are reincarnations of soldiers who fought the same evil in their past lives she is not a reincarnated solider however.
Her “last battle” against the enemy commences when she enters their realm to save the boy she loves from their grasp.
Oddly enough in the anime versions of both stories when the last battle is over she, her team mates, and the men/man involved lose their memories of the battles they once fought together and against each other, but in the manga versions of this story this memory loss never happens.
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Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 10:31 am
The Differences:
Usagi is 14 year old, Momoko is 12, Momoko is a least a good photographer it is her hobby. Usagi’s special hobbies are eating (cake) and sleeping. Personally, I wouldn’t call those hobbies, that said Usagi gets poor grades (around the 30 out of 100 mark) but Momoko gets worse! (20s!)
The whole “dreaming of getting married” is a bit of an obsession for Momoko while Usagi dose list being a bride as her personal dream and she does fantasise about it she does it a lot less than Momoko does, plus Usagi seems to think of her life after the wedding on occasion which Momoko doesn’t seem to do a lot of thinking about.
Though they both transform using a compact and with transformation phrases that almost rhyme (Wedding Beautiful Flower!, Moon Prism Power... Make Up!) they recieve them in fairly diffrent manner (Momoko from Limone in the heat of battle, Usagi from Luna before her first battle)
Momoko/Wedding Peach doesn’t fall in love with Limone - the "magical boy/mystery man" (though she is attracted to him); Usagi/Sailor Moon does fall in love with Tuxedo Mask.
Momoko is joined in her fight by Yuri/Angel Lily and Hinagiku/Angel Daisy who already are her good friends when the story begins, on the other hand Usagi doesn’t meet the rest of the Sailor Soldiers until just a day or so before they first transform. Also Salvia is a lot more aloof than anime/manga Sailor Venus (incidentally Live Action Sailor Venus is rather a lot like Angel Salvia).
Momoko is pretty quickly identified as having one of the Saint Somethings, the Sliver Crystal doesn’t appear until about two thirds of the way through the storyline of the Dark Kingdom storyline. Also in Sailor Moon (well in the Dark Kingdom arc) Sailor Moon is the only one that holds an item of immense power like the Silver Crystal, whereas all the girls get to wield something of great power (Wedding Peach is the only one who can eventually use the all in unison)
The Kingdom (The Angel World) that Peach and the Love Angels fight on behalf of still exists, it may be in peril but it is not long dead like the Moon Kingdom. Also Queen Reine Devilla isn't in love with Limone or Yōsuke (which isn't surprising given that Devila hates love), in the anime Reine Devila fell in love with an angel called Etamine but became insanely jealous when she found she couldn't have him - this is a similar backstory to Queen Beryl and Prince Endymion but this backstory doesn't exist in the Wedding Peach manga, and still Etamine was never involved with Momoko.
While Sailor Moon defends love and justice and is a solider of love ('Ai no Senshi') she defends other things too, like life. Her overall mission is to find the Moon Princess and the Sliver Crystal. Wedding Peach is a Love Angel ('Ai Tenshi') and protecting love is her primary mission. That is the very reason the Love Angels are looking for the Saint Something Four, so that they can protect love by preventing the Angel World falling to the Devil World.
As I said before Momoko dosen't fall for Limone, she loves Yōsuke also their relationship develops a bit more realistically than Usagi and Mamoru's anime relationship (their manga and live action relationships are more well developed than their anime relationship).
The underlings of Queen Beryl are all men, at least Potamos brings an female aspect to the group, although she and anime Zoisite (who is rather effeminate, and a woman in the English dub!) are a little bit alike. Also Viento chooses to stay on the side of the devils out of his own free will (he actually hoped he could kill Reine Devila and stop the Love Angels from getting hurt) Mamoru is brainwashed into it.
Momoko's biological mother is an angel and of royal blood (the Queen's sister). Usagi's past life mother was a Queen and Usagi is a Princess. Cerezo is still alive, Queen Serenity isn't - beyond her essence being retained in a computer on the moon.
Momoko is not a reincarnated solider because she isn't reincarnated, it was her mother that fought alongside Lily, Daisy, and Salvia in their past lives not Momoko and while Cerezo didn't die she was separated from the Angel World long enough to marry and give birth.
Usagi isn't a reincarnated soilder because as the heir to the Moon Kingdom, Princess Serenity didn't fight - Sailor Moon was awakened in this life because Luna didn't relise she was the Princess.
The "last battles" may occur under similar circumstances but the battles happen very diffrently, I'd go into diffrences but then I'd have to write about the anime and manga differances of both shows and that would take forever. The biggest diffrence is that Reine Devila really is the "big bad" that the Love Angels have to fight, whereas Queen Beryl turns out to be merely an underling of Queen Metaria who in both the anime and manga is who Sailor Moon ends up fighting in the end.
When the girls lose there memories in the Wedding Peach anime they remain friends and still have relationships with their lovers - partically because they where friends to start off with (except for Scarlett) and partically because they asked for their memories of fighting to be removed, also Mr. & Mrs. Fūma and Sakura & Shōchirō get back together. In Sailor Moon because Usagi wishes on the Silver Crystal that she could have a carefree life like the one she had before she became Sailor Moon all the girls forget knowing each other and everything about their lives as Sailor Soldiers - Usagi forgets she loves Mamoru.
On a final note none of the Sailor Soliders besides Sailor Moon, and Sailors Neptune & Uranus (who love each other) have lovers. This is because they pledged their lives to protect the Moon Princess and are forced to always choose duty over love, Neptune and Uranus are just lucky they found each other within the Sailor Team. Sailor Moon gets to have a lover because she is the Moon Princess and he was the Earth Prince. The Love Angels have no such pledge and a free to love whoever they want.
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Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 10:44 am
I think this article makes alot of sense because I hate it when people say that Wedding Peach ripped off Sailor Moon when I know that isnt true at all. I think the people who say that need to get a life and figure out what they are talking about by doing their reasearch
All right, all right, I admit it; I too was one of those who believed that Wedding Peach sucked. What would your first reaction be to a series that involved the main characters transforming into wedding dresses for battle? To attack-names like "Saint Lipliner Lily Rainbow," "Lovely Operation Tempete" and "Bridal Kick"? To a villainess who rants about the horrors of love and how her goal in life is to eradicate married couples from the planet? "Jeez," my best friend said upon reading a summary, "this is Sailor Moon gone horribly, horribly wrong." And so it was, I thought, looking at the bubbly, pink haired heroine and her cast. It's just a bad Sailor Moon rip-off.
And then I read it.
Rather than a ditz for a heroine, I was introduced to the bouncy but competent Hanasaki Momoko. Instead of a jerk who saves the girls at every turn, I found the reserved, wise Limone. Instead of a heroines who get beaten up regularly and must cry for help, I found girls who often saved their own bacon. Instead of a cheesy, predictable romance between Limone and Momoko, both characters remain only friends, choosing their romantic pursuits in other people. Said romance between Momoko and her main beau, Yousuke, is realistically done; they actually don't fall in love at first sight, but grow to know each other over the course of the first season. And oh yeah, the plot's good too. I hadn' ever been this pleasantly surprised by an anime series, and haven't since.
MANGA/ANIME
This review is made to be mostly about the manga, but I wanted to point out how smooth the transition from written to animated form was in this series. The manga and anime, happily, are essentially the same story, though the anime has filler episodes with added "monster of the day" characters to spread it out. If you'e seen the first four episodes of the anime you're introduced to the manga, and if you've read the first volume of the manga you've got the basic premise of the anime story. One big difference is in the art style; though the girls are supposed to be twelve, in the anime they appear to be at least fifteen. In the manga, until our heroines transform, they truly appear to be around their listed age. A further difference shows in manga Momoko's vengeful side (small though it is); in volume two she even kills an enemy when Hinagiku is badly hurt.
The largest and in my opinion most amusing difference is actually in the girls costumes. When Wedding Peach was designed as a manga there was no interest in attracting boys to the series, so the Angels were put in laces and frills for battle outfits. When an anime was being designed the producers realized that the laces and frills would kill any hope of a male audience, so who did they get to do the new "battle-armor" costumes but Kazuko Tadano, otherwise known as the character designer for Sailor Moon. To have this make sense, volume two of the Wedding Peach manga has the girls powering up to "Super-Angels" and donning their new lace-free "armor" (which still looked awfully like a mini-dress to me). Still, despite these differences, the story of the anime sticks to the manga, and the characters who do go from manga to anime retain their original personalities nicely. If you like the manga, you're pretty much guaranteed to like the anime as well.
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Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 10:06 pm
This is very thoughtful, and although I think it could use a bit of editing, well thought out. 3nodding
I think one of the things that I found a pleasant surprise about Wedding Peach as an anime was that it didn't suffer from the same production values that Sailor Moon did. Being a Toei anime (DragonBall Z, anyone? Super Sentai series? Hello?), it was slated for a long, looooooooooooong run - meaning there was going to be lots and lots of filler and cheap Taiwanese animation.
(Okay, so I don't actually know if the in-betweener episodes were done in Taiwan, but some of Sailor Moon's filler episodes rival Weiß Kreuz for animation quality, if you know what I mean wink )
Sailor Moon tends to sag under the weight of being a daily anime, as opposed to weekly offerings like Wedding Peach and, well... pretty much any other anime not made by Toei. There are comparatively few important episodes in Sailor Moon as compared with filler episodes. And the good animation is typically reserved for those 'important' episodes (such as the one where Serenity first appears, where Beryl is defeated, pretty much all of the Dark Lady episodes, etc). The filler episodes are generally much worse written and animated and serve no real purpose than to, well... take up space.
By cutting the run of Wedding Peach to 51 episodes (as compared to Sailor Moon's 200), the creators trimmed the fat off the series, so to speak. So instead of having character development, relationships, and stories spread over horribly long spans of episodes, everything moves at a better pace. Character development is tangible, the villains are more colorful (hell, the funniest episodes in the series *are* the pointless Petora filler episodes!), all-in-all it's just more *fun*.
And I think the thing people tend to forget about series like these is that, yes, they have similar elements, because THEY'RE PART OF THE SAME GENRE. If you compare Sailor Moon to, well, just about every Super Sentai series ever made, you'll find that the only real differences between say that and Dekaranger is that one has a team made entirely of girls and the other does not. (I actually showed Wedding Peach to a friend once who went "OMG she moves her hands and makes a speech! Sailor Moon rip-off!" I kind of wanted to tell her to come over and watch some Tokusatsu if she wanted to see speeches and arm motions. sweatdrop )
Really, to me, saying 'Wedding Peach rips off Sailor Moon' (or Digimon rips off Pokemon, or Black Blood Brothers rips off Hellsing, etc, etc) is a bit like saying 'the Avengers rip off the Justice League, because both books were made with the premise that putting a lot of super heroes in one book would sell more copies'. Which Americans would never THINK of saying - I mean, no way does Captain America rip off Superman, right? D:
Also, I think anyone who thinks Sailor Moon is TEH MOST ORIGINAL!!!!!!oneoneone!111! animu ever made needs to sit down and watch 1970's Cutey Honey and Kamen Rider, Clockwork Orange-style, until their eyes bleed. Srsly. (I say this, loving Sailor Moon. But even I admit when a series has flaws. Damn.)
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Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 10:23 pm
OOH! I forgot something!
To say that Wedding Peach imitates Sailor Moon in the 'going to hell to bring boyfriend back' schtick is only telling half the story. Or not even half. Actually...
This is a very old gimmick, not even related to anime. It comes from mythology, which anyone who's ever read a Greek myth can tell is part of the root of Wedding Peach.
Aside from the fact that Nao Yazawa is pretty fond of the Tarot (which are pretty deeply linked with mythology and alternate religions), and that she has actually drawn Wedding Peach cards, there are some myths that look very familiar when put side-by-side with Wedding Peach.
To name a few:
~ Ceres' daughter, Proserpina/Persephone being taken to hell by Hades (this series, as well as Ayashi no Ceres, feature an angel that falls into the human world, and either by a trick or by a strange circumstance marries a human and bears him children. Their names - Ceres and Celeste - are very similar. I wonder if there's any connection there?)
~ an Italian pagan story usually called "The Fall of the Goddess", which talks about the Lady of creation travelling to hell to reclaim her lost companion (this is retold in several formats, most notably (to me, at least) Joseph Michael Linsner's 'Dawn: Lucifer's Halo', but this story is repeated in many ancient cultures)
~ the old Japanese myth of Izanagi and Izanami, the latter of which died and was followed to hell by the former (although in this case it was the woman dying and the man following)
Most notably, however, these stories usually explain the origin of the seasons (the goddess of the harvest losing her beloved - or being lost herself - to the underworld and causing winter until their return in the spring). Is it any wonder, then, that in the anime, the entire story of Wedding Peach takes place over the course of a year - the first episodes are in the spring and by the end of the series, it's March or April again (the cherry blossoms usually bloom around this time)?
So really, in this case, we could say that classical mythological influences were undeniable in both shows, but actually stronger in Wedding Peach (which has a Greek goddess as a very important character, for chrissakes). 3nodding
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Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 10:28 pm
I'm glad that you enjoyed the articles I posted.I didnt mean to make it sound like I hated Sailor Moon or anything like that I was just so tired of some sm fans saying that Wedding Peach ripped off the sm anime and manga when I can tell their are alot of differences between the two majorly. I was wondering is Cutie Honey a good anime to watch I havent seen it yet.
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Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 11:07 pm
700 GET!
You didn't, and I know what you mean - it gets a little tedious to have to always be like "I don't want to sound like I hate your favorite show, but COME ON, stop hating on another one, just cause it's similar!" Actually, one of the Vice Captains here, Hiromi, RPs both Potamos and Sailor Mercury. XD So.
And yeah, Cutey Honey's *awesome*. You can find the original series on the web in places, still (I think Live-evil.org put out a fansub a couple years ago? Possibly?). If nothing else, the live action movie is a work of crackish art. Further, Cutey Honey gets referenced in a LOT of stuff - I've seen references crop up in Slayers Next and Papillon Rose (hell, a LOT of Papillon Rose is a spoof of Cutey Honey). Really, it's a classic if ever there was one. 3nodding
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Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2007 12:32 pm
...I got lost in the jungle of words.
But. biggrin b
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Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2007 6:54 pm
Is that a nice way of saying 'tl;dr', Tot? XD
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Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2007 6:58 pm
Well it was either that or
TL;DR~
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Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2007 7:27 pm
That's such a pretty tl;dr~
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Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2007 8:15 pm
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Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2007 8:37 pm
I bet you could make sparkle on Gaia if you can make it on LJ~
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Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2007 9:01 pm
Yeah, but LJ likes html. :/
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Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2007 11:47 pm
You can link images!
Well...
Okay, so I admit I have no idea how one goes about doing the sparkle thing on LJ, but...
sad
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