Well, it has happened.

I was visiting the Amazoness Quartet's page when I noticed that Guardian's of Order is discontinuing its production of the Sailor Moon expansion for it's bread-and-butter rolepalying game, "Big Eyes, Small Mouth".

This is a continuation of the gradual vanishing of Sailor Moon on television. First, Sailor Moon was removed from the Cartoon Nework, then it was put on the WB network, for a great big TWO WEEKS!

So, SOS is now busy yammering about small things like whether GoO cards will be enclosed with copies of upcoming video tapes, who is producing the 2002 Sailor Moon calendar, the Toonami pool, and a nwe Yahoo club. Gone are the shrill calls for 200 EPISODES AND ALL OF THE MOVIES! (although the graphic still appears on the page).

It's time to face the facts. Sailor Moon's days in the sun are over and done. Barring Naoko's return to the writing table, or barring Pioneer dubbing the fifth season of the series, there will be nothing to add fresh fuel to the fandom fire...a fire which has started to slowly cool.

So, what happens now?

Well, for one thing, the Luna Foundation will stay open! In fact, I plan to expand it to other anime, and I am seriously considering expanding my storage space on Yahoo to accomodate extra pictures and other things. I think that most of the major players in the Sailor Moon online community will stay. They may not update as often as they did, but they'll hang around. Why? Because most of the big internet Sailor Moon sites have become communities unto themselves. The sites are not only about Sailor Moon, but about the people who come and post on the forums and chat in the chat rooms. The more a fan hangs out at these sites, the more the visits to the sties become about meeting friends and less about the anime series that drew them there in the first place.

I think that perhaps the start of new sites might be affected the most. Without the new material coming through the TV screen, there is less of a chance for a person to become acquainted with the series, and less of an impulse to throw one's new-found fandom up on the Internet for everyone to see.

This sort of thing has happened before. Just before the release of the SS series, the Sailor Moon online community had hit the skids a bit. There was some questions about whether there would be more dubbed material released in the United States, and people had started talking about the death of the Sailor Moon online community itself. That prospect had not been in front of us then.

It may be in front of us now.

Artemis

(comments welcome - please email me at lunahq@yahoo.com and I will post your comments here as well.)