I have a weird, long idea for a backstory that
in my own warped mind could be suitable for a
butchering "re-imagining" of Sailor Moon. The big catch that I see with it is that it could easily lead to something that's Sailor Moon in name only.
On the other hand, it would help fix a problem with the backstory of the original, namely why so much of the action is near Serena and company when it doesn't have to be. Anyway, here goes...
Rather than have the Earth and Moon Kingdoms only in the distant past, they exist in the present era as well, in pocket dimensions. Originally, the Earth Kingdom starts off long ago as a refuge for the magically talented who wanted to avoid being bothered by crowds with torches and pitchforks, and later, several colonies from Earth Kingdom are established on the Moon and become kingdoms in their own right, the first of which is naturally called, well, the Moon Kingdom. Nearly everyone in these kingdoms has
some magical ability, with the nobility usually being more powerful. They also know about the Earth outside of their pocket dimensions and some, especially those involved in news or government even interact with certain largely secret magical organizations on regular Earth.
One of these kingdoms has built up even more magical mojo than usual. Near the present day, it is ruled by King SomeGuy and Queen Beryl, and this couple has expansionist ambitions that were hinted at when they named their eldest daughter Moon. (Yeah, I went with the "Luke, I am Your Father" trick. So sue me.
) Their other daughters are named after planets. Initially, they have decent relations with the Moon Kingdom. Queen Serenity in particular is very friendly with Moon and her sisters, in part because she doesn't trust Beryl, and ends up introducing Moon to Earth's Prince Darien. (Or should that be Endymion? Whatever.) Eventually, though, SomeGuy and Beryl start trying to unite the kingdoms on the Moon by war and become downright tyrannical in the process. This disturbs several of the nobility in the SomeGuy-Beryl kingdom, including Moon herself, and Serenity even convinces her and her sisters to start an unofficial secret group to help undermine this war effort.
The war is tough, for three reasons:
- The SomeGuy-Beryl kingdom can spam their enemies with monster mooks. (C'mon, what's Sailor Moon without monsters?)
- The nobility, including the army officers, of the SomeGuy-Beryl kingdom are nearly immortal. Why? Well, the really good mages developed a trick where they lace their bodies with knots invulnerable magic silver microtendrils that help them regenerate, and the really, really good ones use these tendrils to replace piecemeal their neurons. If someone vaporizes the bodies of these latter mages, the tendrils can remain, containing the minds of the mages. Now usually they don't, since it takes nearly forever for these tendrils to find and transmute raw materials to remake a new body, so the tendrils are usually designed to disappear if the body is deemed unrecoverable. The microtendrils of the SomeGuy-Beryl nobility, however, ball themselves up into a stone inscribed with the kind of identifying information that would be on dog tags and send out a distress signal so that they can be retrieved. These are called mindstones. Once retrieved, they are either put in a new body specifically grown for them, or in a unfortunate person whose brain and nerves get replaced by the tendrils from the unwinding "stone."
- The children of the nobility are disturbingly precocious (think Alia from Dune) and many take part in the fighting. This makes the good guys reluctant to counterattack them.
Finally, the war is over, and the Moon Kingdom and its allies achieve a Pyrrhic victory. The SomeGuy-Beryl kingdom is destroyed, and its nobility is killed as much as it can be, with their mindstones being taken into custody by the Moon Kingdom. The mindstones of the adults, including SomeGuy and Beryl, are locked away. However, as a dubious mercy, the mindstones of the children are sent to regular Earth, outside the pocket dimensions of the Earth and Moon Kingdoms, where they are to be planted in new bodies and live out their lives, loosely supervised by some third-party agents with whom the Moon Kingdom had connections. Why regular Earth, aside from the obvious need to have a set-up for a series? Well, that way, if the children, ahem, "misbehave," they do it away from the kingdoms.
Unfortunately, since Moon's unofficial secret group was, well, unofficial, the government of the Moon Kingdom acted like it never existed, and gave her and her comrades mostly the same treatment as the rest of the children of the former SomeGuy-Beryl kingdom. Serenity was pissed at this and tried to pull a few strings to get marginally better treatment for Moon and her sisters. Most of the children's mindstones were placed almost immediately in the bodies of retired old people who were either in the far stages of dementia or near death, since there
were more such old people and if these "miraculously recovered" old people were suddenly different in personality and memory (because they had their brains replaced!) well, it could be chalked up to old age. The mindstones of Moon and her inner circle were set aside to be placed in near-dead bodies of girls closer to their ages, and this took longer since they had to wait for those in the prime of life to die accidentally. Moon's mindstone is the first of those set aside to be placed, and it goes into the body of Usagi (wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to call her Serena now, would it?), who suffers brain death due to a car accident. As far as the doctors on regular Earth know, she "miraculously" recovers and is returned to "her" family. The mindstone of Venus is placed in the body of Mina. Both of them find themselves unwilling impostors, stuck in a world that they find annoying and beneath them. Serenity sends them her cats to keep them company, and Darien even stops by on occasion to say hello. The rest of the mindstones set aside still await.
Meanwhile, back on the Moon, there are a few loyalists of SomeGuy-Beryl who escaped capture. They had no hope of
conquering the Moon Kingdom, but through magic, they scrounge up the resources to take the mindstones of SomeGuy-Beryl's leadership by brute force, and to nuke the royal palace and several other parts of the Moon Kingdom for the sake of revenge. Serenity is dead, and her kingdom is left in shambles. Beryl is revived, and decides that her first priority is to retrieve the noble children left on Earth, including Moon. Beryl at this point is unaware of her daughters' betrayal.
Ok, end of backstory. Now onto the sketch of the plot arc.
Since this is still Sailor Moon, um, sort of, we still need monsters. Beryl guesses that (1) the noble children's mindstones will be placed in, well, children, since bothering to put them on Earth at all was supposedly a mercy, and to do otherwise wouldn't be that merciful, and (2) the children will be sort of close to the gates connecting the pocket dimensions of the Moon and Earth Kingdoms to regular Earth, since it would be easier to keep tabs on them that way. Accordingly, she sends a monster to each gate to attack schools in the vicinity of a gate in order to make chaos, figuring that the noble children would rather attack the monsters than run away like most children would. Beryl was sort of right. A monster attacks Mina/Venus's school, and Venus tears it apart, thus starting her career as a superhero of sorts. Unfortunately, this drowns her school uniform in blood and ruins it, and so to avoid this happening again, she and Moon modify the uniform so that it can change to be more battle-ready. The skirt transforms into a skort, and a grey jumpsuit envelopes the whole body. So that the outfit still has a half-semblance of style, the sailor scarf is still worn on the outside, with the material modified so that liquid beads off of it. Sorry, no naked transformation sequences here. ;D It's only from here on that Moon and her group resemble sailors.
After this, something half-resembling more plot development happens. Beryl contacts Moon and Venus and gets told to go to hell. As her attacks on Earth escalate, she finds to her puzzlement that she's opposed by her own daughters and slowly figures out that they've been opposing her long before this. The noble children themselves aren't standing still, either, and some become villains themselves, figuring that if they are stuck on Earth, they might as well loot it for power and amusement. Civilian casualties mount enough for there to be bodies for the mindstones of Moon's other sisters.
Ok, end of sketch of plot arc.
Obviously, the story is radically different. There's Darien, but no Tuxedo Mask. The "sailors" are princesses, but for the wrong side. Beryl has some semblance of a sympathetic motivation, and the Moon Kingdom isn't all sweetness and light. The "sailor" uniforms are very
un-fanservicey. And there's that "Luke I am Your Father" bit, which I'm afraid gets way into cliched territory.
Like I said, the catch with this one is that you could change some names, simplify a few elements, and have something that would be regarded as thoroughly separate from Sailor Moon. I wonder what other ways there might be to radically remake Sailor Moon that might be somewhat less prone than this one to becoming Sailor Moon in name only.
On the other hand, it would help fix a problem with the backstory of the original, namely why so much of the action is near Serena and company when it doesn't have to be. Anyway, here goes...
) Their other daughters are named after planets. Initially, they have decent relations with the Moon Kingdom. Queen Serenity in particular is very friendly with Moon and her sisters, in part because she doesn't trust Beryl, and ends up introducing Moon to Earth's Prince Darien. (Or should that be Endymion? Whatever.) Eventually, though, SomeGuy and Beryl start trying to unite the kingdoms on the Moon by war and become downright tyrannical in the process. This disturbs several of the nobility in the SomeGuy-Beryl kingdom, including Moon herself, and Serenity even convinces her and her sisters to start an unofficial secret group to help undermine this war effort.