Sometime last year there was a group of people in the Sailor Moon online community that went around acting like a bunch of spoiled brats, kicking virtual sand at people, and making trouble. Those of you around here last year know I am talking about Gretchie, Liz, and their ilk.

One of the big things these degenerates said they planned to do was to bring down or cause the fall or the death of the Sailor Moon online community.

Now, if you are a normal person, you'd find yourself looking at that last line and thinking: "What? HUH?" Because in reality, all they were doing was spewing teen garbage about a group of fans that they couldn't affect. It was like they were the wolf outside the brick house of the three little pigs. Not any amount of their huffing and puffing, none of the whining, none of the forum floods, in short, nothing they could do was going to stop the SMC.

So what happened?

It's simple. They picked up their toys and went home. The hive of this group is the website Cephiro.nu and while they occasionally get a new member to join their coterie, they are quietly ranting about school or music, and other teen items.

In short, they have started what I think everyone goes through at some point in their lives. People tend to throw out the things they were into a few years back and embrace new things. When I was 18, I was totally into anime like Voltron and Thunderbirds 2086. By the time I was 20, I was almost completely out of anime. (It didn't help that the Robotech movie was a bomb in the Dallas pre-screenings and the anime market in the US dropped off considerably.)

However, ten years later, it all came back to me when I saw Sailor Moon for the first time. I now have a HUGE collection of anime...everything from the video collection I have to the pictures on my hard drive at home to my activities here. All of them are the activities resulting from a sort of anime renaissance, at least as far as I am concerned.

I have been talking to a person for the past month, and the subject of Gretchie and her gang has come up repeatedly. What I have said, and what I will continue to say is that that group are going through the stages of late adolescence, and soon, they will be adults. Real Life changes people, let me tell you. I went into Real Life as a rebellious kid, and ten years later, I believe I am a sensible adult.

The same will happen here. Let Gretchie get rent payments and car insurance under her belt and she'll suddenly see that all of her teen-rebel talk was all so much foolishness. She may become embarrassed about her actions within the community, and while she may never ask for an apology...that would be too embarrassing...she will however be a more sensible person, and she’ll be easier to deal with.

But what happened? Why did the attempt to kill the Sailor Moon online community fail? The answer is mind-blowingly simple, and it was reinforced on Thursday when I watched Nightline. Starting this last Wednesday and running through Friday, Nightline has been doing a short series of shows about hip-hop, which to me is perhaps just a step over rap, which means it’s just a step over trash. Anyway, there was this group, and they were scheduled to do a gig at a Miami nightclub. Well, the club was only designed to hold roughly 800, and there were a lot more than 800 people in the building waiting to see this group. So, while the fire marshal and the club owner haggled over how to get half of the people out of the building, the group snuck into the building, onto the stage, and gave a 12-minute concert, which apparently satisfied the crowd.

I compare Gretchie and her ilk to the fire marshal and the club owner, who were intent on stopping the show, and didn’t listen to suggestions that the band simply be allowed to go on stage to get the situation over and done with. They just wanted to stop the show and get the fans out of the building.

But the kicker is this. When you break everything down, the Sailor Moon community is made up of FANS…people who simply like the show, and in this case, they either also like getting online and talking about it, or they build webpages, or perhaps a bit of both. So for Gretchie to turn her hatred of anime into a mission to bring down the Sailor Moon online community is like the police rushing into a Tori Amos concert to break the gig up.

Can you imagine someone trying to break up the original Woodstock, and there were illegal things happening there.

No, any anime community is a community of fans, and nothing short of the passage of time will break up that community. The revolution in this case, is a quiet one.

Artemis

(comments welcome - please email me at lunahq7@yahoo.com and I will post your comments here as well.)