By lady
Prologue
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Epilogue
PLOT:Due to the spell of an enemy, the sailor senshi betray Usagi, and she runs off to North America....and into the arms of unlikely allies from the Silver Millennium.
NEW CHARACTERS: Ashe, Zach, Nathan, Galen, Drake, Logan, Morgon, Usagi's adopted Canadian parents
LENGTH: 517 words
RATING: PG-13
COMMENTS: Ladies and gentlemen, there are certain fanfics in the world which can single-handedly spawn an entire generation of fanfics merely by being written. Granted, the 'runaway fic', as it is called, is not unique to Sailor Moon, nor is the idea of one's friends turning on them due to a spell a Sailor Moon-only plot point. However, if one must trace the evolution of the Sailor Moon runaway fic and all of it's accepted cliches - the inner senshi under a spell, the revealing of Usagi as an ass-kicking kung-fu expert disguised as a klutz, the aid of a Stu who is in fact Usagi's One True Love as opposed to Mamoru - to one source, I'd have to say this is probably that source. The Grandma of Runaway Fics.
And what a Grandma it is. Not only has this fanfic, considered a classic in it's heyday, spawned an innumberable amount of cliches which persist to this day in Sailor Moon fanfics (the ones I mentioned above are only a handful - child of Beryl, outer senshi come and aid the wronged princess, inner senshi beg for forgiveness for their sins...) but this fanfic in particular - which is really more OC-driven soap opera than much else - gives us a particular twist. For the heroic Gary Stu Shitennou guard from the Silver Millennium who turns out to be Usagi's true love, who is more handsome and more devoted, who gives up his own happiness and life for the sake of Usagi's (and single-handedly makes Haruka Ten'ou straight while doing so) - is reincarnated Canadian!
That, my friends, is unique. None of this 'I'm half Japanese' or ' I survived the Silver Millennium and just went to sleep for a few thousand years' tomfoolery. Galen is a straight up Canook crook, yo, right from the heart of Hockeyvania. (Why, yes, I do deserve to be beaten to death with hockey sticks for the Canadian cliches!) Of course, the Canadianness doesn't save it from the sheer banality or clicheness of the story - after all, this is the granddaddy of all runaway fics. And a rather lengthy one that has a lot of words that, in the end, merely hide the flimsiness of the plot. No amount of flowery language can hide the fact that half the cast is a rampaging (and in some cases) OOC Stufest and the other half is OOCly crushing on them constantly (never mind the fact that they were, you know, enemies?). And the sad part is, this is probably one of the better written runaway fics - which says a lot about Sailor Moon runaway fics in general. And what a fanfic it is....
Sailor Moon and related characters are copyrighted ©1991-2006 Naoko Takeuchi.
