Sailor Nothing

by Stefan Gagne

Sailor Nothing shows how being a sailor suited warrior of love and justice is one of the most miserable, thankless, dangerous, and emotionally crippling jobs ever. A bitter little trip into the darker side of magical girl anime. (Reader discretion advised due to mature content. Original novel, NOT a Sailor Moon fanfic.)

ebook

First published August 25, 2001

About the author

As a general creative muck-a-bout, Stefan is a professional independent game developer, a web designer, and apparently also an author. He lives on the Internet and is an okay guy.

Stefan specializes in strange cross-genre web novels, blending science fiction with urban fantasy, comedy with drama, and peanut butter with jam. His stories are available for free online, and as paper and electronic book compilations packed with neat extras.

Reviews

[Kaitlin Bevis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved magical girl anime as a child. I literally had episodes of Sailor Moon memorized, obsessed didn't begin to cover it. So when my daughter was old enough, I introduced her to Sailor Moon, and while I still love it and have super fond memories, there are things I notice as an adult that I just didn't as a kid. Namely how messed up of a situation those children were thrust into and how horrible they were treated anytime they dared point that out. Looking back, a lot of the magical girl anime did something similar.

Sailor Nothing addressed all of that, but there was a purpose to the story beyond writing that wrong. The plot was interesting, the characters, good and bad, well developed, the world believable. The author plays with different formats and styles all the way through (I loved the animated chapter), but he plays with them well. My favorite chapter is a fractured narrative that delivered in a chilling way.

I really enjoyed this series. The book amazon links to above is not Sailor Nothing. To find the story, go here: http://stefangagne.com/sailornothing/

[Alexander Yakovlev · Rating 5 out of 5]

By literature standards, this is bad. Really needs an editor. By web self-published fanfic standards, it's a golden classic.

A grimdark Mahou Shoujo deconstruction, keeping the idealistic core (Friendship is Magic) but not the tone (suicide and rape are mentioned a lot). It stands well against more modern takes (like Madoka Magica) but it's still written as a fanfic from year 2000. (SN is not a fanfic but it deliberately tries to feel like one, even going for setting Japanization)

[C Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story is decent enough, if not a bit anticlimactic. The author does get better with later works.

[AN R · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing is amateurish and the pacing is very rushed, so much so that it hurts the intended tone of the work.

[Rory O’Kane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the experiments with the medium, and also seeing into the minds of characters who think very differently. The story certainly fulfills its goal of showing a realistic dark side to being a magical girl. But the ending doesn’t quite explain everything I was wondering about.