And in last night's writing...

[Bob Schroeck]

Doug sits down with Luna between episodes 2 and 3 and asks her questions I don't think anyone in a Sailor Moon fanfic has ever asked before.

Not and gotten answers, at least.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Norgarth]

What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

[Bob Schroeck]

What is the square root of an orange? Why is a mouse when it's spinning? Why-a-duck, why-a-no chicken?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Black Aeronaut]

Bob Schroeck wrote:

---

Doug sits down with Luna between episodes 2 and 3 and asks her questions I don't think anyone in a Sailor Moon fanfic has ever asked before.

Not and gotten answers, at least.

Okay, now I am intensely curious.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, this may be cruel of me, but the real spoilers are in the responses...

"... why," I wondered, "is Usagi's costumed identity called
'Sailor Moon' and not, say, 'Tsuki no Kaihei'? Why is it
rendered in *English*? I mean, I'd expect either Japanese or
whatever it was in the language of your lost Moon civilization."

"'Sailor', in
English, and 'Senshi', in Japanese. Why do you need to translate
it ... into *two* languages?

"In the language of your Moon Kingdom,
what does 'tserla' mean?"

why the hell is Usagi-chan wearing a sailor suit
in her powered form? Particularly one based on designs that
aren't much more than a century or so old?

Some notes: A couple Armor-Piercing Questions have been left out of this list, as they would be spoilers. Doug and I are both aware of the existence of and distinction between "sailor" and "sera". And as a disclaimer, these questions and the forms they take are presented as they exist in the current draft of the scene, and as always are subject to change.

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Mamorien]

Actually, that last paragraph's questions have been sort-of asked and sort-of answered by one of the Sailor Moon Expanded authors, Sherlyn Lim, in a little ditty she called Dressed to Kill (For Truth, Love and Justice, of course). Apart from that, though, I don't think anyone's ever asked those questions before, in- or out-of-universe. In the words of the incredibly notorious Gypsey Davey to the incredibly famous Willy Rivers, they just figure the territory comes with the cowboy hat, or in this case the miniskirt.

[Proginoskes]

A response of "…. Why did I never wonder about that? Why don't I know?" would be a great way to introduce a quest to find the answer, but I suspect you've already given our heroes enough to do.

My favourite answer to the last question is that when Usagi transformed for the first time, that action set the base pattern for all modern-day Sol-system Senshi. (They aren't duplicating Sailor V because that isn't Minako's "proper" transformation.) The magic that set the costume did so by modifying a uniform Usagi already wore, investing it with power and authority. (If there were any other male "Senshi", they would presumably wind up with a variation on Tuxedo Mask's outfit; it can be concluded that Mamoru attends a lot of "tuxedo required" events.) Yes, this is a Shadowjack theory.

[Labster]

Is the Moon Kingdom's language written with phonetic characters?  Is that why Usagi can't write any kanji?
I had thought about the last question in my entirely unwritten Sailor Moon/Doctor Who crossover fic, Stellar Companion.  The core idea is that Minako would make a great companion for the Doctor (probably Eleven, perhaps replacing the super-boring Clara), as she's actually spent some time in Jolly Old in canon.
As to the origin of the sailor suit, it's actually a Silver Millennium design.  The Doctor and Minako were going to go back in time to see Halley's comet, as predicted by Halley, but do an off-by-one error and end up appearing during the 1835 flyby instead.  There they team up with a spy in Royal Navy and a local tailor, to fight against the malicious aliens who are hiding their spaceship behind the comet.  The tailor sees Minako transform, and do the "sailor-suited beautiful soldier" bit.  After they the time travelers leave, he gets inspired to make a suit like that for real sailors in the Navy.  Which of course leads to school uniforms eventually being made to resemble the original Moon Kingdom designs.
Also, it looks like the square collar comes from 1830, not 1835, but eh, close enough for fiction.
Give yourself extra points if you realized that the four protagonists in my story would be a tinker, a tailor, a soldier, and a spy.  The Doctor is more a tinker than a doctor IMO.
-- ∇×V

[Black Aeronaut]

Interesting questions... gonna have to see if Zeke can ask them in-story at some point.

[Bob Schroeck]

Doug does the logical thing after getting the approximate location of Serenity's palace out of Luna.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

Doug does the logical thing after getting the approximate location of Serenity's palace out of Luna.

Well, he is a pioneer, don't you know.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Dartz]

Gassendi Crater??

Ooooh, Nasa'd be pissed Nixon cheated them out of that discovery.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Bob Schroeck]

City, white
marble, ruined, one each, almost exactly where Luna's fractured
memories said it would be.  Ironically, it was less than 20 kilometers
from the Apollo 11 landing site.  How NASA and every
astronomer ever had missed it... and then I reconsidered the
proximity of that lunar lander.  Who but my own prejudices said
that they *had*?  I hadn't made a survey of astronomical
literature in this timeline; maybe the city was a known anomaly
on the surface...

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[DHBirr]

 Somebody or other did a single comic panel, it might have been Dan Piraro's Bizarro, of a guy at NASA showing another fellow a room which held Viking artifacts such as a horned helmet that the Apollo missions had found....  (Those guys went everywhere they thought there might be things and people to pillage, rape, and burn.)
-----
Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

[Ebony]

DHBirr wrote:

---

 Somebody or other did a single comic panel, it might have been Dan Piraro's Bizarro, of a guy at NASA showing another fellow a room which held Viking artifacts such as a horned helmet that the Apollo missions had found....  (Those guys went everywhere they thought there might be things and people to pillage, rape, and burn.)

Clearly, those were from the Mars missions.
Ebony the Black Dragon
http://ebony14.livejournal.com

"Good night, and may the Good Lord take a Viking to you."

[Bob Schroeck]

<rimshot>
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[jonathanlennox]

It occured to me today that Doug might also seek to discover why one of their enemies, from before recorded history, is named after Tiffany & Co.'s chief jeweler at the beginning of the twentieth century.

(This is at least one version I've heard of why DiC changed the name to Malachite in the English dub-- they didn't want to get sued by his family and/or Tiffany.)

[Bob Schroeck]

Yeah, I'm opening a whole humongous can of worms by having Doug start pulling linguistic threads -- but they're far too obvious to ignore. I'm already using homophones and faulty translation magic to address a few things in chapter two; I'll probably keep plowing through using homophones and false cognates for as long as it remains plausible.

You have to understand here that this wasn't really part of the original plot, but something that popped up as I wrote as a consequence of Doug being Doug and asking logical questions about illogical things. I'm trying not to let it take things over, but for my own peace of mind I have to come up with some kind of reasonable answer to enough of this that I can allow myself to handwave whatever's left over -- if anything is left over by the time I'm done.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Labster]

I've thought about it a little bit.  I feel like Sailor Jupiter would have been Princess Jupiter in the Silver Millennium.  But maybe some linguistic memory survived, which caused the Roman gods to be named after the planets?  It'd help to explain why Minako was messing around Greek ruins, I guess.  I'm assuming the name was corrupted from the original Moonglish for the planet, "Jyupitaa". =D
But gosh, [[wikipedia:List of minerals named after people] is a list of plot holes for BSSM, especially season 1.  There are really only two ways out of the morass of linguistics in fantasy: the MST3K Mantra, or what Tolkien did.  It's for this reason that I try to avoid puns and wordplay when doing fantasy gaming for precisely this reason (and given my personality that is really hard).  Maybe in Sailor Moon you could chalk it up to reincarnation, or similarity to true names or something?
-- ∇×V

[Norgarth]

RE linguistic homophones, as I recall, the Dark Kingdom Renegades series had the Dark Kingdom inhabitants calling themselves 'Jouma', so when the locals started calling them 'Youma', they thought it was correct, just with an accent.
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

[Bob Schroeck]

You recall correctly, Timote -- that was brought up explicitly in the incomplete Evangelion "Bogosity" story, Zeon Genesis Bogosity:

"Here we have two words that sound the same in Japanese and Shazaarian
respectively. But when we romanize the top one you notice it reads 'Youma'
while the second translates as 'Jouma' but local pronounciation makes them
sound the same. Now this one ..." She tapped the scrawl reading "Jouma",
"... is our race's name for ourselves but due to the nonhuman appearance of
the ... uh first contacters upon arrival in Japan they were referred to as
"Youma" by the indigenous population. They heard this as "Jouma" and assumed
they had been correctly identified. Later on we figured it out but there
didn't seem much point in making an issue of it ..." Particularly, Titanite
thought, considering the demonic creation of our kind and the derivation of
Jouma from "child of darkness" in the original Arcadian. Aloud she continued,
"So youma, jouma, potato, potatoe, let's call the whole thing off. We'll
answer to either and only etymologists bother about the fine points. Besides
with us around youma has fallen out of usage as a derogatory term and
basically come to mean jouma."

Going back one more post...

But maybe some linguistic memory survived, which caused the Roman gods to be named after the planets?

That's something I'm handling as translation. "Jupiter" wasn't called "Jupiter" during the Silver Millennium, but when Luna doesn't make an explicit effort to speak in "Lunarian", that's how it comes out, thanks to a translation spell imposed on her during hibernation. (The spell isn't perfect, btw, as it was based on analyzing the speech of the area in which she landed, and as a hasty hack job done in the last minutes of Serenity's life didn't take into account things like the possibility of multiple languages being spoken in the same small geographic region -- hello, multicultural Minato!. Nor did it completely substitute Japanese phonemes for Lunarian ones, cutting corners by leaving Lunarian phonemes that were "close enough".)

But gosh, [[wikipedia:List of minerals named after people] is a list of plot holes for BSSM, especially season 1. ... Maybe in Sailor Moon you could chalk it up to reincarnation, or similarity to true names or something?

I'm circling around a couple ideas like that, but nothing satisfactory has gelled for me yet.

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

I'll just say that I'm reminded of that throwaway gag in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (during the B-ark storyline, IIRC) about how every sentient race in the galaxy has a drink called "ginandtonic" but no two of those drinks are the same...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Bob Schroeck]

robkelk wrote:

---

I'll just say that I'm reminded of that throwaway gag in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (during the B-ark storyline, IIRC) about how every sentient race in the galaxy has a drink called "ginandtonic" but no two of those drinks are the same...

A propos of nothing relevant to this conversation, I always thought that the fact that every race in Babylon 5 had a dish exactly like Swedish meatballs (which of course was called something different everywhere it was found) was a shout-out of sorts to that...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.