08 - Family (partial)

PRETTY SOLDIER SAILOR MOON © NAOKO TAKEUCHI


This is a lineart I submitted looking for critique and it cannot be used in any way.

The first arc of this project, the one dedicated to ‘Sailor Moon’, is almost done!
This is the second to last tribute and it is for Setsuna Meiou, Haruka Tenou, Michiru Kaiou and Hotaru Tomoe as a group of Guests; in other words, baby Hotaru’s all-female family as it appears in Naoko Takeuchi’s manga.

The first thing I thought when this family was created in the manga was ‘But when was this manga made?’ because I found it very... well, very modern. Even nowadays there are so many people that do not accept homosexual couples that a female threesome of a lesbian teen couple and a grown-up woman living together and raising an adopted baby girl as some kind of ‘marriage of three’ (matching rings included) was sort of eye-catching.

These Guests were brought up in order to talk about the concept of family. It is a very simple concept, though: a family is a group of people who love and take care of each other
For example, these are a woman and two teens in love that are comrades in arms and decide to take over an orphan girl who is destined to become a new comrade; there’s love, caring and commitment, thus they are a family. Haruka and Michiru, that were girlfriends, were already a kind of family – there’s no need of marrying or having/raising kids to become a family. Not of romantic feelings either: close friends are family, too.

But every single time that the subject of ‘family’ is brought up, the Church and its cry-babies try to dictate what is a family and what is not – since here in Spain we’re still like that, I suppose that in other countries they’re just as annoying as they are here, and I do not even want to think about the USA. Well, Christians can dictate how Christian families should be if they like, but they do not own the word nor the concept either, so they should shut the hell up when they are out of their churches – families are about love, not about taking other people’s rights away just because someone reading a probably biased translation of an about 4,000-year-old book out of its original context wants so. Seriously
And since it goes along with the subject of family in the legal level, I also have to remark that Christians do not own the concept of marriage nor the word ‘marriage’ either – and let alone since the civil marriage exists.

The drawing is supposed to be a photo of the newborn family of the Outer Senshi right after they moved to their new home; it is sort of the Outer version of Girls Are Sparks, with the four of them dressed as civilians in colours as close as possible to those of their battle uniforms, but these have their hair and eyes in their unnatural original colours, since they are supposed to be those of the manga.
From left to right, there are Michiru in a sailor dress and with her hair in a mess because it was so fucking difficult to draw correctly, Setsuna with a traditional-mom look holding baby Hotaru in a very short dress and a diaper, and Haruka in T-shirt and jeans that looks a lot like a guy although I really tried her to look like the girl she is – c’mon, I dress exactly like her with half of her breast-size and I do not look that manly, what’s wrong with her there? It was very, very, VERY difficult to fit four characters interacting, so please, give me some critique on anatomy. Comments about the subject or about the general composition are welcome too.

By the way, lately I’ve been bashing Naoko Takeuchi a lot for being such a poor (and sometimes, just bad) author. Maybe I should also say how much I admire her as a drafter and as a colorist. Seriously, her works are great, amazing, astonishing And after spending three days to draw this, I see her more-than-ten-character compositions in a new way – it is not as easy as it looks like.
But she’s a horrible author. Not a so-so one, but almost one of the ‘My Immortal’ kind.

_{Note: if I am not wrong, Haruka is what some people call ‘bigender’, but since that stuff makes absolutely no sense for me, I’m just skipping it. Takeuchi, as the horrible author she is, forgot soon about the ‘Haruka is male and female’ – I guess it was too complicated for her to keep up – so I consider her a woman. Period.}

I’M LOOKING FORWARD FOR YOUR CRITIQUE AND YOUR CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK

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_{Some related sources:
Marriage Stamp (~sapphire-warg)}