But that's where Sailor Moon's story begins (the anime, anyway). Our story, the story of Anti-Sailor Moon, begins on October 18, 1992, with a brief Usenet post.

The stage was set on October 17, 1992: The November issue of the anime hobby magazine Animage announced that Nausicaa was no longer the number one in their polls. Who is Nausicaa, you ask? Well, apparently Nausicaa is the main character from a 1984 animated film called Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Though this film was made prior to the official establishment of Studio Ghibli, it's still considered a foundational work, and was very well regarded by 1992--and so the dethroning of what was essentially a Studio Ghibli character in a fan poll meant to gauge popularity was bound to garner some attention, even if it was inevitable. Nothing lasts forever.

But most were not prepared for who knocked Nausicaa off of the top spot, or by how large of a margin:

Enter Enrique Conty (E. Kontei), "the Incredible Man-with-no-Life." His reaction, though tongue-in-cheek by his own admission, can be read as nonetheless genuine at its core: NOTE: We had no idea what an "Ohmu" was before writing this, but apparently, an Ohmu is a giant creature from Nausicaa that looks a bit like a pill bug crossed with a beetle. Indeed, Conty's (admittedly cringey) post reveals an unspoken truth: Sailor Moon hadn't even reached American shores yet, and already people were both obsessed with it, and sick of it, in equal measure. And so it was with this somewhat benign post that Enrique Conty became the first person to publicly speak against the wave of popularity on which rode Sailor Moon like a horseman of pestilence, and like a fish with vestigial legs crawling out of the primordial ocean to take its first breath of air, it is Enrique Conty who we can credit with the very humble origins of our movement.