Aitenshi Wedding Peach & Bishōjo Sailor Moon
- The Similarities and Differences -

On many a Wedding Peach website you’ll find an essay, article, rant, or at least a comment on why the author of the website thinks Wedding Peach is not a “blatant Sailor Moon rip-off” like some other sites (and magazines) sometimes say. And so I feel obliged to give my own article on this matter, and here it is. Before we get started let me say the following…

1. I like both Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach a lot. (magical girl anime happen to be my favourite type of anime)
2. If it weren’t for Sailor Moon I wouldn’t be into anime an I wouldn’t have a Wedding Peach website.
3. I actually prefer Sailor Moon but I like Wedding Peach a lot and I think it is under represented on the internet and there are plenty of non-static, good Sailor Moon sites out there – the same cannot be said unfortunately for Wedding Peach.

..okay lets get on with the article. Many people will have noticed that Wedding Peach seems rather similar to Sailor Moon, especially to the Dark Kingdom storyline of Sailor Moon’s first series. I don’t know if I’d be able to collate a list of their similarities with out missing something out, but on the other hand I don’t think I’d be able to make a list of there differences without people e-mailing me reminding me that I’d forgotten something either, so here are lists of the similarities and differences between the two titles, this is all I can think of at the moment.

The Similarities:

• She is helped by a mysterious man who seems to show up almost every time she has to fight.
• At least once one-or-more of her best friends’ lives are put in peril and she has to save them.
• She is joined later by other girls who have similar powers to her, much later in the series a girl who has had her powers long than she has also appears and joins them.
• She is told she must look for some item/items of great magical power that can help defeat the enemy.
• She is fighting on behalf of a kingdom lead by a beautiful woman against another lead by another woman with lots of dark hair and a great hatred of something.
• One of the things she defends is the idea of love (The Ai Tenshi (Wedding Peach), and the Ai no Senshi (Sailor Moon))
• She falls in love with a boy who she bickers a lot with; he is turned into an enemy later in the series.
• The leader of her enemy has five ‘important’ underlings; this later becomes six when the above boy joins them.
• She fights “monsters of the day” she defeats approximately one-per-battle.
• She learns her mother/past life mother is/was very powerful magically.
• All her team mates are reincarnations of soldiers who fought the same evil in their past lives she is not a reincarnated solider however.
• Her “last battle” against the enemy commences when she enters their realm to save the boy she loves from their grasp.
• Oddly enough in the anime versions of both stories when the last battle is over she, her team mates, and the men/man involved lose their memories of the battles they once fought together and against each other, but in the manga versions of this story this memory loss never happens.

The Differences:

• Usagi is 14 year old, Momoko is 12, Momoko is a least a good photographer it is her hobby. Usagi’s special hobbies are eating (cake) and sleeping. Personally, I wouldn’t call those hobbies, that said Usagi gets poor grades (around the 30 out of 100 mark) but Momoko gets worse! (20s!)
• The whole “dreaming of getting married” is a bit of an obsession for Momoko while Usagi dose list being a bride as her personal dream and she does fantasise about it she does it a lot less than Momoko does, plus Usagi seems to think of her life after the wedding on occasion which Momoko doesn’t seem to do a lot of thinking about.
• Though they both transform using a compact and with transformation phrases that almost rhyme (Wedding Beautiful Flower!, Moon Prism Power... Make Up!) they recieve them in fairly diffrent manner (Momoko from Limone in the heat of battle, Usagi from Luna before her first battle)
• Momoko/Wedding Peach doesn’t fall in love with Limone - the "magical boy/mystery man" (though she is attracted to him); Usagi/Sailor Moon does fall in love with Tuxedo Mask.
• Momoko is joined in her fight by Yuri/Angel Lily and Hinagiku/Angel Daisy who already are her good friends when the story begins, on the other hand Usagi doesn’t meet the rest of the Sailor Soldiers until just a day or so before they first transform. Also Salvia is a lot more aloof than anime/manga Sailor Venus (incidentally Live Action Sailor Venus is rather a lot like Angel Salvia).
• Momoko is pretty quickly identified as having one of the Saint Somethings, the Sliver Crystal doesn’t appear until about two thirds of the way through the storyline of the Dark Kingdom storyline. Also in Sailor Moon (well in the Dark Kingdom arc) Sailor Moon is the only one that holds an item of immense power like the Silver Crystal, whereas all the girls get to wield something of great power (Wedding Peach is the only one who can eventually use the all in unison)
• The Kingdom (The Angel World) that Peach and the Love Angels fight on behalf of still exists, it may be in peril but it is not long dead like the Moon Kingdom. Also Queen Reine Devilla isn't in love with Limone or Yōsuke (which isn't surprising given that Devila hates love), in the anime Reine Devila fell in love with an angel called Etamine but became insanely jealous when she found she couldn't have him - this is a similar backstory to Queen Beryl and Prince Endymion but this backstory doesn't exist in the Wedding Peach manga, and still Etamine was never involved with Momoko.
• While Sailor Moon defends love and justice and is a solider of love ('Ai no Senshi') she defends other things too, like life. Her overall mission is to find the Moon Princess and the Sliver Crystal. Wedding Peach is a Love Angel ('Ai Tenshi') and protecting love is her primary mission. That is the very reason the Love Angels are looking for the Saint Something Four, so that they can protect love by preventing the Angel World falling to the Devil World.
• As I said before Momoko dosen't fall for Limone, she loves Yōsuke also their relationship develops a bit more realistically than Usagi and Mamoru's anime relationship (their manga and live action relationships are more well developed than their anime relationship).
• The underlings of Queen Beryl are all men, at least Potamos brings an female aspect to the group, although she and anime Zoisite (who is rather effeminate, and a woman in the English dub!) are a little bit alike. Also Viento chooses to stay on the side of the devils out of his own free will (he actually hoped he could kill Reine Devila and stop the Love Angels from getting hurt) Mamoru is brainwashed into it.
• Momoko's biological mother is an angel and of royal blood (the Queen's sister). Usagi's past life mother was a Queen and Usagi is a Princess. Cerezo is still alive, Queen Serenity isn't - beyond her essence being retained in a computer on the moon.
• Momoko is not a reincarnated solider because she isn't reincarnated, it was her mother that fought alongside Lily, Daisy, and Salvia in their past lives not Momoko and while Cerezo didn't die she was separated from the Angel World long enough to marry and give birth.
• Usagi isn't a reincarnated soilder because as the heir to the Moon Kingdom, Princess Serenity didn't fight - Sailor Moon was awakened in this life because Luna didn't relise she was the Princess.
• The "last battles" may occur under similar circumstances but the battles happen very diffrently, I'd go into diffrences but then I'd have to write about the anime and manga differances of both shows and that would take forever. The biggest diffrence is that Reine Devila really is the "big bad" that the Love Angels have to fight, whereas Queen Beryl turns out to be merely an underling of Queen Metaria who in both the anime and manga is who Sailor Moon ends up fighting in the end.
• When the girls lose there memories in the Wedding Peach anime they remain friends and still have relationships with their lovers - partically because they where friends to start off with (except for Scarlett) and partically because they asked for their memories of fighting to be removed, also Mr. & Mrs. Fūma and Sakura & Shōchirō get back together. In Sailor Moon because Usagi wishes on the Silver Crystal that she could have a carefree life like the one she had before she became Sailor Moon all the girls forget knowing each other and everything about their lives as Sailor Soldiers - Usagi forgets she loves Mamoru.
• On a final note none of the Sailor Soliders besides Sailor Moon, and Sailors Neptune & Uranus (who love each other) have lovers. This is because they pledged their lives to protect the Moon Princess and are forced to always choose duty over love, Neptune and Uranus are just lucky they found each other within the Sailor Team. Sailor Moon gets to have a lover because she is the Moon Princess and he was the Earth Prince. The Love Angels have no such pledge and a free to love whoever they want.

There are several reasons why Wedding Peach and Sailor Moon are alike; for starters they both fall into the same sub-genre, of a sub-genre: magical girl team anime, Sailor Moon was the first anime to feature a team of colour-coded, similar named, magical girls (ala Power Rangers).
	The Anime Versions of Wedding Peach & Sailor Moon do look somewhat alike

But Sailor Moon is far from the first magical girl anime, that honor belongs to "Little Witch Sally" (Sunny in the manga) which predates Sailor Moon by 26 years, in fact the first magical girl manga "Secrets of Akko-chan" (published in 1963, well before Sunny, but wasn't animated till after Sunny) is a whole 30 years older than Sailor Moon. The first show to bring the superheroine/fighter idea to the genre was Cutey Honey, which was a 70s shōnen series that despite being shōnen is still identified as the first of the fighting magical girls.

There were several magical girl team up specials in the 1980s but Sailor Moon was the first of the magical girl team/taskforce anime (mahō shōjo sentai). And many magical girl team shows followed, including not only Wedding Peach (1994), but other titles like Magic Knight Rayearth (1994), Ojamajo Doremi (1999), Tokyo Mew Mew (2001), Mermaid Melody Pitchi Pitchi Pitch (2003), Sweet Valerian (2004), and Together We're Pretty Cure (2004) as well. So Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach are not the only shows that are similar, and this list dosen't even mention all of the non-team magical girl anime out there, or all the non-shōjo series! Visit Henshin, or Emily's Magical Girls Page for more comprehensive lists.

The main reason that the two shows look visually similar, at least anime wise (I personally think the two manga look rather different) is very simple Kazuko Tadano was one of the character designers for Sailor Moon, Sailor Moon R, and the Sailor Moon R movie. She also was the character designer for Wedding Peach so the two anime do look alike. Also the man who originally concived Wedding Peach, Sukehiro Tomita was in charge of screenplay and script on Sailor Moon, it isn't suprising then that the two are alike.

Momoko and Usagi are also similar because they embody classic shōjo manga standards, the perky young girl with a good heart and a bright smile. Also blue eyed pink/blonde-haired girls show up a lot in anime because blue eyes are seen as ideal when it comes to beauty and because many people think they are more distinctive than brown, and blonde hair is also seen as a feminine ideal whereas pink hair (which dosen't exist naturally in real life) is an indicator of girlishness, flowers, and spring... ever wondered why some pink haired magical girls have "momo" (peach) in their names, not just Momoko but also Momomiya Ichigo, and Minky Momo? Because the Japanese word for pink is "momoiro" litterally "Peach Coloured".

Basically Wedding Peach and Sailor Moon both embody similar aspects and qualities of Japanese culture, in they feel alike in the same way that Superman and Spider-Man are similar - but in the same way they are both very diffrent once you scratch past the surface.