When I first saw this Subject line by itself, I really wasn't sure how I was going to answer this question - maybe with something like Everything Sailor Mercury does, because those are the most memorable moments of Sailor Moon for me. But I immediately knew I'd have to go to this topic/thread and read what others wrote.
Then, when I read how Sailor Mars, the source of this question, answered it, it hit me. What about Sailor Moon kept your interest in it for so long and made it more than just a passing fad in your life? For me, it was a mixture of factors, all coming together in a great synthesis.
For starters, it stuck with me because the protagonists are almost all female, like with Sailor Mars. But it was more than only that for me.
In my case, it was also that all the protagonists were teenagers, with the possible exception of Mamoru - but even the oldest one, him, is college-age at most. This appealed to me because I have long considered my teenage and college years the best years of my life.
But then, one can also find characters like that in American entertainment without looking too hard. So it was also the fact that these characters were portrayed in a
realistic fashion, not with exaggerated personality traits, as is usually done in comedy.
And finally, it helped that it was
not American, but Japanese entertainment. See, at the time I first heard of Sailor Moon, I was very open to learning about other lands/countries and how they do things, and even that the way they do certain things may be better than the way the U.S. does them. My two trips to western Europe, one in junior high school, the other during the summer immediately following my high school graduation, were probably the biggest factors in making me so open to that. And even though I have never been to eastern Asia, I had heard enough about the cultures there to respect them and even look up to them before I had heard of Sailor Moon, even if I had never bothered to look very deeply into the way they do anything, because it seemed like too high of a hurdle at the time (it seemed like there are too many differences between the way they do things and the way the U.S. does things).
Sailor Moon was an easy and entertaining way to jump that hurdle. Furthermore, since it was from a country that I had never looked into in depth (even though I had looked up to it), it opened up a whole new world for me (pardon me for bringing a Disney theme into this discussion), one that I could look into little by little over the next several years where virtually all of my discoveries were fascinating.
These are the reasons Sailor Moon has held my interest for so long. Okay, I've been verbose enough on this topic
. Time to let you go on with your lives.