And her male rival had a crush on a high school boy and eventually her. It steered far clear of sexual tones, but showed romantic attraction. It was so obvious that many of those scenes were censored in the US.
> It steered far clear of sexual tones.
What are the tests or societal norms that censors employ for US releases?
What is censored or changed always seemed pretty arbitrary from my point of view, though I have no knowledge of CCS and don't know what specifically was changed there.
It feels like romantic, sexual, and violent themes are fine in domestic media, but are censored for imports.
As an extreme example take the previous God of War titles with their violence, gore, and literal sex mini-games vs. cartoonish violence and clothing getting censored in imports. Somehow one thing is fine for US publishers, and the other isn't.
But another example of censorship is how the relationship between Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus was changed from being lesbians to being cousins. If you search for "sailor moon cousins", you can read about how that turned out for them. (eg: "they certainly didn’t act like any cousins I knew" -- Sara Roncero-Menendez)
edit: for the record I would not recommend the US "dub", since it's terrible (I don't even think they did the whole series). The original, however, is wonderful.
I did like the new opening they came up with, though it totally didn't fit the overall series aesthetic.
Which, as far as I remember, was most of them - multiple non-heterosexual relationships, multiple student-teacher relationships and multiple cousin relationships.
This one was subverted later in the series - turns out that highschooler secretly had moon-based magic that was compatible with the rival, that he was subconsciously sensing.