The Breakup Breakdown

Most commonly occurring reasons for the bad rep this arc gets are the following, in no particular order:

- Mamoru is wicked mean to Usagi
- Viewers at this point are sick and tired of seeing them apart
- It lasts for way too long
- the Innies provide no levity while it goes on
- The reasoning behind it is stupid
- The payoff is even stupider
- It's an anime-only, filler plot that achieved a whole lot of nothing

As a quick overview, our team of scientists have assembled a timeline of events, marking down which episodes refer to Mamoru and Usagi being broken up as a plot point and who was responsible for writing them.

We're using a Green - Yellow - Red system for emotional intensity, with green being general good behaviour on Mamoru/Tuxedo's part and episodes where they're together, yellow being vague allusions to the breakup or neutral/civil behaviour, orange for when the state of affairs is dictated by the breakup arc, and red when the entire episode relies on it or Mamoru/Tuxedo is being an asshole.

The writers have their own colors to keep track of them through the seasons, and the ocassional pink and purple are for when things are complicated in terms of what exactly they address or the attitude flipflops too much.

Grey is for when nothing of note happens.

First off we see that The Breakup Arc lasts from Episode 61 to 77, featuring it for a grand total of 18 episodes (almost 10% of the show!), but only half of them actually deal with it in some capacity, without counting the two where it gets a vague nod. You'll also notice that the second half has a lot more grey in it than the first.

This table doesn't feel strictly accurate though, and that is because we only find out about the reasons for the breakup arc in Episode 83.

Despite 'officially' getting back together in Episode 77, these episodes feature a suspicious lack of Mamoru, and therefore any meaningful interaction with Usagi until the big reveal, giving the arc an extra five episodes of buffer before it's properly explained and sorted out. For all intents and purposes, the breakup lasts for 22 episodes, despite it only being addressed in 10.

Out of these 10 episodes where our happy couple is apart, only 3 of them deal with the breakup as the main plot of the episode and 1 has the final explanation on the reasoning, with the remaining 6 having it dictate how Mamoru and Usagi interact with eachother in passing.

You can also see via all the grey surrounding 77 that there's not even a consistent incline towards its resolution nor it presents a meaningful change in character dynamics. Take a guess at how well it did its job given 83 had to finish it.

Compare all of this to the whoppin' 1 and a half episode that our happy couple gets to enjoy being together, and already we got all of our ingredients for the unhappy watching experience that you probably remember.

So we got tedium and lack of payoff to look forwards to from this chart alone, and that's without even getting into the details yet.

It does look pretty bad so far.

We'll take a look at the setup before we dive deep into the juicy gossip, because I want to make it extremely clear; despite what it looks like, the breakup arc started with a fucking banger of an idea.