No events in the future will change the fact that multiple Sailors and Cures have been wandering around the city throwing big flashy spells about for weeks or months without the Japanese Magical Government managing to even get a message to any of them.
As I discuss in more detail below, this is almost certainly because the Sailors and Cures are
actively difficult to find. And because regarding the normal procedures of the "magical government," which probably does
NOT have the full resources we associate with a government (i.e. its law enforcement may well consist of handful of grimfaced wizards, not a whole bureaucracy)...
Well, the normal procedures simply do not revolve around
rapidly capturing a flashy, powerful, highly mobile entity that can strike anywhere at any time, but then has the ability to just arbitrarily turn back into a random schoolgirl immediately afterwards.
Think about how much trouble guerilla organizations can cause for nominally strong, well organized, well-equipped foes. The Cures and Sailors are like benevolent urban guerillas in that they are
hard to find, especially to find on short notice without the freedom of action to craft a plan specifically focused on drawing them out.
The inverse. You are looking at this as an isolated snapshot. A universe that came into being when Usagi first transformed and only needs to fit for how things are in the present, not how they could feasibly have become as they are.
Nah, this is straightforward enough.
Example: The British Government deals with magic. Except the British Government only became the rulers of the country in the late sixteen hundreds. Did the non-constitutional monarchs include 'maintain the masquerade' amongst their duties? Did the spellblades take sides in the civil war? And after the civil war when the English started getting progressively more imperialistic, why did they decide that hiding magic would be better than using it? Particularly in using it to combat the many and varied magical stuff of the places they were exploiting? Like for example Japan, were dog demons were openly wondering about decapitating mountains and sleeping with mikos.
[cracks knuckles]
I got this. To answer your questions with a plausible narrative:
1) The spellblades date back as an organization to the rather loose English magical tradition, see also John Dee
et al and assorted points earlier. In those days it was common knowledge
in real life that scholarly people who studied weird ancient lore could, with some effort, become fortune-tellers and sorcerors; it's just that in real life those bits of 'common knowledge' weren't
true.
2) Efforts to enforce the masquerade in the 1600s consisted mainly of active suppression of any practitioners not tacitly approved by the government, a program put into place across much of Europe,
this is why there was a witch burning craze in Early Modern Europe. Monarchs almost didn't have to do much to actively keep this going; it was part of the cultural zeitgeist. Eventually this was successful in driving European practitioners underground and forcing them to rely on powerful patrons or intense secrecy for survival. A few generations after that, the populace at large was wondering why they'd ever believed in magic in the first place as anything other than rural folk superstition and old wives' tales.
3) Given how English government worked at the time, the spellblades were probably just a loose club of 'gentlemen' among the aristocracy who quietly sorted out magical nonsense on the King's behalf, did astrological readings, and so on. A lot of them probably had royalist sympathies during the English Civil War, but they were not numerous enough to have all that much influence, especially since any particularly open displays of magic during this era were a good way to get accused of witchcraft. Especially since there were a lot of Puritans on the Parliamentarian side and the Puritans had no chill.
4) Magic was not used (
much) as a weapon of imperialism by the English and later British because by this time the English/British government didn't have very much magic at its disposal. They had rather more of things like steam power and bullets, and used those instead. The disruption of the English magical tradition (see previous) had effectively reduced mysticism in England to a relatively small number of practitioners, mostly operating in secret, or in slightly less secrecy but sheltered by personal privilege, high socioeconomic status, and connections to the government. This loose affiliation gradually got more coordinated and disciplined over time... but only gradually, much like a lot of other major branches of His/Her Majesty's Government.
5) I suspect that magic was used mostly
defensively by the British during their imperial era, in that they were chronically on the back foot dealing with the extreme diversity of supernatural opposition they might encounter all over a world-spanning empire. A lot of Britain's magical problems during this era probably took the form of something happening in the colonies, being dismissed as "heathen superstition" for public consumption back home, and being brutally, bloodily put down by a column of British regulars who shot everything in the general vicinity whether it was hostile, magical, both, or neither. The spellblades, or whatever form their organization took at the time, were likely stretched thin and mostly engaged in making sure the British didn't lose too many 'Tommies' in the process of drowning the problem in rifle fire.
6) I don't know what you're talking about with respect to Japan; European colonial powers never conquered or controlled Japan directly, and certainly didn't during the Sengoku Period. It is likely that Japan, during the Tokugawa Shogunate and the Meiji Restoration, underwent its own similar process of... 'regularization...' if you will. During which the authorities tended to avoid too much reliance on supernatural allies, encouraged efforts to drive those supernatural forces onto the fringes of society, and were at least complicit if not actively supportive of efforts to "retcon" the supernatural events of their own past as being a matter of mythology.
1) Sailor Moon has not been contacted by the people maintaining the masquerade in Japan. Nor have the Queen's Guard. Or any of the Pretty Cures.
2) The people who maintain the masquerade in Japan have been finding and pre-empting the majority of Oblivion attacks.
I'm not going to tell you you're wrong about (2), but if you're right, I must have missed something. Can you provide a citation for (2) in this argument?
Obviously, if (2) is not true, the apparent contradiction is resolved- whatever magical authorities prevail in Japan are simply unable to track either the Knights or the assorted magical girls. But if (2)
is true, there is still an explanation.
Given the extreme longevity of these organizations, they are very likely to have most of the magic in their immediate area of responsibility catalogued.
Outside context problems are rare, and these organizations are accustomed to working carefully, so as to stay out of the spotlight.
When an external threat arises (some nonhuman spiritual entity), the name of the game is to research it carefully (because you are squishy merely-human mages dealing with demons), and take time to assess the situation (because
surviving supernatural threats are mostly the kind that walk small-ish and try to avoid attention themselves, or the kind that are big and dumb and easily propitiated if you know the right rituals). You move slowly, you move cautiously, you treat problems less like St. George slaying the dragon and more like the bomb squad disarming a bomb. This makes it relatively easy to maintain a masquerade, at least partially and for a while.
When an
internal threat arises,
and this is important, it's usually coming from known individuals who learned magic of known types from known sources. The 'magical authorities' (who may actually be pretty small-time in terms of manpower and organization) will usually know who they're dealing with, who they can talk to for more information, and in many cases have at least a rough idea of where the subject lives and how to counter their magic.
...
The magical girl teams they're now dealing with violate all these rules
hard. They seem to appear out of literally nowhere, they do something flashy for at most a few hours, and then
fucking vanish. The specific magical girls in question (Sailor Senshi and Pretty Cures) come from distant origins in the far past or other dimensions, so there are few if any clues in the literature. Carefully researching their abilities certainly doesn't provide any usable advice on how to find their 'lairs,' that is, their civilian identities. They didn't learn magic from any existing school with ties to the 'magical authorities,' they don't
use magic more close to home than they do away from it, and so on. Procedures invented to track down a random vampire, or a rogue wizard from within their own ranks, or something like that? Yeah, those don't really help much here.
SPECULATIVELY, I suspect the Sailor Senshi are just the
worst for this. We know about the cognitohazard bullshit in the glamour, but I strongly suspect that this glamour is just a side-effect. After all, when the original Silver Millennium enchantments were woven, the identities of the Senshi were a matter of public record- they were royalty! It seems far more likely that the cognitohazard is almost an afterthought, a side effect, of a more comprehensive suite of anti-scrying and anti-tracking precautions, designed to prevent direct application of scry-and-die tactics and more generally to discourage spying on such well known figures as a way of discerning their weaknesses.
So far, the only person with a good track record of tracking down magical girls is Tuxedo Mask, and we have
no idea how he does it. We ourselves only ever encounter Pretty Cures when we trip over them in the field due to Fate itself seeming to engineer such dramatic experiences, and Pretty Cures are probably easier to track than we are.
1) The British Government is not segregated between magical and non-magical organisations. This is stated to be unusual.
2) The British directly controlled a quarter of the globe until half a century ago. Supposedly the various colonial governments forgot about magic. And never told anyone.
It seems quite plausible to me that the British organizations that handle magical affairs are secretive, insular, and chiefly concerned with the British Isles, while leaving magical affairs in the colonies more or less to their own devices, with only limited support to make sure no one in, say, India got bright ideas about siccing a swarm of hungry rakshasa (?) on a column of British redcoats.
I'm not entirely sure I understand your objection here, but this seems like a case where
everyone's magical traditions mostly just hunkered down and quietly did their own things, not really interacting all that much while the muggles got on with this whole "imperialism" thing.
1) The events of Inuyasha take place in the Sengoku Period, 1467 and 1603. They involve demons walking about openly, slaughtering villages, carving chunks off mountains and similar escapades.
2) The modern world has a masquerade, maintained by organisations that have been active for millennia.
1) Nerima is infested with blatantly superhuman martial artists. Most of whom claim their skills have been refined for generations. None make even the slightest attempt to hide behind a masquerade.
2) The Empire of Japan existed and apparently didn't care about super martial arts. Despite the British and Germans presumably having a wizard war alongside the battle of Britain.
We have no evidence that the in-setting Japanese
didn't employ superhuman martial artists or, like, magic ninja or whatever during World War Two. All we know is that it wasn't sufficient to win the war, which is unsurprising. Having a bunch of ki-channeling martial artists who operate at the level of Ranma's setting isn't enough to enable you to conquer China by land, especially since China is no doubt not without its own practitioners to mount a defense. And those martial artists and magic ninja sure as hell aren't going to do you much good in a carrier-air-naval war with the United States in the Pacific.
