Sailor Chibi Moon

Sailor Chibi Moon landing the final pose of her transformation, one arm raised, a heart of pink hearts blooming behind her.

“Moon Prism Power, Make Up!”

japanese name: Chibiusa (ちびうさ)
90’s english dub: Rini
name meaning: small rabbit
likes: pudding, rabbit goods, drawing
dislikes: carrots, lessons & tests
birthday: june 30
zodiac sun sign: Cancer
blood type: O-

Chibiusa (ちびうさ) is chibi, meaning tiny or pint-sized, plus usa, from her mother’s name Usagi, so the nickname reads as “little rabbit” or “small Usagi”. Her royal name is Usagi Small Lady Serenity, and she’s the heir to Crystal Tokyo. For a long time she looks like a smaller copy of her mother, with the same odango (in pink) and the same crying.

The Moon has no light of its own and shines by reflection. It stands for dependence, borrowing, and the tidal pull toward whoever is holding you. Chibiusa falls out of the sky and takes a borrowed name and a borrowed household, and she demands a crystal that isn’t hers so she can save a mother she can’t reach. Wiseman tells her she was never wanted, and that one lie turns her into a cruel, enormous adult. Over the series she gets a light of her own, the Pink Moon Crystal, and her own name among the Senshi.

read the Moon page →

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in hellenistic astrology

dignity

domicile: Cancercare and memoryIts own house, and the Moon only has one. Cancer is a feminine, movable water sign, and its quality is wet. Movable signs start things easily and change quickly. Cancer begins at the summer solstice, and the two lights were given Cancer and Leo because they fall in the brightest, warmest part of the year. At home, a planet uses its own resources and doesn’t rely on a host.In Cancer the Moon’s own significations come through directly, such as the body, food and nourishment, the mother, and the home and family. It shows up as caring for others, protecting what’s growing, a long memory, and moods that come and go in cycles.
exaltation: Tauruscomfort and routineRaised up in Taurus, a feminine, fixed earth sign ruled by Venus. Its quality is dry, and fixed signs are stable and slow to change. Exaltation is a place of honour, where a planet’s significations are raised in standing. Taurus is in sextile to Cancer, the Moon’s own sign, and each night-team planet is exalted in a sign sextile to one of its homes.The Moon in Taurus mixes its own significations with Venus’s pleasure and the steadiness of the sign. It shows up as physical comfort, good food, regular routines, attachment to familiar people and things, a mood that changes slowly, and care with money and possessions.
detriment: Capricornduty and restraintOpposite its house. Capricorn is a feminine, movable earth sign ruled by Saturn. It begins at the winter solstice, the darkest part of the year. Light belongs to the lights and darkness to Saturn, so the Moon is a guest in his sign here. Later texts treat a planet opposite its own house as hindered or in exile.The Moon in Capricorn mixes its significations with Saturn’s limits and the sign’s practical side. It shows up as care given out of duty, a home run on routine and rules, food and comfort that are rationed or put off, feelings kept under control, and daily life organised around work and long-term goals.
fall: Scorpioprivacy and defencePut low in Scorpio, a feminine, fixed water sign ruled by Mars. Fall is the sign opposite a planet’s exaltation, and there its significations lose standing. The Moon is the fortune of all, and nothing can lower what fortune raises. For that reason no planet is exalted in Scorpio, and the Moon is the only planet whose fall isn’t another planet’s exaltation.The Moon in Scorpio mixes its significations with Mars’s conflict and the fixed, private nature of the sign. It shows up as strong feelings kept private and slow to shift, being guarded about home and body, holding on to hurts, protectiveness that turns defensive, and sudden changes in daily life.

Sailor Chibi Moon with her planet, drawn by Naoko Takeuchi

The dashed lines join opposites: detriment sits opposite the house, and fall opposite exaltation.

the whole scheme, all seven planets →

condition

sect: the light of the nightWhether a chart is by day or by night is the first thing settled. Sect divides the planets into a day team led by the Sun and a night team led by the Moon, and Venus and Mars are on the night team. In a night chart the Moon is the sect light, the light in charge, and the night-team planets are more at home and better behaved.In a night birth the Moon’s significations lead the chart, such as the body, the mother, the household and daily fortune. The triplicity lords of the Moon’s sign are read for the overall support of the life. In a day birth the Sun leads instead, and the Moon is on the night team without being in charge.
joy: the third placeA planet’s joy is the place where it’s gladdest to be, whatever sign it’s in. The Moon’s is the third place, called Goddess. It’s a good decline, in sextile to the rising sign. It signifies siblings, friends and relatives, travel, religious observance, temples and priestesses, dreams and divination.The Moon in the third shows up through these topics, such as siblings and relatives, regular travel and movement, local rites and places of worship, and dreams. The Moon signifies the gathering of crowds, and the Sun the leading of them.

powers and transformations

Sailor Moon1992

Sailor Moon R1993

Sailor Moon S1994

Sailor Moon SuperS1995

Sailor Stars1996

She isn’t in this arc. Chibiusa’s first appearance in the classic anime is in Sailor Moon R.

Luna-P, the floating ball painted with Luna’s face, being poked on the nose. — Luna-P
Luna-P
A floating ball painted with Luna’s face, a present from Sailor Pluto. It hovers at her side, turns into whatever she needs, and is her communicator and her link back to the future and to Sailor Pluto at the Space-Time Door. The 90s anime mostly plays it for comedy. The manga treats it as thirtieth-century technology she depends on.

The Space-Time Key held up against a field of stars, its heart-shaped head lit from above. — The Space-Time Key
the Space-Time Key
The garnet-tipped key Sailor Pluto entrusts to her. It opens the Space-Time Door, the one guarded passage between the present and the Crystal Tokyo of the future, and every trip she makes between the eras goes through it. Time travel is bound by strict taboos that Pluto enforces, so it’s a serious thing to trust a child with.

Pixel sprite of the Prism Heart Compact. — transformationMoon Prism Power, Make Up
the Prism Heart Compact
Her transformation brooch, a rounded pink-and-gold compact she’s given once she’s ready to fight in her own right. She raises it and calls “Moon Prism Power, Make Up” to become Sailor Chibi Moon.

Pixel sprite of the Pink Moon Stick. — attackPink Sugar Heart Attack
the Pink Moon Stick
Her first real weapon is a small pink wand topped with a crescent and a heart, sometimes called the Pink Sugar Heart Rod. It fires a scatter of glittering pink hearts that are almost comically weak at first and get sharper as her courage grows.

Pixel sprite of the Crisis Compact, closed. — transformationMoon Crisis, Make Up
the Crisis Compact
She and her mother transform side by side with the paired call, “Moon Crisis, Make Up”.

Pixel sprite of the Crisis Compact, open. — transformationMoon Crisis, Make Up
the Crisis Compact
She and her mother transform side by side with the paired call, “Moon Crisis, Make Up”.

Pixel sprite of the Crystal Carillon, the little bell that calls Pegasus. — attackTwinkle Yell
the Crystal Carillon
In the anime’s Dream arc she’s given this little bell to call Pegasus, and his horn then becomes the Kaleidomoon Scope that arms the guardians’ strongest attacks. The manga gives the same role to the Stallion Reve. In both versions it’s what connects her to Helios.

Pixel sprite of the Kaleidomoon Scope. — attackMoon Gorgeous Meditation
Chibi Moon Kaleido Scope
Helios’s horn, turned into a weapon for her, and she fires the attack with its borrowed power. The page has no picture of her scope yet.

Pixel sprite of the Stallion Reve, the bell that calls Pegasus. — sceneHelios shows her his true form
the Stallion Reve
The Stallion Reve is the small bell Chibiusa rings in the manga’s Dream arc to call Pegasus. Its French name means something like “horse of dream”. In the 90s anime the Crystal Carillon does the same job, so the bell has no scene of its own. This is the dream it rings into, with Chibiusa in Elysion and Pegasus letting her see who he is.

Nothing new this arc.

✦

the Pink Moon Crystal

her crystal

The Pink Moon Crystal is Chibiusa’s own Legendary Silver Crystal, the crystal of the future carried by the princess of the thirtieth century. It is to her what her mother’s crystal is to Usagi, the source of her power and the sign of her lineage. For much of the story it lies dormant, and she is a child chasing a power she has not yet earned.

It awakens when Chibiusa comes fully into her own courage. In the Dream arc, as Sailor Chibi Moon, she stops leaning on Pegasus and others and calls on the crystal herself. The manga treats that awakening as the moment she stops being a burden the guardians protect and becomes a guardian who protects. Like the Silver Crystal it answers only to a selfless heart, so the crystal lighting in her hands shows that hers has grown into one.

✦

Chibiusa and Helios

shared thread

Helios is the high priest of Elysion, the sanctuary under the Earth that was the capital of Endymion’s Golden Kingdom. In the manga he is Prince Endymion’s own guardian priest, bound to him so closely that when the Dead Moon cages Helios, Mamoru falls ill. The pegasus is a curse laid on him, with a black rose growing in his lungs, and the horse in the dream is a projection from a cage he never leaves. In the anime there is no curse and the horse is his choice: he guards the Golden Crystal, and he escapes Nehelenia by putting his spirit into a beautiful dream and hiding there in the horse’s shape. So in one telling she is visiting a prisoner, and in the other she is his hiding place.

He comes to her in a dream, and the manga and the anime disagree about whose dream it is. The manga opens the Dream arc with a total solar eclipse and a ship coming out of the blacked-out Sun. That night a Pegasus asks a maiden for help, and Usagi and Chibiusa each believe he is speaking to them. He isn’t sure himself, and it takes him most of the arc to work out that the maiden is Chibiusa grown up. He leaves a small bell behind, and when she wakes the bell is really there. In the anime the dreams are Chibiusa’s from the start. She is the holder of Pegasus, and the Dead Moon Circus spends a season tearing through every dream mirror in Tokyo looking for the girl who has him.

She raises the Crystal Carillon, made from her old Pink Moon Stick, and calls “Twinkle Yell”. The full call is a request and not a command, asking Pegasus to protect everyone’s dreams. He comes, and his horn is what lets Super Sailor Moon land Moon Gorgeous Meditation. The attack is not hers and it does no damage. Her part is to summon him, and he comes when she calls. He is safe in her dream because there is nothing in it that would use him. A Lemures gets inside it and tries to talk her into ruling the world with his power. She says no.

She sees him as a man before anyone else does. In the anime he shows himself to her in episode 158 and takes her through a ruined Elysion from the air, and the other guardians are not told until episode 162. In the manga he tells her that she matters and kisses her, then goes back to the cage, telling her the man she is looking at is a mirage.

At the end, each version has one of them save the other. In the anime Nehelenia takes her dream mirror and shuts her inside it in an eternal sleep, and Helios kisses her awake. When Nehelenia throws her off the tower afterwards, Sailor Moon goes over the side after her. In the manga it goes the other way round. Helios is dead, or near enough, and Eternal Sailor Chibi Moon refuses to accept it. She kisses him and brings him back with the Pink Moon Crystal, and he understands that she was the maiden all along. The Golden Crystal splits the same way: in the anime it is his, the horn on the pegasus’s head, and Nehelenia takes it off him; in the manga it is Mamoru’s and not Helios’s, the Earth’s own crystal inside him.

Then Elysion is free and he goes home to it. In the anime he kneels and kisses her hand in front of everyone, and she gets one embrace with him out of sight of the others. Then he turns back into the horse and flies away, and she is left crying about what she did not tell him. In the manga he says goodbye to all of them and tells her in particular that they will meet again, and she thinks that when she is grown, he will be her prince.

also carried by Helios

✦

Usagi, Mamoru and their daughter

shared thread

In Act 14 Chibiusa falls out of the sky onto Usagi and Mamoru in the middle of a kiss. She lands on Usagi, kisses Mamoru by accident, announces that her name is also Usagi, accuses Usagi of copying her hairstyle, and pulls a gun. The gun is a toy. She is nine hundred years old and the size of a six-year-old. She has come back because her mother is frozen in crystal, and she is carrying the guilt of having stolen the one thing that could have protected her.

Mamoru is the first to be kind to her, and he gives her the name Chibiusa. He finds her sitting in the rain and takes her home, and he cheers her up with a Tuxedo Mask doll. When she asks whether Sailor Moon is really that strong, he tells her she is invincible. She says he is warm, like her Papa. In the anime she has a crush on him and knows it, and when he and Usagi break up she takes her chance and spends all her time with him.

Usagi is not happy about it, and the two of them bicker like sisters rather than mother and daughter. The worst of it has consequences. Usagi lashes out over Mamoru’s attention, Chibiusa goes back to the Crystal Palace alone, and that trip ends with Esmeraude and then Wiseman. An apology doesn’t fix it. It is fixed when the two of them find out who they are to each other and choose it anyway.

The manga says in one line that she pretends to be cold toward Usagi and in truth loves her more than anyone. When she is sent back to the future at the end of the Black Moon arc neither of them wants to go. From Usagi’s point of view she returns almost at once, with a letter from Neo-Queen Serenity asking her to look after a guardian in training.

also carried by Sailor Moon · Tuxedo Mask

✦

Usagi and Chibiusa

shared thread

Chibiusa and Usagi are mother and daughter, and they behave like sisters. Chibiusa moves into the Tsukino house, where the family has been made to believe she has always been there, and nothing about the arrangement helps. She takes the room and the attention, and she calls the girl whose daughter she actually is by her first name. They fight about sweets, homework, Mamoru and whose hairstyle came first. Usagi is fourteen and nobody’s idea of a mother, and Chibiusa already has a mother, a composed and capable queen who is nothing like this one.

They are alike, though neither of them says so. Both are greedy, lazy, loud, easily frightened, stubborn past the point of sense, and braver than anyone watching expects. The story makes a joke of the likeness over and over, and the likeness is also why the rivalry works. Chibiusa is competing with what she is going to be, which for now is a schoolgirl who can’t get up in the morning either.

Whatever they are shouting about, Usagi does not hesitate. When Chibiusa is in danger she goes in without thinking about it, every time, and that is the one thing about her that is already queenly. From S onward it is no longer a matter of rescue. Chibi Moon is a guardian in the line, they transform and attack together, and the smaller one is at the front. By the end the rivalry has worn down into something plainer than either of them would admit, and Chibiusa is her daughter and her partner.

also carried by Sailor Moon

✦

Chibiusa and Setsuna

shared thread

Chibiusa wanders down a forbidden corridor of the Crystal Palace, goes through the Door of Space and Time, and meets the woman who has been posted there alone since the first Silver Millennium. They become friends. Neo-Queen Serenity chides her for visiting, and she keeps going anyway. Pluto tells her that she and her mother are very alike, and that one day she will grow to be as strong as her.

Pluto is bound by three taboos: never travel through time, never leave the door, and never stop time. The last one costs her life. Time travel goes through her Time Keys, the four small keys on the chain at her waist. In the manga Chibiusa takes one of them and runs to the past with it, breaking a rule to save her mother. In the anime she is given permission and goes with Pluto’s blessing, sent to find Sailor Moon and told not to come home until she has. Wherever she is in time, the key lets her call Pluto to her.

In the manga Pluto dies for her. When Demande tries to bring the two Silver Crystals together and end everything, Pluto breaks her last taboo and stops time, knowing what it will do to her. Her death breaks Wiseman’s hold on Chibiusa and wakes her as Sailor Chibi Moon. Pluto is reborn in the twentieth century with no memory of it, and by Stars she is the school nurse where Chibiusa and Hotaru are pupils.

also carried by Sailor Pluto

✦

Hotaru and Chibiusa

shared thread

Hotaru is twelve, ill nearly all the time and bullied at Mugen Academy for it, and the illness is Mistress 9. She had never had a friend before. In the manga she meets Chibiusa in the middle of a Daimon fight; in the anime it is a hat lost across a park, with Chibiusa chasing it. Either way Chibiusa is the first person who comes back a second time. When Chibiusa is hurt in the fighting, Hotaru heals her with the same power that ends worlds. It is a small power in a series full of loud ones, and healing weakens her.

Then Hotaru’s body is used against Chibiusa. In the anime Kaolinite takes Chibiusa to Mistress 9, who is in Hotaru’s body, and feeds Chibiusa’s Pure Heart Crystal to it, because it needs that to wake all the way up. In the manga there is no one in between: Mistress 9 wakes and takes Chibiusa’s soul and the Silver Crystal straight out of her, and Chibiusa falls into a coma. Either way the girl who healed her is now the reason she is dying.

In both versions Hotaru is still in there. In the manga she spends what she has left pulling the souls and the crystal back out of her own body and handing them to the people they belong to. In the anime Chibiusa is the one who tries to stop Uranus, Neptune and Pluto from killing Hotaru to end it, and what finally overpowers Mistress 9 is Hotaru’s memories of her. Saturn throws Mistress 9 out and hands Chibiusa her heart back.

Saturn goes into Pharaoh 90 knowing what it costs, having asked Pluto to open the Gate of Time for her return, and Sailor Moon brings her back as an infant. The manga gives the baby to Haruka, Michiru and Setsuna, who raise her between them. The anime gives her back to her father, Souichi Tomoe, with the thing that had been possessing him gone.

She grows fast, and she is ten by the Dream arc. The manga puts them side by side again, as Saturn and Chibi Moon through the Dream arc, and by Stars the two of them are at Juban Public Elementary together, walking to school holding hands while Usagi complains about it. Hotaru is openly put out when Chibiusa goes home to her own century for a visit. In the anime it goes the other way. Facing Nehelenia, Saturn raises the Silence Glaive to spend her life a second time, and Chibi Moon stops her with a slap. Saturn tells her it is her mission, and Nehelenia takes the opening and disarms her.

also carried by Sailor Saturn

✦

Chibiusa and Diana

shared thread

▢Chibiusa and Diana

Diana is a kitten out of the same future, Luna and Artemis’s daughter, born in 30th-century Crystal Tokyo. She arrives from a century that hasn’t happened yet. Her charge is Chibiusa, whom she calls Small Lady. In Japanese it comes with -denka, the address for an heir who isn’t yet a sovereign.

The manga and the anime disagree about when she turns up. The manga has her from the Black Moon arc, small and already at work. The anime holds her back two seasons and brings her in during SuperS, where she lands in the middle of a fight and explains on the spot that she is Luna and Artemis’s daughter and Small Lady’s companion.

A new Moon princess is given a new moon-cat, and the second is a softer copy of the first. Diana has the same crescent and the same instinct to advise, and she is much more polite. Where Luna scolds, Diana asks permission. She carries the same thing Luna carried for Usagi, memory that belongs to someone else’s time, and she hands it out to a girl who isn’t ready for it yet.

also carried by Diana

✦

Luna-P

hers alone

Luna-P isn’t Luna. It’s Chibiusa’s: a floating ball with Luna’s face on it, crescent and all. It was a present from Sailor Pluto, and Ami built it in the thirtieth century. Chibiusa gives it spoken orders and it turns into whatever she needs.

In the manga her magic words are “Abracadabra Pon”. She turns it into an umbrella to hypnotise Usagi’s family into believing she’s their cousin, and later it becomes the Pink Moon Rod, when Sailor Chibi Moon wants the power to help her friends. When Chibiusa becomes Black Lady, she knocks it away as a childish toy.

In the 90s anime the words are “Luna-P Change”. It guards her, and she touches its nose to talk to Puu. When she becomes Black Lady the crescent on its forehead turns into the Black Moon’s mark, and in this telling she keeps it: it’s the one friend she has left, and she sets it on the guardians.

✦

Princess Usagi Small Lady Serenity

her title

Small Lady is what the court of Crystal Tokyo calls the crown princess of the thirtieth century, the daughter of Neo-Queen Serenity and King Endymion. It is the name her mother gave her, and she tells Mamoru so when Luna-P says it out loud. Her full title is Princess Usagi Small Lady Serenity. She is nine hundred years old.

For most of those years she did not grow, in body or in anyone’s estimation, and she showed no sign of the power that comes with the name. Her parents worried she would never be able to carry it, and people said openly that she was a fake princess. Her father tried to comfort her and made it worse, because what she heard was that she would never compare to her mother.

She awakens as Sailor Chibi Moon, and her own Silver Crystal answers to her. In the anime, the future crystal turns out to have gone into her body when it vanished; she transforms into Princess Small Lady Serenity, and the two crystals together are enough. In the manga she starts growing once she becomes a guardian, and by the end of the story she has grown. The Sailor Quartet wake to serve her.

✦

Black Lady

her dark self

Black Lady is Chibiusa after she has been told, convincingly, that nobody loves her. The anime shows the moment. The Silver Crystal has just failed to wake her mother, she runs, and Wiseman is waiting to explain that Sailor Moon, Tuxedo Mask and the guardians never loved her at all. She believes him. What stands up afterwards is adult, tall, grey-skinned and beautiful, and it is still her.

The manga does not show the turning. Chibiusa and Mamoru go missing, and the next time anyone sees them she is already Black Lady and he is already hers. This is because in the manga she is the one who brainwashes Mamoru. She is an agent of it and not a victim standing beside him. Wiseman is there, but the page never shows how he did it.

Wiseman means to open the dark gate through her and pour it into the world. She will be destroyed doing it, and he has not told her that. When Saphir works out the betrayal, she kills Saphir for him. After that the two endings part again. In the anime Usagi and Mamoru convince her that they do love her, and she is Chibiusa again. In the manga Pluto stops time and dies, and that is what breaks the hold.

Chibiusa’s friend Hotaru also has an older villainous version of herself. Black Lady and Mistress 9 are both made out of a lonely child who was offered something.

variations

Labelled by source. The manga is the primary text here. The anime, Crystal and the live-action series are separate continuities that sometimes disagree, and where they do, this site argues from the manga.

manga
Sailor Chibi Moon
Act 20
manga
Super Sailor Chibi Moon
Dream arc
manga
Eternal Sailor Chibi Moon
Stars arc
manga
Princess Small Lady Serenity
30th century
manga
Black Lady
Black Moon arc
anime
Sailor Chibi Moon
Sailor Moon R
anime
Super Sailor Chibi Moon
SuperS
crystal
Sailor Chibi Moon
season 2
pgsm
does not appear

elsewhere

Black Lady

In the Black Moon arc Wiseman takes a lonely child who believes nobody wants her, ages her to adulthood and turns her against her parents. Black Lady is what Chibiusa believes about herself, given a body.

Both the manga and the 90s anime run it, and it is the darkest sustained material in either.

Crystal

Season 2 covers the Black Moon arc and follows the manga closely, including Black Lady.

the English dub

Chibiusa becomes Rini. The dub also removes most of her romantic fixation on Mamoru. In the original it is a nine-hundred-year-old child's crush on the man who will be her father, and it is meant to be uncomfortable.

SuperS

The fourth season centres on her. The inner guardians are sidelined almost entirely, and the story runs on Chibiusa, Pegasus and the Dead Moon Circus. It is the least popular season and the only one that takes her seriously as a lead.