Sailor Pallas

PallaPalla is the bluest of the Amazoness Quartet and seems the smallest. She is the one who giggles and talks nonsense while the others scheme. She paints her nails, hoards her toys, rides her big ball through the Dead Moon Circus and talks about herself in the third person, the way a small child does. Of the four she looks the least like a soldier and the most like a doll. She serves nightmares, and everything about her looks like play.

Pallas is Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom, strategy and skilful making. Astrologically the small world named for her signifies pattern-recognition, creative intelligence and a knack for solving a problem sideways. This is the asteroid given to the most childish member of the Quartet. PallaPalla’s cleverness is the intuitive kind that a child has at a game. She sees the shape of a puzzle before she can explain it, and she wins by feel. She is the games-and-riddles member of the four, and under her playfulness is a quick, odd intelligence that plays with patterns.

As a villain she uses that intelligence coldly. PallaPalla treats people as playthings. She stays sweet-voiced and smiling while she turns a victim into a doll or bends the rules of a body as she pleases. Her tone is never cruel, though her logic is. She is kind to her victims the way a small girl is kind to a toy, until she gets bored of them. Her games are neatly built, and each of her traps is a riddle with only one answer.

The manga gives her a destiny that the anime only hints at. In the manga the Amazoness Quartet are the Sailor Quartet, four asteroid senshi who were woken too early and bound with Amazon Stones by Zirconia. When those stones shatter, PallaPalla is revealed as Sailor Pallas, sworn with her sisters to guard Chibiusa in the Crystal Tokyo of the 30th century, and she is the guardian who will wake in the far future. The anime makes the Quartet villains who are redeemed and set loose again. The manga makes them sleeping protectors all along, dreaming through their own villainy until their true selves surface.

In both versions Sailor Pallas is clever in a playful way. She has Athena’s cleverness in the smallest-seeming of the four, and her wisdom looks like whimsy and her strategy looks like a game of dolls. The future she is meant to guard belongs to a child. Of all the senshi, she is the one who has never fully stopped being a child herself.