Sailor Pluto
“Pluto Planet Power, Make Up!”
- japanese name
- Meiou Setsuna (冥王せつな)
- 90’s english dub
- Trista Meioh
- name meaning
- underworld king, a single instant
- likes
- sewing, shopping, green tea
- dislikes
- eggplant, cockroaches
- birthday
- october 29
- zodiac sun sign
Scorpio- blood type
- A
Setsuna Meiou keeps the Door of Space-Time, alone, and has kept it since before memory. Her family name, 冥王 (Meiou), means “king of the underworld”, and 冥王星 (Meiousei) is the Japanese name of the planet Pluto. Her given name, せつな (Setsuna), sounds like 刹那, a Buddhist word for a single instant, so the keeper of all time is named for a moment. Chibiusa calls her Puu, and with her she’s warm.
Setsuna is bound by three taboos: never travel through time, never leave the door, and never stop time. She breaks the third to save the people she guards, knowing it will kill her, and she comes back.
read the Pluto page →
← back to character selectin modern astrology
significations
- power
- force, leverage, the struggle over itNot the authority a person is handed but the force that moves without asking for it. Pluto is read as what operates at a scale larger than one life: pressure, leverage, the will to it, and the fact that it is never shared out evenly.It shows up as the people and the systems that can move a crowd, as the real arrangement sitting under the stated one, and as manipulation in the places where force cannot be used in the open.
- taboo
- buried, hidden, not spoken ofHades presides over the crypt and the cryptic, and the old words for hidden run through burial, cellars and secrecy. Pluto is read as whatever a place has agreed not to say out loud, so its contents change from one place to another while the silence stays exactly the same.It shows up as what runs under a family or a city without ever being named, as shame and the things kept out of the light, and as the subjects a person only discovers are off limits by raising them.
- compulsion
- obsessive, driven, overriddenThe instincts: survival, aggression, desire. Pluto is read as the point where a want stops being something a person has and becomes something that has them, and where agency is lost to it rather than spent.It shows up as obsession, as a fixation that outlasts its own reason, and as the choice made by something older and blinder than the person making it.
- regeneration
- decay, compost, what grows backNot the ending itself, which Hellenistic astrology gives to Saturn. Pluto is what happens to a thing after it has ended: rot, breakdown, and the feeding that comes out of the breakdown. One of Hades’s own cult titles was the nourishing one, and the name Pluto means wealth, the riches of the buried.It shows up as what gets composted rather than repaired, as a return that is not a restoration, and as growth that was only ever possible because something was allowed to finish.
trans-saturnian
Pluto isn’t one of the seven planets Hellenistic astrology reads. Those are the lights you can follow by eye, from the Moon out to Saturn, and they’re what two thousand years of that writing was about. Pluto was only found in 1930, so it was never in anyone’s sky while the tradition was being written.
Modern astrology gave it Scorpio, Setsuna’s own Sun sign, which the tradition gives to Mars. That is the pattern rather than the exception: the moderns didn’t find new meanings past the edge of the old sky so much as move meanings that already had an owner. This site reads the outer three as generational rather than personal, and leaves the rulerships where the tradition put them. When one of them does come to a placement, though, it is felt as hard as any of the seven.
powers and transformations
The Garnet RodHer staff of office: a key the height of a person, with a heart at the top holding the Garnet Orb. It’s the key to the Door of Space-Time she guards, and the focus of her attacks.
The Transformation WandHer transformation wand. She raises it and calls “Pluto Planet Power, Make Up”.
The Garnet OrbThe third talisman, and it sits on top of her staff all along. In the anime she takes the other two back from Eudial, returns Haruka’s and Michiru’s hearts to them, and shows that the orb is the third. With all three together, the Holy Grail appears.
The Time KeysFour small keys hang on a chain at her waist, each one a little Garnet Rod, and they’re the only way to travel through time. Chibiusa’s Space-Time Key is one of them. With it she can cross between the eras and call Pluto to her, and the words she says to use it call on Chronos, the god of time, Pluto’s father.
The Door of Space-TimeThe door at the edge of time, where she stands guard alone. She’s bound never to leave it, never to travel through time and never to stop time, and over the series she breaks all three. Chibiusa reaches it with her Space-Time Key.
what she can do
She isn’t in this arc. Setsuna’s first appearance in the classic anime is in Sailor Moon R.
- Opening the Door of Space-Timepower
- Pluto Planet Power, Make Uptransformation
- ▢Dead Screamattack
Spoken almost under her breath, which is what makes it frightening.
- Time Stoppower
Her forbidden power, and the third of her taboos: once time starts again, she dies. She uses it to get Uranus and Neptune clear of an exploding helicopter, and dies for it. In the manga she does it to stop Demand bringing the two Silver Crystals together. Like Hotaru, she carries a power that’s meant to stay unused, and using it costs her life.
She isn’t in this season of the anime.
- ▢Super Sailor Plutotransformation
In episode 167 she’s given new power and the name Super Sailor Pluto.
- ▢Dead Screamattack
The same attack, now as Super Sailor Pluto.
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 Pluto
Act 15, Black Moon -
manga
Super Sailor Pluto
Dream arc -
manga
Eternal Sailor Pluto
Stars arc -
manga
Princess Pluto
Silver Millennium -
anime
Sailor Pluto
Sailor Moon R -
anime
Super Sailor Pluto
Sailor Stars -
crystal
Sailor Pluto
season 2 -
pgsm
does not appear
elsewhere
the three taboos
Her three taboos are not to travel through time, not to abandon the door and not to stop time. The third carries a death sentence, and she breaks it in the Infinity arc to save Uranus and Neptune from an exploding helicopter.
The manga and the anime both bring her back, and neither of them treats the return as undoing the choice.
Crystal
Follows the manga, which introduces her much earlier than the anime does and gives her considerably more to do in the Black Moon arc.
the English dub
Setsuna becomes Trista Meiou. Little else changes; she is one of the few characters the dub largely left alone.
✦ junk drawer
things in here:0002
odds & ends. old graphics, for fun.
CD Player