Sailor Star Fighter

The fixed stars sit beyond the orbits of the seven wandering planets, and the old astrologers held them apart from everything that drifts. They were the emblems of brilliance, fame and fate. Each is a single point that does not move, and together they seem to hold the whole sky in place. Sailor Star Fighter is a star senshi from Kinmoku. She is not one of this solar system’s guardians, and she comes to Earth from somewhere outside the reach of the sun and its planets.

To search a strange world, she becomes an idol and the centre of the Three Lights, and she performs under stadium spotlights to screaming crowds. The other senshi keep their power secret. Star Fighter makes herself as famous as she can and sells tickets, because she hopes fame on that scale might reach one person who has been lost. The stage career is her disguise, and it is also the way she searches.

She has a hot temper. She is bold and cocky, she grins easily and is quick to challenge people, and she carries herself as the front of the group and its nerve. Under the swagger she is lonely. She is admired, and she is a long way from home. Everything she does on Earth is done in exile, with her world burned and her princess missing, and she is grieving. She is fierce because she has already lost almost everything and will not lose the rest.

Fighter’s bond with Usagi runs through the whole arc. Mamoru is gone and cannot be reached. Usagi longs for him, Fighter has a longing of her own, and the two answer each other. Something like love grows between them, and Seiya speaks of it more openly than any senshi before her. It stays one-sided and gentle. In the end, what Fighter gives Usagi is guidance, and she does not try to possess her.

Her story differs between the two continuities. In the Sailor Moon Sailor Stars anime, Seiya and the others are men in their civilian lives as the Three Lights, and they become women when they transform into the Sailor Starlights. In Naoko Takeuchi’s manga they are women throughout, and they only disguise themselves as men so they can move unnoticed while they search. Each version is canon in its own medium. The anime puts much more weight on the romance between Seiya and Usagi than the manga does.

When Galaxia falls and Kinmoku can be rebuilt, Fighter and the other two Starlights go home. The farewell is meant to be bittersweet. For one season Fighter was a large part of Usagi’s life, and now she leaves and goes back to her own distant place. She has not changed, and she is not forgotten. The world she returns to will need rebuilding.