Sailor Vesta

She is the wildest of the four, and she knows it. Her sisters rely on illusion, dolls or charm, and VesVes goes straight for the animal in the room and dares it to bite first. Her colours are red and orange, in her hair and in the flick of her whip, and she grins when a beast finally does what she tells it. She is the fiercest member of the Amazoness Quartet, and the wild things she tames are only ever half tamed, because she likes them that way.

The asteroid’s goddess is the keeper of the sacred flame. In the old astrology that flame means focus, devotion and a fire tended without wavering, the single-pointed commitment of someone who has found her calling and will not look away from it. VesVes is secretly Vesta. She has never let anyone hold her back, and she is much wilder than a keeper of the temple flame was ever meant to be.

Vesta signifies total, unbroken attention, the will to hold one point of focus. Beast-taming suits VesVes better than any spell, because bringing a creature to heel takes that kind of attention, held while everything snarls and paces. She beats her animals by out-concentrating them more than by overpowering them. The whip is for show, and what does the work is her refusal to blink. She stares down creatures with teeth, and she wins.

Both continuities give her the same hot temper and differ on what it is for. In the anime she is a servant of the Dead Moon, another grinning acrobat working for Zirconia, and she spends it on cruelty until the story frees her from it. The manga goes further back and further forward. There her wildness belongs to a guardian’s spirit sleeping in the wrong century, an asteroid senshi waiting to remember whom she was born to protect, and it was never really villainy.

She does not soften when she wakes as Sailor Vesta. Her untamed streak stays, and now she has someone worth guarding, a small pink-haired princess and the future she carries. VesVes finally has somewhere to point all of that wild focus. Her devotion used to belong to no one, and now she keeps a steady watch over someone.