Player Select
CHOOSE YOUR SENSHI
hover a senshi to preview, click to enter
Choose Your Sailor Guardian
Luminaries
Inner planets
Outer planets
Beyond the solar system the asteroid senshi & the starlights
Asteroid senshi
Starlights
Beyond the galaxy
- UNDER
CONSTRUCTION SAILOR GALAXIA Galaxia - UNDER
CONSTRUCTION SAILOR COSMOS Usagi Tsukino
what is sailor moon?
She drew the sky they were named for
Sailor Moon is a 1991 manga by Naoko Takeuchi. Each planet has a schoolgirl guardian, named for the planet’s god. In this frontispiece Takeuchi put a real diagram of the celestial spheres at the centre of the ten guardians. The manga uses the planets’ names and is built around their chart, which is why this site has a wing for it.
- manga by
- Naoko Takeuchi
- serialised
- Nakayoshi, 1991–1997
- grew from
- Codename: Sailor V, 1991
- length
- 18 volumes, 60 acts
- sold
- over 46 million copies
- anime
- 1992–1997, 200 episodes, five seasons
There are ten guardians, one for each planet, and each is named both for her planet and for the god the planet was named after. Takeuchi also wrote their characters to match those gods. Mars fights, Venus is the guardian of love, Mercury is quiet and studious, and Jupiter is tall and strong. Astrology reads the same planets and the same gods, with the Moon for feeling, Mars for drive, Venus for love and Mercury for the mind, and that is why a manga about schoolgirls is on a site about charts. The character pages in this wing set each guardian beside her planet, the myth behind it and the astrology attached to it.
SAILOR MOON
Love and Justice
Usagi Tsukino
月野 うさぎ
CANCER
CANCER
TUXEDO MASK
Protector of Earth
Mamoru Chiba
地場 衛
LEO
LEO
SAILOR CHIBI MOON
Guardian in Training
Chibiusa Tsukino
ちびうさ
CANCER
CANCER
MOON CATS
Advisors to the Senshi
Luna, Artemis and Diana
SAILOR MERCURY
Love and Intelligence
Ami Mizuno
水野 亜美
VIRGO
VIRGO
SAILOR VENUS
Love and Beauty
Minako Aino
愛野 美奈子
LIBRA
LIBRA
SAILOR MARS
Love and Passion
Rei Hino
日野 レイ
ARIES
ARIES
SAILOR JUPITER
Love and Courage
Makoto Kino
木野 まこと
SAGITTARIUS
SAGITTARIUS
SAILOR URANUS
Guardian of the Heavens
Haruka Tenou
天王 はるか
AQUARIUS
AQUARIUS
SAILOR NEPTUNE
Guardian of the Deep Sea
Michiru Kaiou
海王 みちる
PISCES
PISCES
SAILOR PLUTO
Keeper of Time and Space
Setsuna Meiou
冥王 せつな
SCORPIO
SCORPIO
SAILOR SATURN
Guardian of Silence
Hotaru Tomoe
土萌 ほたる
CAPRICORN
CAPRICORN
SAILOR CERES
Guardian of the Small Lady
Cere Cere
SAILOR PALLAS
Guardian of the Small Lady
Palla Palla
SAILOR JUNO
Guardian of the Small Lady
Jun Jun
SAILOR VESTA
Guardian of the Small Lady
Ves Ves
SAILOR KAKYUU
Princess of Kinmoku
Princess Kakyuu
SAILOR STAR FIGHTER
Guardian of Kakyuu
Seiya Kou
SAILOR STAR MAKER
Guardian of Kakyuu
Taiki Kou
SAILOR STAR HEALER
Guardian of Kakyuu
Yaten Kou
✦ sailor moon & astrology five arcs · 135 beats · 67 galleries then: the whole story
risingunknownno birth time
SunPisces23°50′
MoonTaurus6°27′
MercuryPisces4°52′
VenusAries23°34′
MarsScorpio2°56′
JupiterCancer24°29′
SaturnAries1°23′
UranusVirgo22°19′
NeptuneScorpio24°16′
PlutoVirgo19°13′
north nodeTaurus9°27′
0°13′engagement- 0°26′engagement
- 0°39′engagement
0°55′engagement
1°31′separating
1°35′separating- 1°56′engagement
- 1°57′separating
- 2°10′separating
3°00′adherence- 3°06′applying
- 3°31′separating
- 4°35′separating
- 4°37′separating
- 5°03′separating
- 5°16′separating
- 6°31′separating
- 9°46′separating
- 12°46′engagement
- 12°52′separating
- 14°21′separating
- 14°23′separating
- 14°49′separating
- 15°02′separating
- 15°52′applying
- 16°17′separating
- 17°23′applying
- 17°27′separating
- 17°49′applying
- 18°02′applying
- 18°58′separating
- 19°23′separating
- 19°24′separating
- 19°37′separating
- 20°54′separating
- 21°20′separating
- 21°33′separating
- 22°11′separating
- 23°06′applying
0:004:04
Naoko Takeuchi · 15 March 1967 · Kofu, Japanno confirmed birth time · noon chart
drag the wheel sideways to read it
- born15 March 1967
- timeno confirmed birth time
- placeKofu, Japan
- rodden
- sectday or night not known
- studiedpharmacy, Kyoritsu
- known forSailor Moon, 1991–97
- marriedYoshihiro Togashi, 1999
- runsPrincess Naoko Planning
Naoko Takeuchi was born in Kofu, in Yamanashi prefecture, on 15 March 1967. At school she joined the manga club and the astronomy club, and has said the astronomy club stayed with her. She went on to Kyoritsu College of Pharmacy, took a degree in chemistry, wrote a senior thesis on breaking up blood clots with ultrasound and qualified as a licensed pharmacist. While she studied she worked part-time as a shrine maiden at Shiba Daijingu, and she was drawing throughout.
Nakayoshi gave her its newcomer prize in 1985 and its New Artist award in 1986, when she was nineteen. Codename: Sailor V followed in 1991, and Sailor Moon began in Nakayoshi that December. It ran to 1997, sixty acts in eighteen volumes, and took the Kodansha Manga Award for shōjo in 1993. She reads astrology, mythology and the esoteric, has said she believes in astrology, and when she built the team she gave each guardian a planet. She is still drawing them.
the whole story
a synopsis of the main beats of each season. It leaves out the monster-of-the-week detours and is not an episode guide.
watch the classic animefree from Viz on YouTube · all 200 episodesor watch it on Tubifree · starts at episode 1read the mangaMiss Dream’s English fan translations
the galleries screencaps from the high-resolution archive at Sailor Soapbox, captured and shared freely.
Dark Kingdom
Sailor Moon · 1992 // Dark Kingdom arc
- aired
- 1992–1993 · 46 episodes
- villain
- Queen Beryl and the Dark Kingdom
- arrives
- Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Venus
- written up
- 18 of 46 episodes
anime
Usagi Tsukino is fourteen. She is always late and usually half asleep, she cries easily, she eats constantly, and she has just got thirty on a maths test. On her way to school she stops to help a little black cat that some kids are tormenting. There’s a bandage stuck to its forehead, and when she peels it off there is a gold crescent moon underneath. She doesn’t think anything of it. At school she hides the test from Naru, gets teased about it by Umino, and daydreams about Sailor V, the masked girl who has been in all the papers. The cat is Luna. She has been looking for Usagi for a while, and that night she finds her.
Down below, the Dark Kingdom wakes up. Queen Beryl stands over a scrying orb in a hall full of hooded shapes and takes her orders from the voice of Queen Metaria in the dark. She gives the first job to her general Jadeite, which is to bring back as much human energy as he can get. Naru’s mom runs the OSA-P jewellery shop, and overnight it is selling gold at prices that make no sense. Every woman in the neighbourhood queues around the block, and each of them leaves with less energy than she came in with, because the jewellery drains it. The woman behind the counter is no longer Naru’s mom. She is the youma Morga wearing her face, and she smiles while the whole district is drained.
Meanwhile Usagi leaves the shop with nothing. She crumples her thirty-percent test into a ball and throws it over her shoulder, and it lands on the head of a rude college guy in sunglasses, who reads the score out loud and calls her “bun-head” for it. Neither of them knows what they used to be to each other. They dislike each other at once and get on with their day. He is Mamoru Chiba, and he will be back. She sulks off to the Game Crown arcade and plays the Sailor V machine badly, then goes home, gets told off about the test and is locked out of her own house over it.
That night the cat is sitting on her bed, and then it talks. Luna has been looking for her and has been watching her all day, and she has a lot to explain. Usagi is a guardian, there is a princess to find, an enemy is already at work, and none of it is optional. Usagi reacts the way a fourteen-year-old would. Luna gives her the brooch anyway, with the words that go with it, “Moon Prism Power, Make Up”, and the room fills with ribbon and light. The girl who was crying over a maths test ten minutes earlier is standing there in a sailor collar with a tiara on her forehead. She doesn’t know what she is doing, but she is Sailor Moon, and across town Naru is already in trouble.
At OSA-P she finds the shop full of collapsed women, and Naru, her best friend, being throttled by something wearing her mother’s face. Morga drops the disguise. The first thing Sailor Moon does as a hero is sit down on the floor and cry, so hard and at such a pitch that the noise alone knocks down every monster in the room and cracks the windows. That gives her the moment she needs. A rose lands at her feet, and a masked man in a tuxedo is watching from the window. Tuxedo Mask leaves the fighting to her and tells her in a steady voice that she can do this. She spins her tiara into a discus of light, Moon Tiara Action, and turns her first monster to dust. Mrs Osaka wakes up on the floor remembering none of it, and the next morning Usagi falls asleep at her desk as if nothing had happened.
Ami Mizuno is the smartest girl in school, and the rumour is that she is also the coldest. She gets straight A’s and perfect scores and has no friends to tell about them. Luna doesn’t trust her and wants her watched. Usagi wants a friend and goes about it the only way she knows, by barging straight in, and finds that behind the reputation Ami is a girl who blushes when someone is nice to her and hides behind a book. The trail leads to the Crystal Seminar, the cram school all the top students go to, and it is a Dark Kingdom trap. Rows of computers hand out study disks that brainwash whoever loads them and drain their energy while they work. It is run by the youma teacher Garoben, in a smart green suit. Ami takes a disk home, and her heart is too good for it to stick.
The trap springs and Garoben drops the disguise. Ami is pinned in a room full of hollow-eyed students who never look up. Luna presses a pen into her hands with the words “Mercury Power, Make Up,” and Ami, who has been lonely, becomes Sailor Mercury. Her Sabao Spray fills the room with bubbles and freezing mist until Garoben can’t see the girl she is swinging at, and while Garoben is blinded, Sailor Moon hits her with the tiara and finishes her. She is the first guardian at Usagi’s side and the first real friend Usagi ever makes. Afterwards they walk home along the fence with Luna in Ami’s arms.
Buses going past Hikawa Shrine have started vanishing, passengers and all. A bus goes up the hill and doesn’t come back down. The shrine’s miko is Rei Hino, who is sharp-tongued, proud and psychic, and the neighbourhood whispers that the disappearances must somehow be her fault. She lets them whisper. Usagi and Ami come up the steps with everyone else, because the shrine is selling a lot of protective charms that week, and get their first look at her. Then Rei kneels in front of the sacred fire and reads it, and the fire shows her that the gossip is wrong and the cause is the shrine’s new odd-job man. Jed has been handing those charms over the counter himself. Luna watches from the roof tiles and presses a pen into Rei’s hand.
Usagi talks her way onto the last bus in a borrowed conductor’s cap. The bus is pulled into a dark in-between place, and the odd-job man drops the act. Rei goes in after it, and the youma Kigaan grabs her by the throat, and at that moment the sign of Mars lights up on her forehead. She says the words, “Mars Power, Make Up,” and becomes Sailor Mars. She throws her first Fire Soul and burns the youma out of the air, Tuxedo Mask pulls everyone back out, and they all come home. For a stretch around here, and only in the anime, Rei openly chases Mamoru and the two of them date. It fizzles out, and the manga never includes it.
Jadeite has lost too many times, and Beryl has run out of patience. She tells him to kill the Sailor Guardians or go into Eternal Sleep. He stops hiding behind youma and does something none of her generals has tried. He puts his own face across the sky over Tokyo and calls the three of them out by name, Sailor Moon, Sailor Mercury and Sailor Mars, to Haneda Airport tomorrow night, or he will burn the city down. The day that follows is a normal one. Usagi argues with Luna, eats too much, runs into Mamoru on the street and gets teased about her grades. Underneath it she is terrified, because the enemy has stopped hunting strangers and started hunting her. Nobody has put a face on the sky over Tokyo before, and the girls understand what that means.
They go anyway, all three of them, because he named all three. Waiting for them are a deserted station and a police cordon that is no help, because Jadeite puts the whole force to sleep with a gesture and then raises clay fakes wearing the guardians’ uniforms. At the airport he turns the place against them and sends jumbo jets down the runway after the three girls on foot. They win by working together. Mercury and Sailor Moon hold his attention while Mars gets in behind him and slaps an ofuda on his back, and the planes he aimed at them come for him instead. He goes back to Beryl to bargain, and she doesn’t listen. Jadeite is sealed into Eternal Sleep, and the hunt passes on.
With Jadeite gone, Beryl gives the hunt to Nephrite and changes what they are after. The Silver Crystal was shattered into seven Rainbow Crystals, and they are hidden inside seven ordinary people who have no idea they are carrying them. Nephrite doesn’t work crowds the way Jadeite did. He reads the stars and picks one target at a time, and he is very good at it, but that doesn’t save him. Zoisite undercuts him for as long as he is in charge. He needles him in front of the throne, wrecks what he can reach and takes every failure straight to Kunzite, who backs Zoisite and does not back Nephrite. Out in the world Nephrite poses as a rich financier called Masato Sanjouin, and his way into Usagi’s circle is her best friend Naru Osaka, who falls for him hard. Beryl gives him room to work, and Zoisite waits.
Naru gets a letter, and the figure that meets her wears a top hat and a white mask. It has Tuxedo Mask’s face, but it is not him. Naru goes down first, drained where she stands, while the thing in Tuxedo Mask’s coat feeds Nephrite from somewhere safe. Sailor Moon arrives believing what she was meant to believe, and by the time the mask slips she is already caught, held up in the dark by the one person she would never fight. Mercury and Mars reach her before the drain is finished, a real rose comes out of the dark, and the youma breaks. Beryl is furious. Nephrite is unharmed and already reading the stars for the next one, and Zoisite has told Kunzite the whole story before the night is over. Naru was never the target. She was the bait the whole time.
Umino tells the class about a masquerade at a foreign embassy, with gowns and half-masks and more money in one room than the Dark Kingdom usually gets near. Beryl likes a room full of people with their guard down, so she sends someone. Before any of that, Usagi is asleep and has the dream again. There is a castle in moonlight, a woman in a white gown with Usagi’s face, a man whose features never become clear, and grief with nothing attached to explain it. She wakes up with only the sadness and a feeling that she has lost something. Across the city somebody else is awake at a window with the same feeling of something missing, wanting something he can’t name. Neither of them connects it to the party. Both of them are going, and neither knows the other is going too.
Usagi talks Luna into a dress and goes anyway, and it turns out Ami and Rei have taken the night just as seriously. Naru is there on Umino’s arm and is thrilled with all of it. For a while it is just a party, with chandeliers and borrowed formalwear. Usagi works steadily through the buffet, Rei dislikes the company and Ami dislikes the noise. Then the man in the black tuxedo crosses the floor and asks her to dance, and dancing with him brings the dream back while she is wide awake. It is the same castle and the same white gown, and the same grief comes well before any memory that would explain it. She doesn’t know what she is remembering. She knows only that she has done this before, in this dress, with this man, and that it didn’t end well.
Then the youma drops its disguise. Guests collapse where they are standing, Naru among them. Mars and Mercury come in through the gates to deal with what is left inside, while Tuxedo Mask is wounded getting Usagi clear, and the two of them go off a high balcony with only Luna’s umbrella between them and the street. Somewhere over the city, with Usagi unconscious in his arms and nobody around to see it, he kisses her. She wakes up with no memory of the kiss. What she keeps is the castle. It is the first piece of the Moon Kingdom to surface in her, long before anybody gives it a name, and the first time her past reaches her. It happens again later.
It is summer, and at the pool Naru won’t stop talking about him. Usagi hears it at close range all afternoon, the sighing and the staring into the middle distance any time the name Masato Sanjouin comes up. She doesn’t know how to tell her best friend that the man she is in love with isn’t a man at all, so she doesn’t, and Ami and Rei don’t know either. In the Dark Kingdom the mood is much worse. Beryl has run out of patience with Nephrite and says so where everybody can hear it, and Zoisite stands off to one side enjoying it. Nephrite still has one thing none of the others have. He can read a Rainbow Crystal out of the stars, and he has worked out that one of them is somewhere in Naru’s life.
He asks her to meet him, and Naru spends the whole day getting ready. She picks a dress and does her hair. She is fourteen, and this is the biggest thing that has ever happened to her. He is waiting on a bench after dark and is pleasant about all of it, and every question he asks her is about the shop. He asks about her mother, the safe and the stock, and what came in this week and where it is kept. Naru answers every one of them, delighted to be asked anything by someone who looks like him. Then he finds what he came for. It isn’t in her, but it is close enough that she was always going to be standing right next to it, and he brings out a black crystal and puts it to work. Earlier that evening Usagi spots the two of them together and can’t work out why the sight makes her feel ill.
What comes up out of it is a youma and a great deal of light, and Naru ends up strung up in the middle of it, crying, used to hold it open. Sailor Moon gets there with Mars and Mercury. Mercury has the youma worked out in about four seconds, and the three of them take it apart between them. Naru is carried out alive and has no idea who put her there in the first place. Nephrite gets what he came for and walks off into the night holding it, but he doesn’t look nearly as pleased as he ought to. Naru wakes up thinking a nice man took her out for the evening, and that is the part that gets to him. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.
Naru stops eating and talking and spends school lying face down on her desk, and Usagi doesn’t know what to do about it. Nephrite, in his own way, has stopped sleeping. Zoisite reads them both correctly and sets the obvious trap. A message draws Naru out after dark, three youma are waiting for her when she gets there, and the main purpose of it is to find out whether Nephrite will come. Naru rings Usagi before she leaves, which is the only reason anybody else knows about it. Sailor Moon runs there and is knocked down on the way by Nephrite himself, and a rose out of the dark gives her back the moment she needed. Then Nephrite turns and goes for Naru instead of the crystal, and takes her. Zoisite is watching all of it from somewhere safe, and now he has his answer.
The three youma catch up with them at an abandoned building, and it goes badly. Nephrite takes most of it himself but still gets Naru out, and the two of them end up hiding in the woods with the whole Dark Kingdom looking for them. She ties up his arm with the ribbon from her hair. He lets her, which is already unusual. For a while nobody is hunting anybody and they sit together. Naru talks in her usual way and Nephrite listens, which he has never done for anybody in his life. At some point he smiles at her. It is a real smile, different from the one he uses on marks, and it is the first and only time. She still doesn’t know that he is the reason all this is happening to her, and he doesn’t tell her. Then the vines come out of the dark.
He is bound in golden vines and badly wounded holding them off her, and he keeps holding them off her. Sailor Moon, Mars and Mercury get there in time to see it and do little else. He dies on the grass with Naru holding onto him and begging him not to, and then his body turns into light, and all she is left holding is his jacket, which she picks up off the ground. She sits in the empty clearing with it while the lights that were him drift up over the city. He is the first of Beryl’s four to turn out to have been a person underneath. Usagi stands there in a fuku she can’t explain, watching her best friend, and can’t say a word about any of it.
Nephrite’s part of the war goes to Zoisite, which is what he wanted, and he runs it differently from both generals before him. The seven Rainbow Crystals turn out to be sealed inside seven ordinary people, the Seven Great Youma bound into human lives so long ago that none of the hosts knows what they are carrying. Zoisite works down the list one person at a time, using a black crystal to pull the monster up out of whoever is holding it. The hosts include a kind priest, a schoolboy who dreams the future, a painter who only wants to draw two people in love, Rei’s grandfather, and a fat, unbothered house cat. The girls are after the same seven, and so is Tuxedo Mask, for reasons he won’t explain to anybody.
Down in the Dark Kingdom, Zoisite is working through the list, and the next Rainbow Crystal turns out to be inside a man who runs a crane game. On the surface Usagi is late for something and walks into three men pushing a girl around in an alley. She has no idea how to handle that out of uniform, and she doesn’t need to. A very tall girl in another school’s uniform walks past her, beats all three of them without hurrying, and leaves. She is Makoto Kino, who has just transferred and is already the subject of every rumour going. People say she is too tall and too strong, that she was thrown out of her last school, and that it is best not to look at her directly. Usagi decides on the spot that she wants to be friends with her.
Making friends goes well, mostly because Makoto feeds her. The rumours turn out to be untrue. She cooks and keeps plants, and she is lonely, because people have treated her as frightening since the day she got tall. She gives Usagi half of an enormous packed lunch without being asked. Ami and Rei join them at the arcade. Then Makoto sees the man working the crane game, in a cap, glasses and a jacket two sizes too big for him, and falls for him hard. Usagi is pleased about it for about nine seconds and then less so, because Makoto’s taste in men is a running joke, and because this one is being watched by someone with orange hair in a Dark Kingdom uniform. Usagi says nothing about it.
Zoisite pulls the crystal out of the man running the crane game, and what is left standing afterwards is no longer a man. It goes straight for Makoto, and within about a second and a half it throws her through the air. Usagi can’t reach her, and a fourteen-year-old with a compact can’t fix this in time. Then the sign of Jupiter lights up on Makoto’s forehead. Luna comes in low with a pen in her mouth and drops it into her hand. All episode Makoto has been told she is too big, too strong and too much for anybody. She looks at the pen, asks no questions and says the words. Sailor Jupiter arrives fully formed and angry. She is the fourth of them, the tallest and the strongest, and the only one so far who was winning fights before anyone gave her powers.
Supreme Thunder puts the youma flat on its back, and she doesn’t use it like someone trying it for the first time. She pulls the lightning down through the antenna on her tiara and takes the youma apart while the other three watch. Then Sailor Moon heals what used to be a person back into one, and he wakes up on the pavement with no idea any of it happened. Zoisite leaves with the crystal, so the fight is won but the crystal is lost, and that leaves six. It is the first fight they have won with four of them. The next day Makoto walks into the arcade and finds a seat waiting for her. Usagi has already ordered far too much food for two people, and nobody makes anything of it. Makoto never formally joins the team. She turns up and is already part of it.
Mamoru has had the same dream for weeks. There is a white palace, a voice he can’t place, and a princess who keeps asking him to find the Silver Crystal for her. He wakes up on the floor with a bad headache, not knowing why a dream should feel so much like a memory. In the Dark Kingdom, Zoisite now has Nephrite’s job and is working through the list properly, and the black crystal finds the next carrier, a priest. He is a kind man and has no idea there is a monster sealed inside him. Meanwhile Naru is back at school and telling everybody she is fine. She smiles and laughs at the right moments. Usagi watches her do it for about a day and doesn’t believe any of it, because Naru is her best friend, and because Usagi is the only person in that classroom who knows who Naru is grieving for.
Usagi breaks open her piggy bank and spends every coin in it on cheering Naru up, which is the only thing she can think of to do. Around the same time Luna gives each of them a communicator, so nobody has to go looking for anybody again. Then Naru goes to the cemetery alone. There is no grave for Nephrite, because there was never a body and nobody else knew he existed as a person. She picks a stranger’s headstone and talks to that instead. The priest finds her there and is gentle with her about it. So is the young man with the long ponytail who sits down beside her a little later and asks kindly who she is grieving for. Naru tells him, having no reason not to. The young man is Zoisite. He is there for the priest, he has come early, and he wanted to hear her say it out loud.
The black crystal goes into the priest, and what climbs out is Boxy, a boxing youma with rockets in its fists. It is fast, and it puts Sailor Moon flat on her back before she has finished her speech. Then Umino, who has no powers, no reason to be there and no plan, pushes Naru out of the path of a rocket fist and takes the hit instead. He gets up with a scratch on his cheek and his glasses crooked. Tuxedo Mask gets Sailor Moon off the ground, and Sailor Jupiter arrives with the thunder. When Moon Healing Escalation finally lands, the priest wakes up in the grass as himself again, holding his book and wondering what happened to his afternoon.
The crystal goes to Tuxedo Mask. He has it in his hand before anybody else gets near it, and Zoisite has to leave empty-handed. It is the first time all season that one of Beryl’s people has lost a round to him outright. Luna tells Sailor Moon to take the crystal off him, and Sailor Moon doesn’t. She can’t explain why, to Luna or to herself, and it costs somebody later. Afterwards she finds a gold star locket lying in the grass where the fight had been. Someone has dropped it. It opens and plays a tune she has never heard before, and she knows the tune anyway. The episode ends on a park bench with Naru sitting between Usagi and Umino and laughing properly at something for the first time since the woods. That is what Usagi came for, and she gets it.
Zoisite has reached the third name on the list, and this one is a schoolboy. At a building site Ryo Urawa shouts at a girl to move, about two seconds before a steel girder comes down where she was standing. The girl is Ami. Then the mock exam results go up and everyone at school stops in front of the board, because somebody has beaten her at last. It is Ryo, with a perfect paper. Usagi and Makoto find this very funny, and Ami takes it better than they do. Nobody knows yet that Ryo is no genius. He is psychic, and he gets a perfect score because he can see the answers before he writes them. He falls for Ami on the spot. During the test she noticed he had dropped his eraser and pushed it back across the desk to him without a word, and that is the only reason.
Usagi can never leave anything alone, and she decides to help by getting hold of a photo of Ami and handing it over to Ryo. The photo is an unflattering candid of Ami halfway through a bite of a burger, with a guilty look on her face. Ryo keeps it anyway. The same afternoon Usagi also sees Rei out on a date with Mamoru. The two of them are dating now, and Usagi does not handle it gracefully. Meanwhile Zoisite sits on a rooftop watching Ryo. Ryo already knows what is coming, because he has seen it. He knows what is sealed up inside him and what he is going to turn into, and he knows Ami is Sailor Mercury. He runs away from her on purpose, so that she will not have to be the one standing there when it happens.
It happens anyway. Zoisite puts the black crystal into Ryo and out comes Bunbo, a youma made of school supplies. The first thing Bunbo does is go for Zoisite, because there is still enough of the boy left inside it to know who did this to him. Zoisite has to take direct control to turn it on Sailor Mercury instead, so Mercury ends up fighting the boy who ran away to keep her out of it. The tiara and then Moon Healing Escalation put Ryo back together, and for once the crystal goes to the girls instead of to Tuxedo Mask. It turns out Ryo is transferring schools. At the station he gives Ami the burger photo back, and she gives him a better one. The last thing on screen is that photo as the train pulls out.
Luna is worried. Zoisite has been working down the list and nobody can get ahead of him. Meanwhile there is an exhibition on by the painter Yumemi Yumeno, who is famous for what everybody calls her paintings of love and who has never once come to her own shows. She has decided she is not pretty enough for anybody to take her seriously, so she stands at the back of her own gallery in glasses and a plait and lets the crowd assume she is staff. Usagi drags Naru along and stops in front of one of the canvases, because the man in it is Tuxedo Mask. Beside it is a painting of a prince in armour holding a girl in a white gown. Usagi has never seen either of them, but she recognises them both. Then Yumemi spots Mamoru across the room and goes white, because she painted him before she had ever seen him.
She asks the two of them to model for her. Usagi and Mamoru agree and then sit on a bench bickering through the whole sitting. Yumemi draws them anyway. What she draws is a prince kneeling in the wreckage of something enormous, holding a girl with long fair hair, and she has never met either of those two. She cannot explain it and does not try to. Nobody in the room knows that Yumemi was there on the Moon a very long time ago. She paints two people in love over and over again because she is remembering one particular pair, and she does not know that is what she is doing. Then Zoisite arrives for the green crystal, and the painter turns into Binah.
Binah draws in the air, and whatever she draws becomes real. Tuxedo Mask takes Zoisite off across the rooftops, and the two of them at last fight each other in earnest. In the middle of all this the star locket comes out again. Sailor Moon has been carrying it since the cemetery, and she tries to give it back to him. He tells her to keep it, because it belongs to the Princess he is looking for. Then he tells her, calmly and plainly, that he will take her Rainbow Crystals off her if it comes to that, and after that he leaves. Moon Healing Escalation brings Yumemi back. At the end of the episode she walks into her own exhibition with her face showing and her name on the door.
Makoto gets caught in the rain on the way home and is having a miserable time when somebody holds an umbrella over her head. It is Motoki, who works the counter at the Crown arcade. He is one of very few people in the show who have ever been plainly nice to her without wanting something out of it, and he does it without making a fuss. That is all it takes, and Makoto falls for him. Her type is, broadly, anybody kind. She spends the next few days hanging around the arcade, and nobody is fooled. Then she sees Motoki out in the street with a woman in a lab coat. Her name is Reika, she is at the university with him, and the way the two of them stand next to each other shows they are together before either of them has said a word. Reika is also lovely.
Makoto talks her way into Motoki’s flat and cooks and cleans for him. The flat is a tip, and she does all of it well, far better than he ever will. Then she lifts a photo frame off a shelf and the photo is of Motoki and Reika, and Makoto has to keep smiling with the frame still in her hands. She finishes the washing up first and then breaks down outside on her own. Usagi finds her sitting under a tree afterwards and is a good friend about it for about ninety seconds. Then she lets slip that she fancies Motoki as well, and from that point the two of them stop comforting and being comforted and become rivals. Mamoru watches all of it from the arcade counter, looking like a man who already has enough to deal with.
Down in the Dark Kingdom the black crystal picks its next target, and it is Reika. This is the first proper look at the man Zoisite answers to, Kunzite, the last of Beryl’s four and by some distance the most dangerous. He hears the plan out without showing much interest and lets Zoisite get on with it, and Zoisite is plainly thrilled to have been listened to at all. On the surface Reika has news of her own. She has been offered a research posting in Africa and is going to take it, and she and Motoki have been working out between them what that will mean. That is when Zoisite comes for her. He takes the two of them somewhere with fire in it and pulls the blue crystal out of Reika while Motoki is holding her, and what gets up afterwards is Rikoukeidar.
The fight goes the usual way. Tuxedo Mask and Zoisite fight each other again while Sailor Moon and Jupiter take on the youma, a long green creature with long legs and an energy ball that it uses freely. Mercury and Mars arrive to make it four. Moon Healing Escalation puts Reika back together, and Zoisite leaves with the crystal anyway. That makes it three to him against one each for Tuxedo Mask and Sailor Moon. Five of the seven are taken, and the girls are losing. The episode ends at an airport. Reika is leaving and Motoki is staying, and the two of them agree out loud that they are going to be all right about it. Usagi watches this and suggests they leave the poor man alone. Makoto says no, and they are still arguing as the doors shut.
A scruffy young man comes to the steps of the Hikawa Shrine at night with a bag over his shoulder and asks to be taken on as an apprentice. This is Yuichiro. Rei’s grandfather, who is roughly four feet tall and very enthusiastic, takes one look at him and says yes. There is no interview and hardly any conversation. It is the same night that Zoisite comes for the sixth crystal, and the sixth crystal is inside Grandpa Hino. The black crystal goes in, the old man collapses in the courtyard in the rain, and Rei finds him there afterwards while the crows watch from the roof. Separately, and to her annoyance, Rei goes a little pink every time Yuichiro is in the room. She would deny it.
Most of what follows is about Rei being fourteen. Grandpa is not himself, in a way everybody notices and nobody can put a name to, and Yuichiro fusses over him. Rei finds this very irritating, and it also gets to her a little. The two of them end up out for the day at the park, down by the water, sitting on a bench and not saying much, which is as close to a date as either of them will admit to. Usagi follows them, first in a hat and sunglasses and then dressed up as a fortune teller, in the firm belief that she is helping. She is not. Rei and Yuichiro have a row, mostly because Rei cannot say anything true out loud. Usagi goes home, thinks about it, and buys a box of daifuku as a peace offering.
Then Zoisite stops waiting. He pulls the crystal out of the old man on the shrine steps, and Grandpa Hino turns into Jiji, a red-faced oni about three times his size, with the strength to match and none of the old man’s good humour left in it. Yuichiro is in this fight. He has no powers and no real training, and he has known these people for about a week, but he puts himself between the demon and Rei anyway. He gets thrown across the courtyard for it, gets up, and does it again. Rei has spent the episode refusing to say out loud that she likes him, and now she has to stand there and watch him do this. The youma gets hold of her, and Yuichiro goes straight back in. Nobody in the courtyard is winning, and nobody is leaving.
Sailor Moon arrives in the middle of the fight, out of breath and still holding the box of daifuku. Sailor Mars then has to fight a monster that is also her grandfather, and she does it without hesitating once. Moon Healing Escalation puts the old man back the way he was. Then, before Zoisite can leave with the crystal, Tuxedo Mask knocks it out of his hand and takes it. That makes two crystals for Tuxedo Mask, and six of the seven are now accounted for. At the shrine afterwards Grandpa Hino remembers none of what happened. He is delighted about everything, including the enormous hole in his own courtyard. Yuichiro stays on at the shrine, and Rei says nothing at all about any of it.
This is Luna’s episode, and it opens with her running flat out down a street with what looks like every cat in the ward behind her. There has been some sort of territorial dispute. Luna does not fully understand the terms of it and is not being given the chance to negotiate. A red tabby and about forty other cats corner her against a wall, and she is working out how this is going to end when something enormous walks into the alley. It is a round, pale green cat, and none of this bothers it. It does not fight anybody. It stands there, and the mob leaves. Luna, who spends most episodes telling Usagi to be sensible, looks up at this big calm cat and falls in love on the spot.
His name is Rhett Butler. He belongs to a small girl called An, who carries him everywhere in both arms, and he puts up with this the way he puts up with everything. For the next part of the episode Luna is distracted, sighs a lot and snaps at people. The girls find this very funny, and Luna finds it unbearable. In the end she tracks down the address, reads the nameplate on the gate, and stands outside the gate working out what she is going to say. Usagi and Makoto are delighted, and Rei gives advice nobody asked for. None of them is any help. In the background, and without anyone noticing, Zoisite has finished the list and worked out that the seventh and last Rainbow Crystal has been inside the cat all along.
Zoisite comes for An’s cat. An will not let go of him, because she is about seven and he is her cat, and the chase goes down a manhole and into the storm drains under the city. From here the episode, which has been a romantic comedy about a cat, turns into a chase through a sewer. Luna goes after them. The girls go after Luna and spend their evening in the drains, transforming on the way down. An ends up on the tunnel floor, and the girls find her there. Zoisite, who has spent six episodes gliding about in a cloud of petals looking pleased with himself, is now several storeys underground in the dark, in a smelly tunnel, chasing a cat that is much faster than it looks and does not seem to be taking any of this personally.
Then the rats arrive, and this is the part most people remember. Zoisite, one of the four generals of the Dark Kingdom and right hand to Queen Beryl, is set upon in a drain by a huge number of rats, and the episode gives this its full attention. The rats come along the pipes and the ledges and up out of the water, all in one wave, and there are so many that the animation stops drawing them one by one and draws them as a texture. He swipes at them and shouts at them, and they keep coming. Nobody from the Dark Kingdom comes to help him, since nobody in the Dark Kingdom has ever helped anybody. It is the least dignified stretch of screen time any villain in the series gets, and it goes on for a long time.
The rats bury him until no part of Zoisite can be seen. There is only a heaving grey mound about the size of a car, with one white gloved hand sticking out of the top of it, waving. He gets out eventually, and the chase comes up onto a rooftop in the last of the daylight, where the episode stops being funny for a while. Zoisite does get the cat. He holds up the black crystal and pulls the seventh Rainbow Crystal out of Rhett Butler while Luna watches, and there is nothing she can do about it. What is left standing on the roof afterwards is no longer the cat who walked into the alley and sent forty other cats home without touching one of them.
What Zoisite gets is Bakene, a huge green monster with a great many teeth and a harsh, grating voice. Even in that form, it goes for everybody else in the fight and will not touch Luna, because there is still enough of the cat in it to remember who she is. Moon Healing Escalation puts Rhett Butler back as he was, whole, round and calm. Tuxedo Mask takes the last crystal off Zoisite on the way out, which makes it three to Zoisite, three to Tuxedo Mask and one to Sailor Moon. All seven crystals have now been taken out of the people who carried them. The episode ends at sunset with Rhett Butler sitting in the grass next to Luna, who is going to have to go back to work the next day.
Luna calls everyone up to the Hikawa Shrine after dark, and this time she tells them plainly. She came from the Moon, and she was sent here a thousand years ago on purpose to find them and wake them up. The princess they have been looking for all this time is Moon royalty. It is the biggest thing anybody has said out loud in thirty-one episodes, and the scene is played almost silently, with four girls and two cats on the steps under a crescent moon. Meanwhile the Dark Kingdom is counting. Zoisite has his share of the rainbow shards laid out on a dish, and there are gaps in the setting, because Tuxedo Mask has three of his own and Sailor Moon has one. Kunzite is not pleased about the numbers.
Umino is having a very bad week. He has liked Naru since about the first episode, and she mostly takes no notice of him. He asks Usagi for advice, and Usagi tells him to be more like Tuxedo Mask, cool and mysterious and the sort of person who turns up when you need him. She means the way he behaves, and Umino takes it to mean a costume. He gets a top hat, a cape and a domino mask, calls himself Tuxedo Umino Kamen, and starts protecting Naru from things. One is a truck she was never in any danger from. Another is a woman he decides is a purse snatcher, who is in fact a woman with a purse, and she hits him with it. He ends up on the pavement outside the Crown about once a scene. Naru is never cruel about any of it, and she is very tired.
Motoki hands out tickets to a Redman show at the amusement park, which is the sort of thing that turns into a date as long as nobody calls it one. Down below, Zoisite has stopped waiting for the black crystal to find him a carrier. He has worked out that it can make a youma out of anyone he points it at, and that the quickest way to bring Sailor Moon into the open is to point it at her best friend. So that night he goes to OSA-P. On the stairs outside Naru’s door he sees a small figure in a top hat and a cape, decides Tuxedo Mask has got there before him again, and goes away angry. Umino has saved Naru’s life without touching anyone, and he never finds out that he did. Her mother opens the door, finds a boy in fancy dress on the step at an unreasonable hour, and sends him home.
The next day the park is packed. The Redman show is a man in a red suit fighting rubber monsters on a fibreglass cliff, for an audience of small children who believe all of it. Umino and Naru are down at the front. Usagi has come too, with Luna, because the tickets were free. Zoisite sets up behind the carousel with the black crystal in his hand, picks Naru out of the crowd, aims, and fumbles it. The beam goes wide and hits the stuntman instead, so the Dark Kingdom’s new tactic is first used to turn a children’s entertainer into a monster in front of the children. Zoisite meant the plan to be elegant, and it goes wrong through his own clumsiness. He has to stand in the shrubbery and watch the result.
What comes out of the transformation is Akan, and Akan’s weapon is algae. It leaves his hand as a small green ball and lands as a sphere the size of a car with a person sealed inside it, and it spreads through the crowd. Umino gets between it and Naru and is thrown hard around the plaza, again and again, without once running. Then Naru steps in front of him and is sealed inside a ball herself. Zoisite walks out into a park full of people suffocating inside green balls and makes Sailor Moon an offer. She can have all of them back, and it will cost her the rainbow shard she is carrying. She does not argue or stall. She opens the brooch and hands it over. It is the first time in the arc that the enemy has asked her for something and been given it.
Tuxedo Mask arrives a moment too late to stop the trade, and his rose cannot undo it once it is done, so Zoisite goes home four shards up and very pleased with himself. Moon Healing Escalation puts the stuntman back, the algae lets everybody go, and the Redman show starts again with its monster back at work. Naru, who heard the whole fight from inside a green ball and saw none of it, tells Umino he was magnificent, and he does not correct her. Usagi ends the episode at her bedroom window in the dark, and she is not thinking about any of that. She is thinking about the man in the top hat, who turns up whenever she needs him and who wants the same seven stones the enemy wants, and about what happens on the day she finds out which of those is the real one.
Minako Aino steps up with the cat Artemis. She is the famous Sailor V, and she is also the fifth soldier, Sailor Venus, and the team’s battle leader. With her, the circle of five is complete.
▢Sailor Venus and Artemis reveal themselves as the fabled Sailor V
At Starlight Tower Zoisite sets a trap. He challenges Tuxedo Mask to a duel over the Rainbow Crystals and seals the two of them inside the tower, and Sailor Moon fights her way up to him. In the middle of it Tuxedo Mask is run through shielding her and is dying, and at last each of them sees who the other is. Usagi sees that Mamoru, who infuriates her, is Tuxedo Mask, and he sees that the crybaby is Sailor Moon. Her grief and the last Rainbow Crystal wake the Silver Crystal for the first time, and Sailor Moon rises transformed as Princess Serenity. All their memory of the Moon Kingdom comes back to both of them at once.
With the seven shards gathered, the Silver Crystal is whole, and more of the Moon Kingdom’s past comes back. In that lost age Princess Serenity and Prince Endymion of Earth loved each other across the two worlds. The reunion is cut short almost at once. Mamoru, badly wounded at the tower, is carried off by the Dark Kingdom and brainwashed into becoming their Prince Endymion.
5Kunziteeps 36-43not yet
The five of them head north to the Dark Kingdom’s stronghold at D Point in the Arctic. Kunzite ambushes them with a warping attack meant to scatter them across space and time, but the Moon Stick takes them somewhere else, to the silent ruins of the Moon Kingdom. An image of Queen Serenity appears there and tells them everything about the Silver Millennium, the prince of Earth, Beryl’s war and Metaria’s darkness. Usagi’s memories come back in full. Before this she had only had flashes, and now she remembers the life she used to live. Then the queen sends the guardians back to finish what began a thousand years ago. They walk the rest of the way in winter coats, into a blizzard, and before they go down they promise each other that they will all come home.
Back at D Point the team goes down into the ice, and Beryl sends the DD Girls to stop them. The DD Girls fight with tricks, using illusions and mirrors and copies of people’s faces, and it soon becomes clear that not all five of the guardians will walk out. They make a decision that none of them says out loud. They will fall one at a time, each one winning the next stretch of ground, so that Sailor Moon gets to the throne. Jupiter dies first. She is the strongest of them, and she throws herself at the youma with Supreme Thunder in a charge she does not mean to survive. When the blast clears she is still standing upright, frozen into a pillar of thorned ice and facing the way the others need to go.
Mercury dies next. When Sailor Moon breaks down and refuses to leave anyone behind, Ami slaps her, which shocks them both. Ami apologizes and then volunteers to be the decoy, while Mars and Venus take Sailor Moon by the arms and pull her away. Mercury has no attack that can hurt the youma, only her mind, so she stays behind to hold off the next wave alone, working her supercomputer against the DD Girls while magma rises around her. They conjure an illusion of the boy she likes to break her, and she sees through it. Their numbers and the fire are enough without a trick, though, and she is caught, bound and killed with her visor still running. Far ahead, still being pulled along by the arms, Sailor Moon feels the moment Ami dies.
Venus dies next. She is the team’s leader, and she has been doing this longer than any of them, since before she was anybody’s friend, when she fought alone as a soldier in another city. With Jupiter and Mercury gone, she cuts youma down with her Crescent Beam and works out something none of the others could. The DD Girls’ advantage is illusion, and the illusion has to come from somewhere. She finds the jewel it comes from and shatters it, and every mirror and copy disappears. It still isn’t enough. She is one guardian against too many, and they take her in the open. She is still giving orders when she falls. She dies doing her job, so that Sailor Moon can keep walking.
Mars dies last. By the time the fight reaches her, Rei is already dying. She is badly hurt and burned and has nothing left, and she refuses on principle to be finished off. All through the arc she has been the sharp one, the one telling Usagi to grow up. She gathers the last of her strength, throws one final Fire Soul and burns up the last DD Girl in the air before she falls. Her death is the one that makes Sailor Moon break down. Alone in the ice, past the bodies of all four friends who died one by one to get her this far, Usagi stops crying, picks herself up and walks the rest of the way to the throne by herself. None of them is left to tell her she can do it.
Then, while she is alone on the ice, the four of them come back to her one by one, Jupiter first, then Venus and Mercury together, then Mars. They are not alive, and they are not exactly ghosts either. They have come to tell her to keep going, in the same voices they used on her when she was late for school or crying about a test. They remind her that they gave everything on purpose and that they would do it again. Somewhere in the middle of this she stops crying. When they fade, she is alone on an ice field with the whole Dark Kingdom in front of her, and she goes in anyway.
At the throne she finds Mamoru alive but not himself. Beryl has taken the man who threw roses for her and made him into her own dark Prince Endymion, dressed in Beryl’s colours, with Beryl’s hand on his shoulder and her voice in his ear. He doesn’t know Sailor Moon at all. He attacks her with no sign of recognition and no mercy, and he is good at it. He has the sword, the speed and the precision that he once used to protect her. For the first part of the fight she only tries to stay alive. She falls, gets up and calls his name, and his face shows nothing. None of it reaches him. Queen Beryl watches from the throne, sure of how it will end. He knocks Sailor Moon down onto the ice more than once, and each time she is slower to get up.
She will not raise a hand against him, and she keeps to that the whole time. She takes the blows, bleeding, and refuses again and again to fight back. Instead she appeals to what the two of them used to be to each other. She brings up the star-locket music box and the tune it plays, the Silver Millennium, a princess and a prince who had already lost each other once, and a promise made in a garden a thousand years ago. She offers all of it to him and keeps talking, and she doesn’t stop when it costs her. It takes a long time. In the end her love wears through Beryl’s hold, the sword comes down, and the real Endymion opens his eyes and knows her.
Once he is free, Beryl, cheated of her prince, strikes at Usagi as soon as his back is turned. Endymion throws himself in front of the blow and dies saving her. She has had him back for a couple of minutes, and she loses him again right in front of her, close enough to hold. She kisses him goodbye on the floor of the enemy’s throne room. In her grief, kneeling over him, she rises as Princess Serenity, with the Moon Kingdom fully awake in her at last, and for the first time the Silver Crystal answers her as what it has always been. Beryl responds by giving herself over completely. Queen Metaria pours into her until the two of them are one, the giant Super Beryl, who is taller than the cavern that holds her.
Serenity is alone and half dead, and she is holding a crystal she isn’t strong enough to use. She walks out onto the ice to meet Super Beryl, who is the size of a mountain and doesn’t bother to hurry. The four girls who have already died gather close to her, neither alive nor quite gone, and pour the last of what they had into her hands. The Moon Stick answers with far more light than one person could ever have carried. Together the five of them release the full power of the Silver Crystal and destroy Beryl and Queen Metaria, until nothing is left of the Dark Kingdom. The wish takes Usagi’s own life with it. She knew that before she made it, and she made it anyway.
The crystal grants her one thing more than she asked for. Everyone comes back. They are no longer soldiers, or a princess and her guard, and they are set down in ordinary lives with the war gone from their memories. Ami is at her desk with a book. Rei is sweeping the shrine steps. Makoto is laughing at something, Minako is late for something, and Mamoru is somewhere in the city, not thinking about roses. Usagi wakes up about to be late for school again. She remembers nothing of the kingdom, the ice field, the friends who died or the boy she kissed goodbye. The Earth is quiet, and nothing up there wants anything from them any more. It stays that way for a while, until one day it all comes back to her.
manga
under construction
Written but not yet built. The summaries below stand in until the panels are added.
Luna finds Usagi and, under a Sailor V movie poster, gives her the transformation brooch and a mission to find a princess and a hidden treasure. Usagi becomes Sailor Moon and soon meets the treasure-seeking Tuxedo Mask.
Soon after, Ami awakens as Sailor Mercury and Rei as Sailor Mars, and Luna brings them together. Tuxedo Mask, already seen as Mamoru Chiba, is searching for the Silver Crystal for his own reasons.
Makoto joins as Sailor Jupiter, and the enemy becomes clearer. Its four generals, Jadeite, Nephrite, Zoisite and Kunzite, once served Prince Endymion in the Silver Millennium and now serve Queen Beryl. Here the generals are Endymion’s corrupted guardians. In the anime they are separate schemers.
Minako arrives as Sailor Venus with Artemis. She leads the team, and at first poses as the princess to guard the real one. Luna calls up the crescent Moon Stick for Sailor Moon.
Usagi awakens as Princess Serenity and the Silver Crystal rises from her brooch, while she remembers the fall of the Silver Millennium. Mamoru is revealed as the reincarnated Prince Endymion, her love in a past life, before the Dark Kingdom captures and controls him.
The senshi storm the Dark Kingdom to free Mamoru, who is under its control, and to confront Queen Beryl and Queen Metaria, a huge dark cloud. Sailor Moon defeats them with the Silver Crystal. The stones of the four generals are left behind.
▢Sailor Moon confronts Queen Metaria’s dark cloud with the Silver Crystal
also in this arc Sailor Mars · Sailor Mercury · Sailor Jupiter · Sailor Venus · Tuxedo Mask · Luna · Artemis
↑ back to the arcsBlack Moon
Sailor Moon R · 1993 // Black Moon arc
- aired
- 1993–1994 · 43 episodes
- villain
- the Black Moon Clan, Prince Demande
- arrives
- Chibi Moon, Pluto
- written up
- not yet
under construction
Written but not yet built. The summaries below stand in until the galleries are added.
anime
A pink-haired little girl, Chibiusa, falls out of the sky onto Usagi, points a toy gun at her, calls her “Usagi” and demands the Silver Crystal. Then she hypnotizes the Tsukino family into believing she is a cousin, so she can move in.
▢Chibiusa falls from the sky onto Usagi and points a toy gun demanding the Silver Crystal
The Black Moon clan appears. Rubeus commands the four Ayakashi Sisters, Koan, Berthier, Petz and Calaveras, who send droids to drain the city and hunt for the girl. Dark crescent marks and warped machines start turning up around town.
▢Rubeus lounges aboard his ship as the four Ayakashi Sisters set out
Sailor Moon upgrades to the Crystal Star for Moon Crystal Power, Make Up, and Neo Queen Serenity’s power gives her the Cutie Moon Rod and the attack Moon Princess Halation. Both her wand and her attacks are stronger for the new enemy.
▢the Cutie Moon Rod forms in Sailor Moon’s hands as she unleashes Moon Princess Halation
The Ayakashi Sisters are defeated one by one. They are healed instead of destroyed, and they leave the Black Moon and settle into ordinary lives. Koan is freed first, and her fire mark fades.
▢Sailor Moon heals Koan, the fire tattoo fading from her body
Chibiusa’s key opens the Space-Time Door, which Sailor Pluto guards alone, and the group travels to a ruined future. In 30th century Crystal Tokyo they find Neo Queen Serenity locked in a crystal sleep.
▢Sailor Pluto stands before the Door of Space and Time, Garnet Rod in hand
Chibiusa is revealed as Small Lady, the future daughter of Usagi and Mamoru. She fled her own time with the Silver Crystal to find help. She admits that she feels unloved and blames herself for the disaster.
▢the frozen Neo Queen Serenity behind glass as Chibiusa weeps
Rubeus falls, and the higher Black Moon leaders move in. They are Prince Demande, who covets Neo Queen Serenity, along with Esmeraude, Saphir and the hooded Wiseman. Demande captures Usagi and holds her aboard the ship.
▢Prince Demande reaches toward the captive Usagi aboard the Black Moon ship
The Wiseman feeds on Chibiusa’s loneliness and changes her into Black Lady, a cold grown woman who then turns against Sailor Moon.
▢Chibiusa transformed into the grown, dark Black Lady with a black crescent glowing
Sailor Moon reaches Chibiusa’s heart and frees her from Black Lady. The Wiseman is unmasked as the Doom Phantom, who threatens both eras. With the Silver Crystal, Sailor Moon defeats Demande and the Phantom, and the future is put right.
▢Sailor Moon and the reawakened Chibiusa clasp hands against Wiseman’s dark orb
manga
Chibiusa descends with the floating toy Luna P, hypnotizes Usagi, points her gun at her and demands the Silver Crystal. Mamoru starts having warning dreams of a coming ruin.
▢Chibiusa points the toy gun at Usagi as Luna P floats beside her
Chibiusa flees through the Space-Time Door. Its only keeper is Setsuna Meiou, Sailor Pluto, who is bound by the taboos of the god Chronos. The senshi follow Chibiusa into the future.
▢Sailor Pluto bars the Door of Space and Time
In Crystal Tokyo a hologram of King Endymion explains the Black Moon attack, Neo Queen Serenity’s crystal sleep, and that Chibiusa is their daughter Small Lady. The manga makes far more of this future history than the anime.
▢the hologram of King Endymion addresses the senshi in Crystal Tokyo
Neo Queen Serenity’s power grants the Cutie Moon Rod, and Diana, the grey kitten daughter of Luna and Artemis, joins Chibiusa from the future. Here the Ayakashi Sisters are minor threats and never become redeemed friends.
▢the Cutie Moon Rod appears as Diana perches on Chibiusa’s shoulder
Prince Demande, Saphir and Esmeraude rule from the planet Nemesis. The Wiseman is revealed as Death Phantom, an exiled sorcerer who feeds on the dark crystal. The power of the clan comes from that planet.
▢Wiseman unmasks as Death Phantom above the planet Nemesis
Wiseman turns Chibiusa into Black Lady. When Sailor Moon frees her, Chibiusa awakens as Sailor Chibi Moon for the first time. In the anime that debut does not come until Sailor Moon S. She takes her place as a guardian.
▢Chibiusa awakens as Sailor Chibi Moon, her tiara gleaming
Demande grasps both Silver Crystals at once, risking a paradox that could unmake time. Sailor Pluto breaks her deepest taboo to stop it, using the forbidden Time Stop, and dies saving everyone. Sailor Moon destroys Death Phantom, and Saturn is foreshadowed.
▢Sailor Pluto raises her staff to freeze time, light breaking around her
also in this arc Sailor Mars · Sailor Mercury · Sailor Jupiter · Sailor Venus · Sailor Pluto · Tuxedo Mask · Sailor Chibi Moon · Luna · Artemis
↑ back to the arcsInfinity
Sailor Moon S · 1994 // Infinity arc
- aired
- 1994–1995 · 38 episodes
- villain
- the Death Busters, Professor Tomoe
- arrives
- Uranus, Neptune, Saturn
- written up
- not yet
under construction
Written but not yet built. The summaries below stand in until the galleries are added.
anime
The Death Busters, led by Professor Tomoe and Kaolinite, send Daimons to tear pure heart crystals out of chosen people while searching for three special hearts. The victims collapse as their glowing hearts are pulled out.
▢a Daimon rips a glowing pure heart crystal out of its victim
Two strangers, Haruka Tenou and Michiru Kaiou, appear as Sailors Uranus and Neptune, hunting the same targets for the talismans. They coldly warn Sailor Moon to stay out of their way.
▢Sailor Uranus and Neptune stand together on a windswept rooftop
Sailor Moon’s brooch becomes the Cosmic Heart Compact for “Moon Cosmic Power, Make Up,” and she gets the Spiral Heart Moon Rod and the attack Rainbow Moon Heart Ache. Her power increases to match the more dangerous enemy.
▢the Spiral Heart Moon Rod extends as Sailor Moon calls Rainbow Moon Heart Ache
Chibiusa returns from the future and, in the anime, awakens for the first time as Sailor Chibi Moon, with the Pink Moon Stick. She fights beside Sailor Moon and befriends a lonely classmate.
▢Chibiusa transforms into Sailor Chibi Moon for the first time
Two of the three talismans, the Space Sword and the Deep Aqua Mirror, are in the pure hearts of Uranus and Neptune themselves. Setsuna Meiou returns as Sailor Pluto with the Garnet Orb. Together the three talismans call up the Holy Grail.
▢the three talismans rise together and the Holy Grail materializes
Sailor Moon takes the Holy Grail and becomes Super Sailor Moon, with new power and a new uniform. The Grail turns the fight against the Death Busters.
▢Sailor Moon lifts the Holy Grail and becomes Super Sailor Moon in a burst of light
Chibiusa befriends the frail Hotaru Tomoe, who is secretly the host of Mistress 9. Mistress 9 takes Chibiusa’s pure heart and the Silver Crystal to awaken the entity Pharaoh 90.
▢Mistress 9 emerges from Hotaru’s body, hair rising like dark flames
Pharaoh 90 pours into the world, and Hotaru awakens as Sailor Saturn, the senshi of destruction and rebirth. Super Sailor Moon goes into the breach to stop Pharaoh 90, and Hotaru is reborn as a baby.
▢Sailor Saturn raises the Silence Glaive before Pharaoh 90’s spreading darkness
manga
At the elite Mugen Academy the group senses a gathering evil, and Chibiusa, who is staying in the past, befriends the pale, bandaged Hotaru Tomoe early on. Their friendship is central to the arc.
▢Chibiusa meets the pale, bandaged Hotaru outside Mugen Academy
Haruka and Michiru, Sailors Uranus and Neptune, work apart from the team against the Death Busters and the Witches 5, and Setsuna returns as Pluto. The outer guardians keep their distance from the inner senshi.
▢Uranus, Neptune and Pluto stand apart as the outer guardians
The three talismans held by the outer senshi summon the Holy Grail, and with her new Cosmic Heart Compact, Sailor Moon becomes Super Sailor Moon. The arc turns when the Grail appears.
▢the Holy Grail forms above the three kneeling outer senshi
Professor Tomoe, fused with the Death Buster Germatoid, raised Hotaru as the living vessel of Mistress 9, who now seizes the Silver Crystal. The manga links Hotaru’s illness directly to her father’s bargain.
▢Professor Tomoe stands over Hotaru as Mistress 9 stirs within her
Sailor Saturn awakens inside Hotaru and prepares to lower her glaive, which will end the world along with Pharaoh 90. Super Sailor Moon dives into the Tau nebula to save her. Saturn is reborn as a baby and given to the outer senshi to look after.
▢Sailor Saturn poised to drop the Silence Glaive as Pharaoh 90 looms
also in this arc Sailor Mars · Sailor Mercury · Sailor Jupiter · Sailor Venus · Sailor Uranus · Sailor Neptune · Sailor Pluto · Sailor Saturn · Tuxedo Mask · Sailor Chibi Moon · Luna · Artemis
↑ back to the arcsDream
Sailor Moon SuperS · 1995 // Dream arc
- aired
- 1995–1996 · 39 episodes
- villain
- the Dead Moon Circus, Queen Nehellenia
- arrives
- the Sailor Quartet: Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta
- written up
- not yet
under construction
Written but not yet built. The summaries below stand in until the galleries are added.
anime
A total solar eclipse darkens the sky, and the tents of the Dead Moon Circus go up. Its rulers, the hag Zirconia and the vain Queen Nehelenia, mean to seize the beautiful dream that hides Pegasus and take over the world.
▢the Dead Moon Circus big top appears beneath a total solar eclipse
The Amazon Trio, Tiger’s Eye, Hawk’s Eye and Fisheye, look into people’s Dream Mirrors, hunting for the golden Pegasus. They pull out each victim’s mirror and search it.
▢Tiger’s Eye peers into a victim’s glowing Dream Mirror
The winged Pegasus visits Chibiusa in her dreams, and she secretly shelters him. He is really the priest Helios. Their friendship becomes the centre of the season.
▢Pegasus appears to Chibiusa in a dream, wreathed in light
Powered by Pegasus, Sailor Moon and Chibi Moon transform together with Moon Crisis, Make Up. Chibi Moon rings the Crystal Carillon to call Pegasus, whose horn powers the Kaleido Moon Scope for Moon Gorgeous Meditation.
▢Chibi Moon rings the Crystal Carillon and Pegasus’s horn arms the Kaleido Moon Scope
The Amazon Trio are undone, and the Amazoness Quartet, CereCere, PallaPalla, JunJun and VesVes, take over the hunt. The circus becomes more acrobatic and more dangerous.
▢the four Amazoness Quartet strike acrobatic poses in the circus ring
Helios is looking for the Golden Crystal, which is hidden in the maiden’s dream. The Dead Moon closes in and captures him, and Chibiusa learns his true form.
▢Chibiusa discovers the young priest Helios caged in Elysion
Queen Nehelenia comes out of her mirror, and the Dead Moon overruns the city. Super Sailor Moon and Super Sailor Chibi Moon defeat her, free Helios and destroy the circus.
▢Super Sailor Moon faces Queen Nehelenia before her great mirror
manga
A solar eclipse brings Helios, the priest of the holy land Elysion, to Chibiusa and Mamoru, looking for the maiden whose dream holds the Golden Crystal. He begins as a captive asking for help and not as a friendly dream visitor.
▢Helios reaches out from Elysion beneath the eclipsed sun
The Dead Moon Circus, Zirconia and Queen Nehelenia attack. The Amazoness Quartet serve Nehelenia from the start, and there is no separate Amazon Trio phase in the manga.
▢Queen Nehelenia rises from her dark mirror over the Dead Moon Circus
The inner and outer senshi reach their Super forms, and Chibiusa becomes Super Sailor Chibi Moon. The whole team powers up for the Dead Moon assault.
▢the inner senshi ascend to their Super forms together
Nehelenia is revealed as the mirror queen who cursed the Silver Millennium at Princess Serenity’s birth, foretelling the Moon Kingdom’s fall. This ties her directly to the series’ origin. In the anime she is a standalone villain.
▢young Queen Nehelenia curses the infant princess in the Silver Millennium
The Golden Crystal turns out to be Endymion’s sacred stone, the power of Elysion. Mamoru falls ill as the Dead Moon attacks the Earth’s dream. The Prince’s power, as well as the Princess’s, decides the outcome.
▢the Golden Crystal glows within the ailing Prince Endymion
At the climax Sailor Moon becomes Eternal Sailor Moon with the Eternal Tiare. In the manga the Eternal upgrade comes here. With the Golden Crystal and the senshi she destroys Nehelenia.
▢Eternal Sailor Moon spreads her wings for the first time, Eternal Tiare in hand
The Amazoness Quartet are revealed as the sleeping Asteroid Sailor Senshi, Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta, Chibiusa’s future guardians. They are laid to rest in amber to wake again in her own time.
▢the four Amazoness Quartet revealed as the Sailor Quartet, asleep in their crystal amber
also in this arc Sailor Mars · Sailor Mercury · Sailor Jupiter · Sailor Venus · Sailor Uranus · Sailor Neptune · Sailor Pluto · Sailor Saturn · Tuxedo Mask · Sailor Chibi Moon · Helios · Sailor Ceres · Sailor Pallas · Sailor Juno · Sailor Vesta · Luna · Artemis · Diana
↑ back to the arcsStars
Sailor Moon Sailor Stars · 1996 // Stars arc
- aired
- 1996–1997 · 34 episodes
- villain
- Shadow Galactica, Sailor Galaxia
- arrives
- the Starlights, Kakyuu, Cosmos
- written up
- not yet
under construction
Written but not yet built. The summaries below stand in until the galleries are added.
anime
Mamoru leaves to study abroad. At the airport Sailor Galaxia attacks him and tears out his star seed, and golden feathers fall. Usagi waits for letters that never come.
▢golden feathers fall as Galaxia takes Mamoru’s star seed at the airport
Sailor Moon reaches her final form, Eternal Sailor Moon, with Silver Moon Crystal Power, Make Up. In the anime this Eternal debut comes in Stars and not in the Dream arc. She has wings for the last season.
▢Eternal Sailor Moon debuts, white wings unfurling
The idol trio the Three Lights, Seiya, Taiki and Yaten, transfer to Usagi’s school. They are the Sailor Starlights, searching the galaxy for their lost Princess Kakyuu. Seiya grows close to Usagi while Mamoru is away.
▢the Three Lights perform on stage as Seiya locks eyes with Usagi
A small red-haired child, Chibi Chibi, appears without explanation and attaches herself to Usagi. What she really is stays unknown for most of the season.
▢the little Chibi Chibi tugs at Usagi’s sleeve
The Sailor Animamates, Iron Mouse, Aluminum Siren, Lead Crow and Tin Nyanko, serve Shadow Galactica. They use bracelets to rip out star seeds while hunting for true star seeds. Galaxia culls each one that fails.
▢Sailor Iron Mouse aims her bracelets to pull a star seed free
Princess Kakyuu is found hidden inside a censer, linked to Chibi Chibi, and the Starlights are happy to be with her again. Her arrival brings the fight against Galaxia to a head.
▢Princess Kakyuu emerges in a bloom of fire before the Starlights
Galaxia takes the star seeds of the outer senshi and then of the inner senshi. The Starlights fall too, and Sailor Moon is left almost alone. Her friends dissolve into light one by one.
▢the inner senshi dissolve into light as their star seeds are taken
At the Galaxy Cauldron, Chibi Chibi is revealed as the light of hope, and Sailor Moon refuses to destroy the Cauldron, the source of all star seeds. With love she heals Galaxia and the Chaos inside her, and everyone is reborn.
▢Eternal Sailor Moon reaches out, unarmed, to Galaxia at the Galaxy Cauldron
manga
Mamoru gives Usagi a ring and leaves for America. Sailor Galaxia intercepts him and takes his Sailor Crystal, and the letters he promised never arrive. The ring on Usagi’s finger is all that remains of him.
▢Galaxia seizes Mamoru’s Sailor Crystal, his ring glinting on Usagi’s finger
The Sailor Starlights, women disguised as the Three Lights, search the galaxy for their lost Princess Kakyuu, known as Fireball. They are true Sailor Guardians from another world.
▢the three Sailor Starlights kneel before the flame of Princess Kakyuu
The child Chibi Chibi appears as Sailor Chibi Chibi. She is silent, and her meaning lies in the far future. She stays close to Usagi as the war worsens.
▢Sailor Chibi Chibi stands small and silent, a star at her brow
The Sailor Animamates collect Sailor Crystals for Galaxia. One after another the senshi, Chibiusa, Diana and the guardians fall as their crystals are taken. In the manga almost everyone is lost.
▢the senshi’s Sailor Crystals are torn free and gathered by Galaxia
Eternal Sailor Moon travels to Sagittarius Zero Star, the centre of the galaxy and the throne of Shadow Galactica. She crosses the void nearly alone.
▢Eternal Sailor Moon crosses the void toward Sagittarius Zero Star
Galaxia is revealed as the host of Chaos, the source of every earlier enemy. At the Galaxy Cauldron, where all life begins, Sailor Moon refuses to destroy it. Her final choice is between ending all star seeds and trusting them.
▢the Galaxy Cauldron blazes as Chaos rises through Galaxia
Chibi Chibi is revealed as Sailor Cosmos, Sailor Moon’s own form in the far future. Sailor Moon defeats Chaos with the Silver Crystal, frees Galaxia and brings all life back from the Cauldron.
▢Sailor Cosmos stands revealed, mirror of Sailor Moon across time
also in this arc Sailor Mars · Sailor Mercury · Sailor Jupiter · Sailor Venus · Sailor Uranus · Sailor Neptune · Sailor Pluto · Sailor Saturn · Tuxedo Mask · Sailor Chibi Moon · Sailor Ceres · Sailor Pallas · Sailor Juno · Sailor Vesta · Sailor Star Fighter · Sailor Star Maker · Sailor Star Healer · Sailor Kakyuu · Luna · Artemis · Diana · Sailor Galaxia · Sailor Cosmos
↑ back to the arcsother tellings
the same story told again in a comic, a cartoon, two dubs, a live-action series, a stage musical and a fighting game, each one differing from the one before.
Codename: Sailor V
This is the one that came first. Minako had her own manga, running in RunRun from 1991, a year before Usagi did, and Sailor Moon began as an answer to the question of what a whole team of her would look like. In Sailor Moon, Venus is the fifth guardian and turns up late. Read afterwards, this manga shows her as the one who had been doing it alone the whole time.
the manga
Naoko Takeuchi, in Nakayoshi, 1991 to 1997, and eighteen volumes in its first collected edition. It is faster, stranger and much sadder than the cartoon. The astrology is drawn instead of implied, and the guardians spend far less time being funny. Everything else on this list grew out of it.
the 90s anime
Toei, 1992 to 1997, five seasons and roughly two hundred episodes. This is what most English speakers mean by Sailor Moon. It is also the loosest telling. Whole arcs are invented, the villains get inner lives the manga never gave them, and Usagi is allowed to be a much bigger idiot for much longer.
the 90s films
There are three films, R in 1993, S in 1994 and SuperS in 1995. Each one runs about an hour and is basically a very good long episode. The R film is the one people insist you watch. It is about Mamoru, a rose and a boy who was lonely first.
the English dubs
There are two, and they differ. DiC and later Cloverway renamed everyone, cut heavily and never reached Stars. Viz redubbed the whole series from 2014, uncut, with the names intact, and gave English speakers the final season for the first time.
The first dub also cut the last five episodes of season one, in which Usagi watches all four of her friends die and then walks on alone. Those episodes were missing from the English version for years.
live action
Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, 2003 to 2004, forty-nine half-hour acts. It is the only telling that gives her an ordinary life that keeps going. She has a part-time job, a crush, homework and a destiny, and the series takes an interest in all four. It also invents an ending of its own.
Sera Myu
The musicals ran to about thirty productions from 1993 and were revived from 2013. They are live stage shows in which an almost entirely female cast plays everyone, including the men, and fans can still sing the songs from memory decades later. It is the longest-running telling and the easiest to miss if you only ever watched.
Crystal
2014, and a deliberate return to the manga after twenty years in which the anime had been the default. Usagi becomes competent sooner and there is less comedy. Whether that is an improvement is the longest-running argument in this fandom, and this page is not going to settle it.
Eternal and Cosmos
Crystal finished in cinemas instead of on television. Eternal in 2021 took the Dream arc and Cosmos in 2023 took Stars, with two films each. They look almost nothing like the series before them, and in them the manga's ending is animated for the first time.
CD Player