Tuxedo Mask

Tuxedo Mask standing full-length in his cape and top hat against a starry blue field, one arm held out to an enormous red rose beside him

“Tuxedo La Smoking Bomber!”

japanese name: Chiba Mamoru (地場衛)
90’s english dub: Darien Shields
name meaning: protector of the earth-place
likes: reading, tennis, quiet
dislikes: being fussed over, showing weakness
birthday: august 3
zodiac sun sign: Leo
blood type: A

Mamoru Chiba lost his parents and his memory in a car crash as a kid and grew up with no past. His name, 地場衛 (Chiba Mamoru), means something close to ‘protector of the earth-place’: 地 is earth or ground, and 衛 means to protect. He keeps everyone at arm’s length, teases Usagi the first time they meet, and ends up as the person everyone else leans on.

As Tuxedo Mask he mostly holds his ground. He throws a rose to break a spell, catches Sailor Moon when she falls and lets her land the blow. He doesn’t really level up over the story. He just gets more reliable.

read the Earth page →

read the Sun page →

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in hellenistic astrology

the sun

Takeuchi colour illustration of Mamoru standing in a black tuxedo, winking, a red rose held to his lips, with peacock feathers around him

Mamoru carries the Sun. In Hellenistic astrology the Sun and the Moon are the two lights, and they’re read as a pair. The Sun is the source of light. The Moon has none of its own and reflects the Sun’s. The tradition counts the Sun masculine and the Moon feminine. The Sun looks the same from one day to the next, while the Moon waxes and wanes, and the story casts Mamoru and Usagi the same way: he stays steady, and she’s the one who changes from arc to arc.

The story keeps taking the Sun away. The Sun signifies kingship, the father and the high priest. The story takes all three off the board, and Mamoru is out of the fight in almost every arc. In the Silver Millennium he dies defending the Moon Kingdom. The Dark Kingdom captures him and turns him against Usagi, and in the manga the Black Moon does the same. In the manga’s Dream arc the Dead Moon’s eclipse curses Elysion and he falls ill with it. In Stars, as he leaves to study abroad, Galaxia kills him and takes his crystal. Each time it happens in this life, he’s back by the end of the arc, once Sailor Moon has won the last battle.

dignity

domicile: Leoauthority and judgmentIts own house, and the Sun only has one. Leo is a masculine, fixed fire sign, and its quality is hot. Fixed signs are stable and slow to change. Leo falls in high summer, and the two lights were given Cancer and Leo because they fall in the brightest, warmest part of the year. At home, a planet uses its own resources and doesn’t rely on a host.In Leo the Sun’s own significations come through directly, such as authority and leadership, the mind and judgment, the father, and public life. It shows up as taking charge and taking responsibility, being seen and known, clear judgment, lasting friendships, and honours earned over time.
exaltation: Aries 19°courage and initiativeRaised up in Aries, a masculine, movable fire sign ruled by Mars. Its quality is hot, and movable signs start things easily and change quickly. Exaltation is a place of honour, where a planet’s significations are raised in standing. Aries begins at the spring equinox, when the days start to outlast the nights. It’s in trine to Leo, the Sun’s own sign, and each day-team planet is exalted in a sign trine to one of its homes.The Sun in Aries mixes its own significations with Mars’s force and the quick start of the sign. It shows up as leading from the front, taking the first step, courage and competition, fast decisions, and standing won through action.
detriment: Aquariusdistance and delayOpposite its house. Aquarius is a masculine, fixed air sign ruled by Saturn. Saturn has the two signs furthest from the lights, in the coldest part of the year. Light belongs to the lights and darkness to Saturn, so the Sun is a guest in his sign here. Later texts treat a planet opposite its own house as hindered or in exile.The Sun in Aquarius mixes its significations with Saturn’s delays and limits. It shows up as authority that feels like a burden, recognition that comes late, leadership kept at arm’s length, being set apart from the crowd, and a father who is absent or lost early.
fall: Libra 19°deference and approvalPut low in Libra, a masculine, movable air sign ruled by Venus. Fall is the sign opposite a planet’s exaltation, and there its significations lose standing. Libra begins at the autumn equinox, when the nights start to outlast the days. It’s Saturn’s exaltation, and the Sun’s heat and light sit opposite Saturn’s cold and dark, so where one is raised the other is lowered.The Sun in Libra mixes its significations with Venus’s pleasure and the weighing and balancing of the sign. It shows up as authority shared or handed over to keep the peace, decisions put off while things are weighed, leading through partnership and charm rather than command, and standing that depends on other people’s approval.

Tuxedo Mask with the Earth, drawn by Naoko Takeuchi

The dashed lines join opposites: detriment sits opposite the house, and fall opposite exaltation.

the whole scheme, all seven planets →

condition

sect: the light of the dayWhether a chart is by day or by night is the first thing settled. Sect divides the planets into a day team led by the Sun and a night team led by the Moon, and Jupiter and Saturn are on the day team. In a day chart the Sun is the sect light, the light in charge, and the day-team planets are more at home and better behaved.In a day birth the Sun’s significations lead the chart, such as authority, the father, public life and standing. The triplicity lords of the Sun’s sign are read for the overall support of the life. In a night birth the Moon leads instead, and the Sun is on the day team without being in charge.
joy: the ninth placeA planet’s joy is the place where it’s gladdest to be, whatever sign it’s in. The Sun’s is the ninth place, called God. It’s a good decline, in trine to the rising sign. It signifies travel and being away from home, foreign lands, religion and priests, philosophy, divination and oracles.The Sun in the ninth shows up through these topics, such as long journeys and living abroad, faith and religious office, philosophy, and prophecy and astrology. The ninth also shares in the Sun’s authority, and some texts give it kings and sovereigns.

the earth and the sun

Prince Endymion

Prince Endymion is the Earth side. In the Silver Millennium he was the prince of the Golden Kingdom, so the planet is his by birth, and his name in this life says it again: the one who protects the earth-place. The Earth is the one body in the chart that doesn’t move. Everything else is measured from it, and that’s his job in the story too: stay put, hold the line, be the place she comes back to. He’s tied to the planet so closely that when its heart, Elysion, is attacked, he feels it in his own body.

Helios

Helios is the Sun side. His name is just the Greek word for the Sun, and he plays the part of the Sun the old texts call the high priest. He keeps Elysion’s golden light underground, where the Golden Crystal belongs. The Sun’s joy is the ninth place, the place of God, which covers priests, prophecy and religion, and that’s his whole life. An eclipse of the Sun is the Moon sliding between the Sun and the Earth, and when the Dead Moon brings its false one, he’s the light that gets locked away, reaching out only through a child’s dreams.

the earth

The Earth is our vantage point, so it isn’t a body that appears in the chart. It’s the ground beneath us, and the centre the whole sky is seen from. In the ancient picture of the cosmos it sits still at the very middle, and everything else turns round it. What the Earth gives the chart is the horizon. The four angles are named from it: rising in the east, setting in the west, the midheaven at the top of the sky and the point under the earth. The fourth place is the part of the chart under the earth, the most hidden from wherever you’re standing, and it covers home, parents and private life. That’s where Elysion would sit.

reading the wheel

Every chart is drawn from one spot on the Earth at one moment, and read from its horizon. The solid line from ASC to DSC is that horizon: above it was up in the sky, below it was under your feet. The places are whole signs, counted from the one rising in the east.

how to read a chart →

powers and transformations

Sailor Moon1992

Sailor Moon R1993

Sailor Moon S1994

Sailor Moon SuperS1995

Sailor Stars1996

the same kit, every season

and throughoutnot dated to one arc

▢his transformation

his transformationMamoru becomes Tuxedo Mask: top hat, white mask, cape and cane.

The rose from the 90s anime: one red rose on a thorned stem with a single leaf. — the roseThe rose is his signature and his signal. He throws a single red rose from the shadows, and it announces Tuxedo Mask before anyone sees him. It is a working weapon as well as a flourish. Driven into the ground, it breaks a hold, knocks a weapon loose, or buys Sailor Moon the half second she needs.watch it in the show →

Mamoru in his green jacket holding Chibiusa across his lap, a yellow glow around his hands — his healing handsIn the manga he can close a wound by touch, and the wiki puts this gift beside Hotaru’s. He does it without transforming, so the power belongs to Mamoru and does not come from the cape. He is also said to have some psychometric sense and to feel the well-being of the planet. At the end of the Dark Kingdom arc he uses that power to put the surface of the North Pole back. All of this is manga only, and the 90s anime never confirms any of it.

Tuxedo Mask in top hat, mask and cape, smiling, holding his black cane out at an angle — the caneIn the tuxedo he carries a black walking cane. He fights with it at close range, and he blocks and strikes with it.

Pixel sprite of the star locket. — the star locket & music boxA small golden locket that plays a music-box melody, tied to him and Usagi across their lives. It appears at the turning points of their story and is lost, found and lost again. It is a keepsake that holds on to the bond even when memory has been taken from one or both of them.

▢disguises

disguisesEvery so often he goes in disguise.

✦

the Golden Crystal

his crystal

1/6

The Golden Crystal is the crystal of the Earth and the counterpart to the Moon’s Silver Crystal. It belongs to Elysion, the sanctuary at the heart of the Earth, where Helios is the priest. When its power is restored, Elysion is restored with it.

In the manga it is Mamoru’s. The Dead Moon curse Elysion, Mamoru falls ill, and Helios asks Usagi to unseal the Golden Crystal. It turns out to be hidden inside Mamoru’s body, as the Silver Crystal was inside Usagi’s. In the final battle it is unsealed and joins the Silver Crystal against Nehelenia. It is his Sailor Crystal. The two crystals announce themselves to the galaxy, and Sailor Galaxia comes, kills Mamoru and takes it.

In the anime it is Helios’s. The Dead Moon Circus hunt it because it could free Nehelenia from her mirror, and Helios hides in Chibiusa’s dreams to keep it from them. Nehelenia gets it in the end, the Amazoness Quartet swap it for a pineapple, and Chibi Moon uses it with Moon Crisis Power to restore it. The anime never puts it inside Mamoru.

Long before the story, Nehelenia went to Elysion to claim it. The crystal sensed what she meant to do and drove her off with golden flames. In Sailor Moon Eternal it takes the same lotus shape as the Silver Crystal beside it.

✦

the Miracle Romance: Usagi and Mamoru

shared thread

1/2

A thousand years ago, in the Silver Millennium, Princess Serenity of the Moon and Prince Endymion of Earth loved each other across the gulf their two worlds were forbidden to cross. Queen Beryl’s jealousy of that love gave the dark power Metaria a way in, and the war that followed brought down the Moon Kingdom and ended the age.

Queen Serenity used the last of her life to raise the Silver Crystal and seal Metaria away. With the same act she sent the souls of her daughter, the prince and all their guardians forward to be reborn on a healed Earth, with no memory of what they had been.

They are reborn as Usagi Tsukino and Mamoru Chiba, two strangers who bicker and have no idea they have loved each other for a thousand years, and their memories come back slowly and painfully. The crystal’s greatest miracles answer only when the two of them act as one, with the Silver Crystal of the Moon and the Golden Crystal of the Earth raised together.

Over the series they are separated and reunited many times. In the Dark Kingdom arc Mamoru is captured and turned against her, and he is freed by her love rather than by her power. He dies and is wished back. In the final war Galaxia takes his star seed, and he is gone before the battle begins. Usagi fights on without him.

A thousand years on, the two of them rule a healed world from Crystal Tokyo as Neo-Queen Serenity and King Endymion, and their daughter, Chibiusa, comes back through time to meet them in the present. Their love has outlasted a kingdom, a death and a thousand years. The opening theme, “Moonlight Densetsu”, calls it a miracle romance, and the name stuck.

also carried by Sailor Moon · Sailor Chibi Moon

✦

Usagi, Mamoru and their daughter

shared thread

In Act 14 Chibiusa falls out of the sky onto Usagi and Mamoru in the middle of a kiss. She lands on Usagi, kisses Mamoru by accident, announces that her name is also Usagi, accuses Usagi of copying her hairstyle, and pulls a gun. The gun is a toy. She is nine hundred years old and the size of a six-year-old. She has come back because her mother is frozen in crystal, and she is carrying the guilt of having stolen the one thing that could have protected her.

Mamoru is the first to be kind to her, and he gives her the name Chibiusa. He finds her sitting in the rain and takes her home, and he cheers her up with a Tuxedo Mask doll. When she asks whether Sailor Moon is really that strong, he tells her she is invincible. She says he is warm, like her Papa. In the anime she has a crush on him and knows it, and when he and Usagi break up she takes her chance and spends all her time with him.

Usagi is not happy about it, and the two of them bicker like sisters rather than mother and daughter. The worst of it has consequences. Usagi lashes out over Mamoru’s attention, Chibiusa goes back to the Crystal Palace alone, and that trip ends with Esmeraude and then Wiseman. An apology doesn’t fix it. It is fixed when the two of them find out who they are to each other and choose it anyway.

The manga says in one line that she pretends to be cold toward Usagi and in truth loves her more than anyone. When she is sent back to the future at the end of the Black Moon arc neither of them wants to go. From Usagi’s point of view she returns almost at once, with a letter from Neo-Queen Serenity asking her to look after a guardian in training.

also carried by Sailor Chibi Moon · Sailor Moon

✦

Chibiusa and Helios

shared thread

1/2

Helios is the high priest of Elysion, the sanctuary under the Earth that was the capital of Endymion’s Golden Kingdom. In the manga he is Prince Endymion’s own guardian priest, bound to him so closely that when the Dead Moon cages Helios, Mamoru falls ill. The pegasus is a curse laid on him, with a black rose growing in his lungs, and the horse in the dream is a projection from a cage he never leaves. In the anime there is no curse and the horse is his choice: he guards the Golden Crystal, and he escapes Nehelenia by putting his spirit into a beautiful dream and hiding there in the horse’s shape. So in one telling she is visiting a prisoner, and in the other she is his hiding place.

He comes to her in a dream, and the manga and the anime disagree about whose dream it is. The manga opens the Dream arc with a total solar eclipse and a ship coming out of the blacked-out Sun. That night a Pegasus asks a maiden for help, and Usagi and Chibiusa each believe he is speaking to them. He isn’t sure himself, and it takes him most of the arc to work out that the maiden is Chibiusa grown up. He leaves a small bell behind, and when she wakes the bell is really there. In the anime the dreams are Chibiusa’s from the start. She is the holder of Pegasus, and the Dead Moon Circus spends a season tearing through every dream mirror in Tokyo looking for the girl who has him.

She raises the Crystal Carillon, made from her old Pink Moon Stick, and calls “Twinkle Yell”. The full call is a request and not a command, asking Pegasus to protect everyone’s dreams. He comes, and his horn is what lets Super Sailor Moon land Moon Gorgeous Meditation. The attack is not hers and it does no damage. Her part is to summon him, and he comes when she calls. He is safe in her dream because there is nothing in it that would use him. A Lemures gets inside it and tries to talk her into ruling the world with his power. She says no.

She sees him as a man before anyone else does. In the anime he shows himself to her in episode 158 and takes her through a ruined Elysion from the air, and the other guardians are not told until episode 162. In the manga he tells her that she matters and kisses her, then goes back to the cage, telling her the man she is looking at is a mirage.

At the end, each version has one of them save the other. In the anime Nehelenia takes her dream mirror and shuts her inside it in an eternal sleep, and Helios kisses her awake. When Nehelenia throws her off the tower afterwards, Sailor Moon goes over the side after her. In the manga it goes the other way round. Helios is dead, or near enough, and Eternal Sailor Chibi Moon refuses to accept it. She kisses him and brings him back with the Pink Moon Crystal, and he understands that she was the maiden all along. The Golden Crystal splits the same way: in the anime it is his, the horn on the pegasus’s head, and Nehelenia takes it off him; in the manga it is Mamoru’s and not Helios’s, the Earth’s own crystal inside him.

Then Elysion is free and he goes home to it. In the anime he kneels and kisses her hand in front of everyone, and she gets one embrace with him out of sight of the others. Then he turns back into the horse and flies away, and she is left crying about what she did not tell him. In the manga he says goodbye to all of them and tells her in particular that they will meet again, and she thinks that when she is grown, he will be her prince.

also carried by Sailor Chibi Moon

✦

Prince Endymion

his past life

1/5

Endymion is the prince of the Earth in the Silver Millennium, and Princess Serenity came down from the Moon to see him. He is named for the Endymion of Greek myth, the mortal loved by the moon goddess Selene. Like Serenity, he has a court of four, the Four Kings of Heaven.

In the manga he lives in the Golden Kingdom in Elysion. Kunzite and Sailor Venus find the two of them out and keep them apart. He dies defending the Moon Kingdom from Queen Beryl’s forces, which are led by his own four guardians, now brainwashed, and Serenity takes her own life in despair.

In the anime he swears to help Queen Serenity defend her kingdom, and he is killed along with Serenity. Queen Serenity uses the Silver Crystal to have them and the guardians reborn on Earth. The anime also adds a music box. Serenity gives it to him, and in the present Mamoru has it until it passes to Usagi.

In the manga’s Dark Kingdom arc, once the two of them are revealed as Serenity and Endymion, he is kidnapped, possessed by Metalia and sent after the Silver Crystal. Sailor Moon uses the Legendary Sword on him, and it frees him.

✦

King Endymion

his future self

1/2

King Endymion is Mamoru in the 30th century. He rules Earth from the Crystal Palace in Crystal Tokyo beside Neo-Queen Serenity, and he is her husband and Chibiusa’s father.

In the manga he is the one who explains the future. When Usagi and the guardians reach the Crystal Palace, King Endymion tells them about Crystal Tokyo, Nemesis and the Black Moon Clan, and that Usagi and Mamoru are married and Chibiusa is their daughter. He also says that Chibiusa is 900 years old, and that people under the Silver Crystal now live to about 1,000.

In the anime, in R, Mamoru has nightmares of Usagi dying. They turn out to be false, sent by King Endymion from the future.

In the manga, once, at the end of the Dream arc, Mamoru takes a form that resembles his future self, with a white tuxedo, a lavender cloak and a white mask. He never takes Prince Endymion’s form in the present.

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
Tuxedo Mask
Act 1
manga
Prince Endymion
Silver Millennium
manga
King Endymion
30th century
manga
Moonlight Knight
anime only
anime
Tuxedo Mask
season 1
crystal
Tuxedo Mask
season 1
pgsm
Tuxedo Mask
2003
manga
Helios
Dream arc
manga
Pegasus
Dream arc
anime
Pegasus / Helios
SuperS

elsewhere

Helios and the Sun

Mamoru’s planet is the Earth, and this is easy to get wrong. Takeuchi did not write the hero and heroine as a pair of Sun and Moon. He is Prince Endymion of Earth, his stone is the Golden Crystal and his kingdom is this planet.

The Sun belongs to Helios, the priest of Elysion, who arrives in the Dream arc as Pegasus. He is a separate character, and he will have his own seat on this roster in future.

a note on sources

This is written from the manga page. The 90s anime gives him much more screen time, a longer brainwashing arc under Beryl, and the Moonlight Knight material in R, none of which is in print. Where the anime is named above, it is from general knowledge and marked.

the English dub

Mamoru becomes Darien Shields. The dub makes him older and plays the romance considerably straighter, which removes most of the discomfort the original has about a high schooler and a fourteen-year-old.

✦ junk drawer

things in here:0035

odds & ends. old graphics, for fun.

▾ shut the drawer▸ open the drawer (35)

▾ shut the drawer

in hellenistic astrology

Prince Endymion

Helios

powers and transformations

and throughoutnot dated to one arc

variations

Tuxedo Mask

Prince Endymion

King Endymion

Moonlight Knight

Tuxedo Mask

Tuxedo Mask

Tuxedo Mask

Helios

Pegasus

Pegasus / Helios

elsewhere

✦ junk drawer

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