One thing that I will unapologetically admit to cribbing from DocHolligay’s excellent take on Sailor Moon

Is that of Haruka Tenoh and Michiru Kaioh one is indeed the ‘gold star lesbian’ and it’s….Michiru Kaioh, who is a femme lesbian and as femme as femme can get. This has sweet fuck all to do with Sailor Neptune now or in the Silver Millennium, it’s Michiru being Michiru. She is one variant of a queer experience and somewhat more consciously so than Haruka, at least to a point.

Haruka represents a very different and messier take that also applies IRL to people with queer experiences where it can take time to fully figure out and then to accept things. Michiru never doubted who she was or tried to be anything different. Publicly this is Haruka to the core, privately Haruka did doubt and did try very hard before reality smacked her in the face with the metaphorical nailbat.

I actually have this element return with a vengeance in one storyline where Haruka’s old boyfriend decides to 'rescue’ his girlfriend from the evil lesbian with the relatively faster healing Neptune has giving the impression of something that very much isn’t true, leading to a particular storyline that illustrates both 'stop helping me’ and deconstructs aspects of the Senshi and their healing and what happens when Senshi magic had a bit of a blind spot.

That storyline is intended to 100% be as mean spirited a hatchet job on all those old 90s and 2000s era fanfics as it can get.

A good Harumichi story, though, always needs a bittersweet angle

Because let’s face it, there are no good answers as to why even upperclassmen in high school have literally no signs of their families whatsoever without it being explicitly confirmed that these people are dead, like with Makoto and Mamoru (seriously, the Senshi reincarnation hates parents as much as Disney does).

Add to this if you use the anime backstory (and might as well) that the entire thing hinges on one very determined girl getting her way collateral damage be damned after she was awakened second/first….It was admittedly kind of amusing that back in the 90s/2000s the inevitable ‘break up the lesbian couple’ always had HARUKA as the manipulator/abusive one when in the canon it was MICHIRU who manipulated HARUKA and Haruka is a bit hapless in the face of Michiru, Senshi of Trolling.

Like damn, Michiru never got the respect she deserved for being a magnificent example of the manipulator par excellence.

So there’s a lot of ways to play this off, and since nobody really DOES 'mind control as cheap plot device’ as a preferred course of action like with Mamoru the Reliable Traitor (even if a good twist would be that it’s actually NOT Mamoru for a change because the villains at least partially weaponize their enemies’ misconceptions for LULZ) the Outer Senshi stories, IMO, have a measurable advantage over the Inners.

Plus at the end of the day the Outers are expected to take the harder tasks and make the harder decisions, which means their view of being Senshi is always going to be different to that of the Inners.

“Can we stop at McDonald’s on the way home?”