One of the reasons for expanding on the anime’s Stalker With a Crush aspect of Michiru’s background

Is that it permits expanding on both her nature as a person beyond her relationship with Haruka (which is where canon and fanfic often end up tripping) and allows for her particular element of a tragic aspect to assume the forefront from the start. Michiru’s stalking of Haruka predates the Uranus/Neptune bit, and is in my take, at least, very directly connected to the Kaiohs ditching her. They do literally nothing to warn the Tenohs and merely do it for the sake of embarrassment, as stalking wasn’t exactly illegal in Japan at the time.

Combined with Michiru’s dark and twisted dreams of the annihilation of the world at the hand of Pharaoh 90, OTOH, her family basically went ‘this lesbian is too weird for us’ and dumped her in an apartment to live by herself until she end-ran it and roped Haruka into the Senshi life.

The manga and the anime do not specify when Neptune first awakens, though I like to play with the idea that Venus awoke first….and then Neptune, and that both were having their own adventures long before the rest of the Senshi do. This is also why Michiru, like Venus, is one of the most cynical of the Senshi, though she buries hers under being one of the biggest trolls I write short of Nyarlathotep himself.

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.

In truth though an Outer Senshi-centric story is going to be different from the Inners-centric Sailor Moon canon narrative as is

Due to the in-universe different functions of the Outers and the Inners. The Inner Senshi are guardians of hearth and threshold and the Princess’s group of friends, confidants, and allies. An Inner-centric narrative by default will hinge on the dynamics of the Inners and Usagi and Mamoru, and as I frankly find the Usagi-Mamoru dynamic to be interesting insofar as it switches out the dude for the damsel in distress but otherwise fairly simplistic I just have less interest in writing yet another hetero soap opera.

The Outers exist to guard the Solar System against foreign threats, have far greater relative power and relative responsibility, and have a completely different MO. They also, in a lot of ways, had elements of backstory issues that the anime filled but the manga never really bothered to, as this is one of its main weaknesses at a storytelling level. Takeuchi was making it up as she went along and this is one of the areas where this is very directly shown as the story evolved.

The Outers are also every bit as dysfunctional as the Inners, in very different ways. The Inners all have tragic pasts of loneliness that get filled by their working together as a unit and bringing out each other’s better traits by continuous exposure to each other’s proximities. The Outers have the other problem of codependency with anime canon Michiru a straight up stalker who willfully manipulated Haruka into a path that she didn’t remotely want to take, where manga Haruka basically is a good example of how to not write a lesbian relationship due to her emotional affair with Usagi being taken for granted by Michiru, who far more than in the anime exists only in Haruka’s shadow.

And Setsuna is Senshi Kenny, dying every major issue for drama.

I happen to like the Outers more than the Inners mostly because Haruka and Michiru have an even more dysfunctional dynamic than Usagi and Mamoru so it gets the same soap opera notes without the endless ‘What the Hel are you doing you motherfukers!’

“it aws MIND CONTROL MAMORU”

twist.

As I’ve said before, I am taking elements of the manga, predominantly, leavened by the anime for my various Sailor Moon adaptations

In particular the first anime providing an actual backstory for Haruka and Michiru, though their arc is modified by virtue of the talismans being known factors from the start, with the actual goal of the Death Busters the capture of the Silver Crystal of either Sailor Moon or Small Lady (not that picky) to collapse the barriers between Earth and the Tau Nebula.

I use a somewhat different take on fanon re: Tenohs and Kaiohs as well. The Tenohs, not the Kaiohs, are the half not-Japanese family, with that other half Ainu and their having a mercantile background, first in the open city of Nagasaki and then as leaders of a major Zaibatsu and its post-WWII shape. So Haruka *is* from an affluent family, which by virtue of preserving its Ainu heritage also is conscious of both being not entirely Japanese and thus less beholden to specific Japanese prejudices. Meaning that Haruka’s grandfather both deciphers a direct connection between the Daimon attack on Haruka’s family and the appearance of Sailor Uranus after, and serves as the ‘patron’ that gets mentioned in the Manga as subsidizing Haruka and Michiru.

By contrast the Kaiohs were Daimyos who fought Nobunaga, lost to him, switched to Ieyasu, prospered during the Shogunate as some of the most powerful landowners in Japan, ultimately switched after the Satsuma Rebellion to Imperial Japan…..and are staunchly traditionalist aristocrats who are literal aristocrats who hold onto titled descent from an ancient clan.

And when THIS family has Michiru, who not only has no interest in marriage, nor the formal trappings of the lifestyle they prefer and then there’s the dark dreams and her stalking Tenoh Haruka (which bothers them less for the lesbianism, though that does serve as a bigger issue, and more for the horrific prospect of a public scandal over it). So she’s 'emancipated’ in the sense that they deliberately neglect her and go so far as to give her her own space, which is the one the Outers ultimately end up making their home.

The Tenohs care for and accept Haruka, and are dubious about Michiru due to the stalking thing (and even if they suspect things they don’t know for sure and Senshi magic means up to a point they CAN’T). The Kaiohs opt for the 'not saying we hope they both die in a fire, but’ approach and essentially close off their relationship to Michiru altogether.

This is at least a part of why the Harumichi dynamic I write has Michiru being more than slightly possessive of and codependent with Haruka unless an outside factor shakes this up slightly. Michiru does what she wants to do, and makes the heavens tremble with her successes regardless of the cost. Haruka, by contrast, is a flightier free spirit in accordance with the wind and who gets far more indulgence by a lot of people to be.

Unlike some takes on Haruka but with elements that owe influence to DocHolligay’s excellent Harumichi aspects, her more blustering public persona is a self-aware mask that hides a great deal of insecurities in part and in part is a deliberate obfuscation by someone far cannier than her mask lets on.

This also hinges on the stories centering the dynamic of the Outers, who have that very different function in and out of universe to the Inners, and their dynamics in turn differ precisely as one would expect in those contexts. The Outers, up to a point, deliberately create and cultivate masks for reasons that extend to their arcs including practical aspects of life with celebrity and fame and how the public personas and perceptions can grate on the individual personalities behind those masks.

Setsuna’s mask is that of the wise and mysterious and virtually omniscient Sailor Pluto, which is just as much a mask and just as much bullshit as the masks that Haruka and Michiru wear. She truly is the most ancient and powerful of the Senshi but in the context of life on Earth she’s much newer than some of them and in some ways far more alien than the rest with much less ability to hide it.

Deluxe Suit - Sailor Pluto! ☆

Pattern up on my Etsy ♡

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It took decades…eons….but I finally did the Outers some justice. And a bonus Cosmos cause they need love too.

Azabu-Juban has become a well known Sailor Moon real-life location. But did you know another Tokyo spot, Tennouzu Isle, is the model for Mugen Gakuen? Read more on my blog!

Sailor Moon Real-life Locations Part 2: Tennouzu Isle | Unbordered Life

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PC: White Specs Photography (IG: @whitespecsphotography)