This article is a part of Summer Lovin’ Week 2017.
People deeply identify with their favorite Sailor Moon characters. The series’ memorable, vibrant, contrasting cast of characters lends itself well to viewers’ own personal introspections. You probably see your own mistakes, passions, and flaws when you look at Makoto’s wistful romantic daydreams or Rei’s brusque, tough love attitude. Often, what we see in these characters reflects what we like, or don’t like, about ourselves. Why shouldn’t that apply to our romantic inner lives, too? The Sailor Moon character you identify with most might hold the key to figuring out how you interact with potential romantic partners — even if you’re not planning on getting into a miracle romance anytime soon.
Sailor Moon
You’re always the first one to say “I love you.” Every relationship you’ve ever been in was going to be the one that lasted the rest of your life, until it didn’t. You’re still waiting for a love that hits you like a natural disaster, rewires you on a cellular level; the one that’s the One. You’re waiting to Know. You can’t admit that you don’t know if you believe in Knowing anymore.
Sailor Mars
You don’t enjoy anger, but you find it easier to process than disappointment. Your feelings burn right through you, a clean burn — not like other people, whose fiery emotions leave soot and detritus behind. Even though you know better, sometimes you wish you were comfortable enough with someone to yell at them. Your love is such a roaring, conspicuous presence that you rarely acknowledge it. It’s as obvious to you as gravity, or rain; your love is a fact of the natural world. But none of your exes ever noticed storms rolling in until long after they departed — waking up to the dewy, muggy aftermath, impressed at their own ability to sleep through the night in the middle of all that calamity.
Sailor Mercury
You like to work so hard that sleep physically hits you as soon as you close your eyes. You’re secretly relieved that all of your meaningful romantic relationships were long distance. You don’t know where you’d find the space to put all that proximity to another human. You really wish you enjoyed gardening.
Sailor Neptune
You say you don’t get jealous. You say you like the affirmation that your partner is the most desirable person in the room. It sends a thrill down your spine. So you say.
Sailor Uranus
You never mean to forget to do things. You’re just not great at time management. You don’t like change. You want things to always be like this, the way the two of you are right now. You could live in this moment for the rest of your life. You forget to apologize sometimes. The apologies get stuck inside you. They cluster together, tiny grains of sand piling up into mountains.
Sailor Jupiter
You understand, now, why you used to prefer to keep your feelings to yourself. Unrealized loves can’t spend three perfect months with you before making fun of the way you laugh in front of a group of strangers. Fictional romances don’t make excuse after excuse about why now isn’t a great time to meet their friends. When you finally start falling in love for real, you try on partners like a second skin, absorbing their interests and pet peeves until you become an amalgamation of everyone you’ve ever loved. Those vultures tried to make a meal of your heart and instead, you scavenged the best things about them to figure yourself out. People who see the “you” through the “who you want to be” and the “who you think you should be” excite and terrify you. You’re getting better and better at picking them out.
Sailor Venus
You use crushes to keep people from taking you (too) seriously. You’d climb out a window to avoid letting strangers see how moody or pensive you are under your casually disaffected attitude. You work too goddamned hard at chill to fuck that up by sniping at someone for chewing with their mouth open. You’re in love with your best friend and neither of you really need to say anything about it, you just know the love is there when you need to reach for it. You regularly get enough sleep.
Sailor Pluto
You eat at restaurants alone sometimes with a book, just because you can. Sometimes you daydream about finding someone to be alone with. Alone with books. Alone with a movie. Alone together. But you hate when people leave their wadded up socks on your floor and you don’t know how to care about Breaking Bad so for now, you’re just doing by-yourself alone.
Sailor Saturn
Your life is divided into the years before the thing that happened, and the years after. Even if the thing that happened didn’t happen all at once. It happened slowly and eroded you into whatever you are now. That’s how you see it. You’re learning to be patient and kind again and even though it’s hard, you let another hand hold yours all through a commercial break. You know you’re not alone, but sometimes you forget. Bit by bit, it’s getting easier to feel like most of a person most days.
Sailor Chibi Moon
You hate when people describe you as “nice” more than anything in this world. People can know you for years without picking up on the quiet intensity of your feelings. You’d rather be kind than nice. At least kind is something; nice is just a big bland glob of blah. For better or worse, you immediately fall deeply in love with people who recognize your pensive, reflective side — who can describe you with better adjectives than “cute” or “sweet.” You get so wrapped up in feeling Seen that you block out all external stimuli, including the still, quiet voice in your heart warning you to take things slow.
Tuxedo Mask
You jump head-first into commitments because all you’ve ever really wanted was for someone to love you. You don’t mean to, but sometimes you get so angry, thinking about all the other people who have spent their whole lives being deeply loved for no reason at all. They didn’t need to get good grades or look nice; people loved them, even when they had headaches and whined about it, even when they threw a fit in the middle of a department store. You take care of people because they expect you to. You think if you work hard enough, you can make up for all the years that the people who were supposed to love you didn’t. You’re sensitive about your image, but the coolest thing about you is how uncool you are. You are loved, you know, by the way.