Minako Aino Quotes

Viz's version of Venus's arrival does more for the plot than DiC's and less for Venus. Usagi asks a direct question, whether the newcomer is the Moon Princess, and Venus answers like a briefing: no, and here is the job description. In the DiC-named exchange the page files under the previous episode, she answers the same question "I don't know," and the DiC block set above this one spends the beat on "We'll be a super team." That line is empty, but it is a person glad to meet people. To be fair to the Viz line, it does its work. It closes the princess question so the episode can answer it somewhere else, and by the end of the same episode the Rainbow Crystals have merged with Usagi's tear, she has transformed into Princess Serenity, and Luna says "It's her! The Moon Princess!" Venus's denial is scaffolding for that reveal. Scaffolding is not character, though. Minako's real introduction on this page comes eight episodes later, in an episode titled "Minako's Tragic Love", where she tells Katarina that as long as the two of them are happy, that's what counts. That is the line worth quoting.

Eight episodes earlier, in the Viz version of the episode where the Moon Princess appears, Usagi asked whether she was the princess, and Minako's answer was to decline a crown: she was not the Moon Princess, only a Guardian sworn to protect one. Here she declines a person. The episode built around her own past ends with her blessing a couple rather than fighting for her place in it, and the finale remembers it that way. When Princess Serenity calls on her dead friends, the Viz flashback chosen for Minako is a compressed version of this speech, Alan and Katarina happy and nothing else needed. The DiC flashback gives her a line about the team's short friendship instead, which is warmer and says less. Of everything the newest Guardian has done, the act she is remembered for at the end of the world is a renunciation, and that choice by the script is the sharp one, because the season is about to ask every one of them to give something up.