OOC: Bandwagon Boogie!
There is a LOT here, so the new kid gets her own post....
What Kind of Name is Aino?
Japanese, for starters, and it's also her last name. However, Minako has spent so much time around Westerners that she's fine with being called by her given name instead of her family name. She'll answer to either, but she's used to teachers barking 'Aino!' when she screws up in class.
Screw Up In Class? Who Is This?
Funny you should ask!
Tall, blonde, blue-eyes, beautiful, and highly athletic, Aino Minako is an outgoing student who loves sports and is not quite as fond of academic subjects! Oops!
Minako is first introduced in the Codename: Sailor V manga, which is part of (and predecessor to!) the Bishōjo Senshi Sailor Moon universe. She is awakened as a Senshi by the white cat Artemis when she is thirteen years old and instructed that she has a duty to become the beautiful warrior, Sailor V. Artemis explains that Venus and Earth are "twin planets" of about the same size and weight, that Venus is her "mother star", and that she must protect Earth from its enemies. He shows her Magellan Castle orbiting around Venus and says that it is hers as Princess Venus.
Minako is, of course, not exactly thrilled at first. She wants to be an idol and a professional volleyball player, not a guardian of truth and justice!
Minako is athletic, cheerful, romantic, resilient, and clever. She is very versatile, acting very elegant, intelligent, and refined at times, and irrational, boy-crazy, and over-ambitious at others! In other words, very much a teenage girl! She loves playing video games, eating, gossip, knitting, reading comic books, shopping, and watching romantic movies. One of her greatest loves is volleyball, as shown from the beginning of the first Sailor V chapter throughout the rest of the series-she even considers quitting the Sailor Senshi to become a professional player.
Minako's other greatest love is pop culture. She desperately wants to be an idol, and so makes a hobby of chasing them and attending auditions in acting, dancing, and singing whenever possible, so someone needs to warn Troy and Jono!
She also takes her role as the "Soldier of Love" literally, and enjoys regaling friends and acquaintances with advice about romance, which, with Minako, is an OMG BAD PLAN. Despite her declared expertise, Minako herself has little personal experience in relationships, and it pretty much always ends badly for her.
According to various fan-sites and Wikipedia: Minako enjoys Oolong tea and her favorite foods are given as curry rice, ramen noodles, and stuffed dumplings, with her least favorite food being shiitake mushrooms. Her favorite colors are listed as red, pink, orange, and yellow and she likes birds, the flowers orange dandelions and orchids, and the gemstone topaz. She is stated as having trouble with her mother and the police. All of this is canon, as stated by the manga-ka.
Always by Minako's side is Artemis. Artemis is the feline guardian and adviser to Sailor Venus, and acted as such to her previous incarnation as Princess Venus.
He (yes, he. Mina makes fun of him for having a girl's name) is slightly forgetful, bossy, and lazy at times, not half as diligent as his counterpart, Luna; but when Minako turns to him for advice or his charge finds herself in trouble he pulls himself together and becomes her big-brother type figure. He constantly picks on Minako if he thinks she's slacking off, but often times is seen comforting her or going out of his way to try and make her dreams come true.
And he talks. Shhhhh....
Both Minako AND Artemis are coming to Fandom, which means yet another intelligent kitty prowling the grounds, trying to desperately pretend he doesn't talk. Any conversations with Mina in her room would be NFB, for this reason. (He'll totally slip-up eventually).
Sooooo....what? She's the Incarnation of Venus, the Goddess of Love and Beauty?
You forgot Guardian of Justice!
Minako, like the other Sailor Senshi, must transform in order to gain access to her special powers. To transform into Sailor Venus, she must first raise a special device (a pen, at this point) into the air and shout "Venus Power, Make-up!"
Well, that's the (horrible) English dubbed translation. Since Minako is Japanese, despite her flawless English, she will use the "Henshin yo!" of her native tongue, which translates a bit closer to 'transform.'
As Sailor Venus, her primary attack is Crescent Beam, a beam of light which strikes enemies which Venus controls from her hands. She also has the Venus Love-Me Chain, which in the manga series is an actual chain wrapped around her waist, which is imbued with magic. To banish enemies of the Dark Kingdom, she usually calls out some random attack name that is relevant to the situation, and blasts them with some sort of light that disintegrates them while leaving innocent bystanders/hostages/etc unscathed. She can only access these as Sailor Venus, and not in her human form as Minako.
Since she's between her two canon series, when transformed as Sailor Venus, she wears her sailor fuku from Sailor Moon. Her uniform has a orange collar, orange skirt, blue front bow, yellow back bow, the Venus Love-Me chain around her waist, and orange ballet flats with a slight heel. HOWEVER, she's not wearing a tiara! To protect her identity, she's still wearing her Sailor V mask, and she has the mark of the crescent moon on her forehead as part of her role as the decoy princess. Like this.
Also, the more Minako remembers about her life in the Silver Millennium, and the more she acts as Sailor Venus, her body begins the process of transforming into a Venusian. All the citizens of the Silver Millenium (minus Earth) had longer life-spans, were healthier and more durable (which is GREAT when you're a warrior being tossed into walls and such), and the princesses in particular were said to have great beauty. Minako, being the Goddess of Love and Beauty, was arguably the most beautiful of all, save only Princess Serenity. But that's Endymion's opinion. Minako thinks she's the prettiest!
She does, also, look different as Sailor Venus, through Magical Girl Secret Identity Magic.
Minako is totally in the closet about being a heroine of Love and Justice, which might mean some fibs and quick-talking to her peers, but she's not really a trouble-maker. Impish, hell yes. A bit of a prankster, totally, but she's mostly-harmless.
I'm Lost. What the [BLEEP] is Bishōjo Senshi Sailor Moon?
You poor, poor, young and innocent teacup.
Sailor Moon, known in Japan as Bishōjo Senshi Sailor Moon, has been officially translated as Pretty Soldier Sailormoon (Mixx, 1990s) and Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (Kodansha, current) by publishers/distributors. It is currently a multi-media series originally created by manga-ka Naoko Takeuchi. Sailor Moon redefined the magical-girl genre when it began, as previous magical girls did not use their powers to fight evil, but this has become one of the standard archetypes of the genre.
The story of the MASSIVE metaseries revolves around the reborn defenders of a kingdom that once spanned the Solar System, and around the evil forces that they battle. The major characters - the Sailor Senshi - literally "Sailor Soldiers"; frequently called "Sailor Scouts" or "Guardians" in many Western versions - are teenage girls who can transform into heroines named for the moon and planets. The elements of fantasy in the series are heavily symbolic and often based on Greek & Japanese mythology.
Before the Sailor Moon manga was published, Takeuchi had written Codename: Sailor V, which centered around just one Sailor Senshi -- our heroine Aino Minako, the Soldier of Love and Beauty, Sailor Venus! When Sailor V was proposed for adaptation into an anime, the concept was modified by Takeuchi so that Sailor V herself became only one member of a team. The resulting manga series merged elements of the popular magical girl genre and the Super Sentai Series (Power Rangers) of which Takeuchi was a huge genre fangirl, making Sailor Moon one of the first series ever to combine the two. AND IT RULES. Ahem.
That's Nice. Cut to the Chase.
Fine, let's talk about Codename: Sailor V.
Codename: Sailor V tells the story of our protagonist, Minako Aino, a 13 year old middle school student, who is slightly distracted, outspoken and dreams about some day finding true love. But her calm and normal life changes when she encounters a talking white cat with a crescent moon on its forehead. This cat introduces himself as Artemis and claims that Minako is a girl with the power to transform into a Sailor Scout, a guardian of justice. He calls her "Venus" and tells her she has a mission to protect the Earth. To help her with her new mission, Artemis gives her two items, a crescent moon shaped compact and a magical pen. The magical pen allows her to transform into her alter-ego, the "sailor-suited beautiful Soldier of Justice, Sailor V."
Minako is....not the best Soldier of Justice, to start. She wants to have fun! Chase boys! Do sports! But she quickly starts showing an aptitude for it, getting into a quasi-rivalry with the police force when it comes to nabbing bad guys! Eventually, she ends up working with the police to try and stop the Dark Agency, even going overseas occasionally to fight crime! Or, well, because she won a trip....but details! The Chief Inspector knows that Minako is Sailor V, and has offered her a job more than once.
She continues to get better throughout the manga, until she comes up against, Kaitou Ace, an idol-hero. Minako auditioned to get into his movie, and won the leading role which required a trip to China! Alas, it was not quite what she expected.
Kaitou Ace was revealed as Adonis during a pitched battle with Dark Agency monsters; a Morning Star protector from Minako's previous life who had loved, fought, and died for her, without Princess Venus ever knowing he existed. With that resentment in his heart, he was reborn as Danburite of the Dark Kingdom, the person behind all the Dark Agency attacks. Not realizing he was the enemy, pushing herself to the limit to try and save Ace, Aino Minako Awoke.
All her past memories came flooding back, and she transformed from Sailor V into Sailor Venus.
Minako was appalled by her memories of the past, along with Ace's revelations, and tried her best to save him. However, Adonis cast one last love fortune (or curse) for her: Minako's love shall never be granted for all eternity, so that she will never have to choose between love or duty ever again.
(of course, this will not stop Minako from having a dozen crushes on boys, or having a SERIOUSLY sexy interaction with her teammate, Hino Rei/Sailor Mars, in a few years, but it's given the weight of prophecy...)
I am treating all of Codename: Sailor V manga as canon, with the addition from the anime that during the events of C:SV (right before Chapter 15), Minako spent some of her time as Sailor V in England, where she met a young Interpol officer named Katarina thanks to Sailor V's police connections in Japan, who taught her English and Minako looked up to as a big sister. Sailor V was there investigating the Dark Agency, and while there she met a young man called Alan, with whom she fell in love. After Sailor V was caught in an explosion and believed to be dead, she saw them together and realized that they, without her knowing, had become a couple.
In the anime, she moved back to Japan shortly thereafter. Instead, she then went on to finish the Sailor V manga (chapters 15 & 16), after which I'm sending her to Fandom High, where she shall receive the rest of her training from Artemis and prepare to become the decoy princess to protect Serenity.
TL;DR
Cheerful, video game addict, happy-go-lucky, athletic sophomore exchange student from Japan & her cat. Sekkritly an incarnation of the goddess Venus & a Guardian of Justice.
Questions? Comments? Pie?
What Kind of Name is Aino?
Japanese, for starters, and it's also her last name. However, Minako has spent so much time around Westerners that she's fine with being called by her given name instead of her family name. She'll answer to either, but she's used to teachers barking 'Aino!' when she screws up in class.
Screw Up In Class? Who Is This?
Funny you should ask!
Tall, blonde, blue-eyes, beautiful, and highly athletic, Aino Minako is an outgoing student who loves sports and is not quite as fond of academic subjects! Oops!
Minako is first introduced in the Codename: Sailor V manga, which is part of (and predecessor to!) the Bishōjo Senshi Sailor Moon universe. She is awakened as a Senshi by the white cat Artemis when she is thirteen years old and instructed that she has a duty to become the beautiful warrior, Sailor V. Artemis explains that Venus and Earth are "twin planets" of about the same size and weight, that Venus is her "mother star", and that she must protect Earth from its enemies. He shows her Magellan Castle orbiting around Venus and says that it is hers as Princess Venus.
Minako is, of course, not exactly thrilled at first. She wants to be an idol and a professional volleyball player, not a guardian of truth and justice!
Minako is athletic, cheerful, romantic, resilient, and clever. She is very versatile, acting very elegant, intelligent, and refined at times, and irrational, boy-crazy, and over-ambitious at others! In other words, very much a teenage girl! She loves playing video games, eating, gossip, knitting, reading comic books, shopping, and watching romantic movies. One of her greatest loves is volleyball, as shown from the beginning of the first Sailor V chapter throughout the rest of the series-she even considers quitting the Sailor Senshi to become a professional player.
Minako's other greatest love is pop culture. She desperately wants to be an idol, and so makes a hobby of chasing them and attending auditions in acting, dancing, and singing whenever possible, so someone needs to warn Troy and Jono!
She also takes her role as the "Soldier of Love" literally, and enjoys regaling friends and acquaintances with advice about romance, which, with Minako, is an OMG BAD PLAN. Despite her declared expertise, Minako herself has little personal experience in relationships, and it pretty much always ends badly for her.
According to various fan-sites and Wikipedia: Minako enjoys Oolong tea and her favorite foods are given as curry rice, ramen noodles, and stuffed dumplings, with her least favorite food being shiitake mushrooms. Her favorite colors are listed as red, pink, orange, and yellow and she likes birds, the flowers orange dandelions and orchids, and the gemstone topaz. She is stated as having trouble with her mother and the police. All of this is canon, as stated by the manga-ka.
Always by Minako's side is Artemis. Artemis is the feline guardian and adviser to Sailor Venus, and acted as such to her previous incarnation as Princess Venus.
He (yes, he. Mina makes fun of him for having a girl's name) is slightly forgetful, bossy, and lazy at times, not half as diligent as his counterpart, Luna; but when Minako turns to him for advice or his charge finds herself in trouble he pulls himself together and becomes her big-brother type figure. He constantly picks on Minako if he thinks she's slacking off, but often times is seen comforting her or going out of his way to try and make her dreams come true.
And he talks. Shhhhh....
Both Minako AND Artemis are coming to Fandom, which means yet another intelligent kitty prowling the grounds, trying to desperately pretend he doesn't talk. Any conversations with Mina in her room would be NFB, for this reason. (He'll totally slip-up eventually).
Sooooo....what? She's the Incarnation of Venus, the Goddess of Love and Beauty?
You forgot Guardian of Justice!
Minako, like the other Sailor Senshi, must transform in order to gain access to her special powers. To transform into Sailor Venus, she must first raise a special device (a pen, at this point) into the air and shout "Venus Power, Make-up!"
Well, that's the (horrible) English dubbed translation. Since Minako is Japanese, despite her flawless English, she will use the "Henshin yo!" of her native tongue, which translates a bit closer to 'transform.'
As Sailor Venus, her primary attack is Crescent Beam, a beam of light which strikes enemies which Venus controls from her hands. She also has the Venus Love-Me Chain, which in the manga series is an actual chain wrapped around her waist, which is imbued with magic. To banish enemies of the Dark Kingdom, she usually calls out some random attack name that is relevant to the situation, and blasts them with some sort of light that disintegrates them while leaving innocent bystanders/hostages/etc unscathed. She can only access these as Sailor Venus, and not in her human form as Minako.
Since she's between her two canon series, when transformed as Sailor Venus, she wears her sailor fuku from Sailor Moon. Her uniform has a orange collar, orange skirt, blue front bow, yellow back bow, the Venus Love-Me chain around her waist, and orange ballet flats with a slight heel. HOWEVER, she's not wearing a tiara! To protect her identity, she's still wearing her Sailor V mask, and she has the mark of the crescent moon on her forehead as part of her role as the decoy princess. Like this.
Also, the more Minako remembers about her life in the Silver Millennium, and the more she acts as Sailor Venus, her body begins the process of transforming into a Venusian. All the citizens of the Silver Millenium (minus Earth) had longer life-spans, were healthier and more durable (which is GREAT when you're a warrior being tossed into walls and such), and the princesses in particular were said to have great beauty. Minako, being the Goddess of Love and Beauty, was arguably the most beautiful of all, save only Princess Serenity. But that's Endymion's opinion. Minako thinks she's the prettiest!
She does, also, look different as Sailor Venus, through Magical Girl Secret Identity Magic.
Minako is totally in the closet about being a heroine of Love and Justice, which might mean some fibs and quick-talking to her peers, but she's not really a trouble-maker. Impish, hell yes. A bit of a prankster, totally, but she's mostly-harmless.
I'm Lost. What the [BLEEP] is Bishōjo Senshi Sailor Moon?
You poor, poor, young and innocent teacup.
Sailor Moon, known in Japan as Bishōjo Senshi Sailor Moon, has been officially translated as Pretty Soldier Sailormoon (Mixx, 1990s) and Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (Kodansha, current) by publishers/distributors. It is currently a multi-media series originally created by manga-ka Naoko Takeuchi. Sailor Moon redefined the magical-girl genre when it began, as previous magical girls did not use their powers to fight evil, but this has become one of the standard archetypes of the genre.
The story of the MASSIVE metaseries revolves around the reborn defenders of a kingdom that once spanned the Solar System, and around the evil forces that they battle. The major characters - the Sailor Senshi - literally "Sailor Soldiers"; frequently called "Sailor Scouts" or "Guardians" in many Western versions - are teenage girls who can transform into heroines named for the moon and planets. The elements of fantasy in the series are heavily symbolic and often based on Greek & Japanese mythology.
Before the Sailor Moon manga was published, Takeuchi had written Codename: Sailor V, which centered around just one Sailor Senshi -- our heroine Aino Minako, the Soldier of Love and Beauty, Sailor Venus! When Sailor V was proposed for adaptation into an anime, the concept was modified by Takeuchi so that Sailor V herself became only one member of a team. The resulting manga series merged elements of the popular magical girl genre and the Super Sentai Series (Power Rangers) of which Takeuchi was a huge genre fangirl, making Sailor Moon one of the first series ever to combine the two. AND IT RULES. Ahem.
That's Nice. Cut to the Chase.
Fine, let's talk about Codename: Sailor V.
Codename: Sailor V tells the story of our protagonist, Minako Aino, a 13 year old middle school student, who is slightly distracted, outspoken and dreams about some day finding true love. But her calm and normal life changes when she encounters a talking white cat with a crescent moon on its forehead. This cat introduces himself as Artemis and claims that Minako is a girl with the power to transform into a Sailor Scout, a guardian of justice. He calls her "Venus" and tells her she has a mission to protect the Earth. To help her with her new mission, Artemis gives her two items, a crescent moon shaped compact and a magical pen. The magical pen allows her to transform into her alter-ego, the "sailor-suited beautiful Soldier of Justice, Sailor V."
Minako is....not the best Soldier of Justice, to start. She wants to have fun! Chase boys! Do sports! But she quickly starts showing an aptitude for it, getting into a quasi-rivalry with the police force when it comes to nabbing bad guys! Eventually, she ends up working with the police to try and stop the Dark Agency, even going overseas occasionally to fight crime! Or, well, because she won a trip....but details! The Chief Inspector knows that Minako is Sailor V, and has offered her a job more than once.
She continues to get better throughout the manga, until she comes up against, Kaitou Ace, an idol-hero. Minako auditioned to get into his movie, and won the leading role which required a trip to China! Alas, it was not quite what she expected.
Kaitou Ace was revealed as Adonis during a pitched battle with Dark Agency monsters; a Morning Star protector from Minako's previous life who had loved, fought, and died for her, without Princess Venus ever knowing he existed. With that resentment in his heart, he was reborn as Danburite of the Dark Kingdom, the person behind all the Dark Agency attacks. Not realizing he was the enemy, pushing herself to the limit to try and save Ace, Aino Minako Awoke.
All her past memories came flooding back, and she transformed from Sailor V into Sailor Venus.
Minako was appalled by her memories of the past, along with Ace's revelations, and tried her best to save him. However, Adonis cast one last love fortune (or curse) for her: Minako's love shall never be granted for all eternity, so that she will never have to choose between love or duty ever again.
(of course, this will not stop Minako from having a dozen crushes on boys, or having a SERIOUSLY sexy interaction with her teammate, Hino Rei/Sailor Mars, in a few years, but it's given the weight of prophecy...)
I am treating all of Codename: Sailor V manga as canon, with the addition from the anime that during the events of C:SV (right before Chapter 15), Minako spent some of her time as Sailor V in England, where she met a young Interpol officer named Katarina thanks to Sailor V's police connections in Japan, who taught her English and Minako looked up to as a big sister. Sailor V was there investigating the Dark Agency, and while there she met a young man called Alan, with whom she fell in love. After Sailor V was caught in an explosion and believed to be dead, she saw them together and realized that they, without her knowing, had become a couple.
In the anime, she moved back to Japan shortly thereafter. Instead, she then went on to finish the Sailor V manga (chapters 15 & 16), after which I'm sending her to Fandom High, where she shall receive the rest of her training from Artemis and prepare to become the decoy princess to protect Serenity.
TL;DR
Cheerful, video game addict, happy-go-lucky, athletic sophomore exchange student from Japan & her cat. Sekkritly an incarnation of the goddess Venus & a Guardian of Justice.
Questions? Comments? Pie?