Mentor, Friend, Cat: Sailor Moon and Luna

It’s not easy mentoring a teen superhero…

I am a very late passenger on the anime train, but I’m doing my best to catch up. As it happens, just in time for Black Cat Month, I started watching a series I’ve heard about from many longtime anime fans, Sailor Moon. One of its main characters is Luna, a very special black (or purple, or very dark blue) cat.

The star of the show is Usagi. She’s fourteen years old in the first episode, she goes to middle school, and she’s a completely normal, somewhat klutzy kid who’s a bit of a crybaby. She’s also a superhero, “the pretty guardian who fights for love and for justice.” She wears a sailor uniform—which coincidentally or not resembles her school uniform—and she carries a mystical brooch and wields the Moon Tiara, a weapon of great power.

Luna is much more than a sidekick. She’s a guide, a protector, a mentor, and a friend. In her past life she was an advisor to a queen, and she’s the driving force behind the search for the sailor guardians, of whom Usagi is the first. Her primary mission is to find the Moon Princess, but there are plenty of enemies and monsters to fight along the way.

Usagi first meets her while rushing to school—late as usual. A small crowd of little boys is beating up a cat. Usagi chases them away and rescues the cat, who has a crossed bandage on her forehead. Usagi peels it off and discovers what she calls a bald spot in the shape of a crescent moon.

It is not a bald spot, Luna will tell her later, indignantly. It’s a key to her power. When it’s covered, her sensory powers are dulled, and she can’t talk.

As with so many other magical animals, speech is vitally important. When the animal is deprived of it, she can’t perform all or most of her essential functions. In Luna’s case, that includes doing her job as Usagi’s mentor and guide.

Luna takes that job extremely seriously. She’ll relax into it as the series goes on, but in the beginning she’s quite sharp with Usagi. She presents Usagi with the brooch that gives her access to her powers as a sailor guardian, and tells Usagi how and when to use it along with the Moon Tiara.

Usagi is not the best pupil. She’s a terrible student who gets awful grades, and this feeds into her life as a superhero. She’s easily distracted; she tends to be lazy. She can be oblivious to signs and cues that are obvious to Luna, who has to poke and prod her into doing what’s needed.

Luna isn’t perfect, either. She can miss signals and misinterpret what she sees. When she first meets Ami, she thinks the girl genius is a monster, and only later realizes that she’s the second of the guardians, Sailor Mercury.

Most of Luna’s adventures have to do with saving the world and humanity from various monsters and villains, but she has some personal adventures as well. Usagi has to get permission from her parents to keep the cat, and that’s complicated by her bratty little brother Shingo, who is afraid of cats. When Shingo was a baby, a cat bit him on the nose, and he’s been phobic ever since.

In the fifth episode of the original series, a villain exploits this fear as part of a plot to take over human minds and siphon off their energy to feed the great evil leader. The pet shop called Perfume sells a creature called a Chanela, a long-haired bunny-like animal that gives off a mind-altering scent. Once it’s been claimed by a human, its whole body radiates a white light, and the human falls under its spell.

When Shingo brings a Chanela home, he attacks Luna and declares that the only pet the family will have is the Chanela. Luna and Usagi have to track down the shop and unmask the monster who runs it, and free Shingo from the spell before he’s stripped of all his energy. It’s touch and go for a bit when Usagi is sucked in by a Chanela’s powers, but the outcome is all Luna could hope for. Usagi is freed and able to transform into Sailor Moon, Shingo is no longer afraid of cats, and Luna is accepted as a full member of the Tsukino family. “Starting today,” Usagi’s mom says, “we’re a family of five.”

Quite a bit later on, after Luna has found and confirmed four Sailor Guardians (Moon, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter), she has a no-good, awful, very bad day—or as the episode is titled, “Love and Chased: Luna’s Worst Day Ever.” The episode begins with Luna being chased by a hostile horde of terrestrial cats, and ends with her falling in love with a huge, weird, green cat whose little girl calls him Rhett Butler.

Rhett Butler is a very strange cat, even apart from being green. He’s huge and ovoid and in some ways resembles the beloved Studio Ghibli creature, Totoro. He doesn’t speak, but like other magical anime creatures, he communicates clearly without words. He’s brave and wise, and his little girl adores him. Luna thinks he’s pretty amazing, too.

Early on in the series, we learn that Luna isn’t a solo operator. She’s in contact with outside forces through a game called Sailor V, which gives her information and instructions and helps her with her mission. Eventually she discovers that the voice of the game is another royal advisor from her past, the white cat, Artemis.

In spite of his name, Artemis is male. Unlike the highly duty-bound Luna, he tends to be lazy and he gets distracted by thoughts of food or romance. Luna can be cutting in her criticism: He’s careless, she says. He’s irresponsible. He messes up.

He’s still a very special cat. He’s the advisor of the last of the guardians, Sailor Venus. Like Luna, he has a crescent moon on his forehead, which allows him to speak and to wield his powers. As the series goes on, he and Luna will mate and produce a daughter, Diana.

Sailor Moon and her friends are vital to the survival of the galaxy and the destruction of evil, but none of it can happen without the help of Luna and, eventually, Artemis. Luna is the driving force behind them all, the one who guides them, teaches them, and pushes them to do their duty.

The fact she’s a cat makes it even better. Cats are magical beings, we all know that. Black cats especially. Combine their power with the power of a teen girl and you have a force that can shake the universe.

Judith Tarr

Judith Tarr has written over forty novels, many of which have been published as ebooks, as well as numerous shorter works of fiction and nonfiction, including a primer for writers who want to write about horses: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. She has a Patreon, in which she shares nonfiction, fiction, and
horse and cat stories. She lives near Tucson, Arizona, with a herd of Lipizzans, a clowder of cats, and a pair of Very Good Dogs.
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