January 6th is Hotaru Tomoe/Sailor Saturn’s Birthday!
So how can you celebrate?
♄ Rewatch or reread your favourite Saturn-centric chapter, episode, or musical! She is a key character in most of Sailor Moon S, so why not rewatch the series finale? For a more light-hearted one-off, try episode 117, where she is encouraged to deliver a love letter to an athlete she admires, or episode 118, where a Daimon turns her house into a living board game and she must save the Sailor Soldiers to fix it. In episode 112 she meets Chibi-Usa for the first time, their friendship being core to the latter half of the S season, especially in episode 115. She’s also key in the beginning of the fifth season, Sailor Stars, and episodes 168-169 detail how she came to live with the other Outer System Soldiers.
♄ Sailor Saturn is the only main character not to receive an image song in the classic anime or Crystal. However, she has two key songs in the original Musicals - TO A BRAND NEW WORLD and THE WORLD DIED OUT - and a duet with Chibi-Usa in Un Nouveau Voyage, Chiisa na Kagayaki [“A Small Glimmer"]. There are also several instrumental BGM tracks dedicated to her, including her theme from the S OST.
Here’s a playlist of all these songs and other Sailor Saturn BGM cues, plus original songs by her voice actress Yuko Minaguchi!
♄ Enjoy Hotaru’s favourite food - buckwheat noodles, or soba, which can be prepared hot or cold. Alternatively, her least favourite food is milk if you’d like to abstain for a day.
♄ Hotaru collects lamps and prefers low, mood lighting, much like her name (firefly) might suggest. Relax and meditate in a room lit only with decorative lamps and/or candles and engage in Hotaru’s other hobby, reading - but don’t strain your eyes!
♄ Dress like Hotaru for the day! Hotaru famously wears very dark colours, especially black, sometimes navy and green, and trends to monochromatic outfits with a pop of accenting colour like red or gold. She prefers to keep the majority of her body covered (particularly because, in the manga and Crystal, she has scars covering much of her body) and prioritises keeping warm. Her style is generally neat, timeless and occasionally veering into “preppy”. Iconic accessories include her knit shawl tied with a rose brooch, fully opaque tights, and a berry beret. She also keeps on her person the Taioron Crystal pendant given to her by her mother, so more abstractly, you could wear something given to you or passed down to you by a family member.
After being reborn as a child after the events of S, however, she shows a preference for brighter, happier colours! Naoko even invisioned baby-Hotaru as being something of a little fashionista, so today is the perfect excuse to blend poppy childhood throwbacks with a touch of adult style.
Alternatively, as Sailor Saturn, she has quite a few iconic accessories. Her unique sleeves are shaped like flower petals, and her brooch is a many-faceted crystal star. Her earrings are crystal drop pendants attached to small silver ringed planets, and she wears the gothic purple lace-up knee-highs of everyone’s middle school dreams don’t even pretend like she didn’t dictate your early-2000s “emo” fashion choices. She doesn’t seem to wear makeup, but her “transformation” from Sailor Moon: Various Emotion for the (amusingly) Sega Saturn implied she wore white/silver/nude nail polish. Saturn’s colour palette is purple and maroon with a silver accent.
♄ Hotaru lives with chronic pain as a result of the lab accident which almost took her life as a child. Though the cybernetic components in her body are fantastical, their impact on her life are very much not. Hotaru often finds it difficult to keep up with others due to fatigue and limited mobility, and on days with bad flare ups can barely get out of bed, making it hard for her to maintain friendships - a very real issue people with chronic pain deal with every day. If one of your friends, family members, or someone you know is dealing with chronic pain or illness, or another invisible disability, take the time to reach out to them and let them know that you’re there for them, whenever they have the time and strength, on their terms. Flexibility and support makes more difference than you know. Just make sure to respect their limits and privacy, too.
♄ Write a letter to someone you admire! It can be nerve-wracking summing up the courage to put your thoughts into words, especially if you deliver it to the person yourself, but it always means so much more when you do, as Hotaru learned when she got to meet her track-and-field role model. Write it on paper and send it via snail-mail, or take advantage of the many digital avenues to send someone some fan mail! (Just don’t use Tumblr’s actual fanmail function. Nobody likes that thing.)
♄ Go for a picnic with some friends to enjoy nature and fresh air! It’s good for the mind, heart, and body!
♄ Revert to baby mode and get adopted by a throuple!
♄ Fav and read some Sailor Saturn fanart and fanfic on sites like Pixiv, Twitter, and AO3 - or contribute your own new content! Don’t forget to tag!
Feel free to reply and reblog with your own ideas of how you’re going to celebrate Hotaru’s day!
vaporwave
gummygunk
pixelskylines
prguitarman
baratheonpilled
jacobvanloon
discoholicmusic
theartofmadeline
stormborns
tangentwithtanner
izzy806
