Ooh can you tell me more about your Sailor Moon oc? She sounds super cool <3
Thank you so much for the opportunity to ramble about my girl. So, the creative vision for this Guardian OC is the negative space of the mythic, cosmic romance of the manga and the violence it keeps unexamined. Therefore, her ontology is relational rather than essentialist. Would be thrilled to read some comments if anyone has any thoughts, because I worked really hard on this.
Her civilian name is Nijirō Kirari, who transforms into Sailor Aurora, the Guardian of Emptiness and Emergence. Her Sailor Crystal–thus, her soul–the Aurora Crystal, was conceived when Serenity sealed Nehelenia, making her the (bastard daughter) of both Queens. The details are very erotic, very queer, too: two women breaking their neat binary essentialism by accident when Nehelenia seeks the intimacy of balance, and Serenity insists on the purity of separation. (Which provides us with potential for some delicious dynasty drama as 'royal bastard' is a Dynasty Tale trope Sailor Moon has not yet deployed, and I know Usagi will be thrilled to learn that she had a sister in her past life, immediately ready to embrace her, but will also have a hard time comprehending why the girl who used to be her sister isn't as thrilled about reveal. Kirari has very conflicting feelings about being the stain that was wiped from memory, as the stain on the pristine legacy of the mother they shared. The purity of the myth Usagi inherits depends on Kirari's erasure). Serenity's sealing command and Nehelenia's demand for balance pass through each other and the Silver Crystal, splitting into a new pattern. Sailor Aurora is the moiré baby of Serenity and Nehelenia, right? She is not their daughter as a blend of both, with her Crystal like a vial filled with Light and Dark in equal amounts. She is their daughter as the interference pattern that arises when Nehelenia and Serenity touch, but misalign. Instead of fracturing reality, as the severance of an interdependent, complementary pair where one conditions the other, like Light/Dark would, the inference pattern crystallizes into the lattice (because all crystals form from lattices: diamonds, sugar, salt, quartz, snowflakes, glaciers, etc.), robust enough to metabolize the existential strain. Her soul shimmers in the twilight of the shadow both Queens cast together on the cosmos. Her breath emerges from denied balance. Her heartbeat flickers in the enforced separation.
The visual mood I picture for Kirari is oil-slick iridescence on wet asphalt under violet skies at dusk. I know Black people don't exist in Takeuchi's vision at all, but we Black people want to have fun, too, so Kirari has deep brown skin that interacts with light differently than pale skin does. From pale skin, light bounces off and is repelled when reflected; dark skin welcomes and gathers it. Light lingers and pools on her body. Kirari's luminosity turns colors lush and rich as it is born of absorption, saturation, contrast, dimension, depth, and release.
Her hair falls past her knees in a heavy curtain of midnight plum twist braids. Pulling them into a ponytail or an updo unveils an undercut with shaved patterns that vary every few weeks when she refresshes the cut–stars, swirls, spirals, waves. Chrome wires coil through her strands like shooting stars frozen in their fall. Beads, cuffs, rings, and charms weave constellations into her hair. Glitter dust breathes sparkle across the strands.
Kirari’s everyday wardrobe is loose and has a rebellious edge, a little punk and hip-hop. Mesh, DIY, fishnet, torn denim, oversized hoodies, cropped muscle tops, lots of stud accessories, prefers backpacks over handbags, much of it thrifted. She wears baggy pants that sit below her hips, with the boxer's waistband peeking out. Septum piercing decorates her nose and her ears are decked, too: lobe, helix, industrial, daith, conch, tragus. There is a little downward bounce in her step because most of the time she moves around with headphones and some trap, old school hip-hop, or hardcore punk track in her ears, and some bass rumbling through her bones.
When Nehelenia seeks recognition from the person and order that defined her as corruption and outsider, Serenity responds with uncompromising boundary enforcement. That is contact and repel at once. Desire and denial. Exposure and recoil. Balance denied in favor of purity. Usually (and nothing is usual when it comes to anything spawning from Queen Serenity's rule; the cosmos constantly bends around her and her legitimate daughter's actions to accommodate their decisions; that is just canon), a Sailor Crystal co-develops with a celestial body; Sailor Aurora, technically, co-develops with the sealing event or, rather, dependently originates from the conditions of the event. This, Sailor Aurora, is because that is. And "that" includes the fact that Light and Dark, as Nehelenia rightfully insists, are a reciprocal pair: "Light and Dark call upon each other.
In non-dual terms, Light and Dark are not opposites; they condition each other. “I” cannot exist without a non-I. In turn, the non-I depends on that existence, too. Eliminating Dark is eliminating the condition of Light. The two are not pre-existing substances that clash; one exists because the other exists.
This, aka Dark, is, because that, aka Light, is. If this, aka Dark, ceases, that, Light, also ceases.
That is what interdependence means: remove just one element and all existence vanishes. Queen Serenity may merely intend to banish a rival, but she is using the Silver Crystal to violently deny a plea for balance and reciprocity. That is an attack on the condition of existence itself. To execute the sealing spell, the Silver Crystal must violate the principle of interdependence. Thus, the cosmology/metaphysics reaches a limit. The prior architecture is planet/guardian, inside/outside, purity/corruption, bounded essence/protective defense. However, it can no longer adequately sustain coherence after Serenity’s act. It generates pressures and tensions exceeding this original binary logic.
However, rather than the fabric of existence unraveling, it expands to metabolize the contradiction. The cosmos responds by generating more protection. Sailor Aurora's guardianship emerges because the prior system cannot process the conditions of threat it produces. The Guardian of Emptiness and Emergence arises to protect the absence of fixed, separate essences as the openness in which boundaries that give form, differentiation, and individuality to anything at all can be made and unmade, transform, grow, become, and change. No form exists by itself, no purity protects itself without producing an outside, no boundary can be innocent when it pretends not to depend on what it excludes. Sailor Aurora guards relationality.
Her story in the Silver Millennium is already outlined and written, part of the fic project for which I've already published two Sailor Neptune-centric worldbuilding vignettes. Y'all can check these out here and here. I'm still tinkering a little with how to integrate her into a post-Galaxia plot because there are still too many variables left undecided. But I'm open to follow-up questions if anyone fancies more.
Last, but not least, the theme track I chose for Sailor Aurora is Emergence by Sleep Token. Like, these lyrics specificly just do it:
I've got solar flares for your dead gods, space dust for your fuel rods
Dark days for your solstice, dancing through the depths of
Hellfire, on the winds that started from within
My blood beats so alive, might tear right through my skin
So tell me what you meant by "living past your half-life"
In lockstep with the universe, and you're well-versed in the afterlife
You know that I'm sanctified by what's below
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