Tremendously Tori

Can you talk about Ace/Danburite? I personally always found him really fascinating. Here we have a person so removed and outside of this whole royal conflict (cause that's essentially what this war was based on) and yet he's the one before any of the main players who awakens first and remembers everything? Such an interesting concept, he offers such a unique prospective as a regular civilian in both lifetimes caught up in all this political intrigue I kinda wish more had been done with him?

Ace is a fascinating character! I think fandom tends to discount him because there is this perception that liking/being interested in Ace and what he brings to the story means shipping him with Minako, which I’m not on board with at all. If anything, respecting Ace as a full complex character lends weight to the level of trauma that Minako endures through him.

It’s interesting that Ace was set up as a sort of AU Tuxedo Kamen. Not only is he a mysterious masked man who sometimes appears to assist Minako in fights, but he occupies that shady third party zone that Mamoru appeared to hold in the early Dark Kingdom arc–not quite a good guy, but seemingly not quite a bad guy either. This both primed audiences to expect him to be good in the end despite questionable moments along the way, and once again pushed Minako’s story to run parallel to Usagi’s, with wildly different results.

It’s no surprise that this played with Minako’s emotions. Just the fact that he’s a hot teenager would have been enough to attract her to him immediately, but Ace repeatedly showing up to assist her just continued to validate her emotions. And Minako Aino, particularly the Minako Aino of her Sailor V days, desperately craves validation. One of her very first actions in this manga is putting a ribbon in her hair because her crush told her it would look nice. Ace showed up enough to make her believe he really cared about her specifically.

Ace’s approach to selling himself as a girl’s ultimate dream is exceptionally Minako-like. He makes Kaitou Ace into a TV character, just as Sailor V became a video game character. A TV character who not only fights crime as she does, but who lavishes gifts on girls and does their homework for them.

Ace is set up in direct conflict with Venus’s loyalty to Princess Serenity. He has fashioned himself to be Minako’s ideal boyfriend in every way – handsome, famous, with eyes only for her – and to be with him would mean living Minako’s dream life as an idol herself. And yet still, she hears Princess Serenity calling for her.

What’s murky is how much of a villain Ace really was.

The Kaitou Ace persona was so distant from his identity as the Dark Kingdom soldier Danburite that his own underlings did not realize that they were the same person. Much like brainwashed Prince Endymion in the first season of the anime continuously undid his own plots, Danburite set up situations to attack Sailor V, only to stage a public rescue of her as Ace. He urged her to indulge in a life of stardom, only to give her a film script designed to make her remember her life as Princess Venus. He made declarations of love but refused to believe her sincerity when she tried to do the same.

Was Danburite himself waffling on how he felt about Minako? He had everything he wanted already. The princess he had always pined over was head-over-heels for him. But she still wasn’t Venus. She still wasn’t really the princess he remembered. And there is something very bitter about his refusal to accept her love declaration, like he already expects her to reject him in the end, and is self-destructing the relationship before she can.

He rejected her first declaration of love, but accepted her second one. Why the second one? Because that is when she rescued him. This is what makes me think that Danburite was pulled in two different directions, that the part of him that was a Dark Kingdom soldier was at odds with the part of him that was Adonis. Danburite should have accepted Minako‘s sentiment the first time if he really wanted to manipulate her into staying with him. It’s only when she protects him, the way that Venus once protected Serenity, that he can let himself get carried away with his own feelings for her.

Danburite is fascinating because he is, as far as we’re aware, the only completely non-royal perspective that we have of the Silver Millennium. The cats, while not royalty themselves, were part of the queen’s inner circle. Beryl, while possibly coming from humble origins, was at the center of the final conflict.

Danburite – Adonis – was outside of it all entirely. He was a humble soldier. He never knew Venus, or Serenity, or Prince Endymion. He did not even serve any of them directly–the closest he may have come to any of them was Kunzite. And what Adonis tells us of this world from his perspective is fascinating.

For example, Adonis tells us that Venus lived in Magellan Castle until she was sent to live on the Moon, something that has long been a source of discussion in fandom (did the senshi always live on the Moon with Serenity or did they live on their home planets?).

He tells us that there was a war on Earth, and that the Venusian soldiers were sent to help. Not against Earth, but allied with it. This is a huge shift from what was previously understood in Sailor Moon canon–either Venus alone, or all of the Silver Millennium planets, were allied with Earth at least for this particular war. Who were they fighting? Did the fight with Metallia begin on Earth?

His memories show Venus and Kunzite together, and present-day Danburite served the Dark Kingdom under Kunzite. Did all the armies of Venus fall under Metallia’s influence along with Earth’s? Did Venus watch with horror as her own people attacked the Moon?

More than anything, it is clear that Venus’s status was unreachable to Adonis. She was this distant goddess to him.

Ace’s ending is ultimately bleak. He thought he could have changed destiny to allow him to be with the princess he always dreamed of. Realizing she still will choose her duty to Serenity over everything he hoped to offer, he completely reverts back to Danburite, and attacking her. His final love fortune is telling her that her love will always be hopeless, because she will always choose to fight instead. This is Adonis’ legacy: hardening Minako to battle, making her no longer question her priorities.

Good or bad, Adonis left a mark on Minako that she never really got over. Was he manipulative? Undoubtedly. Evil? Probably. But there was a lot going on with him, and he fleshed out the world in a huge way.

Not to be rude, but I've never seen a bearded cis woman and I'm genuinely curious as to how you have a beard and body hair. I didn't think that was an actual thing in real life, I've only ever seen it played off as a joke in the mainstream media. I don't know anything about this and i don't know why nobody talks about it.

Polycystic ovarian syndrome affects 1 in 5 people with ovaries and one of the most common symptoms is darker, thicker body hair than average. There are other conditions that lead to it, as well as just genetics and hormone fluctuations during pregnancy.

There are millions and millions of cis women and other people with ovaries who can and do grow beards. The reason you don’t know about it is because we’re taught to hide it and pretend it doesn’t exist. 

Nobody had any clue I was hairy like this until I let it grow when I was 26. I’ve been growing a beard since I was 12. It was something I kept secret and was extremely ashamed of my entire life. There are millions of people just like me. It fucks me up to think about.