Character · Sailor Moon
Minako Aino
She had a costume, a codename and a partner in London before the rest of the team knew there was a war on.
In Otakana the clue reads: Guardian of Venus who worked alone first
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Sailor Moon
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Minako Aino fought alone first. Naoko Takeuchi wrote her before Sailor Moon existed, in Codename: Sailor V, where a schoolgirl and a white cat called Artemis chase criminals with rather more comedy than the later series allows. By the time she joins Usagi's group she is the only one with real experience, and it shows in how readily she gives orders.
As Sailor Venus she leads on the field. Offstage she is also the silliest member of the team: obsessed with idols, hopeless in love, forever mangling proverbs, and convinced she is destined for stardom. The gap between the tactician and the disaster is deliberate, and it is the closest anyone else in the cast comes to Usagi's own register.
The manga gives her a heavier past than the anime does, with a duty that pulls hard against everything she wants for herself. Takeuchi kept the Sailor V material in print alongside Sailor Moon, so Minako is the rare supporting character who turned up with a back catalogue of her own already published.
Spelling MINAKO
MINAKO is the given name, and Aino stays off the tiles. Six letters ending in the ko suffix, written with the character for child, which closes a long list of Japanese girls' names and is a reliable guess for the last two squares. Vowels and consonants alternate the whole way, nothing doubles, no vowel runs long.