Outer Sailor Guardians

Out of uniform the group tends to come across as gracious and easy to like, yet how they relate to the Inner team as soldiers shifts from one version of the story to the next. Early stretches usually pit the two sides against each other, leaving Usagi, Mamoru, or Setsuna to smooth things over. For all their devotion to duty, the Outers can hold themselves apart and are prepared to set heroics aside and make cold choices when they judge it serves the greater good. The single sharpest point of friction across every telling is what to do about the perilous Sailor Saturn.

The first anime pushes this further, drawing them as proud and openly combative, waving off assistance as an admission of weakness in Usagi's circle. There they mostly operate alone or in pairs, their goals meshing awkwardly with the other team's, and they never form the close bond with Usagi's friends that later adaptations grant them. Only after their Silver Millennium past comes to light do the two groups arrive at mutual respect.

Back in the age of the Silver Millennium, the four were entrusted with holding the solar system's outer frontier against invaders. When the Moon Kingdom was destroyed and its people reborn on Earth, Sailor Uranus took up life as Haruka Tenou and Sailor Neptune as Michiru Kaiou, both a year senior to the Inner Guardians and bound to each other as partners and lovers. In time the pair gained two more allies, the college student Setsuna Meiou, who is Sailor Pluto, and the much younger Hotaru Tomoe, Sailor Saturn, whose stated age keeps shifting because of her cycles of rebirth and sudden growth.

Where the Inner Guardians fight barehanded, every Outer carries a personal armament. Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto each guard one of the three Talismans, the Space Sword, the Deep Aqua Mirror, and the Garnet Orb in that order, while Saturn brings the Silence Glaive to bear. Depending on the medium, they may already hold these when introduced or come into them later. As the story advances the four also grow faint psychic senses, reading warnings of approaching danger through nature and visions in a way that echoes their destruction themes: earthquakes for Uranus, tsunamis for Neptune, time for Pluto, and death for Saturn.