Haruna Sakurada

The anime keeps Haruna close to her manga model while shifting her palette. Her hair turns a warm reddish-brown in place of the manga's pale blond, and her eyes are colored blue rather than the hazel of the print version.

Barely out of her twenties, Haruna scolds Usagi for slacking one minute and behaves like an overgrown student the next, getting swept up in the same fads and thrills as the girls. Beneath the lectures she is quietly boy-crazy: while warning her class not to be fooled by Nephrite's forged love letters, she secretly wishes one had come to her. That naive, love-hungry streak leaves her low-hanging fruit for the Dark Kingdom and the villains who follow.

Haruna turns up less and less as the seasons roll on and vanishes once Usagi and company move up to a new school year. A running gag saddles her with misfortune: an early episode sees a mind-controlled Umino flip her skirt in front of onlookers, another nearly kills her when the Shape Ray drains her energy, and a third leaves her shoved into a stack of desks by her own class. Her final appearance implies she has at last found a relationship.

A fanbook fills in the rest of her profile: parents and a sister, blood type O, a love of handicrafts and the color lilac, English as her favorite subject against a distaste for biology, peaches over snapping turtle at the table, a dream of visiting Vienna, and a deep fear of snakes.