Hikaru Sorano

Hikaru looks so much like Ami Mizuno of the main Sailor Moon cast that the likeness is hard to miss. The clearest thing separating the two is hair color, since Ami's is a royal blue while Hikaru's is black.

She is an eager admirer of Sailor V, and her enthusiasm helped feed Minako's own fixation on idols. On the school side she serves as vice president of a volunteer club. Her name carries bright imagery, with the reading for Hikaru meaning to shine, a name more often given to boys.

The two girls have been best friends since their elementary years, and Hikaru turns up again and again across the Sailor V manga, though she never crosses over into the later Sailor Moon story. She does slip into a brief cameo in the game Another Story, appearing inside one of Minako's dreams. In the earliest drafts that followed the first Sailor V chapter, Naoko Takeuchi still had Minako leading a team, with Hikaru on it beside early takes on Rei and Makoto. That places Hikaru as a loose seed for Ami, though the connection is purely visual, since their personalities share nothing. She also carries the surname Sorano in common with Gurio Sorano, a hint that the two may be related.