At 09:52 PM 11/28/98 +0000, Douglas Helm wrote:

Consider, here we have Misako, the neglected second child being encouraged
to hate her elder sister to whom she'll have to swear loyalty one day.  
Even worse, although Usagi has the claim to the throne by primogeniture,
Misako is the inheritor of the power of the Earth.  Who better than the
holder of the Earth power to be the queen of Earth?  With only one 
generation into the dynasty, the basis for royal legitimacy hasn't been
established by tradition, so Misako makes a very viable claimant to the
throne who has been trained to be disloyal.  

That's an interesting theory. I hadn't considered that aspect fully. It
would be possible for Misako to assume the throne if the Senshi council had
decided that Small Lady was unfit for rulership. 

It's pretty possible for anyone to do anything when you're still setting up
the rules and have no precedent set that you have to follow/fall back on.

------------
Sailor Pluto stood watch over the timeline. Centuries of standing guard had
taught her how to suppress emotions. How to make difficult decisions for
long term gain. Yet now, frustration moved within her. It was one of the
rare times that the duties she had to preform chaffed. Small Lady would
understand if she saw, yet Pluto could not show her. 

The above sounds like Pluto's picking and choosing the course of history,
to make things come out the way she wants them to.

Someone who follows canon more closely than I do, please comment -- isn't
Pluto's job to make sure the timeline *doesn't* change?  That someone
doesn't make one path happen over another that would occur 'naturally'?
Didn't Pluto "die" in one manga story when she went and changed the
timeline herself (the penalty to the guardian for changing the timeline is
death)?  

She also felt a tinge of guilt; she had caused this pain for her own
reasons. Better to have the Small Lady she knew rather then having a
stranger, or none at all. She could have simply erased Princess Tsukino
Misako but she couldn't bring herself to do that to Small Lady. Small
Lady's happiness was more important then her own sense of loss.

Except, of course, that by exposing Small Lady to Misako, Pluto never gets
the Small Lady she knew at all. The Small Lady she knew never met Misako
until someone shoved her over into an alternate timeline. Pluto's putting
Small Lady back in her original timeline, essentially erasing Misako, would
have meant absolutely nothing to Small Lady back when she first arrived in
the alternate timeline. It certainly should not have had any effects on
Small Lady's long term happiness.






Jeanne Hedge

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