Woman of the Month: Rei Hino

Rei Hino (火野 レイ) from Sailor Moon

I have slowly but surely been making my way through all the seasons of Sailor Moon, which is no small feat considering there’s about two hundred episodes in all. I was about eleven or twelve when Sailor Moon’s popularity kicked off in New Zealand, heralding the start of the anime industry becoming more mainstream in Western countries, so it’s been a real trip watching it for the first time since childhood.

For many nineties kids, Usagi Tsukino – or Serena, as she was called in the first English dub – was their first taste of super-heroism, made all the more unique thanks to the fact the show was unabashedly for young female viewers. The main character was a fourteen-year-old girl, the supporting cast was comprised of four more girls and a talking cat, and the most important villain was an evil queen.

And of course, there was Tuxedo Mask, a character with no personality beyond being mysterious, romantic and having the ability to throw roses as projectiles. Even as kids we knew it was more than a little insane, but it was still ours; a story that catered to our specific interests and tastes, in which a teenage girl could be a klutz and a dunce, but also a heroine and a princess and a superhero.

And naturally everyone had a favourite Sailor Scout, based on their personality, aesthetic or power-set. And let’s be honest, the coolest one in all those departments was Rei Hino. While Usagi was throwing her tiara like a frisbee or Ami was spraying bubbles over everything, Rei was blasting fireballs from her fingertips, generating burning mandalas, or unleashing a literal firebird on her enemies. And she did it all in red high-heels.  

She was the most spiritual of all the girls, working as a shrine maiden at the local Shinto temple, which provides an interesting contrast to her fiery nature. With innate psychic abilities, she’s able to perform fire readings, and utilizes ofuda scrolls, mundras and chanting to dispel evil spirits. Such things require a level of calm and mental clarity, which is somewhat at odds with her ongoing rivalry and incessant teasing of Usagi.

And as befits her planetary alignment, she’s the most war-like of all the Sailor Scouts, perhaps only second to Sailor Jupiter (who generates lightning) when it comes to the raw power she commands. Whenever the girls are up against a particularly dangerous foe, she’s usually the last one left standing.

Which is very much the crux of the show in its entirety: girls standing up and fighting for their ideals without getting a hair out of place. Decades before fandom was writing essay-length manifestos about the importance of Mary Sues and wish fulfilment and power fantasies to young girls, Sailor Moon was serving all of it to a receptive audience. In high heels.