keyofnik: I wanted to come back to this, thanks to a comment commas-and-ampersands made in this post: commas-and-ampersands: Minako tripping here has always bugged me a bit. The stumbling and flailing, understandable, but falling on her butt when adapting/agility is her thing? Mehrgh. Though now I’m wondering if, since this environment is presumably also not real, if that’s somehow affecting her center of balance? And Pluto is not affected because she’s used to chilling in places that don’t technically exist. Yeah, I’m gonna go with that because reasons. Going with a fresh post rather than a reblog because I don’t want the conversation about the animation to interfere with the far more important Minako stuff. I was starting to fade last night, else I would’ve commented on it better, so thank you for pointing it out. Minako falling like this here is the perfect “lesser the Inner to strengthen the Outer” kind of thing that I hate. I’m hoping that it plays more into their part thought, because the writers have been SO INCREDIBLY GOOD about that — like going out of their way to fuck up with even that IDEA — that for them to suddenly do it to Minako within five seconds is so off-point. And so far this arc has shown it’s anything BUT off-point with Minako. We’ve seen her giving orders to everyone including the Outers, which I don’t think has ever been shown before: We saw her reacting first to the mirror shards attack when they were flying/teleporting: Three lines that could’ve easily been spread out between characters, but they’re all intentionally Minako’s, because she’s the one who sees it coming first and figures out it’s an attack that’s going to fuck them up. Even in the silly stuff they’ve packed it just right: Minako utterly focused on Usagi (and herself) And this moment, which is really thoroughly brilliant as a showcase for Minako: Minako — who on the surface doesn’t seem to give a shit about anything but hanging with her friends and playing games and being a pop star — was watching the news this morning. She got out of bed, got ready for school, and watched the news. The boring, stuffy news that most teenagers, let alone teenagers like Minako seems to be, would give a shit about. Which, fantastically, isn’t even the part that Ami QUESTIONS. Minako watching the news is completely in keeping with Minako to Ami, but honestly Minako-chan, can’t you be on-time? And Minako’s response to the whole thing is just to stand there and basically pretend she wasn’t asked the question at all. And these are only a few of the little details we’ve seen since Stars started. The writers of this arc GET Minako, I completely believe that. So then why do this? Why immediately have her flailing and falling on her ass? The “weird space throwing her off” idea is good. What first hit me though was Minako doing this intentionally. Nehellenia’s split the group. Divide and conquer. But Minako’s hedging that their enemy doesn’t really know them (which I think is fair; there’s nothing in what I’ve seen from Nehellenia that tells me any of the traps or even the pairings were deliberately chosen on her part). Minako plans to keep it that way. Nehellenia may be watching them. Given how much she told them she wanted to enjoy their suffering, it seems pretty likely that she is. So Minako’s playing up the bumbling schoolgirl. Let Nehellenia think she’s clumsy and in over her head. Let Nehellenia keep her eyes on Pluto. What, me, a threat? No way, look how ridiculous I am! I can barely stand up! No need to watch me, not at all. You go ahead and look away. I’d never come out of nowhere to Love and Beauty Shock your ass when you least expect it. Nothing to see here, no sir. Just silly Minako!
