Dead Moon Circus
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 Dead Moon Circus Symbol |
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| Dead Moon Circus | |
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| Story arc: | Sailor Moon SuperS |
| Dub name: | Dark Moon Circus |
| Leader: | Zirconia |
| Chaos form: | Queen Nehellenia |
| Key figures: | Amazon Trio, Amazoness Quartet, Xenotime, Zeolite, Zircon |
| MOTD: | Lemures |
| Tools: | Circus resources, Black Mirror, Golden Crystal (briefly) |
The Dead Moon Circus (デッドムーンサーカス Deddo Mūn Sākasu?) are a group of fictional antagonists from the Sailor Moon metaseries. They are the primary villains of the series' fourth season, called Dream in the manga and SuperS in the anime. In the English anime, they are called the Dark Moon Circus.
The Dead Moon Circus is led by the twisted Zirconia, in command by the absence of the dark Queen Nehellenia who is trapped within a mirror. Zirconia is searching for the legendary Golden Crystal, which will allow Nehellenia to break free of her entrapment and take over the Earth. They are the only group of villains with two subordinate groups: the Amazon Trio and the Amazoness Quartet.
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[edit] Key figures
[edit] Zirconia
Zirconia (ジルコニア Jirukonia?) appears as an ugly, insectlike old woman with lavender skin. Secondary to Queen Nehellenia, she controls the Amazoness Quartet and the Amazon Trio. Her name is derived from the mineral Zirconium dioxide, which is often called Zirconia. She first appears in Episode 128 of the anime and Act 34 of the manga. In the English-language adaptation Zirconia's gender was changed from female to male.
In the anime, Zirconia looks the way Nehellenia would look if she were old, and thus she haunts the queen's dreams. Zirconia is the personification of Queen Nehellenia's nightmares, given form to lead the Dead Moon Circus to find Pegasus and carry out the Queen's revenge. She commands the Amazon Trio to go to earth and seek out those with beautiful dreams, who might have the Dream Mirror in which Pegasus is hiding. She uses Zircon, a flying eyeball that usually sits atop her staff, to gather images of those with beautiful dreams, which she gives to the Amazon Trio as their targets. She soon becomes impatient with the Amazon Trio, and allows the Amazoness Quartet to send lemures to kill them. She then sends the Amazoness Quartet to do what the Trio failed to accomplish. They too, failed to find Pegasus, and Zirconia kidnaps ChibiUsa, sending the young girl into Queen Nehellenia's dimension. She goes into battle with the Senshi, who almost defeat her. She asks the Amazones Quartet for their help, but betrays them in order to use their energy to revive herself. When Nehellenia is released from her mirror, Zirconia disappears.
In the manga, the Amazon Quartet calls her bāsan, meaning "grandmother" or "old woman," and she acts as a mediator between them and Nehellenia. Like the other members of the Dead Moon Circus, she doesn't like light, and feels comfortable only in darkness. She speaks to Nehellenia through the mirror, complimenting her often. Little is known about her motivations, but the most important thing to her is to figure out how to make Nehellenia's plans work. Her first mission for the Quartet is to make sure that the circus is a success on Earth, and then taking over everything for the Dead Moon circus, little by little. She tells them to proceed cautiously when dealing with the Senshi, and lets them know that she will not tolerate a failure. In order to conquer the Earth, she says, they must first destroy the Senshi by filling them with nightmares. Sailor Saturn eventually manages to free the Quartet from Zirconia's influence, but the old woman traps them in their Amazon Stones. She then traps Sailor Saturn and Sailor ChibiMoon inside two broken shards of mirror. She then sends the shards and the stones to the other side of the mirror to Nehellenia. Later, after Helios has used the last bit of his strength, Zirconia traps Sailor Moon and the Senshi in nightmares. She makes the Senshi believe that Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Kamen have been killed, while she makes Sailor Moon believe that all of the other Senshi are dead and she is dying as well. Tuxedo Kamen manages to awaken the Senshi, who do a group attack on Zirconia, injuring her and forcing her to flee. She runs into the mirror, followed by Sailor Moon... but Sailor Moon only finds Nehellenia on the other side. Zirconia's last appearance is made after Nehellenia seems to be defeated, only to tell them that the evil Queen is not dead yet.
Zirconia is voiced by seiyuu Hisako Kyōda in the original anime. [1]
[edit] Queen Nehellenia
Queen Nehellenia (女王ネヘレニア Joō Neherenia?), leader of the Dead Moon Circus, is named after the Teutonic goddess Nehalennia. In the English version her name is spelled Nehelenia. She first appears in Episode 148 of the anime and appears in full in act 37 of the manga, though she appeared as a voice in a mirror starting in Act 35.
In the manga, she is like the dark mirror image of Queen Serenity; the self-styled Queen of the dark center of the moon who's existed since the Silver Millennium. As the Sailor Senshi are shown in a flashback, she first made herself known at the celebration of Princess Serenity's birth. Swirling with dark energy, she confronted the Queen, who used the Moon Wand to seal Nehellenia inside a dark mirror forever. In retaliation, Nehellenia cast a curse that the Moon Kingdom would fall and the princess would never inherit the throne. The Sailor Senshi thought this might have been what ultimately brought about the end of the Silver Millennium, but as Sailor Saturn commented, due to being sealed inside her mirror world Nehellenia was able to live on.
Thousands of years later, a solar eclipse allowed her to breach the seal and make her way to earth, where she found Sailor Chibi Moon's four future guardians, the Sailor Quartet, sleeping in the forest. She awakened them prematurely and brainwashed them into becoming her minions, the Amazoness Quartet, to aid her in her goals. Nehellenia claimed to be the true Queen of the Moon, that she was the rightful owner and heir of the Silver Crystal and that the planet Earth belonged to the Moon Kingdom, of which she would be the ruler. She set out to get what she wanted, first by taking over the planet from within, by way of corrupting the land of Elysion with her darkness, capturing its guardian (Helios), and then by sending the Amazoness Quartet to defeat the Sailor Senshi and retrieve the Silver Crystal from Sailor Moon.
Nehellenia's actions against Elysion forced the captive High Priest of Elysion, Helios, to make his spirit flee from his body and seek out the help of the Sailor Senshi; Helios told Sailor Moon and Chibi Moon he had seen in a vision that, in order to save both Elsyion and Earth, they had to find an item called the Golden Crystal and awaken its power. On the other hand, as a result of the battles with the Amazoness Quartet all of the Sailor Senshi received an upgrade in power: the four Inner Senshi were shown their sailor crystals by Artemis, Phobos and Deimos, Guardian Mercury and Guardian Jupiter, whereas Hotaru Tomoe grew in age, reawakening as Sailor Saturn and showing their sailor crystals to the rest of the Outer Senshi.
Once the Sailor Senshi managed to defeat all of the minions, they eventually found out the Golden Crystal was inside Tuxedo Mask's body, and went to confront Nehellenia in Elysion, where she attempted to take the Silver Crystal one last time. But the power of it combined with Tuxedo Mask's newly awakened Golden Crystal, bound together by the love of Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask for one another, prevented this yet again. When defeated by Eternal Sailor Moon using the joined powers of all the Sailor Team, Nehellenia shrivelled into a wizened old woman, and, after being sealed inside her mirror once more, was vanished completely.
In the manga it is revealed that she, like Queen Metalia, Wiseman and Pharaoh 90 is another incarnation of the final arch-villain, Chaos.
In the anime, Nehellenia is a dark, lonely queen who had the dream to stay young and beautiful forever. However, once she asked an enchanted mirror to show her future, she saw herself growing old and ugly due to the pass of time. In order to keep her beauty always, she consumed the dreams of the people of her kingdom. Those subjects became Lemures, the main monsters of the day in the series, and formed the Dead Moon Circus.
From her homeworld, which was located on a lonely and cold asteroid[2], she had also watched the happiness of another kingdom, the Silver Millennium ruled by Queen Serenity, and wished she could replace her. Thus, when she found out about the Golden Crystal, a powerful item which guarded the dreams of the people of Earth and could grant both her wishes of power and eternal beauty, she decided she wanted it and went to the realm where it was kept, Elysion. However Helios, the High Priest of Elysion and guardian of the crystal, refused to give it to her, and eventually Queen Serenity had to seal Nehellenia inside her own mirror as a means to protect the earth by containing, as well as punishing, Nehellenia's dark ambitions. A thousand years later, though, an eclipse freed the dark queen from the seal, and setting after her old goals once more, she captured Helios, which forced him to use his powers over dreams to make his spirit flee from his body and carry the Golden Crystal away with it, to hide it inside a good person's dream. That person turned out to be Chibiusa.
By the end of SuperS, after being defeated by the efforts of Sailor Moon and Sailor Chibi-Moon along with the other Senshi, Queen Nehellenia is sealed away in another dimension which was full of mirrors and where she could keep her beauty. In Sailor Stars, she is released from the seal by Sailor Galaxia, who encourages her to take her revenge by unleashing a nightmare upon the "people of the White Moon"; she does so by breaking Black Mirror created by her anger, and spreading the shards in Tokyo. Mamoru becomes one of her victims after a shard enters his eye and renders him emotionally dead.
After dragging Mamoru into her nightmare dimension, she captures all the Sailor Soldiers, and after being confronted by a powerless Usagi, her tragic past is revealed. As a child, she felt completely alone due to her status as young queen, and never felt that she had any real friends or loved ones. As a result, she learned to love herself, leading to her incredible vanity as she grew up. It is for this reason that she wanted to stay beautiful forever, so that others would at least admire her even if they would never love her. However, Nehellenia is ultimately redeemed by the Senshi's forgiveness, and reborn as a small child around Chibiusa's physical age. She is referred to as "Queen" even at this age, and she only remembers everything as a bad dream. However, signs point to her having learned her lesson, as she is seen making an effort to become close to her subjects as true friends.
In the anime, Nehellenia has two different voice actresses: the adult, evil version voiced by Yoshiko Sakakibara; and the good, reborn child version voiced by Wakana Yamazaki. In the dub version, the adult Queen Nehellenia was voiced by Canadian singer and songwriter Lisa Dalbello.[3] The child Nehellenia has no dub voice, as she was only shown as a child during the undubbed Sailor Stars. In the musicals, Nehellenia was portrayed by Kaori Ishikawa.
[edit] Servants
[edit] Zircon
Zircon (ジルコン Jirukon?) is Zirconia's companion and tool, a flaming eyeball with wings. In the beginning, it simply floats around her staff, but later can fly anywhere, and Zirconia uses it to gather images of those with beautiful dreams. She also uses it as a weapon, or to spy on her underlings. When Zircon is hit hard, any images it has gathered but not yet presented become distorted. It can also be used as a weapon with which to remove a human's Dream Mirror, similar to the Amazon Stones of the Quartet.
[edit] Amazon Trio
In the anime, the Amazon trio are the first group from the circus to face the Sailor Senshi. In the manga they are created from animals from the circus by the Amazoness Quartet to destroy the Sailor Senshi.[4] They each respectively target a relevant Sailor Senshi to kill. The only exception to this is Sailor Venus, who is targeted by Xenotime and Zeolite.[5] They do not summon lemures themselves, but are treated as lemures.
In the anime, members of the trio summon lemures—spirits of the dead—from the shadows to assist them in various battles with the Sailor Senshi, mostly using them to fight their battles entirely for them. They are still created from animals but are not treated as Lemures
Also in the anime, the Amazon Trio's job is to look into the dream mirrors of mortals, searching for the legendary and powerful Pegasus. Pegasus possesses the Golden Crystal which can free their leader, Queen Nehellenia, from her entrapment within a mirror and allow her to take over Earth. The Trio choose their victims by seducing various women and men, whether they be young or old, and attacking them while they are vulnerable. All three of them were male in the original anime, but Fisheye became Female in the English dub.
[edit] Amazoness Quartet
The Amazoness Quartet are the main sub-group in the manga, but only appear in the anime after the Amazon Trio have failed multiple times.
In the manga, they are actually the Sailor Quartet--commonly referred to in English-speaking fandom as the Asteroid Senshi, because they are named after the first four major asteroids to be discovered. They had been placed in a deep sleep, awaiting the time when they could become the future protectors of Sailor Chibi Moon. However, Queen Nehellenia woke them prematurely and forced them to work for her. At her defeat, they return to their true forms and to their long sleep. During the fifth story arc, they accompany Sailor Chibi Moon from the future to help in the fight against Sailor Galaxia.
In the anime, the Quartet are never Sailor Senshi, coming instead from Elysion, the land of dreams. They began working for Queen Nehellenia when she heard them playing and offered to keep them from ever growing old. She changed their dreams into the physical form of Amazon Stones, instructing them to use these to remove the "dream mirrors" of humans. They are dedicated to this task, but still generally spend more time playing than working.
[edit] Lemures
In the anime, both the Amazon Trio and Amazoness Quartet summon monsters called Lemures from the shadows to assist them in various battles with the Sailor Senshi, mostly using them to fight their battles entirely for them. In the manga the Amazon Trio are Lemures themselves, created from circus animals by the Amazoness Quartet to destroy the Sailor Senshi.[4] They each respectively target a Sailor Senshi to kill. The only exception to this is Sailor Venus, who is targeted by Xenotime and Zeolite.[5] The anime presents the Lemures as what remains of Queen Nehellenia's subjects after she took their dream mirrors to stay young. The manga, however, presents them as spirits of the dead.
"Lemures" is the singular form of the word as well as the plural. In the English adaptation, the creatures are renamed Remless, possibly a reference to the REM cycle of sleep, during which dreams occur. The Japanese pronunciation (remuresu) can be legitimately romanized either way.
Each member of the Trio and Quartet seems to follow a basic theme with the Lemures they summon, in both appearance and naming. The majority of the Lemures seen in the anime are female, but Fisheye and JunJun each summon male Lemures instead.
[edit] References
- ^ Hitoshi Doi's Seiyuu Database. Retrieved on 2006-11-10.
- ^ Episode 163
- ^ Voice Performances
- ^ a b Takeuchi, Naoko (September 6, 1995). Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon Volume 12. Kodansha. ISBN 4-06-178814-0.
- ^ a b Takeuchi, Naoko. Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon Volume 13. Kodansha. ISBN 4-06-178820-5.
[edit] External links
- In Defense of SuperS Information on the SuperS season
- Nethermoon - A detailed Nehellenia site
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