Sailor Pluto is one of the most enigmatic Sailor Scouts in Sailor Moon. Her backstory is more complicated than that of the other girls, and it’s made even more so by the fact that she’s the Guardian of Time, which gives her more responsibilities than the other Scouts, who mostly focus on fighting bad guys.
But while she’s the oldest of the Scouts and arguably the most mature, she doesn’t always make the best decisions, and there are definitely things about her in the anime and choices she makes that are possibly not the best things. Here are 10 of the worst things Sailor Pluto did in the anime, ranked.
10 Studying Physics
Setsuna studying physics in college makes a certain amount of sense, considering that she’s the guardian of space and time. Literally nobody has more experience with physics or more of a reason to want to understand it.
But Setsuna isn’t really interested in being a physicist. She instead wants to be a fashion designer. This is totally cool, of course, except that it makes the fact that she’s studying physics absolutely nonsensical and a poor decision on her part.
9 Bringing Alcohol To A Minor’s Birthday Party
As previously mentioned, Setsuna is older than the rest of the Sailor Scouts. While the rest of them are in middle school and high school, Setsuna is a college student. That also means she’s an adult and therefore of age to drink alcohol.
But she’s not always the best at knowing when it’s appropriate to do certain things, especially since she hasn’t actually spent very much time on Earth as a civilian. So someone should probably have told her that she shouldn’t bring alcohol to a birthday party for kids who legally can’t (and shouldn’t) drink it.
8 Breaking The Taboos
As the Guardian of Time, Sailor Pluto is tasked with protecting the Time Door. There are three things she is absolutely not supposed to do with regards to this door: let anyone through it, leave her post, or stop time.
She ends up doing all three things at various points during the series. While she usually breaks these taboos in order to help her fellow Scouts save the day, the fact that she does at all seems to imply that maybe she’s not very trustworthy with such a big responsibility.
7 Being White-Washed
This isn’t really Sailor Pluto’s fault, but it is a quality about her that is specific to the anime, and it’s not a great look. In the manga, Naoko Takeuchi draws Pluto with darker skin, using a darker gray in grayscale pages and actually using a darker skin tone when drawing her in color.
But in the anime, she has much lighter skin. Contrary to what anime might make people assume, Japanese people do have different skin tones and aren’t all the super-white characters seen in a lot of series.
6 Letting Chibi-Usa Steal A Time Key
This is pretty much the most irresponsible thing the Guardian of Time could do. The most basic part of her job is making sure that the time door, and the space and time that it leads to, is protected and that no one can get through it.
So the fact that Chibi-Usa, an actual child, is able to steal a key from her in order to travel through time doesn’t bode well for Pluto actually being good at her job. On top of that, Chibi-Usa is very young; Sailor Pluto has inevitably put her in a great deal of danger by not being able to stop her from running off to a different time period by herself.
5 Letting Sailor Saturn Destroy The Moon Kingdom
Sailor Saturn’s entire purpose as a Sailor Scout is to bring balance by ending worlds that are meant to come to an end. This makes her something of a villain for the Sailor Scouts, who certainly don’t want to see Earth end. The Outer Senshi in general are out to protect Earth from Saturn’s destiny, but Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus have already failed to stop Saturn from destroying everything.
After Queen Metalia’s attack on the Moon Kingdom, Saturn destroys it, killing the Outer Senshi who are apparently totally powerless to stop her. It doesn’t bode well for Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus's ability to stop her on Earth.
4 Time Traveling
Sailor Pluto’s timeline in the series is incredibly confusing. This, like everything else about her, is because she has the ability to travel through time.
So it’s actually a bit difficult to tell where she is at in her own timeline when she makes appearances in the series because she travels back in time to start her life on Earth before the Sailor Scouts ever meet her, while also coming to Earth for the first time as Sailor Pluto sometime later. It’s definitely too confusing.
3 Dying More Than Once
Sailor Pluto should theoretically be the strongest of the Sailor Scouts. She has actual power over space and time, and there are few abilities that would be able to outdo those kinds of powers. But that doesn’t stop Sailor Pluto from dying constantly.
And it doesn’t help that she is often resurrected by being thrown back through time, showing up somewhere else on the timeline, or ending up back at the Time Door at the same time that she’s also on Earth, making everything about her very hard to keep track of, as previously discussed.
2 Following Along With Neptune And Uranus
The Outer Senshi tend to stick together, and they are often at odds with the Inner Senshi, especially when they first appear in the series. Neptune and Uranus in particular are very confrontational with the Inner Scouts, who they feel are getting in their way. Pluto doesn’t seem to have any issues with them treating Sailor Moon and her friends this way because she just lets them treat the Sailor Scouts poorly.
But she’s also separately nice to the Scouts when Neptune and Uranus aren’t around, sometimes even offering them help. The fact that she goes along with Neptune and Uranus and their plan to solve the Saturn problem without looping in the rest of the Scouts, despite the fact that she clearly thinks it’s the wrong move, makes her seem pretty spineless.
1 Almost Killing Sailor Moon
One of the only times that Sailor Pluto shows she is really good at her job as the Guardian of Time is when the Sailor Scouts turn up at the Time Door, looking to figure out where Chibi-Usa came from and how to take her home. Pluto immediately attacks them, trying to kill Sailor Moon, since she’s supposed to destroy anyone who attempts to walk through the door.
This would have been a really bad thing for the timeline since Pluto is guarding the door at the orders of Neo Queen Serenity, who Usagi becomes in the future. This would be the very essence of a time paradox.