The character Minako Aino, also known as Sailor Venus, is not just one of the more iconic Sailor Scouts in Sailor Moon, she's the original, back when she was Sailor V. Sort of the de facto leader of the girls, after Sailor Moon herself, she has the power of love on her side, just like her namesake goddess, and has shown, on multiple occasions, that she would give up her life to save her friends.
That said, Minako is only human, and there are plenty of times she's messed things up for the people around her. Sometimes, she's caused trouble with completely good intentions, but there are other times when she's been less than ethical.
10 Tormenting The Sick
When all of her friends get sick during the Christmas season, Minako decides to rise up to the occasion and help nurse them back to help. Unfortunately, nearly everything she did nearly ended up in disaster. When she tried making some nice rice porridge (chicken soup in the Dic dub), she set poor Rei's mouth on fire. When she tried to play a soothing CD for her friends, she just caused noise pollution.
This point is high on the list because at least Minako meant well. But seeing how she left Mako's house in pieces (and leaving poor, sick Mako to clean it up) one would think she'd learn to leave well enough alone. And how does someone mess up rice porridge? It's just rice and water.
9 Faking Her Death
When Mina was fighting the Dark Kingdom in London, she made a few acquaintances: a man she was in love with named Alan and a police officer named Katarina. When she realized that Alan and Katarina were in love, she politely decided to step aside...by letting them think that she had died in an attack and quietly returned to Japan.
Faking her death had to have been an overreaction that traumatized two people that cared about her. By all accounts, Alan never even realized that Minako was in love with him, so there really wasn't any reason for him to think she was dead so he could "move on."
On a related note, it's also lucky for England that the Dark Kingdom move operations to Japan after Minako returned home.
8 Involving Katarina
Generally, it's an unspoken rule for superheroes not to reveal their secret identities to civilians. Usually, it's a plot device, but the implication is that they don't want to get their loved ones involved. Well, Minako broke this rule when she revealed herself as Sailor V to Katarina. Admittedly, she's a police officer, so it makes sense to get her involved.
But this turned out to be a bad idea, as Katarina was targeted by the Dark Kingdom and turned into the monster Papillion in the hopes of using her to find out the identities of the other Scouts. It's a good thing Sailor Moon learned to changes monsters back to normal.
7 Luring In the Witches 5
During the third season, the Witches 5 are going around stealing people's hearts in the hopes of finding pure heart crystals. Minako starts getting envious that her friends have all been targeted by the witches, so she finds ways of trying to make herself more "pure" so that the witches target her.
At best, the plan was suicidal. At worst, if her plan had worked, she could have given the witches exactly what they wanted and they could have taken over the world.
6 Stalking The Three Lights
In the fifth story arc, the Scouts encounter the Three Lights, a popular boy band with secret identities: they are the Sailor Starlights. Minako decides to take advantage of the situation to launch her own idol career with various schemes involving the Three Lights.
In one poorly thought out scheme, she had Usagi take photos of her and Seiya together that made it look like they were embracing each other (he was just checking her eye for dust) that could have gotten him in a lot of trouble if they got into the wrong hands.
5 Two-Timing
When Tiger's Eye and Hawk's Eye are out looking for targets, they both end up making a connection with Minako Aino, who is under the impression that she's dating two men at the same time. In all fairness, the two villains were out to get Minako, but from her perspective, she's the one taking advantage of them. Minako might be a hopeless romantic at times, but that doesn't justify her two-timing.
Not only is two-timing not a very nice thing to do, but she could have also jeopardized the Scouts' mission against the Dead Moon Circus: a later episode even has Tiger's Eye recognizes Minako as that "two-timing girl" from before.
4 Fighting With Makoto
Minako and Makoto have a lot in common. Minko is the incarnation of the goddess of love and Makoto falls in love just as much as the Roman god Jupiter did. That said, they sometimes have different views on love that cause them to disagree.
After Chibiusa gets picked on by some boys, Minako tries to assure her that boys always tease the girls they like. Makoto promptly points out that such rationalization is sexist nonsense and that the boys were just being bullies. While they both get into a fight during this episode and cause trouble, one has to admit that Mako's in the right here.
3 Fighting With Makoto- Part 2
When the Scouts all volunteer to help at a local preschool bazaar, Minako develops a crush on the handsome principal. When he and Makoto start to get along, like talking about gardening or whether or not Mako would like a career in childcare, Minako gets jealous and keeps interrupting and making a mess of things, like ruining a teddy bear Mako had sewn up, leading Makoto and Minako to start another fight.
Once again, it's hard not to be on Mako's side during the whole incident, since everyone else was working hard to help at the school while Minako was just causing trouble. And the whole thing turned out to be pointless because the man they were fighting over happened to be married (with a child, no less). And to her credit, Minako did fix the bear in the end.
2 Distrusting Artemis
When Diana first appears from the future, she immediately identifies Artemis as her father. Rather than wait two seconds for her to explain that she's from the future and that Luna is her mother, everyone immediately jumps to the conclusion that Artemis had an affair.
While Luna's arguably more to blame for the whole situation, even Minako takes her side against Artemis, despite knowing him longer than anyone else and knowing that he would never do such a thing. She doesn't even give him a chance to explain his side of the story, either.
1 Abusing Artemis
There are also quite a few times in the anime where Minako could be a little too mean to Artemis. Not only are there times when she shoves him in a basket or gym bag, but there are also quite a few times when she punched or hit him.
Sometimes, it was accidental, but other times she meant to cause the poor cat pain. No wonder some of these scenes got censored in the English dub.