Taiki, up close and personal
 
 
Taiki, up close and personal
 
Because Taiki's true form is a girl, here, and throughout this whole site, I will refer to Taiki as she, her, etc.
 
Taiki is exceptional at seeing to her goals. She is highly skilled in the sciences and uses her practiced intelligence for the better. She is confident that she is strong willed, she being "the angel of freedom."
 
Taiki is proud that she is reliable, does good deeds, and is respectable to herself and others. She is forever in search of security as she is "stoic about the present, pessimistic about the future, and fatalistic about the past."
 
Her type is reliable and dependable, especially when it comes to inspecting people. Everything is under a magnifying glass, as she sees the world in purely scientific terms. She is an earnest soul, rather quiet and serious; never flourishing her work.
 
In speech, she is simple, not showy--unless she is reciting her poetry. Her clothes are practical and conservative, and her space is neat, organized, and functional. She is attentive and reclusive, sometimes even to those close to her.
 
She only goes along with ideas and theories if they are going to be useful. She likes to stay in the background when work is in progress, as she is unable to lead. However, once in charge, her superior devising leaves things refined and functional. Taiki sees things as "not concrete," but rather, "changeable" and able to be improved. She is in "touch" with the world around her an happy to know that she is adaptive.
 
 
 
Now I'm not sure that I did a very good job at tring to describe Taiki, so here's an exert from Ravenwood's Illustrated Discussions of Sailor Moon:
 
At first glance, Taiki appears a lot more stable than Yaten. She's usually the one who restrains Yaten's extremes (badgering Seiya, getting into a fight with Haruka for crying out loud, etc.). I have to say, one of my favorite lines in Season Five is Taiki's comment to Yaten in Episode 181, regarding Yaten's typically brusque phone manners: "You worry me." Taiki seems like the calmest of the three; the one who focuses intellectually and works things through before acting, the one with the most contempt for emotional reasoning as demonstrated in her go-round with Ami about the comet (Episode 177). We get some of Taiki's best supercilious expressions in this episode--that faint smile that says louder than words 'my dear, you might actually amount to something if you used your brain'. Actually, I would say Taiki and Ami have more in common than that episode implies; the card game in Episode 184 is a better example of their similarities (notably, gleefully ruthless competitiveness).
 
They both have a tendency to take the potential for a good deal of passion and sublimate it very thoroughly into intellectual activity. In Ami this compressed emotion emerges as an occasional tendency to soppiness. In Taiki, it comes out as a tendency toward both more intense depression and more intense optimism than either Yaten or Seiya. On top of that, she avoids situations that might call out strong emotions like the plague; she's always the peacemaker, despite having her own share of temper. I find it significant that Taiki is the one who writes poetry, too. Poetry involves self-expression, certainly, and sometimes the evocation of powerful feelings, but it's feeling contained in a frame; in order to write poetry well, one has to have enough distance from the feelings involved to discribe/evoke them effectively. This habit of handling emotions with tongs leads to some curious moments of inconsistency along with the general front of stoicism; Episode 179, the exploding cake and Maker's rescue of Sailor Moon, is a good example.
 
In the course of this episode Taiki goes from angry enough to strangle roses and not notice the thorns have cut her to giggling helplessly over what a mess everyone is after the cake explodes (now there's an idea--Arm & Hammer Shortcake Attack!...on second thought...). Perhaps Taiki is more well balanced than the other two, but if so she's balanced on a knife edge. Speaking of balance, though, given the downright addiction to balances that Our Directors display in this show, I'm more than half convinced that they set up Maker as the one most afraid of her emotional strength precisely because she displays the most conspicuous physical strength (even if I did nearly snarf my coffee the first time I heard Maker's attack). Maker is the one who gets to show off, physically, toting other characters around with no apparent effort, succeeding in hand-to-hand confrontations, etc. In some ways, I think Taiki and Yaten are drawn as balances for each other: Yaten's emotional violence against Taiki's emotional suppression, both for the purpose of defending emotional vulnerability; Yaten's rather aggressive sensuality (for all that I think she would almost prefer not to, Yaten practically drips with it) against Taiki's equally aggressive denial of any sensuality (as Taiki she's frequently drawn looking rather uncomfortable with hir body, and while she's graceful in motion it's a rather cold and elegant kind of grace--she definitely has the trick of leading with the wrist). And no way, no how, have I been able to write any scenario that gets Maker romantically involved with anyone at all; it demands deforming the character out of recognition. Aloof is definitely the keyword for Taiki's personality, most of the time. An interesting note on that, to me at least, is that none of the girls ever address Taiki in the familiar form, despite the general convention that boys of the same age are -kun while girls get to be -san.
 
 
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