Sailor Uranus - Reception and Influence

Reception and Influence

The official Sailor Moon popularity polls listed Haruka Tenoh and Sailor Uranus as separate characters. In 1994, with fifty one choices, Sailor Uranus was the sixth most popular character, receiving over nine thousand votes more than Haruka, who was the tenth. In early 1996, with fifty one choices, Uranus was the tenth most popular character, and Haruka was the twelfth. Haruka Tenoh came first in the favorite female character poll in Animage 1995. The following year she came seventh. Mari Nishimura found that Haruka became "very popular" with female fans due to her "clear male attributes".

Sailor Uranus has been described as having "clearly masculine traits", and that she protects Usagi "as a man would a woman". She is presented as being more logical than the others, more willing to resort to whatever means is necessary, and also physically stronger.

In an effort to avoid the controversy that a lesbian character in a cartoon aimed towards a younger audience would cause, given the contemporary social mores in the United States, the dub also states that Amara (Haruka) and Michelle (Michiru Kaioh) are cousins—even going so far as to occasionally state this through characters who should not know such information. However, whether in an attempt to be more faithful to the original Japanese or through sheer failure to edit consistently, several episodes of the English dub retain a noticeable amount of their casual flirting. It has even been implied that the difficulties in dubbing Haruka and Michiru's relationship are part of the reason why there was a gap of several years between the dubbing of the earlier series and the dubbing of Sailor Moon S. However, it should be noted that in Japan, there were also some controversies around the character. Many other international dubs also either toned down or censored the character to reflect similar social mores in other countries. For example, the French dub showed Frédérique (Haruka) was deliberately disguising herself as a man to hide her identity as Sailor Uranus. This even went as far as casting a male actor to play Frédérique, while a female actor played Sailor Uranus starting with episode 95 onward. Mylène (Michiru) was rewritten as merely pretending to be "his" girlfriend to maintain the charade.

Fan fiction featuring Haruka and Michiru is the third-most searched-for fanfiction on the Internet.

Uli Meyer describes Sailor Uranus as being either butch or female-to-male transgendered, saying that "Uranus" recalls Uranism, a concept of homosexuality. Martha Cornog and Timothy Perper describe her as being "dual gendered".