[world_shaking]

I totally cannot relate to the characters' emotional resilience and total acceptance of what's happening to them and to their lives. I can see their acceptance blossoming after they're reawakened to their past lives, but I can't imagine most teenagers having a smooth transition from ordinary (albeit lonely and awkward) school girl to super powered evil fighter in the course of a day.

However, each of them (I'm remembering Rei and Makoto here especially) had some kind of "feeling" that there was something more to them and that they had some kind of power, even if they denied it within themselves. This may have made that transition smoother, and by the moment they transformed for the first time, they had had some degree of reawakening that may have just made it feel right. This might be why Usagi didn't catch right on and become the perfectly postured super hero right away, I think she recovered the least at her initial awakening despite being the first to become a Senshi. She needed Luna's help after all.

The last thing I'll say is that I was always a little surprised and disappointed that there wasn't more resistance from the Senshi to their fate. If I learned at 14 that the girl I had been every day of my life up to that point was effectively dead--ie: "present day me no longer matters because I remember that I was once an interstellar guardian, the importance of whose mission now supersedes any life I was previously planning to live for myself. And I can't tell Mom,"-- I'd have had a bonafide breakdown and probably would have needed to move far, far away. Then again, that Senshi support net is probably pretty darned strong and maybe that's how they kept their sanity and inner peace as a team.

It's a shoujo anime, though, not Alan Moore's WATCHMEN (the graphic novel, not that **** movie), so it's forgiven and still supremely entertaining. Neat question, though.