perona

perona's chart is comically mutable, and one of few i've ever seen without conjunctions or even two planets in the same sign at all, and most aspects are out of sign; besides her mutable big three, she's quite evenly distributed. i have her born around sunset in the summer when the sun has just crossed the descendant below the horizon.

first is her chart ruler, jupiter in aries and her 5th house, of pleasure and creativity and, traditionally, children. of course perona likes play: toys and tea parties and singing cursed songs. she hates boring, not cute men, though she throws this insult around with a tsundere frequency. she's a bit like hawkins in staying out of battle personally, and the parameters of their powers are a game of keep away. jupiter is opposite mars in libra, which tracks for someone who does everything to avoid engaging in direct combat and whose offensive powers primarily incapacitate instead of harm. this opposition is a bit hyperactive, jupiter's boundless curiosity combined with mars' overwhelming energy, which puts her at odds with her kuraigana roommates. i wonder if her being spoiled with her zombie army and servants is moria's single parent cope, or his attempt at healing whatever state of neglect he found her in.

much like i say the 9th house is a pirate house, the planet that joys in it, jupiter, is a pirate planet in the sense of broadening one's horizons. in warlord or yonko terms, it can be about expanding one's territory. i think it fits the horo horo no mi and how she uses her hollows as scouts, keeping an eye on her home's perimeter. there's also a hunger to it that fits any proper pirate, few more so than a princess in only name. she can't help that she needs it all!

jupiter helms her entire chart, but also her pisces moon. her emotional responses are so turbulent—look at her departure from kuraigana—but amusingly, she doesn't match the common reading of pisces and a gaping wound empath. i laughed (laughed) checking my cookbook text by kevin burk where he says the word "negativity" no less than three times about pisces moon absorbing negativity from others and burdening themselves with others' problems. her devil fruit saves her from this, yes, but look at her guilt, even tearing up over how lost zoro is without his swords, and she's genuinely disturbed by usopp's mental health. she's self-centered, but not cold. her moon is in her 4th house, the house of home and one's interior life. we don't actually see her that mobile. she has lived on thriller bark most of her life and cries that she misses it, and she makes a home on kuraigana. the way she protects her corporeal body is by retreating into private chambers, a 4th house realm.

the other major aspect is her pisces moon has just squared the sun in gemini, so she was born about a week before a new moon, the new moon in cancer, given how late her sun is in its sign. demetra george calls this a balsamic moon—the end of the moon's life cycle, appropriate for someone surrounded by death. she's cheerful and confident, but her adoption sounds like it had a sad prologue. another astrologer, susan tompkins, emphasizes moon = biological mother and sun = biological father, which is interesting to try and shove into one piece with all its adoptive relationships. tompkins takes a square or opposition, the difficult aspects, as a sign perona's parents were in discord of some sort from before her birth to throughout her early childhood. i get the impression perona already had her devil fruit power when moria found her, so it's possible the strangenesss of their daughter tested their relationship further—not her fault! clearly! but taking these moon phases as karmic and indicative of reincarnation, perona could be read as an old, old soul hiding in childish behavior, or being allowed to indulge in it for the first time. maybe moria might have some extra insight into her as a virgo sun, the other mutable sign ruled by mercury.

gemini's unflattering reputation as "two faced" or dual-natured could well be applied to any of the mutable signs, but especially both the signs her lights are in: gemini with its twins and pisces with twin fishes. perona demonstrates confounding, contradictory loyalty and self-interest in how she plans to take the thousand sunny and all the thriller bark pirates' treasure, abandoning moria to presumably be defeated by the straw hats. mercury is the quickest proper planet (not a luminary), named after hermes the messenger who travels from the underworld to olympus to back again, strong-willed and flighty and not particularly able to focus on one thing or stay in one place—like perona. still, she mourns moria when she believes the report of his death in the world economic journal, and pisces sun mihawk is able to see the big picture not just because of his eagle eyes but pisces' rulership by jupiter, a lovely complement to mercury's myopia.

i've given her a birth time that makes sagittarius her ascendant, yet another mutable sign to fill out her big three. my reasoning is selfish: i'm also an all-mutable big three, and cross guild is lousy with pisces and virgo, so in my delusions that she joins them, i want to see mutable fire represented, too. but another reason is this makes gemini her 7th house, traditionally known as the marriage house ("spouse house," as i say). in modernity, it's more about close friendships and collaborations. i think perona goes through quite a victorian coming of age by moving straight from her childhood home to functionally living in sin with some man and his protege for over two years. she's needy and first insists other people exist as servants to her, how she tries to replace kumashi with zoro, but through extracanonical materials like her heroines story in one piece magazine, we see her grow up to be a good roommate and friend who takes care of herself and others besides mihawk's barking at her to tend to zoro. she makes me think of emma woodhouse and cher horowitz: smart, spoiled, sweet, and growing.

the out-of-sign aspects i've shunted off to the side are also interesting. it's so annoying they're out of sign because for two of them, it's that that pisces moon of hers lags behind aries, where these aspects would be more potent. but nonetheless: this pisces moon of hers is still liable to be influenced by anything it touches, so forming an imperfect square to mercury helps dial back some of pisces' irrationality. she keeps a cool enough head to bust moria out of hachinosu, for one, and successfully ubers zoro to sabaody. that said, mercury in cancer is quite emotionally expressive, which we see her struggle with upon meeting zoro and mihawk's stoic asses. it doesn't help that her venus in leo, which her moon nearly trines, very much preens, and do you see those men doting on her? (well... not for a while.) it kills and allures me that perona's only interaction with a woman is nami when perona tries to steal the thousand sunny, because moon-venus, in its ideal form, can be such a girls' girl, and i delude myself perona's idea of "cute" that she berates all the men around her for not meeting is GIRLS!! WOMEN!! i'll take my crumbs that nami raids perona's closet.