I recently went through the Dream arc of the manga and came up with some more obscure characters that intrigued me:
The Dead Moon Circus Clowns
Unsurprisingly, the Dream arc is full of clowns and clown imagery. We see clowns on the Dead Moon Circus's posters and flyers, we see them advertising the circus around downtown Tokyo, we see them out and about the circus's fairgrounds. Many of these are random, generic clowns, but when the Dead Moon Circus first flies out of the eclipse in their magical galleon in Act 39, we see this rather eclectic group of unique, detailed clowns: a Bozo the Clown, a masked woman, a freaky jester, a beruffled pierrot, a big lipped woman with an unusual hat, and a monkey in a suit. These bizarre characters are our first glimpse at this arc's villains; they're the first Lemures/Dead Moon Circus members we see, and I think they're fascinating, in part because they don't make a one-off appearance.
As you can see, a clown resembling our Bozo wannabe can be seen busking outside the circus tent. The unicycle-riding acrobat behind CereCere is wearing a headdress that closely resembles the hat worn by Big Lips. And in Act 47, as the Dead Moon Circus goes back into its galleon and shrinks, Naoko features them once again:
Note that she doesn't just reuse the panel art from Act 39; these are brand new drawings of the exact same characters (though the masked lady seems to have been replaced with a different clown, and Mr. Monkey and Big Lips seem to have gotten mini-me duplicates, possibly ventriloquist dummies?), so they can't just be some random, one-off group of evil clowns, right? As with "Reverend Gin and Tonic" in Stars, the level of detail and uniqueness in these clowns' designs, in addition to the repetition of their appearance, suggests to me that at some point Naoko perhaps had bigger plans for these characters. Perhaps they were going to be the antagonists after the Amazon Trio were defeated, but Naoko changed her mind and came up with Xenotime and Zeolite instead. Who knows. I just want to know more about these clowns. I want to know their names, their personalities, their powers. They're far more interesting to me than Xeno and Zeo, and many of the Lemures from the anime. I wish SuperS had featured these guys instead, and I hope they'll appear in Crystal.
(I also would have loved for Vesta's elephant to have been turned into the fourth member of the Amazon
Trio Quartet. Is 'Elephant's Eye' a gemstone, by any chance?
)