Hi Pandora Astrology blog readers! Sara here again. This month I’m going to speculate about the chart of one of my favorite TV characters. Here’s why. . .
Since I last spoke to you all, I had my birthday! I turned 24 on January 18th, which also happens to be the birthday of one of my favorite fictional characters, Parks and Recreation‘s Leslie Knope (according to the show’s writers). Leslie is a hardworking, idealistic small-town bureaucrat who wants nothing more than to support her community and her friends. Many, many people have told me that I resemble her, and us sharing a birthday is such a validation of that idea! In fact, when I told one of my friends that our birthdays were the same, she said, “That’s the best argument I’ve heard for astrology yet.”
Of course, Leslie is a fictional character, so her chart won’t have the same resonance that a real person’s will. However, I suspect that the writers of the show might have been considering astrology when choosing her birthdate. Amy Poehler, the comedian who plays Leslie and created the show, is a sun-sign Virgo, so I’ll bet they made Leslie’s sun be in an Earth sign to match.
According to the show’s website, Leslie was born on January 18, 1975, in Eagleton, Indiana, next to the show’s setting of Pawnee. Since Pawnee’s a fictional place, I did some research and found a site that figured out the real-world location of Pawnee. Looking on a map, it seemed like the real-life town closest to their location was New Pekin, Indiana. Since the creators of the show didn’t provide a birth time for Leslie (how inconvenient for astrologers!), I arbitrarily chose 12:00 PM, just knowing that I’ll have to ignore her house placements.
Anyway, on to Leslie’s chart, and what my baby astrologer instincts tell me about it. Leslie’s sun is in Capricorn, so, like me and all the rest of you Capricorns out there, she’s very focused on structure and goals. She has one big aspiration: to become the first female president of the United States. To get there, though, she’s set up smaller but progressively larger goals for herself, such as filling in an empty construction pit, creating a park, running the town’s Harvest Festival, and eventually running for City Council. Like Jamie’s post about sun-sign Capricorns said, we get energized by achievable goals and depressed by those that seem out of reach. As Leslie’s ability grows, she’s able to visualize bigger and bigger accomplishments, allowing her to take on larger projects. She can’t work directly toward becoming President – she needs to create small stepping stones for herself along the way.
However, Leslie is not a selfish person. All of the goals she sets for her personal growth involve expressing her love for her community, which is to be expected, given that Venus and Mercury were conjunct on her birth date. She feels love (Venus) by communicating it (Mercury). In fact, she lives this so strongly, she even wrote a book that’s basically a long love letter to her town.
So there you have it – astrology can even work on fictional characters! Provided their birthdays were chosen with care, of course, as Leslie’s obviously was. If any of your favorite fictional characters have exact birthdays, take a look at their charts, and let me know what you see! I wonder how many other writers out there use astrology to help create character types – I’ll bet it’s more than you’d think.
