By: Juniper
From an Outsider
I am what many people in "Sailornet" call a newbie. I have
been not particularly successful with the sites
I have attempted to make. I would like to take the chance
to remind all the people out there
what Sailormoon is really about by giving an outsider's or
newbie's view.
It all started when I began watching Pokemon. I had read
an article in TIME magazine about how
it was popular in Japan, and it was coming to America.
Best of all, it was on public TV, not
just cable, which I don't have. So I watched Pokemon. It
was fun, it was happy, and it was on at
3:30 on weekdays, the time I arrived home from school. It
was the perfect show to relax too,
especially since the only other alternative was the
ever-annoying Hysteria.
La la di da. So me and my friends watched Pokemon, and my
other friends watched Sailor Moon.
Yes it was the DiC version. Yes, we never thought there
was much else to Sailormoon besides
our dubbed version. It was a great show. It was fun,
happy, and had a better plot than Pokemon.
So I got into it. Now, I'm not sure how it happened, but
we would start going on the internet
hunting down Sailormoon sites. Why? We printed pictures
out. And kept them in notebooks. We
never disturbed anyone, flamed anyone. We were innocent.
Gradually, we realized that Sailormoon had two parts: anime
and manga. And that there were other
Sailor senshi. I immediately picked Sailorneptune, it was
probably because of her hair, and also
her colors, but now that I have read and seen more of here,
I like her for who she is. Around
this time, we decided to make a web site. He he. It was
on chickpages, a pathetic free
host that only gave you 5 mb. But oh well, it had our HTML
Beginner's Editor, that was the only
thing we knew how to use. We worked so hard on our site.
Sure, our design wasn't great,
our information was stolen, because we realized straight
out we would never be able to tell it
right. We poured our hearts into that site. We were so
proud, we told all of our classmates to
visit it or sign the guestbook. And they did. Our work on
our site represented everything
Sailormoon was about. We told it how it was.
Then we started surfing around more. I found
Sailorneptune.com on a whim, and found a link to
Soldier of the Abyss, which I was so impressed by. That
lead me to all of the other mature,
sophisticated, nicely designed sites, that had lengthy
articles about this and that, lots of
stuff about stealing images, rants, and all of this. The
more complex things I read, the more
I thought and got into these sites, the farther the sites I
saw got from Sailormoon. I am not
saying that these sites are bad, in fact, just the
contrary. I love them and feel they are
neighbors and are sad to see them when they go. But they
seem to stray away from what
Sailormoon is really like.
Please, next time you see a slow-loading site crammed with
huge images and banner ads,
animated .gifs and more, think of how much the people put
into it. This is not to say that all
so-called crappy sites are like this, but a bunch. These
people truly are putting into
their sites everything they see sailormoon as, and they are
truly conveying their love to
Sailormoon. Back then, our site was our pride and joy; our
baby. We put so much time
and effort into it. Sailormoon is a magical world which I
think many of us would like to be
part of, and every one wants a little piece of the pie. I
have always had a dream of the more
advanced sailormoon webmasters/mistresses putting down
their own site worries and helping some
one with little HTML knowledge display their love for
Sailormoon nicely. It is obvious
that will probably never happen, but even just plain
appreciating these little sites is nice.
You can't image the feeling of just getting one guestbook
entry from someone you don't know,
or just getting 10 hits in a couple of days. Long live
sailormoon, anime and all of our silly
worries in our little world :-)
Comments on this article can be sent to: Juniper.
