The Sailor Moon Pocky Box : Reviews

Couples of Sailor Moon

Date Reviewed: June 1, 2005

Category: The Ugly

Links & Affiliation

Do all the links work? Are affiliations clearly stated? Are self-promotion banners, buttons, and links easily visible?

Eudial

Couples of Sailor Moon...hmmm, interesting. Ah, angelfire...joy *falls over* Ok, lets get started shall we?

Self-promotion.

We got a guestbook, the creator's email, and he/she is promoting theweb ring that he/she has created. This is what I see on the main page. As for the "The Site Fights Spirit Flowers" link, I'm not gonna touchthat with a ten foot stick.

Ok, Im off to the "Link Me" section now. This person has multiple bannersthat one could use to link to this person. There's is a good amount ofbanners to choose from here. Suggestion: have at least two of each of yourcouples. For example, I like the Kunzite/Zoisite combo, but there's onlyone banner to choose from.

Next on my list is to the "Links" section. A few banners kinda just throwninto the page. I'm not fond of this because I have no idea what each siteis dedicated to. Are these sites related to music downloads, information,etc. You should not only clean up this page, but provide what these siteshave exactly.

Web Rings you're in....errr, do i care what web rings your in? This COULDbe considered self-promotion, but not really. I...think I'm just gonna avoidthis one. Btw, FIX those broken links.

Yea know, this person has alot of indirect self-promotion. This creatorput their own site, webrings their in, adoptions they did, etc. I'm curious to where the ACTUAL sailor moon content is located...

Well, as far as links are concerned, they all work. Your problem is thedead pictures in your "web rings" and "awards i've won" sections. Pretty good in this catagory, however, you seemed to have overkilled the Self-promotion section. Its goodcto have a large amount, but it seems a bit too much here.

Layout & Design

Is the layout intuitive and easy to navigate? Is it compatible across all browsers and resolution? Is it aesthetically pleasing?

Mimette

Layout.... What layout? There is no layout! There is a space type background, some text with bright blue links, and everything else seems to be centered down the middle of the page. The problem is that there is just too much on the page for it to be considered organized or even nice looking. I can't say much else.

Credits & Site Information

Are all sources visibly and accurately creditied? Is there plenty of information about the webmaster and the site?

Tellu

This site is not so great with credits. On the special thanks page they mention some website giving them a few pictures for their gallery. The site linked actually worked, so that's good. Considering the design of this page I thought it had to be early 90's, but it's refreshing to see that the links listed aren't 404'd into oblivion.

Other than that, all they have listed for links/credit are 5 websites, one of which is S.O.S., which makes me cringe. Why a 'My Little Ponies' site is listed I'm not sure, but whatever...

Not much else to say about this site, other than that the early 90's HTML and scripting and the out of date links and spirit flowers needs to go...they have nothing to do with the topic of the site. Maybe this belongs on a personal site? Oh well.

Written Content

Is there lots of written information? Are all profiles, back story, and other textual content accurate? Does the site offer fanfiction or other miscellaneous written content?

Viluy

Home:

Fairly basic as it goes. Very few mistakes in spelling, typing or grammar. The only thing that confuses me is the usage of *-* where quotations such as "-" or '-' should be used.

About the couples:

There are paragraphs for each of the couples that are considered to be canon in the SM series. The info is fairly accurate as it goes, but there are quite a few spelling and typing mistakes. The only time the info deviates from the norm is about the Kunzite/Zoisite (Malachite/Zoicite) relationship. They were never lovers, just friends. Even in the English dub of the anime, it assumed a lot which was never in the storyline at all. The other inaccuracy is the Chibi Moon/Helios part because Helios never had the Golden Crystal. That was Chiba Mamoru's (Darien's) heart crystal (or whatever it's called) that helped to heal Elysion and sort things out in the end.

One thing to note, if you're going to use names from one version or another, stick to those names, not going back and forth. If you're going to use the English dub names for the majority of the characters, stick to that. It's annoying to read some in one version, and some in the other.

The additional notes gave me a good laugh though, because Peruru is NOT their child, no matter how much he may 'look' like them. It has never been stated that ChibiUsa or Helios got together in the future. It was left open. Perhaps deliberately. It was just artistically done that way, because that is how anime characters of Takeuchi's style looked. It was also stated in the movie (I believe, since I haven't seen it for ages) that they were NOTHING to do with the Moon Kingdom or the family at all. They're from somewhere completely different.

As far as the spelling mistakes and other errors, here's the rundown:

Millenium = Millennium (don't worry, I made this very same mistake, way back when *chuckles* so you're not alone)
sacraficed = sacrificed
there love = THEIR love (side note, 'there' is used quite a lot in the wrong context, where it should be 'their'. Please fix this, as it's a hugely annoying and mainly stupid error, as I know it's taught deliberately in schools.)
guardien = guardian
begind = began
peoples = peoples'
Coma = coma
Artemis should always be capitalised
it's clear = It's clear

Updates:

Two updates, neither of which have any major errors (if any). Pretty boring and standard.

Site summary:

All in all, this site was pretty disappointing in the written context, as well as everything else, which isn't in the purview of this reviewer. I'd suggest a complete site makeover. Even premade layouts you can get are better than this.

Visual Content

What kind of visual content is offered? Is it efficiently organized and intuitively accessible? Are all visual media offered legally?

Cyprine

I'm assuming, from the title of this site, Couples of Sailor Moon, that this site is a shrine to the various romances of BSSM, of which there are many. Actually, though, it's more of a shrine to the couples alluded to in the Dub version of BSSM. The 'pics' links contains subsections claiming to house the webmaster's supposedly extensive collection of pictures, "found from all over the place in my searching".

The different sub-pages offer what is most likely uncredited images, made worse by the fact that many of the images are transparent .gifs, indicating that someone took the time to cut out the backgrounds, but nowhere on the site does the webmaster acknowledge who did. Also, the images are not organized well -- not only are the pages not thumbnailed, but they are haphazardly presented (with no organization other than which two main characters are featured in the images, so if you wanted to go back and find an image, you'd have to navigate through all the gallery pages again to find it), and you can't even click on an image to get a larger view. The gallery pages are quite a drain on resources, and if I didn't have ethernet, I'd probably be too annoyed with load-time to bother waiting for the image galleries to load. The images themselves aren't even edited -- some of them are poorly cropped and others are too tiny to be of much use.

At least none of the images are direct-linked, as far as I can tell. However, again, many of these images are composites, blends, or otherwise graphic creations beyond basic scans or screen captures -- images like that are usually not up for grabs and re-posting, and given this webmaster's lack of demonstrable graphics talent, it's highly unlikely that these are his own creations.

(An aside: Ann and Ail are brother and sister. Yes, they had a weird romance going on but... yeesh! Should we really be swooning over the sheer romance of it all?!?)

*surfs through some more image galleries. clicks on page 2 of the chibimoon and helios galleries*

BAD! BAD! BAD!! The second to last image is of Perle and ChibiUsa, not Helios! Okay, this site loses mad points for not being able to tell one white-haired suitor of the yamhead from another.

Other than a few random adoptions (a pot of clipart flowers?) that have nothing to do with BSSM, the bulk of the site is the aforementioned galleries. The collection is admittedly large, with many screen caps and scans I've never seen before (and having kept a finger on the pulse of the online BSSM fandom since the mid-nineties, that's saying something), but it's obvious all of the images are the product of a lot of hard work right-clicking and saving from other sources. Overall, if you're looking for some interesting and rare-ish images of some BSSM couples, this would be the place to get some ideas (if not high quality copies of the images in question)... that's if you're willing to wade through the crap gallery organization to get to it.

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