NB: I've used Samurai Troopers in the tags of this post because that's what the show is called, but this is more about Ronin Warriors, about what being into that show was like in the last years of the old millennium, and how it formed fandom as we know it today. And it's what we called it then. (And because, as I maintain, Ronin Warriors was always a lot more fun than Samurai Troopers, something that I have to say the new show both understands and has embraced.)
But this is really not a post about either show. It's about a time long lost, and lost friends, and how suddenly they can leave us.
I've been on internet hiatus for over a month, now. I really had no intentions of coming back to social media, maybe ever. I'm burnt out after Trigun fandom, things in the real world are heavy AF, and I wanted to watch the new Samurai Troopers without absorbing other people's opinions or feeling obliged to comment about it (I love it so far, I'm having a fantastic time, and I can't wait to see where they're going with it). But I ducked in today just for some brief housekeeping, and when I saw I had a message from one of the Ronin Warriors old guard I thought it was about the new show. It wasn't.
Winnie, aka Mink of Minkland, passed away on January 6th. The same day the first episode of the new show aired. I am still groping around the reality of this impossible news. If you don't know her name I'm not surprised, this is after all ancient fandom history. But I would not be here on the internet writing this to you, I would not be who I am as I writer at all, if not for Winnie. And through our ups and downs and the distance of years I will never forget the moment, at Yaoicon 2002, when Joy and I turned a corner to the room for the Minkland party and there they all were, Winnie and everyone, just sitting down for a group photo. Everyone shouted for us to come running and we all did, just in time to make it into the shot. I have never felt more like a part of something wonderful, something new and exciting, than I did in that moment.
Four years earlier, in 1998 while mining geocities for pictures of these hot anime boys I was into, I had just I found my first yaoi fic ever, and it was one of Winnie's. I'm pretty sure it was the one with Rowen in drag, and his heels ruining the hotel tabletop while Sage plowed him into it, but there were others, and I read them all. I came away from the campus computer lab with my brain on fire and my eyes bugging out of my head, sprinted across campus to my dorm and called my good friend and fellow nerd @hirokosaunders, who I had infected with Ronin Warriors mania some time before, and said, I FOUND IT.
I think I meant I'd finally found some good smutty Ronin Warrior fics, which we'd been trying to find for ages while clicking through webrings and waiting 4-6 weeks for the pages to load, but I'd also found something else. I found what I wanted to write for the rest of my life. And when I had made my first attempt at a story of my own, a syrupy Sage n' Rowen thing called First Light, I screwed up my courage and opened up my hotmail and sent an email to thee Mink, Mink of Minkland, to tell her how much I loved all her stories (especially the drag ones, which were Very Hot, and Torrent's Evil Twin, which even unfinished was just the coolest thing-- she had Ryo casually pulling on his motorcycle gloves with his teeth, I don't think I've ever written anything that sexy to this day--and Rent Free, which I am pretty sure rewired the brain of every single Ronin Warriors fangirl who read it, even the ones who tried to pretend they hadn't). And finally I asked if maybe she would like to read the story I'd written and if so she'd be welcome to maybe post it on her page? And she did, and she did, and in the months that followed she posted all the others, as well, many of which you will no longer find anywhere online without a wayback machine (for good reason because yikes). The Boxer. Cherry Zima Threesome. A Tiger by his Stripes. Rainy Day Lovers. Lost Legacy. Boo. She posted them all, and made me feel like an absolute superstar for doing something that had always come naturally to me, telling silly or sexy (or both) stories about characters I liked. Only this time I didn't have to mary-sue my friends into the stories as a way to con people into reading them. They were good enough, and in fact better, without that. Winnie knew that, and she told me so.
Writers like to talk about that first agent or publisher who really saw the potential in their work--no matter how that work might make them cringe to remember it--the person with absolutely zero stake in the author or their work, but who said "Hey, this is some good stuff. Keep going!"
Winnie was that person for me. I don't care if Tor Publishing calls me tomorrow and writes me a six figure advance check for a trilogy about burnt-out magical boys reconnecting after decades--though if they do that would be super, it will not dislodge Winnie from that place in my past, in my career, or in my heart. Which is now shocked, broken, and full of more regret than I can begin to convey. I don't know if she ever knew how much she meant to me. If she knew that if she hadn't posted my stories that another fellow Ronin fan would never have been able to write me a letter much like the one I wrote to Winnie, and that I would write her back and we would fall in love and leave behind every other future the world expected of us to be together, that we would still be together, even now, yelling at our screens when we hear the armor drums and see the sakura petals turn to flames again. I hope I had the sense to tell Winnie that, perhaps that time in the late '00s when she came to visit and sat and listened to me tell her the whole story of the original book I was working on, which I would not publish for another six years. (She was very invested in the kidnapping sub-plot. She always had excellent taste in such matters.) I can see her there right now, on the dull beige carpet of the old apartment, drinking chamomile tea while I rattled papers around and basked in her enthusiasm.
And now she is gone, gone before I ever got to ask her what she thought of the new show, if she liked that it was as funny and sexy and serious and goofy and gory and glorious as we always imagined the OG was. Gone before she herself ever even got to see it, gone in fact in the same instant it came into being. I cannot help but see some strange cosmic timing in that. And I'm angry too, because I thought there would be time to ask her these things after this show was done, but instead I'm so angry that here we are at last with some canonical old-ass Ronins and we never got to finish the story we worked on together about what they would be like when they were old, a story that Winnie's humor made so rib-breakingly funny that I would have to pause to catch my breath after reading her bits, with lines we still quote around the house today. (Kento, permanently lodged in front of the TV, saying that that there Angela Lansbury on Murder She Wrote was quite a looker, and Ryo, stone-deaf, replying, "A HOOKER? JESUS THAT IS A SHAME." )
For anyone on the internet these days who has no memory of what it was like back then, how small and interlinked our fandom worlds were, how just one site, one person, could have so much outsized influence, it might be strange to understand. But it is no understatement to say that without Winnie, without Minkland, there would not have been a Yaoicon back then, and there might not be ads for a gay hockey player drama wedged into my news articles today in 2026. She was posting long before stuff like Gundam Wing had any toehold in western fandom (I first heard about it from a fic of hers), before Toonami or adult swim or before our thoughts on yaoi became a meme. Winnie was not just my friend and in many ways a mentor, she was a pioneer. And she is gone from us too soon, and in the keenness of her absence all the feelings of those days come back to me in a rush. I will remember her always, and her purple sunglasses she got for a dollar, and her car that rattled when she went over 55mph, and her cat named Publix, and her unabashed love for these cartoon bitches in their skintight armor. Long live Mink. Long Live Minkland. Dao Jin.
