Final Frontier is a space-themed Vashwood zine featuring the work of 56 Trigun creators. This stellar collection of fanworks all about Vash and Wolfwood in spaaace is available for pre-orders starting NOW ‼️‼️
Blast off to the stars with us and grab your copy of ✨ Final Frontier ✨ here:
🌌 Big Cartel (print edition)
🌌 Itch.io (digital edition)
Our Bundles
Space: the final frontier... We all know how the famous line goes. This project is not only a love letter to Trigun and the Space Western genre, but sci-fi of all kinds with a nod to the roots of fannish culture in mid-1960s Star Trek communities.
Final Frontier is available in various bundles split into digital and print editions!
🌌 Digital Bundles
✨ MIZAR & ALCOR ✨ AKA the digital editions of our books! Final Frontier, our SFW main zine, is 300 (‼️) pages strong; Final Frontier: Total Eclipse is our NSFW add-on zine across 180 pages.
✨ BLACK HOLE ✨ combines our SFW main zine Final Frontier (PDF) with all digital merch and the short story MISSION LOGS. Add our NSFW zine Final Frontier: Total Eclipse (PDF) to your bundle!
>> Grab your digital copy of Final Frontier on Itch.io 🚀
🌌 Print Bundles
✨ SIRIUS A ✨ is our print edition zine option! Final Frontier is a A5 perfect bound soft cover book collecting 300 PAGES (‼️) of sci-fi Vashwood fanworks. Bundle it with Final Frontier: Total Eclipse (NSFW, PDF, 180 pages)!
✨ EVENT HORIZON ✨ is our merch-only bundle, the short story MISSION LOGS (PDF) and all digital versions automatically included. Expand on your bundle with our double-sided standee (125mm)!
✨ SUPERNOVA ✨ is our full bundle combining Final Frontier (SFW, A5 book, 300 pages) with the above merch. Add Final Frontier: Total Eclipse (NSFW, PDF, 180 pages), our standee OR BOTH for an all-inclusive bundle!
>> Grab your physical copy of Final Frontier on Big Cartel 🚀
Want more?
There are great things written in our stars, we can tell! Here are some specials you can unlock by purchasing our physical bundles:
EARLY BIRD ✨ Be one of the first to grab a print edition of Final Frontier and we'll add this exclusive riso print by cherridayys to your order ‼️
STRETCH GOALS ✨ No space expedition is complete without some mission goals, right? With each milestone reached, we will add a goodie or feature to our bundles, with an extra special treat if we reach the big 100.
We're ready for liftoff! Are you? 🚀
🌌 Big Cartel (print edition)
🌌 Itch.io (digital edition)
More on Final Frontier:
🌌 Contributors
🌌 Schedule, FAQ & more
🌌 Anon Ask Box
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.
I’m sorry I might sound like a madwoman for going on a rant about this but man, it’s…
I don’t know how to express it but just the thought of some person, 120 years ago, taking a photo of their cat, which back then wasn’t easy - they didn’t have phones with cameras, each photo required a lot of time and dedication, so not only the person “wasted” a whole photo on their cat, they also did their fricking best to save this photo and carefully put it into an envelope to preserve it so that people in the future will know that there was this cat and it looked like this and it’s owner thought the cat looked lovely that day so much that they decided to take a photo of it and then they loved the photo so much that they went out of their way to preserve it for future generations like “hello people from the future! this is what my cat loos like!” because they loved their cat so much they wanted people from the future to know about it is… crazy to me… and here we are, 120 years later, long after the cat and it’s owners passed away, looking at an old photo of a cat and gushing about it. The cat died so long ago and wouldn’t even know it existed if not for the owner that loved their cat so much that they decided this photo was worth preserving and put it into a time capsule. and seeing now how people dedicate whole blogs to their cats and take countless pictures of them just to show to other people really hits because you realize that in the end, people from today aren’t that much different from people that were 120 years ago. We all just love our cats and want people to look at them.
I bet this woman was imagining the photo may be seen by like… a family some day. But no. It survived till the age of the internet. It has now transcended the original media. It is now being seen by far more eyes in far more places than the media she chose would normally allow.
I hope the taker of this 120 year old photo is PROUD.
when u look at 2017 and think “oh that’s only like 3 years ago” and it’s actually 12,000 years ago and everything is gone and everyone you know has been reduced to ash and the world is completely different
Look, it’s a weird hill to die on, especially when I don’t really explain, but children deserve to experience fear, disgust, and discomfort in safe scenarios where they can process those sensations.
Media for children used to be scary and that’s important.
“Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”
― C.S. Lewis
with Lupita Nyong'o as Viola/Cesario, Junior Nyong'o as Sebastian, Sandra Oh as Olivia, Khris Davis as Orsino, Peter Dinklage as Malvolio, b as Antonio, Moses Sumney as Feste, Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Andrew Aguecheek +
I will reblog this EVERY GODDAMN TIME so people can understand how the US government taking more and more land from Natives is nothing new (even the land originally promised after being kicked off their original, sacred lands) and they NEED to be fucking stopped. They need to be held accountable for the destruction of our people not just then but also now.
i am giving you my official permission to make up a bullshit excuse and not go to thanksgiving with your bad or even just unpleasant family. i am also lending you my psychic strength if you have to go anyway
[Art of a Black knight, shown in profile from the knees up. He is wearing full armor with his shield and helmet strapped to his back. His hair is close-cropped. He’s standing next to a white horse who has their head lowered. The knight looks serious and determined. ]
when you're dying in Liuye @tenshinokorin - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
