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Hi, Mink here,

    Here is the story of why for those of you who care......

    My boyfriend in High school lent me Akira.  I was intrigued.  All you die hard anime fans who dream in subtitles can kiss my ass about the "Everyone likes Akira first and oh HOW lame" factor.   It was the most available anime back then which wasn't too long ago.  It cost him maybe 75-80 bucks then... 

    I liked the Thunder Cats, I liked GI Joe, I LOVED Voltron (as a young young mink, Sven kept me in rapt attention for many a sunny New England afternoon.  Prince Lotar, DAMN!   You gotta love blue skinned white haired bitchy dudes.)

    High School went, college came. I became a pilot amongst other things.

    As any good fan dude did 4-3 years ago.  I started watching Ranma.  I won't lie, as lame as the show is now, I was hooked then.   Caught it in Blockbuster.  After a few months of withdrawal  I drove to Orlando for new tapes (there was no renting at the time) and paid for each BAKA and P-Chan indignity like a champ.

    Then fore score and seven mews ago I first saw an episode of the Ronin Warriors.  I was enraptured for no good reason..   I obsessively watched episodes.  I pushed it on my non-anime friends.   Why do we get these vices, no one will know and if they do it will be an annoying explanation of the psyche that doesn't help any now after you've spent your rent money on RW pencil boards for the 5th time.    (I haven't really done that, cels maybe but not pencil boards.  I am not even sure what a pencil board is.)

    Well still around this time I was still an avid Ranma fan and searched the net for pix and found.... FAN FICTION.  Now this was my first exposure to fan fiction and frankly most of it was shitty (and still is) but I attacked all the Ranma lemons I could find.

    After I saw Ronin Warriors and had seen fan fiction on the net, and sexy fic to boot, my path was clear.  I wrote my first Ronin Warrior and fan fiction fic which is Arc of Descent. (You may not have known it then, Arc started out as pure wacky yaoi but I digress) After much urging from a good friend I posted the Arc of Descent to a, at the time, famous Ronin Site which has since been retired.

    I got some feed back, I sought out the few RW fan fix available at the time and was happy just to find them no matter how lame.   It was rare and when its rare you read it all.

    That changed.

    I knew what I really wanted to write after seeing the MASS of Ranma lemons and the gist of the RW had appealed to me because of that "whateverbishonenness" so I started writing Ronin Warriors lemons.   The very mention of RW lemons in the young and mostly annoying anime fan world was met with the vicious disgust that only a 12 year old fan girl with very little friends that aren't animated could muster.  (And/or 30 year old fanboys who have collected all 13 of the Gold Edition Macross Limited edition collection plates and believe YAOI invades the sanctity of the creator's vision. Whatever dude, get out of the basement in your mom's house and meet a girl.)

    I did what I had to do.  The Mink Cake Archive was born , almost 4 years ago.

    I put the fix up on a sort of (at the time) makeshift page and waited.

    To tell you the truth, I really just wanted to shock the fuck out of everybody and get lots of hate mail.  I didn't get any and I thought the page went up mostly un-noticed.  I really didn't think anyone would LIKE it.  It kind of never occurred to me that it was even a possibility.   It seems strange to say that now, knowing about Yaoi like I do, but there it was.

    As you can imagine it started quite a stir that I wasn't even aware of until I mistakenly joined some very odd RW chat on IRC, they didn't even like heterosexual RW fan fix back then  (I don't usually do all that chat stuff) and was suddenly bombarded with anti-Mink page people. They not only had heard of me, they regarded me as public enemy number one.   If it had been a market square I would have been stoned to death.  I was really astonished at people's reactions, to be fair most were teenage boys but some weren't. What occurred to me was:   Number one, my GOD People were reading!?  AND secondly any publicity, especially in the obscure back water of the Mink page was GOOD publicity. 

    My path couldn't have been more clear.   Take in mind, I still had no idea Yaoi existed, I just liked to write what I wrote and in fact 50% of what I have posted is from that time.  When I found out what I was doing had a name you would not have believed my surprise.  But again, I digress.

     I mistakenly sought my audiences in the Ronin Warrior fan base, which turned out to be not all that successful.  Although to be fair, many people will read what they want under the cover of anonymity and some of those angry teen age boys wrote me privately and said they actually liked the page.   One even came out to me and asked how he should go about telling his parents.

    It was right around then, when the page was gaining some speed and I had changed addresses a few times (thanks again Darkflite for all your help back then) when I happened upon a page that had the word Yaoi in its title. I was shocked that what I had been doing for so long had an actual term.  I searched the net and finally I wasn't alone.  I had found more than a fan base, I found an entire sub-culture. 

    I think that was right about then, when Darkflite took up helping me host that the Yaoi made it into the page name.

    And here I am, I know I was the first Ronin Warrior Yaoi page because nothing is more profound than the first affront if you know what I mean.  And trust me, the bubbly happy RW fans did not see me coming.   And also I would have seen it, if it existed, and it didn't.  4-5 years ago doesn't sound very long but in the context of web pages, that is sort of when that kind of thing had just to begun to explode.  There were a finite number of RW pages and I knew them all.

    There it is in an nutshell.....  I have gotten 1000 letters of praise to the .05 I have gotten of not.  And this page isn't going anywhere...  So all you RW Yaoi Fans breathe easy, I am staying as long as they don't want me to. (And for those of you that do) ; )  This page which started with 2 or three of my fix has exploded into the chaos of fan fiction, fan art from all sorts of people.  Mink's page isn't about me, it's about everyone who has joined the party.

    You have all been so great, every letter I get I fall in love again with what this page is about: Saying what you want and fuck the guy who says you can't.  Come on over whenever you feel like it my friends, because here you can say and do whatever you want. If not here, I will show up like a weed somewhere else. ; ) I, as a Mink assure it. 

    Thank you all you writers and artists who weren't afraid to put themselves up on the web and face the music.  Thank you, the readers, who know a pretty cool thing when they see it.... And thank you, Team Mink (Evan, Urd-Sama, Adam Kayura & Lady Douji) for keeping the Cake Page going when I don't have the time to give it the attention it craves...     

  Signed and endorsed by,

             Mink  xoxo - Nov,1999

PS you tell em Sai...

Evan - Adam - Urd-Sama - Lady Douji - Kayura