You're at a RW site and don't know what Ronin Warriors is?

Okay, Ronin Warriors (Japanese title: Yoroiden Samurai Troopers) is an anime about five boys who have some sweet kick-butt armor and their fight against the evil Dynasty (Youjakai) and it's emporor Talpa (Arago) and his four Warlords (Yon Dai MaSho) who also have kick-butt armor. There is also a young woman, Mia (Nasutei) who's grandfather has spent his life researching the legend of the armors and can provide a tone of information. There is a little kid named Yuli (Jun) who lost his parents in the initial attack and now hangs around them. To aide them and guide them in their struggle against evil, the Ancient (Kaosu) provides assistance when he can.

The show came out in 1988 in Japan. Originally, it ended at the end of the first story arc. Fans cried out for more (they have good taste) and the ending was rewritten so that the second story arc happened. After it's run, three OAVs came out (Gaiden, Kikoutei Densetsu, and Message). Meanwhile, here in America, YST was dubbed by Graz Entertainment and renamed it to Ronin Warriors and aired in the summer of 1995. This is when we first saw it. We've been hooked since day one. It only lasted the summer before UPN took over the station and replaced it with Sailor Moon instead. In 1998, SciFi offered a more cut version and then in 2000, Cartoon Network aired it on Toonami. Finally, in 2002, almost eight long years after it first came out in the U.S., RW/YST was released on DVD (it had never been on VHS).

*grin* We're so glad you asked. We have a lot to say about it.

For starters, RW was the very first of it's kind. No, it wasn't the first anime to ever come to America, but it was the first show to ever not hide the fact that it was Japanese. Ryo's name wasn't changed, and the rest of the cast's names weren't Americanized to things like "Bill" or "Peter". The names, though changed, were still foreign sounding. I mean, "Shin" is a body part, "Shuu" is something you wear, "Jun" is a month of the year and a girl's name, etc. The name Toyama, while different from Shinjuku, is still Japanese. (It is a real city in Japan.) The kanji that display on the Ronin's foreheads are translated for us by the voice actors (even though for some reason they were switched around in a few places...).They didn't even edit out the kanji that appears in the second season with their surekills.

The dub also did nothing, I repeat, NOTHING to alter the script. There was no ridiculous added dialogue, nor was there any ludicrous cutting and repasting to make the series fit into a more Americanized plot. All cuts were on "this is what happened so far," or on scenes like planes taking off that are negligible. In most sequences, the dub is a line-for-line translation. The only modifications to dialogue were to "Americanize" some of the banter/insults so as to make more sense. For example, not many Americans will understand the reference to Sage being a descendant of Date Masamune, the One-Eyed Dragon.

They also got old pros for the voices of the dub. People like Ward Perry (Rowen, Sehkmet), Mat Hill (Ryo), Micheal Donovan (Sage, Cye), and Jason Grey Stanton (Kento), have been in the voice acting scene forever; and are accomplished actors outside of voice actoring. They are everywhere and know their stuff. If Matt Hill can make "You're mother wears army boots!" sound like an hontest-to-goodness insult, then that is acting at it's finest.

Now, keep in mind, this was released in 1995 on UPN. It was dubbed with public broadcasting in mind, yet all of the above was retained. Ronin Warriors was the first anime to come out and not hide the fact that it was an anime. It set a standard for dubbing to be more accurate and more literal. Then it was completely ignored as shows like Sailor Moon and Pokemon came out with added and rewritten dialogue, or Cardcaptors (sub Cardcaptor Sakura) where things were horribly cut and repasted to fit a more American plot. There were even new musical scores for Cardcaptors, where Ronin Warriors kept all of it's original bakground music.

When most people think about dubbing, they think of series like Rurouni Kenshin or Naruto, where it is dubbed and released on VHS/DVD and then, perhaps put on a cable channel such as Cartoon Network later on. Ronin Warriors was a show that was dubbed for public broadcasting only. Heck, it didn't even come out on DVD until seven years later, and it was never on VHS. We think they did pretty good.

Yes we are. We are called identical mirror twins. A little twin 101, fraternal twins are when there are two eggs in the womb. Identical twins are when one egg splits in two. While fraternal twins can look completely different, even be different genders, identical twins are the ones everybody pictures when they hear the word "Twin". They look a lot alike, usually act a lot alike, etc, etc.

If we remember our statistics right, something like every one in twenty births are twins. Of those one in twenty, one in 200(0?) are something that's called mirror twins. That's when the twins are mirror images of each other. Meaning, for example, Mirror is right handed while Image is left handed. Mirror is assertive and Image tends to be passive. Unlike our stories, we wear glasses, and Mirror's strong eye is Image's weak eye. Mirror's hair is kind of thin, Image's kind of thick. Mirror tends to be a little serious, Image very laid back.

To add further, we were also full term babies, which is rare for multiple births (i.e. twins, triplets, quadruplets, etc.). Image was born twenty eight minutes after Mirror was.

Which just confirms the fact that everybody knows. We're weird.

No. For those of you who run web pages, you know how busy it is especially when you have a real life. Tack on teaching (ie, career) and some of you know what it's like to go an entire semester and not be able to work. Well, tack onto all that having to set aside the time to hand draw, color, scan, and code ALL those pics you see in the fanfics. We have, at last count, over six hundred pics for the library alone, let alone the rest of the page. That's a lot of work, and we don't really have the time to do random character sketches for people.

Sure. You may use any picture on our main page, so long as you in some way give us credit and link back to us. If you are using an image from a fic of a particular author, then you MUST ask the author, because those pics are property of that author. For more information, check out the Legal Office and read our disclaimer.

We live in Connecticut, USA, and we often travel to Massachusetts. We're not going to get any more specific than that. There a lot of weirdos out there, and we're not about to re-visit the matter. Once was enough thank you.

That's a good question! This is probably our longest answer, hence why is the last question of this FAQ.

Waaaaay back in the beginning, our page was at geocities. In fact, our link at the anipike still takes you there. After about two years or so, we thought it was time to move on to bigger and better things, and servers that had enough space to deal with just how many pics we were producing.

So after asking around we moved to crosswinds, redesigned our site, and things were good for a while. Then right after New Years of 2001, we couldn't log into crosswinds for a month. We discovered that they had massive server problem and that some pages were deleted. Ours wasn't, so we breathed a sigh of relief and moved on with things.

Then came September of that year. You might remember that the Crosswinds servers crashed after 9.11 since their headquarters were in New York. Our computer had crashed over the summer and we had lost all of our back ups. Our page was deleted before we could reget the backups off of crosswinds. "Okay," we said. "That's okay. That gives us a chance to re-do some things that we've been meaning to do and clean up the page a little bit." We do some "shopping" and decide to move our page to envy.nu. Most of you were able to follow us and the transition took round about three months.

But just when we started to breathe easier envy.nu went out of business and didn't tell anyone.

"That's okay," we say. "We remembered our old mistake. We have a .doc that has the essentials of our page. And scanning for the main pages will be okay. Besides, our library was salvaged, cutting 90% of the scanning. We'll be fine."

How wrong we were. Yes, our library was salvaged, but only part of it. Every single one of our fics was deleted. Envy.nu had limited space for the free accounts, so we ended up spreading our page over three accounts (our main page, the library, and our fics). When envy went out of business, a company called 0catch took up the slack and salvaged some of the pages. About a month after envy died, we got an email from them saying that mnilibrary had been saved and to reload it. Well goodie! Now we just have to wait for an email for the other two accounts right? Wrong. We were making the back ups of the library, but nothing was happening for our fics or the main page. We go back to 0catch and they say that you have to know ftp in order to salvage the files. Okay, we had down loaded an ftp program a while back when got our sub domain (more on that in a minute) and we were getting pretty good in handling it. So we try to connect our computer to 0catch's in order to salvage our other two accounts. It wouldn't connect. At. All.

More than a little annoyed at this rate, we send an email to 0catch tech support to ask why we can't even get in let alone find our two missing accounts. We got an email saying that neither account was on their servers. Meaning that it was all gone. Still refusing to panic, we load to our .doc to at least have the main text of the pages. Our back up was corrupted. Everything else on the disk works perfectly fine EXCEPT our backup and nothing, not reformatting, not opening in notepad, not even dos manipulation of the disk fixed it.

Meaning?

We were essentially back at square one. The library was safe, and that's half our page. Good. But the rest of it that we THOUGHT was safe was not.

BUT! We thought we saw a light at the end of the tunnel. Enter a real life friend of ours from college. He had his own share of web server problems--which surpass our piddly little annoyances by a lot--so he and a friend of his share a domain. anime-ideas.com. Sympathizing with us, he actually offered and then created a sub domain for us at his site free of charge. That was very sweet of him. There's no browser upload there, so as a result we downloaded this cool ftp program--which we've discovered is much more reliable than browser uploads for massive amounts of files.

Of course, life is never that simple. Oh, no. See, our friend has had his own share of problems. Part one, he had bought his domain name with one company, but that company caused him problems. So he switched over to another company and renewed his domain name. No problems. But, company number one never deleted his records, so no only do they keep billing him, but he was in conflict with himself over his domain name! With all of his protests going unheeded and no idea who to contact, he's in a pickle.

Then our friend decided to drop off the face of the planet. When we emailed him, he hadn't done anything to fix his server problem and he was going to drop out of college for a year and then go to a more difficult university in order to get away from one difficult professor. The college he was going to go to is full of difficult professors like the one he's running from. If he's going to be so irresponsible about his life, the fact that he hasn't even tried to fix his domain name left us thinking that we can't be patient enough for him to get off his sorry butt. We've sent emails to him, but he hasn't responded, so we were once more up the creek without a paddle. So we went domain hunting.

envy.nu is a good domain, however, if envy goes down, we wanted a different domain as a back up. After emailing a few friends, we found brinkster.com and we've set up shop. We were actually rather pleased with it. It's not as spacious as envy.nu but it has some nice features. However, the day finally happened, we ran out of space. We gave up on brinkster for a few months since real life was getting rather heavy, and ignored updating anything there any more, since we couldn't. During this time brinkster took on a new look and was becoming more difficult to work with.

Then one of us had some free time, and did a random search for free web-page hosting. Low and behold, we found free.prohosting.com, which has lots of space for growing and lods of bandwith. Life is Good.

And that concludes the history of the troubles you've probably been having while looking for our page. Does that help?