How It All Started

Back in 2000, Yuu Yuu Hakusho had just finished its second airing on local television, and there were some new anime lined up to replace the old favorite. I wasn’t really looking forward to the other series (I completely forgot what it was…I think it was Bakuretsu Hunters? Not sure, hah), but a short clip from Flame of Recca caught my eye. Out of curiosity, I sat down in front of the TV later that day to see what sort of anime had replaced my beloved YYH.

"Okay, opening sequence. Hmm. The song’s catchy and has a nice tune to it…hang on, who’s that guy with his ponytail whipping around in the wind?"

I am a sucker for long-haired bishōnen. My very first victim was Kurama from YYH, but I was kind of getting tired of him and his faggotry already (I'm sorry, but now that I'm older and wiser, I can now see that Kurama is ghey), and even though I wasn’t really looking for a “replacement” crush, I was pretty much open to new…uh…prospects. I caught a glimpse of Tokiya more than once in the video (remember that scene where he looks over his shoulder and that other scene where his shirt’s flying around in the wind?), and he immediately caught my attention. Fine, he did look like Kurama, but he certainly looked more…manly.

So I decided to go online the following day to check Flame of Recca’s character line up. That was when I found Ensui, the very site that inspired me to make Mizu no Kenshi. I learned the things I needed to know about Tokiya…what his weapon was, what his age was, etcetera. Water isn’t my favorite element at all (in fact, my favorite element is fire, which is the total opposite), but something about Tokiya was really yanking at my heartstrings. So I decided to keep on watching the series.

For months, my only reference for information on Tokiya and Flame of Recca was drawn from the internet and from the series. I purchased my first Flame of Recca manga in around late 2000, which made me very, very curious. The manga was in Taiwanese, so I couldn’t understand a thing, but there were several parts that were omitted in the series, and Tokiya seemed to be much much cooler in the manga. I needed more. So I kept on buying manga, and tried my best to search for manga translations online.

Rocky Beginnings

Inspired by the fansites I saw online (most especially by Ana-chan's Ensui), Mizu no Kenshi opened on the 17th of April 2000. It started off as a big rip-off of Ensui. -_-; Seriously, I'm wondering why people liked my site and why Ana-chan was actually being nice to me and wasn't accusing me of copying her. But then again, I was naive back then. I knew nothing about making websites, and I didn't have enough resources to find more original content of my own (the only original online content I had was probably Winter Flower, then known as In the Memory of a Winter Flower, but that's a different story entirely XP). I even had my site hosted on Tripod, and I was using one of their template layouts to make my site. Imagine how horrible that must've looked; Times New Roman font, black background with blue sparkly-things scattered all over it, with humongous Tripod banners at the top and the bottom of the page. Ergh. I eventually got sick of both the layout and the server, so I decided to learn how to make better layouts, and decided to move to Geocities. Mizu no Kenshi expanded a bit from there, more images, more information, more fan-created content, etcetera. I got tired of the two-frame layout again, so I tried to figure out how to make iframes work. I did poorly, really. The image slices were skewed, and the image editing was horrible. At some point in time, I decided to abandon Mizu no Kenshi, as I had very little content to update with. For nine months, Mizu no Kenshi was stagnant little waste of webspace.

Revamps, revamps.

However, on the 22nd of March 2005, I moved Mizu no Kenshi to my [now defunct] domain, silent-aria.com, and made a whole new layout, and added more content. I had just acquired some Recca no Honoo scanlations, and it rekindled the Tokiya fangirl in me because the manga had his complete story, and...well, he was really hot in the latter part of the manga (props to Anzai Nobuyuki-san's progress as an artist; from slightly-disproportionate figures to anatomically correct and detailed figures in one manga series, it's amusing to see how his art evolved).

Beautiful-Beast.net

Eventually Mizu no Kenshi was starting to eat up so much of my space and bandwidth that I had to find a new host for it. Kellie, the owner of Beautiful-Beast.net (which houses a lot of my Flame of Recca-related sites' affiliates), was one of the people who offered to host me. I chose to have her host me since I know we're both Flame of Recca fans and since I'm already acquainted with her...and since tokiya.beautiful-beast.net has such a nice ring to it. XD So in October 2006, the site was moved to this domain, and it's been here ever since.

Future Plans

Well...I don't think there are any really BIG plans for Mizu no Kenshi, but I will be expanding and adding more images/articles/content as I go along...so Mizu no Kenshi will constantly keep growing and growing, as long as I have enough free time to do so and as long as I have new content.

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