Wakaranai

After retreating home from my latest convention visit almost a month ago (Melbourne’s anime festival, Manifest), tired but satisfied with my ~$600 haul of useless but inexplicably fantastic anime merchandise, I took the opportunity to amalgamate the new figures with my existing collection. The above photo is the resultant get-together and represents, more or less, my entire anime figure collection. I thought I had better make a post on my existing collections now because I am going to start posting on new items I manage to get my greedy hands on. It was actually a bit of work getting them all in a decent frame and be reasonably visible. Careful catergorisation by height and a bit of extra shuffling was required to make sure no one missed out on the photo shoot. Although I hate my camera and thinking about investing in a much better one, I guess this will do for now -the photo came out reasonably well.

The collection represents about four years worth of otakuiism. It doesn’t look like much for that amount of time, but until the last year or so the purchases were infrequent and I had a rather long gap in which I didn’t buy anything. But now I’m hooked on these colourful pieces of plastic! Amassed in this photo are

28 Trading figures,
36 Gashapon,
1 Nendroid,
1 figma,
11 1/8 scale PVCs,
1 1/7 scale PVC,
and two irregular-scale figures (Amu from Shugo Chara and Mechazawa from Cromartie High School).

It’s kind of hard to remember now, but among my foundational procurements are: the super-cute set of Cardcaptor Sakura gashapon (which are very high quality for gashapon); the 1/8 PSE figure standing on the green box (which very few people will recognise as it’s an original design by Range Murata as opposed to an anime character); the Nanoha 1/8 figure (back when she was still a cute and badass loli!); and the Gunbuster 2 gashapon set (also exceptional gashapon quality). Since then I’ve added more and more figures to the ranks with a few very definite themes - cute, moe-moe girls, lolis and nekomimi. There’s certainly a gender bias in my collection!

It’s pretty hard to pick favourites from this lot, but my present crush on the electrifying tsundere, Biri-biri leads me to pick her. I’m very happy with the quality of her 1/8 scale figure. It captures her design very well, leaning toward her manga look rather than her slightly cuter, more rounded anime style. I’m eagerly awaiting the release of the next great piece of Biri-biri merchandise, her 1/ scale swimsuit figure! I’ve got her cool and perky side already, so it’d be great to get a complimentary figure that expresses her cute maiden (or just damn sexy) side. As I’m a nekomimi fanatic and a self-appointed member of the Nagi-sama fanclub, I also really love the 1/7 figure of her. The white one-piece and white-pink cat-ears suit her really well. She’s also wearing cat-paws on her feet and hands. It’s a really charming model! The Kodomo no Jikan trading figures (2 of them posing on top of the left-most box, and another two situated at the right) are a recent addition but I really like them. They’re fanservicey nature is really great, but they’re quality is also really admirable. Another newbie is the figma - Kagami from Lucky Star cosplaying as Hatsune Miku. I love this figure because it captures a great moment of the anime, and because Kagami (MOEEE) + the stunning design of Hatsune Miku = pure win.

If anyone has any comments, or can share they’re own collection, I’d be very interested!