Regrets of a Collector

Opinions change.

So here is the deal: be careful when buying figures, especially the expensive ones, the hyped ones, the famous one; because, once you start disliking it, you won’t be able to do anything with it.

This is a harsh lesson I had to learn by my own mistakes. We start collecting, we want everything that seems beautiful. We want more items all the time, and we are anxious for our collection to grow. I am, by nature, a naturally anxious person; so you get the picture.

Back in 2011 I decided to buy a Sengoku Nadeko 1/8 by GSC; it had already been released, I was still in the Bakemonogatari hype, so I bought her for an absurd price on Plamoya. I wanted a new one, so MFC was out of questions. I couldn’t think of risking my money on eBay.

She arrived, I was quite happy. Except for her face. That face broke my heart. She was suffering. I can describe my sensation as being of agony. I felt agony when looking at her face.

But I decided to ignore that fact. I was happy because the quality was superb, the figure came with many accessories, it was from a series I liked. I even made a review in PT-BR of her, praising the painting job and the sculpting.

It took me more than six months to find a place to expose her. During this meantime, I bought other figures. I bought Alter figures, I started building my beloved Tales collection. And then, I decided to display all my figures.

For my despair, Nadeko didn’t fit. She was weird. She was clearly an outcast. Holding that weird expression, she was like a black sheep among my other figures. Then I started noticing: “Why this contrast? It can’t just be her expression.”

I observed all my other figures and concluded that the other thing that bothered me was that Nadeko’s limbs were too thin, unproportionally thin.

I may have been extremely picky, and my actions were going towards finding excuses for simply not liking her. The end result: she is boxed now, for sale. 120 USD, free shipping. It is not a matter of space. It is a matter of collection and of what I expect from a figure.

Observing her also made me turn a suspicious eye to Mayoi, from the same GSC collection line and sculptor, and resulted in me not ordering Karen. Why? Because I don’t want a figure with the same recurrent characteristics that made me reject Nadeko. It is not a problem with GSC, or with Tokunaga Hironori (the sculptor), or with the character. It is a combination of factors.

As we grow in our hobby, we create standards. We observe items, patterns, colours. We watch anime, read manga, admire illustrations. We are constantly being bombarded with information. Our opinion is a walking chaos.