愛と勇気のおとぎ話～A true story

The entry title “ai to yuuki no otogibanashi” means “A fairytale of love and courage” and yes it’s totally ripped off from jpmeyer’s old blog title. Why can’t I come up with cool blog titles like everyone else?

Anyway, I have a story to tell today. It’s a story of love, passion and courage. Okay, so there isn’t really any courage involved and the love is somewhat superficial, but screw it! The title is cool. ねぇ？

Long before the current incarnation of this blog, when I was still a young and impressionable (lol) otakuling, I woke up one day and suddenly felt the urge to splurge all my money on little plastic anime figurines. It was a sudden enlightenment not unlike achieving nirvana or playing eroge for the first time.

Okay, so that didn’t happen. The real version of the story goes like this: I was just surfing the net as usual when a few unfortunate series of clicks brought me to HobbyLink Japan, a blood-sucking store built on the soulless corpses of gullible foreign otaku that exports cool and useless stuff out of Japan because no one in Japan is actually stupid enough to pay for those crap any more.

One of the first things I saw on HLJ was this 1/12 Mahoro & Sports Motorcycle resin kit from Mahoromatic, a show by the lunatics geniuses at Gainax about a flat-chested combat robot maid. Now the combat robot maid part would have been totally cool by itself, but she’s also riding on a cool-looking bike! And holding a huge gun to boot! It boggles the mind as to why she’s doing that in her maid costume, but dammit, I think words cannot describe how awesome this figurine looks.

I knew I wanted it bad. But reality rose its nine ugly heads (wait, maybe I’m thinking about something else here) and my short-lived dream was shattered. It’s 19,800 god-damn yen and I had (and still have) no fucking idea how to assemble and paint a resin kit. There was a completed PVC version of it selling for less, but that was sold out. Shit. I swore to myself that I would one day buy the kit and build it. One day.

The next time I saw the figurine was at a local store that had a completed version on display. To this day, I remind myself of the promise every time I walk pass that store. But alas, “one day” has yet to arrive.

Recently however, Kotobukiya suddenly decided to re-release the PVC version of this totally awesome figurine for a retail price of about 10,000 yen (86 USD) with a pre-order special price of ~8000 yen (~70 USD). You can imagine how delighted I was. I placed an order for it today from my usual source for an estimated price of 138 SGD (88 USD), which is not bad taking into account shipping. Hell, the store hadn’t even added it to their pre-order catalogue until I pestered them about it.

So in another three months or so, I’ll finally have my very own 1/12 Mahoro to admire. No doubt I will hug it to sleep every night and cherish every moment of my life with it, at least until the times come when I grow bored of it (which takes about TWO whole days) and leave it to collect dust like every other figurine before it.

*sniff* Wasn’t that a nice story? I love happy endings.

Okay, so I technically still have yet to fulfil my promise to one day build and colour the resin kit myself, so it’s really just a cheap substitute for the true happy ending. But you know those gal game like AIR where you have to beat all the “normal” happy endings before you get to the “true” happy ending? It’s the same thing.

Now I just need someone to teach me how to assemble and paint resin models so that I can unlock the true end to this story. Any suggestions?

P.S. The title had nothing to do with the story after all… but hey, it still sounds cool.