Sulemio neko-type figures have arrived! And a great little bonus for buying the matched set was included in the form of a mini poster of them posing with a tomato.

Best Gundam-related figures ever.

#TheWitchFromMercury #Gundam #SulettaMercury #MiorineRembran #MegaHouse #MegaCatProject #BandaiNamco #AnimeFigures

Went on a gashapon spree and scored three great little prizes.

First up is a small acrylic standee of Chuchu from The Witch from Mercury doing cosplay of a Gundam from the series whose name escapes me at the moment.

My second capsule was a super cute Cardcaptor Sakura x Sanrio tag of Tomoyo and Cinnamoroll.

Finally, from Kamen Rider Den-O is a mini figure of Deneb.

#Gashapon #Gundam #TheWitchFromMercury #ChuaturyPanlunch #CardcaptorSakura #TomoyoDaidouji #Sanrio #Cinnamoroll #KamenRiderDenO #Deneb

Kind of a WIP: the #HighGrade Zowort. I say "in progress" because I have some decals I want to put on it and the Tickbalang I've built for it.

I am a *huge* fan of this design. I should be complaining about single jointed elbows and knees, but it just looks so good. And this thing has some of the best torso articulation I have ever seen.

#gunpla #modelkits #mecha #Gundam #GWitch #thewitchfrommercury

Prototypes of a little something I'm working on for F1 Manager 24...

(Colors may be slightly off due to the low-tech way I took these screenshots.)

Bonus backstory: Some may recall that my custom team in F1 Manager 24 is based on the Gundam Aerial from The Witch from Mercury. This week, my favorite real-life F1 team (Williams Racing) announced a title sponsor for their team... Atlassian. Being the dork I am, that name immediately made me think of Asticassia, and the idea for a new F1 Manager 24 custom team was born.

#F1Manager24 #TheWitchFromMercury

So, I finished watching all of 2022-3's Gundam of the moment, The Witch From Mercury yesterday, and I am... conflicted about it.

A lot of this conflict comes from the failure of the writing to pay off themes that it seemed would be explored properly - the The Tempest references are mostly superficial (Suletta is a pretty good Miranda, but ironically most of the things named from The Tempest are poor matches) and there's hints of much better things they could have done with that theme (Elen Ceres' clones might have been worked into a Caliban themed strand, if we take Peil's all-female directorship team as a Sycorax stand-in), and really mostly mislead. The Utena parallels work better - there's the interesting decision to invert the personality types of our Bride (Miorine is decidedly driven and determined more like Utena than Anthy), and the "Prince" (Suletta is *very* like Anthy, passive and obedient to the antagonist of the piece) - but Utena's metaphysical concepts run in a different direction to what this series wants to explore, ultimately.
The school setting does provide for an interesting contrast to the "corporate machinations" - but it also means that we never really get detail on a lot of the context that we need to engage with the commentary the show is trying to make at that level.
And, in the end, I think this is responsible for the second-half of season 2 seeming to run on mini-deus-ex-machina; revelations with little proper set up (the code in the tomatoes for Miorine, and then Miorine suddenly having hacker skills never evidenced before, for example; or the eleventh hour "Prospera is dying" thing); and a somewhat confused moral center (the person with the purest motives for doing evil is arguably Shaddiq, and he's basically the only person who seems to be suffering any consequences in the epilogue).

So, I enjoyed the series as a whole, but it also left me with a feeling that it *really* needed at least another series to give it time to sort itself out.

#thewitchfrommercury