I can't believe I haven't written much about my Gundam models in here
One of the key aspects of the Gundam franchise's success and timelessness are the plastic model kits produced by Bandai. At their most simple, they're small mechanical action figures which you assemble yourself from parts taken off of a plastic frame with nippers or a sharp knife. I've been building these as a sort of brain-off meditative exercise, just following directions and trying to make a cool action figure from a TV show I thought was fun. You pose them or paint them or kit-bash them together in to something new, but eventually they end up on a shelf or in a drawer.
I find it really unbelievable that I haven't ever written much about how I feel about Gundam. I've been a fan of Gundam since I was maybe eight years old, and through that entire period I had in my toybox or on my desk or on a shelf. When I was really young, I would often take one or two with me to keep myself entertained in the Greater Sonora Bioregion traffic experiments. I still have a box of them. It was mostly action figures but I got some model kits too.
: some day a photo of the purple and green box will go here
Circa 2016 I discovered Real Grade gundam kits, a sort of compact but more-realistic and advanced construction of the Gundams. This was around the time I started a watch-through of Universal Century and was perhaps finding Zeta Gundam to be particularly engaging. I bought a Real Grade Gundam Mark II and had a great time. It turned in to a bit of an obsession, a nightly ritual to take my mind off of harder problems.
The thing about these models is they don't require glue or paint, just close-cut nippers and maybe some tweezers.
On and they don't come with English instructions
: picture of the instructions
But that's okay because the images are clear and simple, showing you which pieces to cut out and in what order to assemble them until slowly a cool little dude comes together.
: two or three photos of a model coming together
And you can put on a bunch of stickers and paint it funky colors, or just let it rock.
MG 00 Gundam Raiser
I've been re-watching 00 Gundam along with Great Gundam Project and the robots are cool in season 2. I'm building this thing, I saw it on sale at the toy store when I went in on to buy an RC plane I would immediately crash. It's not quite as fancy or as detailed as like a ver. Ka kit, but that's to be expected. lots of unfortunate sprue locations, it's gonna look kind of junky until i paint it, but it's still cool. It comes with the LED kit too.
PG Unleashed Nu Gundam
References
1/60 scale gunpla with detailed molding, inner frame, gimmicks....