A brief perusal of the preorder listings at any figure retailer will confirm that the Fate/stay night merchandise machine continues to hum unabated. And by that that we really mean the Saber merchandise machine; once upon a time there was just a single blonde British girl in a blue dress with a big sword, but since then the one has been cloned into a veritable multitude, with at least a hedonistic Roman emperor, a late shogunate-era swordsperson, a teenager in a Japanese school uniform, and a delinquent-looking girl with a ballcap comprising the products of this mitosis (and I’m sure there are more). There are so many that I’ve sometimes thought about featuring all the oddball Saber figures I own in a series of reviews which would be dubbed Weird Saber Week – though given both the languid pace of reviews here and the sheer quantity of qualifying figures, Weird Saber Year might be a more appropriate name.
Meanwhile, most of the remainder of the expansive cast of Fate/stay night has scarcely received any attention from figure manufacturers. Rin Tohsaka is certainly a victim of their disregard; she appears to be the number-two girl, and perhaps the number-two character (Archer and Lancer fans might dispute this) of the franchise, and yet as far as the figure hobby is concerned, the distance between Saber and her is so vast as to render her runner-up status irrelevant. Over the last half-decade or so, she’s basically gotten one notable figure (which would seem due for a re-release by Good Smile Company any day now) and a few nondescript swimsuit figures. But now, with this figure we can add one more to her insubstantial score. However, I would guess that it’s not the figure that many Rin fans might have been hoping for. I certainly don’t feel that way, though. I mean, if I were to wonder what sort of outfit I’d like to see Rin in, this is pretty close to what I would have imagined.
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