Tentacle Armada

Cuteness isn’t something that I usually account for when I’m deciding which figures to buy. I much prefer sexy to cute, and many of the tropes associated with young, loli-type cuteness in anime – short stature, pigtails, an undeveloped rack – don’t really do much for me. Nonetheless, when MegaHouse announced that they were putting out a figure of Sora, I was captivated by the publicity shots, and I decided right away to put in a preorder.
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Back when I talked about Seena, I mentioned that the promo photos are sometimes misleading, that sometimes the actual figure looks better than what you expect.

The flip side of that, of course, is that sometimes the figure looks as bad as you expect. Or worse.
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With snow armageddon spreading across the entire east coast, I had some time to shoot some photos, so here’s a look at a figure that was released a few weeks ago. Risty is one of the original Queen’s Blade characters and is thus one of the franchise’s more prominent representatives, but this version is a bit atypical compared to its counterparts.
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While Ga-rei Zero’s storyline follows Kagura’s maturation, Yomi is the most important character in the show. She is the only character to appear in each of the anime’s episodes and she is the epicenter or instigator of every major event that occurs. While Kagura is a simplistic, one-dimensional character who exists in the anime mainly because she exists in the manga, Yomi is far more complicated and nuanced. She is a dedicated hunter of evil spirits, a confident and expert warrior, a mentor, sister, and surrogate mother to Kagura, the heir to her family’s legacy and leadership, a ruthless psychopath, a sadistic murderer, a physical and emotional cripple, and a teenaged girl searching for her life’s path. Kagura’s loss of innocence is a core component of the plot, but by the series’ end Yomi has tallied the longest butcher’s bill, and has lost so much more than her friend.
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I’m a bit surprised that Ga-rei Zero hasn’t received more love than it has. It’s got sassy sword-swinging schoolgirls in short skirts, strong lesbian undertones, solid animation, gore in plenty and an impressive body count to accompany the violence. It’s exactly what I’m looking for in an anime series.

Actually, I guess maybe it isn’t that surprising that Ga-rei Zero hasn’t received more love than it has.
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I hadn’t planned on buying Sheryl Nome, but after seeing early reviews of her, I decided that she passed the eyeball test and that I should acquire her. To my consternation, she was sold out everywhere I looked. HLJ and Hobby Search briefly restocked her the day that she was released; she sold out hours later literally as I was removing my credit card from my wallet (one would think that I’d have my number memorized by now). As I resigned myself to the reality that she wouldn’t be entering my inventory, I took a look at BeNippon, a retailer that I hadn’t ordered from before, much less heard of. Hope was rekindled as they listed her as in stock with one unit left, and I quickly paid up and now she’s here.
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Up to this point I’ve passed over the figures from Queen’s Blade, but when I saw the promo pictures for Mirim, I knew she was going on my buy list. With a profession given as “Ultra-Vibration Valkyrie,” how could I resist her? Add in a cute outfit and a chainsaw sword and I was sold.
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