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When I ditched PinkuBentoBox I said I was done with vectors. However a sudden surge of creativity combined with increasing pre-expansion WoW boredom and the fact that I’m between jobs at the moment have together conspired against me. It’s been quite a while since I watched anything that really grabbed me and made me want to do one of these, so instead I ended up digging up some old source images I’d nabbed from Strike Witches back in 2008. I always thought the three I did were some of the better ones I’ve produced, so I thought it might be worth filling out the rest of the cast, not that I’m promising anything. I guess this is kind of semi-relevant again anyway since there’s a new season of they’re-not-panties-so-it-isn’t-embarrassing starting in a couple of months.

I may end up moving over some of the better ones from PBB but the bulk I’ll probably leave behind.

Over the years I’ve built up a fairly substantial figure collection. One of my major issues as my collection has grown has been space. Currently I have four IKEA ‘Detolf’ cabinets, side by side. The problem is that they’re all pretty much full. To make matters worse, as expected with cheap and nasty options (though these things aren’t nearly as cheap in Australia, sadly) they generally aren’t that incredible. They do the job admirably, the large amount of glass and minimal frame mean that there’s nothing really in the way of your eye. They’re also easy to outfit with lighting, though I haven’t done this as I’m always worried the heat from any extra light sources may cause my figures to start to sag faster than normal.

I obviously don’t want to get rid of any of them, since for the most part I try to be fairly picky with what I get in the first place. However that just postpones the inevitable. They are also not actually that good at keeping the dust out, mainly because there are large gaps down each side of the door. My room tends to get a bit dusty, and so keeping the models behind glass as much as possible is a necessity, but that’s only useful if they don’t get covered in grey fuzz while trapped in their glass prisons, something which isn’t really occurring. I hadn’t realised the extent to which the dust had accumulated inside until this evening. For some reason it’s less obvious when they’re behind glass.

It all came to a head today when I received Alter’s Fate T. Harlown Shin Sonic Form. This figure is absolutely gigantic, far bigger than I had expected, though I should probably have. She dwarfs Alter’s old Fate Testarossa from ‘06, which was previously the largest figure in my collection aside maybe for Hayate or the MG 1/100 Ex-S Gundam. Sonic Form Fate, when using the Zanber form blade rather than the two smaller swords, is big enough from the tip of her hair to the tip of her sword to span the bulk of two Detolf cabinets, horizontally. She literally cannot fit into a cabinet at all while holding either of her weapons.

This, coupled with the fact that we recently found out that our landlord intends to sell the house we’ve been renting for the past few years has left me thinking that it’s definitely time to re-evaluate my storage options. The trouble is that previous attempts to find appropriate cabinetry has been an exercise in frustration. Storage places and furniture places never turn up anything appropriate and I’m nowhere near competent enough to DIY my own cabinets. I’m not entirely sure where to look. You’d think that large-sized display cabinets would be all over the place in Melbourne, since as a city we’re absolutely mad for sports of any description and a sizeable number of people collect sports memorabilia or sporting trophies. Maybe they all buy from IKEA.

Figure collectors of the interwebs: how do you store / display your collection? Any tips where to start looking given that the usual furniture places have previously been a bust?

Image Source: Pixiv