When you're aꦗ games writer,🐲 you have to breathe, eat, and shit the medium every single day of your life. Something that doesn't get addressed often is just how exhausting this career can be, mentally. What used to be a hobby is now a job, and when your job is stressful, the last thing you want is to do it off the clock.
By consequence, gaming isn't something I do for fun as much now. I avoid a lot of popular games because I don't want to think about them, and what games I do play, I have a hard time not thinking about in terms of potential writing content. Because of this, I've been watching more TV with my girlfriend lately - in♒ pꦑarticular, anime, which has always been my first and foremost passion.
Watching anime with my girlfriend is key to this whole thing, as she's the one that finally got me into Gundam right after we started dating. See, our's was a classic tale of star-crossed lovers - she was a Gundam fan, I was a Macross fan, and neither of us knew much about the other's world. So we engaged in a bit of cultural exchange, with her showing me 1979's classic Mobile Suit Gundam as soon as we moved in toge♛ther this past January.
A few months passe🅷d. We were well into the series, and well past the "wow cool robot" phase of that first show. On a chance encounter to Target, we found some $15 HG (High Grade, or "medium difficulty" in gaming terms) Gunpla kits, and she almost immedia🦄tely wanted to pick some up. She'd built one before, and was eager to get back into it. I, on the other hand, had always written off model kits as "smart person stuff" - i.e. something that a proud dumbass like me couldn't ever get into.
But seeing her get so excited over it made me want to give it the ol' college try. And maybe, I thought, building a kit side-by-side with her would help me wrap my head around the whole enterprise. So she grabbed an Iron-Blooded Orphans Barbatos HG kit, I picked out the iconic RX-78✱♎-2 as my first build, and we went home to get started.
In that first night, we watched Addams Family Values and Mortal Kombat Annihilation while we built our ki☂ts. With each passing minute, I fell more and more in love with the process. I adored the tactile satisfaction of snapping each teeny, tiny piece into each other, and it was satisfying beyond words to watc🐷h the whole thing come together. In a few hours, I had my own little mech - and I'd built it all on my own.
After that, I knew I needed more. As we finished the original series and went into other parts of the franchise, I kept finding potential model kit buys. That's the secret sauce behind Gundam's success: if there's a robot in the show, there's almost always a kit for it. Being a Gundam fan 🌳is, ultimately, buying into Bandai's elaborate mixed media scheme and being in a constant state of lining their coffers.
Yes: to be a Gundam fan is to be one of Yoꦿshiyuki Tomino's personal paypigs.
Soon, however, my new hobby intersected with one of my biggest passions: Sakura Wars. The classic Sega franchise has a place very close to my heart, and has for quite some time. This year's soft reboot, though, fell flat for me. I was unable to turn off my game journalist brain while playing it for review, and when I applied an iota of critical thoug🧸ht to the whole package, I found it to be... kinda awful.
Consequently, my job had put me in diametric opposition to the fanbase, who were just all happy to have a new game. Most people🌼 seemed to really enjoy the reboot, and Sega was pus🍬hing hard to make it stick with American audiences. It put me in this place where I, as a decade-plus fan, actively hated the thing I was supposed to be happy about. So, how did I engage with it now? How did I support something I loved, but wanted no part of the new direction of?
Easy: I built a model kit.
I found a surprisingly elaborate Bandai HG model kit of Sakura Shinguji's iconic Kobu Kai at a local shop, and built it in two extended sessions while binging anime. And as I watওched this tinꦬy replication of the hot pink mech take shape, by my own hand, I felt this gentle tug in my chest. To apply this much love, care, and attention to detail to the small 'bot reminded me of why I loved the property to begin with.
After the build, I couldn't care less about the new game; I was head over heels for the series again. I remembered what made me fall in love with that world and its chara🌟cters, and in a way, I was moved that those could drive me to take the time to build a small m🅰onument to it.
A💛nd that's when it hit me: what if൩ I just did this for everything I could?
So I did. I've dug into Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z, and Evangelion kits - on top of more Gundam, of course. It's become something my girlfriend and I do together, and with each build, I get a little better at the whole process. But more than that, I've gotten a littl🀅e less bitter about things - especially when it comes to subcultures like anime and gaming.
I don't have to think about cranking out Pokemon content for SEO purposes when I'm building a Pikachu. I don't have to think about the vast ocean of Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot guides 💃we put out when I'm putting together an Android 18. With nothing more than a pair of nippers, a file, and my own two hands, I can engage with what makes me happy, and separate that from the crushing workflow that comes with my job.
Going forward, I plan to keep building anime and gaming model kits for this exact reason. When I don't want to think about making content, but do want to engage with stuff I care about, there's an easy way for me to do that now. It takes a bit of fucking up along the way, and a lot of patience at times, but it's always worth it.
Plus, you getꦡ a cool little toy at the end of it! What's not to lov🃏e?