Miette-chan

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Miettechan and ExileHero's blog. Anime figure photos and reviews! Touhou and Video games too!

Happy 10th Anniversary!

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I can’t believe it has been 10 years since I started taking photos of figures and occasionally blogging about them. That’s ten years of continuing my passion for figures and photography. It has been interesting watching so many people come and go, the different trends in popular characters and franchises. The rise of more and more varied photography styles and the ever improvement in artistry and quality.

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I will always remember my first figure I bought in 2006, Alter’s Kos-Mos. It feels like a lifetime ago now. I had no clue who made it at the time, I just knew this is Kos-Mos, this is the best looking figure of her, and I wanted it.

Back then I was simply looking for nice merchandise from a video game I really, really enjoyed.

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Later on I would go on to find out it was Alter, my now favorite manufacturer who ended up making my favorite figure, which also turned out to be Kos-Mos. It was an interesting coincidence, or perhaps just a sign of things to come. Little did I know that purchasing a Kos-Mos figure wouldn’t be a one time event.

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It would not be until 2008 when I would start and dive in into this wonderful world. By that time I had watched a life changing show… the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Among the cast my favorite was the quiet resident alien interface Yuki Nagato. My best bud went that summer to Japan before I had discovered all the lovely online Japanese figure shops. I tasked him with getting a couple of figures for me, one would be my original slippery slope, figma Yuki.

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I continued to buy a few more figma and dabble in a few more slightly expensive scaled figures. I would see folks back in the day like Danny Choo and super rats from Happy Soda blogging about figures I thought this looks like something fun to do, I wanna try it too. Thus I decided to blog and pick up photography and I’m so glad I did. Photography is a wonderful world to discover and experiment with, figure blogging led me to meet some of the best friends I have today.

All that started with my first review back when my original blog was on Google’s Blogger platform. Good Smile Company’s Ryougi Shiki from the Garden of Sinners films and books. Looking back at those photos and review I feel nothing but embarrassment at my youthful excitement but it always makes me glad to see how far I improved since then. To this day Shiki is one of my favorite figures that I will never sell.

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At this point I have even managed to get mostly all my “grail” figures. If you look at some of them, you can really see my age and how long I’ve been collecting. I was lucky to be able to buy a few thanks to some timely re-releases and now seeming waning interest as the shows get older.

As the years went on my interest started to wane a bit, characters and shows I was watching at the time were simply not getting figures. I was beginning to think this could be it, if no figures I wanted were being made I would probably end up buying less and less until I stopped. Then I made a terrible mistake, a mistake that has haunted me ever since with my figure purchases that resulted in countless nights praying to the RNG goods and an empty wallet. I descended into idol hell.

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Thanks to that my passion for figures was on the rise once more, I started blogging for a time again. It let me to my first visit to Wonfes, see one of my favorite Cinderella Girls perform up close and have a wonderful story to tell about Ayaka Ohashi and one of my Uzuki Shimamura figures.

I have since mellowed out with the blogging mostly due a combinations of things, I decided to change platform and needed to create this new spiffy site. That ended up being a long and tedious affair to move my content over. I started my job as a Red Hat consultant meaning I needed to fly all over the place almost weekly. I rarely had the time or energy to dedicate to blogging and preparing the site.

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Thankfully though, I got a nice lovely social networking platform that allows me to do some quick and easy photos, Instagram. Instagram has allowed me to take quick photos of figures as I get them, thus my “desk series” started. Instagram for me is more about sharing, trying to share my excitement for certain figures or events.

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I have several figures just waiting for me to have the time to make photo shoots for. I can’t wait to getting around to taking photos and writing a bit about them.

Over all it’s been fun, I hope to continue this journey for many more decades to come and look forward to them. After all, I need a place to share my excitement for every addition to my Shinobu shrine!

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