I made this for a teacher I work with. Evangelion is his favorite anime. He suffers from epilepsy, and the stress from work is once again keeping him from doing his job. He came back last year and did well, but this year has taken a toll on him again, unfortunately.
I used Perler Nano and Iron de Beads (local Japanese iron beads company) mini beads for this. Shinji’s fleshtone is Perler Nano Sand, Rei’s is Nano Cream, and Askua’s is Iron de Beads Fleshtone. Re’s hair is two tone Iron de Beads Aqua. These colors matched her hair perfectly. Iron de Beads are slightly taller, but they melt well and I like them way better than Hama Minis, which are too small and cause problems.
This is where I got the pattern from. It was done in Lego! I found this image on Pinterest.
So I guess no girl is safe from exploitation until cartoon girls are safe from exploitation? That seems to be the philosophy of these goody-two-shoes commenting on Evangelion artwork on Pinterest. Nevermind that there are countless American teen movies like American Pie centered on “getting lucky” with plenty of T&A. I was a bit disturbed watching the second season of Stranger Things because it features high school kids having sex. But here’s Evangelion, a show I don’t even really like, although I do like the character designs because I am a fan of Sadamoto’s art style. I do not care what the arbitrary age of the fictitious Evangelion characters are, in the same way that I do not care what the arbitrary age of the characters in those teen movies are, who are portrayed by young adults posing as teenagers. Here we have drawings of girls, voiced by adult voice actresses like Megumi Hayashibara, yet these goofballs are acting as though actual children are being exploited. Yet these same people most likely watch Hollywood movies featuring people who were at Epstein Island, and vote for politicians who are complete pedos like Joe Biden, the Kid Sniffer In Chief.
So above we have a picture of Asuka laying in bed, playing with a puppet. It’s cute and charming. It’s sexy, but not sexualized. Did this happen in the show? I don’t remember. I leave snarky responses to these people. Stuff like, “That’s actually not Asuka, but her 24 year old cousin Shirley.” Why do these people pretend to give a crap?
Holy crap, it’s just a drawing people. If you don’t care about the context of the show, some arbitrary age doesn’t really matter to you. I must say that there’s a difference between sexy and sexualized.
This is just Asuka wearing the suit she wears in the show. I don’t even see why anyone would object to this.
I tried watching the reboot Evangelion movies, but gave up after the second one. So I don’t know why there is a long-haired Rei, or why Asuka has an eye patch, nor did I even know that there’s a 28 year old version of Asuka. You can see here that she’s certainly not built like a 14 year old. Some in the comments are pointing out that she’s 28. Either way, I don’t care as she’s just a drawing. Stupid.
This only seems to be a thing with Evangelion. I saw Ranma 1/2 first when I was in college. Plenty of nudity and shower scenes. It’s just a part of the show, and not once did I think “Oh my gosh, these are teenagers! This is wrong!” It’s just a part of the story. It’s not like they’re having sex or anything. Again, sexy but not sexualized. I haven’t seen the reboot of Ranma 1/2 that’s on Netflix, so I don’t know if the nudity has been toned down. I imagine it probably has. And no such comments on images of Lum from Urusei Yatsura. Or perhaps the sexiest of such schoolgirl anime characters, Madoka from Kimagure Orange Road. Her character is the type of beautiful, unattainable girl with a fantastic body from your school days. There are so many sexy images of Madoka, and so many of them are not as a junior high student, but as a young adult. None of these pictures on Pinterest have any stupid, “OMG she’s only 14” comments.
Seriously, I’ve seen some pretty disgusting stuff while visiting various anime shops in Tokyo and such that are definitely aimed at chomos. Stuff involving naked girls whose years are in the single digits. That’s just disgusting. But speaking as a father of a teenage daughter, there is nothing that these self-righteous internet commandos posting self-righteous comments on Eva girls on Pinterest that would keep her safe. They just post this crap to feel good about themselves.
Mayu discovered a store called Kuroda Toy Doll （黒田人形店）in Maebashi’s Central Shopping Arcade on the internet and on Saturday we went there to check it out. Shoutengai （商店街）are covered shopping arcades and a tradition of Japan. Unfortunately, sometimes these shopping arcades have grown unsuccessful over the years with empty real estate. In English they call this one Maebashi Rose Avenue and this is where Kuroda is located. We’ve only ever been to this shopping arcade once before, when we happened to be in the area during the Tanabata Festival in July several years ago.
Kuroda specializes in traditional toys, so basically nothing which involves video screens. The first thing I noticed upon entering was their selection of Tomica cars.
Misato’s car from Evangelion.
Macross and Gundam Tomica!
Back to the Future Part III and Castle of Cagliostro cars. I bought the BttF III Delorean with the ’50s tires at Village Vanguard earlier this year. I hadn’t seen the one with train wheels until now.
A nice, modest selection of plastic models was there. Here’s the Gunpla selection. I bought the F91 Gundam kit at this store.
Here are car, ship, castle, and other plastic models.
An RC Delorean from Back to the Future! I’ve never seen this before.
There were many older anime and game figures. Here’s Kasumi from Dead or Alive and Mai from King of Fighters.
Plenty of traditional, wooden toys too. A meow-meow tower and… a toy for Klingons? Oh never mind… that would be “Qapla,” not “Kapla.”
There were so many different toys there, such as kendama, plush dolls, and so on. My daughter Ulan wanted the bullet plushy from Super Mario Bros and I got the F91 Gundam model. It’s a neat store.
Since Nadia is one of my favorite anime series, I like looking for random Nadia-related merchandise on Mercari and Yahoo Auctions Japan. Some of the stuff is pretty cool, like Nadia pencil boards, a Nadia ruler, and a booklet of Nadia postcards. Some of the stuff, however, is rather weird.
Oh look, it’s a gun… just like Nadia used in the show. Right? Not. So this is a “fire gun” that is made to resemble the Nautilus. I’m guessing that it creates sparks.
Ha! So this bottle of water came out for the 30th anniversary of the Nadia anime. At least the water isn’t blue due to food coloring. So it’s not really the “Secret of Blue Water” but rather just the “Secret of Water” in this case.
So this is a 1:6 scale Nadia garage kit by T’s System. The proportions look weird. She looks like Gumby who got pulled in both directions. I mean, look at her abdomen! She just wasn’t sculpted right because she is too skinny. The rest isn’t too bad, but dang! Look at her belly! She has the proportions of an alien who’s being starved to death. Eat a sandwich, girl! Plus whoever painted this really got her skintone all wrong. She’s supposed to have dark brown skin. Why do they keep whitewashing her in recent years? They didn’t do this to her 30 years ago. All the merch back then showed her with a proper skin tone.
Here they are after painting their eyes and eyebrows. The main paints were airbrushed with V-Color paints and the eyes were done with acrylic paints. I’m particularly happy with how Asuka’s eyes turned out.
Here they are after I shaded their hair. I used dark blue pastel chalk to do the recessed areas of Rei’s hair and an acrylic goache mix of burnt umber and red to do Asuka’s hair. For some reason, pastel chalks were not sticking to Asuka’s hair. Probably too glossy. Then I did a flat clear coat of V-Color to seal them in and stop the shine. I think I’m ready for assembly now.
Hachiware is a cute cat, and he is Chiikawa’s best friend. Oh yeah, and there’s also Usagi, but usually it’s Chiikawa and Hachiware doing stuff together.
Last week, the three of us went to Tokyo to submit a passport application at the US Embassy for Ulan. It was Mayu’s birthday too. Because I could pay for the passport in advance through PayPal, it sped up the process. An appointment is required, which I did online. We were only there for about an hour. We finished there around 10:30 am, then took the subway back to Tokyo Station.
The rest of the time we spent in Tokyo was in the underground shopping area beneath Tokyo Station. There they have Tokyo Character Street, which you can see in the picture above. I covered this place on my site 12 years ago, when I did a photo journal of our trip to Tokyo Sky tree in 2013. Tokyo Character Street is a collection of speciality shops, for Studio Ghibli, Kamen Rider, Ultraman, Rilakkuma, One Piece (I hate that show), etc. It’s changed a lot since then. The Gundam Cafe is gone, and now there is a Harry Potter store, etc.
So these characters are from a comic/anime called Chiikawa. They’re like these adorable RPG characters who supposedly go on quests, but most of the time they are eating bento and drinking tea and doing cute stuff. Ulan loves these characters.
We had lunch at a grilled fish restaurant since the “Ramen Street” area had long lines waiting for those restaurants. It was Mayu’s birthday, so I let her decide where to go. We also had 1,300 yen parfaits after we did more shopping. Tokyo can be a bit expensive!
There were actually two Ghibli-themed stores there. These Porco Rosso punch puppets were at the one featuring high-end merchandise. I ended up buying more stuff for Ulan’s upcoming birthday than for Mayu’s birthday.
There was a Shonen Jump pop-up store where I bought a deck of Spy Family Uno cards.
One store had these neat-looking Evangelion-themed storage containers.
Ulan likes Kirby, although she’s never played a Kirby game before. I got her a pocket towel at the Kirby store.
There is a whole underground shopping mall down there too, which we only barely entered. We went to the Can Do 100 yen shop, Kaldi Coffee, and the Don Quixote snack shop. Looking at the map online, I realize that it is bigger than I thought.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay long in Tokyo as it was a weekday and we had to go back to work and school the next day. We took the 2:40pm shinkansen back home. We had a nice time.
