In the last couple of years, society in the United States has been riven by cultural and philosophical divides, with little hope of either compromise or reconciliation. But perhaps all sides can agree on one thing: there is nothing so quintessentially American as a school shooting, and on that note, we take a look at this figure, which depicts a heavily-armed high school girl ready to get down with some extracurricular warfare.
This figure is based off of a picture created by Fukai Ryousuke as part of an original series called ARMS NOTE. Joshi Kousei – simply “high school girl,” I think, as this character has not been given the courtesy of a proper name – was the first figure to be released in this series, but Magic Mould has plans for at least one more, and Max Factory also has a line of Figma toys representing this series.
Joshi Kousei is sculpted in 1/7 scale, measuring a shade over 23 centimeters tall. Being that I am now old, crotchety, and in possession of several hundred figures, I don’t particularly like it when a figure is difficult to set up, and Ms. High Schooler was indeed an appalling pain in the ass to assemble. To that end, there are also some parts missing from my figure thanks to both my clumsiness while attempting to put her together and the looseness of her torso section. She should have two grenades hanging from her backpack as well as knives attached to her lower leg shields, but they went skittering off when her body abruptly clattered in half while I was trying to figure out how to mount those knives, and I have yet to figure out where they flew off to. Too bad for me, but I wasn’t enjoying the process of getting her built so I do not regret the incompleteness of my figure.
I’m not sure if Magic Mould is a new company or if it’s just an imprint of Good Smile Company but that is who is credited with manufacturing this figure, at least judging by the box. They apparently have done only one other figure, which is from a series called “Heavily Armed High School Girls,” which suggests that this particular theme is one that they have a specific affinity for.
Ms. Bionic is dressed up in a fairly standard high school getup – a blazer and a pleated skirt, though I suppose the latter item’s abbreviated length might not conform to regulations. She’s also carrying a smartphone, which I suppose is still a weird thing for me; back when I was last in high school (a frightful twenty-two years ago now), bringing a device with the capabilities of a mobile device to class would have been unthinkable (my high school didn’t even let us wear hats). The handset, as best as I can tell, fits in between cheek and hand like sandwich filling, which lends no confidence as to the likelihood of it not falling away and becoming lost – a recurring issue with this figure.
She’s also got a peculiarly-shaped backpack, which looks like maybe it’s shaped to hold a large thermos. As mentioned there ought to be two grenades dangling off of it but I’ve only got the one now.
And she also has these interesting devices strapped to her legs, which I suppose is what lends her her moniker.
And of course, no heavily-armed high school girl would be caught dead without her gun. In this case, it appears to be some sort of bullpup assault weapon with a silencer, which are the terms I’m using since they drive certain gun nuts insane. I’m pretty sure that this gun is entirely fictional in design but I certainly could be wrong on that.
When this figure first went up for sale, I liked the design but I was hesitant to order it because of its massive price tag (close to 18,000 yen, as I recall, which was an exorbitant amount back in 2018 for a figure of this size but isn’t all that abnormal these days). However, this figure does have a feature which was not revealed by any of the publicity photographs – namely, that her skirt is removable. Why they chose not to highlight this quality, I have no idea. One would think that they would want to sell figures and that this sort of thing would only help them to do just that.
At any rate, with her skirt removed Ms. High Schooler looks even more silly, but who’s going to tell her that when she’s packing this kind of heat? Her panties are a curious green color and what’s even more interesting is that half of it is hooked into the cleft of her buttocks, clearly indicating that the designer put some careful thought into what sort of visual appeal he or she wanted this figure to convey.
Overall, I like this figure, but the massive price tag and the fitment issues are a bit off-putting. Nonetheless, she is very cute, particularly with the skirt removed.
And a note about the lack of posts in the last few months. I feel badly about the lack of content and I’m grateful to the people who inquired about my status but truth be told, there isn’t really an interesting reason for my long absence; rather, it’s almost entirely due to a combination of me playing World of Warcraft, Star Trek Online, Azur Lane, and Epic Seven, often simultaneously. All of these games have a variety of daily maintenance tasks which really appeals to me, as someone who values both incremental progress as well as regimented routine (I’ve often said that if I had total control over my life, I would want every day to be just like the day before).
I was about to plead that I haven’t bought as many figures as I usually do, but looking at my receipts I’ve bought around thirty thus far this year, which seems like a lot, especially since I have been feeling that I’m not as into many of the figures that have gone up for preorder in recent times. Strangely, the ones that I think I am most interested in are FREEing’s bunnygirls, which is odd since I generally don’t like animal ears (real or fake) on anime girls, and they are all sort of generic-looking. Nonetheless, I want to buy a bunch.
I’ve recently been collecting polystone statues at a more enthusiastic clip, but I haven’t been photographing them since I don’t think they’re of as much interest to this site’s audience and given their large size, it’s a humongous nuisance to take pictures of them because my shooting space isn’t large enough for them. What I’m thinking I might do is to just take a few shots of them as I receive them and combine them into an aggregated post.
At any rate, I’ve actually had three photo sets ready to go (this being one of them) for the last couple of months, so hopefully reviews will resume on a somewhat typical schedule. Although it seems unseemly to write comment replies months after they were posted, I’m going to try to get all my replies done, as well.
