Reading about Wonder Festival should never be akin to watching paint dry, and yet as I peruse galleries after galleries of event photos I can think of no comparison more worthy. One would expect that an event adorned with the adjective "Wonder" would elicit a basic sense of the word (i.e. astonishment and/or admiration). But hey honest marketing be damned!
Originally I wanted to cement my case by posting all the event kits that are, well, shit; however, I quickly realized that I wasn't interested in going through 46 pages of kits again, eliminating 3% of the ones that don't suck and then making you guys scroll through the rest just to prove a point. So here's a simpler (and better) alternative that sums up the latest Wonder Festival 2011 nicely:
My pet theory is that the stagnating GK scene is the unfortunate result of too many old talents leaving in favor of more profitable ventures (PVC, dollfie, etc.) and not nearly enough new talents filling the void left behind. What we have left is basically a cesspool of "mediocrity".
(Just out of curiosity, I did a little research to find out the annual salary of top Japanese figure sculptors. Averaging figures from several sites produces a staggering 20,000,000 yen (~$233,338.41) which totally explains why they're all jumping off the GK ship. Hell I would too.)
As such, I can't help but wonder about these "new talents": is the WF committee just handing out these one day licenses left and right to anyone that bothers applying? The alternative - that these sculptors were carefully hand picked, out of the many hundreds or even thousands that applied, based on the quality and originality of their work, is truly disheartening.
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4 comments:
Men Alive!! He's ALIVE!!!
Still, I think your thoughts on WF are a little harsh. *Hugs his Kumashiro Maya kit* but I do kinda get where you're coming from.
Having said that, I feel that PVC figures are also going the way of the bland and if that's what the "new talents" are using as a baseline for what is required to step up, then there's no wonder the vast majority of everything seems mediocre. Have you seen the mountains of Black rock shooter crap? Sad to say that the only teams which seem to be consistantly decent these days are Volks and T-Systems, but T-systems has some kind of link to Clayz and their kits eventually become PVCs so there's little desire to get the kits.
Dollfies are also hideously overpriced and only the heads are sculpted. Everything else, aside from the costumes, is stock and the costumes don't cover that much of the pricetag!
Also, I have heard that the one day license is pretty much an open door. The license applies to the venue and not the individual, I believe so the only requirement is that the license holder has given permission for kits of their titles to be sold.
Treasure festa looks like it's going to be a dud. Not too many kits in general are showing up, even though the event is in a few days and I don't even want to think about how WF is going to shape up after Kaiyodo said that they aren't helping with the licenses this time around.
Yeah I haven't seen more than 10 new (semi-interesting) kits for this upcoming Treasure Festival. It seems very much like a repeat of Wonder Festival 2011 but only smaller in scale. Good for those who missed out I guess.
Contrary to past events I actually found myself enthralled with the PVC offerings. The production value of PVC prototypes simply outclassed any GK that I saw (having the financial backing of major corporations and the best talents in the field certainly attests to that). Not to say that I would ever buy a PVC, of course, but I found myself quite bitter over the lack of GK counterparts in many cases.
I know right? The monopoly they have over it allows them to charge pretty much whatever price they want. Can't say I blame people for being suckers for them though - they *are* very well made and there's enough variety to appeal to most people's tastes.
Well I suppose it's no comiket where there's a surplus of applicants. I do feel torn on the issue - having a lot of lousy sculptors present will serve to distract the general crowd and delay sellouts of the more popular kits. I just wish there were more of these good sculptors.
Personally, I find it hard to get excited about PVC figures but that's mainly because I have zero interest in a lot of figures that are covered. I can appreciate some of them ( I remember a figure of Aegis from Persona 3 and Palladion looking really sweet) but when I see a BRS related figure, I just switch off straight away due to complete indifference. Same with K-ON! and a whole load of other figures. And guess what we see lots of these days? Nendoroids and figmas can piss off as well.
But at least the GK makers are still making kits of characters which would otherwise be ignored, even if the kits are nice to look at but don't blow you away!
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