Let’s just for a moment, consider the remote possibility that one could get tired of building Gunpla.
Whaaaaaa???????
Or more to the point, tired from building Gunpla. You’ve just had a week or month or 3 months or a year…when you just built like Noah in a thunder storm. You’ve got Detolfs loaded with sick builds. Overflowing with awesomeness. You have a mountain of boxes from all the builds. Stacked high like a king's trophy room after an epic conquest of a far away barbarian land. Yet….something inside is a bit…..meeehhhhhhhhh (insert sad frowny face here). Normally with the stupid world being stupid with its stupid rules and responsibilities Gunpla washes it all away, but now the Gunpla that used to make you happy and at peace no longer does and you can’t quite tell why. Just maybe, you’re suffering from some sort of builder‘s fatigue. You’ve pushed your mind and your nippers sooooo hard, smashing out all nighters. Planning and executing priming sessions and painstakingly painting inner frame detailing. Just build after build after build. Some from start to finish. Some completed in stages amongst other projects. Some not quite completed but you’ve called it….”yeah I’ll come back to it some time” knowing you probably won’t.
And the, dare I use those evil words… ’backlog’….. mocks you….. reminding you it‘s still there and growing and its better than you. And you paw through the kits looking for something to get excited about recollecting back to when you finally got your hands on that RG that no one else could find or finally sourced a premium kit that you just had to have, you were like a kid in a candy store, sooo happy it was now in your hands and you wanted to build it up right away…but you had a few other builds in progress and you’d get around to it. But you didn’t.
Has this happened to me you ask?
Hell NO!!!
To be honest I haven‘t been building long enough, only about 4 months and I‘m just so full on into it right now the thought of not wanting to build at all is inconceivable and I‘ll embrace that for as long as it stays that way. And I’m not one to blow my own trumpet, I just do what I wanna do, and building like fury is what I like to do. I don’t aim to knock out a Ver Ka and an RG in a single weekend. I’m not the fanciest builder but I think I hold my own for a newb. But some say I’m a machine. I am unstoppable. My inner Gunpla demon has an insatiable hunger to devour kits like tiny little coloured sugar coated chocolate treats that come in bags of a million. And with every kit I build, I see two more I want. Every mobile suit that forms before my very eyes, formed by my very own hands, has me looking at its history and where it sits in the canon and what it evolved from or in to, and I start madly tagging webpages to my Chrome wishlist folder which is so epicly long its really just a list of lotsa kits I’ve looked at. But I do have times, moments, when I think I don’t want to build today or tonight.
“What? Shut your dirty mouth!!!”
I think I’d rather watch some stupid TV about nothing I’m interested in. It’s like hell on earth. The thing that usually has me running red lights to get to the post office after work and staying up till 2am to finish a kit even though I know the next day I’ll be toast….for this very short time…its doesn’t do it for me. For me, a newb, this only lasts like a day. Maybe even half a day. For example, I might get up on a Sunday morning with a plan to build, I sit at the build desk and think…”nahhhhh” and I wander off to be lazy. And when it happens, I say to my brain….….
”Right. I’ll fix your wagon buddy. No Gunpla for two days now.”
I send my selfish lazy mind to its proverbial bedroom to have a good think about its behavior and tell it not to come back until it has a very good apology for me. And so as the day, or two days, or maybe three days if I can stand it, go on I start to get the itch again. I start to think about Gunpla. I start to prioritize builds and projects in my head. I go into my hobby room and I organize some stuff. Cut some boxes down keeping just the box art. I bin a mountain of runners I’ve been keeping, just in case. I sort through my bashing parts box and contemplate what each part looks like and how it might be used, now that it’s not related to a Zaku left leg. I arrange my paints and tools and ditch a bunch of used sanding sticks. I get my shit in order. And after a little while, I feel like my mind has crept out of its ‘room’. It's standing in the hallway clutching its stuffed RX-78-2. Staring at me. Wanting to tell me something. I urge it to speak up..
“I’m sorry. I realize now that without Gunpla, I will go mad as a hatter, and I see now that getting sad about Gunpla was the wrong thing to do. Gunpla is my happy place and I should not be sad in my happy place. Can we please build Gunpla again?”
Oh my beautiful beautiful mind. I am so happy for us now. And so without actually building, but still staying in the game by tooling around in the build space, so to speak, I regain the desire to build again.
Obviously, it’s not going to be like this every time and it’s not going to be like this for everyone. Sometimes, its more about just being chained to one big build. Personally, I’ve never spent more than a couple of days actually working on a kit. I’ve had kits that I’ve started say on a Saturday night, I don’t get through them, Sunday is full of family stuff and during the week I’m too tired and old so I’m in bed before I can even think about building. So it gets sorta put off till the next weekend when I crush it and its amazzzzzing. But I can’t possibly imagine what its like to work on the same kit for weeks, months or years. I read of builders working for GBWC for a year. Builds that have been 3-4 years in the making. If that isn’t gonna challenge your stamina then holy cow you are a Beast!!!.
I’m sure there’s other builds in between and other activities but still….the same build for everrrr. Hats off to you, dude. And its not always that epic. Even setting a goal of something like an MSV Origin shelf in the cabinet or a Seed shelf, or a dozen different Petit Bear Guys. We as builders can get these crazy plans and we get in to them and sometimes we start to tire and for some reason, we blame the Gunpla. The Gunpla isn’t the reason, man. It’s me and you trying to make something hard when it shouldn’t be. Yep, it’s a hobby. Yep, it’s got challenges. Yep, it has its ways of testing our endurance. But we must ALWAYS remember….
We chose the hobby.
We set the challenges.
We test our endurance.
We are the masters of our domains, right? We are the ones that have embraced the motto.
Gunpla is Freedom. And it is.
My first bit of advice and this really is the crux of my whole vibe here....is go build with another human. It is bloody brilliant. Especially when there‘s 3 or 4 of you and you got one guy that can just talk and talk and talk and he's funny and you just chill and listen to someone else's thoughts for a bit instead of yours. It‘s no different to hitting the pub with mates.
I was gonna say it‘s cheaper than the pub but that‘s not always true, is it. Don’t let the building be a burden. When I'm needing a break from building, I tend to watch some Gundam. I love the Universal Century and there‘s lots of it and much of it is easily rewatchable for me and it gets me a bit pumped to knock out a Zaku or GM all of a sudden. If you need a break from a project, build something else. Grab a Petit Bear or and SD or cheap No Grade and just let it go and snap it up. Maybe some Star Wars stuff. If you’re really desperate, maybe build a Zoid!!! But you gotta be pretty desperate right. Hehehe…..just jokes. They’re cute. But the point is, if the big picture is making your happy place less happy, take a step to the left and break it down into several smaller places. Make the decision to break builds up in to sections.
I recently started a Sazabi Ver Ka. When I laid all the runners out, I was like “holy crap this is gonna take foreverrrr” but I flicked through the instructions and pictured it as four to six separate kits and it didn’t feel so epic. And when it started to feel like I’d been working on the Sazabi for ages (a whole two days), I broke away and smashed out a HG Z’Gok-E at a chilled build meet with some good company, and the next day I was fresh and ready to crack back in to the big job at hand.
Gunpla gives us so much. It gives us peace and quiet. It gives us a doorway to a community of people that are just like us and we can find no other way. It never asks for anything in return. But the least it deserves is that when things are a bit sour, don’t blame the Gunpla. Be honest and admit that Gunpla is the only true perfect force in the world and it offers us only Freedom and all we have to do is accept that and share the concept to everyone we know. We’ve drunk the Kool Aid. Its too late!!!
Now go build something, ya whiney sonovabitch.
Image by 'BackToZeon'
