After a so-so build, we follow it up with a so-so photoshoot. True to my fears, the legs kept falling off, and quite frankly after a while it became too much for me to deal with.
In the end I took less than 30 photos in total, which is always a sign of a bad shoot (I think my typical average is over 40, with particularly good sessions getting into the range of 50-60+).
I’m just going to show you a handful of the good photos, make a few remarks here and there about some of the other problems I faced, and then I can move on.
Simple Stand - A Bad Fit
I’ve always known that the mounting peg on the Goodsmile Simple Stand isn’t an absolute perfect match for High Grade Gunpla, but usually it fits well enough that you can get away with it. Not so here. The mounting hole is just a bit smaller, such that even a standard Bandai mounting peg is a tighter fit than usual.
That meant grabbing one of those pegs from an Action Base 2 and sticking it on top of the Simple Stand (side note - I’m actually surprised this worked, but it did).
View From Afar
The seamlines (and those bleeding panel lines) aren’t as visible as I thought they’d be, at least from afar. But if you zoom in enough, you can still see them:
Or if you view it from certain angles.
This is a reminder that mistakes are relative. You may be knee deep in the build when you discover a mistake that you think is going to be blatantly obvious, only to realize later that it isn’t all that big of a deal (or that you can hide it by getting creative).
Arm Articulation
Having the legs fall off sucked, but just as frustrating was the lack of articulation in the arms:
It doesn’t have much of an elbow bend, or a lot of cross body range, or much of an arm lift. And this made it really hard to get a lot of poses exactly the way I had in mind.
Flower Bits
The bendy plastic straws that you use to place the Flower Bits are not really any better than other, fixed-position solutions. It’s more like they are their own form of frustrating.
On one hand, you can indeed use them to position the bits at all sorts of crazy angles. But on the other hand, it’s not very easy to tell where to bend (and to what to degree) to get them exactly where you want.
Conclusion
The Fawn Farsia remains an intriguing and unique looking mobile suit. There really isn’t anything else that’s quite like it. Once you get it into the right pose, there’s no doubt that it has excellent shelf presence.
But there’s also no denying that it it wasn’t fun to build or fun to play with, and that’s a damn shame.
Maybe the problem is with me. Maybe I’m still missing something when it comes to staging action shots, especially anything involving bits or other flying weapons.
If that’s the case, then perhaps one day I’ll get better at it, and I can revisit this thing in the photobooth. For now though, I think it’s best to move forward to the next build.