Upcoming figures: Taiga and Cirno

Isn't it sad, Ami?

AmiAmi just put a new Toradora figure up on their site yesterday, and I think it's the best figure from the series that I've seen so far. The character - to nobody's surprise - is Taiga, but the pose and clothing is quite different from all the school uniform and swimsuit figures of her. No, this version emphasises her namesake over her portrayal in the series, and shows her lying down in a playful pose with tiger ears, paws, stockings, a tail and some stripes on her face.  It looks like she'll be coming with two faces as well, allowing some fairly coarse control over the tsun:dere ratio.

She's being done by Ques Q, who are the guys behind the China Meiling figure I recently blogged about. I wasn't familiar with them before but I can already spot some familiar characteristics in the preview photos, namely the distinct shading used for creases and folds on the skin (see the knee in the third picture).

It's a weird thing to be bothered by, but her linea alba looks excessively defined from this angle.

Definitely a much more familiar face

Those shorts are pretty lewd

All pictures from AmiAmi.

Figure details:

Name: Taiga Aisaka Tiger Costume ver.

Series: ToraDora!

Scale: 1/8

Company: ques Q

Release: June 2011

Preorder from: AmiAmi | Otacute | HobbySearch

The second figure I'll mention is Nendoroid Cirno. She's not up for preorder yet, but some photos of the master figure have been posted at Mikitan's blog, and she will apparently be on the GSC website from tomorrow. It's pretty appropriate that she'll be the 9th in the Touhou series and, while she's hardly one of my favourite Touhous, I think she'll make quite a decent Nendoroid. As expected there's a bunch of accessories, faces etc.

The quintessential Cirno pose

Comes with a frozen frog...

...and her ice shard from SWR

For those times when she's just not the strongest

All pictures from Mikitan's blog. The more of these Touhou Nendoroids I see, the more I want them. Seeing A Hermit and Kirari Star get Flandre has made me really want her to go with Remilia (the only Touhou Nendoroid I have), but even if I had the money she's sold out everywhere as far as I can tell. Reimu and Marisa are slated for a re-release soon though, so odds are good that GSC will end up reselling the other ones eventually too.

I'm also slowly making progress on my review/comparison of some of the big online figure stores. I've decided how I'm going to show the data, and the trends are pretty clear, but for pricing I'm only at n=23 figures and I'd like to get that up to 30-40+ before saying anything too much about it. I still can't figure out how best to compare selection either, seeing as it can vary greatly from day to day and I don't really fancy counting all available figures for ~15 series over a number of sites each day for however long. Hopefully I'll figure something out; any suggestions would be welcomed.

Mikupa's about to start, so I'm going to go look for a stream. I'm sure I'll be doing a writeup of some sort on it, but the date will depend on when I manage to watch the full thing.