#chiakane

Firstly, the zine itself!

I love this zine. I don't consider myself a Chiaki stan, but this is one of my favorite zines I own. And while of course part of that is from a fantastic set of art and writing, a LOT of it is because of the theming. I had expected the video games to be a loose theme, but it was very tight - every single piece prominently featured a game, and the only repeats were in easter eggs like the Pokemon plushies in this Sims piece.

As someone who makes and loves video games, it was so cool paging through this and seeing all the references. They're all done with exceptional care. It takes a moment to figure out some of them just because of adjustments to match Chiaki's visuals (it took me a long time to figure out this was Sims because of the UI not being blue!) but most clock on sight.

There's a list of all the games referenced in the back so that you can check against yourself. The only thing I wished for was some sort of reference for which games were on which page, so that you could get the general sense of the ones you didn't recognize to investigate further. The theme makes this zine feel incredibly tight and well-crafted, in addition to the zine itself being high quality without any immediately noticeable defects.

This print is one of the things I was most excited for with merch! It has started to bend a bit now that it's been a few months, but not more than any other print I own. It's nice and smooth, texture-wise. And really cute!!

These stickers are very cute (for some reason I forget to get a picture of the larger Pokemon sticker sheet? Hopefully I'll remember to grab another one before this post is scheduled). The Smash Brothers are SO tiny!! That's not a bad thing, I just hadn't expected it. I picked up Sakura's Peach since she's my own Smash main (and namesake!) and Aoi's Daisy, and then my favorite fight girls. Part of me does want to order a couple more so I can get the super interesting concept of Mario Chiaki/Peach Sakura and my other main Isabel/Kaede. The stickers themselves are only 50 cents each, not counting whatever shipping!

And here is the keychain! (With Mario Chiaki and Peach Sonia this time! The tangled webs our Mario AUs weave.) This is actually one of the reasons it took so long to review the zine, as when I finally opened it up, it had a big crack across it. They got me a replacement more or less as soon as they switched shipping mods, and I had no trouble with the new one! I wasn't actually that excited about this keychain, but it's really growing on me.