i had to really scrape my save-for-later lists to find stuff i wanted that a) would be just enough to hit suruga-ya's 1k yen free domestic shipping threshold and b) at least one of them had to be large enough that suruga-ya would use a box. i decided this item should be the 260 yen face towel of karasuma reiji, aka my first proper "embarrassing anime merch item". this was a very dangerous decision as i now covet the matching shu but he is much more expensive and much more condemning to own.

extra unfortunately, my ploy failed and suruga-ya shipped in a mailer anyway, and then tenso put it and the bushi mailer in a massive, overly tall box that made the overseas shipping cost over 40 usd because of the volumetric weight. i didn't know what it looked like until it arrived and thought that the reiji towel was simply large enough to necessitate a box that big 😭 oh well! the point was to keep the bromides safe, and they did arrive in pretty much perfect condition.

these are the ones i picked out! that masa was just too beautiful to pass up, i had to get my man arthur, and i've always had a soft spot for the handsome kousuke. both of these kousukes are such insanely cool shots to me... i would've loved to have gotten some toumas too. IF THEY'D SELL HIM :(

from suruga-ya, the aforementioned reiji towel came hilariously and unceremoniously stuffed into a plastic bag 😭😭😭

he's a little smaller in person than i imagined (size is 340x850mm, or roughly 13x33in) but he's also way softer than i expected!! it's kinda microfiber-y? i have realized i have no clue where to put this guy so he is currently in my lap like i'm an old man with a blanket. it is also 30C/86F at my desk as i write this so i'm sure he's having a great time on my legs 👍

also from suruga-ya, i got this nifty faniri keychain that i've had my eye on for a while, and the script to the chemistry voice drama. (plus reiji again in a nicely smoothened state)

faniri keychain will hang from miroir felix and dangle goofily over poor cipher byleth until i feel like fishing out a dedicated pin. i'd like to put it on my work bag; i just hope it doesn't make too many clinking noises 💦

i'm gonna have to take my board down to put up the bromides, which means it's not going to happen for a while lol. i hope i can figure something out for the warping problem soon, as a lot of things on my board have started bending again... :/ i'll probably hotfix it with additional pins until an idea comes to me.

first thing i see after removing the air packaging is shulegs. real unmei moment.

the way the clear file was packed is kinda concerning, as it looks like it's just slightly too big to fit perfectly and one of the corners got bent upward...

but it'll probably be fine after i flatten it under something heavy for a day or two.

so here's everything unplastic'd!

the tcg cards spooked me for a second because i was looking at claude's face through the plastic sleeve and turned him over and saw a weiss schwarz blau card back and i was like !?!??!?!??!??!? until i remembered yuto was in there too lol. claude will be joining my two byleth cipher cards, and i think it'll be cute if i surround yuto with my bandori weiss schwarz cards so it looks like he has an audience 😊

the reiji title pin surprised me with how big it is!!! for some reason i thought it'd be like 3cm wide at most, but it's 6.5cm across and almost 2cm tall!! guess it's to make sure the dense kanji are more legible in itabags and stuff. i only got this title pin since i didn't care as much for the wording of the other one, plus this one is the higher ranked title in dbes so i'm showing the proper amount of oshi-ism 😎

soooo happy to finally have the janus reiji and lrfes shu tickets. when i first decided to start collecting, these were the items i wanted most, as they're my favorite cards for each of them in dbes and the frame design is really beautiful for them!! i love the dots in reiji's romanized name forming an elegant little arc, and the holo elements are really vibrant and gorgeous. i'm going to try my best to make these stand out on my board arrangement since they're so special to me.

confession: i had little idea what the egoistic才Φ shikishi even was when i ordered it. i was just like "song jacket art in some kind of collectible form? add to cart" but i really like it!!! now i want the yume no ato one too lol. there's something really satisfying about nice cardboard (<- predictable words of a collector)

not much to say about desfes sol except that its disc case is identical to the pwy s-sol case, so if i go through with customizing them it's nice that they'll match. not sure if these are original cases or supplied by suruga-ya.

the real prize of this batch is my beloved original reiji acrylic stand, who i never thought i'd be able to obtain for less than 3k... instead i was pointed to a 330 yen listing— unopened!— on some secondhand shop i'd never heard of (lashinbang) and i ordered this thing faster than when i got a stock alert for the tears of the kingdom collector's edition.

interestingly, he appears slightly shorter than suit reiji! it might be the pose though. the art printing quality is also lower, which i'm chalking up to its age in the franchise history, as they probably had a lower budget for merch back then. i won't be looking that close though, so no problem!

his matching kusogaki is on the way, so for now he gets to stand between the suits like a king.

lastly there's the clear file; it has this odd offset effect around the character art and i'm not sure if it's a printing misalignment or intentional or what.

but who cares look at how cool it looks when i put it in front of the window light!!!!

the thumb tacks came in!!! this took me like 5 hours and my back hurt so much afterward lol. still a wip because i didn't get everything up that i wanted to, plus i have more stuff coming in a few weeks and i forgot to leave space for those so i'm gonna have to rearrange everything anyway 😭

i got a pack of standard thumb tacks and a tin of map pins; i'd planned on using the thumb tacks as feet to have items sit on top of and lean against the board, but turns out hardly any of my items are flat or stiff enough to make that work. the map pins were going to be for things i didn't mind putting holes in (home-printed stuff like the shu dialogue screenshot) but i ended up using them to secure the edges of pretty much everything. the thumb tacks only got used on the largest items that needed stronger security (the hanging bromides, the clearfile, etc).

finally have a real shurei shrine happening.... i'm not too keen on the composition of this arrangement though, so i'll see what i can figure out once my next batch of goods arrive.

on an atrociously long list of problems i encountered, a major one was that some of the paper items didn't sit flat, even though i made sure none of the pins were pressing the corners down (all items are secured by their own weight resting against the pins)

so that was just warping in the paper i guess. this effect was at its worst with reiji's ticket because of how he'd been displayed previously, so i cut a piece of chipboard to serve as a firm backing. i made it a couple millimeters short on each side so it wouldn't be visible on the edges.

i attached him with my weakest washi tape so he can be peeled off cleanly and easily if needed; i later placed more rolls of tape on the center of each edge to hold down the spots that were warping outward. this idea ended up working fairly well so i made more backings for other items, especially large and thin ones like the gift drawings and the epsi clearfile. though the chipboard turned out to be thin enough itself to bend a bit too... so i might have to find something even stiffer to protect the items from long-term warping :/

my next catastrophic event was when i was hanging up my little guitar keychain and accidentally dropped it into the abyss behind the wall.... it was a whole 20 minute project to rescue the poor thing, which involved taking the board down entirely and knocking a bunch of items out of alignment 😭 i've now installed preventative measures so anything else that falls will be caught by a safety net. PHEW! glad that the first thing to fall was an easily-cleaned and hard-to-damage metal keychain, and not one of my precious pieces of imported paper.

and speaking of, the felix miroir card is my #1 enemy now. he'd been in a side loader and a plastic sleeve ever since i received him from a trade, and i made the debatable decision to unsleeve everything for the board because i didn't like the reflectiveness and the way it effected the true colors of the items. however, felix's sleeve (which was a long sleeve suitable for bookmarks, folded over for him) was such a snug fit that it was really difficult to get him out of there safely... this man was so stubborn that he straight up broke open the edge of the sleeve instead of just coming out peacefully. in the interest of avoiding further damage to his previously immaculate corners, i just tore the edge of the sleeve the rest of the way down with a pen tip to free him. and THEN he decided to be the only item to fully tumble out of his pins while i was moving the board during the keychain rescue operation. he still looks perfect from a distance, but if you were to inspect him very closely you'd see some small inconsistencies along his edges. that's what i get for unsleeving a nobleman i guess 🙄

as for the fire emblem section...

feeling much better about it this time, though i'm kinda mad the byleth cards ended up misaligned bc i'd originally had them centered over the steelcase, but then i shuffled things around on the shelf and shifted the board and just didn't feel like fixing the cards lol. i'm getting a claude card in my next order anyway, so i'll rearrange them then.

i set up the desk calendar and its sleeve as a little stage way too far in advance so now i'm like. this is where i'd put my linleth acrylics. IF I HAD THEM! the calendar should make for nice backgrounds (it has the monthly murals from fe3h on the reverse side of the calendar months), but i'll need to stuff the sleeve with something so the weight of the acrylics don't bend it.

i might remove the sound selection disc case since it sticks out weirdly and makes for the fourth crest of flames in a very small space, but i also kinda like having a "floor" for the whole section. big ol' memo claude is also a pain to find a decent spot for. i might grab the byleth and sothis memo pads in the future so i can have them all lined up somewhere.

my favorite decision was reappropriating the ridiculous friction album as a stage for shurei. when i have the ceiling light on, it reflects pink light like this (slightly more conspicuous irl)

this stupid thing delights me so much that i took a bunch of pictures playing with it :') below is all lights off except the string lights, and then shining my lamp at an angle to catch the album

the effect works best with a phone flashlight, so i got my sister to take these pics of the album's reflective properties at its maximum potential while i held my phone

makes me want to set up a dedicated light for it LOL.

i wish i could flip the album around to hide the open side, but to get the text on the closed side to be right-side-up i'd have to have the back of the album with the tracklist facing up. i also want to get something to sit behind shurei as a background.... for these two i might just home-print a fancy dinner party type of thing lol, and once i get the og stage outfit shurei acrylics i'll give them the friction album floor and a stage background. as for poor lonely rio... i'll think of something 😭

display stonks are UP. got handed this massive used bulletin board so now i can finally get all my papery items properly put up instead of just leaning against the back of the shelf. i've put them all in storage while i wait for an order of thumb tacks to come in, so here's the state of the shelf in the meantime.

matching shurei stands REAL!!!! (took this pic before putting the clearfile away)

so happy to have them both together at long last... but the stupid diamond-shaped bases prevent me from moving them any closer together!!!! gah!!!!! i guess there's something fitting about that but :'( i wonder if i could get custom bases made so they can stand just 1cm closer.... (words of an insane person)

currently rio is off to the left of them, and he's got such a dynamic silhouette in comparison that i really want another acrylic stand to be on shurei's right... but i shant!!! i've obtained my dream three and i will be happy with thee.... (unless i make custom stands with my own art. then i'll really be mad with power)

i'm really liking the corner thing i set up with kino, though maneuvering their bendy stand thing so it doesn't poke the books while keeping kino far enough from the art on the covers was kind of a nightmare lol. i haven't changed kino's pose in probably over a year (had them hatlessly smiling with their mug in hand), so it's pretty refreshing to see them like this now!! i went for something loosely inspired by the pose on the LN cover.

fire emblem section needs work... i have more pieces from the fe3h special edition upstairs that might help it. ideally i become very lucky and feel spendy enough to grab the acrylic stands of byleth, linhardt, and claude, but that's something of a long-term plan considering their rarity these days...

i also want to do something better with the argopro albums but i'm not sure what yet 🤔 friction especially is going to be hard to work with since it's ridiculously shiny lol. and the sol disc case sticks out a bit and doesn't look all that interesting... need to make a cover for it...