Japan has the curious penchant to personify anything from computer operating systems to deadly sins as cute manga girls. In the Kadokawa game Kantai Collection, the girls are World War 2 warships. I’m not really in the shipfu fandom myself, this was an auction I won with a low bid I placed because the figure is kind of cute with fun accessories, and the character is also called Ro-chan which was amusing to me for personal reasons.
This is the personification of Ro-500, which was German Kriegsmarine U-Boot U-511 before it was transferred to the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1943 and re-designated 呂-500. So naturally she’s depicted as a German exchange student in a Japanese school uniform/swimsuit. With a torpedo.
I think this was just a Taito prize figure, and for that it’s pretty well done.
One thing I didn’t like at all is how her ‘tan lines’ were painted on with a wrong color in a way that looked clearly “painted on” – even though her tan itself is airbrushed and so they could have simply masked them. So I carefully scraped off the ridiculous paint, and what did I find?
There was no tan under the paint, so either this paint was the actual airbrush mask that they somehow failed to remove, or this was a really poor product design… Anyway she looks so much better without it. It’s a little hard to get her to sit straight though.
I guess I have to call this an un-paint rather than a re-paint…
