The Joy Of Creation
If you read my first blog post, you know that stories are my passion. My life’s blood. I enjoy crafting, writing, and telling them. And there’s no one part of the process that, to me, is any less fun than another.
I’ve come to discover, though, that I do get a certain satisfaction from seeing things come together. Enter one of my long-time hobbies; Gunpla.
If you’re not familiar with it, Gunpla is building models of mechs often from the popular Mobile Suit Gundam anime series. The word ‘Gunpla’ is itself a portmanteau of ‘Gundam Plastic Model,’ and they’re sold in kits available around the world.
To people who don’t know, they look incredibly complicated, but they’re actually far easier to build than many other model-building hobbies, with modern kits requiring no glue, no paint, and snap-together parts. You get to build highly posable, sleek-looking models to decorate or do with as you see fit.
There’s even a global Gunpla building competition, where people will go ahead and paint and pose their preferred Gunpla into exquisite scenes and entire exciting scenarios. But it can be expensive since the kits range anywhere from $15.00 to over $300 US for the highest-end products. I have the passion but lack the funds to participate in such a competition.
I first learned about Gunpla when I was in the Navy, living aboard the USS Kitty Hawk CV 63, which at the time called the port at Yokosuka Harbor, Japan home. When I had free time I would explore Japan, often venturing into the heart of Tokyo and its surrounding areas.
It was during one of these trips that I discovered an Endless Waltz Perfect Grade Gundam Wing Zero kit for about $100 USD in a little gaming store in Yokohama. Anyone who knows about Japan might assume the store was in Akihabara, Japan’s “Electric Light City,” known for its tech, gaming, and anime-influenced stores, but not so in this case.
Now, I had never seen a Gunpla kit before, but a nearby display of similar models showed me what I could potentially put together. I realized some were bigger and more complex than others, and quickly figured out there were three main types. ‘HG’ or ‘High Grade’ for beginners, ‘MG’-‘Master Grade’ for intermediate builders, and ‘PG’ or ‘Perfect Grade’ for advanced hobbyists. These days, there’s a fourth tier, called RG, or ‘Real Grade,’ which falls between High and Master grades in terms of building difficulty.
HG and the current RG kits usually are for models that are 1:144 scale. MG’s are 1:100, and PG kits stand an eye-popping 1:60 scale. This means many PG models stand twelve inches tall or better.
Being completely unfamiliar with the hobby or even the Mobile Suit Gundam anime, at the time, I was still drawn in by the sharp lines, customizable poses, and bright color schemes. The sheer variety of them was enticing as well.
I still wasn’t sure how into it I was going to be, as the only other model building I had done was of a 1957 Chevy Corvette I’d gotten as a gift as a kid. I’d gotten it painted but never got to assemble it because I was maybe eight years old and my parents understandably didn’t trust me with the model cement.
So, I went ahead and purchased some wire cutters to clip the plastic parts from the trays they came in, and an exacto knife to trim any burrs or splinters. Then I purchased two models. The Gundam Wing Zero kit, and an HG Deathscythe Hell kit, also from the Mobile Suit Gundam Endless Waltz series, just to see if I could get the hang of it. The HG kit looked cool with its laser scythe and bat-like wings.
After getting back to the ship, I had the Deathscythe kit assembled within a matter of hours despite the instructions being written entirely in Japanese. The kits come with assembly instruction manuals that are fully illustrated with easy-to-understand visuals for non-Japanese speakers, and lore about the model as well for those who could translate.
By the time I was done with the HG kit, I was sold on the hobby. I went ahead and built the Wing Zero model and completed it in a day and a half, which required only the addition of a small screwdriver to put it together.
I was so proud of it. Naturally, few of the senior sailors thought it was very impressive. Sadly, while cleaning the ship one day, the model was thrown out as trash while I wasn’t around to rescue it. It wasn’t considered essential military property, and Operation Enduring Freedom was in full swing.
But nearly twenty years later, my wife, as a birthday gift, found a new kit for me. I got to assemble it all over again, with all the joy I’d gotten from it the first time around. It now overlooks our rumpus room, flanked by other models I’ve assembled over the years.
But it’s that same joy I also get from stories. When they start out, stories come to us in pieces, and we assemble them, bit by bit, until the finished product stands before us, proud and ready to face the world.
You can tell when an author has put love and passion into a story because you become that much more invested in it. If they care about the characters the reader does as well. The plots are all the more intriguing, fantasies are more fascinating, and even the cold depths of space seem to have a warmth of heart when written by a passionate author.
There is a joy to destruction as well, a catharsis to taking things apart, breaking them down into their base components. But for me, it doesn’t hold a candle to the process of creation and assembly.
