Gunpla: 00 Raiser (a long time coming)

This particular Gunpla I'm quite fond of: it was the first Gunpla I built after a long hiatus from building Gundam models. Or, more specifically, the 00 Gundam is what I originally built. In this post, I present to you the 00 Gundam Raiser, a model that represents how far I've come since getting back into this hobby.

When I was in high school, I built a lot of no-grade Gundam Wing model kits. Eventually, I did a few High Grades, then I got into Master Grades, but when I started college I stopped building. I kept the models on display in my childhood room in my parents' home, resplendent in their shoddy assembly and poorly applied stickers, and I never looked back.

Fast forward to 2013. It was my second year in Korea, and I needed a hobby. I had seen Gundam models on sale at my local supermarket, and with nothing better to do I figured I could just buy a cheap, modest-looking kit and have a go at it. That's how I ended up with the 00 Gundam. Building it was a blast, and at the time I was satisfied to call it finished without applying any extra details or markings. It looked plain, bare, and hardly complete by any standards at all, but I was happy with it.

A few months later I was visiting my friend in America, during my winter vacation. He introduced me to a new Gundam animation that had a heavy focus on the model aspect of the franchise, and he showed me the custom model he had been working on. Frankly, I was impressed, and it pushed me to want to dive deeper into the hobby.

This past year, I revisited my 00 Gundam and spent some time giving it the attention it deserved. I sanded it properly, inked it, painted on extra details, and gave it a nice topcoat to seal everything in. It looked so much better than before, but there was still something missing...

In the Gundam 00 animation, 00 is upgraded after combining with a space fighter, the 0 Raiser. It was difficult to find a model kit of the 0 Raiser, as none of the Gundam Bases in Seoul carried it anymore, but eventually I was able to locate one online through the Korean equivalent of Amazon, Gmarket.

Now the 0 Raiser is built, and after combining it with the 00 Gundam, I can finally say my Gundam 00 Raiser is complete. I'm not going to pretend like my modest model is some great accomplishment for the hobby at large; what it is is a personal triumph, a benchmark showing how much my skills have grown, and a promise to myself that I'll continue to work hard to improve even more.