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[fourseasonsfigs]

Building Block Figs - Armory

Following up on the recent sets of building block figs I've been posting, comes one of my absolute favorites!

As I mentioned with the earlier fig sets (Building Block Figs - Beautiful Fight Scene in the Middle of the Lake (Part One, Two, and Coda); Basking in the Sun, Catching Light, and Two Devils), I missed these sets when they first came out, so I've had to pick them all up on Xianyu. With the exception of this set! This one I couldn't get on Xianyu, despite my best efforts. I have only seen it for sale exactly once, and when I tried to buy it, it turned out the listing was only up to draw traffic, and the seller just had one other (vaguely related) set. I was resigned to just keep watching and searching for it and hoping for the best, which was a real pity, because just from the small sales picture I really, really had to have it.

Thankfully! Qilin, the merch wrangler extraordinaire (@88Qilin on Twitter), had bought this set way back in the day, and when she heard I was on the search for more of these sets, was kind enough to check in with me to see if I needed it. AND BOY DID I. She immediately sent it off, and it arrived in record time! She even included some wonderful little extras, that I took a picture of immediately, but for some reason can no longer find. I'll take another pic and add it! In the meantime, I'll add a placeholder:

[Qilin's extra goodies pic goes here]

I was so excited to get this set, I can't even tell you. I feel super, super lucky.

(Fun fact, Qilin is the reason I originally found out about fan made figs in the first place! I saw her post on Twitter (also way back in the day) about the New Year's series of 6 figs, and I absolutely had to have them. I had just reactivated my long-dormant Twitter account to keep up with the fandom, and I was super nervous to message her, thinking she would be like, "who is this total rando messaging me out of nowhere?!" But no, she was super nice, and very helpful, and it was entirely thanks to her I was able to buy the whole set. A minor miracle at the time, trust me, considering how green I was at navigating Weidian back then. If you ever want to buy figs directly, definitely check out her pinned post walkthrough on her Twitter page, it's invaluable information.)

The set came sealed and as usual, in a plain box. Inside there was the same set up as the other sets in this series - a double bagged bag of bricks, the card with the QR code for the online 3-D instructions, and a handy little tool to separate bricks.

The full name of this set is Lao Wen Sacrificed his Life to Save Ah Xu. It measures 8.0 x 5.6 x 12.1 cm, and is rated 10 hours to complete. The "hours to complete" ratings have been extremely accurate to date. But, I was determined to get this set done over this holiday weekend, so hoped that my prior experience on these would serve me well to get it done in record time. So I timed myself!

Here I am getting ready to start. Not a lot of colors, which is typical for these sets. Not too bad looking, huh? You'll notice that unlike the other sets, I didn't carefully pre-sort out all the pieces by size and shape. I simply sorted by color and left them in big piles like this, in a bid to shave off even more time. I was a bit curious if it would be faster to hunt-and-peck through each pile for the right bricks, or if sorting them was about the same. Given that it took about an hour to sort through the larger sets, I decided to roll the dice here.

The directions informed me there were 184 steps in this set. Not too bad! I sat down, put on my headphones, cranked up some music, and got started.

I finished the first little block just as fast as could be. I was flying! I was so proud of myself. It was a holiday weekend, the morning was bright and sunny, and I was having a grand old time.

The next step was to add a second base square in, and then a third and fourth. I added in the second base and kept on flying through it. And then...I ran out of a white brick in the largest size.

Which is kind of impossible. Each of these sets has extras of all the bricks - quite a few, actually. So I searched through the white pile a couple extra times, and sat there and wondered what was going on. As you know, I have lots of spare bricks from the previous sets, so it would be easy enough to pull the right one out, but this shouldn't be happening.

So I was like, wait a minute. I looked back at the phone directions for the step I was on, and said, hold on, I don’t see the character 白 for white anywhere. Uh oh. I Google Translated the characters that were there and sure enough, 透明 meant transparent.

I had just been going off the colors on the phone screen, and I mean, come on! The bricks looked white! If you scroll up and look at it, don't you think so too?

Anyway.

So, I pulled off all the white bricks, and replaced them with transparent bricks, and hey, what do you know, I had plenty of them.

Alright, alright, so this happens when you don't speak the language. Never fear, I'm back on track!

Dear friends, I was not back on track.

Sometime in all this confusion, I had spun around my little base square around, so when I attached it to the other base squares, I started filling in the top bricks the wrong way around. Luckily, I realized what I was doing after a few steps in, and I didn't have to totally reassemble it like I did with the Not White But Transparent Brick Debacle of early 2024. I just gently disconnected the base squares from each other, turned them around, and kept going.

So! I finished the first layer 1 hour, 46 minutes in. This, of course, includes the one major mistake and the one minor mistake. It's pretty big, isn't it? The other fig sets only had max 2 base squares, so I was pretty excited to see how nice and big this was. The transparent bricks look nice, huh?

I took a bit of a break. Made a little bit of lunch, tidied up a bit, and then came back excited to tackle the next round.

I was paying attention to the names of the brick colors at this point, believe me.

I finished the next layer 2 hours and 54 minutes in. Pretty cool looking, isn't it? It looks like some kind of disk in an alien language. I must admit when I got here, I was both quite happy and also a little concerned. Only layer 2? Still 138 layers to go, and it's been about 3 hours?

Well, no big deal if it took me longer, really. I was having a good time, and there was no actual rush. I will say that at this point, my finger tips were certainly feeling the constant pressing and snapping of the bricks. They had actually toughened up back when I was doing set after set after set, but it had been some time, and my fingertips were back to their usual soft selves.

Luckily for my fingers, I had errands to run and other things to do, so my sore little fingertips got a needed break.

The next morning, I was up and back at it!

The third layer was starting to look like the actual base of the platform from the show. I was pretty excited to finish this layer, I have to say. I took little breaks here and there, but I was pretty determined to make some real progress.

By that evening, I had gotten pretty far. I stopped here at 6 hours and 3 minutes.

I was inordinately pleased by getting to this step. I could see the robes carefully spread out here, just like the show, and their hands out there. There was also a little bit of white where I was starting Lao Wen's new hair color.

You can tell the passage of time by how the light keeps changing in each of these pictures! I always end with the bricks for the step I'm on laid out in front of me, so I always know where I am when I pick the set back up. My memory is just too bad otherwise, I'll forget what I'm doing.

Well, 3-day holiday weekends don't last forever, so I woke up this morning determined to finish this. There was a little bit of race against the clock today, since I had appointments I had to take care of, and I needed to have enough light left to take final pictures. So, I sat down, and started going as fast as I could.

At 7 hours and 6 minutes, I had built up the bodies, and was on to the heads. I hurried through my afternoon errands and got back around 3:10 pm. The sun sets here around 4:20, so I didn't have much time. Tomorrow I get on a plane, so it really was up against the clock! I didn't even put my headphones on this time, I just sat down and focused.

But, it turns out that I didn't need that much time. 45 minutes later, I was done!

Total hours clocked in at 7 hours and 51 minutes. I will tell you, I was indeed flying through this set - all those other fig sets that I made mistakes on definitely helped me. I knew what I was doing, and I went fast. If this had been my first set, or even my second (ok, let's be real, even my third), it would 100% have taken me at least the full 10 hours. It also helped that other than Big Error 1 and Small Error 1, I didn't make any other mistakes.

You can see how many bricks are left (which is why I knew something was up when I ran out of that white brick earlier). I will say that not pre-sorting the bricks is definitely the way to go - it's pretty easy to pick out the right ones, and certainly saves a lot of time just organizing them into piles.

Alright! Let's do some beauty shots, shall we? As you know, the light wasn't super great, but it was good enough!

Oops, I see I need to press down a little on Lao Wen's head to get the bricks firmly squeezed together. I'll admit my aching fingertips were not pressing down super hard at this point!

I really love the 3-D effect of the icicles ringing the platform. This set is just fantastic!

It's a little hard to see A-Xu's luxurious mane of hair here with the black on black, but it's quite nice.

Lao Wen's closed eyes! Please also note the little white underlayer on his robes here at his neck. So cute.

This is a nice angle to see A-Xu's married hair bun (minus one hairpin, of course) and Lao Wen's loop of hair.

This angle is the coup de grâce of this whole set for me. For the longest time, I thought the single bricks was his eyes and the marks down his cheeks were tears, but in reality I think the larger bricks are his eyes, and the smaller bricks are his eyebrows going up in shock and horror. But all I can see are (non canonically accurate) tears free flowing down his cheeks!

I did waste several minutes at the point I was building this just contemplating his face, and I was THIS close to subbing in the light blue for to make tears after all, because (sorry A-Xu) I find it delightfully hilarious. Little Lego tears! I can't even. But, I decided to go with the actual design for this so you could see it (and go back and replace them afterwards).

Ahem. Anyway. This is also a beautiful shot to see Lao Wen's long white hair draping over his shoulders.

More of the snow and icicles all the way around. It looks great.

Seriously, don't you think they look like tears? Right, anyway. This actually isn't a bad angle to admire the modeling on the clothing.

And we're back around. The modeling really is beautiful on this, with their robes carefully spread out behind them and to the sides of them.

Time for some closeups:

Aww, Lao Wen.

Aww, A-Xu, honey.

The bottoms-up angle was really hard to get on this set, since the base was so large.

The top down angle looks great I think. This is actually the first time that I'm noticing they have the scroll underneath them.

Honestly, I'm so impressed with this set. With only 9 colors, and some very basic building block shapes, they did a gorgeous job rendering this scene.

With my last picture, in the last of my fading light, here's my two sets of armory figs re-enacting this scene. The closest set is actually from the New Year's set of of 6 that Qilin helped me buy back in the day, so this really is full circle!

I couldn't quite get my camera to focus on both sets, but you can see the relative size difference at least. It's a big set!

Alright, these are the last of these sets for a while - there's two more sets of two single figures each, but I have not been able to locate them on Xianyu either. I'm ok with it though - this is the last of the big scene sets, and one I really, really wanted. The others are nice but not quite as special as the sets.

Thanks for the figthusiasts friends that have accompanied me on these building block fig posts! They're all quite long, so I appreciate you reading all my thoughts and experiences with these. I absolutely love them - they were a ton of fun, and I only wish I had more! I'd love to enact out the entire series with building block scenes - can you imagine?

Material: Plastic building blocks

Fig Count: 520

Scene Count: 37

Rating: Pure love

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

Goodbye Jianghu

As you can tell from the title, these figs represent some of the last moments of filming for Word of Honor for Gong Jun and Zhang Zhehan.

The inspiration for and the name of this set comes from Zhang Zhehan's Weibo post from March 23, 2021, marking the airing of the final episode of Word of Honor. His post is simply titled, Goodbye Jianghu:

It's such a beautiful picture of Zhehan - walking back in his white immortal A-Xu robes.

I had this picture in mind as the matching photo inspiration of Gong Jun, white haired and ethereal looking:

...but when I went to upload it, this clearly isn't it, after all. Did the fig maker just make a complementary fig to Zhehan's picture? I have no idea? I searched through every pic in my Behind the Scenes photo folder, and I could not come up with a pic that matched this fig. Let me know if you know!

On a side note, I recently bought a little lighted box to take pictures in, so I wouldn't be quite so dependent on the few daylight hours in my photography area. I tried it out with these figs, and we'll see how it goes.

Hmm, there's quite a bit of texture in the backdrop, isn't there? Well, we'll keep going!

Yes, those are some little tears welling up in Zhehan's eyes. Like Zhou Zishu, he is also tough on the outside but soft at heart!

I really, really love that Gong Jun's hand is tucked behind his back in his signature pose. Also, his big chunky white hair bangs are fantastically modeled here.

These figs stand up beautifully. So much so that I didn't put them on stands at all, which is extremely rare for my figs, if only because I like them to generally have a uniform look. But, in this case, I wanted to preserve Zhehan's pose just like this.

The robes help quite a bit in keeping them standing tall.

The slight motion modeled into these figs is great. Not overdone, just enough to make it interesting.

The little hands are adorable.

Aww, this is the clearest shot of the tears in Zhehan's eyes! Don't cry, little fig.

Here's a non-box background set of photos for contrast. In retrospect I probably should have picked a non-white clothed set of figs to try this out, since they're all slightly blending into (whichever) background. The LED light of the photo box is a little golden tinted, I see.

I really like how fig Gong Jun is very correctly wearing his black pants with this costume. I love this level of detail!

You can see them a little better here. Sorry for the reflection of the background underneath their hair, I have no idea how that happened! I see I definitely need to replace this little backdrop in the lightbox.

Zhehan's face is just so sweet in this set!

I love A-Xu's little married hair bun. Both of their hairstyles in the epilogue are A+ for sure.

The art on the boxes are very, very cute. We have the background with Zhehan's Weibo post and what I imagine is the background on the green-screen mountaintop from Gong Jun's pose for this fig. I'll keep looking around for it!

Material: PVC

Fig Count: 518

Scene Count: 36

Rating: 后会有期 - I'm sure we'll meet again someday

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

Longines Han

I missed this fig when it was first sold, but had been keeping my eye out for it for a long time. As far as I can tell, this fig maker only sold this one figure. I'd been waiting for her to sell any remainders (holding out hope that she had some), but when I saw this little guy on Xianyu I had to grab him!

This inspiration for this fig is this picture from Zhehan's appearance on January 4, 2018 for the opening ceremony of the 8th Longines Beijing International Equestrian Masters.

You may recognize this outfit, as it is a much beloved outfit by the fans!

Zhehan looks tall, sleek, and elegant in his riding wear.

I think everyone that follows me knows that I am Team Long Hair for Zhehan, but I admit that he looks amazing no matter how long or short his hair is!

Here's a video of this event. The videographer on this has pretty singular focus, it's true!

The seller I bought this figure from just sold it as is, already stuck to a stand, without the box or any of the cards or anything with it. That's not my favorite, but this fig doesn't come up very often, so I took what I could get. Can't afford to be too picky!

Luckily, he arrived safe and sound. I had the warehouse wrap him in some bubble wrap packaging, and it turned out he was only attached to his standee stand with fig stickers, so it was easy to pull him off. One soapy bath later, all the travel had been washed off of him and he was fresh and clean!

Longines, if you did not know, is a luxury Swiss watch brand. I did not know that (I had mixed it up with Longchamps, the French purse brand). But, this is why he's modeling the watch!

I love his long boots - the fig proportions are so small that even tall boots look tiny (and adorable)!

The fig maker made sure that fig Zhehan filled out his riding breeches just as well as the real Zhehan.

This fig maker is a Junzhe fan, so we have a cute looking Samoyed on the back of Zhehan's jacket!

The short buzz cut is so pebbly looking here! It makes me giggle, it's very cute. It's a smart way to render it - you get all the texture but none of the difficulties (and breakage concerns) of spikes.

As you can see, this fig stands perfectly. The boots may help, but they're not particularly large or anything. It's just a well modeled fig.

Speaking of good modeling, the pose is beautifully done!

The fig maker also did a great job on the shape of the eyes, not to mention the hearts in them. This is really a great fig all the way around.

This is a particularly cute angle of his smiling mouth!

I'm glad to have finally gotten this fig. I wish the fig maker had made more, since she did such a nice job on this one!

One last shot of our short-haired cutie.

And that's all - again, sorry for no box cards or any special bonuses, but happy to have him at all. Actually, I do have a bonus, of a different kind! I'll leave you with this extra picture - of Zhehan for Longines in this gorgeous suit. I love it - he's still looking so tall and slim and elegant, just with a gorgeous velvet blazer and some very cool matching shoes.

Material: Resin

Fig Count: 516

Scene Count: 36

Rating: Dashing!

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

Happy Camp Dolls

There's few things cuter than figs holding dolls! This set in particular is super, super adorable.

The inspiration for this is the interview for Zhang Zhehan and Gong Jun's joint Happy Camp appearance to promote Word of Honor.

They're checking out their character's official Rua 10cm dolls!

These two, I swear. I love everything to do with Happy Camp so much!

...and so does everyone else, based on my entire shelf of Happy Camp figs! And more are still on the way.

These two cuddled their dolls all the way across the ocean, arriving safe and sound.

And here they are! Looking super, super cute. I absolutely love the poses here, with Junjun holding his doll in both hands (like the picture) and Zhehan holding his out in his palms.

I was able to prop up these figs to take the first pics, but there was no way these two were going to be able to stand up on their own. These figs are heavy! Since they are unbalanced they would definitely fall over. They got glued down immediately.

I was trying to think of the best way to say, there's a lot going on with Zhehan's pants, but I can't quite figure it out. I think we need a pic of what Zhehan is wearing.

Ah yes, these ones! I swear they almost look like overalls. Anyway, the fig maker did a great job adding in the extra design elements of these jeans (that's a good way to say it!).

I like the detail in the shoes too, which we now can compare to the full-length pics (sorry they're not better quality).

I will tell you that until these figs, I never realized either of them had anything on the backs of their shirts. In fact, looking at the pictures and various videos I still don't see the image on the back of Gong Jun's shirt except for this one video:

And there it is, sure enough. Ahaha, hearing Junjun mutter, Wo de tian never fails to put a smile on my face!

The slightly stockier "fat body" style is super cute - makes these already adorable figures even more so!

The fig maker did such a nice job here with the tiniest of details, like the colors on the shirts.

I love how they did Zhehan's spiky short hair here!

Too, too cute! I'll get a close up in there of the dolls for you:

The scale on these dolls are tiny. They did a good job making them look like the Rua dolls - I'm impressed they got the detail they did!

These figs look like they should stand up well with those nice wide feet.

Zhehan being a little bit shorter makes him even cuter!

I'm really happy the dolls are attached to their hands and I did not have to try to wrangle the dolls into their hands. Zhehan's doll would have been ok but I do not even want to try to imagine trying to wedge Junjun's doll in his hands.

A+ for these figs! I am just so charmed by them. I have another set of figs with dolls on order, but they are still in production. Still, I'm looking forward to them!

Material: Resin

Fig Count: 515

Scene Count: 36

Rating: The happiest!

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

Coda - Beautiful Fight Scene in the Middle of the Lake

What's this? Yet another post on this fig set? Yes indeed! This is a follow up to Building Block Figs - Beautiful Fight Scene in the Middle of the Lake (Part One and Two). It won't make a lot of sense if you haven't read those first, so if you have time, check those out!

For those of you who have read those posts, you may recall that I wasn't really happy with the original design of the lake raft being blue and green, and that you could see the cream colored base:

So, my plan was that when I finished the rest of my building block figs, I'd see what I could do with the leftover bricks. That time has come!

I pulled this fig set back out and took off the figs. I dismantled the base down to the very beginnings, and counted the bricks for the raft. I compared them to my remaining brown bricks, and it seemed like I would just have barely enough, if I was thoughtful about how I used the sizes.

I seemed to have enough blue bricks to use for the base, so I went ahead and made that, expanding the water to cover all sides.

Part of the base is not blue but brown, so I went ahead and started using what I could. You see that this is all the bricks that are left! I wanted to use black in the raft as well for a little more detail, but I didn't have nearly enough black bricks. I also didn't have enough grey bricks to use for further contrast either.

You can also see I have a few transparent bricks for water splashing. The original design used about 2/3 of them, but I liked the look, and figured the more the merrier! I decided to use all of them. There's not a lot of them anyway - those there you can see are all there are.

As you may recall, the original raft used green for the raft and dark blue for the contrast. Maybe to show the water through the bamboo? I'm not sure. I followed the instructions as carefully as I could, substituting the colors, and then trying to add on more clear bricks towards the elevated top to show the froth of the water as the raft came up out of the water.

I meant to take more progress shots, but I have never been a good multi-tasker. It took all my brain power to figure this out! I had to adjust a little bit for the extended base, translate the colors (which was harder in my brain than it should have been) and I had to conserve brown bricks more than I thought I would have to. It was a little more difficult than I expected, but I'm really happy with it! As you can see, I did in fact, go to town with the transparent bricks. I added on some water drips that were most definitely not in the original design.

Here's another view. I really had liked the horizontal lines going through the raft in the original, but I didn't have enough grey bricks in the right shapes to add them. I'm hoping when the next sets arrive that I'll have enough to add them in. In the meantime, I still like this better.

I'll let you be the judge!

I did pull off one of the two cream colored bases (I was like, why did I have two stacked up on each other?), but I realize now it's to elevate the back of the raft up a bit more off the ground. I'm going to put it back.

You can really see where I went to down on the water droplets here. Too much? Maybe! I still kind of like it.

Yeah, having another base underneath won't be visible but will give the elevation back for sure.

The raft is fairly stable - in one area I only had small brown bricks, so it's a little weaker in that area. I tried to reinforce it as much as possible, but rough treatment would probably make one of those back brown pieces fall off. However, this is going right into my fig case, so that's not a concern.

Oops, looks like I need to push down that right side there a bit in the water.

This is really such a cute set. I continue to be charmed by their flying hair!

Ahh, a little more of the water effect! I'm really very pleased with it. Hmm, I also see I'll be pressing down a little bit on that upraised blue brick there in the middle.

You're definitely getting a little more fig detail in these second round of shots!

The transparent bits don't look too overdone from this angle, I think.

Hobo-Xu's goatee here continues to make me giggle. It's so funny!

Oh, I really like the transparent bricks.

Here's the revised underside. Luckily I had a bunch of those long dark blue bricks left.

As you can see, the raft is a little plain now. Which I think is ok, since it puts the attention on the figs themselves. Still, I think it'll be nicer when I finally do revise it a bit with the lateral grey pieces.

Alright, I think 3 posts for one fig set is enough! Thank you for hanging in there with me on this building brick adventure. I'm really looking forward to the next set I get. Unfortunately, it'll just be one...the other two I had ordered off Xianyu both fell through. I'll keep looking though - eventually someone will sell them.

No updated fig counts on this, since this is just a do-over, but if anyone wants to see non-brick figs, the master index is here.

[fourseasonsfigs]

Chulian on Lake

For today's fig post we have this amazing set - that lights up!

This complex and beautiful set features Zhang Zhehan's lotus spirit Qing Lian (aka Xiao-Zhe) from his advertisement for Jade Dynasty: New Fantasy, together with Gong Jun's Dong Fang Yuechu from the upcoming drama Fox Spirit Matchmaker: Yue Hong.

First, just a few pictures of our ethereal lotus fairy:

And a few pictures of our stunning Daoist priest:

That last one in particular is the inspiration for this fig here.

This set arrived in an enormous, fairly heavy box. I had to ship this air mail because of the electronics involved in it.

I was a little worried about how big and delicate this set was, but it arrived in perfect shape. Full credit to the fig maker and the factory for cushioning it so well.

Here's all the pieces. I still think it's incredible all the fragile flowers and stems make it through.

You can see here the little tiny holes (up at the top by the edges) where you can insert the lotus leaves and flowers. They went in quite easily and were very stable.

Here's a close up of the electronics. The set came with both batteries and a USB cord. The button there turns on the lake light.

Here's the lake by itself, before the figs go in. As you can see, Yuechu stands in the boat via peg legs. Very seaworthy of him! Qing Lian just lays down however you like inside the lotus.

Before we put the figs into their respective conveyances, here's a closeup of them. Qing Lian is all curled up and sleepy eyed, and Yuechu is casting a magical fireball of some sorts.

I could only really get two angles of the figs before they went into the lake, since neither of them stand by themselves.

This was a very difficult set to get good pictures of. One, because I lack any real photography skills, and my phone kept hyperfocusing on certain parts and blurring out the rest. But, as we go around the fig, you do end up seeing the whole thing. So please bear with me!

Beautiful, isn't it? I love how detailed these figures are - their hair is amazing.

Here's a top-down view. Yuechu fits in the boat beautifully - the pegs went right in, and he's pretty secure in there. No glue needed. Xiao Zhe is resting peacefully and easily in his lotus.

We'll do a couple closeups here. He's quite tiny all curled up like that!

Huh. Is Yuechu conjuring up Qing Lian? It looks like we have a lotus in the middle of that magic. I'm not sure!

Our lotus lake at midnight! It does in fact light up like a dream. I just went ahead and plugged the USB cord in the wall, so it's a little less beautiful than it would be cordless with the batteries. Still, it's very lovely.

The fig maker included a double-sided postcard, a matching keychain with the art, the batteries, and the USB cord (that I had already plugged in).

I really appreciate how she included both. This is her first set, and I hope she makes more!

Material: Resin

Fig Count: 513

Scene Count: 36

Rating: Luminous!

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

Xu Si is Rising with the Wind (Hand crafted)

I was really hoping by the time I started posting Xu Si figs that I would have made some progress in watching Rising with the Wind, but I have had exactly zero time lately to watch TV. It is definitely next up though! If you love Gong Jun in suits (and I do), it definitely seems like a show to watch.

So far I've just been getting my Xu Si in suits fix from Tumblr posts across my feed, and I've been thoroughly enjoying it.

This fig was inspired by Gong Jun's November 17, 2023 photo he posted on Weibo from a promotional event for Rising with the Wind:

Love the long blue overcoat! He looks so good.

My favorite ultra-light clay artist also loves Gong Jun in suits, so she designed this little guy to celebrate his show. I snapped it right up off her storefront, and in no time at all he was heading his way to me.

She always packages her figures very carefully. The ultralight clay is remarkably tough, but she avoids crushing damage but putting her figs in well-padded plastic boxes.

And here he is! Looking downright dapper, if you ask me.

The pose on this fig is fantastic. It's so casually elegant and confident.

His hair looks fantastic here. What a fabulous swoop! Please also note the watch detail! I love it.

Hmm, my camera seems to have focused on the base here and not the fig. Well, his hair still looks magnificent, even from this angle.

We don't get a back view of Gong Jun in that one photo, but fig makers scour all available pics from all different angles to get every detail right!

His little feet are so cute.

I like the details of the break in the trousers here.

She did a great job of the proportions of the suit - the right length on the overcoat and the suit underneath. Keeps the chibi proportions while still looking quite elegant.

It's always a little difficult to get bottoms-up angles when there's stands, but thank goodness there IS a stand. I really like how she always builds the fig into a stand.

I have a few extreme closeups for you - a good one here of the painting of his face, and of course the watch detail.

A good front view of the suit and tie - the tiny details here are so well done. She has a very steady hand!

More of that magnificent sweep of gorgeous black hair.

I'm so glad she was inspired by this show to make this fig. I definitely need to watch it.

Material: Ultra-light clay

Fig Count: 511

Scene Count: 35

Rating:

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

Warm Winter Clothes

Following up yesterday's New Year's figure, we have another New Year's figure!

Today's Wen Kexing happens to come from the exact same scene as yesterday's - the paper hanging party in Episode 28. This version, however, is properly wearing his fur-collared overcoat. I like this overcoat (as does everyone else, I think) because it matches the winter vibe of A-Xu's fur overcoat. A-Xu's blue outfit and overcoat gets a lot of screen time - it still remains a tremendous pity that this one only gets one scene.

But the scene is a wonderful one, so I can't complain (too much!).

This version of Lao Wen is holding a plateful of melon seeds out for his beloved A-Xu to snack on. You can tell he's offering these seeds to A-Xu because of the hearts in his eyes!

As you can see, the plate required what appeared to be minimal assembly. Just drop the plate (gently) onto those grooves on his open hands, and done, right?

I mean, more or less. I think I was expecting the plate to sit in his hands and stay in his hands. Instead, the slippery little thing eeled out every time I turned around. And even when I didn't turn around! I tried sticking it with putty at first, and then when I found the plate mysteriously lying on the shelf next to him, I called it quits and glued that thing down. It isn't going anywhere now!

He is super cute. He's made by one of my all time favorite fig makers. All her little guys have so much personality.

You can see the challenge here with the angle that the plate is at, right? No surprise it kept wanting to slide downwards.

I like how they designed the fabric detailing. Just enough to be beautiful but not too much to overwhelm the fig or distract from the overall presentation.

Little bit of paint overspray on the hairpin there, but since this hairpin is fixed and didn't require any assembly (and didn't break during shipping), I can't say I mind! I think it's really hard to avoid overspray from the black hair on the white hairpin when it's all one piece like this.

As you can see, he stands beautifully, with the help of his robe. No glue needed here.

The plate angle looks even steeper from this side!

He has the cutest little expression on his face - a very Wen Kexing expression, I must say.

You can see here how the fur detail on his robe was mostly painted on - no texture or too much in the way of modeling. I think it would be quite difficult or expensive (in the case of flocking, say) to do so. I think he looks great though, I don't mind the painted look at all, and the beaded chain is done gorgeously, with no paint overspray at all. I love him.

Hmm, I guess I considered the first pic my bottoms-up pic when I was taking pictures, so I didn't take another one. We'll just skip to the top down set.

I was going to say those seem like fairly large melon seeds, but compared to the size of fig heads, they're just about right!

Just the normal Wen Kexing loop of hair here and his iconic hairpin.

We have our gorgeous two-sided box card art here. Just a plain box, but these beautifully designed cards.

Material: Resin

Fig Count: 510

Scene Count: 35

Rating: Warm and as gentle as jade!

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

New Year Paper Decorations

Happy New Year from Siji Manor! Lao Wen is busy (with Chengling's help) decorating with beautiful paper cut outs. After all, he bought a whole basket of them - enough for every room!

I've had this little guy for a while, but today seemed like the right day to have him show off his big beautiful decoration.

The inspiration for this scene, of course, is the paper decorating party midway through episode 28, where Lao Wen does start off pasting paper decorations...

...but then rapidly abandons it to eat seeds with A-Xu and flirt with him.

Chengling is having fun with the paper decorations though - it's delightful. I love the whole Siji Manor arc so much.

I was a little worried Lao Wen wouldn't arrive with his paper cutout intact - it's fragile resin and the decoration is quite delicate. Luckily, however, he arrived perfectly.

The decoration is a beautifully done replica - here's a shot of the lucky fish from the show:

Pretty spot on!

As you can tell by the fact that he's on a fig stand, this little guy could not stand up on his own. It's a shame, since his feet are slightly larger-than-average boots, and he ought to be a very stable figure. But, he wasn't, and I wasn't going to risk any falls with that delicate ornament.

His chubby little arm is SO CUTE. I know I say I love all my figs, but this one is so cute!

You'll notice though that he is wearing just his robes, without his heavy fur overcoat. Which is not quite accurate to the scene, since this is in fact the only scene which we see this gorgeous overcoat. The rest of the New Years scenes feature him cooking (and eating) without it. Which is a real shame - if you ask me, the overcoat did NOT get it's due screentime.

The overcoat could theoretically be hard to render in fig form, although you'll see in the next post it wasn't that hard. But! I'm not here to quibble about cute figs, and frankly he does wear this outfit most of the time without the overcoat.

I had forgotten he was wearing his hairpin in this scene. I have a decently good (although nowhere near 100%) track record with hairpins arriving unbroken, and luckily, this fig added to the positive tally.

I like that the fig maker continued the belt detail all the way through the back, it looks great.

His face is super cute, with his open laughing mouth! I love him, he's adorable.

You can see the fig maker matched the lucky fish in his eyes, along with the same green of his outfit. This could have been a color combo that didn't work, but I think it looks wonderful.

The detail on this fig is nicely done, with the paint neat and clean.

You can see how nice and broad those boots are - pity about him tipping over so easily. I will note I laid this fig down to take pictures extremely gently.

Little bit of overspray on the hairpin, but that's because it's not removable, it's just part of the fig. Harder to have clean paint lines that way. Also thankfully, the decoration he is holding arrived just like that, and is also not removable. I am so grateful - I would have been terrified I would have broken it if I had to assemble it into his hands.

The hairpin really looks good overall - the overspray is really barely noticeable on the fig itself. The camera just brings it into sharp relief.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope 2024 brings health, happiness, and prosperity to all.

Material: Resin

Fig Count: 509

Scene Count: 35

Rating: This year will be a good year!

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

Building Block Figs - Two Devils

Following up on the last few days of building block fig posts, this is the last kit that I have to post about. I have three more incoming, but they won't arrive for at least a month, if that.

I actually started on these figs a while ago - they were the second set I started to make, after my first kit of Beautiful Fight Scene in the Middle of the Lake. That one was so involved that I figured I'd relax a little on an easy set before tackling the next scene.

Ahahaha. Little did I know.

First, I had such a big problem with this set that I originally wasn't sure I was going to buy it. The full, long name of this set is: Ghost Valley Valley Master and Tianchuang Leader. Great, love it, right? Always a fan. Except, this was the picture:

Right, you see the problem. Valley Master Wen is all dressed in his Episode 1 red finery, but our Tianchuang Leader definitely is not dressed in his midnight-hued civil servant assassin best. Why on earth would Zhou Zishu be in white? This is not "Rescue from Tianchuang Jail" A-Xu (although I kinda wish it was, that would be great).

Also, less egregious but still not great is the fact that Zhou Zishu's hair is Jianghu-styled half down, and that Baiyi has a cross-guard. This whole fig is just not working for me!

But, as you can tell (and as you would already have suspected anyway), I bought it, and just planned somehow to figure out a solution to change up the entire fig.

Somehow. I had no actual idea how to do it, but I felt confident I would somehow figure it out. So confident, that I even went ahead and put together Valley Master Wen first.

He, at least, was not going to require changing. The only thing I'd change up with him is to give him a gold guan instead of his hairpin, but I used up all my extra yellow bricks on the Catching Light fig, so I was out of luck. That's alright, I don't mind this one so much. The Valley Master would wear his hairpin at times, that makes sense.

Oh, I should say, in comparison to the other building block sets, these two together totaled 856 bricks - 424 for Wen Kexing and 432 for Zhou Zishu. The figs stand 4.4 x 5.2 x 10.2 cm and 5.2 x 5.6 x 10.2 cm respectively, and each one is rated 2 hours to complete. Like all of these kits, the time to complete is pretty right on, if you follow the directions.

The two figures came together in a set. I wouldn't have minded if they split up the two figures in two different bags, but nope, they're all mingled in there together!

Here's a sample progress pic:

This one wasn't too bad - it's always a little harder for the ones that are mostly one color, since it makes it easy to miscount as the colors all blend together. But, I didn't make any mistakes and it went pretty smoothly.

I finished the body and moved on to the face. They have you do the fig in pieces, and then put it all together at the end. You can tell the passage of time from the quality of the light in these photos, but I pretty much finished this one over the course of a day and an evening.

I had to laugh as I saw his red cheeks/eyeliner. Very cute!

And here he is! Photographed at a rakish angle, as well. He looks great!

While I was at it, I decided to click through the directions for Zhou Zishu, and see if I could figure out any ideas in advance of working on the fig. By this time, even one (and a half) sets in, I could see that they had provided lots of extra bricks, so the idea that was starting to half-bake in my head was that I would have enough bricks at the very end of all my kits to do something instead of the white.

While clicking though, I realized that I could skip the body part and do the head, which would help use up some of the necessary bricks. So the head it was! That way, I would really only have leftover bricks at the end.

That I got done very quickly. It wasn't bad at all! And, the best thing was that this head didn't have any long hair attached to it. So, I could just ignore the long hair when building the body, and use the head as is. Things were looking up!

I mean, Valley Master Wen looks horrified, but don't worry Lao Wen, he'll get better.

I set aside these two, and went on to the rest of the sets.

That brings us to this morning. I woke up, pulled out my SHL reference book, sat down with all the brick remainders, and figured out, I think, a pretty good plan of attack.

Technically, all his clothes are midnight shades of blue and wine, but those are not colors I had available, sadly.

I had a lot of black bricks left over since I wasn't doing the half-long hairstyle, and plus extras from the other sets. That being said, there wasn't a ton of the smaller sized bricks in black. Also, I didn't really want a fig that was black on black on black, and technically his robes are that deep midnight blue anyway. The biggest problem with that was that I didn't have enough of the darkest blue bricks. Or really any of the blue bricks, and of course going lighter would get us right back to a non-canon compliant fig. So, I decided to try and do his cloak and body with as much of the black bricks as possible, and try to use the blue ones as judiciously as I could, in the hopes of stretching them far enough.

I'm a little annoyed at myself I didn't take a pic of all the remaining bricks left so you could see what I was working with, but at least here you can see the start of the fig and the remaining black bricks left. You can also see where I started off making the interior white, to try and use as few black or blue bricks as possible. My plan was to make the cloak as enveloping as possible in order to use the least number of blue pieces.

You can see here how very few blue pieces there are left, and how far I have to go. You can also see here how I started changing up Baiyi, to make the hilt dark grey vs. the neon orange.

I will note at this point I was about two hours in on the body, which sounds ridiculous, but let me assure you, it gets worse. I stopped here for lunch, and then came back ready to finish this up.

Unfortunately for me, though, this is where I started to get into real trouble. I was changing up the sword, the top hand position (inadvertently, since I got rid of the cross-guard), I was trying to make the cape wrap around the front robes, ignore the directions for the long hair in the back and therefore revise the back (which is half hair). And I had no idea what I was doing with any of it, other than to desperately stretch out my remaining dark blue pieces. For each blue piece I did use, I was trying to figure out if I'd be better off using a bigger piece, or multiple smaller pieces, or if I might need those exact configurations later.

Basically, I was doing way too much off script, and didn't have the skills to back it up. The directions at this point were almost useless.

You can see how the step I was theoretically on looked nothing like the fig I was trying to make!

I must have reworked this piece here three different times. It doesn't help that the arms are asymmetrical, which only complicated something that I really didn't need to be any more complicated.

The biggest problem, of course, was that I was just way out of my depth, and kept making mistakes that I would have to go back and fix. And unfortunately, I have extremely poor visual short term memory, so when I disconnected a piece to fix a mistake or replace a brick, I couldn't remember how to reconnect it. And since I was so far off book with the instructions, I couldn't use that to help. I just had to figure it out new each time.

It was pretty rough going, I'm not going to lie.

Somewhere in this I ditched the two-brick configuration for Baiyi and made it into the slimmest, whippiest, greyest version I could.

At this point, those were all the blue bricks remaining, and I was critically short just a few pieces. So, I went to the lake raft set from Beautiful Fight Scene in the Middle of the Lake, which I'm going to re-work next to make the raft brown vs. blue and green. I pillaged a few dark blue bricks from the raft in advance of.

Finally, after three (more) hours, I was done! I couldn't almost believe it. Very happily, I started to take some pics.

And that's when I noticed that Zhou Zishu was actually taller than Wen Kexing. I was like, wait a minute. How is this possible?

It was possible.

At this point, I was really, really tempted to just say, you know what, it's good enough. Clean up the bricks and move on with life. But the bricks were still out, and I just couldn't let it go. After all this time, working so hard? No way.

I figured here the easy way out was to extend Wen Kexing's legs. Gong Jun is all legs anyway, so it would work.

I didn't take any pictures of this, because at this point I was losing the will to live, but basically not only did I extend his legs, I ended up extending the train of his robes just a little bit. Just to make it a little more like the show! I had plenty of red bricks, so this was actually fairly straightforward.

So NOW it was done. Unlike this extremely long blog post. Picture time it was!

You can see he's quite a bit taller now.

Don't judge my fig-designing skills too harshly, please! I was struggling. Desperately.

This is actually the first time I am really looking at them since I finished, so I'm curious about this too.

Oops, I see in my fugue state I knocked a little tendril of the Valley Master's hair off kilter. I'll have to fix that.

Ah ha, I did fix it! I have to say I really love how we have Wen Kexing's hand behind his back here - love this modelling. This is a good angle to see the train here - I just added that last two rows, nothing special.

Hmm, I guess I should have done a straight box down at the back for Zhou Zishu's cape, vs. trying to shape the shoulders and arms from where he's holding the sword. There isn't a ton of black bricks left, but I might go back and see if I can streamline it some.

Ok, this doesn't look too bad from this angle. I could have curved his bottom back part of his hair a bit more, but I suppose it can be the braid in back.

Well, Baiyi looks good!

Finally, I remembered to take a good bottoms-up pic for these building brick figs!

And the top here. Oh, I forgot to mention I had changed up Zhou Zishu's hair tie too - it was originally light grey and light blue, but I made it light and dark grey.

Alright, I'm at 30 pics, so there we have it. Clearly not the best, and there's still clean up work to be done, but I'm pretty happy how he turned out, considering everything. At least he's not wearing white robes.

In conclusion, I will not be giving up my day job for a brick designer job, that's for sure.

Well! Thanks for tagging along with me through brick festivities! I am looking forward to the next sets coming - they look wonderful. And best of all, I don't think I'll have to change a single thing on them!

Material: Plastic bricks

Fig Count: 508

Scene Count: 35

Rating: 8 hours of build time

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

Building Block Figs - Catching Light

Continuing on from the last Building Block Figs - Basking in the Sun and Building Block Figs - Beautiful Fight Scene in the Middle of the Lake, Part 1 and Part 2, we have this wonderful set.

These figs make me laugh - I love them so much! I don't know why, I just find them ridiculously charming.

This building block set is 1,544 pieces, measures 8.4 x 17.6 x 15.6 cm, and is rated 10 hours. I did indeed take all 10 hours to build this, if not a little bit more.

Here is the sales pic of what the finished product is supposed to look like:

Cute, isn't it? As usual, sellers do a much better job of setting the scene than I do. I will say, though, that I did make two little tweaks to the set to make it a bit more canon compliant. Can you spot them?

It'll be easier to tell as we get better pictures, so I'll get into it!

First, here's the box of doom bricks. Like the others, this came in a generic sales box, with a super handy little unsnapping tool, and a sticker with a black and white image of the set and QR code instructions.

Once again, you'll notice my line up of extra bricks from the previous sets hanging out in quasi-neat little rows. Originally I figured I'll leave them all out in case I ran short of any, but in reality, this set maker gives me extras of each color every time. Which is handy, as you will see for later posts, when I make some adjustments to the fig sets to make them a bit more canon compliant.

As you can see, there's a LOT of extra bricks left over. To be honest, there shouldn't be so many white bricks - those are from another set that I made a major change to. I'll post about that one tomorrow.

Here's the different order of assembly - I went ahead and started with the base and tree, as they suggest.

As you can see, this is a very beautiful terrain here. I did not remember this area being so green and flowery from the show - in fact, I remember it being kind of sandy and desolate, but my memory is pretty lousy, there might be a scattered flower or so. Let's check.

HUH. There is not a flower in sight, is there. Hmmm. Well, this is kind of gonna bother me. Maybe I should have looked up the inspiration before putting together the entire 10 hour plus set, huh! Well, the little flowers are easy enough to lever off.

Hmm, anyway, moving on (for now).

So a couple things here. First, as you can see, there are only two green colors. I mean, one normal color really - the light green here is actually a neon green. It's brighter than it looks here. It looks great here, don't get me wrong, but now all I can see is the very sandy terrain of that screenshot.

Second, I tried something a little different here. It actually takes a long time to sort all the individual bricks, so in an attempt to shave off some time, I decided to experiment with this set. As you can see, I dumped the entire bag out to the right and am just picking out individual pieces as I go.

You'll note it's now evening. This tree took a LONG time to build. I actually timed myself up to this point, and to get to this mostly-done state took 2 hours and 58 minutes. I was pushing hard, too, because I really, really wanted to get the whole tree done that evening before I went to bed. But there was no way. I was too tired and was hitting the point where it was less fun and more work. So, despite really not wanting to, I summoned my inner adult and called it a day here.

Fast forward through time to the next day, and I'm all bright eyed and ready to bust this tree out. And it's done! I like this tree a whole lot...I think they did a beautiful job modeling it. Imagine if they had the full Lego suite of colors and special pieces! It would be really something. I kind of like it this way though (although I would take more colors, I can't lie). It really has an old-school style charm.

You can see the grey rock there where Lao Wen will be propped up against. And of course, the cheerful greenery and pink and yellow flowers.

Feeling VERY accomplished, I put the tree aside, and moved on to A-Xu.

Yep, looks pretty good. I was a little surprised they picked the medium blue color instead of the dark blue color, considering how bright the dark blue color actually is. But this looks fine too.

I am going to proudly say that I did, in fact, knock this fig out in record time. I've put together two and a half A-Xu figs by now (the half is going to be explained tomorrow, I promise!), so this third one went like a breeze.

As you can see in the back, I couldn't help myself, I was starting to make a few little piles of the colors I was working on. The big messy pile of bricks was kind of a pain, and I had to keep resisting the urge to sort them out.

And here he is! All done. He has a very solemn no-expression on his little brick face, which is appropriate. Can you see how there's a little bit of a neck (nothing too saucy or anything), the thin white layer of his under-robe, and then the lighter blue layer? I love it. Very charming. We also have his black belt with a bit of the tails.

It was yet another evening by this time, but since I did manage to finish him before I went to bed, I did indeed sleep the sleep of the righteous.

I woke up even brighter eyed and with pep in my step, ready to rock this last fig out. 10 hour assembly time? I don't think so!

I had now made three Wen Kexing brick figures, so the fourth one was gonna be just as quick as A-Xu was, no doubt. I pulled up the instructions on my phone, and got ready to go. 95 steps for our battle-weary Valley Master, huh? Huh. That's kind of a lot. But considering A-Xu was 85, not too bad. The tree was 119, by the way.

As I looked at the picture, however, I noticed that they had Lao Wen's (virtually) omnipresent hair wispies here. Given that this red wedding costume is the one outfit where his hair is pulled back all the way, it kind of bugged me. Which is funny because I've never liked how he doesn't have the wispies with this hair style on the show. It's my least favorite look on him, which is too bad, because I did like how they at least mixed his hairstyles up some. In my defense, I feel like I'm right (so right!) about how much better he looks with the wispies with this hair style, because you could see it at the concert. And he looked spectacular.

Anyway. Warring between my extreme desire for him to have the wispies and the simple fact of it not being canon, I started to build.

I got the first big chunk done very quickly indeed. Many of these figs are done where you do a big piece, and then set it aside while you work separately on the next piece. This is where I was.

And that's where I stayed, for a long time. I built this piece three times. I had to completely disassemble the entire thing the first time I built it, because I was off on my brick count, and the second time I had to disassemble it down to the first third.

Part of the problem was the way the directions were. As you can see, they still have the first "set it aside" part showing up on the directions directly under the new piece. Unfortunately, all that red blended into each other when I rotated the image around, and it was very easy to accidentally think I needed more or less pieces than I actually did.

I went ahead and built it with the wispies, as directed...and then just couldn't do it. I disassembled half the head and re-built it again without them. I also think that this fig, just like Lao Wen, does not look as good without them, but canon is canon.

Unfortunately, it was so late and I was so tired by the time I finished him (and yet also pretty jubilant), that I forgot to take a pic of the finished fig! Yes, I literally finished this set late last night, despite my best intentions of finishing it up and then triumphantly posting about it on the same day. It did, in fact, take longer than the 10 hours build time.

It took a long time, in general. My finger tips have actually toughened up a bit, so they don't feel sore from snapping the bricks in place, but my neck isn't all that pleased with me from hunching over these various sets for so long. So, I've been taking a few more breaks to stretch and do other things.

But, I woke up early today, and very happily took this set's beauty pics in the clear light of the morning. I love it!

I love how this set all fits together. We have the tree growing over the edge of the base, and Lao Wen there leaning up against the rock. A-Xu is standing with his elegant posture, and their little brick hands are reaching out to each other. Cute cute cute!

Wow, this light is great. I clearly should get up early to take fig pics more often.

The tree looks great, I think (and not just because I spent hours building it!).

This is a good view of the rocks behind Lao Wen here, and his big ponytail (I do like this part of his hairstyle).

The green doesn't look so bad on the ground, I think. I'll pull off the yellow and pink flowers, and maybe make a brown patch on the corner closest to A-Xu. That'll keep it colorful but make it a bit more like the show.

A-Xu's hair looks great, as usual. You can also see how I removed the wispies on Lao Wen's hair. I'll get a close up later so you can see it better.

Shoot, not my best pic - can't really see any of the detail on A-Xu's glorious night-black hair.

There we go, now you can. Oops, I see I knocked a tiny piece out of kilter on the bottom of his hair, I'll have to fix that. But! Here you can see both changes I made from the instructions - the lack of wispies of course, and then I made Lao Wen's guan gold instead of white. This took a while too, because I didn't have enough yellow pieces. The only yellow I had from any of the sets was literally from the yellow flowers here and the few extra they gave me of it. I actually pulled a few yellow flowers off the base there and replaced them with green or pink, just because I needed them for his guan. I then also carefully checked to see what internal yellow bricks were covered up by the black of his hair, and replaced them with black so I could save the yellow ones for the parts that did show. I'm very happy with how it turned out! It looks just like the white one, except, you know, yellow.

I don't know why they didn't originally design it with yellow, given that it is gold on the show, and they had already included yellow bricks with this kit. Maybe they felt the white stood out more or something. Anyway, it was bothering me it was white, so I'm glad I was able to figure out a way to make it work.

Alright, we're back around! And a bit of a different angle here, so you can see the poses a little bit more clearly.

Alright, a true top-down pic here. May I just say one more time how much I like this tree! The detail in A-Xu's guan is really nice too.

The bottoms-up pics are always tough here with the bases. Not a flattering picture, sorry A-Xu!

A close up of our noble shixiong with his little hand outstretched...

...and our weary shidi. What a great set, I love it! I'm so delighted by it, I can't even tell you.

Alright! come back tomorrow, for the much hinted at next set. And the last one, for a while - I have to wait for the remaining sets to be sent to me.

(Come back tomorrow, she says, as she still has some assembly on the last fig to do! I'll wake up bright and early tomorrow, and hopefully finish up).

Material: Plastic bricks

Fig Count: 506

Scene Count: 35

Rating: They're actually both reaching for their light

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

Building Block Figs - Basking in the Sun

Following up on yesterday's Beautiful Fight Scene in the Middle of the Lake Part One and Two, we have another building block set!

I won't go into all the backstory on these sets (please refer to Part One for a lengthy story), if only to keep this at one post instead of another two-parter.

The name of this set is actually just "Tavern". This inspiration for this scene is actually my favorite scene in the show. It's the Basking in the Sun scene from Episode 12, where they are drinking in front of the tavern and talking about good and bad people. Wen Kexing has my favorite line: "I just feel, that to be alive, to have the sun shining, and having someone’s name for me to call, is so good".

Both A-Xu and I agree, he's right.

Before we get started, a few specs: this set is 1,726 pieces, measures 8.4 x 16.8 x 12.8 cm, and is rated 11 hours of assembly time. This is the longest rating out of any of them, with two others clocking in at 10 hours each. I will say that I have found their assembly times to be extremely accurate.

Here's what the finished model is expected to look like, along with the directions for each piece. As you can see, we have both figs, the tavern table, the (open) door behind A-Xu, and a lantern.

Once more into the breach! The kit looks so small and innocent there in it's box, doesn't it? It doesn't look like 11 hours at all.

Like yesterday's set, this comes with the small black utility tool, the sticker with the tiny image of the finished set, and the QR code for the directions.

You'll notice there's already quite a few bricks sorted behind the unopened box. Those are all the left overs from my previous projects in this line. I didn't want to waste all the time I had put into sorting the bricks, and since the color palette is so limited, I end up using the same ones over and over again.

It really doesn't look that bad, huh?

In order to encourage myself and give myself a sense of satisfaction from completing a piece, I skipped over the figs and went straight to the easiest component - the lantern.

It was indeed quite satisfying to finish this up and put it to the side.

Next up is the tavern door. I admit when I saw this I was a little confused - I know A-Xu was leaning up against a pole kind of thingy, but the background with the flags didn't really register to me. So, I went back and watched the scene again, this time for the background:

It looks pretty good!

It was a lot of building up. As I mentioned in the last post, they don't have thicker bricks, so it's all 1-ply bricks here.

Looks good! I like how they have one of the doors open.

Well, at this point I could no longer put off the main part of the set. Nor did I want to - I was excited to get into it.

Onwards and upwards!

I'll save you the bulk of the gory assembly details, but here's a shot of my counter with all the sorted bricks all lined up, along with the base that I have just started working on. You can see what I mean about the limited size and color palette. By limited I don't mean as a criticism, it's just what we have available to work with. 3 different colors of blue, 3 different colors of grey, and then pretty much just one of each other color.

As you may recall from the last post, here's a sample of the directions from one of the sets. It looks flat and 2-D here, but I can pinch and swipe my phone's screen to rotate completely around to see from all angles. You can also see the step's bricks listed there, along with the left arrow to go back if you need to check your previous work, and the circle with the number of how many steps you have left. As you can see, I'm pretty far from the end.

Here's my progress that matches the corresponding direction. I haven't gotten very far, here!

It's been funny for me to watch the progress of light and shadow across these pics - you can literally see time passing with the day going into the night!

At this point, I had finished the base, was well as the bottom robes of A-Xu and Lao Wen. You can see the steps behind A-Xu, and the table they are both leaning on.

Last progress pic (a couple days later). Now you can really start to see the figs take shape!

Here's a little bit of a better illustration of how I can rotate the instructional image to see different areas. Only 46 more steps here to go!

And here's the final assembled piece. I love it!

The way they modeled the poses are just excellent. We have Lao Wen's relaxed sprawl here, and A-Xu's equally relaxed pose on the stairs.

A little peek through the open door.

You'll notice that A-Xu's drinking gourd here is a pretty neon shade of orange, and that one of the dishes on the table is a similarly neon shade of green. This is again due to the limited color palette - there's no light brown or light green in this world.

Their hair is not as dramatic in this scene as it is in the fight scene from yesterday, but that makes sense, they're just basking in the sun. I still love it - we have A-Xu's multicolored guan and Lao Wen's silver guan rendered in tiny brick form.

They decided to show exactly how happy A-Xu is here by giving him a big smile! The same neon orange color as the gourd, unfortunately.

You can see here the way they have rendered the robe's drapery. And Lao Wen's little black boot there.

A full view of A-Xu's big orange smile! I could remove it if I wanted - as you saw, I have plenty of leftover bricks. I could take the orange off all together (which I think I will) or just leave on a little bit for his cheeks.

Here's the official Basking in the Sun figs to show the size up against these figs. This set is quite a bit bigger, but still not too bad, space wise.

Let's get a couple close-ups of our main stars...

A-Xu's smile is so funny! You can also see his bangs here, which I really like, and a little more detail on his robe. I think they did a fantastic job on the robes in general. Very evocative of the show.

Here's a top down view, with a particularly nice view of the hair crowns.

Ah ha! I was able to squeeze in one last picture before I hit the 30-pic limit. Here's our bottoms up pic - not very good I know. It's hard to do these ones with the bases.

In closing, I will say that when I told my husband I was putting together the "Tavern" scene set of building blocks, he got a puzzled look on his face and said, "which tavern? weren't they at taverns for like half the show?"

Fair. Very fair!

Material: Plastic building blocks

Fig Count: 504

Scene Count: 34

Rating: Let's drink!

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

Building Block Figs - Beautiful Fight Scene in the Middle of the Lake (Part 2)

Following up on yesterday's long post, today I am finally showing off the actual assembled pics of these figs!

You may have also noticed I have renamed these two posts, to be the actual (very long) MTL name from the original sales listing. I think of this scene as the "Bedema Lake" scene from the original fan fig that was sold with this name. A sharp eyed friend of mine told me today that the MTL for "Bedema Lake" is less likely to refer to an actual location, and more likely a clever reference to the Word of Honor Concert. 贝德玛, which Google renders as "Bedema" is Bèi dé mǎ, the Chinese transliteration for Bioderma, the French micellar water makeup remover (which is in my cabinet right at this moment, actually, it's great stuff!). One of the MCs during the concert made a joke about the lake scene being a "makeup remover lake" because it took off Zhou Zishu's mask. Here I was thinking all this time it was the actual name of the lake! I had to laugh. I have learned a lot writing this blog, let me tell you.

Anyway!

Now that the whole set was assembled, I played around with the different poses with the figs, from the original pose listed in the instructions sheet:

(note, the MTL here for the title is "Bamboo Raft Play in the Middle of the Lake" which is also very descriptive and 100% accurate).

Here's my finished rendition:

Oops, I see I should have scootched A-Xu one row forward. Well, that's ok, because I took him off to place him in a different pose, which is beautifully showed off in this gorgeous sales pic:

This is super nice. One day I aspire to have nice fig photos like this!

I actually like this pose a lot, I see why they picked it. It's not exactly accurate to the show, but it really shows them off to their best detail.

Last pose is this one, which is from Episode 6:

I like this one a lot - the original Bedema Lake fig was this exact pose. Here's my rendition:

I feel like there's not quite enough real estate on the raft for this pose, and unfortunately you don't get both cute faces at once like on pose number 2.

Well, let's go ahead and spin around the fig so you can get all angles here. I took pics mostly in pose number 2 for this, since that's the pose I'm going to end up keeping them in for the display.

Like always, the camera zooms in like a laser for any imperfections, which can't be seen with the naked eye (or at least my aging eyes). So I can definitely see where I didn't press down the blocks together tightly enough!

I love all the motion modeling on this - the flying hair and robes are great.

Yes, I think I'm definitely going to try to rework the raft in brown and black, and throw in more of the leftover transparent bricks.

Lao Wen is very easy to pose since he's balancing on his one foot. The bricks are really great to keeping the figs securely on the base - they certainly have that over the normal PVC/resin figs!

I think they did a spectacular job on the hair all the way around, including the hair ornaments. Lao Wen's hairpin and A-Xu's hairband were rendered very nicely. I will note that their hair was super fiddly to assemble - lots and lots of little tiny pieces, many just hanging on by one connection. The number of times I pressed down on the fig in areas to squeeze the bricks together, and a piece of hair go flying off ... well, it doesn't bear repeating! There was some colorful language also flying around, I will say.

When I re-do the raft I'm also going to cover up the yellowy-beige base with more blue bricks so it looks more like water and less like water on a beach.

Note the little fig ears. Those were actually pretty easy to make!

The hobo goatee just makes me laugh! Just amazing.

And we're back around. The way they did the robes in 3-D fig form is also really excellent - the pants don't quite show up like this in the actual show,as they are hidden by the robes most of the time, but the way they are showing the motion of the figures here is quite inspired.

Alright, we're switching back to the original configuration where they are facing each other for the rest of the pics:

You can really see more of the hair detail here. There's a bit of light streaming in from my window that makes A-Xu's hair look lighter than Lao Wen's, but they're the exact same bricks.

Kind of a three-quarters angle, here, so you can see more of A-Xu's guan.

A little bit of the bottom's up view - it's a bit hard with the base to see all the detail. I'll have to remember for the other sets to take pics of the figs off the base.

Here's a size comparison to a very typical sized "regular" fig:

I put him on the raft so you could get the best comparison for the fig height. So, larger than a regular fig, but not tremendously so.

My conclusions after assembling this first set:

One: This was indeed an excellent project to do when recovering from surgery. I could sit without moving very much, put my headphones in and listen to music, and use some but not all of my brain. With the rest of my mind not preoccupied with counting bricks or puzzling out directions, I could just let my mind process through any number of things, or reminisce as the hours went by. It was very peaceful (except for when pieces went flying or I realized I had set a brick down in the wrong place several steps prior!), and some nice quiet time to myself. Normally I'm doing a ton of things all at once (or trying to, anyway!) and hustle and bustling all around between work and travel and the household and the fandom, so this was indeed a nice break.

Two: It really was a ton of fun. A big chunk of the time when I was assembling the figs I had no idea what I was doing or what piece of the fig I was actually working on, so to see it slowly unfold under my fingers was pretty cool. It was surprisingly rewarding, and indeed just plain fun to see the moment when I was like, oh there you are! I particularly had fun with the little details of their costumes, like their belts or their necklines, and I really enjoyed putting the little wispies on Wen Kexing's hair and the bangs on A-Xu.

Three: For the limited color palette and the limited brick sizes, I think they rendered these figs beautifully, with a lot of attention to detail. I would definitely have liked to have had more show-specific colors, but that would have been beyond the scope (and budget) of a small shop. It continues to be a good lesson for me to work through - not to be so picky about the details, and to be less pedantic about accuracy. A great reminder that what is important is having fun and enjoying each creative interpretation of the show, not about the exact shade of say, Lao Wen's robes.

Four: I am in fact entirely charmed and delighted with these fig sets, and despite my sore and aching fingers from snapping together endless rows of bricks, I moved directly into the next set.

Come back tomorrow for set two - Basking in the Sun!

OR, read the coda to this, posted later: Coda to Beautiful Fight Scene in the Middle of the Lake

Material: Plastic building bricks

Fig Count: 502

Scene Count: 33

Rating: Fighting? More like dancing in the middle of the lake!

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

Building Block Figs - Beautiful Fight Scene in the Middle of the Lake (Part One)

Figthusiast friends, it's time for a little something different! Today we have the first of a series of building block Word of Honor fig sets.

I first saw these sets earlier this year when I was browsing for figs on Xianyu, my favorite secondary market app. I stopped my scrolling in total surprise when I first saw a picture, and was like wait...are these actually Lego-type Word of Honor figs??? I zoomed in, and lo and behold, they sure were.

I absolutely loved Legos when I was a kid. My family didn't have enough money to be able to buy much in the way of expensive toys, but I did save up my babysitting money so I could buy a few of them myself. It took a long time at $1.50 an hour!

So, of course when I saw these, the nostalgia factor combined with my fandom fig obsession made these a must buy.

Today's fig is that the first set I found. It's called (via MTL) "Beautiful Fight Scene in the Middle of the Lake", which I must congratulate for being extremely descriptive and 100% accurate.

As soon as I saw this, I did an immediate search on Taobao and Weidian to see if I could just buy the set vs. pick it up off Xianyu. For two reasons. One, I can buy directly off Taobao (vs using a third party purchase agent for Xianyu), and two, I was hoping there was more in the series than this one figure. However, they were no longer being sold on either platform, so Xianyu it was.

I browsed around and was lucky enough to find a seller on Xianyu that did, in fact, have other sets in the series, and who was clearing them all out, brand new and unopened. She noted that she was still a fan, she just had never had the time to put these together and realized now with her workload she probably never would. I bought all three of her sets, including this one, for about $37 total, which is about half off the retail of 179 yuan per set they originally went for (about $25 each). I thought this was a great deal considering the actual costs of specialized Lego sets these days, even non-branded building block sets.

As far as I can tell, there are four big sets that are famous scenes from the show, and three small sets that are just our two favorite leads only. I was able to buy the three big scenes off that one person, and one of the set of figs-only, but I'm still missing some (too many!). I keep checking Xianyu. I was actually surprised to see the other day there was another set I didn't know existed - but sadly it ended up being sold out. I'll keep looking.

Anyway!

The Beautiful Fight Scene in the Middle of the Lake is a 1,236 piece set, measures 8.4 x 16.8 x 12.4 cm, and it's rated about 8 hours to complete. It's the fastest of the big sets (the remainder of which are rated 10, 10, and 11 hours respectively). In retrospect, should I have started with the smaller figs-only set (rated 2 hours)? Probably. But I was just so charmed by this set, and I only have one lake fig set to date, so this seemed like something very fun. Plus, as you will hear about later, I did not fully understand the specs until well after I was almost done assembling the very last set.

I had a surgical procedure that was scheduled this month (and is why I've been out of commission for a while), and I had specially saved up these sets as fun projects to make while I was recovering. I figured it would be nice to have something to look forward to.

So, post surgery, once I felt up to sitting up, I made myself a comfy little nest and settled in with my little boxes of treasures.

This is the pic from the seller - you would never know these were Word of Honor sets. They're just generic boxes from the manufacturer, with a small sticker on the top to indicate what set it is, along with a QR code.

I excitedly opened up the box, to find a bag o'bricks, a small black plastic piece and another sticker with QR code.

It turns out the little black plastic piece is a super handy little tool to quickly and easily break assembled bricks apart. Which is great if you accidentally assemble any steps incorrectly, as I would soon find out.

The QR code was for the directions, which were, in a quantum technological leap forward from my admittedly decades ago Lego experiences, online and fully 3-dimensional.

Pretty cute! I decided to go in order, and indeed start with the simple looking raft.

As a side note, I will tell you that I started this completely sure I was going to be able to assemble this set in an afternoon. I had somehow completely missed the MTL for the estimated assembly time until literally just now, as I was translating pics for this blog post. The set seemed fairly small in the picture, and while it has indeed been decades since I put together a Lego set, I'm (literally) an old hand at it. I felt extremely confident. Overconfident, you might say, given that my exact mental words to myself as I clicked on the raft image was, I'm gonna knock this thing out in no time.

Doesn't look like much, does it?

I figured that before I did anything else, I would sort by colors and shapes, so when I was ready to get started, I could move really fast. So I sorted. And sorted. And sorted some more. The bag doesn't look like a lot of bricks, but let me tell you, there were a LOT (1,236, which once again, I only realized until I was researching for this very blog post). Unlike Legos, these were all thin single-brick height, so there were no 4x4x4 type bricks, for example. It made it easier to sort, but as I was sorting (and sorting some more), I realized that it might take a lot of building to get significant height going.

Eventually, after about an hour, I got them all sorted, and felt very accomplished, if a bit tired. I took a little nap, and then settled back into my crafting nest, and then got ready to, and I quote myself once again, bang this sucker out.

The directions started with an image of the final product, which was helpful.

I will say the online direction interface was pretty amazing. I could zoom in, spin around, go upside down, view it any which way I wanted to by pinching and pulling at my phone's screen. It was fantastic, and certainly made it much easier. That little circle on the right side is the "next direction" button, and helpfully the number in the circle tells you how many steps you have left. There were 34 steps in this raft, and you can tell by the number here I'm not too far along.

Here's a little further as I gamely plug along. I got momentarily confused early on by the colors - there's a dark blue, a medium blue, and a light blue, and I had started assembling the raft with medium blue instead of dark blue. I got to figure out how useful that brick de-assembler was real fast, let me tell you. I also started screenshotting and translating the colors until I felt I had a good handle on what exact colors I should be picking.

You can see here how I can zoom in to figure out exactly where to place the bricks. You can't tell by the screenshot, but the bricks you are laying in each particular step blink, and are outlined in dark black like you see in the shot above. It's very handy.

I got into a groove pretty quick. For each step, I'd count and select the bricks shown in the little legend at the bottom, and put them in a little pile next to me. I did this to make sure I used up all the bricks each layer, as early on I was just following the directions and not realizing that some steps you had to put the brick underneath other ones, which would not be visible on the blinking screen unless I pinched and pulled the model to flip it around on the screen. If I got to the end of the step and still had bricks left, I knew one (or more) were hiding, and I could rotate the image around until I found where they should go. Yes, I did learn this the hard way, naturally.

After a good long time, I finally finished the raft! I will say, I was a bit puzzled that the raft is green and blue, as we well know the raft in the show is just bamboo.

Did I re-watch the scene just to make triple sure? I sure did!

So there's actually two rafts, this simple one here in the foreground, and then the bigger, sturdier raft there behind the boat. It's this first raft that this set is capturing, and more or less this moment, if not at such an acute angle.

I may actually rearrange the figures to be in this particular configuration later. Stay tuned!

It turns out that the raft is these colors because (now that I've put a lot of them together) the company doesn't appear to make many brick colors. The blues are unusual in the sense there are actually three different shades. The red bricks I have have only ever been one fire engine red color, and the brown bricks only one medium brown. So, rather than make the raft uniformly all brown, they made it colorful with the blue and green, perhaps to simulate the water. I admire the colorful nature of it, but I have to say, I'm contemplating re-doing the raft when I finish all the kits. Each kit has leftover bricks, and I seem to have a lot of brown bricks left over. I think I'm going to try remaking this with a brown raft base and black for the lines instead, with some blue and more of the transparent bricks to simulate water. Stay tuned for that, too!

So, by the time I finished the raft, I was beat. Super tired, and surprised it took as long as it did. BUT, I reasoned it only made sense since it was the very first piece I did, so naturally it would take longer than most. It was time to sleep.

The next day, I woke up bright and early, on a mission. On to Wen Kexing!

I started confident (confidence is never my problem, unfortunately, but it is sometimes A problem) that now that I had experience, I could in fact, bust this bad boy out.

I was merrily assembling away, and I happened to take a closer look at the directions - specifically, the little number in the bottom circle.

I don't know if you can see this number, but it is two of Gong Jun's favorite number 88. That's right, EIGHTY-EIGHT. I was like, what?!? How many was there in this figure? I've been going for a while (answer, as I scrolled back through the directions, is 111).

Remember how I said that these are all single-ply building bricks? Yep. Takes a bunch to turn them into a tall, yet humble philanthropist. Well, the only way out is through, right?

The directions kept having me assembling parts, and then having me set them aside for later. It looked nothing like a mild and gentle scholar, but I've found that, similar to life and perhaps also Ikea assembly instructions, sometimes you just have forge ahead and take it on faith that things are gonna work out.

Ah ha! Suddenly it IS starting to make a little sense. I recognize that costume!

(Sidebar to say, we all recognize this costume! And we know this gorgeous pale green outer robe is not, in fact, blue. I was slightly taken aback by this until I realized later the thing about the factory's lack of colors. The bright, intense grass green of the only green option (other than neon green, ahahaha) would have been even less suitable for our peacock's fine feathers, so actually this is a very good choice).

MAY I also note that number in the bottom right hand circle is 55. FIFTY-FIVE.

I'm gonna fast forward through the naps and the breaks, and just take one quick other picture break:

I just about cheered when I got to this point! I was like, oh there he is! You can also tell by the quality of light and the shadows that it was late at night at this point. On a different day.

Anyway, we arrive at the glorious conclusion:

Hooray! I was so happy and tickled at this point. I was just so charmed by him. His little rosy cheeks, his side wispies on his hair, the motion of him standing on one foot. The back of his hair is fantastic too, although you can't see it here yet.

On to our beloved A-Xu...

May I just say how DELIGHTED I am that this is indeed hobo-Xu? His little beard and goatee combo in brick form just made me giggle.

First thing, I checked to see how many steps our reclusive hobo had. 115, which I appreciated for Zhang Zhehan's birthday kadian, if nothing else.

You can tell by the colors and shadows that once again this is a different evening, here on step 77 and about to graduate to step 76:

Once again it looked pretty unrecognizable, except that now I had done one fig, I was starting to understand kind of where they were going.

Plus, Lao Wen got to watch this time. In the daytime, as you can tell by the nice bright light.

Annnd it's night time again. Ahahahaha, I love this fig! I really like how they did his bangs. You can see here too some of his glorious black hair streaming out behind him.

By the way, at this point the tips of my fingers were quite sore in a stingy kind of oversensitive way. Sadly, typing away at a keyboard all the time (also for decades!) at my desk job has in no way toughened up my fingers. I did not think snapping bricks into place and pushing down on them to squeeze them tightly together would tax them so much. Sitting here typing this, actually, my fingers are still sore (I am admittedly working my way though the last set, the 11 hour one).

It's yet another (different) evening, and at last, A-Xu is here! I was so happy to get to this point!

Annnnd I'm out of picture slots to do the full beauty 360 degree spin of these two. Sorry to make you wait (although you may be tired of such a massive post already!), but come back tomorrow for Part Two!

Material: Plastic building bricks

Fig Count: 500 (I'm gonna wait to count these until tomorrow)

Scene Count: 32 (same)

Rating: Lots of fun, actually. I'll give the in-depth low-down tomorrow!

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

Merry Christmas and Happiest of Holidays from Junbaobao and Hanbao!! 🎄🎁❤️

[fourseasonsfigs]

Reindeer Jun

Merry Christmas from Reindeer Jun! He's here to deliver a very special present just for you!

If you remember from my Santa Han post a year ago today, I had just ordered Reindeer Jun (rendered helpfully by Google Translate into "Elk Jun" which is all I can think of when I look at him). I didn't have to wait a year for him though, I got him a while back and have been saving him for this festive occasion!

He arrived straight from the North Pole all wrapped up in snowy pearl cotton and snug as an elk in a rug.

He arrived all dressed up in his cute costume, together with his present!

He's so cute I can't even handle it.

His little red nose!

The little tail is also adorable.

All the details on this costume are just spot on - the hooves on the jammies and the horns on his hoodie are just so cute!

He sits a little back on his tush - you can tell by the way his feet are a little bit up in the air there. He will topple over backwards if I don't set him down carefully, but otherwise I'm comfortable enough to have him sitting just like this and not glued down to a stand.

The fact that he sits back up against a shelf works too, because even if he did tip over backwards a bit, his little hoodie there would just hit the shelf and help stabilize him.

The pose here is just delightful!

The way the fig maker did his hair and eyes is just cute perfection too!

You can see how well the bell is detailed here.

I guess another view of the tail, here!

The face on the reindeer hoodie is also super adorable, matching the red nose on the hoodie to the red nose on Junjun.

You can see this fig is flawless in every respect - no paint overspray, no dents, no nothing except total cuteness!

One more view of him and his present....

And one last Christmas wish from Santa Han and Reindeer Jun! A very Merry and Joyous Christmas to everyone!

Material: Festive and colorful resin!

Fig Count: 500 merry and bright ones!

Scene Count: 32 wonderlands!

Rating: Ho ho ho happiness!

[link to the Master Post Index]

[fourseasonsfigs]

Happy Camp - Holding Hands

This fig set celebrates an extremely charming fan favorite story - about the possibility that Zhang Zhehan and Gong Jun were actually holding hands for a moment underneath the table at their Happy Camp interview.

Let's roll the footage, shall we?

Now I will say, I am as hard core as the next Junzhe fan, but this is a piece of speculative fan lore that I'm not sure I 100% believe. Do I think their hands could have been pressed up against each other? Or that Zhehan may have bumped him on the hand or knee? I sure do! We know Junjun was nervous about his appearance on the show, and I think it's entirely within the realm of possibility that Zhehan was providing some sort of tactile comfort for him at the filming. It's certainly in character for Zhehan, and also in character for Gong Jun to accept it as a matter of course. We've seen this time and time again during filming and during the promotional period.

Do I think they were actually holding hands? Probably not...but they could have been! And I certainly love all the geometric angles and speculation that the fandom has poured into this over time. I find it delightfully fun, and this fig set is like a beautiful love letter to the fandom.

Before we get started with the figs themselves, I will note that this is the fig set that I had to handwrite a statement of sincerity for in order to qualify to purchase. I talked about this in my post Character and Sincerity. You can see my (very!) poorly handwritten statement there.

These two hand holding cuties arrived perfectly, with all their accessories intact!

These figs have so much personality! Look at Junjun's smirk! Zhehan's gremlin face! Amazing.

While we're here, I'll show you the detail on the underside before we put them in their chairs. Zhehan's pants actually have a ton of detail. In my mind they're just jeans, but every time I see the video snip I am reminded there's a lot going on with them.

In pics of this fig set, I've seen clever fans dress up the table by adding a table skirt. So cute. I really need to do that.

And here they are! Even without the skirt you can't tell what shenanigans are happening under the table.

You can see Zhehan sits slightly in front of Junjun in order to make the positioning work. I should really pull him a bit more forward and turned (as in around the table) so his hand tucks right under Junjun's.

I'm going to take the normal set of pictures of them without the table, so you can see more detail. You'll notice here they're sitting really high up in their chairs. That's because they kept slipping out, and I went ahead and stuck them on with some museum putty as a temporary measure. I meant to go back and glue them down...and then I forgot. I still have forgotten! I need to do that this weekend. I've given up on fig stickers and museum putty/wax for the most part - if something isn't going to stand/sit properly, I have found that glue is a must. Otherwise the other options tend to fail at the worst possible time, and figs tumbling down display shelves is the inevitable conclusion.

The museum putty here is too bulky, so they are both raised up, Junjun evven more so. They're adorable with their feet swinging free like that, but they'll look better with their feet level on the floor (and it'll be more secure, frankly).

This is a great angle to see the detail on Zhehan's pants, and shoes for that matter.

It's so cute they have each other's English names / nicknames on the back of their shirts. This set of figs is really for the fans!

Junjun's head is slightly bigger than Zhehan's here, which is accurate.

I really love how the fig maker did Zhehan's spiky buzz cut hair! It's so fun.

You can really see how high Junjun is sitting here with the museum putty. Zhehan too, but slightly less so.

Ugh, sorry all, I should definitely have glued them down. They're sitting like me with my short legs dangling vs. the long-legged men they really are.

Here's the front view again, but with them actually holding hands this time! I see I also scooted them a little forward in the chairs so their feet are touching the ground more. This is much closer to how they will actually look post-glue fix. They are ADORABLE. The expressions on their face are too perfect!

Please note Zhehan's Very Special silver butterfly necklace, which I 100% do believe Junjun bought him. He also has hearts in his eyes! Junjun has star sparkles.

Aww the hand holding. Super, super cute.

The box came with some extras - a sticker, a pin, and an art card.

This is the extremely cute box. We have quotes on the sides of the boxes, and then their signatures and the iconic quotes from each of the actors to their characters - Zhehan's Live a good life as you wish, and Gong Jun's If possible, let's start a new life together.

The quote here on the bottom is "The best love is unchanging and steadfast", from a famous set of posts made by Zhehan and Gong Jun.

The back of the box cards has the exact moment of inspiration for the figs! I absolutely love this set. It actually had an option to buy a diorama with it, but I bought it so late (on remainders) that I didn't have the option. I'm definitely still on the hunt for it!

Material: Resin

Fig Count: 499

Scene Count: 32

Rating: Two Figs in Love!

[link to the Master Post Index]