Pinky:st

This month’s…well last month’s Bibliotheca Blog Circle theme was dolls. In case you’re thinking “Kelp, are you taking advantage of your position as Bibliotheca Boss to make a late post” the answer is no. Sorta. I slot in late theme posts as long as they’re published before I finish the newsletter. But of course, whether or not the newsletter is finished is…on me…

Anyways. I could have easily written a blog post about my childhood playing Barbie Fashion Designer and its sequel, Cool Looks. Except actually no. I would feel compelled to dig up screenshots and maybe even track down some of the clothing I made that I know is prolly still around somewhere. (Perks of being a parasite single – no need to go to your parents’ house to track down childhood items!)

I do have this BGM readily handy, though I forget which of the two games it’s from

Insert Peg A Into Slot B

Pinky:st dolls were put out by a company called Vance Project, working with the artist BABYsue. I don’t know much about either, but I’m listing the information here in case it’s useful for people more familiar with the figure world. The big selling point of these small plastic figures was their interchangeability.

An example given on their website circa 2008

From the low resolution flowchart above, you can see that the heads, torsos, and legs of the dolls can be switched out. But it’s actually even more intense than that. Skirts can be swapped as well, given that the legs have the proper notch (some of the “pants” legs don’t, but since the plastic is flexible, you can kinda…make do…). And the hair is also separate components: the fringe connects to the…back? to enclose around the head, and any additional parts (like a ponytail) can be removed and stuck onto other hair, provided there’s the requisite slot for the peg.

A handful of Pinky:st dolls, courtesy of myfigurecollection.net

There’s even the doll equivalent of zip-off cargo pants, along with some interesting accessories, like the studded bangles on the lower left. They also released a number of collaborations, some under their P:Chara and Pinky:cos line, and all of these could be mixed and matched with their regular line as well.

On left, Asuka and Kuromi from the Pinky:cos line. On right, Mai and Athena from King of Fighters and a Monster Hunter (Rathian armor?) from the P:Chara line.

Tales of a High School Weeb

I honestly don’t remember how I got into collecting Pinky:st dolls. I know that it was limited more or less to when I was in high school, with me picking up a few more at anime conventions while I was an undergrad in college. By this time (early 2000’s), I was regularly ordering a lot of weeby stuff from online stores, but not figures. (The amount of seamail I was getting on a monthly basis…)

My best guess is they were being sold at a semi-local Kinokuniya I would occasionally visit. They’re also pretty inexpensive – the original list price for a set was around 1,000 yen, and I don’t think I ever paid more than around $15 for any of the normal sets. So compared to other fashion dolls I could have gotten into, like Blythe or Pullip, they were relatively accessible.

Recently, I sorted through all of my Pinky:st dolls I could find (which, of course, was not all of them). This involved emptying out a lot of cursed freezer ziptop bags and re-distributing their contents into smaller ziptop bags…

Part of this was to sort out which dolls I could potentially sell at the FanimeCon swap meet, but ultimately I only packed up one – the Type-Moon collab Arcueid Pinky, which was one of the few I was able to find all of the pieces and parts for and put them into the original box. As you can fathom, each set potentially has some very misplaceable pieces, but not being able to fully gather everything wasn’t my only reason for holding things back for sale. Pinky:st dolls interchangeability is both a pro and a con – most of the parts I was fine with letting go belonged to larger sets with items I did want to keep. So if I was to sell the dolls as they were sold, I would have to part (…) with …parts…I didn’t want to part with (I promise that’s not on purpose, I’m on a deadline and don’t have time to massage copy).

Of course, I could just sell a cursed ziptop bag of parts – I know I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to purchasing that myself. But at least for the time being, I decided to keep what I have. Pinky:st dolls aren’t heavy, nor do they take up a lot of space. Arcueid was easy enough to let go since both of her ‘outfits’ weren’t anything particularly special (and I’m not a Type-Moon fan. I mainly bought the collabs just to have more outfits.)

Tales of a High School Weeb, Part II

One thing I did to preserve what little remained of my sanity in high school was to take ‘slacker electives’ – instead of loading up my schedule with AP classes and what not, I took the easiest, laziest stuff available. My senior year, this ended up being Video Tech and Photo, and for the latter I had a project that involved making a picture book?? with photos we had taken?? I’m actually not sure of the exact prompt, though I’m sure I got a good grade. Inspired by Junko Mizuno’s Cinderalla, I put together the following – I still have actual photos which are much higher quality, likely taken with my sister’s digital SLR, but what I’m uploading here is are pictures of the finished product that have somehow survived over the past fifteen or so years. Fellow weebs might recognize the Tenjou Tenge collab dolls – again, I was just interested in more outfits, haha.