lazypadawan's Holocron

In some fashion familiar to me, including how I can’t think back to a resonant moment of discovery but have to resort to saying “one way or another,” I became aware of a manga now available called Red River. The thick “three-in-one” omnibus volumes might have been obvious enough in the bookstore with their red spines. At a certain point I happened on a brief explanation of it as a “thrown into the past” shojo manga that had begun in the mid-1990s. While some past concerns that I’d been running low on manga to read with new titles not catching my attention have faded, perhaps the sense of an older manga that wasn’t “long familiar” amused me and had me thinking this was a chance to broaden my outlook, if only by a tiny bit. I went and bought the first collection.
( Plunging back )

After assembling my first Gundam model kit (and the first full-blown model kit I’d put together in quite a few years) I bought another “Entry Grade” Mobile Suit from the same hobby store and built it as well. I was a little inclined to ponder how both of these kits “left out accessories” from how their Gundams deployed in their anime, the better to motivate you to move up a grade, perhaps. With that in mind, when I saw a third Entry Grade kit that happened to be the very first Gundam and was labelled on the box (this time in Japanese and English) as including a “Full Weapon Set” extending to more fanciful armaments left out of the compilation movies, I was motivated to buy it.
( Fine details within )