the most heavily armed transgender allegory of the 24th century, the source of tieria erde's first catastrophic identity crisis meltdown but certainly not his last, one of the last visible remnants of a prototype design of gundam 00's main gundams where they were all both themed and named after chess pieces1, it's NADLEEH and VIRTUE!
this one's a long one so it goes under a readmore
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in this concept, the 0 gundam was known as the King Gundam, exia the Pawn, dynames the Knight, kyrios the Bishop, virtue the Rook, and nadleeh the Queen. exia would have originally been the one to transform into nadleeh, reflecting a pawn making it to the other end of the board to become a queen. the literal chess schtick got scrapped later in development, the nadleeh transformation was instead given to virtue, and the general idea of a surprise twist powerup sequence was handed out to everybody in what ultimately became Trans-Am.
while i bought MG virtue/nadleeh in i think 2022, i only actually got around to building it in september of last year. absolutely phenomenal build, INCREDIBLE work on the armor, i legitimately still haven't thrown away the virtue box and the extra runners because it feels too good to waste. the only confusing thing about this kit was the abundance of dark blue plastic on the cannons and bazooka - virtue in the show has those parts in entirely black, so i'm not really sure where all this blue came from. i don't mind it that much, but it was strange.
virtue's build, which i finished about a week later, being a high grade from 2007, was...not so nice, but it turned out fine. i finished it about a week after i'd finished nadleeh and didn't have too much issue with it aside from a deep desire in my heart for real clear-plastic GN cables rather than its hard-plastic-with-a-purple-sticker-on-top approach. i gave the stickers another nail polish treatment so at least they'd be glittery.
my posing options for these two were unfortunately pretty limited, since i got the virtue on a whim from my local hobby shop with a faint idea for putting them right next to one another that ended up being hamstrung by shelf space and needing to make sure that 1/144 virtue could hold up 1/100 nadleeh's bazooka without falling the hell over. i also wanted nadleeh to be able to hold virtue's littler bazooka, but the hand shapes didn't work out and i didn't feel like breaking plastic or using glue to get it in there. for now it's simply another denizen of the Spare Parts Box.
after i built MG dynames and found myself wishing i'd repainted all that yellow in gold, i made sure i wouldn't make the same mistake with nadleeh and virtue. another tamiya spraycan, another lovely result. with these kits my longing wish is instead that i'd sprung for waterslide decals rather than just using the clear stickers in the box. they just look so much nicer...ah well. HG virtue got to benefit from MG Nadleeh's sticker sheet, at least, which was fun.
oh, and speaking of unnecessary extra things i sprung for: are the official GN Drive bandai LEDs obscenely overpriced, especially considering they don't even come with batteries? for sure. am i ever going to buy them again? not even once. would i recommend them to anyone else? extremely no. were they worth it?
No further questions at this time.