Lately I’ve been in the habit of writing about the in-universe technical details of the model kits I build. I find it to be good fun to nerd out about this stuff, but sometimes it is tough to determine how far to go with it. For instance, say I’m building a model of Mobile Suit D, which happens to be based on Mobile Suit C, which was based on MS B ,etc. Subsequently, MS D was the basis for MS E, F, and G. How much do I talk about these other units? How much is enough to provide proper context about Mobile Suit D? How much is too much?
I don’t have a good, consistent answer to that question, and looking back at my older posts, it shows. There are times where I go too deep, and times where I don’t go deep enough. And as I write more and more posts, about more and more mobile suits that just so happen to be related to one another, I find myself struggling to keep each post from devolving into a mess of links and cross refernces.
Here is my proposed solution - I am going to try and fix this problem by writing “Design Series” posts, in which I discuss a group of related mobile all at once. That way, if and when I build a model kit of one these units, I can refer to its related Design Seriies post, and you can get all the info (and related context) in a single place.
There is still a chance that, over time, any given Design Series post will end up loking to a lot of other DS posts, and that I’ll end up with a mess anyway, but there’s only one way to find out.
Postscript
I want to fully disclose that a lot of the content for these Design Series posts is going to come from two places - MAHQ, and the Gundam Wiki. I’m doing this for a few different reasons:
- To give credit where credit is due
- I’m not entirely sure where these sources get their information. It is entirely possible that one or both of them may be inaccurate about anything, at any point, in which I will also be inaccurate as well. In that case, you can lay the blame on me for being unable (or unwilling) to verify their information.
- My experience with fan wikis is that they change a lot over time. I’ve seen wikis with pages and pages of useful lore get edited down to bare details (or replaced with poorly written, typo-riddled gibberish). By echoing the contents of the wiki when it has useful information, perhaps these Design Series posts can help preserve this data if and when either site gets blown away (of course, considering that I just said that I cannot verify these two sites, it is entirely possible that I’ll end up preserving lies and misinformation, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take).