I originally wanted to have a male Arkonide figure, but maybe you can imagine how hard it is to find a male figure head with long, white hair. And then most male action figures look scary (huge muscles, angry facial feature, etc). So the idea of buying a female figure became more and more attractive.
Even then finding a figure head with long white hair turned out to be not so easy. And then female heads have the opposite problem: they all try to look cute. An Arkonide woman, as described in the novels, would make a rather arrogant impression, though. So I was lucky to find the figure head in the picture. No Arkonide eye color, of course, but I edited the picture to add red irises.
And then there was the adventure into action-figure-land. As mentioned above, most action figures have bizarre proportions. I wanted a tall, lean, male figure, but all you find are bodybuilders. Then I looked for a tall, lean female figure. "Lean" was not so much of a problem, but in action figure land, "small breasts" means "C cup". So I ended up buying a "girl" figure, which does not have DD+ breasts.
Some 1/6 action figures these days have highly detailed, seamless silicone bodies, and you can easily spend a few hundred Euros on one (I didn't). This is why figure heads and bodies are usually sold separately. I got a "pale" body and a head that also looked "pale" in the pictures, but turned out to be slightly tanned. Not a big problem, it still looks plausible. Digging a bit in the Internet reveals that matching heads and bodies is a pure gamble.
More fun facts: scaled to real life, the figure I bought would be 177cm (5ft 8) tall, have European shoe size 34 (a children's size, about US 3), and glove size 6.5 (XS). Because the body is very lean, the proportions still look good, though.
Then there seems to be more than one "1/6 scale". I bought a coat for my Arkonide woman figure, and its sleeves barely covered the elbows. Because I did not feel like sewing, I made a dress from space blanket, glue, and transparent sticky tape. A proper dress for an starship captain!
Many manufacturers state that you should use a hair dryer to warm up the figure head before attaching it to a body. This is solid advice! I set my heat gun to 80C and heated the head for about 10 seconds, and this worked like a charm.
The chin on the figure protrudes quite a bit, but this only underlines the exotic and assertive nature of the Arkonide woman. I like the figure.
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