Looking for a few good men: the lack of male anime figures

12:00 PM on 08.05.2009   |   Brian Szabelski

In the time it took you to read this sentence, seven new Haruhi figures, three nearly-naked Kanu Unchous, two different yet similar Yoko swimsuit figures, five Touhou figures and a brand new Saber cosplay figure were all announced. Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but if you are a frequent reader of Tomopop, then you know by now how flooded the anime figure market is with female characters. That's especially the case on the high-end of the market, where the figures are bigger and cost a bit more, but are of much better quality. This is the realm of the Waves, Kotobukiyas, Uplarks, FREEings and Alters of the figure world.

But it is not the realm of male figures. There are many popular male characters in anime today, but trying to find a figure of them can sometimes be an absolute nightmare. It's a problem I've run into many times before that's left me wondering why this happens and why figure makers seem content with the status quo.

Follow me after the jump, and we'll talk about why this is, and why it's probably costing figure makers more than they realize.

The biggest reason for this disparity is, of course, simple economics and demographics. The majority of collectors and anime fans are male, and for the most part, they're very vocal about which female characters they love the most. So how do you appeal to that crowd? Figures of their female characters, sometimes in all kinds of skimpy clothes and sexually charged poses.

Of course, this actually tends to work out well for their bottom line, allowing them to pay less attention to those who want figures of male characters. Since that group is quite a bit smaller, but likely substantial in size, they can throw a character their way every once in a blue moon without too much of a financial impact.

Take, for example, the popular series Gurren Lagann. Viral's finally gotten his due, and Kamina has a few figures of his own, too, but that's it. The series' main protagonist, Simon, does not have a figure, period. Not of young Simon, not of adult Simon. Nothing. Meanwhile, Yoko, who is by all accounts not that popular in Japan, is providing a pretty good challenger to Kanu Unchou.

At least Evangelion fans have some Shinji and Kaworu figures, and some good ones at that. But when you consider the popular series came out in the mid-1990s and the sheer number of Asuka and Rei figures on the market, the message is pretty clear: if you're not a fan of those two females, then we don't really care.

And if it's a series with popular male characters, but no wildly popular female characters, like InuYasha was in its heyday ... well, it's not pretty. Bandai released two series of gashapon and partnered with Toynami to produce a line of 6" PVC figures of moderate quality. Kotobukiya also had a line of 6" figures that weren't very easy to find and were only slightly better quality than the Toynami figures. That was all, and truthfully, it has always puzzled me. The series was popular enough to run for almost 12 years straight as a weekly manga series, covering some 550 chapters. It was popular enough that two years after the 167-episode series ended, it still cracked the top 100 anime of all time in a major online survey in Japan ... at number 20. And it's still popular enough that Sunrise has committed to finishing off the anime it started by producing a new series that will cover the last 20 volumes, starting this fall. But you want a quality figure of one of the series' many male characters? You're out of luck.

Likewise, popular video game series with male protagonists that aren't called first-person shooters have the same problem. You can always find our friends Master Chief and Marcus Fenix cast in high-quality PVC, but if you want a figure of any of the male Soul Calibur fighters on the same level, you have a problem: they don't exist. At all. Period. You can certainly find trading figures or some of these characters, but if you want a nice 1/6- or 1/8-scale Soul Calibur figure, you pretty much can pick from Ivy, Taki and ... Ivy. Boobs win out again.

And while we're speaking about fighting games, there's one series I love that's a terrible, terrible offender in this regard: Street Fighter. While they have redeemed their ways a bit and announced or released very nice Sagat, Zangief and Vega figures recently, almost all of the high-quality Street Fighter figures out there are either Chun-Li, Cammy, the Terrible Trio (Ryu, Ken and Akuma) and an assortment of other femme fatales. That M. Bison, after years of being an imposing antagonist in the franchise, has only a few cheaply-produced action figures to his name is nothing short of embarrassing. I haven't even mentioned the laundry list of other male characters that have almost nothing on the collectibles market.

OK, that's enough: you probably get the picture by now. But that long list of examples goes on to prove my second point: there's a whole market out there many companies are not adequately tapping into. I just gave you several examples of male figures I'd happily buy if they were actually available, and that's just one person. I know in my conversations with the Tomopop crew that almost all of us, both male and female alike, would buy figures of our favorite male characters if they were more readily available. 

Ultimately, because these companies don't seem to realize how big the potential male figure market is, they don't have a reason to throw as many resources into it. From a business perspective, it's a justified position because you don't want to potentially throw money down the drain. However, they're ultimately leaving money on the table while unconsciously flooding the market with more of the same, and that's actually a worse position to be in. Oversaturation leads to fewer purchases, which leads to less revenue. Add in the money you're leaving on the table by not meeting male figure demand and it becomes apparent one cannot live on plastic tits alone. Well, at least in the figure industry.

However, the only way more quality figures of male characters will be made is if we make sure the demand is known. Since most of the figure companies don't have English Web sites, contacting them directly isn't the easiest way to go about getting what you want, but it's still worth a shot. Just remember to be courteous, be polite, and get to the point when you write them. Rambling and being rude will get you nowhere.

Even contacting companies might not be enough on its own. It's also showing interest conventions, on news sites like Tomopop and Danny Choo, or even on sites like Capcom Unity that have secondary connections to the figure industry. There's no guarantees these things will work, but it's certainly better than sitting around and hoping they can read our minds.

Things do seem to be looking up on the male figure front as of late, especially in regards to Figmas, Revoltechs and Nendoroids, but I think there's still quite a bit of room for improvement. I certainly look forward to the day that I can spend my time drooling over an adult Simon figure from Uplark rather than having to stare down naked Ikkitousen figure #1,278.