Did Justin's wish finally came true?? A Follow-up and Calling out BAD journalism by journalist Justin Ling and Wired.com original article from May 26, 2022

Did Justin's wish finally come true?? The Third Follow-up and Calling out BAD journalism by journalist Justin Ling and Wired.com original article from May 26, 2022

Disclaimer:

This piece is, once again, NOT about 4chan, you will not find anything about 4chan here. Go somewhere else.
We are not here to defend GOOD SMILE COMPANY (GSC), rather, this is a follow-up fact-finding article as GSC had launched their much delayed new website on February 28, 2024.

May 20, 2025: GSC main website no longer lists 18+ (and even some borderline non-18+) items from FREEing for pre-orders since 2024.

So, the company dispised by one Justin Ling had finally launched their new website on their seldom-used .com domain (https://www.goodsmile.com/), so can Justin finally claim "I was right all along" this time around????

Sadly, a big-fat NO. Not. Even. Close.

While GSC have stopped updating their old website (https://www.goodsmile.info/) since the end of December 2023, the old site is still accessible as of March 20, 2024. There was a hard-redirect implemented on the first week in March for the old site's home page to the new website, but that auto-redirection was removed some time after March 15, 2024, and most product litings remain accessible.

Even worse, GSC new website seems to want to get rid of any notions that it might carry any 18+ products. Previously there was the option to include "18+ results" in the product search parameters, and that option was no longer available as of March 19, 2024 (but not necessary impacting their existing search results). Also on March 19, 2024, FREEing had one new product listed for pre-order, and normally it would be listed on GSC website, but not that particular one (most hobby shops, including our partners HOBBY SEARCH AND HobbyLink Japan are marking that item as 18+, while CD Japan listed the same item with no issues (CD Japan is known to not carry anything that has implicity nudity). Without much information from GSC, we can only speculate that they really want to "keep it clean" going forward. Of course, this will get tested when MAX FACTORY makes anything new or brings back some old stuff from their PLAMAX Naked Angel lineup, and we will certainly keep an eye on that.

*** Update on March 25, 2024: well, we got one PLAMAX Naked Angel sightings on GSC Website with the usual GSC Tuesday pre-order announcements (new item no less).

For reference, this is the item in question (stock photos for this one not really NSFW, but heck, we collectors have a much higher tolerance for "skin" than normal people).

And the kicker: try searching for his favourite phrase "wendy" or "ウェンディ" on the new website. She will not show up, poor Justin. Oh yes, GSC has stated in one of their site announcements that they will not bring any old products over to the new site, unless any of them are getting a new re-run (unlikely for many of them, especially for anything from Marvel and Disney plus really old items).

Furthermore, from a technical perspective, the domain "goodmsile.com" was not even under the possession of GSC from 2000 to 2011. See for yourself with the handy Internet Archive Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://goodsmile.com/): around 2011, "goodmsile.com" was actually available for sale at a cool USD $4830, and how much GOOD SMILE COMPANY ended up paying to grab the domain is pretty much unknown (not really our job, go ask Justin to do his job). With GSC taking over the domain after 2012, they did not use the domain for a long time, only having it redirecting "temporary" (SEO jargon for a "302" HTTP status code) to their goodsmile.info English home page. Only in around July 2022 GSC launched their "corporate" website under the subdomain "corporate.goodsmile.com" (yep, that late), until they decided to merge their website and online store into one under goodsmile.com, with goodsmile.info being an archive site after April 2024.

It is now nearly two years since the original article was published, Justin Ling and Wired.com still own all of us a long-overdue correction and apology for that tiny wrong information Justin presented in his article (it is MAX FACTORY, for the third time). We don't really care anymore if Justin will admit his mistake and make amends, but this and two previous articles are just to make sure he is held accountable for his own words and refusal to admit one tiny mistake he made back in 2022, even after being called out directly on "X" by us. Same with Wired.com for their inability to fact-check.

Let the Internet remembers everything, right and wrong.

Written by Otaku HQ

First published on March 20, 2024.

May 16, 2024: additional information with reference to Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

May 20, 2025: article title update and minor content ("Wayback Machine" paragraph) rewrite.

Note: Justin Ling Twitter account went inactive after April 20, 2023, and who says we are letting him off the hook?? His "ugly" website [https://justinling.ca/] and his Mastodon account [https://mastodon.online/@justinling].