I feel I semi-aged out when i moved out, and didn't have the disposable income for toys. I would get a few here and there. AOTC Jango with the magnetic head (spoiler).
I never really stopped due to X-Men and Spawn and Star Wars, so I kept pushing all the way through college and the Army.
I aged myself out around 2005. I moved to a new state with a friend and nostalgia aside, I found toys started to suck. Even the Marvel Legends proportions and portraits just looked terrible and Goofy to me after the initial afterglow. NECA were statues. Franchises I liked weren't being represented anymore.
Made the choice to stick with comics and Warcraft, but I did pick up the odd thing that spoke to me - Palisades Zim as example. I think the last figure I picked up was Infinite Crisis Power Girl by DCD.
I got into a relationship with a woman who was a secretary at a car dealership. I was a bartender. Only once I was invested and earned the actual title of boyfriend did this woman become emotionally and mentally and physically abusive. What had happened was she was a secretary but she had plans to become a neuroscientist and once she got that grad school acceptance her entire personality flipped. She was the genius slumming it with the bartender. She'd introduce me to her peers as "but he didn't even finish college, and he was only enlisted" at grad school events.
But I was young and dumb, and I thought I knew what love was.
She hated that I liked comic books and video games. She hated that I was a bartender, despite the fact that was making four times as much as her cash, daily. But she hated it all in that really passive aggressive sweet toned way that people manipulate you. And when she didn't get her way she would hit me or berate me and even though I imagined I could put her through a wall, that probably wouldn't have been a good look when any authorities got involved. I think a lot of you can relate that it's really hard to be a 6'3" broad guy and make the 5'4 millennial thin girl look like she was the aggressor and threat.
She threw out all my graphic tees on concert teas because I was too old at my mid-20s to be wearing such trash. She sold some of my figures and music collection while I was at work one day.
Now eventually I came to my senses and rescued myself. In hindsight, she was narcissistic and probably bipolar or borderline. Later in life when I would get my own neurodivergent diagnoses and wondered, yeah, that was probably a really terrible concoction going on.
Anyway, once I got out of that, I immediately reverted to finding myself and the first Marvel Legend I picked up was Rachel Grey at a Walmart, hidden behind the Hot Wheels. I picked it up because of that Bachalo cover, and they nailed that head.
I still stayed out of the action game barring the odd DCD showcase piece until Legends came back, and it was that X-Men Juggernaut wave that put me back into the Check the Toy Aisle habit. So that was almost, what, a ten year absence?
I'm really glad that a lot of obscure things like Inhumans and Cover Girl are coming out now rather than even when I first got back in, because I feel we've had a couple generational leaps even since like 2020. As far as the paint applications and articulation go. I even got to live Mafex Sucks to Mafex is Amazing and Mezco is Amazing to WTF You Doing Mezco?
