You Ever Get Tired of This?

Ru1977 said:
Leaving this community would be a lot harder, but I should be able to be an idiot here AND not collect if that's where I end up heh.
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I couldn't. I know myself. I don't have that kind of willpower. Hell, you guys are the reason I have half the shit I own, or thereabouts. If I know it's there and people are talking about it, I'm going to get invested in having it. The only/best way for me to cut out the collecting is to not let myself even know what's out there.


altcunningham said:
That's how I manage. And if I'm not rotating it in, why do I have it.
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Exactly. That's how I ended up getting rid of most of my Legends and SWB. It just came down to 'am I ever seriously going to pull down other stuff from my collection to have this on a shelf?' It's also how I succeeded in paring down my HACKS collection. I had tons of army builders and the question became 'yes, I love my Greek soldiers, but do I love them enough to take up 50" of shelf space when I could display one of each and take up 7" of shelf space?' The answer was, I like looking at them, but I don't like looking at 10 of them 10 times more than 1 of them.

@cmoney You'll never be alone - you have us! But also, you never know. You could meet a nice collector of your preferred gender identity and end up DOUBLE fucked because now you both have an expensive hobby problem to deal with in addition to feeding into each others' bad habits.

Sometimes I wish I were single just so I wouldn't feel like I'm dragging my family into my ridiculously expensive hobbies (even though my wife and both kids are very supportive and various types of collectors themselves).
 
The only Army builders I ever sold that I regretted were the legions goblins from one of the in stock sales.

And that's because I figured you could probably get them later down the line. Fool, I. I should have kept my little squad of five.
 
I regretted getting rid of a bunch of my Stormtroopers until Hasbro came along and made way fucking better Stormtroopers. Besides that, maybe tellingly considering I STILL fucking army build a little bit to some extent, I don't think I've ever regretted selling army builders. Maybe my NECA Cartoon Foot Soldiers. That's a bit of a bummer.
 
Yeah I used to have 12 troopers for classified. Now it's just four of the new Vipers. And I swore off all the specialty Vipers. Four look cool flanking the big three Cobra heads. That is honestly all I even wanted out of the Classified line when it started.
 
Damien said:
I couldn't. I know myself. I don't have that kind of willpower. Hell, you guys are the reason I have half the shit I own, or thereabouts. If I know it's there and people are talking about it, I'm going to get invested in having it. The only/best way for me to cut out the collecting is to not let myself even know what's out there.
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Come on, it's not that big of a deal! I used to frequent the Classified thread on Fwoosh just to talk about Joe stuff and had no problem buying nothing for... at least... a couple months... huh. But I mean, now I only have... a few.... several... dozen... figures... Hrm.
 
I actually did sell a handful of things on eBay the other day. Didn't get as much as I wanted, but it did feel kinda nice to at least make a positive step towards eliminating some of the unwanted clutter, however small. Maintaining the motivation to continually list and pack and ship stuff is still a hurdle though. :)
 
I honestly feel this happens when you have an overabundance of things. Let's be honest, most folks here have HUGE collections of toys, walls lined with them. But do you really enjoy them? Have you actually taken the time to enjoy each figure in your collection? Is each purchase special in some manner to you? Or is it just another piece in the puzzle, something to just take the edge off, or simply to complete some team?

For many reasons, some out of my control, I have a small collection of figures, even if I've been collecting pretty much all my life. I only buy a few figures a year, and yet, I try to enjoy each figure as much as I can. I can tell you a story about every single figure in my collection. Each figure meant something to me. I'm not a completionist, I don't buy to complete teams or lines or anything. If I buy a figure, it's because it somehow speaks to me, either as a character or as a piece of art. Not to say that I haven't bought some figures that I didn't enjoy that much, or haven't ever made impulse purchases, of course I have. But I really try to make each purchase meaningful to me. That's why I always watch reviews of figures before I buy them.

And even then I sometimes feel like its too much. But it always helps to appreciate what I have, to think that I am very lucky to have these things, that many people would love to have but don't. This helps me appreciate what I have even more and enjoy it.
 
On the topic of army building, that's something I've only recently (last couple of years) gotten really into, despite having the itch for a long time. The most extensive army building I have right now is SHIELD agents. I've got the original Fury that I use as with the Dirk Anger head, the two-pack troops (which are basically that figure again with slight changes), then I bought two of the women SHIELD agents, and I've got the BAF SHIELD Mandroid and the Fury, Dugan, Carter pack. I keep thinking I should get rid of them. But then part of my shelf space is just dedicated to the villains and they gotta have someone to pummel. Kang or Ultron just look better tearing through a half dozen SHIELD dudes.

This is easily the part of my collection I wrestle the most with. It feels like too much. I've got two Guardsmen, I could just keep those for the same purpose and dump these, surely. I do like that SHIELD uniform though...
 
Damien said:
I was thinking about this today while opening some new toys (and having the continuing existential crisis) and realized another element of my discontent is definitely the cyclical nature of it. Probably 80% of the toys I open I have already owned at some point in my life in some manner. More than half of my Joe Classified collection is just 'I had this in the ARAH days and now I bought it again.' And I'm really asking myself, how many times are these companies going to convince me that I need a new He-Man, a new Luke Skywalker, and a new Wolverine? So far the apparent answer is 'many, many times.' But I NEED to sit down and decide on a stopping point where my collection not of a line, but of an entire brand is just finished.
And if there's never a stopping point where I think I can be satisfied, I definitely will have to deal with that problem.
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I think this is the underlying issue for many of us, and it’s not always easy to recognize, It’s simply a function of time. The longer we’ve been collecting, the more prevalent the issue becomes.

Look at DC as an IP. How many different DC lines and sub-lines have there been over the last 25 years? However, none of them have truly been compatible in terms of articulation, style, and/or scale.

I keep saying that it’s my DC Universe Classics collection that will follow me into retirement in a few years, yet I’m on the edge of my seat waiting for the McFarlane DC Multiverse Zatanna preorder to drop. What’s my endgame here? In a perfect world, I would have my one perfect Zatanna as part of my one perfect DC collection, but God knows, it’s not a perfect world, especially when it comes to action figure lines.

Maybe that’s where a lot of this disillusionment is coming from. We’ve been chasing something for years (and in some cases, decades) that we’re finally beginning to realize/admit that we’ll never achieve. If we want to stay in the game, we may have to reevaluate our goals and more importantly, our expectations.
 
spinc said:
I honestly feel this happens when you have an overabundance of things. Let's be honest, most folks here have HUGE collections of toys, walls lined with them. But do you really enjoy them? Have you actually taken the time to enjoy each figure in your collection? Is each purchase special in some manner to you? Or is it just another piece in the puzzle, something to just take the edge off, or simply to complete some team?
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The problem that I see here is that not taking the time to enjoy each figure individually does not equal not enjoying your collection. For some of us the enjoyment comes from putting together that puzzle and recreating those teams and groups that we have loved since our childhood. I can look at my Jim Lee X-Men shelf and get immense feelings of nostalgia and happiness from it without even noticing the Jean Grey figure in the corner. That old saying comes to mind, can't see the forest for the trees. You get so bogged down in detail that you don't see the whole picture. For me collecting is definitely about the whole forest more so than any one tree. Do I have individual figures I love more than others? Of course, but I could never see myself just buying some members of Excalibur and not all of them.

Put very simply, when I'm eating a slice of pizza I don't individually taste each piece of pepperoni (or pineapple if you're nasty). I taste a slice of pizza with a whole lot of other things on it. That doesn't mean I'm not getting enjoyment out of eating the slice.
 
Xavion2025 said:
The longer we’ve been collecting, the more prevalent the issue becomes.
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That's exactly it. Like with your DC example; every time a new MOTU line comes out I convince myself that's the 'final' line. MOTUC made me really happy for a long time. I was convinced I would never need to buy another He-Man figure for my entire life. Then Origins came out and I was like 'actually, this hits all the feels for me that MOTUC didn't, so I want this too.' Then Masterverse is going strong and I'm like 'well, these are better-articulated, more modern He-Man figures so I definitely want these...' And it just keeps going. Every time I convince myself 'this is the last time' and it never is.

I'm 43 years old. I've had 4 different G.I. Joe collections. 5 different MOTU collections. 3 Star Wars collections (6 if you count the times I sold off all my stuff and rebought the exact same figures). 5 or 6 TMNT collections. 2 Marvel collections (and to be fair, the one collection is ongoing for 20 years and includes buying, selling, and re-buying the same characters sometimes a dozen times over that period of time). At what point do you say 'no more of this brand.' I think I'm finally hitting the point where I have to make myself draw a hard line in the sand and say 'if I can't stick to this, I have to admit I have a problem and stop completely.'


JakeEkiss said:
But then part of my shelf space is just dedicated to the villains and they gotta have someone to pummel. Kang or Ultron just look better tearing through a half dozen SHIELD dudes.
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Not that YOU do this, but MY problem with this same thought process for my own collecting is that I never DO it.
I always think 'well, I need 10 Vipers because it'll look badass with Snake Eyes plowing through them all on the shelf.' But I never actually set up my shelves like that. So all of my army building becomes entirely theoretical; "It would look cool IF I ever did this with it." But I won't. So why do I have them? I like having a few army builders to give the impression on the shelf of 'there's a lot of these guys' and that needs to be good enough.
 
Damien said:
MY problem with this same thought process for my own collecting is that I never DO it.
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.....

I just haven't done it YET.

*shifty eyes*

(I will say, part of my plan for 2026 is to actually start executing the displays I've been thinking about for forever for exactly this reason)
 
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