I have a theory that the more obsessive adult male collectors of boys' action figures are subconsciously amassing not toys, but little plastic father figures to replace or supplement the lame dad they had as a kid. It's like Optimus Prime is the dad these people wish they had instead of their real fathers. I think it's true for many single adult male figure collectors and some of these stories would support my idea.
I also think that for adult males in childless relationships action figure collections become inadvertent replacements for children, essentially making TRU the baby momma of several thousand geeks. That's kind of where I'm at right now!
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Like fathers like toys
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2 comments:
Pretty much, I think this nails it on the head. I can't recall the number of times when I'm picking up an old DVD set of cartoons or some show that I loved as a kid, not to mention any toys that I buy, when I didn't think "Hey, this would be great to show my non-existant kid."
What's weird is that neither my girl nor I want kids, but if we ever do there will be a shitload of fun stuff for them to grow up with. Much better than the crap my parents have in their house.
I've given up on forecasting the future toy likes and dislikes of my nonexistent kid. The only solid thing I have to go on is that both my wife and I loved playing with cardboard boxes when we were little. I can go through the neighbors' trash cans for that stuff like my dad did for me.
However, it's most likely that my future nonexistent children will have tastes that are 180 degrees out from my own. So I'm not going to be getting the current sexy robot dinosaur space Martian figure for my theoretical future children. I don't have enough room to amass crates and crates of unwanted sexy robot dinosaur space Martian figures. I've already got enough crap of my own. And right now my crap eclipses theirs because they don't exist yet.
Existing gives me and my toy robots priority over non existent people. Me existing now trumps the toy collection of my future kids. I'll let them collect toys from the future. Heck, their toys at this moment are just as nonexistent as they are now. I'm saving a lot of room by not getting future toys now.
Besides, kids end up hating their parents by the time they're eight years old anyways.
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