Can someone explain the Funko Pop hatred thing to me? I can understand not liking the weird round-eyes-no-mouth aesthetic...
Can someone explain the Funko Pop hatred thing to me?
I can understand not liking the weird round-eyes-no-mouth aesthetic (although I myself think it’s cute). I can understand feeling contempt for the collectible-hoarding brand of consumerism, I suppose. But the weird offhand commentary that crosses my radar seems much…deeper, and more specific, than that.
(I’m honestly glad that someone in the world is trying to do the “whatever you love, we’ll make you a plastic doll of it in our house style” thing. Sadly they mostly don’t make the Funko Pops I’d actually want, but – that seems like a cause for a wistful shrug directed at my inner toy-loving child, not anything else.)
Is this tied in with some kind of subcultural or tribal conflict that I don’t understand?
Personally I find them banal and resent that they now take up a bunch of real estate in stores that used to mainly sell media (though, to be fair, those stores would just go out of business faster without them). That said, I recall reading a piece once – which I sadly can no longer find – talking about how they came in at a time when custom vinyl figurines were popular, and mass-produced what were previously individually sculpted figures with more character, so I think there are some hobbyists who are mad that they crowded out more interesting versions of the same thing.
much like the Big Dog t-shirts of yore, funko pops are something that weird people erroneously take as a sign of the cultural and intellectual poverty of “normie” society because they’re everywhere, when in fact they’re most often bought by people who are also weird but in a different way
They’re top-heavy and fall over all the time if they’re on the same surface that anyone uses for anything.
On the dining table in my residence is a collection of thrift-shop vases of thrift-shop artificial flowers, some random glass Christmas ornament someone gave me propped upside down in a vase an amateur ceramicist gave me, and my Shabbat candlesticks, all of which stay nicely upright even when people put elbows on the table, bump into table corners while walking, et cetera. There is also my roommate’s old funko pop, which is currently flat on its face.
And funko pops are not pretty enough to merit their own special display shelf.
The concept is “whatEVER mass-media property you care about, we make merchandise of it you can buy!”, it’s not terribly odd that became a shorthand for a life overweighted towards caring about mass-media properties and buying merchandise
Also like, it makes it really explicit that the creative properties are equally interchangeable theming around a core of Selling Product, such that to be a fan of or participant in Funko culture there’s not much disclaimability that you’re enthusiastically amplifying that dynamic.