This week I will host a guest post on my blog, it’s the first actually. I would like to present a post written by my valued fellow blogger Kai of Deluscar, who just celebrated his blog’s 5th anniversary of blogging! Thank You to Kai for providing an new article to my humble blog.

Deluscar is an editorial-orientated blog, that focuses on reviews, impressions, commentaries about anime, manga, visual novels, video games and other things from the Japanese visual culture as well. His posts are often of very thoughtful nature and entertaining to read, be sure to make a visit (*＾▽＾)／.

Hello everyone, Kai of Deluscar here. I’m here to talk about impulse buying, something I’m sure most of you figure collectors are pretty familiar with.

tfw impulse buying

Impulse buying, I mean come on, everyone’s done it in one way or the other. Sometimes you see something you like but probably don’t really need. But it just looks so aesthetically-pleasing, and it seems to be made in such high quality in closer inspection. Finally, the decent price for such a high-quality item sealed the deal for you, and thus, you take out your wallet and the deed is done — only to regret it (or not) some time later. This apply to just any kinds of items, but especially true in figures. The “buy first, think later” is an especially popular mindset behind figure collectors.

The Shinkai Shoujo Miku figure. One of the most aesthetically-pleasing Miku figure I ever came across — and my dream figure which I will never get.

While figures can be expensive, for one thing, figures rely heavily on aesthetics to attract customers, and I’ll be damned if some of these figures don’t look good. There are quite a lot of good figure companies like Good Smile Company, ALTER and so on that just so effortlessly came up with countless good figures. Each and every single figure they made are so intricate and detailed. Furthermore, types of figures like nendoroids and figmas help bolstering expressions too instead of -only- just aesthetics, with the ability of changing different faces and body parts. As far as anime decorative stuffs, they are arguably the best.

Because of that, impulse buying is a very common urge for figures collectors. Though it may sounds weird for me to say this now after everything I said, but I don’t really have much of this problem. I think it may has to do with the fact that I have always seen myself as more of a casual collector. If anything, I’m good at “limiting” myself, and my mind quite naturally adapted to a personal policy whenever I’m buying figures.

For one thing, buying figures for me is an emotional investment to a series and characters I like. That means I will only buy figures of characters I actually recognize and like, and figures of characters from shows I don’t know and even figures of original characters are something I wouldn’t spend hundreds of dollars on no matter how good they look.

My glass cabinet in question

Of course, my ideal room would be that it has to be neat and have a decent amount of figures on display. I don’t want to buy so many figures to the point that figure boxes would be sprawled all around as if my room just got struck with a tornado. All my figure boxes are packed up nicely in my cupboard, and the figures that I want to display are done so in a glass cabinet. I’m running out of space though. My room’s pretty small to begin with and while I would love to buy another glass cabinet, there’s just no space anymore. I can just toss my figures and boxes haphazardly around the room, but aforementioned, I don’t really like that.

I know some people also adapted a constant buy-and-sell cycle, so that they can make new space for more figures. Not something I personally want to do, like I said, buying figures to me is an investment to the series, an investment to the characters — a form of fandom engagement. Furthermore, my figures are my sweat, tears and blood… and also money and empty room spaces (yes, my room spaces are important). So I’m not selling them anytime soon.

It’s an odd mindset, but I’m glad I have it-at the very least, it’s great for controlling my impulse buying. Though when all the pieces fall into place, and there’s a figure of a character I really, really like, I still fall into the pitfall of impulse buying — as it was the case with my latest Miku figure (because come on, it’s fucking Miku!).

At the end of the day, all I want to say — consumerism is a bitch. If you’re a victim of impulse buying as well, especially of figures, what do you do to control it?

Or do you just let your impulses RUN WILD?