My kids never had any interest in Labubu, but have been caught up in other fads like Pokemon cards. My sense is that these kinds of trends are mostly driven by scarcity. If you manage to get your hands on one, then you get the feeling of owning something rare, exclusive, and desirable amongst your peers - which is enough reason on its own to want something. You can also convince yourself that paying the normal MSRP is a smart buy, since normally they are sold by scalpers at inflated prices, even if you have no intention of reselling.
I’m not immune either. They sell Pokemon cards at 7/11 here - typically a store will put out one or two boxes a day - and usually they sell out very quickly. When I see them in stock, I feel an urge to buy them even when I’m not with my kids. Just because I know they will sell out soon.
I’m referring specifically to the cards, which exploded in popularity after some YouTuber paid millions for a rare card.
The prices are completely driven by artificial scarcity - obviously they could easily print any card in unlimited numbers, but they intentionally print some cards in limited quantities that can only be obtained by getting lucky with a random pack.
This was true over 20 years ago when I was in elementary school - I don’t know anyone who really played the game, most people just collected the cards.
Magic the Gathering was always both though, you collected good/rare cards & played the game with them!
> probably around the same age as the average HN user.
Based on the references and speech patterns I've seen on HN, I think the average HNers is at least a decade older than Pokemon. The first Pokemon videogame only came out in 1996.
Y'all are boomers - nothing wrong with that, but HN has become an older monoculture.
Agree with this FWIW. The music and movie references here are largely from the 80s. Nostalgia here tends to be rooted in the 80s to the early 90s. This place feels solidly GenX to me which makes sense as the first web-forward generation.
i am! but i see a fair amount of people just starting their careers, students, etc. as well. and, based on some of the comments ive seen, i think there is a lot of young folk. most of my students are active, or at least browse, HN. they are mostly 18-20.
i took a wild guess that ~30 would be the average. maybe 35-40 is closer. either way, i think my point stands: 30 years seems too long to be classified as a fad.
> i think my point stands: 30 years seems too long to be classified as a fad.
Yep! Completely agree! I'm not that much older than Pokemon, and most of my peers have been influenced by it heavily and their kids will be influenced by it as well. If Pokemon is a fad, so are smartphones.
In classic HN fashion, I decided to kvetch about something completely irrelevant to the larger convo ;)
Trading Card Games (TCG), and generally any item relying on gacha mechanics, are this generation's "scratchers".
It's amazing seeing grown adults who would scoff at their peers buying lotto tickets and scratchers enthusiastically burn cash on TCG without the slightest sense of hypocrisy.
The secret is "social head canon".
"Head canon" is when you fill in the plot holes to make sense of your favorite narratives.
"Social head canon" is the same but for our understanding of society.
When the algorithm feeds children videos of adults opening TCG packs what they see is grown adults, the people who are appear to, and are supposed to, have it all figured out, losing their shit over cardboard and the child fills in the "why" on their own.
But they are wholly ignorant of "gambler's high" so they concoct elaborate narratives for why the adults "love the cards". That "social head canon" is so sticky because it can be anything, infinitely complex, wholly private, and different for every person.
Once that child grows up they learn about "gambler's high" and so seek the same thing, but now for the intended reasons.
Labubus have one of the most sophisticated marketing on Twitch and YouTube, by the same people who are paid to promote anime and gaming "conferences".
I agree that reality and fiction unfortunately merges for a subset of the population. The gaming addicted are also most likely to develop an AI addiction, because LLMs and agent setups are basically a computer game.
If some people feel happy playing with Labubus, mechanical keyboards, or <insert_product_here> why do you care? It's their life and not yours.
Additionally, this article also clearly fails to deep dive into how Pop Mart basically exported Asian style marketing strategies to the West. Back in Asia, conspicuous consumption and quick commerce is not viewed negatively the same way it is amongst Western HN/Redditors, and the "cute marketing" that Pop Mart leveraged is the norm back in Asia.
In that sense, I'd argue Labubu and TikTok are both significant milestones in Chinese IP and cultural exports, as it gave them a Tomogachi and Hallyu moment.
Additionally, using Reddit to make qualified judgements on "society at large" is fundamentally flawed.
Discussing the nature of hyperreal consumer products is similar to art criticism. You think about the intent of the item and how it affects the recipient. It isn't just being a jerk about it that is, since you can gain insight into societal trends by asking, "why the heck are people taking weird pictures of Donnie Darko stuffed animals and posting them online." Discussions of buying new mechanical keyboards when you have plenty that work fine are a bridge too far though. Because I buy too many of them.
Unfortunately many products that “make people happy” are nothing more than plastic trash pollution. How many resources have been used and how much damage done to ship plastic trash across oceans, that doesn’t even do anything?
> why do you care? It's their life and not yours.
Because ultimately it does affect me, it affects all of us.
You could apply this same logic to your comment. "If Labubu discourse makes them happy, who cares? It's their life." We should live and let live but that doesn't preclude discussion.
Sure, but the article is going from discourse into direct moral judgement. If you write an entire blogpost making a moral judgement on personal choices yeah I'd flame you.
I can imagine someone who xollects Labubus feeling insulted or patronized, but they are not lifting a finger to stop them from buying a Labubu. They are just publishing their thoughts. Their thoughts happen to contain moral judgements, that is not a departure from participating in discourse. Frankly it is ridiculous to suggest discussing morality is not engaging in discourse, and this kind of ontological/categorical argument is a way to sidestep the merits of the argument without engaging with them by just labeling them as illegitimate.
Generally, I'm just not buying that only some forms of discourse are legitimate, and again, if this article was illegitimate, your comment would be illegitimate for the same reason, so what are we doing here?
But I would agree that people who felt judged, slighted, etc. would be free to respond, "flaming" or otherwise. I see no issue with that. (Flaming is probably not the right way to respond but that's a different question.)
>If you write an entire blogpost making a moral judgement on personal choices
as the article correctly points out the Labubu craze is not a personal choice. It's a social, commercial, public, media driven phenomenon. People didn't organically discover this toy, it's part of a very deliberate marketing and attention effort. And as Ian McGilchrist points out, attention is a moral act:
"Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way. The fact that a place is special to some because of its great peace and beauty may, by that very fact, make it for another a resource to exploit, in such a way that its peace and beauty are destroyed. Attention has consequences."
What we as a culture promote, celebrate spend focus, time and resources on, and in turn what we sacrifice for that is an important question and worthy of debate. And thinking it isn't, is literally acting like a child being mad that someone took your toy away.
Every bit of this all comes down to a child shaped hole in the hearts of modern people. We're living through the first generation of humans for whom having children by 25 is not the norm. That has had knock-on effects to every corner of our psychologies imaginable. For men it expresses as angst, anger, and existential lack of meaning. For women it's infantilization, dog-momming, and love of toy dolls. And of course that inability to have children all boils down to the cost of living crisis foisted upon us by the business elites. Like vampires sucking every last drop of humanity from the world to line their pockets.
I couldn't suspend disbelief after the author called Labubu "cute".
My daughter owns one. It's not cute. It's terrifying. It has a monster's grin. It looks like something out of "Child's Play". You know it will murder you in your sleep.
Thankfully, she got bored of it pretty fast, as I suppose do most children (and adults).
extrapolated all of this not only 7 months too late beyond the trend’s implosion,
while missing the way more obvious fact that being trendy attracted women of the same age range
this was also the tail end of the fashion trend based on muting masculinity in favor of catering to the female gaze, an adaptation once again for women’s comfort until women realized they hate feminine men more than they thought they briefly hated masculinity.
You saw the juxtaposition and instead of simply ask, you draw all these completely unrelated lines from what you best understood and are completely wrong about what fuels the adaptations
correlations that have nothing to do with the actual guiding decisions, the simple timeless tale of adults attracting adults. You touch on it briefly though before wondering if the man plays with his labubu at home, which I’m not sure was sarcasm or not, I hope it was because the answer is no he doesn't play with the labubu, its a charm
makes me wonder what my blind spots are, what I’m out of touch about
The lack of actual photos of Labubus "in the real" (usually on a keychain at a pant's belt loops) is jarring. The topic of the "performative male" has been regurgitated in social media for quite some time. Still the author ignores that and misses the overall bigger picture.
I think any argument made here with regard to Baudrillard's hyperreality could be made about most trends, not only Labubus. Actual insight into the demographic is missing.
I prefer the following video which touches on the performative male (it's in German though). Don't get distracted by the title, it's nuanced and offered me some insight into performative behaviors (both the recent manifestation and in general)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rFMdKcR824
>this was also the tail end of the fashion trend based on muting masculinity in favor of catering to the female gaze, an adaptation once again for women’s comfort until women realized they hate feminine men more than they thought they briefly hated masculinity.
Am I missing something? They're cute little dolls.
My kids never had any interest in Labubu, but have been caught up in other fads like Pokemon cards. My sense is that these kinds of trends are mostly driven by scarcity. If you manage to get your hands on one, then you get the feeling of owning something rare, exclusive, and desirable amongst your peers - which is enough reason on its own to want something. You can also convince yourself that paying the normal MSRP is a smart buy, since normally they are sold by scalpers at inflated prices, even if you have no intention of reselling.
I’m not immune either. They sell Pokemon cards at 7/11 here - typically a store will put out one or two boxes a day - and usually they sell out very quickly. When I see them in stock, I feel an urge to buy them even when I’m not with my kids. Just because I know they will sell out soon.
Haha what would Pokémon have to do to convince you it's more than a fad? It's already the world's biggest IP, it's been around for 30 years...
I’m referring specifically to the cards, which exploded in popularity after some YouTuber paid millions for a rare card.
The prices are completely driven by artificial scarcity - obviously they could easily print any card in unlimited numbers, but they intentionally print some cards in limited quantities that can only be obtained by getting lucky with a random pack.
Most buyers don’t even play the card game.
This was true over 20 years ago when I was in elementary school - I don’t know anyone who really played the game, most people just collected the cards.
Magic the Gathering was always both though, you collected good/rare cards & played the game with them!
indeed, i always understood a "fad" to mean some short-lived trend. meanwhile, pokemon is probably around the same age as the average HN user.
> probably around the same age as the average HN user.
Based on the references and speech patterns I've seen on HN, I think the average HNers is at least a decade older than Pokemon. The first Pokemon videogame only came out in 1996.
Y'all are boomers - nothing wrong with that, but HN has become an older monoculture.
I don’t think this is true. HN was well known to CS people in my undergrad and I’m barely a millennial.
Agree with this FWIW. The music and movie references here are largely from the 80s. Nostalgia here tends to be rooted in the 80s to the early 90s. This place feels solidly GenX to me which makes sense as the first web-forward generation.
>Y'all are boomers.
i am! but i see a fair amount of people just starting their careers, students, etc. as well. and, based on some of the comments ive seen, i think there is a lot of young folk. most of my students are active, or at least browse, HN. they are mostly 18-20.
i took a wild guess that ~30 would be the average. maybe 35-40 is closer. either way, i think my point stands: 30 years seems too long to be classified as a fad.
> i think my point stands: 30 years seems too long to be classified as a fad.
Yep! Completely agree! I'm not that much older than Pokemon, and most of my peers have been influenced by it heavily and their kids will be influenced by it as well. If Pokemon is a fad, so are smartphones.
In classic HN fashion, I decided to kvetch about something completely irrelevant to the larger convo ;)
Trading Card Games (TCG), and generally any item relying on gacha mechanics, are this generation's "scratchers".
It's amazing seeing grown adults who would scoff at their peers buying lotto tickets and scratchers enthusiastically burn cash on TCG without the slightest sense of hypocrisy.
The secret is "social head canon".
"Head canon" is when you fill in the plot holes to make sense of your favorite narratives.
"Social head canon" is the same but for our understanding of society.
When the algorithm feeds children videos of adults opening TCG packs what they see is grown adults, the people who are appear to, and are supposed to, have it all figured out, losing their shit over cardboard and the child fills in the "why" on their own.
But they are wholly ignorant of "gambler's high" so they concoct elaborate narratives for why the adults "love the cards". That "social head canon" is so sticky because it can be anything, infinitely complex, wholly private, and different for every person.
Once that child grows up they learn about "gambler's high" and so seek the same thing, but now for the intended reasons.
Rinse and repeat across generations.
Labubus have one of the most sophisticated marketing on Twitch and YouTube, by the same people who are paid to promote anime and gaming "conferences".
I agree that reality and fiction unfortunately merges for a subset of the population. The gaming addicted are also most likely to develop an AI addiction, because LLMs and agent setups are basically a computer game.
Labubus are fucking dumb, ugly, and useless. Here, I said it
Alternatively - who cares?
If some people feel happy playing with Labubus, mechanical keyboards, or <insert_product_here> why do you care? It's their life and not yours.
Additionally, this article also clearly fails to deep dive into how Pop Mart basically exported Asian style marketing strategies to the West. Back in Asia, conspicuous consumption and quick commerce is not viewed negatively the same way it is amongst Western HN/Redditors, and the "cute marketing" that Pop Mart leveraged is the norm back in Asia.
In that sense, I'd argue Labubu and TikTok are both significant milestones in Chinese IP and cultural exports, as it gave them a Tomogachi and Hallyu moment.
Additionally, using Reddit to make qualified judgements on "society at large" is fundamentally flawed.
Discussing the nature of hyperreal consumer products is similar to art criticism. You think about the intent of the item and how it affects the recipient. It isn't just being a jerk about it that is, since you can gain insight into societal trends by asking, "why the heck are people taking weird pictures of Donnie Darko stuffed animals and posting them online." Discussions of buying new mechanical keyboards when you have plenty that work fine are a bridge too far though. Because I buy too many of them.
Unfortunately many products that “make people happy” are nothing more than plastic trash pollution. How many resources have been used and how much damage done to ship plastic trash across oceans, that doesn’t even do anything?
> why do you care? It's their life and not yours.
Because ultimately it does affect me, it affects all of us.
You could apply this same logic to your comment. "If Labubu discourse makes them happy, who cares? It's their life." We should live and let live but that doesn't preclude discussion.
Sure, but the article is going from discourse into direct moral judgement. If you write an entire blogpost making a moral judgement on personal choices yeah I'd flame you.
I can imagine someone who xollects Labubus feeling insulted or patronized, but they are not lifting a finger to stop them from buying a Labubu. They are just publishing their thoughts. Their thoughts happen to contain moral judgements, that is not a departure from participating in discourse. Frankly it is ridiculous to suggest discussing morality is not engaging in discourse, and this kind of ontological/categorical argument is a way to sidestep the merits of the argument without engaging with them by just labeling them as illegitimate.
Generally, I'm just not buying that only some forms of discourse are legitimate, and again, if this article was illegitimate, your comment would be illegitimate for the same reason, so what are we doing here?
But I would agree that people who felt judged, slighted, etc. would be free to respond, "flaming" or otherwise. I see no issue with that. (Flaming is probably not the right way to respond but that's a different question.)
>If you write an entire blogpost making a moral judgement on personal choices
as the article correctly points out the Labubu craze is not a personal choice. It's a social, commercial, public, media driven phenomenon. People didn't organically discover this toy, it's part of a very deliberate marketing and attention effort. And as Ian McGilchrist points out, attention is a moral act:
"Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way. The fact that a place is special to some because of its great peace and beauty may, by that very fact, make it for another a resource to exploit, in such a way that its peace and beauty are destroyed. Attention has consequences."
What we as a culture promote, celebrate spend focus, time and resources on, and in turn what we sacrifice for that is an important question and worthy of debate. And thinking it isn't, is literally acting like a child being mad that someone took your toy away.
> I'd argue Labubu and TikTok are both significant milestones in Chinese IP and cultural exports [...]
Interpret this article as an attempt at criticizing or curtailing this effect instead.
Every bit of this all comes down to a child shaped hole in the hearts of modern people. We're living through the first generation of humans for whom having children by 25 is not the norm. That has had knock-on effects to every corner of our psychologies imaginable. For men it expresses as angst, anger, and existential lack of meaning. For women it's infantilization, dog-momming, and love of toy dolls. And of course that inability to have children all boils down to the cost of living crisis foisted upon us by the business elites. Like vampires sucking every last drop of humanity from the world to line their pockets.
I couldn't suspend disbelief after the author called Labubu "cute".
My daughter owns one. It's not cute. It's terrifying. It has a monster's grin. It looks like something out of "Child's Play". You know it will murder you in your sleep.
Thankfully, she got bored of it pretty fast, as I suppose do most children (and adults).
extrapolated all of this not only 7 months too late beyond the trend’s implosion,
while missing the way more obvious fact that being trendy attracted women of the same age range
this was also the tail end of the fashion trend based on muting masculinity in favor of catering to the female gaze, an adaptation once again for women’s comfort until women realized they hate feminine men more than they thought they briefly hated masculinity.
You saw the juxtaposition and instead of simply ask, you draw all these completely unrelated lines from what you best understood and are completely wrong about what fuels the adaptations
correlations that have nothing to do with the actual guiding decisions, the simple timeless tale of adults attracting adults. You touch on it briefly though before wondering if the man plays with his labubu at home, which I’m not sure was sarcasm or not, I hope it was because the answer is no he doesn't play with the labubu, its a charm
makes me wonder what my blind spots are, what I’m out of touch about
The lack of actual photos of Labubus "in the real" (usually on a keychain at a pant's belt loops) is jarring. The topic of the "performative male" has been regurgitated in social media for quite some time. Still the author ignores that and misses the overall bigger picture.
I think any argument made here with regard to Baudrillard's hyperreality could be made about most trends, not only Labubus. Actual insight into the demographic is missing.
I prefer the following video which touches on the performative male (it's in German though). Don't get distracted by the title, it's nuanced and offered me some insight into performative behaviors (both the recent manifestation and in general) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rFMdKcR824
>this was also the tail end of the fashion trend based on muting masculinity in favor of catering to the female gaze, an adaptation once again for women’s comfort until women realized they hate feminine men more than they thought they briefly hated masculinity.
Am I missing something? They're cute little dolls.