As some of you may know, Evangelion finally concluded with the release of 3.0+1.0 in non-Japanese markets. So I set aside some time, rewatched it, and prepared for Thrice Upon A Time. Sunday came, I gathered all the ingredients of a good night's watch, and sat down to enjoy it. I won't write a review, but I'll say that the ending got to me. It really did. I'm in a pretty tough spot these last few years, for various reasons, so the more optimistic and "real", yet wholesome, take of a grown up Anno, over the non-defeatist but melancholic end of EoE written by a depressed Anno, hit harder. I mention this because, once again, Anno tried to tell the Hikikomoris and all such assorted people, or just generally the fans down on their luck and stuck in escapism, to stop worrying about made-up nonsense and go and live their life. Now, I, and I doubt anyone here for that matter, am not that far gone. I left obsessing over fictional worlds behind me. The fanfics and the lore memorizations and everything. I keep track of certain IPs, but I'm not using them to escape reality. I am attached to certain things, but they don't require a daily investment. I have my obstacles to overcome, but that's another discussion.
Anyway, after I finished the movie I let it settle a bit. I started looking around. As I've said before, aside from a line or two, I never had a proper "collection" in the sense of having tons of Hasbro figures, ToyBiz Marvel and the such. I had my Lego (now in storage), my vidya, the odd comics I'd find (mostly Euro stuff and Ultimate Marvel), that one imported line (Minimates) and so on. So, when I looked around, I noticed various things. My books, in the library I'm still building. The hundreds upon hundreds of singles (comics) in their cardboard boxes. The ever-growing Hardcovers/Omnis/Absolutes. My 1/6th figures. The trunk with all my Minimates. My Doom Shelf. Some have been left behind, but more or less so far so good, these are all things that I have a connection to. The comic series I never finished have been thrown away, my HCs are of series I love, my books are mostly things that I enjoyed and didn't read as a chore, and so on. Then my eye fell upon my external HDs. The movie still rattled inside my head, so I started going through them. I have tons of stuff in there, from language packs to music. But really, it was the one with my TBs of comics and general Pop Culture entertainment that I wanted to check. I wanted to see just what I'd "saved" there. And it was a lot. A lot of series. Packs of entire imprints, some with things I'd never even heard of. Chronological Packs of characters with little importance to me. Just... a ton of "things". They weren't favourites put in a disk to be saved no matter what, they were a completionist's collection of data.
I like making lists, so usually I revise my wants. Across all media and licenses, I sit down sometimes and I list all the figures I'd, ideally, like to own. And I write and I write. Of course then I start crossing off names; it's part of the fun, really. Last time I did it, just for the 1/6th stuff, I reached a number of around 300 characters. Excluding specific looks. Granted, lots of these things will never get made in dolly format, but still... 300? Do I really need 300 figures? I cross-referenced that list when the things saved in my HDs. Everything was there. Some of my absolute favourite movies alongside a capebook I read 5 years ago and remember it, or 80GBs of a character's entire publishing history because a decade ago I randomly bought a toy of his. It was pure insanity. It cheapened the things I genuinely enjoyed, maybe even "loved" (as much as you can love such things) and it was just ugly. Files upon files upon files. Why was all that clutter there? Can't I just choose? What am I, some parasite that latches onto everything that it encounters? The credit song and the final scenes kept being repeated in my head. So I just did what I had to do. I started deleting. And I kept going on and on...
I'm more or less saying the same things, but there's a difference this time. I "felt" just how useless all this is. Logically, we all know it. But to "feel" it is different. I was sitting there, after midnight, in a dark room, and... that was it. Evangelion was, is, over. It's been close to a decade after 3.33 was released. Whether you feel the ending was satisfactoy or not isn't the point. The point is that after all this time, it's over. Lots of other franchises and sagas have ended in their own way, but Eva was just this 90s/00s thing that in a lot of ways shaped the modern otaku/fanboy and internet culture. And now it's gone. Nothing's changed. It all goes on. How could anything do? It's just fiction. And that's Anno's point. Who cares about the lore? It's all fluffy nonsense. He gave us the happy ending and told us to move on. The characters are, and will be, fine. We have to care for ourselves. It's a retread, but this time with a joyous and optimistic tone, of EoE. That's all well and good, but what got me was that it's
over. How many other things have I finished? How many shows? How many runs? How many? I can't even remember. Gone and forgotten. Nothing gained. Only time lost. How many backlogs do I have? How filled are they? I thought about all those things and I just felt empty. It’s not just the time. It’s that there are very few things that could get a definitive closure and affect me as much as Eva. And now Eva is over. And the world goes on. So why bother with all the rest? Literally why? Am I still looking to pick up new interests in the realm of pop culture decades into my finite life? There’s no argument to do so. No reason to create attachments to anything new, or stoke long-burned-out fires. I didn't want to finish my backlogs. I didn't want to remember the things that didn't immediately spring to mind. I was content with just the few that instantly lit up in my mind. I liked that. I liked having a genuine connection with an, ultimately "worthless", piece of media that did affect me. How could I possibly equate that with something of miniscule interest to me? It's insulting. It's ugly. How can I spend 300 euros on a character I love, and do the same for another because... X goes with Y next to Z, I suppose? No.
I came out of this whole thing having stripped down my planning down to the essentials. I'll still watch a film on Saturdays, catch a cool new show, like the recently concluded "The North Water" for example, and so on. I'm not burning it all down. I've already drastically trimmed my consumption of entertainment compared to the past, so it's not that. It's just that I decided to choose. I decided to choose only the ones that truly matter to me. For superficial and silly reasons yes, but reasons enough to drop that 300 and feel good about it. It's not that I dread the clutter or the money or anything. Obviously they're major factors, but it's something bigger. I don't
want the "dead weight". I don't want to look at a piece of memorabilia and feel disinterest. I don't want to waste the time to remain updated and buy useless things and find the best way to display them and on and on. I don't want to buy a bunch of characters I don't care for just to complete a specific iteration of a team. I don't want a huge, sprawling room full of plastic memorabilia that ultimately have no "weight" behind them and exist just because consuming is easier than choosing.
Personally, I want to pass down my collection. It's a part of me and I want those that follow me to gain an insight into me, even with something as silly as my favourite characters represented by realistic and expensive dollies. It's important to me. I want every piece to have a story. And I intend to assemble a great, coherent storybook, not a series of nonsensical vignettes. Variety will of course be present, but the kind that is a part of me, not variety for its own sake. After all, this is the entire point of collecting all these. Representations of the parts of our inner child. Materialised and kept in stasis. A way to keep our infantile side in check and alive.
I'm rambling again. But the film just got to me and made me face some things I'd been deluding myself about for a long time. I knew them, but I suppose it just hit the right chords. I've been writting this for too long, and time's too fleeting. For the first time in a while I don't feel conflicted. And especially in this. If I want to say something about reigning in the habit of overconsumption, it's that ultimately everything fades. But while the majority fades to nothingness, some leave some faint flickers behind. Latch onto these. Focus there. The rest is of no consequence. Buy the things that, if your eyes fall upon them one night, will form a smile. That's it. It might seem scary at first, but letting go is a wonderful feeling. It's what makes what remains all the more special.
I am speechless at such a ruthless insight into oneself.
I am also sort of glad that, luckily or unluckily enough, I am not in your situation.
Being born in the 70s, I was subjected during my childhood and teens to a healthy diet of what I consider good quality, scifi/fantasy, pop culture nonsense. Not only previous stuff, such as 2001 or LOTR (books, role games, and the animated Bakshi movie), but also contemporary, such as SW OT, Star Trek, Highlander, Flash Gordon, Big Trouble in Little China, Superman, Predator, Alien+Aliens, Willow, Blade Runner, Robocop 1&2, Indiana Jones, ET, Logan's Run, Excalibur, Inner Space, Terminator 1&2, Explorers, Legend, Greystoke, The Abyss, The Golden Child, Die Hard, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Shining, Jaws, Mad Max 1&2&3, Enemy Mine, Rambo, Scrooged, The Running Man, Akira, Krull, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Brainstorm, Little Shop of Horrors, The Thing, Escape From New York, Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Tron, Conan, The Last Starfighter, Pale Rider, The Goonies, Dune, Gremlins, Coccon, Howard the Duck (yeah, it's great), Ghostbusters, 2010 TYWMC, The Never Ending Story, Octopussy, Never Say Never Again, Back to the Future 1&2&3, and great, lesser known stuff (Firefox, Moontrap, Outland, Batteries not Included, Blue Thunder, D.A.R.Y.L., Flight of the Navigator, Starman, Short Circuit, The Final Countdown, Electric Dreams, The Day After, The Hidden, Year of the Dragon, etc). I am sure forgetting great stuff, and then there were those unforgettable tv shows, too many to list (not only American productions).
There sure was crap - I disliked Burton's Batman, Total Recall, Star Trek 5, etc, and I am sure biased, but for the most part, all those movies are now classics, in spite of their technological shortcomings (as seen today).
BUT
something started changing in the 90s. I guess it was the final triumph of the Neocon Revolution, which finally catched up with, and engulfed Hollywood, putting an end to the 60s Revolution. But somehow, as digital special effects and other industrial aspects of movie making greatly improved (such as financing power, production techniques, or cinematography), movies also started dumbing down and becoming the empty carcasses they feel like to me these days.
Hook, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Pierce Brosnan's Bond, Alien 3 and 4, The Mummy, The Flintstones, the Batman crap, True Lies, Titanic, the Godzilla crap, all that wildly successful Disney crap, Dick Tracy, SW PT. Heck, I can't even remember more of them because I stopped bothering at some point....
There sure was some good stuff - I loved Forrest Gump, Silence of the Lambs, The Professional, Tremors, Seven, Sleepy Hollow, The Fifth Element (well....sort of), Groundhog Day, Apollo 13, Contact, Pixar's stuff, some sequels carried over from the 80s (T2, Die Hard 2...), and The Matrix and Last Action Hero are amongst my favorites of all time, and I am sure biased, but for the most part, 90s movies became weaker and weaker as the decade went away. I have heard that the trend of absurd pop culture started with the ridiculously bad Independence Day. But nevermind.
My standards and requirements were set in the 70s/80s. Entertainment from that era is my point of reference. Back then I used to dream about how much better future entertainment would be (naive me), and needless to say, in my "extremely demanding" opinion, the last 30+ years have witnessed the demise of Hollywood/USA as a boundary-pushing creative force in the scifi/fantasy realm (setting aside the technological/industrial/non-artistical aspects of movie making, which can only improve, and which I have lost any interest in). Hollywood learnt in the 90s that they should stop caring about artistical values and making the movies artists wanted to make, and rather start making the movies PEOPLE CAN EASILY UNDERSTAND. Stop gambling millions on visionaries that make Blade Runners, only to get broke, and start only manufacturing products approved by technical committees and algorithms, then hire docile and greedy bean-counters-self-styled-artists like JJ Abrams, Ryan Johnson, Peter Jackson, John Favreau or Denis Villeneuve, who will give your corporate product the appearance of something made by an artist. There is a Plinkett review that reproduces a segment of a George Lucas interview in which, discussing his ousting by Disney, he puts quite bluntly where things stand right now: "no risk whatsoever, ever, with our shareholders' cash. Wanna make the next milestone in Cinematic History? Great, but you will have to create those assets with your own resources. Thank you very much.".
From my hard-line old-school perspective, Art and Creativity are synonyms of risk, rebellion and disruption, and those concepts are forever more forbidden in today's USA (UK has followed suit, and Europe... oh... nevermind...). Artists are no longer welcomed, except for window-dressers. Engineers, lawyers and accountants are today's Hollywood's workhorses. Welcome to the Disney Paradigm, where the no-risk requirement has had such an impact in the environment, that in the last decades, art schools have turned into silicon foundries, and the so-called artists they manufacture eat, drink, breath and **** hi-tech Anti-Creativety since the day they are conceived, behaving and performing for the rest of their productive lives as obedient and efficient CPUs in flashy fleshy encapsulations, to just be adored by us, the techno-idiots. By the looks of it, choosing a career path in Movie Making these days is every bit the same as it is in IT, only more showy.
It is not Organic Creative Bankruptcy. It is Anti-Creativity (aka Creative Sterilization), engineered at the top of the food-chain, mixed with ever-impoiving Hi-Tech plus hollow and silly SJW fakeness, and fed to the bottom through teaching, hiring and Corporate Culture (and of course, by example: just look how rich you will get if you just obbey us!). And boy, do people embrace that ****...... both "creators" and audiences...! And (directly or indirectly) presiding over all this, the likes of Bob Iger, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Ridley Scott. But don't get me wrong: dumb, desperate-for-idols-to-worship audiences are the real culprits of The End of Art in Movie Making. No one else.
REMARK: I hold no faith on recent fan backslash or youtubers thrashing new movies these days. The same people then swear by the Gods that the SW PT or TFA are fine movies........ :-(
As a result, today's Star Wars and Marvel movies, as almost everything else, are perfectly forgettable and disposable corporate products with a comedic coating on the surface and very clumsy epic at the core, exclusively derivative, made by people who actually hate the franchises they are given, and who deep beneath, beyond the love words in marketing press kits, show a very clear its-just-another-gig-and-another-million-bucks attitude. These movies are perfect fan service tampons which nobody will talk about in 10 years time because everyone will be too busy discussing in Unithought the neuro-FX of the latest Iron Man installment. Meanwhile, the list of wildly succesful, insulting and self-insulting crap goes endlessly on and on: the Predator sequels, the Blade Runner sequel, the Alien prequels, the Harry Potter saga, JJ's Star Trek, the DC stuff, the new Hellboy, Tenet, the Pirates of the Caribbean saga and other Disney crap, Transformers, the Indiana Jones sequel, War of the Worlds, the Godzilla crap, and etc ad nauseam.
There have been flashes in the last 20 years, remembering us what a good movie looks like, but they were not full-blown good movies in my book: Noland's Batman stuff, 2012, First Man, the LOTR and Hobbit trilogies, Inception, Elysium, Legion, King Kong Skull Island, Dredd, Avatar, Predators, CA Winter Soldier, Kingsman, the Robocop remake, etc. And some movies, precious few, were even good (Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes), and I am sure biased, but for the most part, scifi/fantasy movies have gone to hell. Same applies to tv shows: Picard, ST Discovery, and the Mandalorian come to mind (I know nothing... about GoT, so I can't discuss it). REMARK: yeah, HBO's Rome was great, and that's why its fate was what it was.
This old-man movie rant, for what? When I got into collecting (early 2010s), I already knew all the above. I had not gathered so much evidence, but I was already decoupled from my previous fan life mainly because of the dismal turn mainstream scifi/fantasy had take already in the 90s (and because of the SW PT!). Yet, I still suffered of my lifelong need for the beauty of finely crafted stuff that I could physically change and interact with, and so, knowing that my fandom was veeeery finite, and thanks to the Internet, I eventually reconnected with Hasbro's 3.75" SW stuff, then organicly evolved into 1/6, then Hot Toys revolutionized the movie 1/6 niche, Asmus entered the LOTR scene, and wonderful robot pieces popped up everywhere (SSC Raynor & Tychus, HT Ed209, lots of Threezero big pieces). Besides doing a small share of 1987 Predator and 1986 Aliens, and a little bit of Cyberpunk pieces (Akira, Dredd, Robocop, and other dystopian stuff), I eventually discovered a taste for Historical 1/6 (both European and Asian) when Coomodel intoduced their Series of Empire range, and for Sherlock Holmes/Steampunk when some related figs were released. I, an anti-militarist, even regained an interest in GI Joe that extended to that amazing Military 1/6 stuff that is being produced these days (only weapons & equipment). Oh I forgot: in my book, there is only one superheroe, and he is not even that. Batman. I got into that too, but almost only Noland's. Pour in quite a bunch of 1/6 kitbashing, and that is all the collecting I do. I will get a bit into 1/18 planes and helicopters in the future, as well as airsoft, but only for the guns. No fighting in the woods, no cosplaying, no props, no comics (only high quality graphic novels, pdf format, and very rarely; no long over-extending serials). Maybe a few cheap blurays, and I am done with the media.
Well, yes: it got out of hand wrt initial plans, but with the built-in hard limit which always was my aforementioned dislike for everything that is done in the media these days. That makes beating my collection addiction very easy, for I suffer from none. I am just a completist of what I do love, which is not much, and getting to love it took my 30+ years. 85% of all 1/6 done these days, I don't care about.
There is a 1/6 bubble cooking, which will explode when lots of collectors worldwide realise that they are compulsively buying lots of expensive figures of characters (even almost identucal repetitions thereof) they don't even know well, let alone like or love. For really liking and loving takes lots of time and depth, none of which are easy to come across theae days.
Sorry for the long "me" rant.
RfC
PS: my dismal take on movies these days sure bleeds onto music too. To me, John Williams died in 1989, Hans Zimmer does not even exist, and don't get me started about rock/pop these days..... :-(
