These kinds of things are always full of psychoanalysis that I don't think actually qualifies. We've had beanie babies before. My daughter ran around and played on a large one at Taipei Taoyuan Airport and there were a few of them around. We were walking through Hong Kong when there was a big meetup with a giant inflatable orange, but it turned out to be Mojo Carrot - another plushie merch thing.
There were a huge number of people gathered there. And I imagine it's not very much different from Pokemon or baseball cards or what have you. My wife and I have a daughter who enjoys the Mojo Carrot and we plan on having another daughter within the next year. We've got fulfilling social lives at home in San Francisco, and when we stayed in Taiwan and Canada for months we had a wonderful time since walking down the street we'd run into a relative or friend. I only say this because the loneliness function doesn't ring true for me.
The whole article has a flavour of the adults saying "When you're kids talk about X they're using a code word for ecstasy and they're on drugs! Which the dealers hide in Halloween candy" or whatever. It's dressed up, but really that's all it is.
I think it's much simpler. It's just that humans are pretty good at assigning meaning to inanimate objects. The $30 microfiber fleece I bought at Big Lots in 2012 is just a $30 microfiber fleece I bought at Big Lots in 2012. But in 2026, it's the same $30 microfiber fleece that my daughter sleeps on. And now the fact that it's been with me those 14 years from when I came to America to when my daughter came to America means it represents a constant in my life and for that it's nice: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-11-29/Things_Do_La...
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.
from what i remember about toy trends as a kid, it wasn't about wanting to have the thing. it was about not wanting to be the one that didn't have the thing.
All of these gambling box toys are a way to simulate a reality where you can actually afford meaningful and expensive things - like real estate, nice cars, etc. When those are entirely out of budget for someone they might cope with a $30 toy they purchased for $200, which then can get milked by installing onto your belt.
I’m referring specifically to the cards, which exploded in popularity after Logan Paul paid $5 million for a rare card in 2021.
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.
In February Paul resold the card for $16 million. [1]
>I’m referring specifically to the cards, which exploded in popularity after Logan Paul paid $5 million for a rare card in 2021.
the cards have been popular for significantly longer than 5 years.
my kid's entire class (the entire school, really) brought their binders of pokemon cards to school every day in ~2002 until the school banned pokemon cards on premise because they were such a distraction and causing issues (kids crying about unfair trades, etc.)
They have long been popular, but the popularity has increased more than 5x since the pandemic. They were printing less than 2 billion a year before then [1], and are now selling more than 10 billion a year despite shortages, scalping, etc [2].
Perhaps "boom" is a better word for it than "fad". But my point is just that this demand seems to be largely driven by artifical scarcity, speculation, influencers - similar to Labubu.
And eventually prices will hit a peak and I expect we will see demand fall off rapidly.
Can you really say they're scarce if they're printing 5x as many, by your own words?
Look I agree with you, kids find YouTube videos about really compelling IP really compelling! But that is the story, with Pokémon cards and Labubu. Artificial scarcity, which a bajillion games try to do, most of them failing, doesn't alone move the needle on appeal. It's basically meaningless as a design choice. That's what you mean by artificial, the perception of scarcity, maybe, which everything collectible tries to do, and to me, is not really why kids find it appealing or care of whatever.
It's just the part of the product that you understand. That is what I am trying to say. You don't know why they find Pokémon appealing. You have no idea. You understand the gacha part but it doesn't really matter. It's easier to see this when you try playing really popular Roblox games, it really hits you how poorly you understand appeal.
> Can you really say they're scarce if they're printing 5x as many, by your own words?
All the local stores that sell random packs of Pokemon cards are sold out. So is Amazon, etc. If I wanted to buy some right now, the only way I could do it is through scalpers. So yes - they are scarce.
I think The Pokemon Company is very intentional about how many cards they print. As many as possible without saturating the market. I'm sure they employ people with degrees in business and economics whose job it is to figure that out.
> You don't know why they find Pokémon appealing.
That's not true. I like Pokemon. I have a Pokemon sticker on my laptop. I understand that there is intrinsic value to a Pokemon game, figurine, and even a cool holographic trading card. But the reason people are buying random packs from scalpers which usually just contain worthless junk cards is the hope of scoring a rare card. It's the scarcity.
That's also the reason they are sold that way instead of just selling you the cards you want as singles. If I could just go out and buy any special art card for $100 direct from The Pokemon Company (a huge margin for them), it would completely tank prices and ultimately demand.
> That's not true. I like Pokemon. I understand that there is intrinsic value to a Pokemon game, figurine, and even a cool holographic trading card.
Okay, see, so you don't know what the appeal is. You wouldn't know where to begin creating your own Pokémon. You would be like, well let's make some monsters. You wouldn't get it. If you did know how, you would be a billionaire. Do you get it now? It isn't enough to just make gacha mechanics.
Their popularity is a fad. You are talking about their popularity when they first released in the US. They faded significantly for at least a decade if not two until seeing a recent resurgence so massive even random corner stores carry pokemon card packs these days.
What gets me is that no one actually plays the game or cares about the cards. They buy them purely to resell them to someone else later for more. It's just like crypto in physical form.
When my kids open a pack they usually don't even look at what cards they get. They spread them out just enough to see the border - which is enough to tell whether you've gotten a rare card or not. I'm sure they've thrown plenty of cards in the junk bin without ever once looking at them.
The "special art rare" ones are admittedly pretty cool, and those do get taken out and looked at from time to time. Usually when friends come over.
I recently watched an excellent video about that incident. [1]
The takeaway was that this was yet another move by rich assholes designed to siphon money from the pockets of small time gamblers just so that the rich could get richer. They did it to Pokemon cards, destroying the experience of playing the actual game, and they tried to do it to Manga (although they hopefully won't succeed there).
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!
Yes I remember having a hard time finding other kids who wanted to actually play the pokemon card game. And even when I could find someone, they didn't care about the rules/energy costs. This was in elementary school though to be fair.
> I’m referring specifically to the cards, which exploded in popularity after some YouTuber paid millions for a rare card
Objectively untrue boomer take. Pokemon cards have been popular & have been traded since I was in middle school and I'm 40 now lol. Even without ever collecting them I know how cool having a Holo Charizard was.
If you look at Google Trends you can see that interest in Pokemon Cards was mostly flat until 2021 when Logan Paul made headlines for spending $5m on a card. It spiked again in late 2024 and has remained high when they released an app for trading cards digitally.
Before 2019 they printed fewer than 2 billion cards per year [1]. Since 2021 they are printing 9 billion cards per year, and 12 billion in 2024 since they released the app. And release 7 new sets a year. And they are still selling out as soon as they hit store shelves [2].
The popularity you experienced in grade school is nothing like the revenous demand today. I suspect you might be the one who has fallen behind the times.
> 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.
Do you have a source for that? I'm likely the same age as you are and I usually feel like people on HN don't swing that widely away from our age group, but based on vibes alone I would have put the median HN poster closer to 25-30 than to 50.
In 2007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=63294 the median age was 25.5 and mean 27.3. In 2022 (15 years later) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30897468 the median age using midpoints was between 35.44 and mean age was 37.22. If we presume that older folks tend to not answer these (so polls skew young), then I think it's safe to say young-Gen-X to older-millenial is the core demographic here.
Obviously not. HN is an anonymous forum that doesn't collect that kind of data. But given the fact that a large portion of childhood and early 20s references on HN tend to discuss life in the 1980s-2000s and don't reference the Great Recession highlights a large portion of HNers would have been born in the late 70s to at most early 90s.
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 ;)
In that case, I'll kvetch about the "boomer" term (Baby Boomers are ~61+ years old), as I think you're conflating it with Generation X (45 - 61 years old)
This trend never got me or my kids and i never understood the fuss around it , I mean they are not pretty , they are not playable , or maybe it is because I am just getting old ? Born in 1988 here , maybe I just don't get the new generation .
I was born in 1986 and I got excited finding them in stock for retail price at a store before the holidays, my daughter’s favorite color is blue and they joy she had at pulling a blue one then clipping it to her blue backpack and her calling it her “Lablublu” made me really happy. We got another one for my nephew’s girlfriend for Christmas and she called my girls on FaceTime and thanked them for the present. That felt like a good use of $80 in my opinion.
Once something catches on, jumping on the bandwagon gives people a sense of community.
But, the nature of what makes something viral, like how the article mentions pandemic, seems agnostic to what actually becomes viral. Why did labubus go viral and not something else[1]? It’s luck and timing, and we can try to reverse-engineer it, but it’s just being prepared & luck. We’re seeing a survivor bias and thinking the survivor is special inherently.
So what enabled Pop Mart to be prepared?
[1]Actually, there’s also sneaker hype, meme stocks, etc.
The name itself, Labubu, is obviously chosen for babyish associations.
To me, it sounds Filipino. As for the appearance, I think it's a strange mix between cute and grotesque, like a combination of Japanese and Western styles, which might explain its popularity.
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.
Every TCG buyer I've spoken to is always "up" on cards, though if you dig further you'll find they haven't cashed in any actual gain and are just mentally up based on what they think they could sell them for. While also mentally discarding any losses.
The real winners are probably the people reselling the unopened packs for slightly higher than retail since they have removed the gambling aspect.
You can pretty much be guaranteed to break even if you check the odds of scratch tickets and buy enough of them. You can check how many tickets are left and which prizes are left for a particular game. That's what we did when I went in on a bunch of tickets with some friends.
Speaking of trading cards as a side hustle, a couple of my friends used to drive around the region buying boxes of baseball cards. They'd weigh them to figure out if some specific special cards was in it, return the light boxes, and throw out most of the other cards from the boxes they opened. Now that same card series has unopened boxes going for like $2k
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.
Huh, most anime cons have horrendous if any marketing. Beyond basic social feeds most of their reach these days are from inviting "influencers" to join in on panels, cosplay judging contests, etc.
Which in turn pisses off a lot of the con's main audience as rarely are these influencers sufficiently knowledgable on the topics (ie little knowledge on costume making, barely aware of a given series, etc).
Few if any western anime cons have managed to get any sort of meaningful virality in terms of marketing, whether organic or manufactured. And especially little from the labubu type crowd given cons are more male dominated, and labubu far more of a women's interest.
The big thing labubus had beyond the gambling aspect was that its something you can put on your bag and actually bring around places, far more visibility than most other "viral" goods. It was an accessory.
> The big thing labubus had beyond the gambling aspect was that its something you can put on your bag and actually bring around places, far more visibility than most other "viral" goods. It was an accessory.
I have one friend (Chinese living in China) who is a big fan of popmart products. But Labubu is a secondary thing for her. Her passion is Dimoo.
Dimoo comes in figurines that you can display in your home. Or on your desk at work, I guess. You can buy third-party accessories for it; my friend has a hollow cupcake with the text GUPCAKE on the wrapper, for your figurine to look like it's bursting out of a cupcake. Or maybe like it lives in one.
Another Chinese friend of mine mentioned to me that Popmart figurines were trendy, and the blind boxes made them more fun to purchase. She objected strongly when I characterized this as 赌博 ("gambling").
All of the appeal of these products is the gambling aspect. Labubu isn't even distinctive except in its foreign news coverage.
it used to coalesce into organized religion and its local institutions. what's new is that those sources of meaning and connection were not explicitly commercial ventures.
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 Weeabo or 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.
Hey op here. You make a great point regarding marketing and conspicuous consumption - it just wasn't the focus of the article for me to investigate those cultural differences. It would certainly add more context.
I didn't aim to be judgemental and sorry it came off that way, yet, it's difficult to comment on something otherwise (from a personal standpoint). I do think it's wasteful - environment is a focus of my blog.
On using reddit - I don't use any social media, reddit was a quick way to get some pictures to illustrate the points. Obviously, I don't propose this is research grade work.
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.
That we now have a whole array of "disney/labubu adults", perpetually stuck in child-like nostalgia, cozy aesthetics, fleeing from the real world and think that's all beyond criticism and that there's no public dimension to what we consume is just immature.
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.
Consumerism also doesn't really make people happy in the same way alcohol isn't a cure for depression. It's a short term rush that leaves you in a deeper more empty pit after.
Pretty much, it’s just another form of collecting stuff, this happens to be a trendy thing. Some do with hello kitty, hot wheels, some with music bands, CDs, others with tools, among many, and I am sure who wrote it also collect stuff as well. And yeah, posting few Reddit posts is an indirect way to make fun of something, we all know Reddit is always hyped and cringy about anything, regardless you see it as bad or good, I think the article is trying to portray some picture about who buys or collect X.
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).
The appeal of labubus is simple: they are cute-looking creatures that show their demonic side. Since many people have it, they find labubus cute.
Remember the first scene in the movie Constantine, where the woman that's being exorcised looks at her demon in the mirror and finds it cute? That's the same thing.
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
Hyperreality is a bogus concept altogether, inasmuch as it's supposed to be something new in human history that only happens because of computers. Prehistoric/ancient humans also had fashion trends and myths and symbols and deep context
computing merely spurred the conceptualization of hyperreality. the original impetus was more along the lines of societal imagery like media, wax museums, or theme parks (as mentioned in the article). computing is not seen in the seminal definition of a map overflowing its territory. this definition does align with integer overflow/underflow but isn't predicated upon the existence of those concepts. therefore the concept of hyperreality may be embodied in many contexts, both prior to and post the advent of computing.
Hey, op, thanks for the points - a quick reply here:
-I'm very out of date, yes...I wrote a lot of notes ages ago and came around to finishing the article a long time later. I also don't use social media for good reasons so am not aiming to provide info that anyone doesn't already have. The article was mostly an excuse to read Baudrillard, and goddamn that is hard work ;-)
-i did not miss the point that being trendy attracts others of the same age. As women account for 80% of sales that is clearly not the key cause of the trend but is relevant for some
-agree my 'analysis' is lacking, could have conducted interviews, analysed multiple social media platforms.......
-the story of 'i saw this dude in a supermarket' is partly used to create a narrative in the article. And, obviously, I am not going to ask a guy 10 years younger than me why he is wearing a toy!
-'does he play with it at home' - how could I have been clearer that I doubt he plays with it and that it's for ornament, and possibly to attract girls.
>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.
An incredible number of words spent while missing the point completely.
Labubu is a child substitute. It's a caricature of a mischievous young toddler.
Historically, most people in their mid 20s would have already had at least one child. As parenthood gets pushed further back, people struggle to fill that biological yearning.
Scroll through the photos and mentally substituite a child for the doll and it will all make sense. Labubu on a keychain? The toddler is with you everywhere you go. Taking your kid to work. Dressing them up for a wedding. Taking fun selifes, visiting the gym, etc etc.
No need to pull in COVID19 or the Baudrillard wankery.
These kinds of things are always full of psychoanalysis that I don't think actually qualifies. We've had beanie babies before. My daughter ran around and played on a large one at Taipei Taoyuan Airport and there were a few of them around. We were walking through Hong Kong when there was a big meetup with a giant inflatable orange, but it turned out to be Mojo Carrot - another plushie merch thing.
There were a huge number of people gathered there. And I imagine it's not very much different from Pokemon or baseball cards or what have you. My wife and I have a daughter who enjoys the Mojo Carrot and we plan on having another daughter within the next year. We've got fulfilling social lives at home in San Francisco, and when we stayed in Taiwan and Canada for months we had a wonderful time since walking down the street we'd run into a relative or friend. I only say this because the loneliness function doesn't ring true for me.
The whole article has a flavour of the adults saying "When you're kids talk about X they're using a code word for ecstasy and they're on drugs! Which the dealers hide in Halloween candy" or whatever. It's dressed up, but really that's all it is.
I think it's much simpler. It's just that humans are pretty good at assigning meaning to inanimate objects. The $30 microfiber fleece I bought at Big Lots in 2012 is just a $30 microfiber fleece I bought at Big Lots in 2012. But in 2026, it's the same $30 microfiber fleece that my daughter sleeps on. And now the fact that it's been with me those 14 years from when I came to America to when my daughter came to America means it represents a constant in my life and for that it's nice: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-11-29/Things_Do_La...
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.
from what i remember about toy trends as a kid, it wasn't about wanting to have the thing. it was about not wanting to be the one that didn't have the thing.
All of these gambling box toys are a way to simulate a reality where you can actually afford meaningful and expensive things - like real estate, nice cars, etc. When those are entirely out of budget for someone they might cope with a $30 toy they purchased for $200, which then can get milked by installing onto your belt.
I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time.
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 Logan Paul paid $5 million for a rare card in 2021.
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.
In February Paul resold the card for $16 million. [1]
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/16/americas/pokemon-card-log...
>I’m referring specifically to the cards, which exploded in popularity after Logan Paul paid $5 million for a rare card in 2021.
the cards have been popular for significantly longer than 5 years.
my kid's entire class (the entire school, really) brought their binders of pokemon cards to school every day in ~2002 until the school banned pokemon cards on premise because they were such a distraction and causing issues (kids crying about unfair trades, etc.)
They have long been popular, but the popularity has increased more than 5x since the pandemic. They were printing less than 2 billion a year before then [1], and are now selling more than 10 billion a year despite shortages, scalping, etc [2].
Perhaps "boom" is a better word for it than "fad". But my point is just that this demand seems to be largely driven by artifical scarcity, speculation, influencers - similar to Labubu.
And eventually prices will hit a peak and I expect we will see demand fall off rapidly.
[1] https://www.pokebeach.com/2021/06/pokemon-tcg-sold-3-7-billi...
[2] https://www.ign.com/articles/10-billion-pokemon-cards-were-p...
Can you really say they're scarce if they're printing 5x as many, by your own words?
Look I agree with you, kids find YouTube videos about really compelling IP really compelling! But that is the story, with Pokémon cards and Labubu. Artificial scarcity, which a bajillion games try to do, most of them failing, doesn't alone move the needle on appeal. It's basically meaningless as a design choice. That's what you mean by artificial, the perception of scarcity, maybe, which everything collectible tries to do, and to me, is not really why kids find it appealing or care of whatever.
It's just the part of the product that you understand. That is what I am trying to say. You don't know why they find Pokémon appealing. You have no idea. You understand the gacha part but it doesn't really matter. It's easier to see this when you try playing really popular Roblox games, it really hits you how poorly you understand appeal.
> Can you really say they're scarce if they're printing 5x as many, by your own words?
All the local stores that sell random packs of Pokemon cards are sold out. So is Amazon, etc. If I wanted to buy some right now, the only way I could do it is through scalpers. So yes - they are scarce.
I think The Pokemon Company is very intentional about how many cards they print. As many as possible without saturating the market. I'm sure they employ people with degrees in business and economics whose job it is to figure that out.
> You don't know why they find Pokémon appealing.
That's not true. I like Pokemon. I have a Pokemon sticker on my laptop. I understand that there is intrinsic value to a Pokemon game, figurine, and even a cool holographic trading card. But the reason people are buying random packs from scalpers which usually just contain worthless junk cards is the hope of scoring a rare card. It's the scarcity.
That's also the reason they are sold that way instead of just selling you the cards you want as singles. If I could just go out and buy any special art card for $100 direct from The Pokemon Company (a huge margin for them), it would completely tank prices and ultimately demand.
> That's not true. I like Pokemon. I understand that there is intrinsic value to a Pokemon game, figurine, and even a cool holographic trading card.
Okay, see, so you don't know what the appeal is. You wouldn't know where to begin creating your own Pokémon. You would be like, well let's make some monsters. You wouldn't get it. If you did know how, you would be a billionaire. Do you get it now? It isn't enough to just make gacha mechanics.
Only billionaires get Pokémon?
Their popularity is a fad. You are talking about their popularity when they first released in the US. They faded significantly for at least a decade if not two until seeing a recent resurgence so massive even random corner stores carry pokemon card packs these days.
What gets me is that no one actually plays the game or cares about the cards. They buy them purely to resell them to someone else later for more. It's just like crypto in physical form.
When my kids open a pack they usually don't even look at what cards they get. They spread them out just enough to see the border - which is enough to tell whether you've gotten a rare card or not. I'm sure they've thrown plenty of cards in the junk bin without ever once looking at them.
The "special art rare" ones are admittedly pretty cool, and those do get taken out and looked at from time to time. Usually when friends come over.
I recently watched an excellent video about that incident. [1]
The takeaway was that this was yet another move by rich assholes designed to siphon money from the pockets of small time gamblers just so that the rich could get richer. They did it to Pokemon cards, destroying the experience of playing the actual game, and they tried to do it to Manga (although they hopefully won't succeed there).
[1] https://youtu.be/W2x-UQpiARc?si=eVwXhHAtD0keH2ON
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!
Yes I remember having a hard time finding other kids who wanted to actually play the pokemon card game. And even when I could find someone, they didn't care about the rules/energy costs. This was in elementary school though to be fair.
> I’m referring specifically to the cards, which exploded in popularity after some YouTuber paid millions for a rare card
Objectively untrue boomer take. Pokemon cards have been popular & have been traded since I was in middle school and I'm 40 now lol. Even without ever collecting them I know how cool having a Holo Charizard was.
If you look at Google Trends you can see that interest in Pokemon Cards was mostly flat until 2021 when Logan Paul made headlines for spending $5m on a card. It spiked again in late 2024 and has remained high when they released an app for trading cards digitally.
Before 2019 they printed fewer than 2 billion cards per year [1]. Since 2021 they are printing 9 billion cards per year, and 12 billion in 2024 since they released the app. And release 7 new sets a year. And they are still selling out as soon as they hit store shelves [2].
The popularity you experienced in grade school is nothing like the revenous demand today. I suspect you might be the one who has fallen behind the times.
[1] https://www.pokebeach.com/2021/06/pokemon-tcg-sold-3-7-billi...
[2] https://www.ign.com/articles/10-billion-pokemon-cards-were-p...
Well, they have all the characteristics of a fad (driven by imitation, viral adoption, unserious, novelty over substance) aside from short lifespan.
There are fad diets that have been around for 50 years after all...
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.
Pokemon itself is not a trend but the current hype around the cards is and has only been around for a few years.
> 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.
I'm roughly the same age (maybe a bit older) as you and frankly, we are middle age. Yet by HN standards we skew young.
Do you have a source for that? I'm likely the same age as you are and I usually feel like people on HN don't swing that widely away from our age group, but based on vibes alone I would have put the median HN poster closer to 25-30 than to 50.
In 2007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=63294 the median age was 25.5 and mean 27.3. In 2022 (15 years later) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30897468 the median age using midpoints was between 35.44 and mean age was 37.22. If we presume that older folks tend to not answer these (so polls skew young), then I think it's safe to say young-Gen-X to older-millenial is the core demographic here.
> Do you have a source for that
Obviously not. HN is an anonymous forum that doesn't collect that kind of data. But given the fact that a large portion of childhood and early 20s references on HN tend to discuss life in the 1980s-2000s and don't reference the Great Recession highlights a large portion of HNers would have been born in the late 70s to at most early 90s.
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.
People born in 1986 aren't even Gen-X, much less boomers: you are talking about millenials!
Even the youngest boomers are near retirement age now.
>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 ;)
:-)
In that case, I'll kvetch about the "boomer" term (Baby Boomers are ~61+ years old), as I think you're conflating it with Generation X (45 - 61 years old)
10 years older than pokemon isn’t even Gen X, it’s millennial…
They probably meant "Boomer" in the colloquial sense of "somewhat old person" like how "Boomer Shooters" are for GenX and older Millenials.
Thanks! I didn't know that. That's... really unfortunate that the slang has gone that direction.
This trend never got me or my kids and i never understood the fuss around it , I mean they are not pretty , they are not playable , or maybe it is because I am just getting old ? Born in 1988 here , maybe I just don't get the new generation .
> not playable ...
My Uber driver, a man about 35 years old, pulled up in a Tesla Model Y with four Lububus superglued to the dash.
Seems like some kind of status thing, not a plaything.
They are a dumb fad, just like all the other dumb fads before them.
I was born in 1986 and I got excited finding them in stock for retail price at a store before the holidays, my daughter’s favorite color is blue and they joy she had at pulling a blue one then clipping it to her blue backpack and her calling it her “Lablublu” made me really happy. We got another one for my nephew’s girlfriend for Christmas and she called my girls on FaceTime and thanked them for the present. That felt like a good use of $80 in my opinion.
Hey same age as you here.
They fill the same slot as like, troll dolls.
Remember Beanie Babies?
They are key-chain Furbies.
key chain furby lootboxes
Once something catches on, jumping on the bandwagon gives people a sense of community.
But, the nature of what makes something viral, like how the article mentions pandemic, seems agnostic to what actually becomes viral. Why did labubus go viral and not something else[1]? It’s luck and timing, and we can try to reverse-engineer it, but it’s just being prepared & luck. We’re seeing a survivor bias and thinking the survivor is special inherently.
So what enabled Pop Mart to be prepared?
[1]Actually, there’s also sneaker hype, meme stocks, etc.
It's gambling, community, status and fun. Some people find it hard to understand that.
The name itself, Labubu, is obviously chosen for babyish associations.
To me, it sounds Filipino. As for the appearance, I think it's a strange mix between cute and grotesque, like a combination of Japanese and Western styles, which might explain its popularity.
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.
Except scratch cards are a guaranteed statistical loss. Trading cards, if you're skilled and know what you're doing, can be a sensible side-income.
It's the difference between poker and roulette...
Every TCG buyer I've spoken to is always "up" on cards, though if you dig further you'll find they haven't cashed in any actual gain and are just mentally up based on what they think they could sell them for. While also mentally discarding any losses.
The real winners are probably the people reselling the unopened packs for slightly higher than retail since they have removed the gambling aspect.
You can pretty much be guaranteed to break even if you check the odds of scratch tickets and buy enough of them. You can check how many tickets are left and which prizes are left for a particular game. That's what we did when I went in on a bunch of tickets with some friends.
Speaking of trading cards as a side hustle, a couple of my friends used to drive around the region buying boxes of baseball cards. They'd weigh them to figure out if some specific special cards was in it, return the light boxes, and throw out most of the other cards from the boxes they opened. Now that same card series has unopened boxes going for like $2k
Most people who try to make money in trading cards will lose money
Another similarity is the endless line of credulous people who "have a system".
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.
Huh, most anime cons have horrendous if any marketing. Beyond basic social feeds most of their reach these days are from inviting "influencers" to join in on panels, cosplay judging contests, etc. Which in turn pisses off a lot of the con's main audience as rarely are these influencers sufficiently knowledgable on the topics (ie little knowledge on costume making, barely aware of a given series, etc).
Few if any western anime cons have managed to get any sort of meaningful virality in terms of marketing, whether organic or manufactured. And especially little from the labubu type crowd given cons are more male dominated, and labubu far more of a women's interest.
The big thing labubus had beyond the gambling aspect was that its something you can put on your bag and actually bring around places, far more visibility than most other "viral" goods. It was an accessory.
> The big thing labubus had beyond the gambling aspect was that its something you can put on your bag and actually bring around places, far more visibility than most other "viral" goods. It was an accessory.
I have one friend (Chinese living in China) who is a big fan of popmart products. But Labubu is a secondary thing for her. Her passion is Dimoo.
https://www.popmart.com/us/pop-now/set/471
Dimoo comes in figurines that you can display in your home. Or on your desk at work, I guess. You can buy third-party accessories for it; my friend has a hollow cupcake with the text GUPCAKE on the wrapper, for your figurine to look like it's bursting out of a cupcake. Or maybe like it lives in one.
Another Chinese friend of mine mentioned to me that Popmart figurines were trendy, and the blind boxes made them more fun to purchase. She objected strongly when I characterized this as 赌博 ("gambling").
All of the appeal of these products is the gambling aspect. Labubu isn't even distinctive except in its foreign news coverage.
it used to coalesce into organized religion and its local institutions. what's new is that those sources of meaning and connection were not explicitly commercial ventures.
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 Weeabo or 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.
Hey op here. You make a great point regarding marketing and conspicuous consumption - it just wasn't the focus of the article for me to investigate those cultural differences. It would certainly add more context.
I didn't aim to be judgemental and sorry it came off that way, yet, it's difficult to comment on something otherwise (from a personal standpoint). I do think it's wasteful - environment is a focus of my blog.
On using reddit - I don't use any social media, reddit was a quick way to get some pictures to illustrate the points. Obviously, I don't propose this is research grade work.
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.)
> 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.
>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.
That we now have a whole array of "disney/labubu adults", perpetually stuck in child-like nostalgia, cozy aesthetics, fleeing from the real world and think that's all beyond criticism and that there's no public dimension to what we consume is just immature.
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.
Consumerism also doesn't really make people happy in the same way alcohol isn't a cure for depression. It's a short term rush that leaves you in a deeper more empty pit after.
Pretty much, it’s just another form of collecting stuff, this happens to be a trendy thing. Some do with hello kitty, hot wheels, some with music bands, CDs, others with tools, among many, and I am sure who wrote it also collect stuff as well. And yeah, posting few Reddit posts is an indirect way to make fun of something, we all know Reddit is always hyped and cringy about anything, regardless you see it as bad or good, I think the article is trying to portray some picture about who buys or collect X.
Block) (:****
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).
The appeal of labubus is simple: they are cute-looking creatures that show their demonic side. Since many people have it, they find labubus cute.
Remember the first scene in the movie Constantine, where the woman that's being exorcised looks at her demon in the mirror and finds it cute? That's the same thing.
another example of a fabricated hype.
who cares about this?
You don't need to care about the product to find the sociology interesting.
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
Hyperreality is a bogus concept altogether, inasmuch as it's supposed to be something new in human history that only happens because of computers. Prehistoric/ancient humans also had fashion trends and myths and symbols and deep context
computing merely spurred the conceptualization of hyperreality. the original impetus was more along the lines of societal imagery like media, wax museums, or theme parks (as mentioned in the article). computing is not seen in the seminal definition of a map overflowing its territory. this definition does align with integer overflow/underflow but isn't predicated upon the existence of those concepts. therefore the concept of hyperreality may be embodied in many contexts, both prior to and post the advent of computing.
Hey, op, thanks for the points - a quick reply here:
-I'm very out of date, yes...I wrote a lot of notes ages ago and came around to finishing the article a long time later. I also don't use social media for good reasons so am not aiming to provide info that anyone doesn't already have. The article was mostly an excuse to read Baudrillard, and goddamn that is hard work ;-)
-i did not miss the point that being trendy attracts others of the same age. As women account for 80% of sales that is clearly not the key cause of the trend but is relevant for some
-agree my 'analysis' is lacking, could have conducted interviews, analysed multiple social media platforms.......
-the story of 'i saw this dude in a supermarket' is partly used to create a narrative in the article. And, obviously, I am not going to ask a guy 10 years younger than me why he is wearing a toy!
-'does he play with it at home' - how could I have been clearer that I doubt he plays with it and that it's for ornament, and possibly to attract girls.
>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.
yes, here is San Francisco’s “Performative Male” contest. With the publication SF Standard directly mentioning labubu charms in the caption
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNrxS2ZXCBW/
that year old contest itself being a satire on a played out fashion trend and archetype that everyone is already mocking
An incredible number of words spent while missing the point completely.
Labubu is a child substitute. It's a caricature of a mischievous young toddler.
Historically, most people in their mid 20s would have already had at least one child. As parenthood gets pushed further back, people struggle to fill that biological yearning.
Scroll through the photos and mentally substituite a child for the doll and it will all make sense. Labubu on a keychain? The toddler is with you everywhere you go. Taking your kid to work. Dressing them up for a wedding. Taking fun selifes, visiting the gym, etc etc.
No need to pull in COVID19 or the Baudrillard wankery.