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.
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".<p>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.
Alternatively - who cares?<p>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.<p>Additionally, this article also clearly fails to deep dive into how Pop Mart basically exported East Asian and ASEAN 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.<p>In that sense, I'd argue Labubu and TikTok are both significant milestones in Chinese IP and cultural exports.<p>Additionally, using Reddit to make qualified judgements on "society at large" is fundamentally flawed.
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?<p>> why do you care? It's their life and not yours.<p>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.
extrapolated all of this not only 7 months too late beyond the trend’s implosion,<p>while missing the way more obvious fact that being trendy attracted women of the same age range<p>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.<p>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<p>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<p>makes me wonder what my blind spots are, what I’m out of touch about