Labubu have fascinated me as someone who has a recurring brief special interest in beanie babies. The design of them almost appeals directly to me, but is just idk, "conventional" enough to quell my desire to really seek them out. (If they were reptile or amphibian based monsters instead of rabbit based I imagine that would increase my interest tenfold) but with them costing almost 40 dollars (and that's directly from popmart) in my country, there's no way in hell I'd be getting one.
And the fact that they're blindboxes.
I loath I detest, I [AM hate monologue] despise blindboxes so much that it kills any goodwill I have for the market tbh. Ever since I was little blindboxes made me want to enact grandiose feats of wanton violence.
I think because I was a special brand of AuDHD hyperfocus that I actively WOULD NOT BOND with something if it wasn't one of my select species or if the design didn't particularly appeal to me. For example: if it wasn't a dog or a penguin (or dinosaurs under specific circumstances, etc) it was dead to me as a toddler. This has of course extended into my current toy collecting where, since getting back into LPS pretty much exclusively because they have axolotls now, I will not buy any species except axolotls, some dogs, and some penguins.
The majority of LPS axolotls, naturally, are sold in the damn blindboxes. But unlike labubu, you can technically figure out what code on the outside of the box corresponds to which animal you will get. I EXCLUSIVELY obtain blindboxes this way. If you can cheat. And in that way, I guess I can see an appeal in blindboxes. Purely because I have a little problem-solving inventor brain who likes to hack the stupid shit ass system for his own glory.
With labubu I am most interested in the bootlegging and fandom creation side of things. And of course hoping that this repopularizes the rubber face/plastic eyes trend in stuffed animals that died off when people decided rubberface animals from the 50s were "creepy"
in the defense of the lego people, that is Captain Rex we are talking about. But still, yiiiiiikes. Capitalism makes me want to be dead.