No Content Wednesday:  Hate Leads to Suffering

We should probably change the name of this series to "Low Content" rather than "No Content." I'll take it up with the Banthaskull legal team. We certainly pay them enough, so I might as well keep them busy.

The true reason I'm calling this a No Content article is because it gives me the excuse to use generic graphics. If there's anything I hate about this "job", it's designing images and graphics for the articles. But it's actually a full article, not really in the spirit of "no content." Nevertheless, here we are.

So I've recently settled on the item in my collection that I dislike the most. See if you can guess what it is as you read along with the class.

Now, I am a completist, so I will buy at least one of everything for my collection. Due to the choices I've made with regard to this hobby, I don't have the luxury of skipping something because I don't want it. But that doesn't mean I have to like it. I won't call it "hate", because that's entirely too strong of a sentiment. I don't hate it by any stretch. But there's a lot that I don't like about it. (I'll use "hate" in the case above with no hesitation, as that is how I feel with regard to designing custom graphics for this site).

Let's start with what I do like about it. I enjoyed the source material, even though this enjoyment is not shared anywhere near universally by the community. It is an iconic piece from this source. It earned additional screen time in follow-on media. It was (maybe?) requested by a significant enough portion of the community, and Hasbro delivered. It is (potentially) a capstone world-building item for its original media source. The item is very well designed, with a lot of features, and was clearly engineered with a lot of love by the Star Wars team at Hasbro.

• Grand in size, it is one of the largest items in the 3.75" line.


• It is hefty in mass, being able to support the display of several figures in and around it.


• Hasbro paid outstanding attention to detail went into the design, and few existing items in TVC can match it.


• It boasts superior features that allow you to recreate a multitude of scenes.


• It seemingly thrived with regard to sales, and appeared to be a very successful product for Hasbro.

So it sounds pretty good, right? I mean, it is an excellent item. It's hard to criticize it a whole lot, although there are definitely some opportunities to pick away at it, causing it fall short of perfection. But it is nevertheless hard to deny that it is impressive, and an excellent display piece.

So why do I dislike it? Well, I would flip around one of its positive points, in that it is large. It is pretty huge, and it's hard to find a suitable space to display it. I actually was in the process of designing my custom built-in display before I had it in hand, and I had to ensure that there was a place for this. It wasn't easy, but I managed it. So it takes up a lot of space. And while there are areas within it, and around it, to display a bunch of figures, it falls well short of items like the Barge or the Cantina in that regard.

But here's the biggest thing, and it bugged me from the get go: It was essentially the first item in the 3.75" line (that matched the TVC aesthetic) from its source (even though Hasbro cheated and labeled it being from a more contemporary source), and I felt the ship had sailed, so to speak. I was no longer interested in it. I probably would have wanted it 10 years earlier, but it was too late for me. I feel the source material had aged beyond the point where a representative toy of this size was something I wanted to add to my collection so as to kick-start an entirely new display that was previously non-existent. It would be kind of like if Hasbro suddenly made the Onyx Cinder from Skeleton Crew in 2034, after not making a single item for the show in that decade - except for poor lonely Jod Na-Na Junior Shabadoo. I wanted some Skeleton Crew stuff when the show came out. But I'd probably be super annoyed if Hasbro suddenly did a bunch of stuff several years from now.

So now I have this ginormous ship, which was very expensive, taking up large chunk of valuable real estate, and a place of honor, to boot, in my display...and I have no interest in it whatsoever. I never even look at it. It kinda sucks, because it's a pretty great piece, and the associated figures are some of the best Hasbro has made. But for me, it just arrived too late in the game, and it doesn't interest me. So for these reasons, it has earned my award for my most disliked item in my collection.

Click HERE, if you haven't already guessed what it is.

So what item do you have in your collection that you dislike and wish you could get rid of it, but for whatever reason, you hold onto it?

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