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Discussion (91 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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...
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.
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...
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.)
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
Magic the Gathering was always both though, you collected good/rare cards & played the game with them!
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.
There are fad diets that have been around for 50 years after all...
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.
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 fill the same slot as like, troll dolls.
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 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.
It's the difference between poker and roulette...
The real winners are probably the people reselling the unopened packs for slightly higher than retail since they have removed the gambling aspect.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
who cares about this?
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.
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.
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.)
Interpret this article as an attempt at criticizing or curtailing this effect instead.
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.
> why do you care? It's their life and not yours.
Because ultimately it does affect me, it affects all of us.
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
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
-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.
Am I missing something? They're cute little dolls.
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
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.