The Question of the Day is a way to facilitate community discussion to help members ponder the unanswered questions of the world that are somehow relating to the hobby. Questions are many times open ended and up to interpretation. Feel free to post your thoughts in as much or as little detail as you’d like.
Helpful Considerations may or may not help some people focus their answer, these are blurred to not bother those who have their own ideas.
Today’s Question: QotD: Can you separate your nostalgia from why you collect?
Helpful considerations: Is collecting based on nostalgia? Are there other reasons why you enjoy Pokemon? Would you enjoy it as much without the nostalgia?
I don’t think I can. I started collecting decks because of nostalgia for what I had as a kid, it evolved from there but there will always be a kernel of nostalgia at the core of all my collecting.
An unhealthy mixture of completionism, escapism, nostalgia, treasure hunting, and anxiety fuels my collecting behavior. Nostalgia leads me to the Pokemon IP, but ever-growing interests and forging new connections to Pokemon or cards keeps me engaged.
I think I would struggle to enjoy Pokemon if I didn’t have nostalgia for the underlying property. This is why I don’t have much interest in other TCGs such as Flesh & Blood or MetaZoo.
I don’t have my childhood cards anymore. %99 of my collection goals are for things that happened after I stopped collecting and playing. I have "missed out"stalgia…is there a word for that? I have a longing for things that I lived through, but that I was not involved in at the time.
But I collect because I have a warm fuzzy fondness. This is why I have a ton of gameboys and older nintendo DS stuff too. I love it. I loved it. Its something that makes me feel connected to an era I miss. An era that I feel like I didn’t get to fully enjoy the way I wanted to at the time.
And I’m not alone, we are all the same. The very first baseball cards were enjoyed by the kids of their day. Then later, they grew up, and realized they missed their youth. Then they tried to see if anyone kept those old cards or not. And that longing to hold onto our youth is very human. Take it from someone who has chronic Nostalgia.
Okay thats my speech. I’ll just step down off my soap box here.
I do collect cards because of overall nostalgia for the Pokémon franchise, mainly for the games I played during my childhood (a lot of Heartgold and White 1), but I don’t collect cards because of nostalgia from these games specifically. HGSS and BW sets just either don’t interest me or are outside of my budget range to collect. However I am very much looking forward to seeing what Black Bolt / White Flare is about this summer and that’s totally driven by my nostalgia for Gen 5.
I also collect Warhammer miniatures. The games themselves have plenty of flaws, certainly not the best rulesystem on the market. But they have 30+ years of writing behind it. The stories and universe is absolute aeons ahead of their rivals. The IP and my tie to it is mostly why I collect.
As for Pokemon, I actually had tears in my eyes when Ash finally won his title vs Leon. I’m nearly 40. Yeah there’s been gaps in my interest in Pokemon, huge ones too, but I saw it all start “live” from an imported USA Pokemon blue to Ash’s journey to now.
Without nostalgia I wouldn’t be in to collecting Pokemon cards at all.
Echoing others, it’s all mixed up there but nostalgy and the childhood dream to catch them all will always be there, but things like collecting different types of art, saving pokemon history and just the need for escapism have all been added to the pool. But cards from my childhood eras will always be the most special to me, they don’t have to be the exact cards or even same language but the feel of old cards still gets me every time
I think it is hard to compete with the feeling of stumbling upon a collection of once-forgotten vintage cards- while the happens less and less, this brings back the nostalgia the most for me! Like others have said, I also collect plenty of things that I’m not nostalgic for simply due to a love of Pokemon and the amazing things they create!
