Funko Pops, to me.
I understand that some of them are fairly overpriced, but I also really like them as is. It doesn’t work on all characters, but it sometimes work on a lot and there’s so much representation and variety that it’s good to have a few.
If people want to talk about waste of plastic and vinyl, they should bark at the companies who make teeny tiny figurines that serve no purpose and have so little detail that spending any money on them is a waste.
I would argue that collecting things having purely aesthetical value is also legit, though there is an issue about manufactured demand and role of merchandise in popculture, but fair enough.
I see benefits of displaying art made by a person, but I take issue with collecting. It feels like a form of hoarding.
It definitely can be, for example art is very often hoarded as form of investment, and this can be a much lower-price form of the same, but not necessarily. I would say the more those things price is, the more chance for hoarding.
That is, economically. If you mean hoarding as in psychology probably it’s more depending on person, a lot of people i know including me were collecting more or less useless things but nobody i know went into true hoarding problem and most of those people at some point got bored and got rid of their collections. Other than above personal experience, idk.