Full disclosure, several months ago I enjoyed cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken’s custom GPT breakdown of the roles of comedians Tim Robinson, Nathan Fielder and Connor O'Malley in American culture. For my own amusement, I wanted to see what my own robots could tell me about Labubus. Then I forgot. Then I remembered. Then I heard about Funko Pop’s financial woes and figured I’d ask about that. After all, I own a few. My anime-fan daughter owns many (including some pretty cool Chainsaw Man ones). I probably don’t need an article (AI or otherwise) to tell me about Funko churning out way too many Pops. But I was curious about the Funko/Labubu divide. Which is a long way of saying I’ll happily read things no one wrote…. (and yes, there are gendered assumptions here... But let's just have a read shall we....)

Guys Buy Comfort Canon, Girls Buy Chaos? A Tale of Pops and Labubus

We’re middle-aged men. We don’t really get Labubus. But we know Funko Pops get us — and our favorite fictional worlds, from Star Wars to Stranger Things. So we’re a little vexed by the news that Funko is in financial trouble. How can a company that has basically colonized our desks, our kids’ rooms, and half of Comic-Con be wobbly?

This: Pops — “I belong to that world.”

Funko Pops are the easiest way to make the inside of your head visible without oversharing. And a lot of men have learned two public rules:

• Signal competence.

• Keep emotion tidy.

One squat figure says: I grew up on Hoth. Another says: Yes I watched all of Stranger Things, even S4. Line up five and you’ve got a biography.

They work because they’re identity as reference. You point at something in culture — a show, a band, a game — and the Pop is the little shrine to it. Everyone who knows that text recognizes it instantly. It’s legible, and legibility is catnip to people who spend a lot of time in IP worlds.

They also slot neatly into what cultural researcher Maxwell Juhas calls a pleasure archive — a tidy set of similar objects that externalize the stuff we love. Magnets, stickers, enamel pins, now Pops. It’s the same impulse that made us alphabetize CDs.

That: Labubu — “I feel like this.”

Labubu, on the other hand, doesn’t reference anything we already know. It’s not Vader, not Eleven, not Luffy. It’s a strange, slightly feral little plush with tired eyes and a goblin grin.

That makes it identity as feeling.

When people post Labubu, they’re not saying “remember this franchise?” They’re saying, “this is the mood today: chaotic, exhausted, still kind of cute.” It’s an emotional proxy, not a fandom token.

One is a public reference, the other a public mood. Put differently: Pops organize the archive; Labubu haunts it. That’s fantastic for the Very Online under-30 crowd who are fluent in “I’m unwell but vibing 😂.”

It’s weirder for us. We were trained to wear the band shirt, not the emotional goblin.

Why Pops feel more “ours”

Three very boring but real reasons:

1. Recognition is safer than confession. Saying “I love Empire” is easy. Saying “I’m frayed and need a cuddle-creature” is… a different register.

2. Pops are front-stage. They look fine on a work desk. Labubu looks like it wandered off TikTok.

3. Pops reward collecting brain. Variants, exclusives, waves — this is how a lot of us learned to enjoy stuff in the first place (cards, comics, figures). Labubu is vibes, not checklists.

So of course Funko made more sense to us, and of course news about layoffs, inventory write-downs, or line cuts feels off. The product feels inevitable; the balance sheet doesn’t.

Why people keep buying the same shape

1. Low-friction self-construction. The blank face invites projection; the prop anchors memory. You supply the feeling; the vinyl supplies the form.

2. Network effects of fandom. Because each figure is a node in a shared universe of references, a single Pop plugs you into a discourse—TikTok hauls, Discord trades, convention exclusives.

3. Shelf fluency. The uniform size and pose let a collection read as a coherent display. (“The archive itself takes on meaning, independent of its parts.”)

4. Ritualized accumulation. Releases, chases, exclusives, and con drops turn collecting into calendar—an ongoing practice rather than a single purchase.

These aren’t accidents; they’re outcomes of a design and licensing system tuned to recognizability and repeat purchase. History-wise, Funko’s model evolves directly from bobbleheads toward a chibi-like silhouette that can absorb any IP (and, crucially, any moment).

And yet, Funko's in trouble again?!

Funko’s in a real bind: sales are down ~14%, they’ve posted multi-quarter losses, debt is up, and they’ve even warned investors they may need fresh capital or a buyer to keep going. That’s the “uh oh” headline you’re seeing.

But the context matters:

1. They overstuffed the pipeline. For years Funko treated every license, every show, every micro-fandom like it deserved vinyl. That worked… until collectors got tired and retailers wouldn’t take more. Now they’re stuck unwinding overproduction. Basically Beanie Babies, but with better IP.

2. The market shifted toward blind-box/mini formats. While Funko was pumping out full-size Pops, Pop Mart and other blind-box players were minting demand with surprise mechanics and scarcity. So Funko had to answer with Bitty Pop, Bittyverse, and tinier, cheaper, more “grab one” SKUs—because that’s where the toy metabolism is right now. Their own Q3 call basically said, “Bitty Pop saved our margins.” That’s format evolution in action.

3. People still want recognizable totems. Even if Funko has to cut lines or pause outlooks, the core use case—“I want a small, affordable object of the fictional world I like disappearing into”—is intact. That’s something Labubu and the blind-box craze don’t replace, because those are about emotional surprise, not IP recognition. Funko just can’t keep making everything for everyone every quarter.

Mark chimes in here: Strange to think we live in a world where you can prompt your own action figure, but the pop-culture glut of lower-tier line extensions threatens the future of middle-aged men's desk decoration. But in the event they do more than trim the SKUs, I'll still have my Lemmy from Motorhead. And in the event that the kid ever graduates to more emotionally-chaotic Labubus, maybe I'll inherit her Chainsaw Man merch too.