Relationships. Everything is relationships.
In my own life, something like Zeroids does not come from a natural progression of interest in toys. It comes from my relationship to another person showing me the figures, and their interest blending with my interest to create a new interest in these items.
As time passes, I see things ending. My relationship to things. I don't think we're Toys4Life. Maybe. But I see a lot of collectors who buy stuff and it can't leave them. Ever. They have everything they've ever had. I don't exist in that fashion. Things...end.
It was a profound thing to be sitting in the movie theater during
Watchmen and to see the scene with Dr. Manhattan on Mars. Conceptually, it translated exactly how I felt when I read the comics, the idea that at the same time multiple things are happening at the same time that new things are happening that old things were happening.
It's like that with toys. Is Inhumanoids really ever over, just because I don't have them any more? I can look at a picture of Tendril and have that feeling again of Christmas 86/87, whichever that it was, and seeing that monster unwrapped facing off with my gift from mother of the Earth Corps and the two vehicles for them. Or the pic from when I sold him. A screengrab from the cartoon. Standing by the bay in San Diego arguing with someone about how bad of a toy D'Compose was, compared to the child's thought of having him. Looking at those boxes in the Toys R Us as a child, wanting something and knowing it might never be. Looking back at scans of catalogs from sites long gone but never forgotten.
Time passes. "I'LL ALWAYS LOVE BATMAN!"
X-MEN
Transformers
Star Wars
But that's not true, is it? We never know the direction where things will go, corporate decisions making all X-Men return from death, the obvious miscasting of Mr. Freeze becoming a reality, the strange figures marked Star Wars in the TRU of 2010 that I don't recognize...
I feel my connection to many of these things coming to an end.
What that translates to in my "play" is a sense of finality. Funny though, at the same time, it breaks the barriers which always held. Now, Twiki and Microman and Gi Joe can fight on the same battlefield with Dr. Fate and Tron.
Which brings us to this.
I can't give an exact explanation - I don't necessarily WANT to - but there was a time when all of these things were their own entity. Buck Rogers and Gi Joe weren't friends, even though their bodies were constructed in the same way.
I have a continuity that exists in the toys themselves, and a continuity that was real life for me.
Time has changed things. Although it was not always so, the toys above, in their fictional lives as living creatures, have become of the same world.
And things went to shit.
It ties to something in my own life, the parallels unmistakable in my own life to the lives of these beings. As I was finally confronted with the ultimate Evil in life, so thus did my avatars face their Ultimate Evil.
Mine is not fantastic, more banal and disappointing and difficult to discuss; in their world, it can be something colorful with personality that can draw you in, make you think that evil is cool. But it isn't - it destroys people's lives, without thought. Absorbs everything in its path, throwing aside what it does not want. CONSUMES.
So my guys try to find an answer.
The problem they have is that they don't KNOW that things were once NOT this way.
They think they have always been in the same world.
At the time of these pics, there was one being who knew the truth - that this was some Limbo, the leftovers of a great destruction. He is known as the Time Traveler, mainly because he has been seen at different times in history, yet is still alive today.
If they only knew the truth.
Exposure to time itself changed him. He can't travel through time - he is unstuck from time, appearing randomly here and there. He waits for the time when he pops from this existence into another one, perhaps where he can change things.
Commander Rann, the great strategist and space explorer, looks at his destroyed friend, the transforming motorcycle High Wire. hope is waning. The army of the great evil one is advancing on the sole remaining known fortress in the world, Wayne Manor.
The great Evil sends his minions out to fight the battle. Baron Karza and the Emperor are two of his Commanders, leading vast armies of Acroyear, Antrons, and soldiers from across the world.
The forces of good fight back, but the army of evil never seems to end.
A recon mission brings back needed supplies, and something strange - a being similar to Time Traveler, but made of metal and dead. he touches it - and three other Time Travelers appear.
Such a strange thing has never occurred before, and TT feels himself become stuck to this time period.
There will be no escape.
He must fix this world, or die. There are no other choices.
A band of heroes must take the Time Traveler and this strange dead being to the last known location of science in the world, through a wasteland of giants, in hope of something that can revive the fallen being.
Little do they know of the journey they will undertake, that will lead them through the Edge of Space into something completely unknown to them, and the true secret of the universes...
It took me a while to find an eBay auction for this one - Ascender with Jack Reily - because I didn't know the name of it.
