It’s almost a brand new year and you know what that means? Lists! Lots of insufferable lists! And the worst are those Best and Worst lists. They’re cliché and awful, and just like taking that horrid first gulp of Alka-Seltzer on the morning of New Year’s Day, I’ve determined they’re absolutely necessary. Which brings me to the real reason I’m doing this: I need a week off! Between balancing work and the Holidays and drinking enough so that I can cope, it’s been a real bitch keeping FigureFan chugging along. I’m proud of the fact that I didn’t drop the ball this 4th Quarter, like I did last year, but I’m really spent and this is the best way to keep the ball rolling with some content while still getting me a much needed rest bit. And that means compiling a list of my Favorites and my Biggest Disappointments of 2012. It’s the lowest common denominator of blog content, but it’s necessary if I’m going to chill for a week and keep myself from freaking out.
It may surprise some to know that I attempt to write a set of these lists every year and somewhere along the way I either bore myself to tears or just get too frustrated trying to set up categories or figure out what was released when. This year, I wanted to make it work and so I set up some simple and ludicrously arbitrary rules to help move the process along. So first off, these lists are not necessarily about what came out this year, but rather what I featured this year. If I didn’t buy it, I’m not touching it, so there are no doubt plenty of great and shitty releases from 2012 that won’t be included because I never featured them. In a vague attempt to keep things topical, I am going to exclude any “Vintage Vault” features from consideration. To keep things even more arbitrary, I am also only allowing each toy line to appear once on each list.
The great news is, I’m already done! Yes, I’ve compiled a week’s worth of this bullshit delightful content, with Tuesday and Wednesday making up my ten Favorites, and Thursday and Friday the ten Biggest Disappointments. The entries will drop in automatically, and I can go crawl into bed for the week and try to sleep off the shellshock from the horror show that was the last couple of months.
Enjoy, have a safe and happy New Years, and I’ll be back next week year to kick off the year more proper like and get things back to business as usual.
FigureFan Zero 