>>7074070Based anon here
>>7075047 captured it perfectly. I got my first army men when I was about 8 years old and was hooked from that moment onward. I gave up so many of my toys as I grew up but my armies expanded, became more elaborate, more organized. At its height my plastic armed forces counted easily over ten thousand men.. but then I hit an extended period of stagnation, marked by significant downsizing of the collection. Up to that point my younger brother and I had waged plastic wars together for many years, but then he started to drift away in his interests and I'd withdrawn into my own world for a while. When I reemerged I had to change my previous mentality of quantity first (to be able to throw endless numbers of men into battle) to smaller, more space-conservative collecting. Sold off a good chunk of my armies, but my forces still number in the several thousands, with a better soldier-to-vehicle ratio.
The fore-mentioned stagnation happened largely because army men have slid into a valley popularity-wise: fewer places carry them, and what does show up in stores is often the cheapest, most generic, poorest quality, most cloned/copied stuff. I'd lived overseas a lot as a kid and it seemed army men were way more popular there, I loved hitting up the regular street flea markets because someone somewhere always had second-hand soldiers for sale, good ones too. The only time in the last ten years of being back in Canada that I remember seeing anything like that here was surprisingly enough at the corner convenience store down the street; they had half an aisle of toys and among them was a bag of WW2 German Afrika Korps, which I had to snap up. Really miss those days, hope that the valley climbs back into a mountain someday, so that new generations of would-be generals can experience the joys of plastic warfare.
