"Any time! Honest!"
Stop spending all our cash On back issues of The Flash
— Ookla The Mok, "Stop Talking About Comic Books or I'll Kill You"
Being a geek is tough. But never mind any social stigma, or trying to explain your hobbies to other people. Oh no. The hardest hits in Geekdom go straight to your bank account.
Perhaps because they feel that they don't reach a wide audience, makers of
so-called "geek" paraphernalia charge a pretty penny for their wares. It doesn't help that geeks are as into their interests as any Sports fan is into his favorite team, which is to say a lot. Just because their bobbleheads are more likely to be
Mobile Suits than football players, doesn't mean they're not like the rest of mankind. Just in different ways.
Can be made worse by the hardcore
Fanboy's
preference for overpriced merchandise. This guy wants geek paraphernalia to be overpriced because he wants to be the only one on the block who can afford to own it. If an item costs $9.99, then any old fan, even one who has a mortgage and bills to pay, can afford it; but if it costs $129.99 and comes with the
fake totally legitimate signature of the fandom's creator, then only a true fan would spend so much of his
mother's money to purchase it. This is a dream come true for the manufacturer, who would much rather sell 10,000 items at a $128 profit margin than 50,000 items at a $8 profit margin.
Additionally, because the in-roads and availability of material related to the hobby seems so tenuous, the
Fanboy will be willing to pay inflated prices to ensure that material keeps being produced. Of course, the rise of the internet has proven there is a breaking point, as many anime licensees have found out: expecting people to pay $40 for a good seventy-five minutes of entertainment that can easily be distributed online may soon put you out of business.
As these hobbies become more mainstream, the prices will often fall. Many fans then find that the situation doesn't get all that much better, as the lowered prices simply encourage them to get
more.
Since these hobbies are so expensive, ads for them count as
Up Marketing, just at fans of these instead of the upper class.
Obviously, this trope doesn't just apply to "geek" culture. People can be obsessed with collecting just about
anythingnote Which is the this page is for in-universe examples only, because it turned into "The thing I like is expensive!" "Me too!" "And mine!", ranging from guns to sports memorabilia to classic cars and everything in between. The prices for some items can be absurdly high, depending on how rare the item is and how much money collectors are willing to shell out.
Add only In-Universe examples.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
- Medabots has a main set of characters, the Medabots themselves, as expensive to buy and maintain. (Justified, in the fact that they are built to shoot missiles, lasers and other things.)
- Air Gear has the Air Treks that are expensive, comparable to what you'd expect from rollerblades with motors, necessitating the teens to work part-time. Unless it's provided for them.
- Possibly justified by the fact that wearing them apparently allows the user to violate physics.
- Definitely justified by the fact that wearing them lets you jump several stories and move close to 100 MPH. from shoes. If anything, the fact students on a part time job can afford them makes them cheap for what you get
- In Yureka the characters have all the money hangups of online gamers, but the technology is much better (read: More expensive). Add to that the price of Netrooms when a home computer isn't available, it's no wonder most of them can barely afford it.
- Yoshii of Baka To Test To Shoukanjuu spends all his food allowance on anime and manga. He gets around this by eating ridiculously small meals, including sugar water.
- In the Read or Die series, the main protagonists often spend so much money on books that they have no money for food, much to the dismay of the one Paper Sister who isn't a bibliomaniac.
- In Lucky Star:
- The girls discuss this trope when they talk about how Japanese people seem to love limited edition items. Konata herself does this a lot, often buying limited edition items that are hard to get.
- It might be related to the aesthetic ideal of wabi-zabi, and to the Zen idea of the impermanence of all things—that wouldn't be the oddest place in Japanese culture that wabi-zabi has turned up.
- This trope is also Play For Laughs in the Extra Material mini-series The Empty Stomaches of the Miyakawas. The titular family in in Perpetual Poverty exactly because the older sibling was trying to fit her otaku hobbies into a bookstore staff wage.
- In Welcome to the NHK, Yamazaki, who is already a massive otaku with shelves packed full of manga, DVDs, and figurines, gets Satou into the hobby and trains him to buy things on impulse. But Satou doesn't have much money to spare, so this just accelerates him towards bankruptcy.
- Hinted at in Yu-Gi-Oh!. While never specifically stated that cards cost vast sums of money, they do mention that the packs do cost something, assumably about the same as they do in real life. Considering that the characters are playing the game for a living, and that the rarer cards are more or less unique *
ex. Dark Magician is only seen once outside of Yugi's deck. Not only is it a different color, after winning the duel, he gained possession of the card.
, so presumably they spend even more money building their decks than professionals do in real life.
- The manga chapter introducing the card game (chapter 9) has Sugoroku mention that some people have sold their houses to buy cards.
Comic Books
- Part of the reason BA and Bob are perpetually broke in Knights Of The Dinner Table is that they use what little money they earn from their minimum wage jobs to support their role-playing hobby.
Film
- Right before the submarine is submerged in Crimson Tide, Gene Hackman offers Denzel Washington a cigar with the admonition not to get to used to them, as they are "more expensive than drugs."
Literature
Live Action TV
- This is a borderline Meta example since it's based on Real Life, but Pawn Stars shows the opposite side of this trope with some people who make a living off it. The Harrisons frequently buy things because they know they'll be able to resell them to collectors who are willing to pay huge sums of money for antique guns, classic cars, historic documents, pop culture memorabilia, etc.
- In The Big Bang Theory, the fellas play a card game called Mystic Warlords of Ka'a. One episode sees the release of an absurd Wild West and Witches expansion pack, which Raj describes as "like a secret tax for guys who cannot get laid". Moments after, the four have shelled out $25 each for said expansion. Raj will later show off his Wild West and Witches collector's tin...
- An episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun had Dick becoming addicted to Fuzzy Buddies, to the point he begins to lose control of his family's finances.
Theater
Webcomics
Western Animation
- The Batman The Animated Series episode "Beware the Grey Ghost", The villain is a toy collector who turned his toys into bombs to get the money to buy more toys
used with permission.
