u/InnerSpecialist1821

Anyone else notice it?

I follow a Lot of subreddits about the phenomenon and other tangentially related topics. They all go through highs and lows of activity together.

There's lulls, there's focus on specific topics, theres shared fear or shared joy. Right now the past couple days I've been seeing more and more spiritual threads even in relatively secular subreddits, with comments of people ageeing or admitting they used to not agee but do now.

it's interesting. i drifted away from the spiritual side of things for a couple weeks but I'm feeling drawn back to it now

i wanna share something that happened to me several years ago.

almost a decade ago at this point, i learned about a very rare stuffed animal made by a very tiny company in China. This company made unique and original plushies (aka not bootleg) of pokemon that were left completely ignored by Nintendo and never received official plushies. They had tried previously to get officially licensed, but were rejected since their factory was too small and they could not scale to Nintendo's typical global demands. So they remained unlicensed, producing small runs of plushies to sell unbranded to various third party retailers. These plushes are fairly large and absurdly high quality for being unlicensed; their quality often rivals official merch.

Because of this unique situation, they will only do a plush for short run before they design a new pattern of a different pokemon and make that. They never revisit old patterns, effectively making their plushes limited and incredibly rare, since they are hard to search for online. Only collecters name who it was made by, since that's very niche information, and collectors also know that they're rare, so they are Very expensive.

I have three top favorite pokemon, all three of which are niche but one of those goes completely ignored by Nintendo. I tried looking for an official plush, but they had never made one at that point. I had found old listings of people selling this unlicensed one for hundreds of dollars, but no current listing even existed anywhere -- it was that rare.

i forgot about it, discarding it as beyond my reach.

years later, out of the blue, i suddenly felt like i should search eBay for it. i had not thought about this plush for years, i don't even think i was thinking about pokemon in that moment either.

there it was. someone had JUST listed it with generic terms for 17$ buy now. they had absolutely no idea what they had in terms of rarity. it was in perfect condition, like I'm talking absolutely perfect, it looked brand new. i grabbed it immediately.

it struck me as odd at the time, but it wasn't until years later after things started getting even weirder for me that i remembered this and had more terms to describe it. completely and utterly mundane, but relatively extrodionary at the same time.