I woke up today to an interesting, yet mildly aggravating take shared on the bird site.

Funko Pops are an affordable way for working-class people to display their interests to visitors and guests. You guys just hate on them for clout bc you’re computer-addicted elitists who think poor people don’t deserve happiness if it doesn’t conform to your own bourgeois taste.

(source)

While I usually don’t allow bird site takes to aggravate me, I felt that this one touched on things I’ve long thought about. As such, I wrote a response. Unfortunately, it was a flawed one. Twitter’s terse posting limit, as well as personal misjudgements, led me to make some mental shortcuts in the way I responded which were obvious to me but not obvious to many onlookers, including at least one person I trust.

So let’s try again.

While Funko Pops are a valid example of affordable merchandise, they’re still high-profit collectible items. Their design is, however, simple enough to allow lower pricing while keeping a decent margin. I don’t think they’re a good icon of “working class” fan consumption, at least not in the space I grew up on the sidelines of - the country of Poland and the anime/manga/MLP:FiM fandoms.

Today, I want to talk about can badges.

Cheap can badges. Simple, usually circular, metalic badges with a printed image on their front and a pin on their back. Often, they feature random images downloaded from the Internet - this can be a memetic idiom or a photo of your favourite idol, but it can also be a screencap from a show or a drawing of a character.

I’m going to try and explain, poorly, that these can badges represent, in my eyes, an icon of working class merchandise; at the very least, for the case of my home country, they do so much better than a Funko.

Cost

A Funko Pop in Poland costs about 15-20 dollars; sometimes one can get one for as low as 10 dollars on a discount. Admittedly, that’s pretty cheap for a figure - lower-priced Japanese “prize” figures here cost about 25-30 dollars these days¹. A Nendoroid can go for about 50-60 dollars, while scale figures have pretty much arbitrary pricing in the low hundreds of dollars.

However, can badges offer a representation of your favourite character for much less - on Vinted in Poland, they’re sold for anywhere between $1.50 and $3.00 as of writing. For the price of one Pop, you can populate your bag with ten little badges for every fandom that your heart yearns for. They’re also more affordable and universal than other popular character representations, such as acrylic stands.

Production

That’s the typical purchase price. Let’s talk production.

Practically speaking, once you have the required tools, a can badge costs under 20 cents to make, plus the cost of printing part of a piece of paper, and a little bit of labor. As such, for the price of one Funko Pop, you can make almost a hundred can badges - enough to represent all of your fandoms, plus the fandoms of your friends.

As all a can badge needs is a printed image, you can also make them out of anything. There are very few fandoms with zero artwork available - if it exists, you can put it on your badge.

However, none of this would matter if the tools were expensive - but they’re not! The cheapest badge-making machine can be had for as little as 25 dollars as of writing. This is slightly more than one Funko Pop. More durable models can still be found under 100 dollars. People can, of course, pool together to buy one of these and make as many badges as they wish, skipping middlemen. Owning the means of production, ahoy!

Of course, personal use is more of a fantasy in practice, as is owning the means, but we’ll get there. For now, let’s enjoy the metallic shine of a can badge.

Diversity

Figures are typically only made for sufficiently popular and/or profitable characters and franchises.

A can badge can be made for anything that has an image. Popular character? Sure! Unpopular character? You bet! Photo? Absolutely! Original character? Of course! Pride flags? Neat! That allows them much greater diversity at much lower cost.

This also leads to their popularity - since any fandom can be represented with an image, and they’re among the cheapest ways of decorating. In a sense, they become the building block of makeshift ita bags: ones built by and for the masses, not the classes.

Stolen valor

In spite of all these advantages, the can badge world is, in practice, built on a kind of stolen valor.

Let’s step away from the fantasy world of possibilities and get back to reality - a consumer trying to buy some cheap merchandise at an anime convention, or on a classifieds/auction site. This consumer finds a listing or a table with many dozens of badges, inexpensively priced and very varied.

Have any of you ever wondered where the art for these comes from exactly? As in, beyond “the Internet”? Some people believe it primarily comes from screencaps or official media, and that is true for some of them. However, most can badges you see in the realm of anime fandom - whether bought or homemade - are based on fan art; that is, art made by hobbyists or small-scale businesses as a type of fan activity without licensing the characters’ likenesses.

Did they ever get permission to use that art? Is that… is that tumbleweed?

So, it’s safe to assume that it was never granted; especially if you see someone mixing screencaps (hard to get permission), art from people on other continents (hard to get permission), et cetera. Now, this would be tolerable enough if it were people making them for personal use in the comfort of their own homes; people even print their own manga volumes like that.

But let’s consider the perspective of the seller. The can badges cost little to make. The art was “free”. Even selling the end result for one dollar a piece would net you about half that in profit. It’s all too tempting to just make a can badge for every remotely attractive piece of art you can find and try and sell them for a big markup. It’s so simple! So simple if you ignore the fact someone drew the art, of course.

Now, some of you might be wondering - why can’t the artists do the same, and compete on the market of a convention hall?

• First of all, an artist can’t afford to draw a badge for every character and fandom. One drawing can take hours, and there’s only so many of those in a day. Conversely, a mass seller can take art from an arbitrary number of artists, going into the hundreds (and, if you observe the rise of generative AI, arguably millions).
• At the same time, an artist has to pay just as much for a table as the mass-scale seller. Conventions don’t have a market reason to give them a better deal. Of course, the bigger player stands to attract more eyeballs and make more money thanks to their broader variety.
• An artist still has to compensate themselves for their own labor of drawing the art. This isn’t a charity, after all.

To be clear, I’m talking about large-scale sellers. There’s a difference between making a few badges for friends “at cost” and setting up a store with hundreds, if not thousands of them “for profit”. I think it is fair to call the latter bootleggers, and I will do so throughout the rest of this post².

I’m also not getting into the aspect of such a large-scale operation hurting licensed merchandise - that’s a separate can of worms entirely, with its own caveats³, but suffice to say that they too face a kind of unfair competition from the cheaper goods of a bootlegger. I’ll just link to a TikTok video by the store Manga Drift (in Polish) instead, if you’re curious about how they feel about it.

But, in the end, is there a difference between reading thousands of pages of comic books and buying a few can badges?

Acceptable and unacceptable piracy

After all, how are people supposed to know what is ethical and what is unethical?

We’re talking about the anime and manga fandom. People who enter it are often young or stuck working near-minimum-wage jobs. As soon as they enter it, they are told that all the manga and anime in the world “can” be consumed for free without regard to anyone who worked on it, translated it, or is trying to sell it⁴. Doujinshi from Japan, fan comics made by artistic individuals and circles sold at events in Japan, are also “fine” to download for free, because they’re not officially translated and not available in Poland⁵. Fan art is routinely shared via Twitter links. It is also “accumulated” without permission on large image collection websites - so-called boorus. At the same time, anime conventions increasingly feature official collaborations with licensors and musicians, included in the price of the ticket. They feature many tables with people selling various goods, some of which are obviously licensed goods, some of which are made by fan artists, and some of which are made by bootleggers.

Therefore, how on Earth is someone with this background supposed to intuit that all of the above is perfectly acceptable, a normal part of being a member of the community which hurts nobody at all⁶, but the second they buy a $2 can badge from a large, multi-table booth, they’ve irreversibly dealt financial damage to the lone artist sitting on the other side of the aisle trying to sell their own, handmade badges and pins for $4 a piece?

This is something not everyone will agree with, but in my opinion this is one of the prices of accepting some forms of piracy. People without a comprehensive literacy in how pop culture businesses work are not going to magically understand which forms of unauthorized media consumption hurt big corporations, which ones hurt small artists, and which ones are roughly as harmful as jaywalking. Without such awareness, they will pick the cheap can badge, because it has a prettier looking character, or a girl from a niche property they like. Besides, the seller just gave them a small discount if they buy a ten-pack, and it’s not like the American or South Korean fan artist will be particularly upset about a badge sold in Poland, right?

Through all of this, the can badge becomes the informal icon of the working class:

• It’s the cheapest way of asserting one’s pop culture identity, and the working class doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on frivolities like fandom.
• It’s the most varied way of asserting such an identity, and if you’re spending a resource precarious to you, picking something that is the closest to what you seek is important.
• It’s among the easiest ways of creating such decoration among a person and their friends. Not that this is done very often in practice, but it remains a theoretical option without the heavy markups or large minimum order quantities of online print shops.

In all of this, the people who suffer the most are the honest artists and laborers - those who reject the idea of building their livelihood on stolen valor.

Shifting blame

Who’s to blame for this state of affairs?

Is the “working class” to blame? Well, it’s hard to say many of them know they are doing something harmful to their local community. Just a few hours before writing this post, I was arguing with someone if it’s okay to just take free art from the Internet and use it however you wish. Copyright literacy in Poland is low, and we’re talking about a fandom which willfully ignores it throughout most of its basic activities. At the same time, artists can primarily reach their existing fans - people who do not need to have any of this explained to them.

Are the artists to blame? No! Of course not⁷!

Is the community to blame? In a sense, I do believe that some of this is a side effect of normalizing media piracy. Ultimately, small-scale artists are just another form of media creator, except unlike Disney, they don’t have an army of suits ready to protect what they hold. However, it’s hard to speak of guilt here; it is simply a consequence of the culture as it formed⁸.

Are the badge sellers to blame? Obviously! Don’t fall into the trap of feeling sorry for them; the most egregious ones are not mom and pop shops. They’re businesses who have been around for many years, sometimes under changing names; businesses which are alleged to hire people and pay them poorly or treat them unfairly; businesses which make enough money to buy up a few tables at a time and still pay the event threefold compared to what an artist can afford. They’re here to turn a profit, a much bigger profit than many of the smaller artists will ever see throughout their career.

Finally, is the convention to blame? That’s a tough one, and my opinion is heavily contested here, but I do think they’re at minimum not blameless.

Allowing such bootleggers in the first place is legitimizing their business. The convention lends its brand’s credibility to the people it hosts, and it also makes an independent choice on who to feature in the first place.

I’ve had many discussions about this phenomenon for years with organizers, but unsurprisingly, they have arguments of their own. Bootleggers compensate them well for the privilege, and they attract customers. Despite artist complaints, they’ve never exactly hurt a convention by merely existing. More money can translate to a better event - remember that some conventions in Poland are still organized by non-profits! Suffice to say, my attempts at propaganda in the past have been rather unsuccessful.

Closing words

I hear people lament all the time that there’s not enough local artists in Poland, yet they are placed in a fundamentally uncompetitive situation. While it is normal for most fan artists to not turn a profit on Japanese conventions⁹, their booths remain much cheaper¹⁰ than what small artists have to pay, especially when factoring in the audience size.

Paraphrasing an artist ranting on a Discord server a few months ago:

[…] rarely does someone pay more than $12, one serves only a few people every hour - we’re talking about small artists, after all […]

How is one supposed to feel excited about building professional-level skill in a world where they have to give away their time charitably, spending money to allow people to buy their art, while facing bootlegging profiteers on one side and generative AI on another? Being able to do so at all is a massive privilege, only enabled by having ludicrous amounts of money or a rare kind of job. I’m certainly not going to tell others to do it this way, even if I do so myself with many of my projects.

Now, I don’t have a solution. In some places, like the United States, this can be solved by the rightsholders themselves. Crunchyroll in particular polices the commercial (non-Artist Alley) area at Anime Expo for unlicensed merchandise of properties they hold, while the AA tries to prevent large operations from masquerading as independent creators. However, Crunchyroll runs their own merchandise store, so they have a very clear interest in taking care of bootleggers.

Just because something is “working class” does not make it ethical. Buying at Biedronka¹¹ is certainly not more ethical than buying from local suppliers, but the latter struggle to compete on price - especially if you factor in fuel and availability. Buying a Fairphone is more ethical than buying most $200 phones, but the former costs three times as much only to provide merely similar overall performance and functionality. In the end, it’s the affluent, those with spare capital, who have the choice of doing the better thing - and often choose not to do so. It, too, is a form of privilege. I can afford to commission an artist¹²; I assure you most conventiongoers cannot, though I respect those who try anyway. Of course, one can argue that a can badge is not a strictly necessary kind of good - there’s many ways the conversation can go from there, so I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader.

To end on a positive note, I do think the problem will lessen with time. In 2015, when I was at my first convention, the idea of having twenty, thirty, or more independent artists at an anime convention was preposterous - it was almost all either small-scale bootleggers, large-scale bootleggers, or people selling imports with an equally impressive markup. Nowadays, convention organizers are complaining about too many artists competing for booths, and small-scale artists are starting to complain about competing not just with bootleggers (which is unfair), but with larger-scale fan artists (which is another story) and with legitimate merchandisers.

As I was updating this post, I’ve also been told that at the currently ongoing event, Hikari 2024, bootleg merchandise is vastly outnumbered by licensed and fan merchandise, but I can’t verify that myself. However, if that is the case, then maybe the problem is resolving itself as we speak. In particular, licensed shops can have a competitive breadth of merchandise with none of the related unfairness.

Likewise, the video game industry in Poland faced similar struggles in the 1990s, with pretty much every upstart attempt at publishing foreign games or creating new domestic games facing high rates of piracy. However, as games became more affordable and accessible, awareness of copyright increased, licensors started emphasizing that which the pirates cannot provide, legal action and technical protection measures increased, it feels like for the last few years it’s the legal mode of consumption which became the default, not the pirate one. Remember that, for local anime and manga fandoms, the accessibility of legal merchandise and fanwork is a new phenomenon in itself. Of course, this does nothing to help artists who want to make a living now.

Ultimately, all of this leaves me optimistic for the future of fanmade merchandise, but for the time being, I believe that these “stolen” can badges are here to stay for a little while longer as an icon of a working class fan. Or maybe I’m just out of touch. Now, if you’ll excuse me, as an aspiring wannabe member of the bourgeoisie, I’m going to get back to accumulating¹³ more Nendoroids. Capitalism, ho!

If you want me to write more about my bizarre opinions, feel free to let me know. If you agree or disagree, also feel free to let me know - these subjects can get quite subjective and controversial, and I’ll readily admit I don’t have hard data for a lot of it.