If you could have a do over in this hobby what would it be?

So I saw LUTs dolls when I was in my IMVU days (I was like 14-16) I’m 26 now lol. I thought all the dolls were Japanese only dolls like they weren’t sold here. I one said came across a Instagram creator I can’t say her name because she is actually banned on DoA. I wanted her doll and became OBSESSED. However she only made a few dolls to look like her and to my understanding she doesn’t make anymore. So people who have them don’t sell them. I’ve legit
Never seen anyone sell the doll or even the head. Most of the people who have the doll actually are on Instagram who create wigs or are other sculptors or artist in the community. It sucks but it is what it is

 

I honestly had to really think over any possible candidates I could conceive of for this, and really only a couple stand out enough to make me wish I could have a do-over with them.

My biggest regret was buying the 66cm Classydoll body instead of putting the money towards another one that was more fitting for the bjd I got it for. Besides the color not being a match, it looked very different from how it appeared in the website photos. It's proportions were really wonky compared to what I saw on their site.

Lower key, but I figure I'd add this: I wish I hadn't impulse bought my Dearmine Angela after fawning over a SD Dearmine doll at a local meet. For a while I planned to make a catgirl version of my feline companion out of her, but as time passed—I lost interest. I should've invested that money in a bjd cat instead (OT Evedoll or similar). Also, after a while I realized that anthros weren't my thing (including cat ones, even though I'm a cat lover), and I preferred more realistic cat dolls instead.

 

Ooh, getting rid of my Dollzone Floy. To this very day I still kick myself for getting rid of that doll.

 

I should have bought a Dream of Doll. It was technically the first BJD company I came across. I would get a Shall if I could.

 

SAME, i now can't get it anymore because it is way out of my price range i am willing to pay... so rip

 

Buying a Volks Suigintou back when I first could have and actually had the opportunity to when she was affordable/brand new. Buying a Volks Yukinojo even though he wasn't the exact Yukinojo that I wanted. And doing an FCS back when the Volks USA store was in Torrance as a memento before it closed. Oh, and attending more doll meet-ups/conventions in person before the pandemic *sighs* even if it was just to walk around and look at stuff.

 

I wish I would've thought to download a lot of my favorite photos and videos from other hobbyists back in the day. Most of them have since left the hobby and deleted their flickrs, YT channels, and instagram pages, so there's no way for me to find a lot of that content again even though it was so inspirational to me!

I also wish I hadn't fallen into the FOMO aspect of limited releases in this hobby like I did. It led to me impulse buying a bunch of dolls that I'm now in the process of selling off because they just don't do it for me anymore. I wish I had funneled those funds directly into my planned and cultivated wishlist instead.

 

I would of told my old self to learn about staining. And vinyl care! Oh vinyl care....

 

The only thing I regret is not going to doll meetups or events that I knew of in the city I use to live in. Where I live there are not any but I am looking forward to when we will be able to attend future events in other cities.

 

Realizing that I prefer 70 scale dolls and not MSDs. I was convinced that I only liked smaller dolls, because I also collect 1/6 action figures and barbies, but lo and behold, I prefer bigger dolls for resin. Now I'm attached to these MSDs, but I hate having inconsistent sizes

 

My do over would be saving my money on certain dolls I have bought over the years. I guess it would be more of a "wish I had known then what I know now" kind of thing. Unless you are able to see the doll in person no amount of pictures can tell you how you will feel about it once you actually have it in your hands!

 

First, I shouldn’t have bought dolls I didn’t really like. I tried so hard for many years to bond with them but I ended up selling them because I realized it just didn’t work. Second, I should have listened to myself more than listening to what a dealer said. I very much regretted it that I paid more for a body that I didn’t like at the first place and I ended up selling him eventually.

 

The biggest one: I wouldn’t have brought my ex into the hobby with me—I spent so much shelling her characters that were counterparts to mine in a roleplay that I didn’t feel I owned my collection when we broke up—it was a big reality check.

There are limited releases I regret—there’s a few sooms I ought to have nabbed, like Garion, and soul stealer breccia. There are a couple twigling girls I could have gotten in on back in times of better exchange rates, and some truly beautiful second hand scores I could have had, but I really don’t think any of it stands up to the differences in my hobby experience if I’d gotten into it for me, and not shelled characters from universes that weren’t mine. This time over, I’m being way more careful about shelling other people’s characters versus my own.

 

I wish I'd joined DoA sooner (yeah, yeah, I know there's something brown on my nose), and I wish I had discovered BJDs sooner. So much money wasted on OT dolls...

 

I regret a lot of the posts I made here as a kid, but we all have situations like that. I can't blame my younger self too much for acting as weird as I did, but I do wish I had been a bit more calm. I feel like I really annoyed some of the older members of my local community as well, and I wish I hadn't done that. Most of them have moved on now and I wish I had become better friends with them.

I regret buying a Migidoll Miho head, because I thought he was just as good as Ryu. I ended up buying a Ryu anyway but I still have that Miho head hidden in my room somewhere. I haven't touched that head in years and I don't think I'll ever bother buying him a body.

I regret not buying a DoD Petsha while the company was still running. She was my first dream doll, but I wanted to go big for my first doll and decided against her because of the hype and FOMO of a limited doll. I never got around to buying one after either.

Not a regret, but an almost regret: I tried to sell almost all of my male dolls a while back. Luckily I priced them all too high and no bought them, but I now realize how attached I am to them and how many good memories I made with them. I almost sold off my piece of DoD history. I reserve the right to change my mind someday, but right now I am so thankful I still have them now that I have an income and am much more financially stable than I was as a high school and college student.

 

The top on the list would be being more selective of the dolls I chose to add to my collection, set some kind of criteria for the dolls, ie ok I'm going to collect only centaur dolls, or only MSD with this aesthetic instead of oh this doll is gorgeous must have..lol. My collection has grown way to large and its been a struggle to juggle so many and deciding which to rehome is even more stressful. So yea I wish I would have had a more defined purpose of what I truly wanted to collect and what I did with them so it wasn't so overwhelming. As it is right now I hardly do anything wtih them and its sad they are just collecting dust. I think I would have stuck with the majority of my Resinsoul dolls because the fantasy colors were exactly what I was after when I first started in the hobby. I went off the rail from there when I started looking at all the other fabulous fantasy dolls out there (souldoll, luts, dollmore, soom)..lol.
Darn you doll companies for having cute dolls I can't resist.
On the flip side there are also dolls that I wish I would have bought when they released because now they are sold out and impossible to find. It's a double edged sword..lol. A constant re evaluation for sure.

 

I would resist the urge to drift away from paying attention to news/forums for a few years. In that time Dollzone discontinued Sawarrieda, and I still regret my decision to just... stop paying attention for a few years, because I lost out on her. At the time it made sense, but missing out on her was not worth it.

 

I do wish I hadn't been gone from the hobby for so long. I do think I needed some time away to evaluate and refine the overarching storyline these characters fit into (because I only refined it due to the guilt of keeping my dolls instead of selling them when I wasn't playing with them for years), and being in the hobby kept me wanting more and more of the pretty sculpts I saw and forming characters based on the sales pictures, not my own characters. Despite that, I wish I wasn't gone for quite so long. 7-8 years is a long time, and so much has changed, and I missed out on so much. I wish I wouldn't have let my dad put so much pressure on me to not buy any more doll items.

I also wish I would have told my fiance' about these dolls sooner. I brought them up once when we had been together for about a little over a year because I was struggling to try and sell them again to pay for some bills that had come up. He happened to mention something about thinking dolls were creepy, so I told him about mine, sent him a few pictures, and how I was trying to find the strength to sell them. He didn't find them creepy at all, and encouraged me to keep them. Even then, I still kept them hidden in my closet and didn't talk about them for another year and a half to two years until we got engaged and his parents wanted to give us a nice camera as a wedding present. He almost turned them down thinking I wouldn't be interested. That was when I told him that one of the major points of my dolls was as photography subjects. I don't know much about it, and I didn't try very hard back when I got them because of the guilt and shame I struggle with, but I still do want to see if I can make photostories with them. He suggested we get them out and use them as subjects for testing out the new camera.

 

So true. We should all aspire to be @MBLilac's level of comfort with our SOs about our hobby. ("Honey, you carry the horses." )

 

Oh, no kidding, lol. He would carry the horses too, though he would be nervous about accidentally breaking them somehow, knowing how expensive they can be.