How did YOU start?

[thelastallosaur]

When I was a bit younger my grandmother frequently helped run jumble sale type events for the RNLI, and the most exciting bit for me as a child was the selection of toys on offer. One particularly good haul yeilded a very nice toy truck that due to having a soundbox and his name written on his trailer was easy to identify as Optimus Prime (it was the G2 version, though I wouldn't know that for quite a while). Because of how awesome this toy was, I go rather excited when I heard an advert on TV a few years later, featuring the RID versions of him and Ultra Magnus. But the time wasn't quite ripe, so the only RID figure I got at the time was the spychanger Magnus. It seemed I was doomed to never be a transfomers guy, until the media blitz that was Armada. With a cartoon showing on terestrial television and many many commercials to fill my young mind, it seemed like this was the big push to what I am today, when my brother got Armada Blurr, I had to go one better, and of course I remembered the tinny voice from a little back box and knew that for that christmas I would ask for Optimus Prime. But as much as I loved Prime, and later Overload and Jetfire, I was leaving primary school and was under more pressure to leave toys behind, Energon to me was just a bunch of rehashes and repaints, transformers was no longer worth my time, and after one last hurrah a year after getting Prime in a surprise Armada Unicron, I was done.

Fast forward a few years. On a trip to the cinema my attention was grabbed by a large robotic eye, it was everything I had dreamed of during my Armada phase, they were making a Transformers movie! By now I was fifteen, but the movie excited me so much that I bought myself Leader prime, telling myself it'd be a one off. It almost was, and buying the dissapointingly simple Ratchet all but killed my desire for them, but I gave transformers one last chance, but when that last chance is deluxe movie Bumblebee, it means one thing; transformers was back for me. I always meant it to be another phase, "I'll only buy movie characters (lies)", "no, I'll stop when Animated comes, it looks rubbish (lies)", "I'll not buy any Universe (lies)"... and by the time ROTF rolled around, I realised that the years hiatus I'd planned between collecting the movie lines had gone, Transformers had got me completely, there was no escape...

The boards tell me it was late 2008 when I joined the online fandom proper, though I'd been lurking since the very start of Animated, when I realised there were better ways of finding out where and when things were coming out than hoplessly getting the bus around town every week. Since then I've been to Auto Assembly once in 2009, and I'd love to go again when I have money. And I still have that G2 prime at my grandparents house, though I've never counted him as part of my collection, which is currently at around three hundred figures.