by Seibertron » Sun Sep 22, 2013 3:14 pm
- Motto: "'Til All Are One!"
- Weapon: Twin Shock-Concussion Missiles
This is a really good question. I've taken the opposite approach with my 4 year old daughter, since all kids are interested in toys. I've essentially inundated her with them, which probably doesn't surprise many of you considering how massive my collection is. She has always been around Transformers toys since she was little so it just isn't a thing to her. She asks lots of questions about them ... what's their name? Are they friends with Megatron or Optimus Prime (until she figured out the Autobot and Decepticon symbols on them). We still just call them good guys and bad guys mostly. Once in a while I refer to them by their respective factions.
I guess it is different because she's a girl though to the extent that she mostly has a ton of My Little Ponies and Disney Princess/Barbie dolls (and all 6 of the original Rescue Bots) so there is a very clear line in the sand between what are her toys and what are my toys. I imagine with a young boy that the line in the sand would be a little harder to draw if he was into Transformers as well.
Once in a while when I'm doing a massive gallery push and I have a bunch of Transformers in our living room that I've transformed, I'll let her "play" with a couple of them with her dolls. It's probably a much more gentle play than boys playing with toys because a lot of it is "talking", going to "Ponyville" or the Disney Princess Castle or finding out about rainbows or something along those lines. One of my favorite memories of my daughter in the past 6 months was letting her play with my SDCC 2013 Titans (Grimlock, Bumblebee, Megatron, Optimus Prime, and Soundwave). Her ponies were trying to teach Megatron about the "friendship of magic". She kept doing this cute little mean bad guy voice saying over and over "I'm a bad guy". It was really cute.
My wife is probably more concerned when she sees a Transformer sitting out than I am. I always assure her that I wouldn't leave something really valuable out. If she broke TFP RID Optimus Prime, it'd suck, but it certainly wouldn't be the end of the world because he's a common recent figure that'd be easy to replace.