I HAVE A magpie brain – it wreaks havoc and is attracted to all things whimsical and chintzy. You can make a strong comparison between me and the corvid family. We are loud, splendid nuisances, silly pranksters and snack-hungry little freaks with a disdain for authority. And, relevantly, we’re keen collectors.

Recently, I purchased my first-ever set of Sylvanian Families. It contains three baby animal figurines – a beaver, a mouse and a rabbit – dressed as assorted gourds. It’s an exceptionally cute toy set, and I knew immediately that it wouldn’t be my only one. 

Sylvanian Families have been around since the 1980s. They’re miniature anthropomorphic woodland figurines made of flocked plastic (they’re fuzzy!). Aesthetically, they’re twee to the nth degree. The sets generally contain a few animals – or a family of animals – with themed outfits and accessories. They’re like Barbies for crunchy people or nativity scenes for the godless: you can also purchase furniture, houses and village scenes. Think country homesteads, seaside merry-go-rounds, farmers’ markets – world-building for maximum cuteness.

I never had Sylvanian Families as a kid. They’re relatively expensive for what you get, so they were firmly out of my family’s budget. Instead, I had a Winnie-the-Pooh treehouse. Like their Sylvanian counterparts, these treehouse sets included character figurines – also made of peach-fuzz plastic – with miniature furniture and accessories to fill the world. It’s the same concept, just Disneyfied. 

If you love the idea of veggie patches, potlucks, picnics and preparing a cauldron of soup for your friends, you’ll probably love the Sylvanian aesthetic. It’s so fucking quaint. 

I’VE ALWAYS HAD a stronger connection to animals than people, which has heavily informed my interests and collections. Much like the cunty food critic in Ratatouille, I don’t just like something, I love it.

As a kid, I lived with my dad, who is a utilitarian in many ways. He grew up in a large, dirt-poor family who hoarded their possessions in fear of scarcity. While my dad overcorrected his parents’ working-class anxieties by valuing minimalism, decluttering non-essentials and rejecting sentimentalism, I certainly did not.

During my pre-teen years, I amassed a large collection of animal plushies and figurines. I loved collecting different species, different families and different genii. I didn’t just want a generic teddy bear, I wanted specific representations of the animal kingdom: grizzly bears, black bears, sun bears and so forth. (FYI: in earlier decades, it was hotly contested whether giant pandas were true bears or were closer to their raccoon relatives, so my panda plushie split its time between families.)

My plushies were ‘decluttered’ when they were no longer ‘age appropriate’. I was expected to become a different kind of person – one who doesn’t think about plushies. One who can get by on utility, with no need for art, beauty or whimsy. One who can use their perspicacity for something sensible.

It wasn’t to be. My dad’s influence failed miserably – emphasis on misery. Or, arguably, it swung me further away, back in the direction of my grandparents, imbuing my possessions with sentience, value and personality. I find it unbearable to let anything go. 

Just because something is cutesy doesn’t mean that my level of interest is shallow. I can appreciate twee in a deeply studious way that isn’t often recognised as such. Why can’t I be a scholar of kitsch? While some universities embrace the study of constructed languages, such as Klingon and Dothraki, this level of social credibility is rarely afforded to more adorably niche interests. Why is the lore of Star Trek lent more legitimacy than that of Steven Universe or Sailor Moon? 

MAYBE YOU’RE NOT into Sylvanian Families. Perhaps these toys are nothing special to you (can’t relate), or you just don’t connect with them (couldn’t be me). But they’re just one example of the need for twee. Or, at least, the allure of creature comforts.

I invite you to think about your relationship to cosy gaming – games that are focused on relaxation and nurturing. Did you ever have a Tamagotchi, play Nintendogs or The Sims? I ask after your collections, if you have them. What do they represent, and what do they give you?

In 2020, at the height of COVID-19, there appeared to be a widespread return to gentle play as a refuge. Life-simulation games, such as Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley,became a lifeline for hordes of people, allowing both escapism and connection in a newly changed world. Speaking of hordes/hoards, we also saw a surge of anxious hoarding from the general population during the pandemic lockdowns. My grandparents’ scarcity mindset became a mainstream phenomenon.

For the first time in my life, I felt reasonably well-adjusted – and well-equipped – to cope with intense anxiety and fear. I didn’t hoard toilet paper or other necessities; I shared resources with my community, as a Sylvanian character would. As someone with agoraphobic tendencies, I experienced my Covid lockdown as a prolonged time at home, as usual. Emotionally, it was nothing too new.

For cosiness, I turned to Neopets, an online game I used to play as a child. I even managed to recover my childhood account, where I could access my old pets, petpets (the pets Neopets can adopt) and inventory of Neopian goods. I also dabbled in Stardew Valley, building up my virtual treats and treasures. I watched my partner play Animal Crossing, and we’d create little scenes and settings together. Our points of connection to the world became cute games and homely activities, like baking and crafts. The obligation to be at home enabled the mainstream permission to be cosy.

That gentleness feels long gone. Why can’t we be cosier, in general, outside of a crisis? 

Play is often reserved for children. Or at least, play is acknowledged as necessary for children and a luxury for anyone else. In this throwaway generation, as we witness the world collapse in on itself, buckling under the trauma of colonialism and late-stage capitalism, there’s a nihilism that lends itself to extended childhoods, or never-adulthoods. 

I don’t want to sound like one of those people who are like, ‘adulting is hard!’ I don’t really know what that means; everything is hard, always. I do feel that, as someone without a functioning life, hospitable planet or viable future, people don’t give that much of a fuck if I waste my days away on toys and video games. Yet I can’t help but interrogate my taste in play – what it says about the life I am living, in this world and this bodymind. 

Why isn’t joy considered profound? Misery is seen as a well – a plunging threat of ineffable, echoing depth – but it can be as shallow as any whim. Is there nothing poetic about pleasure? About play?

Do I need to intellectualise any of these emotions? Or do they just need to be felt?

WHEN IT COMES to cosy gaming and playing, we seem to yearn for the dirt. We imagine a proximity to nature, and to each other – however anthropomorphically. But nature poses a question-exclamation mark combo (?!), raising more quandaries than it’ll ever solve. 

Nature inspires much of our art and our interests but is strangled by all that we create. It serves as our weary mother, degraded by the weight of our wanting, and our psychopomp, guiding us to our deaths (and its own). It is everywhere and nowhere.

Hobbies and nature are both experiential and immersive, but the background stimuli of our lives and minds are cacophonous. In my opinion, even as someone with a monotropic thinking style, the distractions have gotten much harder to tune out, the sense of immersion inevitably less immersive. How accessible is nature in our current lives? Is it prioritised? Are we ever truly immersed in it?

And how does nature creep into consumerism? After all, Sylvanian Families are a faux-connection with nature to be purchased. You can work, trying to survive all week for the price of your energy, and then get a little squirrel family to play with on your coffee table after you clock off.

Our world encourages interactions with sanitised, toothless animals, with a safe and predictable iteration of nature. Sharks are killed in their own homes for their predatory instincts, sought out in vengeance, while ‘Baby Shark’, a children’s song, makes millions.

In the Western world, many of us live in apartments or ugly, uninspired suburbs with limited access to nature. We’re often interfacing with nature through capitalised means, in the time we have available outside of work and other commitments. 

I live in a regional area, and even I look to the sky and wonder about our access to the stars. But I know nature will seek us out, eventually. This will be the last thing that ever happens on planet Earth.

RECENTLY, I WATCHED an episode of Hoarders for the first time, its familiarity as sharp as a papercut. 

Premiering in 2009, Hoarders is a reality TV show that follows cases of severe compulsive hoarding, with a goal to help participants tidy and declutter their homes. Some episodes bring in expert trauma cleaners and psychologists, while others feature ‘professionals’ who use shame as a key tenet of their practice.

Hoarders is often marketed and consumed as ‘trash’ television for the purpose of humiliating its participants. But their hoarding behaviours made perfect sense to me, and I watched their bravery with clear eyes and a full heart. I could see their deep fears and needs, so similar to my own. Family histories shone forth, and even relatively ‘minor’ incidents – like having toys discarded or sold as a child – held incredible emotional salience in the lives of adults just like me. Like many of the participants, I’ve also had support staff in my home taking photos of spaces that I previously thought weren’t ‘that bad’. I watched with compassion and kinship, as I know I’m not the target audience; I’m one of the ‘freaks’. 

In one episode, a child – with similar disabilities and the same name as me – hoards plushies and forms intense emotional attachments to his possessions. The pang of recognition aches. Another name for hoarders, I learn, is ‘pack rats’. Once more, like the cunty food critic in Ratatouille, I commune with rats.

(Mice exist in Sylvania, but rats do not. I would love a huge family of Sylvanian rats; I want my collected worlds to feel truly full and inclusive. But a world that intersects with capitalism will never be wholly and proudly diverse. Everything is influenced by a marketing decision, a curatable and commodifiable aesthetic. Rats aren’t a financially viable choice: they will gather at the bottom of bargain bins.)

A similarly voyeuristic show, My Strange Addiction, focuses on uncommon compulsive behaviours – many of which, to me, simply seem to be stimming behaviours, pica, nutrient deficiencies and sensory regulation. I think the oddness of these shows is demystified for those of us who recognise these behaviours in ourselves and understand them intimately. After all, most hoarders are likely to have existing disabilities, trauma histories, chronic loneliness, unmet needs and an internal logic surrounding their behaviour. All of this reminds me of how unfriendly the world is to disabled people, especially those of us who need more support than a pair of earplugs from a targeted ad or an app to boost productivity.

As the participants grappled with the invasion of their homes and the shedding of their possessions, I saw their fear of loss and deprivation, their need for certainty, and the beauty they found in holding on.

In a lonely and disempowering world, what else can we cling to but the things that make us feel safe?

AS I WROTE this essay, I listened to early 2000s emo bands like the Used and My Chemical Romance. The latter’s ex-drummer died, and I felt both so near and so far from my younger self.

A bird flew through the window and shat on my kitchen floor – nature came to greet me, I guess. I sat in the garden typing while my cat and dog lay in the sun. I ate pasta amatriciana, rich and glossy with cannabutter, staining the Tupperware. I overdrew my bank account. I had terse conversations with the NDIS. 

I feared that I wouldn’t be able to write a single decent sentence, that everything I’d ever written was either a fluke or irrelevant. I spread small amounts of money to mutual aid. I got Covid for the first time. I tried to slow down, even when life demanded, demanded, demanded like a needy toddler. I failed.

I peeked over someone’s shoulder on the train as they did little self-care tasks on Finch, an app that allows you to care for yourself as if you were a Tamagotchi. In one quiz, I saw them indicate that they rarely have fun. I felt so near and so far from them, too.

I watched episodes of Daria and felt the trick of nostalgia; I love this show, but I hated my teenage years. The same could be said of my relationship to Animal Crossing or Sylvanian Families: I love little critters, but do I really like gardening? 

AS I SEE it, Sylvanian Families represent an idyllic world in which I can complete basic tasks and chores – where I can feel useful in my community, and everyone can have the kinship they need. In reality, I feel pretty useless. I have lacklustre hard skills, worse soft skills, and I stink. I get disability support, but less than I need. I rely a lot on other people, but I feel existentially alienated much of the time.

There is an appetite for an agrarian life of community care. Our gentle playtime habits suggest that we want walkable cities, gardens, fresh produce and self-sufficiency within small communities. We want slow living: pastoral lives and pastoral care, with reprieve from media punditry and overwhelm.

In Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing alike, community events are a huge priority, as are neighbourhood connections. You can’t really create a ‘successful’ life in these virtual worlds without caring for the non-playable characters as a priority. Sylvanian Families, too, are about caring for something as tenderly as you would a pet, even if that thing serves no practical purpose beyond the joy of itself. There’s something socially progressive about this form of life – it’s gentle and communal, careful and care-filled. 

In Sylvania, houses are for living in, and the village shops and scenes are for gathering. We don’t question whether a tiny family of hedgehogs deserve a home, because of course they do. People get what they need – clothes are made for a variety of bodies, for example, and things exist to serve the inhabitants, not vice versa. People also get what they want to a reasonable extent – little treats, bicycles, special outfits. I wish the same could be a given in our communities, too.

However, another interpretation of Sylvanian life may skew conser-vative: after all, some people use their love of twee, wholesome lives as a denouncement of progressive values. I think of tradwives – conservative women who believe in ‘traditional values’, particularly in relation to strict and regressive gender roles. Tradwives are often seen to be baking, creating and homemaking, all while adorned in rural feminine aesthetics – much like the mother of a Sylvanian Family. Tradwives tend to preach right-wing politics, and they sometimes intersect with conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers. Tradwifery also frequently encompasses a rejection of modern technologies and their strain on the planet and humanity.

Sylvanian Families could warrant similar criticisms of ‘cottagecore’ aesthetics – of a bias towards whiteness, the nuclear family, Eurocentrism and colonialism. A badger policeman exists in Sylvania. Why? Law enforcement is uncomfortably ubiquitous in children’s media, too – even in the 2015 film Inside Out, which is set within a child’s mind. Why, in our imagined worlds, even our wildest imaginings, are police still extant as a necessity, or an inevitability?

Both Sylvanian Families and cottagecore fashion romanticise a whole-some, crunchy farm life as an aesthetic while often relying on consumption, production of plastics, ‘fast’ manufacturing predicated on exploitation of people and the planet. Sometimes I worry that my focus on anthropomorphic animals is just a manifestation of psychoterratic emotions: of climate anxiety. 

With so much access to information, we often have little excuse not to balance the dialectics of our interests: to find enjoyment but remain critical. Yet some interests are scrutinised more than others; some of us must justify our tastes constantly. Is it more ethical to like sports than toys? Why are Disney adults looked down upon? Is it better to love a Sylvanian mouse or Mickey Mouse? Does it make a difference, or am I selfish for wanting at all?

I am unsure of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to like something. I wonder if my cutesy, old-school interests can be paradoxically progressive rather than some inherent endorsement of conservative lifestyles simply based on vibes alone. 

Tweeness often entails an apathy or ambivalence towards adjusting to ‘the times’. Over the years, the Sylvanian style hasn’t changed much. Nostalgia is the drawcard; nobody wants a Sylvanian family of TikTok influencers, after all. (Unless…) In Neopets – at least for now – I can still play the same HTML Flash games I played on their website when I was eight. I can still visit the Giant Omelette and the Giant Jelly, naff and clunky as ever. 

I love this commitment to nostalgia, but I appreciate that it’s a hard way to survive: for a game or toy to commit to an internal sense of relevance among a superfanbase rather than aspiring to yassify itself for the masses into a nondescript ‘Instagram face’ version of its former glory. 

As a human, I have no choice but to adapt to ‘the times’ – and in some ways, this is good: I like that I can order food deliveries to my house, have assistive technology and be a loud lesbian. But apparently, ‘the times’ also want me to adapt to things like surveillance states, data mining and planned obsolescence.

There’s something so fierce about basking in your obsolescence, celebrating your twee cringe (did you just say ‘cwinge’?) rather than planning your defeat to capitalism. If I’m going to become obsolescent, I want the Earth to claim me itself, organically.

SHORTLY AFTER PURCHASING my first Sylvanian set, I visited an op shop with my mum and found three Sylvanian sets, boxed and unopened, for a bargain. She asked me to pretend I hadn’t seen them, as I’d receive the sets as upcoming birthday gifts. 

As she paid at the counter, the cashier said, ‘These sets are so cute. They’ll make some kiddos really happy.’ 

I stood there, a kiddo at the ripe age of thirty, and wondered why some hobbies are treated differently to others. Would she say the same about my older brother’s vintage Pokémon cards? Or tabletop game miniatures?

It’s not often that we care for each other’s inner children. Maybe we should. I once mentioned my old Winnie-the-Pooh treehouse – the Sylvanian Family stand-in of my childhood – to a co-worker. I told her how it had become a casualty to one of my dad’s decluttering cycles, how I loved Eeyore’s birthday set and hoped to find it again someday. A few weeks later, she surprised me with a second-hand set that may as well have been plucked from the dumpster twenty years earlier.

When someone nurtures the kiddo I am, I feel seen as more than an adult who’s expected be productive and lawful and composed. I feel seen in my joy first, not my misery.

On the flipside, I can’t always tell the difference between inner-child healing and infantilisation. I tend to receive many children’s toys as gifts, even ones that I haven’t indicated an interest in. I collected plastic miniatures of Coles and Woolworths groceries not by choice, initially, but simply because others bestowed them upon me, a childish inheritance. 

The more people assume I’m a hoarder, the more I become one. The more I’m perceived as just a girl who likes cute things, the more I’m reduced to a miniature version of myself.

IN PSYCHIATRIST RD Laing’s 1967 book The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise, hypersanity is proposed as a higher level of consciousness that may emerge through experiencing an odyssey of madness. 

Basically, hypersanity can be understood as when a ‘breakdown’ is actually a ‘breakthrough’. It sounds kind of cheesy, and it’s certainly not a clinical term. But when I consume media about hoarders, doomsday preppers and other ‘extreme’ lifestylers, I think of hypersanity.

When I look around my house, I see threads of sanity knotting around each other, leaving me friction-burnt. This home is self-indulgent, luxuriating in half-finished art projects, blanket nests and uncategorised miscellanea; meanwhile, all that is boring and practical fades into the peripheries. I practise self-compassion and worry about enabling myself. I show tough love, but then it (ani)morphs into self-deprecation.

Where’s the line between hypersanity and insanity? What about hyper-insanity? When is a breakdown a breakthrough? Are ‘through’ and ‘down’ mutually exclusive? And what if you just plain break?

I am a control freak. I am stubborn, assertive, emotional and defiant – the definition of a brat.

Like many control freaks, the undercurrent to this freakiness is extreme anxiety. Unpredictability chips away at my soul every day. It may sound melodramatic, but I find the chaos of the world immensely distressing. 

Amid this, I find it difficult to connect with people. I survive most interactions in a fugue; I don’t understand anything. I am soft-bellied and simple-minded. Nothing is seamless – the textures of this world sit raggedy and dysphoric against my skin.

In her 2015 essay collection Small Acts of Disappearance, Fiona Wright explores the way that ‘too-small things’ disrupt the everyday, and our attention, with their tiny, precise, perfect unreality: ‘Perhaps what miniature objects offer us, then, are borders… Smallness preserves…an interior inviolable and precise, a private world that is steady and safe, however limited and constricted it may also be.’

I spend so much time thinking about chaos, about what’s waiting, what could be. Sylvanian Families, as miniatures, enable an idealism that is perfectly controllable. 

You can collect a large number of small things and still feel in control, to an extent. But when does control become lack thereof? How does the scale tip? When does your house eat you alive? How will I recognise enough?

Hobbies are an extension of home. And my homes are many: a messy house, a Sylvanian village, a Winnie-the-Pooh treehouse, an almost-defunct Neohome, a pixelated farm or island. There’s a tremendous intimacy to revealing your tastes, to inviting someone over. What will it say about me, my values, my childhood?

Online, we can endlessly curate. We can crop out the dirty dishes, the bong, the shameful/less clutter, the utter vulnerability of our everyday lives. We can turn away from the cereal crusted onto ceramic, the unopened mail, the dusty knick-knacks, the curving stain of an uncoastered tea. 

Which hobbies do we share outside the home, and which stay offline? Which parts of our homes are an Instagram backdrop, and which remain truly private?

AS A COLLECTOR, all Corvidae in nature, I’m torn between an animal world and its plastic carapace. I’m drawn to both, flaws and frivolity and all.

When I see my pets sleeping on soft grass in the sun, I want to protect their bliss with everything I have. I feel like I’ll never have access to that much pure joy in nature, in my own body and brain. Their minds are almost as empty as that of a Sylvanian piglet in a tiny pastel crib.

Unlike Sylvanian characters – and more like me – my pets are innately feral and impossible to miniaturise into a safe aesthetic mould. We live gruesome lives, far from the sparkle of Sylvania. Every now and then, I sit outside with my fellow beasts, tie ribbons onto their collars and adorn them with fanciful hats. Here we become Sylvanian-esque, as illusory as the shifting symmetry of a kaleidoscope.

Or maybe that’s just my magpie brain, gravitating towards chintzy twee once more.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons