Stickers! - an expat brony's search for legit hasbro toys volume 3

Stickers!!!!!

As I may have mentioned before, I am currently living in Shanghai working on my masters degree. Although I am a student on scholarship I need to make a little extra through things like internships. Currently I am teaching an after school Drama class for a primary school here in the city. It's enjoyable to get to interact with a bunch of seven year olds who just enjoy acting and playing in theater (minus the two are tree little brats in the class).

And of course the moment the girls found out that I watched My Little Pony they started telling me all about which Pone was best Pone (okay they didn't say it like that ).

However, this also means that when I bring prizes I really want to bring pony stuff... this yet again leads us to the problem of legit toys. As you can see by my past posts, and many post of Equestria daily TaoBao is the leader of the fake MLP:FIM toy market.

Normally in the USA if a vender on EBay were to start selling knock off or copies of Copyrighted and Trademarked toys then it would be easy enough for a corporation like Hasbro (or 4DE) to come in and send a C&D to the company producing the fakes... However, it seems that companies operating inside of China don't have to obey copyright law. This is not entirely true, the Chinese government does in fact protect copyright, but only for companies the operate within China. This seems like it shouldn't be a problem but a non-Chinese company can't run in China and can only interact with Chinese laws through a partner company. This means that because of the complications and red-tape involved in operating in china and trying to make copyright claims it is not worth the time and money involved to stop the fakes from being made.

This still leaves the Brony on the search for the real stuff with a few problems. 1. as said before the show is still barely off the ground here, with a Youku Chinese dub that I am pretty sure is not official through Hasbro or DHX, and 2. the few place that sell the real toys sell them at the same price or more then the USA (a problem when I get well vs. the cost of living, but not vs. US toy prices).

So for the prizes my students received during class I started of with giving out the extra blind bag figures I had collected while buying out the Toy's R Us stock in the last month or two. But at 20RMB a bag ($3.50) I couldn't keep this up for too long as three ponies is roughly a 4th of what i get paid for class.

So as the end of the semester approaches I broke down and went to taobao for prizes. Wanting to be a good fan (but mainly a poor college student), I didn't buy them anything super fake, instead I did stickers and some accessories.

As could be expected when the stickers arrived (12 sheets for roughly $2.25) I poured over them to see if there were any stickers I wanted for myself. Here are some picture of some of the more odd, funny or terrible stickers I received.

Someone in China has been reading to much FimFiction

I want to comment of the cuteness of the double Twilight but I'm just too horrified by the abomination below it.

well time to see in the girls in my class notice how bad some of these are.

Keep the Harmony
-Don Swordspony