Mobile Suit Gundam Forum

ANN spotted a a news article about a guy in Japan who burned down his own home-- and reportedly attempted to burn himself as well, as he had doused himself with kerosene –because his mother had “gotten rid of his 'valuable' Gundam plastic models.”

These articles are always a bit tough to deal with because people think it makes otaku look more obsessive than they really are on average, or because people actually do come to think that otaku are that obsessive. It's pretty clear that this guy had issues well beyond mere otakudom (like, for example, why was this nearly-30-year-old man's mother getting rid of any of his stuff anyway?).

However, I can remember being very upset when my mother once got rid of a big stack of books (she felt they weren't up to my reading level). Fortunately, my mother is very understanding and she's loathe to get rid of even the smallest things without my giving the OK.

Have your parents ever gotten rid of something you didn't want them to?

I used to be an avid artist. My mother used to be an avid Christian. One day she decided my art was evil, so she pulled it all off of my walls and burned it. She is no longer an avid Christian, and thinks this event is funny in retrospect. I am no longer an avid artist, and I don't think anything is funny in retrospect.

@John_Martone: My mom threw away our Nintendo some years back, but for a long time we still had a big stack of the games...also kind of odd.
 
The rest of our systems fell victim to the "someone took it away with them to college and eventualy got rid of it" setup. The Sega went that way, and by the time my brother took the Playstation 1, we already had the Playstation 2, so I had no interest. I took the PS2 (because by then we had a regular DVD player, which was part of the reason for buying the PS2, the Christmas it came out)...and that was the last console my brother and I had in our parents' home. My parents now have their own Wii and somehow I doubt that I can kidnap it.
 
...Though I may try. <3