Within material practices that emphasize reproduction, customizers often extrapolate, creating new material to fill in gaps. Bricolage transforms mass-produced items into individualized creative works by improving the perceived accuracy of licensed merchandise or by recycling and repurposing items to achieve realistic and imaginative results. Customization's material fan practices reproduce items in order to create transformative narratives. After duplicating a beloved fan object's definitive appearance, clothing, and/or accessories in one-sixth scale, customizers often pose and photograph action figures in recreations of iconic scenes. Other images and photostories use miniature reproductions of material objects to rework existing media texts and characters or to tell completely original narratives. Images also disrupt and deconstruct the valorization of accuracy. Living rooms, pets, and other aspects of everyday life intrude into photographs of accurately reproduced items and characters. Figures in photostories may be made to break character. Such transformative moments call attention to the toys' status as toys and to the constructed nature of poses, dioramas, and narratives.

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One-sixth scale action figure fans complicate existing fan studies models, which emphasize cultural or social capital over economic capital, and which minimize or erase fan activities involving potential profit to focus instead upon gift economies. One-sixth scale action figure customization and other material fan practices offer productive examples of how multiple fandoms incorporate both pleasure and profit, use-value and exchange-value, into their fan practices, and how they explain or justify such practices to those within and outside their fan communities. Customizers emphasize their creations’ use-value over exchange-value in three specific ways. First, customizers create items not offered by any company. Second, they create affordable alternatives to expensive official merchandise. Third, their projects remedy inferior aspects of officially licensed merchandise. Customizers modify existing products or create their own if they cannot find or afford desired items of appropriate quality. These justifications offer insights into how multiple other fandoms likewise frame any commercial efforts as emphasizing use-value over exchange-value. Such constructions of fan practices ward against legal and ethical complications of using licensed texts, characters, and/or merchandise as a base or inspiration for one’s own creative efforts.

This article builds upon examinations of vampires’ metaphoric threat to individuality as part of its larger argument concerning vampires’ mainstream popularity. Tensions between narcissism and simulacra illuminate how vampires express intersecting cultural concerns over mechanical, cultural and biological reproduction. First, vampires reflect cultural anxieties over monoculture and loss of individuality by reducing individuals to a means to transmit information: like media images, or Jean Baudrillard’s clones. Rather than marking yet another victim as Other, vampires actually subjugate yet another individual to monoculture, converting yet another body into a medium for cultural reproduction and the reproduction of desire. Second, reproduced images’ false permanence undermines narcissistic fantasies of eternal vampire life. Third, people and love become commodities enhancing self-image but not self-development. Finally, whereas vampirism arrests physical ageing, the Peter Pan syndrome arrests emotional maturation. Children never grow up, and their continued dependence never reminds parents of ageing, death and replacement by new generations.

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