There's a difference between collecting something and having wayyyy too many of something.
The difference being collecting is always looking for more items with slight variation, and owning too much of something is bordering on hoarding. But then there's the question of what item it is. When does it go a step beyond hoarding?
Reddit user TheJudge47 asked the internet:
Here were the spine-tingling answers.
A Saga
My mother has an obsession with anything green, has had a lime green ford fiesta with the license plate reading kermet and has 100s of kermet the frog items, constantly purchasing anything green and has colored her hair green. This all started when I was 11 and painted my room lime green to rebel against her... she loved it and soon painted the master room to match.
I used to work as a dog walker and saved up money to paint my room, when my mom left for a work trip she had pre-ok'd with my dad to help paint my room either a lavender and white color scheme or a blue and grey room. I immediately wanted lime green and lemon yellow. (I know god awful, I don't remember why 11 year old me wanted to rebel) My father didn't see a problem with switching colours or think he would get in shit if it wasn't pre approved by my mother. So we spent that week painting 3 walls green and one wall yellow, as well he helped me paint the base and roof trimming to paint it the opposing colour (green walls had yellow trim, yellow wall had green trim, including around the door frames) let me tell you my dad loved the bright colours so much he painted our 2 car garage the same day with those colours. Let me tell you when my mom came home she went bat shit crazy, I thought I was going to die, my dad was in the dog house for a whole week too. But my mom went along with it and started making me blankets, pillows and painted my furniture green and yellow. After this she decided with the leftover paint they were going to paint the master bedroom green. I got sick of it very quick and begged for it to be changed but I wasn't allowed, I had to live with this terrible mess I made. Later that year we had to move provinces and when my parents traded in their cars my mom went with the lime green Ford Fiesta, my father bought her Kermit seat covers because her friends said the car reminded them of Kermit the frog. After about 6 months my mom got the license plate 'Kermet' and yes spelt wrong because 'Kermit' was already taken. From then on out, everyone in our family bought my mom Kermit the frog stuff whenever they saw it and my mom keeps it in her China cabinet and around the house. The green hair came about because she's always had short hair and she bleached it to white and then put blue in it. Soon enough she tried to bleach the blue out and it became green and she loved it. Crazy hair stuck around for about 2 years but now it's brown. Also we are in Canada and no, none of the tagged ladies are my mother, but she is probably just as crazy and loveable as all of them. If I can find pictures from my childhood I will link pictures.
Me Hungry
Furbies. Then and especially now.
Why Do You Have...So...Many?
Urns filled with the ashes of cremated people on your fireplace mantle.
Write It Down
Notebooks. There's a youtube video of some dude's house, HumanBeing151 is his name, where a big room and closet is filled with thousands and thousands of notebooks, which have all been filled out with ramblings of how awesome he thinks P. Diddy is.
Dude is f-cking insane.
Sandra Bullock Is Somewhere, Creeped Out
VHS copies of Speed.
Is This Self-Esteem?
Self Portraits, Imagine going over to a friends house only to find hundreds of pictures of themselves lined up against the walls.
How Many Missed Calls?
Cell phones. 1- Completely normal 2- Maybe one is for work 3- getting weird 4+ - definitely drug dealer
Grand Master
Pianos
I bought one for my wife.
She later inherited one.
We have two pianos in our living room. It's weird.
...Or You Work In Theater
Condoms... A few boxes and you're responsible, hundreds of boxes and it gets weird.
Feathered
There's a quest in Morrowind where you have to kill some rats in a lady's house. As you go in she remarks "oh, I hope they didn't get into my good pillows." Then as you're traversing this lady's house, you find she has tons and tons of pillows. Not even on furniture, she has them on shelves and in chestst. She has piles of them just laying around. She's clearly not keeping them because they're comfortable, b-tch is just obsessed with pillows.
So Pillows.
Things Get A Little Hairy
Human hair. And basically the only socially acceptable place to keep it is on your own head.
Pachyderm Parade
Elephants!
My mum started collecting elephants a few years ago, there must be around 300-400 elephants in her house now. Big ones, little ones, elephants everywhere. Walking round her house makes me cringe.
Now I know where I got my madness from.
Cola Creed
Coca Cola decorations. I went over to a friend's house one time and their entire house was decked out in Coca Cola themed products. Chairs. Tables. Drapes. You name it. It was bizarre. They also had a whole wall dedicated to Elvis.
Living Episodes Of The Twilight Zone
I currently work from home as a personal shopper and there is this one customer we have that is constantly shopping for reborn dolls. For those that don't know what those are it's baby dolls that are super realistic and pretty creepy IMO. Anyway, one day I'm bored and decided to Google her name to see if anything came up. Well, I found a Facebook profile with her name and a cover photo/profile pic of her sitting with a bunch of these new born dolls and a giant purple cursive text that says, "My babies." Every time she comes back that picture always comes to mind and it sends a shiver down my spine because those dolls creep me out so much.
The Legend of English Muffin Man
My cousin doesn't like to go food shopping, and he only eats certain things at home (for lunch and dinner he goes out a lot). For instance, he only likes to eat English muffins for breakfast. He's eaten English muffins for breakfast every morning for YEARS. He uses that spray butter for a "topping". So, if you open up his freezer, it is loaded with English muffins. Like it's literally the only thing in there. In neat piles. The fridge consists of beer, a Britta pitcher, and the crisper drawer filled with bottles of spray butter. You wouldn't think it's weird but if you see it in person...it's weird. When he finally does go food shopping to replenish his supply, he literally buys all of the English muffins on the shelf. Apparently one time the stock person saw him taking all the packages and gasped "oh my GOD. You're the guy!" Like he was an urban legend. The legend of English muffin man.
Idolatry
Pictures of the same person. This weird motherf-cker for example. His comment signature has changed now (apparently he's now obsessed with Ariana Grande instead of Katy Perry and "only" has about 500 gigabytes of pictures and video of her), but it used to be this. That says 1.419 TB, with a T, as in terabytes. 2 insane-level collections of pictures just of celebrities he thinks are hot. And the switch to Ariana is pretty recent, I checked him out just a few months ago and he was still worshipping Katy Perry then, so 500 gigs in just a couple months is pretty "impressive".
These Are My Friends
Cardboard cutouts. It's okay if you have one or two as a decoration, but when you have like 50 of them all in a room it's pretty weird, especially if you talk to them.
Clang Clang
Cutlery. This is more of a personal gripe because my parents decide to buy 3-4 completely different sets of cutlery with all different styles, it gets super weird when you take a look in the drawer for a knife to butter a slice of bread and find some weirdly decorated clown knives mixed in with other multi-coloured knives each with their own blade style, the rest of my family does the same and i get weirded out when eating because everyone else is wielding some sort of pride themed utensil.
Anything
Literally anything. If you have a sh-tload of bananas in your house. Like wall to wall bananas. I'm gonna think you're weird. But I'll still eat one.
Penny For Your Thoughts
Pennies. Like, who has pennies? Not like, one hundred or two hundred, but thousands. Millions. Just jingling everywhere you go, smelling the room with your copper and zinc scent, and all the people in town are like 'there goes ole' jingling joe! With his f-cking pennies." Don't think about it too much, but pennies are weird.