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Handmade Is Better

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There's a common adage that says, "Handmade is better." Whether it's food, handicrafts, or other trinkets, products made by human hands are treated better than factory-produced ones.
The logic behind this idea is that profit-oriented retail/store items are designed to be mass-produced as quickly and cheaply as possible, and are therefore low quality. Conversely, handmade items are much more personable and can be customized to fit the individual client/recipient's specific wants or needs, making them unique and one-of-a-kind.
Furthermore, it takes skill to create great artwork, or food, or anything else. Therefore, the fact that something so well-made is crafted by hand instead of assembled by specialized machines is seen as more impressive and, therefore, better.
In romance stories, The Power of Love may be at play, as the gift receiver appreciates the thought, time, and effort their loved one pours into making the goods (even if it turns out badly) more than expensive stuff bought from the store, or even ones commissioned from professionals. Sentimental Homemade Toy is a subtrope.
Might overlap with New Technology Is Evil and Appeal to Nature, since this often comes with the mindset that things made "naturally" by human hands are better than those made by unreliable machines.
Compare Technician Versus Performer, which pits a work/performance carried out with technical perfection and polish against one presented with a more creative and outside-the-box flourish. See also A Master Makes Their Own Tools.
Contrast Crappy Homemade Gift and Homemade Sweater from Hell, where the homemade stuff is seen as low-quality crap precisely because it's not professionally made.
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 Handmade Is Better / int_11d0af1
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Handmade Is Better
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His Dark Materials: In Northern Lights, Lyra's polar clothes are held to be superior to whatever was given to Bolvangar's inmates because hers were handmade from local materials while theirs were made in factories far from the Polar area.
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Fiddler on the Roof: In a humorous inversion, Motel the tailor is overjoyed when he acquires his first sewing machine, as it means his clothes can be produced more accurately and efficiently than when he had to hand-sew every stitch himself.
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 Fiddler on the Roof (Theatre)
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Handmade Is Better
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Ranma ½: Zigzagged. Akane believes that handmade stuffs are better, and with a sister like Kasumi it's easy to see why. But Akane herself lacks both the know-how and patience to make a decent homemade gift, be it food or sewing a scarf for Christmas, and more often than not her handiworks end up as Crappy Homemade Gift.
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 Ranma ½ (Manga)
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The Way of the Househusband: In her introductory chapter, Torajiro's sister Koharu arrives in town selling premade donuts from a well-known franchise in a deliberate attempt to hurt her brother's food-truck business. Tatsu helps Tora win against his sister by making his own donut, which tastes much better than Koharu's donuts.
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Parks and Recreation: Ron firmly believes in self-reliance to the point that he crafts all of his own furniture instead of buying mass-produced. Rather than letting Ben and Leslie buy wedding rings, he forges them a pair out of a lighting sconce.
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Ah! My Goddess: In the anime series, Belldandy hand-knits Keiichi a sweater for Christmas. Meanwhile, Urd uses magic to accomplish the same task, while Skuld uses a machine to do so. Sayoko gets a high-end sweater crafted by a skilled artisan. In the end, it is Belldandy's carefully hand-knitted sweater that Keiichi ends up appreciating.
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In an episode of To the Manor Born, Audrey starts selling honey straight from her own hive. Eventually, she gets so successful that she runs out of honey, so she buys commercial stuff from Richard's grocery store and transfers it to her own jars to sell as authentic local honey. Of course she charges many times what the store does.
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In Final Fantasy XIV, NPC store-bought equipment will always have stats below the listed item level, meaning that it will be significantly weaker than it should be. By contrast, player-made items can be made "high quality", giving it stats appropriate for its level.
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In Quilts & Cats of Calico, Aunt Agatha doesn't trust the Iron Loom, which mass-produces quilts, because its operators don't care about the quality of its output, which is why the cats aren't attracted to it. When Mona challenges the Quilter to a duel with the Iron Loom, they manage to beat it with their handmade quilt, and while Mona is impressed by their skills, she uses that to "improve" the Iron Loom so it'll perform better than humans. It's later revealed that the Quilter's father invented the Iron Loom out of desperation to win the war, and he regrets giving up hand-making quilts for it. However, he's proud of his child continuing his legacy, so he asks them to sew a quilt for him to show how far they've come.
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Dragalia Lost has Sharpshooter Sarisse's adventurer story, where she comes across a craftsman who's closing up shop to work in a factory. When she asks if he still values his work, the craftsman agrees, but making ends meet is more important to him than Doing It for the Art. Sarisse counters by saying handcrafted accessories have a charm to them that mass production lacks, which would bring about an eventual shift in public opinion. This causes the craftsman to reconsider his choices.
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Adrian Mole: Adrian's friend Nigel says that Adrian's racing bike is mass-produced, unlike his own which was handmade by a craftsman in Nottingham. Adrian writes that he has gone off Nigel, and also gone off his bike a bit.
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Doraemon: The Doraemons Special has a chapter opening with Nobita whining about not having enough money to buy expensive gifts for Shizuka's birthday. With Doramed's help, he time travels to the past to retrieve his grandmother's treasure box, which he lost when he was younger. He manages to find it but is surprised/disappointed when he finds nothing but worn-out pieces of paper inside them. His grandmother then reminds him that they are the paper cranes that Nobita worked hard to make for her when she was sick, and she sagely asserts that she'll have to leave behind any riches she has when she's gone, but she can take Nobita's love and kindness with her to the next life. Inspired, Nobita decides to reproduce the same paper cranes his now-deceased grandmother had treasured so much to give to Shizuka. In a hilarious subversion, however, when Nobita tries to hand over the cranes to her during the party, Shizuka mistook them for some trash and points him to the trash can.
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Star Trek: It's something of a Running Gag across the various series that "real" food (i.e. food that was grown rather than replicated) somehow tastes better, at least to those who aren't used to eating the replicated stuff.
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Craig of the Creek: King Xavier reveals in "The Other Side: The Tournament" that he prefers handmade gifts over store-bought ones. The reason being that while he can buy almost anything he wants, it is the fact that someone devoted their time to making him something that makes him show genuine appreciation towards them.
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Starfinder: Handmade items have better durability than mass-produced, and you can repair an item that you yourself have crafted in half the usual time.
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SpongeBob SquarePants: In the episode "Neptune's Spatula", King Neptune challenges SpongeBob to a cook-off after he pulls Neptune's legendary spatula from the grease bucket. SpongeBob spends all the allotted time making a single Krabby Patty by hand and with love, while Neptune uses his magic to mass produce enough burgers to feed the entire stadium. King Neptune is declared the obvious winner... until he and the audience eat his Krabby Patties and find they taste terrible. Neptune then eats SpongeBob's burger and finds it so delicious he immediately hires him as his personal fry cook.
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Guitar players and the Rock Star place a high value on hand-crafted guitars, tube amplifiers, speaker cabinets and effects. They are willing to pay several times the price of mass-produced gear to buy handmade items. They believe that handmade gear has better tone quality.
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In Santa Claus: The Movie two elves are in the running for Santa's chief assistant, Patch who favours a production line method of creating toys with machines, and Puffy a traditionalist who prefers each toy to be handmade. Patch wins the position but despite his well meaning enthusiasm the toys he makes fall apart and break easy causing a backlash against Santa. The position is handed to Puffy instead but the film's novelisation does explain this is intended as a bit more of nuanced take as Patch's mistake was not modernising but modernising so fast and without developing the know how to maintain his machines as well as ramping up the production too much rather than strictly due to old vs. new methods.
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My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Zigzagged in "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000". The central conflict of the episode is a contest between the Apple family, who hand-make (or, well, hoof-make) their apple cider by a careful and laborious artisanal process, and the Flim-Flam brothers, who mass-produce large quantities of it using a complex machine. The twist is that the brothers' product is in fact really good — it only turns into an undrinkable mess once they turn off the quality control in order to ramp up production.
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Yakitate!! Japan:
Alluded in the second volume where Manager Ken Matsushiro mocks inferior bakers as "bread-making machines". Kawachi takes offense at this, and Ken challenges him and Azuma to put their heart and soul into their craft to make better bread.
At the end of the Monaco Cup, Azuma manages to best Shadow in the Grand Finals to achieve victory for Team Japan, even though Shadow had used his Power Copying abilities to be able to bake as well as Yuichi Kirisaki. When Shadow complains to Kirisaki about this loss, Kirisaki admits that Azuma has now surpassed his skill. He also mentions Azuma had made a lot of his own ingredients (including sugar) while Shadow uses store-bought ones, citing the "Handmade is better" adage as part of his explanation.
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The Strong Bad Email "what i want" briefly makes fun of this perception, giving an example of a homemade "gift" that was made because it would supposedly be seen as better: a seashell with office supplies haphazardly hot-glued to it.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

 Violent Night / int_d8dd1dc3
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Handmade Is Better
 Adrian Mole / int_d8dd1dc3
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Handmade Is Better
 His Dark Materials / int_d8dd1dc3
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Handmade Is Better
 The Citizen Series / int_d8dd1dc3
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Handmade Is Better
 Ah! My Goddess (Manga) / int_d8dd1dc3
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Handmade Is Better
 The Way of the Househusband (Manga) / int_d8dd1dc3
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Handmade Is Better
 Yakitate!! Japan (Manga) / int_d8dd1dc3
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Handmade Is Better
 Parks and Recreation / int_d8dd1dc3
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Handmade Is Better
 To the Manor Born / int_d8dd1dc3
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Handmade Is Better
 Starfinder (Tabletop Game) / int_d8dd1dc3
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Handmade Is Better
 Fiddler on the Roof (Theatre) / int_d8dd1dc3
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Handmade Is Better
 Quilts & Cats of Calico (Video Game) / int_d8dd1dc3
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Handmade Is Better
 Craig of the Creek / int_d8dd1dc3
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Handmade Is Better