2023 Majisto GWP

[Black Falcon]

For me the minifigs they choose make sense. If there is a Pirate ship there would need to be the Captain obviously. But for a little heist with a rowboad you wouldn´t send the captain, right? You´d rather send some crewmates for that job.

[dvw2]

On 11/8/2023 at 2:53 PM, Aanchir said:

Well, there are also the brick-built ones that often show up in Friends sets, made from a red Bionicle ball joint attached to a green 1x1 flower plate

Nah, this is a ridiculous take. The hair pieces with tight curls are hardly any more race-specific than old-school ones that obviouly have straight hair like 4530 and 6093. Even in licensed themes, we've seen the newer curly-haired designs used for actors/characters of extremely varied races and ethnicities. For example, 79688 has been used for characters like T'Challa, Mo Morrison, Viktor Krum, and Bruce Wayne. 21778 was also used for Viktor Krum, along with other characters like Lando Calrissian, Dennis Nedry, Dean Thomas, Wong, and Razor Fist. Frankly, I think it's much better that these more varied options exist rather than having to pretend that smooth or straight hair is implicitly neutral/universal, when anybody with more textured hair can tell you that's not the case.
 

Moreover, LEGO Castle and Pirates have been heavily based in fantasy rather than historical reality since at least the late 80s. In fact, portraying of these themes as fantastical, idealized storybook versions of these time periods is a big part of how the original LEGO designers even got away with including so many weapons in classic LEGO Castle and Pirates sets in the first place, since back in the 80s the company's leaders were much more averse to portraying any forms of realistic violence, death, or warfare in sets (regardless of their setting). And as others have already pointed out, we can all recognize that ghosts, magical wizards, and dragons are not real.

Even Robin Hood and his Merry Men are, for all intents and purposes, not real — even if there might have been a real-life basis for "Robin Hood" at some point, the Forest People obviously take their inspiration from the fictionalized portrayals of the character in later folklore and works of fiction, such as his signature Lincoln green garb and fortified treetop hideouts. Likewise, Captain Redbeard and many of the other LEGO Pirates characters are obviously much more heavily inspired by fictional pirate characters like Long John Silver and Captain Hook than by any real-life historical pirates. You might as well be complaining about the historical inaccuracies in Le Morte d'Arthur or Treasure Island.
 

If you truly believed that the neutral facial features and yellow complexion of the classic minifig were meant to be able to represent anybody and everybody, regardless of race or ethnicity, then I don't see why any of this should bother you? After all, back in the 80s, other LEGO fans were free to interpret the generic knights/soldiers in classic LEGO Castle and Pirates sets as women, just as you were free to interpret them as men! It's not that strange to believe that versions of these themes updated to modern design standards would acknowledge these varied possibilities.

Yet the objection you express here isn't that these updated figures include varied facial features and hairstyles — rather, your issue is just that LEGO didn't uniquely prioritize your interpretation of the classic Castle and Pirates characters as "male unless otherwise specified". All in all, if these are the best arguments you have against LEGO designers including diverse characters in their sets, then their position in that debate is hardly the ridiculous one!

Bravo! Well said.

This is a topic that must be let go of once and for all.

Edited November 10, 2023 by dvw2

[Sir Blew]

On 11/8/2023 at 10:39 PM, Alexandrina said:

This would pretty solidly undermine Lego's own aim in gender equality (unless you extend this to all male minifigures having a female alternate face). Right now the message to young girls when they play with Lego is that they are just as represented as boys. If you start putting male heads in sets as alternates, the message becomes "boys are the default, which is why we've had to throw them a bone on top of their 50% of the representation. You girls are the afterthought". Not a very nice message.

Honestly, I really don't understand why people get up in arms every time a "historical" set dares to include women. Why does it bother people so much?

Including alternative or reversable heads allows us to choose our preferred gender for the characters. The original heads in classic Castle sets were not gender specific, which allowed us to choose what we wanted them to be. Lego didn't impose genders until the first Pirates sets of 1989, although some characters were obviously suggested by the torso prints.

I personally prefer to have male characters for knights and warriors, as that's more accurate. Others may prefer to have them as females, but that's up to them. Lego could easily please everyone by including reversible or alternate heads. I'd gladly swap most of the junk spare pieces included in most sets for that option.

On 11/8/2023 at 10:56 PM, Alexandrina said:

This set literally includes a magic wizard and his magic workshop. Of course it's fantasy.

You could take that argument all the way to include Space characters in Castle sets.

[Gavino]

12 hours ago, Yperio_Bricks said:

Did Lego say that they swapped out Redbeard in some designer interview or so?

I'm not 100% sure, but every other figure is just an upgraded version of a figure from the previous set, and the female pirate is the only "new" character. I think it degrades the set just a bit loosing out on such an iconic figure, still one of my all-time favorite sets tho

10 hours ago, Black Falcon said:

For me the minifigs they choose make sense. If there is a Pirate ship there would need to be the Captain obviously. But for a little heist with a rowboad you wouldn´t send the captain, right? You´d rather send some crewmates for that job.

The point of the set was to recreate the old set, its nice to be able to get the two main factions leaders in one set. Plus you can break Redbeard out of jail which makes a ton of sense

[Alexandrina]

5 hours ago, Sir Blew said:

I personally prefer to have male characters for knights and warriors, as that's more accurate. Others may prefer to have them as females, but that's up to them. Lego could easily please everyone by including reversible or alternate heads. I'd gladly swap most of the junk spare pieces included in most sets for that option.

Aside from the fact that Lego don't put the 'junk' spare pieces in because they think we love them so much we want more; it's because they're so light that the factory scales can't necessarily determine if a piece is missing so they put two in for safety - are you advocating for all minifigures coming with both male and female heads? Because if not, what you're saying is that men are the default but women can have representation as an 'alternate'.

This also comes with a litany of other problems. How does this intersect with minifigures who have exposed backs of their heads? Is it done with two heads or a dual-sided head? What about figs with visible hair? Do Lego include hair styles for both male and female minifigures, or do we just only have one or two hair styles like it was in the 90s? What about box art, instructions and promotional material? How does Lego decide which figures are male and which are female on the box?

Or alternatively, they could just ignore the gurning from people mad that there are women in their plastic block kits and continue with equal representation.

5 hours ago, Sir Blew said:

You could take that argument all the way to include Space characters in Castle sets.

Not a good argument. Castle is fantasy and encompasses the fantasy genre and its trappings (it always has; even the earliest Castle sets were an idealised storybook world rather than any sort of accuracy.) Witches and wizards and dragons are appropriately fantasy, as are trolls and dwarves and ghosts, and if Lego ever felt the urge to include elves and fey in a regular Castle line they'd be appropriately fantasy too. Spacemen are not genre appropriate. You yourself presented them as the endpoint of your slippery slope. When spacemen appear in a medieval-esque setting, it's invariably either somehow deconstructing the genre or it's a science-fictiony genre with medieval dressing (Time Cruisers, for example, could get away with this.)

Women are appropriately fantasy. Women not only really existed in the time period the genre is based on, but (especially in recent times) there's been an increase in representation of women as knights and guards (the Critical Role TV show, for example, has women as guards just as much as men; so do video games like Skyrim) and entire books/series where women don armour and fight just as much as or more than men exist in the genre. The Priory of the Orange Tree, for instance, has plenty of women as fighters. The Wheel of Time has an entire culture where the women are more fearsome fighters than the men.

Lego Castle has always been fantasy. Lego themselves explicitly prioritise play experiences for kids over realism. And having women be knights is both improving the play experiences for girls who want to see themselves, and true to the genre of the theme.

3 hours ago, Gavino said:

I'm not 100% sure, but every other figure is just an upgraded version of a figure from the previous set, and the female pirate is the only "new" character.

The Governor is specifically not Broadside from the original set, though, and the soldiers are all generic anyway. None of the 'specific' minifigures from the original Eldorado appear in the new one.

[jodawill]

The gender topic is getting really annoying. Do we really have to discuss it for every set? Can we break it off into its own thread?

[MAB]

11 hours ago, Sir Blew said:

Lego could easily please everyone by including reversible or alternate heads. I'd gladly swap most of the junk spare pieces included in most sets for that option.

 

I used to think the same. But now, there are so many male and female heads, I don't think it matters too much. We get pretty decent gender balance across most themes where there are no main / named characters that repeat within the theme. As Alexandrina notes, a key issue then is advertising the set. Do LEGO advertise the character on the box as male or female? Unfortunately, that sort of thing matters a lot when advertising. It may also lead to social media rants if more male characters can be turned into female or when characters with dresses are or are not supplied with a head that turns them from female to male, whichever way they chose to do it they would be wrong. 

Personally I switch out the heads and hands of all my soldiers for fleshies anyway (mainly male, as I prefer historical rather than fantasy) but all the yellow ones get used for City or traded.

It might also be why what little Castle we have had has been fantasy based recently, as there LEGO cannot really be criticised for aiming for a good balance when it comes to gender. It is fantasy so there is no rigid demographic for job roles. Whereas if they start going for realistic historical, warriors tended to be men. So it is not surprising if they stick to fantasy rather than trying to depict accurate historical. Not that much of their Castle output has ever really been that accurate historically.

[Aanchir]

6 hours ago, Alexandrina said:

Not a good argument. Castle is fantasy and encompasses the fantasy genre and its trappings (it always has; even the earliest Castle sets were an idealised storybook world rather than any sort of accuracy.) Witches and wizards and dragons are appropriately fantasy, as are trolls and dwarves and ghosts, and if Lego ever felt the urge to include elves and fey in a regular Castle line they'd be appropriately fantasy too. Spacemen are not genre appropriate. You yourself presented them as the endpoint of your slippery slope. When spacemen appear in a medieval-esque setting, it's invariably either somehow deconstructing the genre or it's a science-fictiony genre with medieval dressing (Time Cruisers, for example, could get away with this.) 

Women are appropriately fantasy. Women not only really existed in the time period the genre is based on, but (especially in recent times) there's been an increase in representation of women as knights and guards (the Critical Role TV show, for example, has women as guards just as much as men; so do video games like Skyrim) and entire books/series where women don armour and fight just as much as or more than men exist in the genre. The Priory of the Orange Tree, for instance, has plenty of women as fighters. The Wheel of Time has an entire culture where the women are more fearsome fighters than the men.

Even beyond your comments about modern fantasy, plenty of stories of its own about warrior women or warrior queens emerged even in medieval Europe. And while some of those stories fell unambiguously within the category of legend or myth, others were certainly presented as real history (even though in many cases modern day historians have failed to find evidence corroborating that these were anything more than local folklore that got muddled together with accounts of real events).

As such, I feel like medieval warrior women at least fall within the same category as tales of heroic outlaws like Robin Hood, powerful wizards like Merlin, larger-than life heroes like Arthur and Beowulf, and fire-breathing dragons like La Gargouille. Whether purely a product of fiction or mythologized/exaggerated accounts of extraordinary people and events from actual history, they are well established as part of the medieval storytelling tradition which LEGO Castle is rooted in.

4 hours ago, jodawill said:

The gender topic is getting really annoying. Do we really have to discuss it for every set? Can we break it off into its own thread?

Honestly I worry a topic of that sort would be kind of a nightmare, given the many past comments I've seen about that topic which have veered into "culture war" style fearmongering and tribalism. But you're right that some of this discussion like the talk of which figures should or shouldn't have appeared in Eldorado Fortress is definitely moving away from the intended subject of this thread.

[azog]

Whew...finally caught up on this discussion haha.

I actually really like this GWP! It gives us a modern dragon masters knight and an updated Majisto's workshop for the upcoming medieval market village! Hopefully the Museum modular will still be up for pre-order by the time this releases!

For those who don't like it, I'm really sorry you don't! I think you all just got your standards set too high! The only reason the forest hideout had all the updated prints and molds was because they appeared in the LKC. I guess this confirms that we will never get another Dragon Masters or Black Knights set (at least in the near future). 

I'm definitely an optimist, but I think most of us in this fourm already own the correct helmet, plumes, and shields for the Dragon Masters faction, so it won't be too hard to update this figure. If you don't own them, at least the pieces aren't "too" expensive if it really bothers you!

As for the comments about the knight being a female, grow up and accept that it's a toy based in a fantasy world. Because guess what...I can guarantee that you have at least 1 male minifigure head laying around if it truly bothers you that much. I'm sick of these comments using, "historical accuracy" to justify their sexist views. Remind me again...when did wizards and dragons exist? Oh...that's right...NEVER! It's fantasy! I will never not laugh at people when they complain about a female knight/soldier.

[zoth33]

10 hours ago, Alexandrina said:

Aside from the fact that Lego don't put the 'junk' spare pieces in because they think we love them so much we want more; it's because they're so light that the factory scales can't necessarily determine if a piece is missing so they put two in for safety - are you advocating for all minifigures coming with both male and female heads? Because if not, what you're saying is that men are the default but women can have representation as an 'alternate'.

This also comes with a litany of other problems. How does this intersect with minifigures who have exposed backs of their heads? Is it done with two heads or a dual-sided head? What about figs with visible hair? Do Lego include hair styles for both male and female minifigures, or do we just only have one or two hair styles like it was in the 90s? What about box art, instructions and promotional material? How does Lego decide which figures are male and which are female on the box?

Or alternatively, they could just ignore the gurning from people mad that there are women in their plastic block kits and continue with equal representation.

Not a good argument. Castle is fantasy and encompasses the fantasy genre and its trappings (it always has; even the earliest Castle sets were an idealised storybook world rather than any sort of accuracy.) Witches and wizards and dragons are appropriately fantasy, as are trolls and dwarves and ghosts, and if Lego ever felt the urge to include elves and fey in a regular Castle line they'd be appropriately fantasy too. Spacemen are not genre appropriate. You yourself presented them as the endpoint of your slippery slope. When spacemen appear in a medieval-esque setting, it's invariably either somehow deconstructing the genre or it's a science-fictiony genre with medieval dressing (Time Cruisers, for example, could get away with this.)

Women are appropriately fantasy. Women not only really existed in the time period the genre is based on, but (especially in recent times) there's been an increase in representation of women as knights and guards (the Critical Role TV show, for example, has women as guards just as much as men; so do video games like Skyrim) and entire books/series where women don armour and fight just as much as or more than men exist in the genre. The Priory of the Orange Tree, for instance, has plenty of women as fighters. The Wheel of Time has an entire culture where the women are more fearsome fighters than the men.

Lego Castle has always been fantasy. Lego themselves explicitly prioritise play experiences for kids over realism. And having women be knights is both improving the play experiences for girls who want to see themselves, and true to the genre of the theme.

The Governor is specifically not Broadside from the original set, though, and the soldiers are all generic anyway. None of the 'specific' minifigures from the original Eldorado appear in the new one.

Your point about the Wheel of Time is off.  The women wield the one power and are magic users.  The warders are warriors that protect the Aes Sedai and they work together to defeat their enemies.  The whole point of the Wheel of time is that women and men need to work together to save the world.  I think you totally missed that by using that for your argument.  Yes their are powerful women in fantasy case in point is Galadriel in the original LOTR triliogy and the Hobbit trilogy.  She didn't need a sword or a shield to be strong and powerful, she already was with her magical prowess and she was still feminine.  Conversely The Rings of Power showed her as a petulant child even though she was thousands of years old at that point, and they also had her wield a sword and try to act like a man.  The Rings of Power also made Galadriel totally unlikable, by making her not care about anything but revenge and tried to make her a badass fighter which she never was in the books.  Not all women have to be badass warriors either, they can be feminine and powerful too just like Yennefer from the witcher.  Then you also have Wonderwoman who is a badass warrior.  But characters need to be written correctly to be good and work within the world they are in.  As to the head thing it is what it is just swap the head there are hundreds of options on bricklink or PAB.  As to women as warriors it all depends on the world that is from like LOTR, the Witcher, Star Wars, Marvel, DC, WOT, etc,

[Gavino]

11 hours ago, Alexandrina said:

The Governor is specifically not Broadside from the original set, though, and the soldiers are all generic anyway. None of the 'specific' minifigures from the original Eldorado appear in the new one.

Sure you could say it's not Broadside, but the new one had almost identical prints to the old one, it's just improved quality. Removing Redbeard from the set makes it less desirable, even if only slightly less so, as well as changes the lineup of figure from the original in a negative way. I think the soldiers are all great and I have absolutely no problem with the inclusion of female soldiers and officers, I don't care about gender as long as the product quality is the best it can be.

[Alexandrina]

Just now, zoth33 said:

Your point about the Wheel of Time is off.  The women wield the one power and are magic users.  The warders are warriors that protect the Aes Sedai and they work together to defeat their enemies.  The whole point of the Wheel of time is that women and men need to work together to save the world.  I think you totally missed that by using that for your argument.

No it's not, because I wasn't referring to the Aes Sedai, I was referring to the Aiel and the Maidens of the Spear.

[zoth33]

22 minutes ago, Alexandrina said:

No it's not, because I wasn't referring to the Aes Sedai, I was referring to the Aiel and the Maidens of the Spear.

Ok thought you were talking about the main people of the book my bad.  

[Sir Dano]

1 hour ago, Gavino said:

Sure you could say it's not Broadside, but the new one had almost identical prints to the old one, it's just improved quality.

These heads aren't really similar, though:

[Gavino]

18 minutes ago, Sir Dano said:

These heads aren't really similar, though:

I would say the only reason they don't look similar is because of how far headprints have evolved. Even if the heads are taken as not similar, the character at least still greatly resembles the original with the same uniform and hat, which is the point that I was trying to make. They just excluded Redbeard for some reason.

[Sir Dano]

That's because uniforms are, well, uniform. Of course two guys with the same uniform are going to look alike.

[Gavino]

17 minutes ago, Sir Dano said:

That's because uniforms are, well, uniform. Of course two guys with the same uniform are going to look alike.

Fair enough, but I mean I don't think they needed to do much beyond that. Not sure what stance you are trying to take, if you wanted an exact remake that's understandable,

[Mandalorianknight]

I don't think it's a massive deal, but look, soldiers are predominantly male, even today. The beautiful thing about lego is that if you want a female soldier, you can stick a female head on a knight torso. (Or vice versa, hence why I don't think it's a huge deal). As for "accuracy doesn't matter since it's fantasy", sure. But you could say the same thing about giving the king a funny hat instead of a crown. Doesn't REALLY matter, but it's nice when the things that aren't bombastically fantastical are kept generally accurate. 

Like I said, not a big deal. But personally, I like the majority of my soldiers in my collections to be men, just because that's how it was/is. And seeing people claim that preferring to mostly have male soldiers is sexist is insane to me.

One thing that could make both groups happy is introducing an amazonian-inspired sub-faction.

[Sir Dano]

1 hour ago, Gavino said:

Fair enough, but I mean I don't think they needed to do much beyond that. Not sure what stance you are trying to take, if you wanted an exact remake that's understandable,

My stance is they aren't the same characters from the original set and making changes like that is perfectly fine.

Edited November 11, 2023 by Sir Dano

[El Garfio]

Adding some polemics

Why not change the gender of the Majisto? 

It's maybe because the most stereotyped gender issue in the knights era was wizards vs witches? (As we have seen at Disney for decades) 

Traditionally, witches are always bad people, black magic fans (if a female makes white or positive magic is called a fairy)

Wizards like Majisto (like Merlin) in knights era are known for doing white magic and being helpful to the knights (are the descendants of druids) 

Not all the wizards are white, like Gargamel, but Gargamel don't dress like Majisto o Merlin

But, put a female face to Majisto and you get a witch, and the first you will think is that she is making strange poisons for dominating or killing their adversaries

And oh wait, a witch is more accurate to knights era canon than a female warrior

[JohnTPT17]

Man, this discussion has been going nowhere for a long while... Who know there would be this much controversy around a single printed part that most AFOLs can easily swap out with less effort than it would take me to type this sentence? When I was growing up, I got the faces I had in my sets, and I lived with it. If I didn't like the face, then I would either swap it with some of the other limited few I had, or put in under a closed helmet so I didn't have to see the face. No need to do any mental gymnastics over the lip color of a minifigure or figure out exactly why I got certain minifigures in one set over another. Heck, I will even admit that I wish I did have more girl faces to fill my army ranks with - but I never let the face of one minifigure ruin a set for me. There seem to be a lot of people on here that feel really entitled over what is included or not included, and, honestly? We're all adults here, so I feel safe in asking everyone to just get over it - especially when it is just a face, and it's not affecting any of the other torso printing. If you don't like the face, get another one. If you didn't get the minifigure you wanted, go look for it on Bricklink... Or, just skip the set altogether if you're that offended by one part/minifigure. I hope that when I get to share my sets with my own kids/nieces and nephews, that they can play with it however they want - whether that be with boy knights, girl knights, robot knights, or who knows what else. 

[Gavino]

1 hour ago, Sir Dano said:

My stance is they aren't the same characters from the original set and making changes like that is perfectly fine.

Fair point. I just selfishly want a red beard figure lol

[Sir Dano]

4 minutes ago, Gavino said:

Fair point. I just selfishly want a red beard figure lol

If you just want a Redbeard the one from Barracuda Bay is actually pretty cheap on Bricklink.

[MAB]

7 hours ago, zoth33 said:

 As to women as warriors it all depends on the world that is from like LOTR, the Witcher, Star Wars, Marvel, DC, WOT, etc,

Lego is making it clear that in their modern fantasy Castle, women can be soldiers. 

5 hours ago, Sir Dano said:

These heads aren't really similar, though:

When time passes, hair tends to grey and beards become fuller and less hipster.

 

2 hours ago, El Garfio said:

Traditionally, witches are always bad people, black magic fans (if a female makes white or positive magic is called a fairy)

 

Traditionally, yes. But in more modern literature, there are plenty of examples of witches that are not evil, such as those in Harry Potter. Traditionally it was old and ugly means bad witch, whereas young and beautiful means good. That is rather outdated now. Some old females with magical powers can be good, some can be bad. Some good looking females can be bad, some can be good. 

 

3 hours ago, El Garfio said:

And oh wait, a witch is more accurate to knights era canon than a female warrior

Which knights era canon are you referring to for accuracy? This set is LEGO castle based fantasy of the 2020s, where the largest castle in the realm has a female leader and many of the soldiers are female. A female soldier in this set fits perfectly with this.

[Black Falcon]

As mentioned before, no idea why we have to discuss this every set they are introducing. But however, since it doesn´t seem to stop:

8 hours ago, azog said:

As for the comments about the knight being a female, grow up and accept that it's a toy based in a fantasy world. Because guess what...I can guarantee that you have at least 1 male minifigure head laying around if it truly bothers you that much. I'm sick of these comments using, "historical accuracy" to justify their sexist views. Remind me again...when did wizards and dragons exist? Oh...that's right...NEVER! It's fantasy! I will never not laugh at people when they complain about a female knight/soldier.

For me this post is very problematic to be honest. While I personally can understand why Lego makes the things they do the way they do and I don´t have a problem with that, I kinda still would prefer them to be more accurate in that matter honestly - calling everyone sexist who thinks that way is just insulting and stubborn to me. 

 

5 hours ago, Mandalorianknight said:

Like I said, not a big deal. But personally, I like the majority of my soldiers in my collections to be men, just because that's how it was/is. And seeing people claim that preferring to mostly have male soldiers is sexist is insane to me.

Exactly this.

 

3 hours ago, El Garfio said:

Why not change the gender of the Majisto? 

Well that argument is way off. Majisto has to be male because he was - there is a difference between changing an certain iconic character and just changing a random knight. They could have decided to include a female wizard instead of Majisto in the Lion Knights castle, but obviously they wanted to have the Iconic Wizard included - as for the workshop. It is Majistos Workshop, so that wouldn´t work here.