Karalora

My thought is that you can't have Animal Crossing without Tom Nook, but including Timmy and Tommy would require an additional mold for their smaller heads. So Tom is back to being the shopkeep. What I find slightly more puzzling is the lack of any indication that a human villager player character minifig will show up anywhere. Unless the idea is that the person handling the LEGO is projecting themselves into the setting by playing with the pieces, and a minifig would be redundant?

The Animated Series

Well, tough. The theme is Flamingo Wars.

Humanoids are not involved in the Flamingo Wars. However, the elite Flamingo Cavalry have been known to ride into battle...on goats.

Introducing LEGO's newest action theme: Flamingo Wars! It's the battle of the century between the Dark Pink Flamingos and the Bright Pink Flamingos, with a wild card third faction: the Coral Flamingos! Collect every set! Dark Pink Flamingos HQ Lagoon (32 x 32 blue baseplate with some lily pads and reeds and 4 flamingos in Dark Pink) $79.99 Bright Pink Flamingos HQ Lagoon (32 x 32 medium azure baseplate with some lily pads and reeds and 4 flamingos in Bright Pink) 79.99 Flamingo Ambush (16 x 16 blue baseplate with some lily pads and reeds and 2 Bright Pink flamingos and 1 Dark Pink flamingo) $59.99 Flamingo Storage Lagoon (12 x 12 medium azure baseplate with some lily pads and reeds and 1 Dark Pink Flamingo and a NEW shrimp mold!) $29.99 Coral Caravan (16 x 16 sky blue baseplate with some lily pads and reeds and 3 Coral Flamingos--ooh, which side are they going to join? You decide!) $64.99 Flamingo Battle Pack (includes 2 Dark Pink Flamingos and 2 Bright Pink Flamingos and 1 Coral Flamingo) $14.99 Ultimate Flamingo Battle in the Lagoon! (32 x 32 blue baseplate with sky blue and medium azure printing and some lily pads and reeds and 3 Dark Pink Flamingos and 3 Bright Pink Flamingos and 2 Coral Flamingos) $119.99

It just occurred to me that we might get some new flower molds out of this!

Very much this. The whole point of Animal Crossing is that you build your village up the way you want it.

A YouTuber I follow seems to be associating the AC teaser video with just the opposite, that there will never be any LoZ playsets. I haven't had a chance to watch his video yet, and the title does specify playsets, which could mean a line of display models is on the way. He seems pretty cut up about a lack of playsets, but I suspect most of the demand for Zelda is coming from the AFOL side, which favors display models with character minifigs.

Given how flat the trees are in the teaser, I'm wondering whether the buildings will be similarly flattish, and Resident Services is the $50 set, leaving the $75 set to be the player character's house with a fully designed and customizable interior and exterior.

Not always, if you're lucky you can get there just when the shark is full from eating its siblings...

How soon they forget...a decade or so ago, the humble pitchfork was one of the most craved parts in the LEGO catalogue. We were ecstatic when they started showing up as CMF accessories.

I for one am looking forward to building a faction of jerfolk.

The concept seems to evolve through phases. Earlier in this very thread I described what the phases had been up until that point, and now they seem to be trying something else again.

The teddy bear is also an animal (according to Bricklink).

...it's a costume?

The Night Hunter from the same theme also has a very cool design!

To think that the mistreatment of people of color in North America stopped 200 years ago, and/or that the policies of the past do not still have knock-on effects today...well, the kindest interpretation is that it's an extremely naive viewpoint. If misrepresentations of medieval European cultures do not bother you...great! It's legitimately a good thing that the brutality of past centuries no longer harms the descendants of those people. It must be a big relief to you that no one is using the violence of the Vikings to stereotype modern Scandinavians (or white people overall) and justify depriving them of their civil rights. But do you see how not everyone enjoys that privilege? Do you get that? Maybe you don't--you give your location as "Europe," so maybe you aren't aware of just how bad it still is over here, in many ways. The cruelties of the 1800s aren't something that we can just laugh off if we care about real people...if for no other reason than the fact that bigoted people are trying to sweep them under the rug so that they can drag us backward. Back to speculating about LEGO sets...if TLG wants to make minifigures of Indigenous Americans, maybe a better context than "the Old West" would be a modern cultural festival, with people showing up in traditional tribal costumes such as the ones @SamVimes showcased on the last page. The designs would have to be simplified to some extent, but LEGO printing these days is well up to the task of illustrating the variety present in Indigenous art and design. On the other hand, if they really wanted to dive into "the Old West" as a setting, maybe the nicest concept available would be a trading post, where white settlers and natives gather to barter goods with each other. No generic "cowboys and Indians"--give it an actual sense of place by portraying the natives as members of an actual tribe, with details of their costume and gear as accurate to the real culture as they can be manufactured.

I don't want to drag this discussion too far into the weeds of politics, but I will note that some historical periods and events are more fraught than others, when it comes to portraying them in cheerful toy form. No one objects to historically inaccurate European knight minifigure factions waging war on each other because the legacy of the actual history has little to no effect on anyone's quality of life today (and whatever effect it has is not as lopsided as other examples I am about to mention). On the other hand, a LEGO set of European knights waging war on Middle Eastern warriors would spark a lot of controversy because of current issues surrounding immigration and Islamophobia. By the same token, the treatment of black and indigenous Americans in the 1800s absolutely affects the quality of life for those demographics today...and careless depictions of said demographics in art and literature have been, and still are, used to justify poor treatment. If people aren't sure they can trust a depiction not to be careless, the reaction is likely to be "Can we just...not?" I don't think the Old West period should be entirely off-limits for LEGO, but they would have to be careful about how they portrayed any indigenous people so that they were neither mocking their culture (even inadvertently) nor making light of the very real atrocities the peoples in question were subjected to during that time. And it's reasonable to ask whether it's even worth walking that tightrope when they could be putting their efforts into Ninjago sets instead.

It makes sense if the wi-fi doesn't work deep underground, but one would expect computer tech to play some sort of role. Maybe the team's computer expert manages to develop a "crystal GPS app" that helps locate large or important crystal deposits? I guess my larger point is that if you don't have anything for the characters to do with laptops and smartphones, then there's no reason to set the theme in the modern day as opposed to a few decades ago.

I can dig it (get it? Underground...dig...? I'll see myself out). Some thoughts: 1. What role does modern technology (internet research, smartphones, etc.) play in the adventure? It probably needs to play some role, or it won't come across as authentically modern. 2. What are the underground denizens like? Are they humans or some fantastic pulp adventure race? 3. I love the idea of neon crystals as light sources, and I'm thinking these could also serve as a general visual motif for the underground world. Maybe the dinosaurs and other creatures have crystals growing on their bodies!

It's been drifting for a while. Every post on the actual topic seems to spawn a whole sub-discussion about some tertiary aspect of the suggestion.

SpacePolice89 is either unavailable for the time being or uninterested in continuing this line of discussion, but I want to make my point. A white person like myself and a Chinese person look far more alike than either of us looks like a typical LEGO minifig face such as the ones I linked to for examples. The minifig face is a heavily stylized cartoon toy that doesn't look very similar to any real person. It is only because our brains are hardwired to interpret two dots above a horizontal line as a face, that we can empathize with a minifigure as if it were a person at all. The only reason to interpret such a minifigure face as "white" is if you experience Caucasian features as "normal" and the features of other races as "unusual," requiring some particular additional detail to illustrate properly. Looked at objectively, a typical minifig face with highlighted dots for eyes and a simple line for a mouth can stand in for a human of any race or ethnicity equally well, because it looks equally like--that is to say, equally unlike--all of us. What is "wrong" with non-European minifigs (such as the Chinese characters in the original Adventurers line) in this regard is that they emphasize the features of people of color as something "unusual" and imply that any minifig lacking these markers should be interpreted as white by default. And that's no good, because a regular undifferentiated minifig is supposed to be able to represent anyone.

You haven't answered my questions. What about the faces you used as examples, makes them "European"? The red hair I'll grant you, but if the hair were recolored black, would they then be African or Asian? If not, why not? What race(s) do my example faces read as to you? Why?

What makes those face prints European, exactly? What race does this face print represent? https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3626bpb0534&idColor=3#T=C&C=3 How about this one? https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3626bpb0503#T=C&C=3 Or this one? https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3626cpb0857&idColor=3#T=C&C=3 Whatever answers you gave, how did you make that assessment?

What is so especially "European" about the face prints on knight minifigures?