Karalora

I love it!

I would argue that we already have Athena (Battle Goddess) and Pan (Faun), as well as Poseidon (Ocean King)...which is not to say that Greek mythology is not loaded with enough iconic characters to fill two or even three waves! I would go for every single figure, since mythology is one of my interests. My accessory of choice for Demeter would be a cornucopia, which would also look lovely in Thanksgiving MOCs.

I was just thinking, another reason fleshies work better in licensed themes than they would in non-licensed is the presumption of interchangeability in the latter. In most licensed themes, every part of a minifigure is specifically designed to represent one particular character in a specific costume, so if the head/neckline/hands are all one color and can't be swapped with parts in a different flesh tone without the figure looking mismatched...that's fine. They're not really supposed to be swapped. City minifigures, however, are marketed on the basis that you can remix the parts to make different characters as much as you want, and introducing different skin tones would limit the extent to which you could do that.

It occurs to me that minifigs built in the BAM station work out to $3.33 apiece in the U.S., and I imagine it's probably comparable in other countries. This wouldn't be very meaningful if all there was in the BAM station was overstock of existing parts like there used to be, but now that we're getting exclusive parts, sometimes in matching sets that are clearly meant to evoke CMF-style characters, it seems pretty weird that it's less expensive. Especially since at the BAM station, you do get to pick exactly what you get. What if what we're really paying for is the bag?

I already have a microphone and stand with the Roadie (who is there, along with the Band Supporter, because I wanted a couple non-musicians in there). Multiple microphones in one theme would be kind of a bummer.

I know a lot of people want a violinist...but I suspect what they really want is a violin, and rightly so! But another name for a violin is a fiddle--there's literally no difference--so I included one in the hands of a bluegrass musician to add an extra dash of variety. Those would be fun as characters, but it's hard to think of good props for them.

This theme is one we all need every bit as much as animals and food...MUSIC! Each minifig comes with an instrument (or other prop) AND a 2 x 2 printed tile featuring a couple bars of sheet music and a page number. Put them together in order, and they make an actual melody! (What melody...I haven't decided.) Conductor w/ baton (new mold, like a plain bar but tapered) Country Singer w/ acoustic guitar Marching BandMember w/ sousaphone Bluegrass Player w/ fiddle New Wave Artist w/ synth keyboard Roadie w/ microphone and stand Troubadour w/ lute Blues Performer w/ trumpet Big Band/Swing Musician w/ clarinet Orchestra Player w/ cello Band Supporter w/ poster (2 x 4 printed tile) Music-Loving Kid w/ triangle Beat Poet w/ bongo drums Greek musician w/ lyre Percussionist w/ cymbals* Opera Singer w/ bouquet of roses * I wanted to have a grunge artist with a full drum kit, but it occurs to me that a decent drum kit is outside the scope of a CMF bag. It would work better as one of the mini-builds in a hypothetical Music Festival People Pack.

These are amazing! I laughed out loud when I got to DHS and saw the guitar for Rock 'n' Roller Coaster!

It's fine by me. Let's just make sure they don't take over the thread or the mods will move it to the Licensed subforum where it will be redundant.

What I'm holding out hope for is that they do more with the theme parks.

I agree, while also being sensitive to the statements by darker-skinned people who don't feel that yellow authentically represents them (due to the default principle and the historical lack of appropriate hair). I think LEGO can build up good faith in the user community by consistently using hair pieces in just that way and showing that yellow can be anybody.

Next up from me...Fairy Tales! This is similar to @Arc2149Nova's Fantasy series, but with a lighter tone and more specific, recognizable archetypes. (And I'm going to deliberately avoid copying anything from that series, since the two go so well together.) Storyteller (a Mother Goose character) Prince Charming Long-haired maiden (Her hair has a braided appearance with a Technic ball joint attachment at the end, and she comes with a few additional sections to hook on--keep collecting more to make her hair as long as you like!) Fairy Godmother (uses the poofy Queen skirt) Humble Woodcutter Big Bad Wolf (structurally a retread of the S14 Wolf Guy, but light gray instead of dark gray, and without the clothing print) Cottage Witch (Is she good or bad? Depends on which side of her face you use!) Brave Tailor (with huge scissors that could also be a sword) Shoemaking Elf Simple Hero (the "foolish but good-hearted and lucky young peasant" archetype) Dark Fairy Cranky Dwarf Sad/Laughing Princess Vain Emperor (wearing only boxer shorts and a crown) Well-Dressed Cat Scullery Maid

Maybe, maybe not. The thing about LEGO sets and minifigures is that they're meant to be collected and all used together. A doll is more of a singular toy that a child chooses as an inanimate best friend. When I say children of color are no less deserving of choice than white children, I mean that they should have more to pick from than just the small family of minifigs at the fun fair. If LEGO did go to all fleshies, with three or four different shades to indicate different skin tones, it would be pretty weird for them to stock each City set with just one color, or to have alternate versions of sets that were identical except for the "race" of the minifigures. Cities tend to be where you get diversity and I would expect to see mixes most of the time. Though I'm actually less wary of children refusing sets with the wrong "color" of minifigures and more wary of racist parents refusing to buy them.

Likely because Disney merchandise is always heavily subdivided into franchise brands. The only reason the LEGO Princess theme was renamed was so they could keep including Frozen sets under that banner, even though Anna and Elsa are NOT officially part of Disney Princess, which ironically is because Frozen is still so popular as its own brand. The Disney Animated Canon as a whole (which I assume is what you meant by a Disney theme) is too broad-based--they have all kinds of movies in there and they wouldn't know who to market it to. They managed to get Princess out of the subset of movies that feature a female lead with a glamorous costume, because it's easy to sell dress-up fantasies to little girls, but there was no "natural" grouping of movies to appeal in the same way to little boys. When it came to the boy market, they had to resort to outside IP acquisitions like Cars and Marvel, which means there is no overall Disney "boy" franchise the way there is a "girl" franchise.

I don't think it should be a foregone conclusion that minifigure skin color should exactly mirror the demographic statistics of the market region. This is something that comes up a lot in discussions of representation, probably because it makes intuitive sense that such mirroring is "fair." But to go back to something I said earlier, population statistics don't play with toys, individuals and families do. No one individual or family is less deserving of having a full range of choice just because they belong to a minority demographic. I remain of the opinion that the best thing LEGO can do with City and other non-licensed themes--at least for now--is keep the figures yellow but continue to expand hair options and the like. They should pay attention to fashions in hair (including facial hair) and clothing across multiple nations, cultures, subcultures, and, yes, races. The importance of hair representation for black folks has been mentioned upthread, and...well, in addition to being socially responsible, hair pieces like this one are just so dang CUTE. We all win when we have more possible parts to mix and match!

You could probably fill three waves with variations of Homer. I'm interested in the warriors concept though! Do you have a list?

First of all, I don't think anyone has specifically said that the yellow is problematic. At most, we are asking if it might be, and discussing possible solutions if it is. Second of all, why are we doing this now? Because, not to put too fine a point on it, the world is extra-conscious of race these past few weeks. That's all. And you can't say it has nothing to do with LEGO when TLG has pulled advertising for many emergency-themed sets in response to current events. This too is the default principle in action. Male is seen as the default, so extra markers are required in order to make a face read as female. There are also extra markers that read as male (facial hair), but they aren't required to merely establish the face as male and can be used to add personality instead. This effectively robs the female face of an effective characterization tool--the style of a woman's makeup (or the absence of the same) can say a lot about her, but when lashes and lips have to be there just to label her as female, the options to sketch her personality on top of that are more limited. Incidentally, when I apply this default principle to the race of children playing with LEGO minifigs, I don't mean that Caucasian children look at these yellow faces and say "Yep, this toy is Caucasian, like me!" It's more that the default principle runs throughout society to make white children less cognizant of race in the first place. It's not even that they think of the minifigs as neutral and themselves as also neutral--they don't think about it. They have that luxury. Black children, on the other hand (except the youngest), are painfully aware of their race as they grow up, and in particular how it is seen as an exception to a (white) norm, so you can see why they might see a yellow-skinned (i.e. comparatively light-colored) toy and automatically assume that it isn't supposed to represent them. If that doesn't happen, if they are able to project themselves and the people they know into the minfigures...awesome, well done, LEGO. I'm just saying I can see why it might be more of an issue for black children. It's not as simple as U.S. = white, though. Sure, the U.S. is majority white, but it's not a huge majority--something on the order of 58%, last time I looked at the statistics. And even if LEGO is less popular with children of color than white children (perhaps because families of color tend to be poorer, an issue outside the scope of this thread), in a nation of 340 million people that still amounts to an awful lot of brown-skinned children playing with minifigures, or potentially doing so. Even the most mercenary of toy companies isn't going to brush them off as not worth addressing.

Did anyone say it was the first thing to come to mind? (Besides you just now, I mean?) Is the first thing that comes to mind the only thing worth thinking about, ever?

I'm not sure what your point is. Population statistics don't play with LEGO...individuals and families do. Are you saying it doesn't matter if black kids can't identify with yellow minifigures because they are the minority? That's...I'll be nice and say harsh. That's harsh.

I can neither read minds nor travel back in time, but I can make an educated guess. The default principle is real. I'm not accusing the designers of any malice. I would say it is intended to be neutral, but whether or not it succeeds depends on the individual user. Intent isn't magic, Death of the Author, and so on and so forth.

I love your ideas! (Why haven't we seen a wooden sword accessory yet? That would work with any scenario that includes children playing pretend swordfights.) P.S. Flatwoods Monster is probably my favorite cryptid. It's always described as an "alien encounter" but it's so different from "typical" alien descriptions! This next list was actually my first stab at a themed CMF wave, Winter Holidays. With many nods to @Robert8, who has designed many of these archetypes for his own CMF thread: Angel (I know TLG doesn't like to involve religion, but maybe it could be someone wearing a pageant costume, like the Imp in the Monsters series) Mrs. Claus Snowman Ugly Sweater Guy (bonus part is a second torso with a different ugly sweater print) Female Holiday Elf Sugar Plum Fairy Jack Frost Krampus Charity Santa (with a donation bucket and a bell) Santa's Helper (adult in an elf costume) Reindeer Suit Guy Polar Bear Suit Guy Ragdoll Nutcracker Miser (Ebenezer Scrooge) Baby New Year I think we could also have a lot of fun with a Sea Voyage theme, perhaps released alongside a renewed Pirates line: Circumnavigator (similar to the Conquistador but with a naval bent) Cabin Boy Mermaid Queen (with a coral crown and a Technic ball in Pearl Light Gray) Siren Atlantean Warrior Heroic Pirate Lookout Castaway Admiral Stowaway (a young woman disguised as a crew member) Sharkman Island Chieftain Junk Sailor (junk as in a Chinese boat) Junk Captain (same) Port Official Ship's Cook You'll notice I'm not giving detailed descriptions of most of these. This is because for the most part I think they speak for themselves and there are lots of different design possibilities. When I do have a specific detail in mind I lay it out.

CMF seems to be a bit on the skids lately, at least as we AFOLs see it--more time between non-licensed waves, and fewer interesting niche figures in favor of City characters that just don't intrigue us as much. We all have our preferences for the kinds of things we like to see in CMF--I'm a sucker for historical, fantasy, and holiday-related minifigs. So I thought we could indulge ourselves by imagining waves that cater to specific concepts, like the Monsters and Costume Party series that have been released. If your favorite LEGO theme or idea got a CMF line all to itself, what would that look like? Feel free to re-use CMF concepts that already exist (TLG certainly does) as long as you draw a distinction between your version and the earlier one. Here--I'll start with something that's sure to be a crowd-pleaser: Animals! Each minifig in this series comes with a NEW animal mold. Beyond that, they might have little in common, but we sure do love our animals. Cat Groomer with Persian Cat Show & Tell Kid with Gerbil Zoo Presenter with Cockatoo Kung-Fu Sage with Praying Mantis Shepherdess with Lamb Fish Fancier with Tropical Fish Goth Girl with Raven 4-H Member with Calf Park Ranger with Bear Cub Dog Trainer with Labrador Retriever Park Visitor with Duck Birdwatcher with Cardinal Dinosaur Vet with Baby Triceratops Moon Goddess with Deer Fairytale Witch with Toad (larger and wartier than the existing frog mold) Kitsune with Fox Go nuts!

I am still curious to know why some people think ending the blind bags would effectively end the interesting genre-based figures and turn the CMFs into an offshoot of City alone. I should think it would be the other way around, since from what I have seen, the historical, fantasy, and other specialty figs seem to be the most popular among collectors.

For whatever it's worth, that elf is built using the alternate elf parts that debuted in the BAM stations a couple years ago.

Well, technically you could. Of course, the risk is extremely low, since large boxes don't invite the sort of intensive handling that blind bags do. Germ transmission via shelved merchandise wasn't really something to worry about until COVID-19 became a pandemic. I think people are right to be a bit concerned--not panicked, but concerned--about the prospect of someone who might be infected without knowing it, putting their hands all over every bag in a display in order to suss out the contents, taking the ones they want, and leaving the rest, perhaps for a small child to touch only a few minutes later and then rub their eyes.