Karalora

N-no? I'm just saying some people like the licensed themes, some don't, and everyone seems to be talking past each other.

"There's no accounting for taste" means that people like what they like and no one can explain why in a way that everyone will accept.

I think if this thread has taught us anything, it's that there's no accounting for taste.

Well, silly, that's because turbans are necessary for scenarios like having Johnny Thunder and Pippin Reed beat up the sultan's guards (they don't have names btw). Without the turbans, how would you know who the bad guys are? But Johnny Thunder isn't about to beat up a women in hijab (she covers her hair in public, clearly she's already being victimized), so she doesn't need to exist.

Not all women who wear hijab (or various other head coverings) are Muslim, and not all Muslim women wear hijab. It's not inherently a religious article of clothing, and many/most of the women who wear it do so out of choice, because to them, it's just normal. And I think that's really what the crux of the matter is--to the anti-hijab folks, it's not normal, it's a scary Muslim costume, and they feel on some gut level that if there are hijabi minifigures then LEGO is being taken over by Muslims or something.

It's in poor taste to raise such a lament in the context of marginalized people wishing for representation. "You don't need minifigures that look/dress like you, you just need to use your imagination." Really? I mean...really?

They can be intimidating in that way. My own personal experience as a rather tepid MOC-er is that there isn't a good, established way to transition between building sets from the instructions and designing your own creations from scratch. Most of the "building advice" I've seen tends to start from the assumption that the person reading is already an accomplishing MOC-er and just needs some fresh ideas for interesting parts usage or broad aesthetics. What I would love is some kind of "Master Builder Kit" that included a bunch of different parts and instead of instructions for a model, a "textbook" of sorts with demonstrative lessons for practice with those parts. But that's an entirely separate issue from licensed vs. unlicensed.

They don't remotely need to go that far. I see women in hijab probably every time I'm in a public place with high foot traffic, like a big shopping center. It's just how some people dress on the daily.

Whose creativity is the issue here? The designers' or the end users'? Because there is nothing preventing anyone from picking up a LEGO set in any theme, licensed or unlicensed, and experimenting like mad with the pieces.

The "need for it" is so that hijabi girls and women can have representation in LEGO. As for the religious connotations...only partially. It's my understanding that it's more cultural than religious and while there is significant overlap, if a Christian-style wedding ceremony with the white gown and veil can be uncoupled from its religious origins enough to include in a City LEGO set, there's no excuse for excluding minifigures in hijab. It's a style of dress for many millions of women around the world. Now, if the issue is that they're having trouble figuring out how to design one, that's quite a bit more understandable. Among other concerns already raised, there are multiple ways of wrapping a hijab for a variety of looks. To be really authentic, the piece(s) would have to be produced in a variety of solid colors as well as printed patterns (florals and so on), which would increase production costs. I think it would be worth it for the representation, but I can see why they might be dragging their feet for now.

I think @SpacePolice89 was saying he doesn't think much of the current unlicensed themes vs. the ones from the 80s and 90s, largely for just that reason. idk, it seems to me that some people use words like "creativity," "imagination," and "originality" not as useful descriptions but as shibboleths. What makes a theme "good" or "bad" largely comes down to matters of taste, so they invoke these terms to imply that their tastes are objectively superior. We're all just supposed to roll over and accept that the classic themes promoted creativity while current ones don't--an actual argument to that effect is not made. And I say this as someone who is uninterested in most of the licensed themes, mainly because so many of them are things I'm bored with in general and tired of hearing about in pop culture. Star Wars and the MCU and Harry Potter and jeez, even Disney these days, can all take a long walk off a short pier as far as I'm concerned. But that's not a LEGO-specific complaint.

I am less certain of this, if only because I'm on Rebrickable, where you very often get people posting alternate builds of licensed sets that have nothing to do with the original, and on the flipside, sometimes the alt-builds of unlicensed sets are minor variations on the original. And really...what is the difference between the play encouraged by a Classic Space-style set and the play encouraged by a SW set? Both sets have an "intended" build to be made from the parts, and instructions showing how to put together that intended build. The main difference, from what I can tell, is that the minifigures in the SW set have pre-assigned names.

That only tracks if you assume that licensed themes don't encourage creativity and imagination. And there's probably an argument to be made there, but you have to actually make it. I'm as disturbed as anyone by the fact that big-budget cinematic media has appropriated so much of people's imaginative function these days, but I don't think it necessarily follows that the flights of imagination that follow someone's experience of a popular action move are necessarily inferior to the flights of imagination they might take in response to something less specifically labeled, like a toy spaceship. An existing film or TV series can be a powerful springboard for the imagination; it gives people somewhere to start. [quote]I was mostly thinking about minifig themes but the Red Fox is also very different from licensed themes in a good way. It is a 3 in 1 set and with no Hollywood connections and is a nice model of a fox. If it was a licensed set it would be named something like Hank the Fox and have a laser gun and a purple hat and a backstory and be part of a superhero franchise and cost 35-40 euros more.[/quote] I'm with you on the price point thing, but I fail to see why a model of a fox character from a movie is somehow worse than a model of a wild fox, in terms of inspiring the people who build it. Maybe you wouldn't be as inspired by hypothetical "Hank the Fox," but...I feel compelled to point out that you made him up. You combined the concept of the existing Red Fox with the overall phenomenon of licensed themes and made up something new out of it. Even if it's coming from a place of disdain, the licensed themes got you to use your imagination!

What a strange claim. Do you also think animal models like the Kingfisher and Red Fox are killing creativity and imagination? Those, after all, are also just copies of things that already exist, rather than original designs.

We might be talking past each other a bit. I just thought one reason the classic themes were discontinued might be that the company decided they had done about all they could with them, and/or new generations of designers were eager to develop their own ideas instead of just working with past concepts.

When I look up the Classic Pirates sets on Bricklink, there doesn't seem to be much variety in the builds--just a handful of ships, rafts, and chunks of tropical island. Likewise Castle--the factions and their heraldry come and go, but the sets don't vary much wave to wave--we get a large castle, a gatehouse, some sort of cart or wagon, a tower, etc., and the strictures on historical castle design mean that the shapes remain basically the same. Space should be much more expansive, but "Classic Space" apparently means something very specific to AFOLs, such that new sets would have to look basically just like the old ones in order to scratch the itch, and if that's the case why not just reconstruct the old ones?

Very much this. Some people seem to want LEGO to be perpetually frozen in the state it was in the 80s and early to mid 90s. I question how much more creative utility could be gotten out of those very well-explored themes and aesthetics. And after the original designers retired, their replacements would want to contribute their own ideas, not be shackled to the creativity of their predecessors.

I don't know if "too many" licensed themes is the problem, but certainly some of the specific IPs they license is a little puzzling to me. Like...Wednesday and Wicked? Were they that hard up for "girl" franchises to partner with?

If we do get playsets in synergy with the movie, I hope they're not based directly on the movie. I would love to see some Zelda sets based on vibes and recurring elements rather than specific game-accurate scenes (as if the LEGO version were its own game, which it kinda would be!), but I worry that giving the movie a bunch of specific merch would imply that it was the "real" LoZ.

Fingers crossed. I know Nintendo announced a March 2027 release date for the movie adaptation, so I can see some brand synergy if the sets are planned for late 2026.

You're a kind soul.

For whatever it's worth, I only consider a minifig head to be "male"(-presenting) if it has visible facial hair/stubble. Eyelashes and lips get the "female-presenting" designation, and if the head has neither, I consider it gender-neutral and will use it for either if I think it fits the personality I have in mind. And all this talk of muscles and bikini tops has me wishing there were some female bodybuilder torsos with both!

I didn't discover the CMFs until...series 3, I want to say (still pretty early in the game). I was never in it to collect everything, but to build a stock of interesting characters for the themes I was into and various specialty projects. I never traded any because I don't know any other AFOLs IRL. But even with that, the more recent waves have felt like more of a crapshoot as to whether it will be worth buying a handful of blind boxes to see if I get something I like. People scanning all the boxes (or before last year, feeling all the bags) to get the figure(s) they want, leaving less variety in what remains, only exacerbates the problem.

Going from 16 figures per wave to 12 was a downgrade, to be sure. I think we've all more-or-less gotten used to it, but in conjunction with the increasing reliance on licensed waves and the price increases, it does seem like TLG is much less invested in giving us fans of "vanilla" CMFs a good collecting experience than they were when the concept launched.