Alexandrina

Honestly I don't get this! I've got plenty of sets I haven't built yet (including Diagon Alley which is taking up way too much space in my Lego room just sitting there in its box, and is also blocking one of the only plug sockets because the box was too big to fit anywhere else!) but I'm acutely aware of all the sets I've got. When I buy something, it's either because I really like the build - in which case it gets opened Day One - or because I want certain parts that are in the set, in which case I've got notes regarding what the set is and what parts in it I wanted, so if I need those parts I don't buy them again. But then, my Lego spreadsheet is so bulky now that it takes as much as ten minutes to calculate all the formulae when I close it down, so perhaps I'm the abnormal one here in how much attention I pay to exactly what I have.

How have I missed this? This is honestly an incredible build. The fort has some heft - it definitely looks like it would be intimidating towards marauding pirates and brigands. I love the windmill design too, great use of the little flags.

Honestly even that would still be cool if done right. I'm imagining puzzles that are similar to the door traps in Skyrim, where a series of stone columns have to be rotated so that they're displaying the right animals in the right order in order to unlock the door. I've no idea if stuff like this is in Zelda, or if it's even practical to convert to physical form in the limited footprint of a Lego set.

I don't know about this. Lego's Castle offering has always been distinct from Game of Thrones (and if they were concerned about going too close, they could easily either cut down on dragons or go full-fantasy with trolls and dwarves again for a wave or two) but I feel like they missed a trick. A Castle theme would have had perfect synergy with Thrones, and got plenty of sales from young adults wanting to make Thrones-esque MOCs as well as older kids who watched the show (and as someone who was still at school when Thrones began, I can say with absolute certainty that such petty things as 'age ratings' were disregarded). Lego could have released completely unoffensive Castle sets and still raked in the money from Thrones fans. What I think is more likely is that the last year of regular Castle sets flopped (they were mostly pretty terrible tbh), hence why in 2014 there was only the minifigure packs and in 2015 there was nothing at all. Then, Nexo Knights ultimately failed to live up to what Lego wanted it to be, but they considered it internally a Castle continuation. Then after two flops in a row they mothballed the theme for a while; the success of the recent Castle sets and the presumed Medieval Village next year should bode well for Lego trying again with a regular theme in the future, hopefully one which has better models than 2013. (I do wonder if the rise of PAB indirectly led to the failure of the Castle line. Once it became easy for AFOLs to buy the minifigures in abundance on PAB, they'd have been less likely to buy lots and lots of a given set for the minifigures.)

Curious. It's got to be something from an upcoming set, surely? Just put on PAB early. Are there any Christmas-themed sets that haven't been revealed yet? The white colour combined with the shape makes me think of a snow vignette.

I'm sure a full theme can't be far away. We've been feasting on special sets the last few years, and it's pushing a decade now since the last actual proper Castle theme so it's well overdue. I do wonder if Lego are trying to reintroduce key elements through successive D2C budgets, so that they have more of the budget for a specific Castle theme (though this may be severe copium talking). Does anyone know off-hand whether any Castle-specific parts have been introduced/reintroduced in the Blacksmith/Lion Knights' Castle that were out of circulation altogether? I know the Bard CMF gave us the lute.

Yeah, that's totally fair enough. On the Kiddicraft subject, I did a bit of Wiki editing this afternoon - the page on the founder was written in a very adversarial manner (basically, "here's all the ways he got shafted. By the way, Lego tell a different story") which is inappropriate for an encyclopedia imo - but when I dug deeper, half the stuff was either not sourced at all or wasn't mentioned in the source. At this remove we'll never know 100% for sure what went down between the two, but I don't think making stuff up helps either side of the matter.

Despite buying Eldorado on release day and building Bag 1 in early July, I'm still very slowly working through the set and just completed Bag 3 today. I'm very impressed with the ramp - specifically, how sturdy the thing is when it's put into place. I was paying very close attention to that part of the build since slopes and hills that accommodate the walk cycle of a Brickfilm and don't collapse under too much pressure are a rarity, and I'll definitely be stealing the technique Lego used for this ramp - even if it was quite fiddly to get it in to begin with, since the gap it was slotting into was very much just-so shape-wise. I've been surprised so far by the uneven distribution of the minifigures. There were quite a few in Bag 1 but I'm yet to encounter any more and it doesn't look like Bag 4 has one either. I'm sure most sets spread the figs around a bit more.

However, there's a difference between "company that also makes building blocks" and "company that sells other people's designs, uncompensated". To my mind, companies that make their own designs are legitimate. Companies that scrape designs off the Internet are illegitimate. Not that I'd ever buy non-Lego bricks personally, you can always tell the difference and the off-brand stuff always comes off inferior.

I definitely think it'd be interesting to see Lego tackling puzzles to solve in a playset. I imagine a lot of puzzles which work for video games (idk about Zelda specifically) wouldn't work so well when the kids have to physically build them first. (I suppose this could lead to a whole load of younger siblings being fooled by their older siblings' new Lego kit)

Oh so Zelda is an actual character that appears in the series? Lol, that means my interpretation of the story from the title alone was completely wrong! I assumed Zelda was some sort of mythical sorceress/goddess from a long time ago whose influence was still felt in the world but who didn't exist in it, and the green guy (Link, I presume?) was trying to find her or something. Honestly it sounds like there could be some pretty cool minifigures if those are the archetypes the series uses.

I'm not sure Craigievar is notable enough to have a set made of it, but it would be a beautiful set if they did.

Because Majisto is a specific named character not a generic knight. What is this comment? No idea why you're bringing the issue of race up here - but also, is there really a long list of 'white male' characters who have been replaced by women and POC in Disney/Netflix adaptations? I'm talking actual main characters, not supporting cast or walk-ons? Companies usually hire the best individual for the role (unless they're specifically race-matching a character to an already-cast character)

I might have to take the risk of having my first ever broken piece. That's an incredible torso.

No problem, I don't want to derail the thread any further but if you ever want to discuss anything else I'm happy for you to DM me To keep things on topic: I've never played a Zelda game myself. Is it a series with specific characters who would presumably be turned into minifigures, or something where the player's character is unique from player to player?

A beautiful build. I'm sure most of the references are going straight over my head (though I caught the Back to the Future one; the third film was always my favourite) but that doesn't matter because the city itself is simply delightful to look at. Very thriving. Plenty of stuff going on. What are the torso/skirt pieces you used for the woman in red outside the church? I don't recognise them.

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.

What was the series of events which led 'brickfilms' to be a trademarked term in the first place?

When did Lego reduce the number? I'm sure it used to be eight minifigs in Advent Calendars across the board - the formula was minifigure followed by two days of builds related to said minifigure, then new minifigure and repeat. I used to count the days by when the next minifig was due.

For anyone who sees the hyperlink in the quote and immediately wants to click it, it doesn't go to a website, the forum software is just assuming the set numbers are actually a phone number. Some poor bloke might end up getting a load of phone calls and be confused when people think he's Lego Indiana Jones 2024 sets.

Welcome

Interestingly, this particular piece was used more often in non-Aquazone sets than it was in Aquazone sets.

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.

Yup, and I collect all the different yellow heads, so having a new yellow head is the single most important criterion for me when coming to whether I'm interested in a CMF figure or not. I'll inevitably be getting half the set on Bricklink after the fact anyway, so I won't be buying the non-yellow-head figs and will probably sell any that I do happen to get in blind boxes in order to fund my yellow head collecting.

If it helps, the problems will likely be the same as people on the other side of the camera at the low end. The actual work itself pays just fine; the difficulty early on is in getting consistent work. I work in the production side of it, still entry level, and the daily rate is easily livable on even in London. The catch comes when you finish a job and can't get another for months! I would definitely not recommend moving to London if you're not already based there, unless you get into a drama school or you have some other reason to move (as in: don't just go to London speculatively because there are more acting gigs there) until you have at least a few pieces in your showreel. There are more acting jobs, but there are also more actors who want them. I don't know exactly where you're based, but if you can get yourself in a position where you can easily travel to Cardiff, Bristol or Salisbury for a week's work, you're in a great spot to start out - there's less major production in Cardiff and Bristol but there's plenty going, and Salisbury is home to one of the best film universities in the UK - they are always on the lookout for actors there, and from experience I know that students there tend to reuse their favourite actors for all three years of their course. (And also get into the industry; it never hurts to have working relationships with people who are in a position to give you a job.) The big jobs are usually London-based, but they'll usually at least cover your accommodation fees. But yeah. Certainly don't get pound signs in your eyes the first time you get paid for the work and blow it all on Lego like I did.