Alexandrina

If I'm looking at the right image, that skirt is a disasterclass. It looks like he's wearing a grass skirt! I definitely don't think matters are helped by Marvin having a plain red shirt on; the plain torso just makes the whole thing look unfinished even if it's not. Fingers crossed he's not representative of what's to come!

Now, this is a novelty - small it may be, but it looks like it could very easily be a genuine Rock Raiders set. It's a rare thing indeed to produce something that gets across the essence of the products Lego actually release in such a small piece-count. Now, this is a novelty - small it may be, but it looks like it could very easily be a genuine Rock Raiders set. It's a rare thing indeed to produce something that gets across the essence of the products Lego actually release in such a small piece-count.

Not any more! It's in three regular sets, two Play Cubes and a foil bag - all Friends sets. I only know this because I have a whisk myself, but not 41366.

I'm in love with this! The wheels might be out of scale, but they feel strangely nostalgic for me. I think I might have had a toy car when I was younger with an identical wheel-to-car ratio! What's the hairpiece of the woman on the original build, if you don't mind me asking?

I've just dug out my copy, and the exact quote is: "There were only two other people who seemed to be able to see them: a stringy Slytherin boy standing just behind Goyle was watching the horse eating with an expression of great distaste on his face; and Neville, whose eyes were following the swishing progress of the long black tail". Nott is not mentioned by name in the scene, and that Slytherin boy does not factor in again. That said, it's a fair assumption that Nott is the Slytherin in question. Of the students in Harry's year, Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle are mentioned by name in that scene. The only students whose House is unknown but could be Slytherin are Lily Moon, Sally-Anne Perks, Sophie Roper, Runcorn and Sally Smith - all female. 'Stringy' doesn't appear to describe Blaise Zabini at all, and Nott is the only remaining possibility. Given that he is explicitly described as 'weedy' in another book, everything lines up. JK is also on record saying that she knows more about Nott than is revealed in the books. If she created a backstory for him that would explain him being able to see Thestrals, it would make sense that she'd therefore mention it in that scene.

Yeah, that I think captures her essence well. The difficulty with modernising her is that her face - minus the frame of hair - doesn't have distinguishing features in the way Johnny and Kilroy have with their facial hair. Having that frame of hair is unnecessary with a good hair piece, but then there's nothing distinctive about her face. Adding the dual-moulded helmet gives her that "adventurer" feel.

Great work! It immediately screams "medieval house", post title notwithstanding - which is already a fine start in a medieval MOC. I don't recognise lots of the parts used to make the minifigures - especially the innswoman's multi-coloured hair, which I love - but they fit the era. I particularly like the repurposed sextant sticking out of the wall. I'm a big fan of parts designed for a specific purpose, being reused for something completely different.

That's a clever little idea - and is Johnny's raft your creation, because I love the technique! My only little teensy bugbear is with the modernised Pippin. With dark red hair and a new face, she just doesn't seem Pippiny enough - though that's likely just a limitation of available parts, since Johnny was specifically updated by Lego and Kilroy's retained his head because there's simply nothing equivalent to it.

I was mainly going off the Harry Potter wiki for this, which gives Nott Sr's year of birth as 1965, though this doesn't really work too well either. Factor in also me forgetting that Harry Potter is set in the early 1990s! I genuinely don't remember that scene! My recollection of Nott in the books is him being sorted, and a later scene where he's described as "a weedy boy called Nott".

I definitely think Lego should keep up their trend of adding a minor student as an additional figure in all large Hogwarts-related sets, with different variants as appropriate. That way collectors can populate their Hogwarts displays with students, without needing a dozen Harrys and a dozen Malfoys. Justin in the Great Hall is a great continuation of this, and I have hope that at the very least the likes of Ernie, Terry Boot, etc. get a turn.

Parts don't seem to yellow at a consistent rate. I think exposure to sunlight has an effect - your photos show what I've also experienced, studs that are covered by over bricks tend not to discolour as much or as fast - but that's not entirely the case, and even within a set you can see the discolouration happening at different speeds. I have next to me set 75182, bought new in 2017 and assembled on the day of purchase, and having been on my shelf ever since. The parts are from the same box, have had the same exposure to daylight, and on some the yellowing is clearly beginning while other bricks are as bright white as when the set was first opened. Unfortunately yellowing is inevitable, since it's a property of the plastic itself; sooner or later, every white brick will turn yellow. There are posts on Eurobricks with suggestions for combating the yellowing - I can't vouch for these, since I've never tried anything myself, but it does appear to be possible to restore white bricks to their original colour. I'd guess that any part with a sticker on is impossible to salvage without removing the sticker in the process, but who knows? To be honest, if you're into Lego enough to have a Lego room, and you want the Ghostbusters car, I'd go for it. Certainly don't hold out in the hopes that Lego fix yellowing once and for all, because I can't see that happening any time soon! As for broken bricks: I've never broken a brick myself (except for a plant piece which I shut in a door hinge when I was younger!) but I've come across many from joblots. The broken parts have tended to be older bricks (1970s-1990s) rather than post-millennium bricks, with no correlating to colour, but I can't vouch for my anecdotal experience being gospel.

I have a wanted list on Bricklink full of parts that I need in VAST quantities - big rock pieces, trans-light blue 1 x 2 tiles, etc. Every time I place a Bricklink order, I check to see what that store has from my list, and order a few pieces if they've got any. These are all in anticipation of sets I'll need to build further on in production for my ongoing film project. When the time comes that I need these pieces, probably in a year or so, I'll hopefully have enough, but even if not it does make it easier to source the parts I need. It's a real pity Lego have never produced an Xtra set with just a couple of BURPs and LURPs..

Exactly. Anything that's going to require several hundred bricks to get structural integrity before you've even started on the actual build is a non-starter. As an aside, do we ever really see the vaults beneath Diagon Alley? The closest thing I can think of is the Honeydukes basement in Hogsmeade, but that's not compelling enough to make a set.

Aside from the fact that I'm only being part-serious, Cuaron definitely had some degree of a say in the script. In any case, it's symptomatic of Cuaron taking liberties with the source material (the first two films are by far the most book-accurate.) Cuaron did a good job, but he had multiple new students when it would have been easy to pull a character from the book. The assumption for a long time was that Bronson Webb's character was Nott (I will personally always see him as Nott) because of this, and the new character Bem had a lot of lines which could easily have gone to Dean, Parvati or Lavender, or even one of the stable of Hufflepuff students established in the previous film. While Cuaron's changes weren't too egregious - though there are issues with bits of his storytelling, namely his failure to make it obvious to non-book readers who Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs were - it set the precedent which eventually resulted in the mess that was Half Blood Prince. Blaise Zabini fits this bill, doesn't he? And I know they're absent from the books, but both Tracy Davis and Daphne Greengrass could be argued as being 'decent' Slytherins, since they're never shown to engage with Malfoy's gang. Also, the timelines don't match for Nott's father to have been at school with Voldemort (I suspect the Harry Potter wiki has made a mistake there), and Avery, Lestrange and Rosier are definitely all active Death Eater names in Harry's era - Mulciber too, possibly, though I'm not sure if there is such a character. In any case, to keep things Lego related - is there any possibility of Nott/not-Nott turning up in a set? If the Shrieking Shack comes and it's a big enough set, I can see Lego padding the minifigures - since canonically you only have the trio, Black, Lupin, Snape and Wormtail. If they wanted more figures, Malfoy and his gang are the obvious choices, and not-Nott would be a new figure. With solid-enough supports on all four sides and a perimeter of overlapping bricks on top, you can just about get a structure that will balance - though not something that can easily be moved about. That's probably not something Lego will ever be doing in a set, though, even setting aside the large piece count just to support the baseplate.

So Cuaron made up another character when there was a student he could have used? Add that to the list of reasons why Cuaron should not have been given a Harry Potter film.

Nott is in Prisoner of Azkaban, one of Malfoy's hangers-on. In the Weasley family photo, you can see him in the background.

I don't think there's any reason to necessarily assume that a Ford Anglia has to come with a remade Aragog set. Both previous Aragog sets fell in the 150-200 piece range, and both are pretty barebones in terms of forest. If Lego wanted to do a £30 Aragog's Lair, I don't see where the car would fit - adding it to the previous sets would pretty much max out the part count for a £30 quid set, and that's before you've even started to tackle the actual lair (and bearing in mind, the last Aragog set included a single tree and some spiders; there's the whole pit full of spiders they could create, if they wanted to go big).

The fact that we have a lioness gives me hope. Honestly, if I didn't insist on writing scripts calling for specific creatures/items that Lego hasn't produced - and then insist on waiting for Lego to produce those parts - I'd probably be more productive. If I can get a female deer and a medieval lute I'll be chuffed forever.

I'd love to see the reactions if Lego came out with a castle set on a raised baseplate, with a dozen rock pieces, the castle walls made entirely out of panels, and the Great Hall open to the elements a la the Night Lord's Castle. That's exactly the sort of set I would eat up - but I suspect the prevailing mood on EB would be a little different.

I think my own ignorance is more to blame! My overriding memory of a deer experience was at a... effectively a safari park, but only with farm animals (not sure how that works!) where I went in my youth to feed the deer. Except they were all female deer, and I was at that impressionable age where my assumptions on the world were being set in stone, so in my mind deer don't have antlers. Of course, they do - but my mental image is out of date.

I love to see voices in support of the big rock pieces. Are they ugly? Yes, I suppose so. But they're a great way to quickly add bulk to terrain, and it doesn't take much to disguise them. A few well-placed slopes and some foliage, and a big rock piece doesn't look like a big rock piece. In terms of Lego designing sets, using those pieces allows the designer to get to the point of the set they're making without padding the parts-count just to create the terrain. An example which just happens to be in front of me as I write is the 6494 Mystic Mountain Time Lab, from the old Time Cruisers range, which has no less than seven rock pieces. Do they look like rock pieces? Yes - but they convey the fact that the lab is set into the mountains while still allowing the majority of the parts to be put towards the build itself rather than its mountainous base. I wouldn't say no to the return of raised baseplates (I'm in exactly the right age bracket that all the big sets growing up seemed to have raised baseplates, but by the time I was old enough to afford big sets the raised baseplate was a relic of the past) but I can appreciate why that isn't likely. But rock pieces? Yes please! Their biggest problem is the relative rarity nowadays (the triangular rock piece has only been in two sets since 2017) which means that people like me who emerge from their Dark Ages can't easily get hold of the new colours. For example, I currently have ten of the old dark grey triangular rocks (and some light greys) and exactly zero of the dark bluish greys. Getting a decent supply of the new colour is difficult given the vast majority of its sets are off the market (I suspect 2019's set is lingering in shops somewhere still) but Lego recently came out with part 23996, the perfect companion piece... in only the new colour. If they were to release a Castle theme (or... just about any theme, really) with a healthy supply of rock pieces, big and small and in between, I would be one very happy girl.

Don't forget Nott. (Everyone forgets Nott).

That was the torso I was referring to. I get making the Gryffindor robes for screen accuracy, but why make Slytherin robes when Malfoy doesn't wear them, unless they're planning on making further use of the robes - either specifically using the Slytherin robes again or intending to represent all four houses.

You got me excited for a second thinking that there'd been a deer released other than the reindeer/patronus that I'd somehow missed. I agree with you: while goats would have been nice, they're not essential, nor are they inherently more interesting than, say, pigs or cattle. I'd much rather them make their return in a set where they're essential, perhaps a future Medieval Farm set.

I can agree with that! Echoing others, it does seem odd that they'd create the robe torso for a set where it's out of place, unless they planned to make use of it the following year.