Accio Lego

Images of the packaging have leaked. Looks like the Nutcracker comes not only with a sword but a printed round tile that seems to be a walnut. That wasn’t in the Promobricks description, so there’s stills a chance that characters like the dragon costume, wolf costume, and popcorn bit could have accessories we don’t know about yet.

I like the gap tooth on the reindeer lady. It’s one of those small quirks that you normally wouldn’t think of but makes the character stand out.

Eh, not really. It just needs to be put on the ground floor. Not like we didn’t already have modules like that with the Chamber of Secrets, not to mention the number of roof and tower sections that have to be put on top of things. My best guess right now is the ‘The Office’ Ideas set rumored to be coming out in October. That’s the same time the advent calendars typically release so a mix up would make sense. However, I know absolutely nothing about that IP, so the shirt could be just as incongruous for that set for all I know.

I think it was less a false rumor and more hopeful speculation. Between the amount of time that it’s been since we had two unlicensed series in a year and the fact that we knew it was going to be announced at the same time as the 90th anniversary sets it was easy to make assumptions.

Anyone else noticed that about half the series are what could be interpreted as parent-child paired costumes? We’ve got the Nutcracker and Sugar Plum Fairy, the Reindeer and Elf, and the Dragon and Knight (who has teen legs). It’s pretty cute actually, kind of wish they’d taken it further - I’d much rather see a kid in a pumpkin costume to go with the turkey as opposed to that popcorn costume.

Nah, they definitely intended to have a full reveal pretty soon after. The lego con format just sucks for revealing a large group of minifigs. Just look at the reveal clips for the Sanctum or Castle sets. The video quality for getting in close to the details was pretty garbage - no good at all for presenting a set of highly detailed minifigs. Add on a time crunch and it was definitely a conscious choice to stick to one massively scaled up character and two fairly simplistic regular ones. I expect we’ll be seeing Series 23 added to the ‘coming soon’ category of the Lego Con products page shortly. Yeah, but unprinted, and therefore easy to switch out if you so desire. Medium legs are harder to come by so I’m not inclined to complain. Besides, it’s a costume knight with a hobby horse - making her kid sized actually makes more sense.

So in addition to two horses and a cow the 90th anniversary castle also has one of the new lambs

Yeah, my first thought on seeing it was “I’m going to have to arrange the modules so that the Fat Lady can open up into last year’s Gryffindor gwp!” I’m also definitely thinking that the Fluffy encounter room will have to go on the other side, but we’ll see how it pans out.

Yeah, hopefully we’ll see the official images of the whole series drop with the next couple of days

Only the Cardboard Robot, Reindeer Costume, and Ship Captain were revealed. So frustrating.

It occurred to me that it could potentially come from the upcoming Lego Ideas The Office set - since that’s rumored to be releasing at approximately the same time the advent calendars usually do. But the only thing I’m familiar with from that show are the internet memes, so I have no idea if that shirt fits one of the expected characters or not.

With Promobricks releasing lists of the advent calendar prizes for the licensed calendars I can’t help but wonder if we’re rather surprisingly going to see them all revealed at Lego Con. After all, they released the lists at around the same as they did a list for the new Super Mario character packs, which happen to be the only thing that lego social media has outright specifically confirmed by name they’re revealing tomorrow. Maybe it’s just coincidence - certainly I wouldn’t do advent calendar reveals at something like lego con - but I do think that official images can’t be far off.

One of these (I’m guessing the Gringotts + dragon) must be separated into two builds, because there are only 23 bullet points on that list. I also doubt that Hedwig will come alone, she’s always had a selection of other goodies with her when she’s come in the advent calendar in the past.

Clearly I just don’t have much luck at my local store. Then again, they’re hopeless at keeping all the different parts separate so usually I’m more worried about plumbing the depths of the bins just to find any heads and wouldn’t necessarily notice any interesting old prints.

I second that. If we can agree on anything it’s that this really isn’t the right space for an in depth discussion of this topic. What we really should be debating is the much more on topic issue of how on earth a 10+ year old cmf torso ended up in a BaM tower. I’ve seen cmf stuff turn up in BaM often enough, but usually only about a year or two after they originally appeared - but series 3 was over a decade ago! Quite the mystery.

Except unlike armored knights there actually are native Americans who continue to preform these ceremonies as part of their present day culture (and that’s glossing over the fact that plate armor never really had any spiritual significance). And I think you know that comparing a headdress that is pretty much unique in culture context to common food items that aren’t considered exclusively spiritual even in the context of the religion you’ve listed is a glaring false equivalency, and I’m going to do you the decency of presuming you just didn’t take the time to think that through instead assuming you were speaking in bad faith. (A far more accurate equivalent to a war bonnet would be something like Maori face tattoos) In the digital age it takes almost no time at all to shoot off some emails to relevant cultural leaders to get a quick consultation on whether a specific design is good representation, or even ask for help with the design process. And for all I know, that is what Lego has been doing in these instances. My intentions were never to say “this is racist and here’s why” but instead “this could be a problem if the right steps weren’t taken while making it, and that’s why some people might have a knee jerk reaction to thinking it’s a bad idea” - it’s all about consent, that’s the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural sharing, and we have the privilege of living in a time when it takes the bare minimum of effort to ask for it.

Umm… the cultures who wore these styles of outfits absolutely are still alive, and very much vocally taking offense to caricatures of them being used as sports mascots and such. They have every right to be consulted on a representation of their culture as modern day Japanese or Pacific Islanders. I’m flabbergasted that you claim that this is ‘part of your culture’ but seem to incorrectly claim that culture is extinct - which is it? I might just be a white American, but I learned enough at school over the years to know that Eagle feathers and the Eagle feather war bonnets like the one the lego figure is depicted wearing were of great spiritual significance, and I’ve seen enough callout posts about not using them as Halloween costumes every year to confirm that the relevant Native American tribes get pretty offended by them being casually appropriated. I’m not saying lego shouldn’t make minifigs of Native Americans and other indigenous peoples, but they have to work with the cultures they’re representing if they want to be respectful, and that goes for any global culture.

For a lot of these things it’s not just “how accurate is it?” but also “is this done with the knowledge and support of the people it’s supposed to be representing? or did one of the designers just copy a photo they googled?” and “in this context, does this outfit come across as the sacred garb it’s actually modeled off of, or an appropriated costume?”

Haven’t seen anyone mention it here yet but a better quality photo of the Tonks and Voldemort heads has leaked, and it also includes the Myrtle head. Nothing particularly new, but both the Tonks and Myrtle heads are both double sided.

As far as I know the new owl is the only exclusive animal at the moment, and the store might just be out of animals that were added less recently. I am surprised not to see any of the blue/yellow parrots though. I recently stopped my my local lego store and grabbed some bam minifigs and there were a whole bunch of them in there for pirate constructing purposes.

Why stop at Gryffindor and Slytherin? Between written and video game canon the appearances of the Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw common rooms is well established, and House Pride and completionism should be enough to compensate for the lack of movie appearances. And I wouldn’t mind seeing the Professor minifigs swapped out for house ghosts instead of an extra student. It would definitely be the best direction to take the Moments series now that they’ve mostly exhausted the classrooms (the only on screen class left is the CoMC hippogriff lesson, which is tricky to fit in the format. There’s also History of Magic, Astronomy, Muggle Studies, Arithmancy, and Ancient Runes, none of which appeared in the movies and most of which weren’t even shown in the books, making the pretty poor choices for sets).

With all the other reveals set to happen for sets that are scheduled to come out much earlier I doubt we’ll get a full reveal. Possibly some sort of teaser? But I still think it’s more likely they’ll stick to promoting the new summer wave. They’re coming out the day afterwards in the US, and June 19th is such an odd day for a release that I’m sure it’s been scheduled like that on purpose. Lego’s probably hoping to see whether or not the hype from Lego Con will directly affect first day sales.

I wish I’d thought to screenshot the original info page from the lego website. I did copy paste some of the text at the time though. “More official set reveals than last year!  Expect official reveals from some of your favorite franchises. From LEGO® Super Mario ™, LEGO Star Wars™, LEGO DOTS, LEGO Marvel, LEGO Minecraft® AND brand-new Minifigures (to name a few), there are more official reveals than ever at LEGO CON 2022.” It notability also mentioned DOTS, which also doesn’t get mentioned in today’s new promos, and Minecraft and Star Wars, which rated a mention but with no reference to set reveals (despite the fact that we’re pretty certain they’re coming). I’m inclined to suspect Minifigures and DOTS just didn’t rate a mention there because they aren’t as big ticket and likely to get kids excited as the themes that have outside media linked to them.

Yeah, when Lego Con was first announced there was a list of themes (including Minifigures) on the info page that were supposedly getting reveals. All the information detailing set reveals has ‘mysteriously’ disappeared for some reason (to give themselves wiggle room should there be set leaks or a need to change schedule I imagine). But Promobricks just released a character list months before we should have heard anything and I doubt that’s a coincidence.

With no skin tone printed anywhere and the arms notably absent, it could literally come from any theme. Wait- has anyone checked The Office?