Accio Lego

Whatever next year’s expansion is I imagine it will be Deathly Hallows based, focused on some aspect of the Battle of Hogwarts. As for potential castle sets beyond that - I suspect the Forbidden Corridor and the Chamber of Secrets will probably take priority over a room that never had a proper action sequence in it. Lego hasn’t done all the potential sets from OotP by a long shot, but the thing is, after the first two movies more and more of the really big action scenes happen outside of the castle until DH2 (there’s a reason the large castle sets from the last two years have both featured Christmas parties). It’s even more noticeable in OotP where 90% of the story has the main characters helpless to influence the main conflict and most of the meaty scenes with a large number of characters (inside the castle) happen in the already done Room of Requirement. With the Weasley twins’ fireworks rather trick to pull off properly in LEGO form, I can only really see Umbridge’s office sneaking into a set if they ever get around to redoing the Room of Requirement or Dumbledore’s office.

When you think about it - 16 and 18 is only a two years age difference, and unlike sets meant for really young kids there shouldn’t be a large difference between the coordination and ability to comprehend difficult instructions between the two age groups. In most other situations 18+ would mean “only for adults” but since Lego has a pretty hard line about not making stuff with adult content, their 18+ means more “the target audience for this set is mostly adults who we’re afraid won’t touch it if we don’t put it in a slick black box and say it’s not for kids.” Meanwhile, adult Harry Potter fans will walk into Hot Topic or PBTeen to pick up their awesome fandom merch without batting an eye about what the target age group for those shops is perceived to be because we all stopped caring about that stuff ages ago. Anyway I doubt we’ll have to worry much about DA being 18+.

You can’t really judge what will be on the calendars now by what was on them 2 years ago though. After all, back in 2018 there was a large chunk of time when they weren’t putting GWPs on the calendars anymore (which had all the Harry Potter fans anxious about when the microscale DA would be available). It’s entirely possible that Lego isn’t announcing VIP early releases several weeks ahead of time right now because they want to have wiggle room to cancel an early release if they don’t have enough stock yet due to factory closures. Not everything’s been making it onto the calendars lately either, the July calendar doesn’t say anything about the miniature gingerbread house gwp that I saw being promoted on the website the other day

Honestly, since the 31st (aka next Friday) is a significant date in the Harry Potter canon (Harry’s birthday and by extension the date of his first trip to a Diagon Alley), it wouldn’t surprise me if we got the reveal/designer Q&A on Friday and a teaser earlier in the week. Given the stated September 1st release date for the CMF, I expect the official reveal of that will come next week as well.

I think you’re right about that. The only place I could see a new mold from the CMF turning up this year is the D2C (since Hogwarts Castle used the new snake mold from Nagini for its basilisk). But, just to play devil’s advocate, what if we’re talking about a brick built Monster Book of Monsters? (Sure a polybag probably wouldn’t be big enough for that and we’ve already gotten a Harry Potter polybag for this year but what if?)

That’s not necessarily because of the 18+ thing, it might just be because that’s the best looking way to showcase the piano. Combined with the font used for the title and the sort of spotlight on the picture of the set itself it gives off “on stage at a fancy concert hall” kinda vibes.

Possibilities: A) the Target listing could be a mistake B) We know Barnes and Noble is getting Hedwig as an exclusive (Target likely won’t be able to carry it for several months) so they are releasing it, and any other sets they get, half a month later than Target claims they plan to in order to make sure they actually have everything in stock everywhere as opposed to jumping the gun and pissing off a bunch of people. C) the USA is slowly descending into Hell and the employees running both companies websites are punching in random numbers with the grim assurance that none of us will be around to call them out by the time that date arrives. (I’m joking... mostly)

Yeah, once August hits I plan on calling up my local Lego store semi regularly (or maybe just see if they’d be willing to email me) to keep track of when the sets get in. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if different parts of the country get the sets in stock at different times at this point.

I suspect they will be more comprehensive than that, but I still expect “what was your favorite set/element to design” to come up at some point. It’s a standard question. But since the submissions were through VIP, which I think you need to be an adult to have an account in, I imagine there’ll be a decent number of more complex questions.

Well then whatever they call the low level employees in the social media department doing all the grunt work. But I can’t imagine the two designers answering the questions will see anything more than a very pared down shortlist. (And honestly, knowing the Internet, one of those poor low level employees has the job of deleting all the questions about non Harry Potter themes, because you know there were people ignoring the theme listed on the submission page)

I imagine that there are some interns doing keyword searches to sift through a lot of questions right now. Both to get rid of questions they know they’d never answer (I imagine there are a bunch of key words and phrases that are considered to likely mean a question is spoiler-y and get it automatically rejected - for instance anything that mentions Diagon Alley by name or characters that haven’t been released yet), and to pull up questions they plan on answering no matter what (there are bound to be some common repeat questions that they know they’re going to get several versions of beforehand, I’d be very surprised if they hadn’t developed a quick method of pulling all the repeats up at once, choosing which version they’re goin to use, and then getting rid of the extras). I imagine that a lot of the volume of submissions they have are repeats and unanswerable questions, and as you said, once they find enough questions they do want to answer why bother sifting through the rest.

More like they know that using #legoleaks will get a bunch of angry fans who take the miss-use of that tag very seriously dog piling them. The community doesn’t take kindly to fake leakers, and kingnono did not fall gracefully. He’s probably trying to fly under the radar by just using #harrypotterlego. All he’s done so far is hint at Diagon Alley (which we already knew about before he even started this the first time) and repost a couple of his old character hints with the actual character names added. Maybe he’s trying to play the same game with a different audience now that the D2C announcement is teased and more people are aware of it, maybe he just wants to remind people what his “leaks”/predictions were in hopes of seeming legitimate when some of them inevitably turn out to be true (as if being able to make educated guesses somehow makes your predictions real leaks). If he’s looking for respect from the legoleaks community he probably won’t get it.

The AC’s goblet uses a 2x2 cylinder as a footprint and looks to have 3 full bricks of height, plus a few plates and other spacers - so probably around 4 bricks in height total. It’s definitely around movie prop accurate size.

This has the same energy as someone wandering into the Harry Potter fandom and asking what “My Immortal” is (long story short for those who weren’t checking Instagram and this forum way too much in the months leading up to the official set announcements and release, kingnono was/is a fake leaker who got caught in their lies when they said the Advent Calendar would be OotP based and the first pics leaked showing it was Yule Ball themed. Now either the original kingnono or a copycat is apparently back at it, spurred on either by the official advent calendar pictures or the impending Harry Potter reveal teased on the VIP page. The best course of action is to ignore it)

Technically the two windows on either side of the fireplace are probably repeat builds (at least I expect them each to come behind a separate door) but since they make up a nice little common room diorama instead of just being repetitive decorations and there’s only two of them it’s much less bothersome - more like the two tables from last year’s calendar.

Finally, the advent calendar drops. I’ve been waiting for this to happen since the Star Wars one was fully revealed (also figured it would come at the same time as the City and Friends ones, and yep, there they are). Love the exclusive figures - definitely psyched to get Cho instead of another repeat. This will definitely fill out the Clocktower set nicely - although poor Fleur is now the only one without a date (but Roger Davies would be ridiculously easy to purist moc so that’s not too bad). The builds are pretty much all amazing - yeah there are the requisite generic Christmas ones, but there are plenty of Hogwarts and Yule Ball specific builds to balance them out. I agree that the only thing that really falls flat for me is the triwizard cup, but I get why they included it, and, well, it’s impossible to create a truly accurate minifigure scale triwizard cup, so it is a little fun to see how different designers tackle the problem. Kind of surprised not to get a Hedwig, since I kinda figured she’d be something they’d try to squeeze into nearly every advent calendar, like the husky in the City AC (although City doesn’t have a husky this year so...). But I don’t consider that much of a drawback since the new flying Hedwig came in over half of this year’s sets and the polybag.

I don’t think anyone thinks the advent calendar needs a Comic-Con level announcement, but the Star Wars one had full official images released weeks ago when it was uploaded on shop@home, so it’s logical to assume that the other three advent calendars could show up on the website any day now. I also think that there’s little chance the Ideas piano set will be the only set announced during SDCC week. That’s not to say the announcements will necessarily be Harry Potter related, but I can definitely see the full announcement for the piano coming out tomorrow after today’s teaser, and more ComicCon appropriate sets being announced Wednesday-Friday. I could definitely see us getting the CMF announced next Monday and the D2C announcement on Friday.

Really unsure now to be honest. Last I checked my local Lego store wasn’t even letting customers grab boxes off the shelves for themself, so I doubt my usual feel method will be allowed. I’m probably going to wait until closer to the release to decide between buying a full set off eBay or buying a whole box from Lego and selling the extras.

The little invite text actually says “submit your question today” I suppose we all just took that literally - it’s also quite possible it really is only up for one day/the weekend, but that just means much more than 24 hours because they want to make sure all their fans around the world have an equal opportunity to notice it and submit questions.

I wish they hadn’t cut out the explanation of James being a stag animagus or Remus and Tonks entire relationship from the movies. It feels like the James/Lily and Remus/Tonks ships don’t get nearly enough love in the fandom because there’s a whole portion of the fan base who have no idea about the symbolism or depth of feelings invoked in the original text.

Nah, at least one of them has to dream about UCS Lucius Malfoy’s Cane

The thing about Azkaban, especially a large scale one, is that it’s shown in such a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene that it really isn’t too marketable (I don’t think there are any models of it on the market right now despite companies like Bradford Exchange and Hallmark recreating any building they can get the rights to), but I really want to see how the Lego designers would handle that crazy movie version of Azkaban that’s basically a giant hollow triangular column. I can just imagine all the fun and devilish building techniques that would go into getting the shape right.

It’s worth a shot. Who knows, maybe they have something that’s physically or monetarily impossible to do (like an inflatable Aunt Marge or a minifigure scale Azkaban prison) that they wish they could create in LEGO but will definitely never be made so telling us about it won’t spill any secrets.

I decided to ask if they approach the ‘remakes’ (I.e. the sets that were also done during the first theme run) any differently than the sets that cover entirely new subject matter. Kinda lame I know, but at least it’s fairly specific to this theme

In my experience a good chunk of the people calling to ‘cancel’ Harry Potter itself just because jkr is currently espousing (admittedly extremely hateful and harmful) unpopular views are people who didn’t actually like the books/movies in the first place and are all too excited to finally latch onto a reason to tell real fans that they’re wrong for liking it. The real fans I know recognize that the Wizarding World has become so much more than just one person, and the vast majority of us are a tolerant bunch (apparently because of Harry Potter according to some studies that have been done). So don’t let anyone tell you you can’t still enjoy the story and buy the merchandise - they’re the ones who need to learn what death of the author means.