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MAB

Eurobricks Archdukes
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Everything posted by MAB

  1. MAB
    Buying a product doesn't make you any more an insider than anyone else. They may have changed the VIP name to imply that, but we are not able to influence them from within. They have to make what you want for you to be able to send the message that you will buy it. If they don't make what you want, there is no way to 'support' them. Same here. I used to buy lots of parts from brickforge and brickwarriors. Accessories for historical figures like Spartans and Romans, fantasy for elves and dwarves in LOTR style. All before LEGO started to do those. LEGO doing them was bittersweet. Nice that you could get official items, but not so good that they cut down sales for the entrepreneurs that used to fill the area before LEGO did the same ideas (whether it was an independent decision or they took the idea). I'll still buy AliE figures for the accessories, especially if I am going to cut, glue or paint them anyway. I bought a few PF style motors a few weeks back. If LEGO won't sell them any more, I'm not paying 8-10 times the price for an official one. Even the knockoff ones are expensive for what they are. Similarly I understand people buying baseplates in other colours. The clutch is just as good as LEGO and if LEGO won't sell that colour, go for it.
  2. MAB
    1. The alternative argument is that it is OK to any amount of fantasy that LEGO likes to reach the maximum possible audience for their product. The argument is not that there must be gender equality because that would be fantasy, but this is a fantasy set/theme and having gender balance in non-licensed / generic themes leads to better sales. 2. It is marketing, the same as for modulars, botanicals, etc. 3. There are no historical characters here. They are fantasy characters. Where these fantasy characters were not gender specific in past versions of the set, what is to say they were not intended to be female? If they weren't gendered, they were not male. This is a GWP set with a reasonably high purchase threshold. So if you are buying direct from LEGO to get it, add an order of for example 20 male heads from pick a brick. The cost is small compared to the threshold. Then you don't have to worry about it now or for the next few years.
  3. MAB
    Fantasy castle may have some elements based on some long gone period of history, but the key phrase is "based on". If there weren't changes to known history, it would be a historical set and not a fantasty set. If it is acceptable to have non-historical elements such as a wizard in fantasy, then it is just as acceptable to have female warriors. It can still be based on Medieval times but use females in some of the traditionally male roles. The change from factual to fictional makes it fantasy.
  4. MAB
    This set is not based on medieval times. It is fantasy. If you don't need a wizard in a castle set, then this set is not for you. If you want male soldiers and no wizards, then you can wait for a historically accurate set. You might be waiting for a long time though.
  5. MAB
    What do you mean by you "would prefer them to be more accurate in that matter honestly"? What does accurate mean here? LEGO can put whatever they like in a set. So long as the contents match the images and instructions, the set is accurate.
  6. MAB
    Lego is making it clear that in their modern fantasy Castle, women can be soldiers. When time passes, hair tends to grey and beards become fuller and less hipster. Traditionally, yes. But in more modern literature, there are plenty of examples of witches that are not evil, such as those in Harry Potter. Traditionally it was old and ugly means bad witch, whereas young and beautiful means good. That is rather outdated now. Some old females with magical powers can be good, some can be bad. Some good looking females can be bad, some can be good. Which knights era canon are you referring to for accuracy? This set is LEGO castle based fantasy of the 2020s, where the largest castle in the realm has a female leader and many of the soldiers are female. A female soldier in this set fits perfectly with this.
  7. MAB
    I used to think the same. But now, there are so many male and female heads, I don't think it matters too much. We get pretty decent gender balance across most themes where there are no main / named characters that repeat within the theme. As Alexandrina notes, a key issue then is advertising the set. Do LEGO advertise the character on the box as male or female? Unfortunately, that sort of thing matters a lot when advertising. It may also lead to social media rants if more male characters can be turned into female or when characters with dresses are or are not supplied with a head that turns them from female to male, whichever way they chose to do it they would be wrong. Personally I switch out the heads and hands of all my soldiers for fleshies anyway (mainly male, as I prefer historical rather than fantasy) but all the yellow ones get used for City or traded. It might also be why what little Castle we have had has been fantasy based recently, as there LEGO cannot really be criticised for aiming for a good balance when it comes to gender. It is fantasy so there is no rigid demographic for job roles. Whereas if they start going for realistic historical, warriors tended to be men. So it is not surprising if they stick to fantasy rather than trying to depict accurate historical. Not that much of their Castle output has ever really been that accurate historically.
  8. MAB
    According to bricklink, there are over 1350 yellow heads, so adding a bit more variety in colour where possible is not a bad thing. Have they confirmed that this is meant to be a direct recreation of the original bat lord that came to be known as Basil? It could equally well be showing what that now old figure could have been if they had access to current colours back in the 90s. To me, that is much more interesting than an exact copy of an old existing figure that you can just buy on bricklink. I find the old pupil-less eye heads don't work very well alongside modern heads anyway, so an update there would be necessary. If they added pupils, they would be doing a more modern take on it. And in that case, why not update other features to give something that would be done if they made a modern Fright Knights sub-theme. I cannot tell whether they have changed the colour, but making a bat lord's head white or glow in the dark like they do for other vampires makes the CMF version more interesting to me.
  9. MAB
    Quite a few of the green ones are for the Joker. Then a few other fantasy/superhero characters. A clown. Everyone is Awesome had a green hairpiece. Very few 'realistic' City style sets have green hair, although there is a female crook with one, presumably she is meant to be a bit rebellious.
  10. MAB
    No I've not experienced hacking. However I have changed email details in the past and there was no indication sent to the previous address when changing it. It would have probably been 9-10 years ago but I remember thinking it was rather insecure if an account had been hacked as it instantly locks out the owner as they will not be able to receive a change password link. Maybe it has changed now. If it hasn't, it should be.
  11. MAB
    1x1 red round brick, with a 1x1 plate on top = jar of sauce. It doesn't matter if tomatoes or glass jars existed at the time. With imagination, they are there. These sets are not historical, they are fantasy. So long as the torsos are neutral in both gender and skin, I'm fine with it. It is easy to get hold of heads these days, whether male or female, yellow or a large number of flesh tones.
  12. MAB
    Same here. In my experience, set prices rarely change if a once rare part from the set is re-released. If it is exactly the same part, any other unique parts in the set tend to increase slightly. If it is a similar but not exactly the same, little changes. The sales volume of the old part might drop, but then the volume of sales of the goat is negligible anyway.
  13. MAB
    Bricklink also need to take more ownership of security especially when it comes to changing data such as email addresses and linked paypal accounts. If you have the password to an account, then you can change the email address and password with ease, and once that is done there is no way for the real owner to change it. Even for reasonably active accounts, the owner is not warned about the change and won't be aware until they try to use their account. For a dormant account, the hacker is essentially free to keep the account to use at a later date whenever they please.
  14. MAB
    It's a man that has just eaten a tomato based sauce. Problem over.
  15. MAB
    Detolf. Some people also like the Ikea/LEGO Bygglek storage boxes.
  16. MAB
    Ikea sell a tall glass cabinet that is popular for LEGO displays.
  17. MAB
    That's interesting. I'm a little younger than you and in the mid to late 70s there was LEGO aimed at girls (or boys and girls) such as the Homemaker range. And quite a few adverts back then had girls in them. But they seemed to lose it again going through the 80s and 90s, increasing the gender divide and splitting off the Scala/Belville for girls and 'proper LEGO' for boys.
  18. MAB
    To many British kids, she would have just been 'the witch'. In an era when minifigures were not named on boxes, the names were not widely known. Unless you read magazines or books were a name was used for the characters, they were fairly generic unnamed characters.
  19. MAB
    Fire and Police (and to a lesser extent, Hospital) are still among the most popular sets today. But under the modern City theme, which is why there is likely low demand for a vintage remake as we still have them just done in a modern style.
  20. MAB
    I think LEGO is much more acceptable now for teens and adults than it used to be. Now there are specific sets aimed at adults and older teens, whereas in the past the sets were always "kid's toys" even if an AFOL was MOCing. Celebrities with LEGO have probably also helped. David Beckham has said in the past that he built the Taj Mahal and maybe the Disney Castle or something similar. Orlando Bloom has been pictured with a large collection of sets. British "Hard Man" Danny Dyer too ... you can see Buckingham Palace and the edge of Yoda here. And TV shows like LEGO Masters have shown there is more to LEGO than just kid sets to a mainstream audience. I think times have changed from even 10 years ago, but definitely from 30 or 40 years ago.
  21. MAB
    Basil is coming back in the CMF series.
  22. MAB
    Yes, it is important to remember it was bricklink that took the site down and not hackers. No doubt they can bring it back up whenever they want to. Being the weekend, I imagine they had only a small number of staff available and we have seen in the past that if something breaks on a Friday evening then it rarely gets fixed until the Monday. Let's hope that any hacked accounts were phished off site or using the same passwords as other hacked accounts elsewhere and that there was no hacking on site. It might be that they need to have better security when changing passwords and changing email addresses. If you know the password and email address, you can change the email address, then change the password, effectively locking out the account owner so they cannot change it back. If the account is dormant, it won't be noticed by the owner.
  23. MAB
    It is not just finding it that can be a problem, but having to dismantle a build if you used the wrong colour on the inside and only realise when you have the wrong colour left for the outside.
  24. MAB
    Similarly Majisto went from having blue decorative dragons on his workshop to having yellow printed ones on his tower.
  25. MAB
    It isn't really any different to people speculating and posting wants lists here.
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