Aanchir

I doubt that'll be an issue. Those single-piece palm tree trunks were a product of the much-maligned "Town Jr." era. These days LEGO tends to rely a lot less on prefab tree pieces than they did even in the 80s, let alone during that rather dire period in their history. I suspect maybe the old-school palm tree trunk segments may have been retired for some reason related to their hinges? Despite being used for less than two decades, they went through a startling number of mold changes/redesigns according to BrickLink, which leads me to think that there may have been some kind of quality assurance or production issue LEGO was struggling to address. I'm reminded of how the Bionicle ball joint sockets have had to be redesigned so many times over the years due to earlier designs either losing friction over time or being prone to breakage. Mind you, I haven't heard much about builders encountering any of these sorts of defects with the palm tree trunk pieces. But that could just mean that LEGO was able to identify and filter out "duds" produced by those molds before they got packaged in sets, perhaps due to visible molding defects. Or it could just be because the palm tree trunk segments (at least when used for that specific purpose) rarely need to support as much weight as Bionicle joint pieces. Notably, unlike most other LEGO "ball and socket" hinge pieces, the socket part of the palm trunk segments lacked any cutouts or grooves that would allow the part to expand and contract when additional segments are being added or removed. But I have not seen any sort of designer statements on the matter, so all I can really do is speculate. Truth be told, I think the straight, thin trunks are a good fit for how the palm trees in the "Dynamite" music video look. But I agree that the classic "four big fronds" approach for the leaves is very inauthentic and cartoonish-looking for palm trees in most sets/themes, including that one. Real palm leaves tend to be more layered, rather than arranged in a flat disk like daisy petals, and the fronds tend to look less like one big leaf and more like several little leaves joined together. This is probably why so many sets from the past decade or so have opted for the "finger leaf palm" piece instead. The old palm leaves DO still work pretty nicely for some heavily stylized themes like Super Mario and Disney, though! They're also great for banana plants, which are not palms (and technically not even trees, since they lack a woody "trunk"), but DO have big, solid leaves with uneven tears along the edges. The Tiger Widow Island palm tree design is definitely pretty great! And truth be told, many real-life palm tree species (such as coconut palms or palmettos) have relatively smooth trunks that more closely resemble the creature tail pieces used for palm trees in many current/recent sets than the old-school segmented look. One weakness of these smoother palm tree trunks compared to other trunk designs/builds over the years is that they lack contours or attachment points along their trunks for animals like tree frogs or monkeys (or pirates fleeing pursuing soldiers) to grab onto. And they also can look simplistic compared to the rougher-textured trunks of some real-life palm tree species, such as date palms. So for those sorts of applications, either a more Technic-based construction or a more segmented build (like the classic palm trunks, or stacked cone or crown pieces) still works a bit better. I doubt there will ever be one type of palm tree build that is perfect in all these different respects. But LEGO has gotten really good at both designing versatile plant pieces and designing brick-built plants with creative builds, so I feel confident that if they DID introduce a new piece for palm tree trunks in the future, it'd end up having a whole lot of great creative potential even beyond that application!

Agreed! It seems almost ideal for that purpose since it has connections along the length that can be used for attaching yards and booms. I'm surprised there's been no mention here yet of the fern piece from the Rivendell set? Seems like a very useful part for building tropical plants. There are also a lot of great recolors in that set including bar holders with clip and bar holders with handle in Medium Nougat, which could be useful for shipbuilders.

I feel like if this kind of theft were enough to really devastate a product line's sales, NO companies would bother producing any sort of "blind box" products. The fact that blind boxes remain a thing seems like evidence enough that this sort of tampering is a cost that manufacturers and retailers alike are able to bear. I realize there are a lot of AFOLs/collectors who aren't interested in buying a product unless we can tell ahead of time exactly what its contents will be. And that's a totally legitimate preference! But for kids, the "surprise" of not knowing what you're getting can often be part of the appeal for these sorts of products (almost like unwrapping a present), and the risk of getting duplicate or unwanted items can be mitigated by trading with friends. So there's less incentive among that core demographic to resort to tampering.

There is a pin hole on on the side of the tower containing the treasury and toilet, which can be used to link it to old 80s Castle sets like some of the ones you mentioned. Newer sets like this one could potentially link up in the same way — though of course, this only works if you display the castle in an "open" layout, as in a closed layout that pin hole faces back towards the other wing of the castle. As far as MOCs go, you can also create new segments that attach BETWEEN the two wings using the same clip-and-handle attachments used to link the wings together. But that doesn't seem like a likely option for this village/marketplace set, given that its layout is less curtain wall focused than the Lion Knights' Castle. Oh, I hadn't noticed how that spruce was built, but that is awesome! Creative conifer tree builds are a lot less common in sets than deciduous tree builds I feel like, so depending how this looks it might be a very useful technique indeed!

Ha… when I did the LEGO Inside Tour he said that he knew how to do three things with a computer… turn it on, swear at it, and turn it back off. He may be somewhat more tech savvy now than he was then (or than he was willing to give himself credit for), but he still doesn't seem like the type to join a LEGO forum. If only it were so!

Ooh, great work with the railing and ladder so that the station manager isn't stuck up there! It matches the station's design language beautifully! The stairs out front also look great. I wasn't totally sure about some of the mods you had i mind but you did a brilliant job making them work!

Oh, lovely! I was a big fan of Spyrius in my early AFOL years, and in hindsight I still find its emphasis on robots and flying saucers EXTREMELY compelling compared to some other old-school LEGO space factions. This captures that theming brilliantly, in spite of its more modernized aesthetic with lots of curves and studless surfaces. I especially love how the robot incorporates curved parts, ball-jointed articulation, and mechanical greebles while still keeping the primitive wheels and claw hands to retain the original theme's pulpy, old-school sci-fi flavor. Likewise, the ship itself retains those old-school faceted windscreens and the imperfect octagonal shape (as opposed to the more rounded disk shape people generally associate with flying saucers) for a delightful balance of old and new. Moreover, the way the robot is deployed from the center feels VERY much like the sort of function that might have shown up in one of those old space sets, even if none of the actual Spyrius sets employed this particular gimmick! The ramp and hoses even helps obscure/disguise the robot when the model is "closed", maximizing the feeling of wonder and surprise when the model opens up and the robot emerges! To top things off, you did a great job "upgrading" the minifigures with parts like shoulder armor, modern face prints, and the new bubble helmet while keeping a lot of the more iconic printed elements from the original figures. This is a fabulous tribute to the Spyrius theme through and through!

Ooh, thank you for sharing the instruction link! So the cardboard box going to the Jazz Club contains… a donut? Can't say that choice makes much sense to me. Even if the box is too small to fit much larger than a 1x1 tile, I still think there might have been options that would make more sense to ship like this and/or make more sense for the jazz club itself. Perhaps the star piece or a medieval coin as a medal/award of some sort, or a diadem as costume jewelry for the dressing room? There had to be a better option for that IMO. The rest of the build is outstanding, though. I hadn't even noticed until now how the grille is constructed from stacked 2x2 dishes! Very clever!

I think what shapes are most useful for floor plans varies depending on what sort of stuff you're building. To me, a lot of the recent rounded plate pieces (including the thicker ones from the Super Mario sets) feel super useful for the floors of castles in particular (i.e. for towers, turrets, bartizans, oriel windows, etc). They offer a great alternative to the more angular square or octagonal tower shapes that have been the default in the Castle theme for pretty much as long as it's been around. A lot of these round plates are also a great complement for exciting round pieces of the past decade like the 2x2x5 quarter cylinder panel, 5x5x5 quarter cylinder panel with half arches, 3x3x2 curved fence, 3x3x2 curved bay window, etc.

Let's not put sole responsibility for that project's derailment on LEGO's shoulders. The "Thomas & Friends" brand is currently owned by Mattel. And while Mattel theoretically COULD license the property out to LEGO (as Hasbro has recently done with Transformers and Dungeons & Dragons), I'm not sure they'd be too keen on it since they also have their own in-house construction toy brands — namely Mega Bloks and Mega Construx. I feel like if that license does become available again, LEGO would probably be thrilled to pick it up — at least for Duplo sets like the ones they had back in the mid-2000s.

Yeah, accessory packs like these are generally treated as one element, since all the parts are pressed off the same mold and then bagged. It's basically the modern equivalent to how many smaller accessory pieces used to come on a sprue (like the old "tool wheels"), allowing designers to introduce several part shapes for the cost of just one new mold. It's just that nowadays, LEGO punches the parts off the sprue before packaging them so they can recycle the leftover plastic. I also suspect that the fern mold (the other non-minifigure mold from this set) was designed for another theme like Friends or City and simply happened to show up here first, since if it were designed specifically for this set I'd have expected LEGO to call more attention to it in the press release in the part where they talked about all the new weapons.

It helps that back when MMV came out, KFOL-oriented playsets and adult-oriented exclusives alike often had simpler builds than they often do now. So even the relatively simple/traditional construction of the walls, roofs, and tree (about on par with contemporary Creator 3-in-1 sets) was still an impressive level of detail for that time. Same goes for the following year's Imperial Flagship, which was a pretty groundbreaking set for its time, but nowadays it's been surpassed in detail even by some more KFOL-oriented sailing ships like 70618, and primarily stands out in hindsight for its number of sails. This new medieval village/marketplace set naturally looks as though it'll be a lot more impressive than MMV by today's standards, with more complex roofs and wall timbers (similar to those in last year's Lion Knights' Castle), and multiple types of tree. It's hard for me to really appraise or analyze it in much more detail than that when all we've seen is one small, blurry image, but I'm sure when better/more finalized pics surface it will give us even more reasons to get excited!

Yeah, some of the non-minifig recolors that caught my eye include: LEGO Elves vine/filigree pieces in White Ice pops and sausages in Medium Nougat Bar holders with clip and bar holders with handle in Medium Nougat Square signs with clip in Sand Green 1x1 tiles in Nougat I suspect the new weapons will come as an IP-locked accessory pack (like some of the Batman weapon packs we've seen over the years), but that doesn't reduce their utility for MOCs — it just means we're maybe less likely to see recolors of them in other themes. The ferns, on the other hand, are probably gonna show up in other themes soon — after all, if they were designed for this set specifically, they probably would be mentioned in either the set description or the press release. There are a number of interesting looking printed floor tiles as well!

Yeah, the dwarves' cottage is pretty much the most obvious subject for a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs set, and while LEGO has had Duplo and 4+ sets of it before, it's not too shocking that a set based on a classic film like that also appeal to older Disney enthusiasts. Snow White is also a character Disney is really heavily promoting as part of their 100th anniversary celebration (as the star of their first animated feature film), so right now is an especially unsurprising time for LEGO to turn their attention towards that character. Given that it's a type of locomotive that has previous sets have depicted TWICE (4551 and 10183), I feel it's not nearly as niche/obscure/risky a subject as you're making it sound. Heck, the fact that builders pitched either of these two projects to LEGO Ideas shows that it was something they expected other AFOLs to be interested in, so the idea that nobody would've cared about them before those projects were posted seems rather silly! I feel like a lot of the "Ideas plagiarism" charges are simply a result of how many Ideas projects there are, even just among those that achieve 10,000 supporters. It's hardly shocking that some of these would overlap with products that LEGO is already working on, especially when many of them are things that builders would obviously have quite a bit of interest in, with or without a successful Ideas project to "prove" it. The Colosseum and Fiat 500 in particular were both part of well-established Creator Expert/Icons product lines (Landmarks and Classic Cars), so it's especially weird to act a though those two are things that LEGO would never have thought of on their own. I suspect that the LEGO Ideas projects THEMSELVES were heavily influenced by these two already popular product categories. Likewise, the Ghostbusters HQ and the Jurassic Park gate and T. Rex are ridiculously iconic subjects from their respective IPs, so it's weird to act as though those product ideas wouldn't have been on their mind as soon as the rights to those IPs were secured (if not sooner)! As for Brent Waller's Bonsai project, it reached 10,000 supporters less than six months before the official set's release. There's no doubt that development of that set was already well underway by that time, especially since it has a fairly complex build that shares no major parts or building techniques with Brent Waller's MOC. I'm most confused about why the Harley Davidson Fat Boy is on your list of supposed "stolen" Ideas projects. As far as I can tell, no Ideas project of that bike has ever achieved more than 62 supporters. It's one thing to think that designers have no better way of coming up with concepts than sifting through Ideas projects that have made it to review. It's another thing entirely to imagine that they have nothing better to do with their working hours than browse failed Ideas projects that never even came close to 10,000 supporters (on that note, no Crocodile Locomotive project ever achieved more than 2277 supporters, either). But suppose we look at this from a different perspective. Even if LEGO designers were scraping the LEGO Ideas site for product concepts to copy/steal… why would they end up picking these projects in particular to plagiarize? I mean, there are hundreds of train/locomotive projects that have either been rejected in the review phase, or expired well before reaching 10,000 supporters. Why would they prefer to plagiarize this one middle-of-the-road train project rather than any of the others? Likewise, why plagiarize a Fiat 500 project instead of any of the other classic car projects that achieved large numbers of supporters? While we're at it, let's consider the projects that get to review and DO get approved. Why would they decide to credit/reimburse the "Motorized Lighthouse", "Jazz Quartet", "A-Frame Cabin", "BTS Dynamite" "The Office", "Winnie the Pooh", "Medieval Blacksmith", "International Space Station", "Steamboat Willie", and "Central Perk Coffee" project creators — but rip off the creators of the Snow White cottage, Colosseum, and Fiat 500 projects from those same review periods? I haven't seen any explanation for the grounds LEGO would hypothetically use to determine which projects they approve (with credit and royalty payments to the original builder), and which they "steal". It seems downright arbitrary — even among non-licensed projects, or projects based on licenses from one particular company like Disney! Whereas it's much simpler to explain if many of these rejected projects really ARE just ones that happened to be similar to sets that were already in development by the time of the review period, while the approved projects are the ones that LEGO genuinely decided to produce based on the popularity of the fan submission. If you apply Occam's Razor — the scenario seems much simpler to explain if you accept LEGO's claims that these purported "thefts" were really just coincidence (and the supporting evidence designers have presented in particular cases like the Jurassic Park gate and T. Rex) than if you propose some inscrutable system for picking out particular successful or expired projects to plagiarize instead of simply approving them. After all, approving a project bolsters the reputation of the Ideas platform and the company as a whole in exchange for a meager 1% share of profits (not even of sales/revenue like most royalty payments!) and collaboration in the development process — perks they've been willing to grant other fan builders without hesitation. I get that basically ANY company has an incentive saving money when possible. But even many of the individual accusations of LEGO Ideas plagiarism over the years have failed to pass the smell test. And these sorts of accusations of routine plagiarism seem to create far more questions than answers.

I mean, this seems to tie in a lot more with the Jazz Club, in my opinion. I see how the saxophone painting could tie in with either last year's art gallery or the Jazz Club (which has a similar music-themed painting in the club manager's office). But the piano and juke box are much more closely tied to this set's musical theme. Not to mention the cardboard box full of unknown contents marked "TO: JAZZ CLUB". Realistically, though, the truck could easily tie in with both sets, if the painting is being shipped from the art gallery to the jazz club. Looking at the set, I'm struck by the use of a brick built hand truck instead of the molded one (which was last seen in sets in 2020). I guess that's a pretty strong sign that after three decades of use, the hand truck mold's journey has finally ended. It's also neat that this truck appears to have a low floor like the design used for U-Haul vans — contrast with the moving truck from last year's Main Street Building in which the cargo bed was raised over top of the wheels. I usually prefer trucks and cars that can fit drivers and passengers side-by-side, like the ones from Downtown Diner and Fire Brigade. But the narrower, curvy cab design here definitely suits the modular street's vintage mid-century vibes and helps it stand out from more modern LEGO Friends and LEGO City trucks (as was also the case with the Corner Garage tow truck). The old-timey version of the classic LEGO Town/City Cargo logo is also a very nice touch! Props to the graphic designer for that detail.

Yeah, I think there are a number of cases like that where LEGO can include those sorts of builds with just a spoonful of plausible deniability — no reason a drink counter can't serve juice, seltzer, mineral water, or any number of non-alcoholic mixed drinks. Sort of the same situation as with the casks in a lot of Castle sets — that could be anything in those barrels! A fully stocked bar with bottles lined up across multiple rows of shelves might be pushing the envelope a little too much to get approved, but it's hard to say for sure. Regardless, I think the pizzeria in this set provides more than enough explanation for where the patrons are getting their beverages. Also, it's important to keep in mind that pretty much all Modular Buildings (and other sets, for that matter) regularly have to reduce or leave out certain features in the name of efficiency/economy of detail, even if they'd be logical or necessary in real life. One of the most glaring examples of this, to me, is that the Grand Emporium has just ONE escalator between every two floors. How do customers who go up to the higher floors ever get back down? Are they just trapped until an employee decides to turn off or reverse the direction of the escalators? On a similar note, Town Hall only having one elevator and no stairs or fire escapes seems like a pretty serious fire hazard! And how come the photo studio and apartment in Assembly Square can't be accessed without first walking through the bakery and dentist's office? What are their occupants to do when those places are closed? Bear in mind that access-related concerns like these would still generally apply even if all the Modular Building sets still came WITHOUT furnished interiors! On a more general level, none of the shops in the series have any sort of break room or stock room, and most of the restaurants/cafes (including the aforementioned rooftop bar) don't include any sinks or dishwashers. Even utility closets for brooms, mops, fuse boxes, ladders, etc are pretty much unheard of. And of course, while the designers have gotten better at including bathrooms in new buildings from Assembly Square onward, toilet access was WAY less reliable in the collection's early years! This is why I'm willing to tolerate the relatively limited seating in sets like the Palace Cinema and Jazz Club or the small number of suites in the Boutique Hotel, and would likely make similar concessions if we ever got a schoolhouse or hospital as part of the series. Likewise, while I'm all for fleshed-out, "livable" interiors, there are a lot of features that I'm willing to do without if they aren't eye catching, aren't critical to the primary activities within a particular setting, or feel too similar to stuff from other recent buildings. Most stuff in the LEGO world is just smaller than it would be real life, and that often means suspending disbelief about these sorts of practical considerations if the same space could be used in more fun and interesting ways. Yeah, a bar would make a lot of sense for a jazz club like this, but I'm not convinced it'd be more fun or interesting than the pizzeria that can serve food and drinks to not just the clubgoers, but also to the upstairs tenants, outdoor diners, or customers who want a pizza delivered.

Oh no, I get that bulk packs of single-colored bricks in every color could not be a thing, and I definitely see your point about how useful it'd be for LEGO to bring those back in some of the more basic/common colors (I suspect that Pick-A-Brick has at least partly taken the place of pre-packed assortments like that, but I can see the advantages the older "service pack" approach could have even today). I was responding more to some of the comments expressing the opinion there are way too many colors in general. 'Cuz to me, the parts variety in any given color seems way stronger today than it was during my childhood.

Yeah, while I can definitely relate to the frustration of particular parts not being available in the particular shade of blue or green I want, I feel like the current color palette could not be much smaller than it is now without cutting out a huge slice of colors that are super important to one group of builders or another. I mean, we've seen how much hubbub there was over LEGO getting rid of Bright Bluish Green, Sand Red, and Tr. Fluorescent Orange — and how much worry there is any time another color like Tr. Fluorescent Green seems like it might be on the chopping block. And these are relative outliers from the more "traditional" hues associated with LEGO, or their nearest tints and shades! I can hardly imagine the uproar there'd be if LEGO got rid of a color like Earth Blue or Dark Orange on the grounds that there are similar colors that are "close enough" to serve roughly the same purpose. Even some of the colors I personally could just as easily do without, like Dark Brown or Olive Green, are hugely important to other builders — as plainly evidenced by the responses any time a LEGO Ideas set even partially replaces Dark Brown parts from the original pitch with Reddish Brown ones. Also, as a 90s kid myself… I don't understand where people get the idea that in the 90s, it was easy to find whatever parts you wanted in that decade's more limited colors. Certainly that might have been the case with colors like red, yellow, blue, black, or white. Less so with green, which was still used in a fairly limited capacity until the middle of the decade. But colors like pink, purple, and teal were next to useless due to how few parts came in them (especially in minifig-scale themes), while Dark Orange was still non-existent outside of Duplo and Belville. Likewise, it wasn't until near the end of the decade that standard orange bricks EXISTED, or that useful basic building elements started showing up in colors like Dark Grey, Brick Yellow (Tan), or Earth Orange (Brown). Previously, these colors had been almost entirely limited to specialty parts like animals and minifig accessories. And there were lots colors on the palette at that time that saw even MORE limited use than those! For example, 90s sets offered five different solid shades of green — it's just that only ONE of them was at all useful as the main color of a System build, since most were only used for a small number of Duplo/Belville parts, Fabuland figures, plant pieces, and baseplates. It's particularly telling that a lot of people thought Bright Green was a new color when it showed up in the 2012 City recycling sets, even though it was in fact introduced in 1995! It took 18 years for LEGO to release enough basic building elements in that color for many System builders to actually take notice of it! Frankly, despite there being around 44 solid colors on the current LEGO color palette, I'd say LEGO is doing a much better job today at releasing a useful variety of System parts in those colors to justify their existence than they did with their color palette in the 90s. The only solid colors out of those 44 that are still too limited to be used as the main color in a build are Medium Brown and Warm Tan, two colors introduced last year as skin tones, which still haven't really seen any use outside of that context.

Yeah, the village looks lovely indeed and is the one set from the current batch of leaks that's already a "must-have" for me. I'm curious whether it connects to the Lion Knights' Castle or is just designed to accompany it — but one way or another, the leaked image shares building techniques from that set for its tower, so they will be a good match for each other on display. I'm hoping these leaked images DIDN'T originate from a survey recipient within the AFOL community, cuz if that's the case it would make LEGO less likely to reach out to AFOLs with this sort of confidential info for market research purposes. But apparently the Rivendell set WASN'T one of the sets pictured/described in the survey, so it's possible that it and these other images were ll leaked from a totally different source like a retailer catalog or toy fair press kit.

Good spotting! In the official images I can see 2x2 bricks, 2x4 bricks, 1x1 round bricks, and 1x1 round plates in that color. The first two are brand-new while the round plates and bricks are relatively uncommon. It's also the first set I've seen with the 2x4x3 half-cone (38317) in Bright Blue, or the old elephant trunk/tail (28959) in Reddish Brown. The set also seems to have a LOT more useful minifig accessories like swords, spears, (unprinted) shields, fish, gems, gold ingots, goblets, forks, cleavers, mallets, old-school magic wands, bones, etc. than a typical Classic set (even a cauldron, which has been a relatively rare part in recent years). For that matter, I see a lot of Reddish Brown parts like arches, window frames, 1x2 scroll bricks, and 1x2 palisade bricks that could be useful for trees and buildings alike, plus white 1x2 palisade bricks and 1x2 masonry bricks. Also several colors of frog! Of course, at such a high price ($90/£80/90€), it's probably not a great value as a parts pack unless you're also interested in the multicolored basic bricks and cartoon eye/mouth pieces that make up a far greater share of the set's inventory. But I'm sure some people might make good use of it, and in the very least it might help drive the aftermarket price of some of these parts down.

Yeah, I was mostly adding that to acknowledge that there are probably at least a few Classic Space fans out there who would be keen on re-imagining the theme in a "darker and grittier" way, which is perfectly fine even if it's not my own preferred approach. Something I just realized I haven't seen anybody mention in this thread: the Galactic Spearhead crew from the 80s Jim Spaceborn comics. These comics used a blue uniform for Bart Seeker (Captain), red uniforms for Viva (Chief Pilot) and Mello (her co-pilot), a white uniform for Jim (passenger/Duncan's assistant), yellow suits for unnamed background characters such as hangar crew, and overalls for Duncan (engineer) and the other mechanical staff. In the second book, "Kidnappers from Swamp Planet", Duncan also wears a blue spacesuit during spacewalks. I'm curious if anybody has taken inspiration from those comics for their own Classic Space crew assignments? Granted, there are no black-uniformed crew members on the Spearhead (probably to avoid them getting confused with Kazak's space bandit faction, which had a sort of proto-Blacktron aesthetic), so their role would have to be improvised along with the "modern" uniform colors if you went with that approach. On a related note, the unreleased book "Trapped in Space" used its uniform colors to represent assignment to the Red Team, White Team, or Gold Team, each commanded by a Team Leader aboard the Galactic Spearhead. Red Team seems to be made up of pilots, whereas Yellow Team is made up of engineers. White Team's general role is less obviously apparent, but one team member, Nicola, is "a White Team expert on rocks and minerals", so they may be miscellaneous scientists/specialists. That said, this book was a prototype from 1983 — before blue and black uniformed astronauts were introduced — so it offers no suggestions for what roles they might be assigned.

It's definitely pretty heavy subject matter for its intended age range. That one didn't end up bothering me so much in middle school, but in my later high school years there were a lot of stories that I still sometimes tear up just thinking about, like "Of Mice and Men" and "Flowers for Algernon" (this was a time when I was very anxious about whether I could ever have a happy, successful adult life as a disabled/neurodivergent person, so stories like those hit me PRETTY hard). I don't think The Giver was the first story about a futuristic caste system of that sort, but I do feel that a Classic Space fleet based around that sort of concept would likely end up with similar dystopian vibes. So I'm personally not keen on integrating it into my LEGO Space headcanons. That said, I know I don't speak for all Space fans.

Can't think of any historic military factions that orange epaulettes would make a lot of sense for. Usually if they wanted a bright "sunny" color like that to represent a particular rank, I figure they'd just use gold, rather than orange ones that might get confused for gold. That said, I suppose a pirate captain or a particularly ostentatious merchant could wear them as a appropriated fashion statement rather than a symbol of rank. On more of a fantasy level, they could be a pretty good match for the Sky Pirate minifig parts from the 2016 Ninjago sets, whose designs included a lot of steampunk-ish metal armor with orange paint. …Or you could use them for John Lennon from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

One very pirate-y piece I'd love to see in the future would be some sort of neck accessory that allows a parrot one of the new monkeys to sit on a pirate's shoulder. Granted, to work with minifigs' wonky proportions, its design might have to be somewhat more cartoony/fantastical than a lot of folks here tend to prefer, and it probably wouldn't work with some larger hat pieces, but I still often find myself wishing something like that existed.

Frankly, a lot of the licensed themes which make up the majority of the excluded theme tend to be largely child-targeted themselves. Sure, themes like Disney, Star Wars, Super Heroes, Jurassic World, and Super Mario DO include adult-targeted exclusives, but those tend to be the exception, not the norm. Even themes like Ninjago and Friends include 10+/12+/14+ sets these days. Whereas City, in spite of its simplicity and lower target ages compared to some of those other themes, still commands a LOT of interest within the AFOL community — certainly more so than Bionicle itself tends to. It's definitely a bummer that Technic and Icons are excluded, since those are both themes that a lot of old-school Bionicle fans have a peripheral interest in. But even so, these seven qualifying themes still give buyers a LOT of sets to choose from to meet this threshold, including plenty of buildable mechs and creatures which have a natural overlap with Bionicle. It shouldn't be hard at all to hit the purchase threshold with just one or two of the more advanced Ninjago, Monkie Kid, or Creator sets.