Aanchir

It's interesting to hear multiple people talking about bringing back Orient Expedition sets. That theme is one that we know for fact was not a successful one (because no sets from 2003 made money except Bionicle and Star Wars sets), yet it seems to be a lot more popular with AFOLs than other failed themes of the early 2000s. I can't really think of a lot of sets I'd want re-released, because I'm pretty much at peace with what sets I've missed out on, even if in hindsight I might wish I'd gotten them at the time. Plus, even a lot of past sets that were really extraordinary designs for their time feel kinda rudimentary compared to modern stuff (just compare the complexity and level of detail of Imperial Flagship with Destiny's Bounty), so I think that in most cases LEGO could get more mileage out of taking those core concepts and reinterpreting them from the ground up than just doing a re-release or updated re-release like the Taj Mahal or Millennium Falcon.

Thank you! ^_^ It was definitely a learning experience and I'm thankful to some of the friends who looked at some of my WIP pictures and gave me pointers on how female anatomy works and where the model could be improved. I do have a lot of experience building female figures, but most of the time it's armored Bionicle figures, on which the shaping tends to be less exact and there's more room for abstraction than on a smoother System creation aiming for a lifelike appearance. I've been trying to build a male counterpart to PAIGE on Digital Designer in order to step outside my comfort zone and get a better understanding of how the shapes of the male figure fit together. It's been a little slow going, though. Thank you! I was glad I was able to get all the parts I needed to exhibit her at BrickFair. I didn't get a lot of direct feedback from attendees or other exhibitors, but it's good to know you left with a positive impression of her!

Just saw the pic and it's maybe the most obviously fake set I've seen all year! Looks absolutely nothing like a real collectible minifigures pack or even a preliminary version of a minifigures pack from a retailer catalog. There's no reason why they'd list the minifigures on the pack, nor why the watermark would be grainy when the rest of the image isn't, nor why the watermark would say "2016" on a 2018 product, nor why the Ninjago logo would be sloppily blacked out when the Sons of Garmadon logo is not. It's just riddled with so many flaws. The ironic thing is that the person who made it could probably have made it more convincing with LESS effort just by not including so many unnecessary details that would make it stand out as fake. A small, grainy image of a blank pack with a question mark, a watermark, and a Ninjago logo would have at least been closer to the level of detail these kinds of leaks might ordinarily have. EDIT: The person who posted it actually admitted this was just "possible concept art" based on a rumor floating around, so I guess it wasn't meant to be construed as a real image. Still feels a bit pointless. I guess whatever gets those clicks. *shrug* I still suspect the rumor is bogus as well.

Fantastic use of that little ice piece from the Chima sets! I never even thought of using it in an Elves MOC but it works great as crystals!

Phenomenal build! You did a great job recreating the vehicle's shapes using panels in ways I've never seen them used before. It reminds me of the sheer wackiness of a lot of late 90s Technic sets, but with the technical and visual refinement of a modern-day set or MOC. The colors are very striking. And couple all that with it being a reference to a classic cartoon and you have a model that's appealing on several levels! On the other hand, I feel like you jinxed yourself in the contest by making Dick Dastardly's car — there's no way he could've won first place! Even so, congratulations on your second-place win!

Would this work? 5 modules long (4 modules from center of hip joint to center of ankle joint) If you want to make it a module shorter you could replace the entire lower limb with this piece: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3614b#T=P However, it's a retired piece which comes in very few colors and even fewer current colors. That said, at this scale, it may not even be worth having a working knee/elbow joint. Your call.

"What is happening with LEGO's Quality Assurance?" makes it sound like this is a recent problem. And in the case of Lady Iron Dragon, it's definitely not. LEGO has struggled with printing light colors on darker colors for decades. It was the same with Jango Fett's head back in 2002, Willa the Witch's torso in 1997, and even the fire uniforms from 1980. It's just most noticeable in cases like Lady Iron Dragon or Jango Fett where the printing is meant to match the figure's skin color.

Would a mini-doll head be too small?

I just realized that I don't know if anybody's brought up the Battle of Atlantis has some great sand green parts that could be good for castle building, as well as the first appearance of the LEGO Atlantis trident piece in Titanium Metallic (pearl dark gray/gunmetal)! The helmets on the Atlantean guards could also be great for fantasy builders, though their angular torso prints might look too sci-fi for people's tastes. Also, looking at other recently released sets, the Christmas Town Square could be a good source for those ornate fence pieces that are used so often in the Elves theme! Their art nouveau styling might be a bit modern for realistic medieval stuff, but for fantasy builds they can make some good ornamentation. It also has some other nice parts like Dark Orange palisade bricks and Sand Yellow (Dark Tan) masonry bricks. So, a decent parts pack on its own, possibly even a better one if it gets marked down after the Christmas season has passed.

In some of the other pics you can see a Technic bar of sorts behind the wheel that is probably there for that specific purpose. On another note, it's interesting to me that this is the only one of the ninja's vehicles besides the Mech Dragon and Destiny's Bounty that uses a lot of Warm Gold. In other Ninjago sets, Warm Gold tends to be a unifying color across the entire "good guy" faction, especially in the form of lots of bladed pieces as decoration. But the movie sets use it a lot more sparsely.

I mean, unless you count flying speeders like the Ussanui, it took Bionicle eight years to get any bikes. I feel like maybe the designers are afraid of stepping on the toes of the vehicle-heavy Technic theme. Plus, the bigger vehicle and creature sets usually don’t sell as well as the smaller figures, so how many there are can depend on how many sets a theme can support at those higher price points, and whether the designers think vehicles are the best use of those price points. When customers balk at the price of a $20 set, $35 and higher sets become something of a risk.

Yep. Even if it’s not meant to literally be romantic, their dynamic plays around with tropes and turns of phrase associated with romance — only playfully substituting “hate” for “love”, “bad guy” for “boyfriend/girlfriend”, and so forth for comedic effect. So many of their little quips parody the kind of things you might hear in the romance movies Batman loves so much.

Lots of options in the Ninjago theme. In particular, the LEGO Ninjago Movie has a number of great new faces, although which would be most useful to you might depend on what sort of expressions you need — many of the bad guys only have angry expressions and many of the civilians only have panicked/distressed expressions. Overall, though, the average minifigure is simple enough in its level of detail that the facial features don't tend to be really specific to any one particular race or ethnicity. When the minifigure is given those sorts of characteristics, then as you mention with regard to Orient Expedition, it often starts to evoke rather unsavory racial stereotypes (like this figure's exaggeratedly pronounced lips, or the Indians' noses and narrowed eyes). So for a historical Asian setting, most of the faces you'd want to outright avoid are ones that have eyewear or facial hair that is too modern– or western-looking for your setting.

The previous couple webisodes also got pulled down from YouTube but were later re-uploaded to the LEGO Elves website. I think it's a case of the YouTube videos accidentally being released early. So it seems to me like we should see Webisode 33 back up eventually. Haven't seen it back up yet, though.

I think to some extent this is coincidental. Not the idea of the movies exploring themes of family — that much is almost certainly deliberate, since it's a common thread in lots of animated movies that's proven to help kids and adults alike relate to them. But in terms of exploring father-son dynamics in particular, Batman/Robin and Lloyd Garmadon/Lord Garmadon had those dynamics well before The LEGO Movie came out, so I figure once LEGO and Warner Bros. settled on Batman and Ninjago as the next two movie-worthy IPs, those characters' family relationships were the obvious starting point. Also, I think simplifying the movies' themes to "daddy issues" kind of obfuscates the major differences between them. It's true that in both The LEGO Movie and The LEGO Ninjago Movie, we're seeing the story of a child-like character who feels threatened by his emotionally distant father figure. In The LEGO Batman Movie, though, the main character is a grown-up orphan who takes his nearest living father figure for granted until he's called on to become a father and start a family of his own. Furthermore, The LEGO Batman Movie's main protagonist-antagonist relationship is coded as romantic rather than familial, even if Batman's angst over the loss of his parents remains the primary stumbling block between him and any kind of serious interpersonal relationship.

What about Elves? Despite having different figures, as far as builds are concerned you're making a lot of the same type of stuff you'd see in a traditional Castle theme, and often with a much greater level of detail. I can understand Castle fans not liking it for one reason or another, but "nothing remotely close" is probably overstating things — even without touching on the number of castle-ish builds in other themes like Disney, Minecraft, and Ninjago. In general, I think the hate for Nexo Knights remains overblown. It's not likely to stick around beyond next year, the way I see it, and other classic themes like Space and Pirates have been through much longer hiatuses than that (and in the case of Pirates, with far fewer themes exploring similar subject matter in the intervening time). I'm not saying there shouldn't be any sense of longing or disappointment, but the way so many Castle fans talk about it you'd think LEGO had put out a press release with the headline "Sorry, AFOLs, the classic themes are never coming back". As for the City theme's popularity, some of it comes down to age range. City and Friends are aimed at a young-ish 5+ age group that's still fascinated with the world around them. Familiarity appeals to them, and the opportunity to shrink that familiar world down to a smaller scale and manipulate it to their liking satisfies most of the need they have for imagination or novelty. Honestly, that kind of familiarity is "boring" to a fan of themes like Castle, Pirates, or Space the same way that those other classic themes might be "boring" to fans of Ninjago or Nexo Knights, which take one step further away from the familiarity of the real world by juxtaposing familiar tropes and ideas in ways they wouldn't ordinarily go together in real life or traditional storytelling genres.

We had K-2SO. But I agree that it'd be great to see more droids.

I don't think TwistLaw is trying to argue that G1 Bionicle was any less "torso+limbs" than Hero Factory, but rather that those sorts of builds are inherent to the constraction category and that the variety of new pieces G1 introduced each year helped to compensate for those inherent structural similarities. Truth be told, I'm not sure how big an impact that sort of repetition really has — people who like constraction probably expect it to an extent, and also I feel like a lot of Hero Factory and Bionicle G2 sets did a good job mixing their builds up in ways besides new molds (recolors, different color blocking, different use of basic Technic, etc). I have to admit, though, that it's a criticism I've heard numerous times from AFOLs who never liked constraction in the first place — new parts or no new parts, it's all just more of the same "limby action figures" to them.

Because the number of new Bionicle molds didn't actually decrease for some time after the introduction of the Inika build. 2006, 2007, and 2008 each had around 60 new molds. It wasn't until 2009 that that number went down to about 45, and at that point, the decision to start winding the theme down had already been made. While the "Inika build" was a step up from previous torso builds in terms of versatility, for the first few years it didn't result in any fewer new torso molds each year, nor did it really result in any meaningful changes to other parts of the build other than the torso. Also, it's worth noting that the Inika build years also coincided with a steady increase in the number of figures with unique face/mask pieces and the number of different armor styles.

While it's true that G1 Bionicle often had more new molds per year than G2 Bionicle, I don't think that can really be held up as the way constraction should be, since it wasn't really sustainable. By the very end a lot of the theme's profits were being cancelled out by those types of expenses. It's also worth noting that G1 Bionicle also often had a lot more SETS per year than G2 did. In 2015 there were 27 new Bionicle parts across 18 sets (one and a half new molds per set). Ten years earlier in 2005 there had been about 52 new molds across 27 sets (two new molds per set). If constraction themes really need that many new molds every year to sell well, then that's probably a pretty valid reason for LEGO not to invest in them now that they can create even bigger hits much more economically.

While I'd certainly appreciate a more slender arm option for characters like Rey in the future (probably a specialized beam like the Ben 10 thigh piece rather than a shell, since I'm not sure shells can get much narrower than they already are), I don't think it's fair to say that her current arms "look male". Women can be buff too. Still hoping to get Rey and Chewbacca (my two favorites of the current wave), but I'm a bit reluctant to buy them on impulse, considering that clearances on these buildable figures seem to be fairly routine at this point. Honestly I'd be willing to wait for clearance on a lot more of the themes I collect if it weren't for weird cases like the Elves Dragon Sanctuary from 2016, which was retired and became hard to find within six months of release. Then again, I might even be more willing to buy a set like Rey at full price if I weren't in such a bad place emotionally and felt like I could justify treating myself.

Interesting build. I especially like the torso construction. A part of me can't help but wish there were a little more repetition of some of the G1 motifs here. Say, for instance, if there were some way to echo the segmented design of the lower legs in other parts of the body. I recognize, of course, that this is a tricky feat with G1 parts, which often lack matching motifs and textures, or only match parts with very particular and difficult-to-use proportions. Like, the Hordika foot or the narrower style of Toa Inika chest plate have a similar segmented look to the lower legs of this model, but I can't think of anywhere you could include parts that big and bulky that wouldn't mess up the nice proportions you have here. Another way this model could maybe be improved is to add some sort of additional accessory to give her a little more personality. I have to admit that one of my own struggles as a builder is liking to build humanoid figures with nice proportions but then not having much idea of how to make them stand out and not just feel like mannequins. Sets that succeed at this often tend to either add some sort of armor or accessories that change the silhouette or the way the character interacts with the world around them. Like, say, a big shoulder pad on one shoulder, or a pair of wings, or some blades/spikes/fins. I'm not sure if any of these kinds of ideas really suit the type of character you were setting out to create here, but it's something to think about.

It's not a minifigure-only project or a battle pack, it's a series of vignettes. If it were a $10–15 set with only around 100 or fewer non-minifigure parts, then I'd consider it a little more questionable. But take away the minifigures from this set and you're still left with over 200 pieces. That makes it even less of a minifigure pack than Luke's Landspeeder (four minifigures and less than 140 other bricks). Furthermore, the point of the "no minifigure packs" rule isn't to rule out every project that happens to be person- or character-focused. It's to keep out nonsense like the Star Wars Dark Bucket. Also, the prohibition involving sci-fi blasters is no "large or human-scale weapons or weapon replicas of any kind, including swords, knives, guns, sci-fi or fantasy blasters, etc". Minifigure weapons do not violate that rule. The only time LEGO Star Wars has come close to including that is back in the early days when it featured life-size lightsaber hilts inspiration models in the back of the instruction manuals. The other violence-related prohibitions say nothing about sci-fi blasters — just "Death, killing, blood, terrorism, horror, or torture", "First-person shooter video games", "Warfare or war vehicles in any modern or present-day situation, or national war memorials", and "Racism, bullying, or cruelty to real life animals".

That the sets went on clearance doesn’t totally surprise me, especially for such a short-lived theme. Ongoing themes can sometimes be a bit slower to go on clearance since as long as the theme as a whole is still being marketed, it can continue to drive sales of the older stuff. That said, I try not to read much into that kind of thing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people assume Friends or Ninjago is on its way out because they’ve been seeing it on clearance, yet those themes tend to be persistent bestsellers. Also, as @BrickG mentioned, interest in monsters and spooky stuff (in the US, at least) tends to be somewhat seasonal on account of Halloween.

While this has been the case for many AFOLs, I'm curious how much it will continue to apply in the future. A lot of the AFOLs around my age who ARE in relationships (men and women alike) either found their romantic interests within the LEGO fan community or brought them into the AFOL community fairly early in their relationships. Plus, I feel like the number of girls/women and LGBT people in the community is growing, so even if romantic pursuits do continue to pull people away from LEGO as teens and young adults, it might just as easily be an interest in boys as an interest in girls.