Inclusive advertising Lego

There was a bit of a huff from some fans too regarding the release of the police station modular after BLM.

Ddraig yes indeed !! Although I suppose the argument is all their licenced themes are fantasy (Star Wars, DC Superheroes etc) so it isn't 'real' violence

Cops and robbers is an old and recurring theme in LEGO:

brickset.com/sets/60068-1/Crooks-Hideout

but it seems that in the past year LEGO are now steering away from this.

LEGO also currently (make an effort to) avoid issuing any sets having a religious aspect:

godbricks.blogspot.com/2009/05/official-lego-sets-with-religious.html

The other set was a criminal hideout set. They decided against releasing it.
I'm surprised that one got off the drawing board in the first place, tbh. Very odd idea.

There have actually been two sets withdrawn from sale recently because it was decided it went against their ethics. One was a Technic helicopter based on a real helicopter that is used by some countries as a military vehicle. Lego does not make sets based on anything 'real' to do with modern war.
The other set was a criminal hideout set. They decided against releasing it.

They had to bring in the genderless brick because too much of this was going on at headquarters....

Hahaha!

twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1395525998112755713

Genderless bricks

"Lego Unveils New Genderless Bricks With No Male/Female Connectors"

Effectively we have a chicken and egg problem. Girls are socialised to gravitate towards these sort of products. Even when parents do their best to raise their daughters in a more neutral way there are huge influences from friends/classmates and popular culture. If a toy company bathes its products in pink, it perpetuates this but if it instead only produces neutral products then they don't sell as well.

I agree with this. My SIL, despite being very non conforming herself, has gone all in for gendering her children (even before they were born she said she hoped she only had boys as she didn't know how to raise a girl). Her son gets everything STEM related, her daughter is drowning in pink and dolls. Not surprisingly her dd has grown up now with a preference for those things. My dp works in STEM and was really keen to try to encourage his niece to try out more STEM related toys so he started buying her things like construction toys covered in pink and flowers and she loved them. I don't think she'd have played with them if they weren't overtly feminine. It's a shame that some girls don't feel they can be interested in a variety of toys unless they're overtly coded as feminine, but that's the reality of the world as it is at the moment. The alternative would have been buying her neutral or masculine coded toys and her simply not playing with them, which surely would have been worse. I think lots of people agree that the cycle needs disrupting but the hard part is knowing at which point to do so.

Now Bricklinking the Green Grocer. My bank manager would like a word!

You'll be having nightmares of sand green grooved 2x1 bricks and pound signs on fire DdraigGoch.

(After writing that went to look at the prices on bricklink. Eek!)

I think many people on this thread would like the Ethics in Bricks account - they are on Twitter and Insta.

My daughter loves her Lego Friends sets (the hotdog stand is our fav) and builds them into all kinds of stuff, especially after watching Ellie V on YouTube. The level of detail is great. She wants to be an architect when she grows up (I keep trying to encourage engineering, there's probably more jobs in it...)

Unlike every other feminist, I was slightly bored by the plain 80s bricks, as I wasn't very imaginative about what to build with them. I would have loved to have had something more detailed.

(I can’t start the thread though because I haven’t built anything original in years)

Ddraig no I was being sarcastic about the horses. Lego Friends gets a lot of criticism and people saying "we never had any of that girly stuff in my day etc etc" making out that Lego has never done a 'girls' range before when they have infact done several. The picture I showed was from their Belville theme. The theme 'for girls' that Lego created years before Friends.

It was this minifigure that got me back into LEGO as an adult.

We love lego friends. It is mixed in with my DH’s old box of lego, so they spend their time creating wildlife rescue centres (including for the baby velociraptor) in the Amazon while exploring ruined castles (which are reached via the pirate ship).

I used to think Friends was terrible, but it was the Gateway That got my girls into lego.

My girls love the Lego friends. They notice all the detail like different eye colours, t shirts etc. They rebuild the sets into all sorts of things but they do just like building houses and vets and things like that. We have loads of Lego now and I sort all the Lego into shapes so we can find stuff quickly, it is very therapeutic!

My daughter and I really like watching Ellie V on u tube.

Good to know the hair is interchangeable... Means I don't need to separate out the hair in my minifig/doll storage case. I have separate compartments for heads, bodies etc.

Those ones are nothing like the ones that dd has. Hers are definitely ganglier

The mini doll body shape has never changed.

I love this hair. So funky.