We had a milestone on Sunday: Ada’s first real Lego. What’s especially gratifying is that the set she chose is old-school Lego; rather than being what I tend to think pejoratively of as modern Lego, with large, irreducibly fully-formed pieces, it’s a collection of small pieces that form the whole, much like the Lego I had when I was a lad. Even more pleasing is that it was in a section of similarly old-style boxed sets, alongside some dedicated collections of block types—boxes of wheels, boxes of windows, boxes of roofing tiles.
For a while Lego was beginning to look more and more like Playmobile than Lego: a castle might be made, not from acres of grey blocks, but from half a dozen large segments that snapped together. The tractor is at the other end of the spectrum; the wheels could be repurposed to a moon rover, the cab the observation deck of a spaceship, the headlight to a sports car.
(If you’re wondering why the references to spaceships, it’s because Ada was trying to build rockets with her Duplo; this provoked me to bringing out my old Lego, which I’ve build many a fine spaceship from, and knocking up a small fast spaceship, a large spaceship with swing doors that can carry cargo, and Space Truck, a mighty assemblage that, under Ada’s guidance, has evolved to carry passengers, Siku metal cars, sport cranes, grapples, and a tree; the last of these is presumably fodder for the Space Koala that sits atop the back of the large spaceship.)
Here’s the thing: for me that’s the whole point of Lego. There are no shortage of toys that give you defined, channeled play: toy cars, dolls, houses, what have you. The magic of Lego is that you can enjoy your pristine, perfect creation of an object from instructions, or you can tear it down and rebuild your own thing, learning, along the way, a little about the nature of things, about how to build strong buildings and how to avoid weak buildings, about how much better things fit together if you think about it a little ahead of time, the problem-solving of making limited resources fit elaborate schemes. The play is not just the objects, the play is the creation of the objects; child as creator and producer, not child as consumer. And that, for some time, is what it looked to me like Lego had lost in pursuit of idiot-proof, instant-gratification licensed product sets and so many of their themed products.
I’m glad there’s real Lego still being made.
That said, I still have a few reservations: I’d like to see some slightly less hideous gendering with it. I’d like to see fewer grim-and-gritty angry little Lego people, too, for that matter.
I had to buy a set of female lego minifigs from some collector in the US, because Rebecca had noticed that all the little people she had were men. At the time, Lego had, quite literally, no female minifigs in the lines on sale. They’ve pulled their head back in a bit in the last 18 months or so - you can now get a number of sets with little women in. This is in tandem with a return to the more freeform, less vacuum-formed sets that you note.
Ada simply declared her tractor driver a woman. It’s probably not meant to be, but in the absence of any obvious male-gender markers like facial hair (now apparently mandatory for police figures) I see no reason to disagree.
That’s a good point. Absent any caricature gender characteristics (lipstick, long hair, etc) why do we assume they’re male? I tried to convince Rebecca of this but she didn’t go for it - so we got some Lego figures that did have the stereotypically female traits. It’s like that point that Alison Bechdel makes about how in many comics, the default character is male, and female characters are differentiated by putting things onto them (long eyelashes, lipstick, red high heels, etc).