Upcoming Queen Figure

Discussion of official LEGO Castle Theme sets and products
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Aliencat
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Post by Aliencat »

Username wrote:What next? Do you want Barbie to have more masculine male characters to make it more boyish?
Are you calling Ken girly?
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Karalora
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Post by Karalora »

Heir of Black Falcon wrote:More enlightened.... come on Karalora this is getting a bit on the soapbox side is it not. Most of us here clearly have agreed it'd be nice for TLC to make some more female fighter figs but I think you are getting a bit carried away.
Sure I'm standing on a soapbox...a soapbox made of LEGO!

And no, I'm not getting carried away. I'm always like this. 8)

To reiterate (on-topic, no less!) what I like about the Queen:

1. She looks middle-aged--possibly the first definitely middle-aged (rather than young or elderly) female minifig LEGO has produced. As princess_storm says, it makes her marriage to the King much less squicky.

2. Her alternate expression is fierce/angry rather than frightened.

3. The detail on her gown, both front and back, is excellent.

4. New hairpiece!
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Post by Mog »

Username wrote:Sorry, but I bet Lego has done research time and time again that says more boys prefer Lego than girls. So it would make sense to do what Lego is doing.
:roll: :lol:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I don't know how you/LEGO can say that, when there really aren't any "girl" sets (besides the pink brick box, which I know sells well enough) out there. There might have been once, but times change. Once upon a time video games were seen and marketed as "boy" toys, too - now look at the success of music games and games like the Sims in bringing in a large female audience. (Note: I'm not saying that those are the only games girls play, of course.)

And the success or failure of prospective "girl" sets is sort of a moot point to begin with, because I'm not talking about making "girl" sets anyway. I'm talking about making the "boy" sets less exclusive to boys. Even if the "conflict"-themed sets are always going to appeal more to boys (a total assumption based on stereotypical gender roles, but let's assume that it's true anyway), would it kill LEGO to change one of the knights to a girl? I'm sure even boys would appreciate the extra variety, rather than just getting eight faceless dude knights.

But again, I'm one of the weirdos who doesn't really "get" gender-typing toys to begin with. Why do we have to tell kids what they can and can not play with? I played with my sister's "girl" toys, and she played with my LEGO bricks. I think we both turned out okay.

Even using your Barbie example, which you undoubtedly meant as the most extreme example of a "girl" toy possible...if toy companies, parents, and society at large didn't tell boys that Barbies were "for girls," do you really think that there wouldn't be more boys playing with them? After all, "macho" barbies already exist - they're called action figures. ;)
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Quickblade22
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Post by Quickblade22 »

The topic is "Upcoming Queen Figure", not "Lego Marketing Practices". Who cares which gender likes this figure? I like it and that's good enough for me. :wink:
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TheMaster
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Post by TheMaster »

I think that debate about gender equality belongs in another topic.
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Post by RebelRock »

Mog wrote:After all, "macho" barbies already exist - they're called action figures. ;)
Such a great burn on action figure owners. (myself included) :lol:
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Post by Tower of Iron Will »

Quickblade22 wrote:The topic is "Upcoming Queen Figure", not "Lego Marketing Practices". Who cares which gender likes this figure? I like it and that's good enough for me. :wink:
Yup, well said. I know that I can use this figure in some of my Castle factions. If it's a decent enough price on Bricklink I'll buy multiples of it as a whole and more of just the head to create different figures.
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Lord Scuba
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Post by Lord Scuba »

Quickblade22 wrote:The topic is "Upcoming Queen Figure", not "Lego Marketing Practices". Who cares which gender likes this figure? I like it and that's good enough for me. :wink:
I love the fig too, can't wait to see it's availability, though I'm guessing only one or two sets...
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TheMaster
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Post by TheMaster »

The queen mini figure looks much better than the princess.
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Post by timber_wolf899 »

In this talk of 'girl' and 'boy' sets arent we being steritypical? I mean perhaps the case is this.

Lego appeals to children who like to build.
In general boys are just more interested in this than girls.

Lego themes like castle focus on battle.
In general boys are more interested in this.

Now when it comes to things like town, I think we go back to point one. You can play house just fine wiht town sets, but if you don't like guilding toys and only want to play house, you'll just buy ready made toys, no?

TO sum it up, I think lego has a hard time with girls not so much because of set design or mini fig gender, but because girls just ar enot in general as into building toys?
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Bruce N H
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Post by Bruce N H »

A few thoughts on the direction this thread has headed. We've discussed the marketing of LEGO to girls vs boys at various times in the past, such as earlier this year in this thread. I'm happy to see that LEGO is doing a couple of the things I noted in that thread (because I'm sure they were reading this forum and listening to me :wink: ) in including more (and really good) female figs across themes and including sets some sets with less of a conflict theme (e.g. the Medieval Market Village, the upcoming farm theme, etc.). I'd love to see more of this.

On the note of warrior women versus damsels in distress, there was also the Ninja Princess, though some don't count Ninja as true Castle.
Mog wrote: The only "real" set in the "girl" section is the nurse and patient, presumably because of the female nurse.
...
Look at the City 40-figure set. Count the female minifigs. (No, really.) According to LEGO, girls can grow up only to be nurses, princesses, or a bunch of generic women with identical ponytails.


I think you're being caught up by gender stereotypes there. I assume you mean set 4936, which is named Doc & Patient, not Nurse & Patient. In 9247, Community Workers, the woman you note is definitely an EMT (as is her male counterpart). There's also a woman wearing an airport uniform holding one of those lights they direct planes with - not a stereotyped stewardess role. Finally, aside from the 10 figs with hair, the other 21 figs in the set are classic smileys with hats. So you may be assuming those construction workers are dudes, but it may just be that not every female construction worker or police officer etc puts on overstated lipstick and false eyelashes before going to work.
Yes, I see a standard smiley in a hat and most often assume male fig as well, but isn't this more a function of my inherent biases than of the actual fig? It's akin to the whole "yellow skin = white people" debate. Before they introduced "natural" skin tones, it was assumed that minifigs were representative of all people, now (you could argue, and LEGO did argue for years) the introduction of brown and tan and fleshy heads has confused this issue. Similarly, back in the day we only had classic smileys, which stood for both men and women. Then they introduced figs with beards, lipstick, etc, and figs became less generic. Maybe all of my red and white astronauts were women, maybe they were men. I'm a boy, so I assumed they were boys, but would a girl playing with the exact same set make the same assumptions? Of course that was before Sally Ride, so all of my pictures of astronauts from real life were male (yes, two Russian Women before that, but the only Cosmonaut I could name without looking them up is Yuri Gargarin). BTW, I saw Sally Ride give a talk a few years back and she's a great speaker on topics like getting kids (esp girls) interested in science. Okay, I've veering too far OT, so it's time to close.

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Karalora
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Post by Karalora »

Thanks for linking to that other thread, Bruce. I tried to find it in order to move the off-topic discussion there, but I couldn't remember what it was called, and the text search terms I was using kept turning up too many results.
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Post by Username »

Aliencat wrote:
Username wrote:What next? Do you want Barbie to have more masculine male characters to make it more boyish?
Are you calling Ken girly?
When we were kids, my older brothers made my sister's Ken doll manly buy shaving his head (this was back when the Ken doll had hair and not just plastic).

:lol:
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Post by Assassin »

Guys - don't want to depress anyone, but take a look at the following site
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26056914@N ... 019298003/
which I found by following a link from the Castle Customs page here.

It's a guy named Roaglaan - if you check out the work he has in progress, it looks very much like the "queen" desgn AND the "troll/orc shaman" design might be from him.

I just hope he's copying them from Lego pictures and that they really are coming out next year.
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Roaglaan
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Post by Roaglaan »

Assassin wrote:I just hope he's copying them from Lego pictures and that they really are coming out next year.
Thats exactly what I did, I made my versions from the images that have been floating around since they were anounced at brickcon. If you go to my minifig gallery on my flickr you can see the final versions applied as stickers.

Roag
[url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/26056914@N03/]My Flickr[/url]
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