Super Hot Take About Lego

Modern Lego is not worth it. Yes the pieces can get more intricate and specialized, and the models are more complex. But they’re promoting a mindset that is anti-Lego, honestly. The only good thing is that they’ve started, slowly, to seemingly push back a bit but even so it bothers the hell out of me.

Originally Lego were just sets of bricks you got, with nominal models to make that maybe, at best, you made once to see them. Then you broke them apart and had a bucket of Lego. When you wanted to play with Lego you would fish through it all and create something new. Eventually you would take it apart to reuse those pieces and keep creating. From scratch. Things you wanted to make. Your way.

Then in 1999 Lego licensed someone else’s property for the first time, instead of designing sets in house. Star Wars Lego (and Winnie the Pooh Duplo just FYI). And that was when the downfall started, in my eyes.

See ever since then, more and more, you get people who buy a Lego set and build it to look like the thing on the box. And then they stop. They build an Ecto-1, or Death Star. They build a fancy typewriter, or the Daily Bugle. They put them on a shelf. They buy a new Lego kit.

They’ve become model building, instead of the best free-form play around. I, personally, think that’s terrible.

I am aware some of you are going “Well I do both!” Cool good for you. But the majority of Lego is just straight out kit building now. I do hear that Lego themselves is starting to push harder on the just bags of bricks and such, trying to reclaim what they should always be, but it is sad they have to push even to try and get back there.

We let free-form play be trapped by “Build someone else’s dream and merchandise” and thanked them for it. I’m sorry, but for me that will always just be a point of sadness.

So please, yes, go buy Lego! And put it all, unsorted, into a big bucket. Then dig and create something off the top of your head. You’ll feel happier than looking at that replica of an X-Wing could ever make you.