Article by Cole Edmonson | October 30, 2021
Introduction (My Time Away, in a Dark Age…)
In mid-2021, I started actively building with LEGO bricks again and finishing new MOC projects.
Five years had gone by, and my LEGO hobby remained mostly dormant while I focused on responsibilities and life’s events. This season of life, in which LEGO gets set aside for an extended period of time, is what many AFOLs refer to as their ‘dark age;’ most fans have one around age 13, and I finally had mine in my twenties! (Five years isn’t as long as the traditional dark age, though, so perhaps this is technically considered a ‘dim age?’) Attending university full-time, starting a career, working multiple jobs, serving at church, investing in relationships, moving out, and dating / getting married… all of these wonderful opportunities and pursuits took up a good deal of my time, energy, and focus between 2016 and 2021.
During that time, I attended a few LEGO community events, such as the local AFOL convention, and occasionally checked in on the two main blogs at the time, BrickNerd and The Brothers Brick. I experimented a little bit with social media, on and off, and I tried to pay attention to the LEGO Group (TLG)’s new set releases; I didn’t really buy much, however, because of tighter funds and not having much time to do anything with the pieces. My existing building instructions, sitting online, continued to make some money, but that was about it for my engagement with the LEGO world.
Coming Back to the Bricks
The first step in my return to the hobby was the act of purchasing more storage drawers for my collection when I moved into a new apartment in early 2020. Having a new space to keep everything in, I started making time to reorganize the brick wall and make it look nice, and I came back into contact with the colorful plastic pieces. The second major step was the encouragement I received from Natalie, my sweet girlfriend, fiancée, and then wife. When she first met me, she enjoyed looking at all the past things I had done with LEGO bricks and I got to see my old hobby afresh through her eyes. After we got married in late ‘20, she surprised me with a gift of my favorite new LEGO set and helped me build part of it. I knew she wanted me to actually do something with the wall of LEGO bricks we had taking up space in our dining room, along with all the new parts I was starting to purchase in order to update my collection…
The third and final step was meeting up with a few LEGO friends, some old, some new. Spending time with Matt Chiles and his family, and then getting to hang out with Eli Willsea after I met him through a church acquaintance in early ‘21, were incredibly inspirational to me. It was then that I jumped back into active building with a jet fighter project that I had started several years before but had never finished. I suddenly finished it in June 2021, along with revising another older MOC, and my return to active LEGO builder was complete. Finally, I could say the dark age was over.
Observations on What is New in the Hobby: Three Areas
Five years is a chunk of time, and in coming back to my beloved LEGO hobby, I am noticing some interesting changes that have taken place. I will describe these developments in the following areas of the AFOL experience: Cultural Shift, Brick Supply, and Community Resources.
#1 – Cultural Shift
It seems to me that, when I was last active in the hobby, the LEGO brand (and public perception of the toy) was in a state of flux and self-discovery as it made inroads on popular culture. For example, the recent movie partnership with Warner Bros Animation had led to the highly-successful The LEGO Movie and was then followed by a mixed bag of sequel and spin-off films. Other commercial / licensing partnerships (outside of LEGO’s building sets) were somewhat limited; the popular video gaming collaboration with Traveler’s Tales was winding down, and other paraphernalia and apparel were less prominently offered.
What wasn’t winding down was the fans’ own energy, increasing creativity, and out-of-the-box thinking when it came to their hobby. Emerging LEGO fan media, such as Beyond the Brick, were beginning to popularize MOCs outside of the existing fan bubble and share AFOL culture more directly with the general public in my opinion. TLG noticed that their company’s conceptually-crowdsourced ‘Ideas’ product line was starting to take off and that more adult-focused, collectible sets like the Modular Buildings were more successful, the more they resembled the kinds of detailed models and nostalgic fandoms that fans produced for themselves. Not only that, these products were appealing more and more to adults who were not existing fans but enjoyed LEGO kits in new ways based off of more niche interests. TLG began to more openly embrace this broader sphere of focus and potential use of their toys by adults, both by fans and for fans.
In the last several years, the cycle has continued: AFOLs’ interests have influenced TLG’s products, and TLG’s expanded set of products (and new Age 18+ targeting, based off the Creator Expert line) has continued to spark new interest from adults. We are now seeing a major shift in product design and presentation; art-themed and decorative pieces are on the rise, with LEGO DOTS products being marketed at arts/crafts stores instead of the toy aisle. Sets based off of popular sitcoms, retro/nostalgia themes, and lifestyles are coming to the forefront. The two-way cycle of influence is also growing between the LEGO fandom and mainstream pop culture: as a couple of examples, the LEGO Masters reality TV competition, premiering in 2020, has now been separately hosted and broadcast in multiple countries, and multiple media personalities and celebrities are openly expressing their enjoyment of LEGO products across social media, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic of the last year-and-a-half.
This mainstreaming of the LEGO fandom is leading to a widening number of bilateral collaborations with new partners such as IKEA, Adidas, Levi’s, Warner Music, and more. It’s also coinciding with TLG’s increasing emphasis on inspirational campaigns such as Rebuild the World, which seeks to promote creative problem-solving in children to address global issues. TLG has also started to regularly address social causes such as online safety, environmentalism, racial diversity, non-gender-binary marketing, and LGBTQ+ community affirmation as the company seeks to bring these cultural values to the forefront of the LEGO brand and promote its social platform on the global market. I’ve really noticed, as a marketing professional, that the LEGO company’s cross-channel messaging has been growing (at an accelerated rate) in its sophistication and segmenting, with many different demographics and interests being targeted separately with new products each year.
Overall, the LEGO brand has advanced significantly from a successful toy brand and creative system to an evolving cross-cultural touchpoint that is mirroring societal values, and I’m curious to see where it goes next.
#2 – Brick Supply
It’s truly an exciting time to be a MOC builder. Having followed the LEGO community at various levels since 1998, I think I can say with some certainty that we’ve never had as dazzling an array of LEGO product lines (aka themes), sets, and parts to choose from in our building.
If their financial reports are any indication, TLG has been growing tremendously in the last several years (even despite the global pandemic) and has been especially successful in China: 91 LEGO Brand Retail stores were opened in China in 2020 alone, and LEGO set themes such as Monkie Kid and Lunar New Year have proliferated worldwide in large part because of this regional growth. I’ve noticed that Chinese factories are providing more and more of TLG’s production capacity and, aside from some inconsistencies in product quality as observed by the fans, this move by TLG seems to have largely improved the overall reach and efficiency of their supply chain.
With growing markets and production capacity, TLG has been shifting in the types of new sets they’re developing, and they’re dropping new sets all the time, much more frequently than I remember throughout the 2010s. With all those new sets, I’m noticing new pieces… most of which fit into four patterns. The first is small detail: the last four years of LEGO sets have introduced a large number of newly-molded elements in the 1×1–1×3 size range (again, the DOTS line is an example of this shift towards smaller-scale detail for aesthetic refinements), mostly in the curved slope, round tile, and modified plate families. The second is omnidirectional freedom (aka SNOT) through a host of new side-studded and bar/clip (aka 318) connective elements that allow for building side-ways subassemblies in more durable, small-space, and visually diverse ways.
The third is digitally-mixed reality (or LEGO DMR) parts that hybridize both the building and play experiences of LEGO models with smart device technology by allowing the LEGO parts to be read by the devices or vice-versa. TLG has been exploring this concept of creative play and augmented reality with their products for years, often failing initially (e.g. Life of George, LEGO Dimensions) with more software-heavy solutions, then slowly finding some success with more element-based crossovers (e.g. Ultra Agents, Hidden Side, Super Mario). Even the more robotics-focused products have been drifting from the isolated Mindstorms line into Technic and the new Boost platform. And finally, the fourth is color: the last several years have seen the biggest increase in available color options we’ve seen in the LEGO element palette since the Friends line was first introduced in 2012. Many of them (e.g. the ‘bright light’ colors, the azures and dark turquoise, the ‘glitter transparent’ effects) aren’t new, per se, but they were more uncommon (or downright rare) until the last few years. We’re also seeing brand-new satin and iridescent options, and the recent coral (from 2019) is really nice.
Lastly, in the Brick Supply area, I’m amazed by all the new ways to buy LEGO products that weren’t there before (or if they were there, they were just getting started and weren’t as effective to use). The big one that is new (at least to me) is TLG’s own ‘Bricks and Pieces’ (BaP) feature in the customer service of their website. I don’t have enough space in this article to describe the ins and outs of BaP… let’s just say that it often outperforms Pick a Brick (PaB) and even BrickLink in some categories. [March 17, 2022 Update: Bricks and Pieces has largely been absorbed into PaB and is far less useful now: read more here.] The options for third party sellers are multiplying too; where I live in Oregon, I have at least four different brick-and-mortar LEGO-centric shops (besides the LEGO Brand Retail store itself) within driving distance of me and there are more and more options online. The number of small, startup businesses (in the likeness of Brickmania) that are creating and shipping out their own custom kits is much bigger now too, a reflection on how easily they’re able to get parts as well.
In summary, it seems like an amazing combination of factors that has led to an increase in the variety and availability of parts in the last several years. Coming back to the hobby, I’m overjoyed and impressed by how easily I can pick up the themes, sets, and especially individual pieces that I want in order to build better MOCs.
#3 – Community Resources
I’ve missed being together with the community in the last few years, especially during COVID. That being said, I’ve seen the pandemic shifting even more of the focus for collaboration and sharing to take place online… especially as LUG meetings, conventions, and other in-person events still struggle (at least in this part of the United States) to find their footing again.
It’s been around a while, for sure, but the gaming-focused app Discord seems to have really taken off in the last several years as a preferred platform for subsections of the LEGO community… probably due to the next generation of builders’ preferences. When I revisit some of the more traditional websites and galleries for sharing MOCs and exchanging ideas, I find that some of the stagnant sites have completely disappeared at this point (RIP MOCpages), some of the once-active sites have now grown somewhat stagnant themselves (e.g. Flickr), and the few newer sites haven’t found much traction (e.g. Blockheads). TLG’s own web gallery project, ReBrick, was ultimately pulled down and scrapped while I was away. Now social media (mostly Facebook and Instagram) are the some of the most primary ways for AFOLs to share their work and get found (and this is often by default, if not by popularity, of those given platforms). When I stopped being active in the community several years ago, it was just a few builders who were active on Instagram… now IG use is very widespread in the community.
The last several years have seen the rise of LEGO YouTubers, such as JANGBRiCKS, who came to prominence with a million subscribers in 2018, along with a greater number of set reviews and reaction videos in the fandom. Videos, in both long-form (like YouTube) and short-form (such as IGTV and TikTok reels) are advancing in popularity across the hobby, as they provide both a more three-dimensional look at the LEGO items on display and a more up-close and personal interaction with the creators and influencers themselves (especially over livestreaming).
The AFOL blogsphere has remained mostly the same (e.g. The Brothers Brick), with a few notable exceptions: BrickNerd, which used to closely parallel TBB in terms of content, has now meaningfully diverged into more technical commentary and deeper nerd perspectives on every area of AFOL life and the hobby. We’ve always had Brickset for more straightforward product releases, reviews, and parts data… and now we also have New Elementary, which offers deep analysis and applied insights into all the newest LEGO elements and serves as a highly sophisticated tool for cross-referencing all the data.
Together, the reshuffling of the AFOL community’s online platforms, as people come and go, continues to shift the level and styles of interaction that builders have with one another. I would even say that it’s the more sophisticated commentary and LEGO product-tracking tools on some of the newer blogs that represent the maturation of the hobby as a whole and, of course, have helped me keep track of all three major areas: Cultural shift, brick supply, and community.
Reflections and Conclusion
These were just a few thoughts I had in coming back to the hobby and actively engaging with the LEGO world again… I didn’t even cover other LEGO-related projects (such as creating this website) or other community developments (such as the rise in digital building that’s accelerated the last few years with improvements made to apps like Stud.io). Overall, I’m excited and pleased to see the proliferation of our hobby culturally, the increased availability of parts we use to bring creativity and joy to others through the models we build, and the advancements in community tools and resources.
Thanks for reading and letting me share my comeback tale and observations with you! Did I miss anything? What are some of your own favorite changes and shifts that you’ve seen in the last several years? Let me know by sending me a message here.
Best,
Cole
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