So, if you're in that latter camp, this might be a very, very boring Blogpost for you.
If you don't know, however, Adult-Fans-Of-LEGO are absolutely a thing. There's a cottage industry of sorts - If you go to a convention and see a huge setup, or are browsing Pinterest and see an enormous LEGO construction on someone's Inspiration board, you're probably seeing the work of an AFOL.
They're a recognized component of LEGO's market, too. They know that grown-up fans are still out there. After all, while we accept that the $300 death star playset might be on some kids list, it is harder to imagine that the static, ten thousand piece Collector's Edition super star destroyer is intended to be purchased by a 12-year old.
So, let's talk LEGO.
Personally, I lapse. In High School, I packed up (most) of the bricks I owned and put them in the garage. Excepting an occasional birthday gift (Looking at you, OG Clone Gunship) I mostly sat out of the hobby. My brother and others kept buying the occasional set, and this was right around the time that LEGO licensing exploded. I basically sat out the entirety of the license boom. I never bought a Harry Potter LEGO set. I asked for the Republic Gunship because I felt it was one of the few sets that was interesting on it's own, and not because it was a star wars toy. My anti-consumerist tendencies pined for the days of the non-denominational SPACE theme, probably in part because back then, I had never been the one buying them, and I've always made a family experience out of assembling sets, because, you know, I was like six and these were 700+ piece sets.
I didn't think much about LEGO, until I was out of college. At that point, I actually had my own palce to live (and mess up, as it happened) and so, on a few trips back home or when my family would come to visit, I started to ask for pieces of my LEGO collection. The big Rubbermaid boxes all slowly trickled in, always finding a few more each time I went home for the holidays. So finally, about a year ago, I managed to get most of them in one room.
I had two primary goals here - Sorting, and Construction. Nostalgia, and the unlikely presence of instruction manuals fo rthe huge sets, drove me to start trying to re-assemble the sets from the 'Glory Days'. Core Magnetizer. Deep Freeze Defender. Spectral Starguider. Spy Trak 1. Solar Snooper. I managed to build most of these back up, with only a few substitutions. But perhaps more importantly, I managed to fill an entire workbench parts drawer system with LEGO pieces, all sorted into a sane, easy to find system.
Of course, the truth is that it's mostly small parts, and that only something like 15% of my lego collection, size wise, made it in. But the real valuable, hard to find stuff is all in there - The pieces you spend hours searching for. Most of the big stuff resides in other bins, sorted by slopes, bricks, and barring that, by color.
So, with those assembled, and more recently, some display space picked up, why am I still talking about LEGO, instead of just basking in the glow of nostalgic greatness on a shelf in my den?
The answer is twofold: Legends of Chima, and then, Mobile Frame Zero.
The first LEGO sets that I bought in years turned out to be the Legends of Chima sets. LEGO Anthropomorphic wolves? Why yes, please.
The Pack Raider was the first, and later I'd pick up the mecha-Gorilla suit and the Steampunk-raven-air unit. I can't get over how nifty these sets are, and alongside the LEGO movie, they made me realize that some part of me, in clinging to the past, had kind of missed out on one of LEGO's best decisions in the new lines, possibly learned from their foray into licensed themes - Creating actual characters. Chima especially is rife with this - And while I managed to find a Skennet (a skunk) Minifig, I still have yet to actually see one of the Fox minifigs in stores, due to rarity and / or popularity. These guys, with their big, animal-totem vehicle sets, live on my desk at work, on and off.
The second thing, and what brought me out to write tonight, is Mobile Frame Zero. This is a tabletop wargame built (heh) around LEGO mecha.
it took me this long to get into MFZ because of two factors. A slowly building interest as I saw more and more of the critters floating around, and then, I was worried that my old parts wouldn't really be what i needed to build them.
As it turns out, I finally went and picked up the parts list for some of these little buggers and, while I am, in fact, a little screwed on certain very special pieces, I generally have most of the core pieces which make up the mechas laying around in a variety of colors.
Which, ahs led me to the strange, strange thing I did today - I actually bought lego sets (Three of them, to be exact) without intending to purchase, build, and display them. I bought them solely for their parts list.
To some part of me in the past, this is bonkers. It almost seems against the Spirit of LEGO. However, I am no longer convinced that this is the case. The trouble with MFZ, to some extent, is that it requires a slightly different form of thought about construction. Trying to make smaller, stable joints to build up a mech's skeleton is arguably the most important bit of making a MFZ unit, with all of the rest just a matter of Aesthetics. I felt like, in addition to pushing more money into high piece-per-cent sets with interesting pieces and giving back to LEGO as a company, buying up sets with these skeletal bits was a sort of investment, that I could build lots of suits, down the line, based on these skeletons.
So now, I have my childish nostalgia more or less held at bay by the Chima sets sitting on my desk, complete, and play-with-able... While behind my childish self's back, purchasing sets for the sweet, sweet core pieces that help build the skeletons for my inner wargaming construction toy AFOL. So far, it seems like it's a pretty good balance.
So, expect to see more of these little guys from me in the future, and let me know if you also have a MFZ army in Tucson or want to parts draft!
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