Lego Friends, err, FIENDS

[Zahru II]

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[IVhorseman]

But if you make the protagonist or whatever of some adventuring set a female with her plucky male sidekick boyfriend who cooks and cleans and always needs rescuing, you're addressing both little girls who want to be awesome as well as boys who like things that are awesome. Awesomeness can be appreciated across gender boundaries.

Not by seven-year-olds - you do this and sales drop by half. Little kids are ridiculously gender conscious.

The great thing about minifigs is that their heads are easily interchangeable, and your female protagonist can become a male one, or vice versa. If this is explained on a box well enough for a little kid to figure it out, I think it just might work. Just try and stay away from printing tits on the torsos and you're square.

[stubby]

: \

Oh don't get all :\ on me, it's just a one-day ban. He'll be back tomorrow.

The great thing about minifigs is that their heads are easily interchangeable, and your female protagonist can become a male one, or vice versa. If this is explained on a box well enough for a little kid to figure it out, I think it just might work. Just try and stay away from printing tits on the torsos and you're square.

What we need are boobs that are also interchangeable. Hey Lego! If you're listening, http://www.brikwars.com/downloads/valky ... 0x1024.jpg

[stubby]

Anyway here's my favorite bit from that article I linked to earlier.

I suspect in my case it would have been even more work for the rest of the world if I hadn’t had the experience of growing up poor, which meant that every time I saw or read someone who’d never been poor expound obliviously on what was really going on with poor people, I had to fight back the urge to beat them to death with a hammer. The experience of having to deal with people wealthsplaining poverty, and then trying to get them to listen to someone who had spent actual time in poverty, made it possible for me to more easily conceptualize the idea there were lots of subjects about which I had great potential to show my ass simply by opening my mouth.

Which doesn’t stop me from doing so, mind you. Knowing you have vast potential to show your ass doesn’t mean you won’t show your ass. It just means that you have to own up the fact you did it to yourself when it happens, rather than shifting the blame elsewhere. Which is also a hard thing to learn to do. It’s especially hard when you see yourself being sympathetic or aligned to the plight of others and you still get called for ass-showing. It makes you want to ask for the “hey, I’m on your side” discount on your ass-tasticness. But just as the rest of the world does not see its highest life crisis as helping the White Male understand his unearned advantages, neither is it required to clap its hands encouragingly when the White Male says “look, I’m helping,” especially when in reality he’s making kind of a mess.

[Zupponn]

I'm going to say that I stand with Brag on this issue.

I've actually been happy to notice that more and more companies in the past couple of years have been shying away from posting "Happy Holidays!" and have been going back to saying "Merry Saturnalia!". Most political correctness in my opinion is a fucking farce.

[Arkbrik]

But if you make the protagonist or whatever of some adventuring set a female with her plucky male sidekick boyfriend who cooks and cleans and always needs rescuing, you're addressing both little girls who want to be awesome as well as boys who like things that are awesome. Awesomeness can be appreciated across gender boundaries.

Not by seven-year-olds - you do this and sales drop by half. Little kids are ridiculously gender conscious.

The great thing about minifigs is that their heads are easily interchangeable, and your female protagonist can become a male one, or vice versa. If this is explained on a box well enough for a little kid to figure it out, I think it just might work. Just try and stay away from printing tits on the torsos and you're square.

This is a particularly reviling thing about the Fiends... their parts are not interchangeable with regular fig parts. Gender segregation ftw

[stubby]

I've actually been happy to notice that more and more companies in the past couple of years have been shying away from posting "Happy Holidays!" and have been going back to saying "Merry Saturnalia!". Most political correctness in my opinion is a fucking farce.

True enough, but that's a much different thing than saying that all political correctness is automatically a farce unless some guy who's never had to deal with objectification grants permission that your suffering counts as suffering.

[mgb519]

I'd personally assume it's not a farce until you can prove otherwise. Often I can do so, but at least I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.

[stubby]

That's kind of what this boils down to: there's a not-insignificant number of women who are looking back on a life of being treated as objects, forced to take the back seat and wait for men to decide their position in society, their value as human beings, whether their opinions and emotions are valid, whether or not that really counted as "snuggle," etc. They know the role that popular media played in turning them into objects, in making them and everyone around them believe that that was their proper role in life, and in allowing men to grow up never questioning or even noticing the "not hurting anybody" privileges associated with relegating women to that role. And more immediately, they can see the direct effect that each new reinforcement of the desubjectified-woman stereotype has in the lives of their daughters as they go through grade school, as they go through high school, as they hit the professional world.

You talk to women about this, especially mothers, and they see the direct connection between the toys and cartoons that make boys always the heroes, and the kids who grow up learning to treat women as supporting cast. For mothers of girls, it's not some philosophical idea they're debating in the abstract, they don't have to theorize. It's their daily reality. It's what they had to live with growing up, it's what they have to face every day they interact with other people, till the day they die there's never going to be a day where that de-protagonization isn't forced on them on some level. Every one of them has a different set of experiences to draw from, some feel it as more or less of a burden, each sees things in a different light than others, but I haven't found one yet who's read Brag's posts up there and not wanted to take a cue from Scalzi and "beat him to death with a hammer" for being such the poster child for self-satisfied oblivious privilege.

So my opinion is that the Friends line is actually really good, because it puts its girl characters into a lot more empowered roles than a lot of people realize at first glance. A lot of my women friends on the other hand, the moms of daughters in particular, feel like Friends is just one more thing that will feed into their daughters' second-class treatment as women.

I tend to respect the moms' position more highly than my own on this particular subject, because they know what it's like on a much deeper level to deal with constant monotonous unquestioned "not hurting anybody" sexism day in, day out. They're experts.

[Ham701]

On a different note, Fiends are great for painting and customizing. I posted a bunch of examples of badass custom fiends a while back, but some sexist pricks like RM dismissed them.

[stubby]

Oh yeah, those are sweet. Good link here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1833881@N25/pool/

[Ham701]

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7009/6729138057_3949ec6246_b.jpg

And look, there's even Bragallot's tranny cousin!

[Silverdream]

Not Brag. He was the only person brave/stupid/racist enough to say "niggas" in a serious manner.

[Insert_blank]

I really can't understand why "P.C." has become bad word or why being P.C. is considered bad or wimpy or whatever. It means stopping for one second and considering if someone may be hurt by what you're about to say or do. Whether hat person is "justified" or not doesn't really matter. The point is for whatever reason it will hurt/offend them. Isn't that good enough reason in and of itself NOT to be an asshole?
Telling someone they have no right to have a basic emotional reaction to something is a really silly thing to do. I used to say the word "pretty cool guy" a lot until a friend said "Hey... whenever you say that word it makes me cringe a little bit and feel really uncomfortable could you please stop?" I stopped and said "Oh, wow. Here's a living breathing person who is upset when I say something and it took him a long time to actually say that to me in person. How long has he been feeling bad because I didn't stop to think about his feelings?"

Showing basic decency to people shouldn't be marginalized or called wimpy or a waste of time.

[Natalya]

That's what it means to be objectified.

Err, I think you mean marginalized.

That's what objectification is in a nutshell.

I really think you're talking about marginalization...

Bury your white guilt already, stubs. I didn't make society the way it is today, I did not murder anyone or denied them a job based on their skin colour or gender, so I have nothing to apologize for. And if you think I do because I'm white, well, then you're exactly the same thing you're trying to accuse me of.

Recognizing your privilege isn't having white guilt. I'm white too by the way and like I can recognize simultaneously that A: those of other races have disadvantages in our society, and B: that I'm not necessarily guilty for it, but even though I might not be guilty, it still happens.

For example, I know that when I look for an apartment I don't have to worry that the people at the leasing office are going to try to find a way deny me on account of my skin colour. That's not me doing something racist, it is just me recognizing that other people may be at a disadvantage.

I'm going to say that I stand with Brag on this issue.

I've actually been happy to notice that more and more companies in the past couple of years have been shying away from posting "Happy Holidays!" and have been going back to saying "Merry Saturnalia!". Most political correctness in my opinion is a fucking farce.

That's a shitty example because really it is just the profit motive at work there.