Lego fans, generally, all go through a transition.
There is the childhood “Lego is fun!” beginning, the awkward “I’m too old for this” teen years, and then the eager submission and acceptance as adults: “I have money now”/”that looks cool”/”I wanted that when I was younger”. I’m at an age now where the phrase “when I was younger” is becoming more and more common in my daily life, but nonetheless, when I was younger… I was absolutely mad for Lego. Castles, and Pirates, and so many Helicopters. I had other toys but for me, there was always Lego and excitingly buckets and buckets of it. Birthdays and Christmasses were involutarily small-scale Lego events. Trips to hospital would always be rewarded with Lego. Pocket money would mean, of course, Lego. I don’t think I really had many of the big sets of the 90s when I was growing up, but there were hundreds of smaller sets and vehicles, minifigures and adventure bases, and it all massed itself into quite the respectable collection, enough for years of some pretty sweet imagination and building.
When I hit puberty I became susceptible to the same societal cool/lame (AND GREASY) pressures and problems as everyone else, and stopped collecting and playing with Lego outright. This would’ve been around the early 2000s at some point. I suspect computer games, music, and the internet played a huge part in that echoing that entire generation of children, but Lego, and the company itself were struggling at the time, with some bizarre set design choices and very questionable innovations. The Lego Group faltered immensely in the early 00s (and not just because of me, silly) dabbling in CDRoms and Webcam film-making tools, and producing absolutely hundreds of Bionicle sets, very different sets and ideas to the classic, common brick. I still don’t know what the fuck a Bionicle is. I never want to find out.
Lego fans commonly refer to their time away from Lego as “Dark Ages”, and it usually occurs at the same age for all builders. Boys are cool, right? My Lego Dark Ages lasted for several years -mostly High School, (hell) which would then of course gave way to some actual Dark Ages: my own mental health doubt, depression et al for a few years after (actual hell). I wasn’t interested in Lego any more but for years it felt like I wasn’t interested in anything any more. I didn’t do much of anything, creativity was a foreign concept, and I just really moped around for years while studying part-time. There was a lot of late nights, tv repeats and internet scrolling. Sometimes there were family dinners. While I was off The Lego Group were very much still on, and they kept producing and releasing sets throughout the noughties. Up until the early 2000s Lego as a product had only been original themes and in-house IPs, but in the turn of the millenium two franchises dominated the entertainment -and subsequently toy- industries: Star Wars and Harry Potter. I was a fan of both at the time but the actual Lego sets relating to both IP garnered no interest from myself- something something not as good as my childhood etc. Soon after this was exemplified: on a random rainy afternoon’s internet trawling, I stumbled upon LUGNET, The International LEGO Users Group Network.
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