As an old person, I occasionally hear grumblings that Lego used to be cooler and more fun back in the day. Back when you have a box full of coloured and slightly tooth-pocked bricks you could assemble into anything, rather than sets with clearly defined and circumscribed outputs and special Girl-Lego that was redesigned to be pink and filled with genderfail.
To these protestations I can only make one response:
THEY HAVE BATMAN AND AVENGERS LEGO NOW AND YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID
There are video games, there are playsets, there are oversized figures, there are iPhone apps to make stop motion videos, there are Marvel and DC characters and you can put sirens on everyone’s heads.
And if I had travelled back in time and informed 10-year-old me that when he was 40 he could build Lego dioramas where Batman and Captain America teamed up to fight Loki and maybe some dinosaurs, he would have shit his pants in terror because OH FUCK TIME TRAVEL been totally fucking stoked.
Truly this is the best of all possible worlds. There has never been a better time to be a grown-ass man with badly screwed-up priorities.
(I’m not saying there’s not some weird bullshit Lego out there, and creating a ‘Lego Lifestyle’ brand for clothes and backpacks is kind of deeply fucked up, but I can forgive a lot in the name of Lego Iron Man, alright?)