Uh, did you read my post at all? Because this argument was directly disproved by it. Duskfall is basically about as violent as a good amount of Bionicle, and is very much aimed at the very audience you claim LEGO’s approach is going to lose.
I, again, am personally not a fan of how violent Duskfall was, but it does exist nonetheless.
Yes, there were three or four small images showing light gore and an indiscernible squashing. DuneToa’s comic pages were far more direct and explicit in what happened.
It can’t be aimed at an older audience and also at the core demographic. At that point it isn’t ‘aimed’ at anyone.
It’s not much more violent than Fortnite, tbh. The image of an Oni being stabbed has very little of the wound shown, in fact I think the gratuitous blood splatter is used to avoid actually depicting a stab wound. And crushing an enemy with a giant boulder has been in many ways an excuse by filmmakers for decades to avoid actually showing the gore of crushing someone.
Bionicle at times went out of its way to describe injuries (ie. the Toa of Plasma that Zaktan is implied to have eaten, who was turned into molten metal and scraps of armor, the gelatinous guy whose name I forget getting splattered everywhere like jello), but the shots I’ve seen from Duskfall look like the average combat injuries in a 1980s cartoon, where they’re simultaneously over the top and shot in ways that downplay the gore. It’s like how the A-Team has everyone using real guns, but there’s maybe 3 episodes where someone gets shot, and no one ever dies (to my knowledge).
Duskfall does show corpses, which is above average for Ninjago though.
It’s not being aimed at the core demographic; that’s what I’m trying to say. Just like Monstrosity, it’s targeting that older demographic over Ninjago’s primary demographic.
*Which Ninjago characters are unfortunately in (including one created by Greg Farshtey).
I honestly forgot about those; I’ll correct that post accordingly.
I forgot about Zaktan’s light snack 
Bionicle does have a big advantage in that its content was rarely depicted visually, as most of it was shown only in the novels. Still though, it did depict character death and maiming way more frequently than any other LEGO property has before or since, and did so in a way that maintained its kid-centric focus.
Sometimes I like to poke fun at Greg fir his silly moments, but he really did do a good job of translating much of the Bionicle world into a digestible format aimed at kids while simultaneously covering heavy topics and grave moments.
Probably the greatest critique of Duskfall’s older audience focus, tbh. It compares in its depiction of violence to an online multiplayer game primarily inhabited by Ninjago’s target audience of pre-teen to early teens, which someone at LEGO got the memo on because the ninja are now there too.
I think it’s rather telling when a property becomes more “adult oriented” by focusing on heavy violence being the drawing factor. If that’s your only selling point, you’re not selling anything at all. Thankfully Duskfall also has better animation than the rest of Ninjago, but we’ll see if that carries it.
It’s the same advertising strategy as Samurai Jack, which was forced to self-censor on cable TV by making most of the characters who die be robots instead of human henchmen. This feels kind of like how other “adult-oriented” shows resort to focusing on other immoral or unethical themes to maintain the claim that they’re telling a “mature” story, when it’s the actions and not the story that’s mature content.
Some of you seem to think I’m defending Duskfall’s direction; I really don’t like it, actually. I merely thought it was relevant to bring up in this discussion.
You know, I find it so ironic how those kinds of topics as now supposedly too mature for LEGO to cover in an original theme, even while now they quite openly break their own standards by making sets based on licenses with explicit violence such as Jaws, or sometimes, they even make sets that actually depict a scene in a movie where an explicit murder takes place, such as the Smeagol and Deagol Icons set they did last year!
To me, it seems like their avoidance of violence doesn’t come from some deeply held ethical convictions, as their company policy against depicting violence in their sets is clearly flexible depending on whether the sets in question would sell or not. Rather, the only reason they refrain from showing too much violence in their sets and media is probably just so they would avoid offending parents and lose money as a result.
The Hypocrisy of LEGO is honestly so outstanding, it’s not even funny. They really have no excuse why they can’t tackle more mature themes in their media anymore when something like 60% of their current product output is explicitly aimed at adults, even some of their current Ninjago Legacy sets that have also adopted the collector black box branding!
Even without the intrigue slant, I always liked the idea of a “Villain Factory.” It felt like that was what everything was building towards, at least.
There were certainly a lot of interesting ideas Hero Factory had that were never explored properly. Early on, they made a big deal out of the Hero Cores needing to be recharged and how if a Hero’s core “dies,” they can be restored, just not with the same identity.
But some time after Ordeal of Fire, the Heroes needing to be charged at all sort of became non-existent, or at least never factored into the story. And we never got to see or hear of any Hero of consequence losing power and essentially “dying.”
So I definitely agree that Hero Factory should have gotten more time, but that’s very retrospective; I remember being a 10-year-old clamoring for its swift end and Bionicle’s return. 
I wonder if this was intended to cover for VA/writing changes in the videos, since Surge and Evo both suffered heavily from this.
I can buy that for Evo, but for Surge…
Surge died and became an Aussie in Invasion from Below lol.
I hate and find it funny at the same time.
Another round of unpopular opinions:
LEGO is genuinely loosing a lot of potential customers through their decision to focus exclusively on Licensed Themes. This might seem counter intuitive because it would appear at least at first glance that licensed themes are so much more profitable… However, there a few things that I feel like LEGO is completely missing when it comes to this:
With all this in mind, it feels like today Original Themes are an endangered species, not because people don’t want them anymore, but because LEGO decided to take the easy way and only pursue whatever makes the most cash the most quickly without much effort or risk. And while they are trapped in this mindset, they are completely oblivious to the fact that they could be earning way more money from original themes than from licenses, because a devoted fan base is going to continue buying your products consistently, rather than appealing to causal adults that might buy one set based on a license they like and then don’t care otherwise. That to me would be the equivalent of if a company like Nintendo suddenly decided to abandon their own original IPs like Mario in favor of making Sports games like FIFA because casual adults who are into sports are more likely to buy those than a Mario game.
Right from the start, Lego’s policy has never been claimed to be against any and all violence; it’s only ever been against modern, realistic violence. I vaguely recall some statement in which someone from Lego said that the (extremely paraphrased) goal was to avoid sets that resembled anything a kid might “see on the news”. This isn’t some modern “relaxation” of the rules either; Lego has been making weapons in their sets for close to half a century.
While I do agree that Lego has probably depicted more than they might have been willing to decades ago, I can’t think of any example that actually breaks this rule as I’ve described it above.
It was really fascinating the other day when I was subbing K-5 kiddos at an elementary school and they cared more about just building with the bricks than any licensed themes. They made tanks and beach houses and little marble tracks with the LEGO pieces. They didn’t make anything from liscenced material.
Something for LEGO to consider.
I genuinely have to question whether your average kids even know or care about all the Licenses that LEGO is chasing now. How many kids under the age of ten in the West watch or even know about One Piece, for example? I certainly didn’t when I was a kid. Or what about licenses based on old movies, like Indiana Jones? Are 8-year olds, the alleged target demographic of those sets, really the people who are actually watching those old movies from the 1980s?
I have to commend LEGO for at least being honest and admitting that the real target demographic of those licensed sets are actually nostalgic adults rather than kids, as their older marketing would have claimed, even if the fact that they focus on adults only so much now is completely wrong.
I think the reality is that most average kids would rather just play with generic toys that don’t represent anything specific but just regular real world things. That’s why lines like City or Friends continue to be so popular.
I guess this would depend on what would be considered “modern” warfare. Are WWI and WWII considered modern? Because LEGO has done plenty of quite realistic looking vehicles from this era in lines like Indiana Jones, and sometimes even as actual accurate models, such as the Sopwith Camel set (a recreation of a WWI military plane). Does that mean that tanks, as long as they represent WWII era tanks and not modern ones, are allowed?
Or what about lines like Dino Attack? The fact that such a line came out all the way back in 2005, before the avalanche of licensed themes and before lines like Indian Jones, should be even more surprising. Even though those are technically fictional sci-fi vehicles and not based on real models, I would say they do look quite similar to the types of vehicles you might see on a news broadcast today. Does that mean that the restriction is against creating direct replicas of real world military vehicles, but as long as they are fictional or have a sci-fi twist on them, they are okay?
LEGO doesn’t seem to have ever been very consistent when it comes to enforcing this rule, not even in the past, let alone today.
That might be quite common actually. I first got into Star wars when i found novelizations of the OT at a flea market when i was at least 14, and didn’t watch the movies until way later.
I just looked this up, and LEGO considers Middle East conflict and later wars as “modern” in their definition (as per a CNN article where the topic of military depictions in LEGO sets occurs.) Presumably this is why we can’t get Halo sets (the vehicles in Halo as well as Marines are blatantly based on modern-day Middle East conflict vehicles and gear, so they would definitely violate LEGO’s policies despite being sci-fi) while we can get Star Wars and Indiana Jones (these depict fictional/pre-modern wars with clear good guy/bad guy factions, whereas current-day wars are both more ambiguous and obviously carry real consequences for depicting various factions in one way or another).
Lego obviously doesn’t want to make a set that includes real terrorist factions (even if they’re shown being stopped by Germany or Russia or Kenya, etc.) as it would force them to choose sides. Their current policy allows them to remain relatively noncommittal regarding current wars, but depicting actual conflicts in sets would again make them have to pick a side to promote in each set, whereas Indiana Jones obviously has the Nazis/native cultists/magic skeletons as bad guys while Jones and his friends have to stop them from killing the heroes/unleashing powers beyond control upon the world.
I would say that one of the most popular kid frienldy franchises in the entire world, that keeps breaking records in terms of views and sales, both in the East and West, is not a very good example.
It’s undeniable how insanely popular the Netflix Live Action show is, and, while you could argue that the comic books and animated show are more fit for a more mature, teenage audience, the live action is made specifically to appeal to kids, which is what Lego is capitalising on.
back when you and I were kids, OP didn’t have much of a presence outside of Asia, so it was easy to not know about it, but if you’re a kid in 2026 and you’re allowed to go outside or watch TV, it’s basically impossible for you not to at least be aware of it.
Personally, I would go as far as to say that One Piece is a prime example of a Lego License theme that’s more popular with kids compared to adults, and a clear example that lego is doing something correctly for once.
If I am not mistaken, Lego did have to cancel an Indiana Jones set a couple years back because of the movie’s arguably problematic and dated depiction of Native Americans.
Lego Indiana Jones was a product of its time, and I just can’t see Lego releasing the kinds of sets they were releasing two decades ago with this theme.
–It was actual Indians that were depicted in a racist manner by The Temple of Doom, but, otherwise, yes.
My humble opinion is that the only people getting offended would be those who don’t even like the franchise and sets. Nobody gets up in arms about the portrayal of Egyptians in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” also being extremely stereotypical, as well as Turks and Syrians in “The Last Crusade”. Heck nobody is up in arms about the Chinese in the same film, either. Cancelling the set was a cowardly decision that left one of the most memorable Indy films in the dust. But oh well.
I’d argue, and this is something Lego Adventures did, is portraying stereotypes of all ethnicities are part of that 20th Century Adventure genre, including Aussies and Americans and British people. It’s part of the fun of the genre. It also ironically makes people actually like different cultures; my exposure to Indiana Jones actually made me more curious what China, India, Egypt, etc. were actually like.