Random minifig of the day: twn268

Would anyone like to buy any flowers? They last forever you know, with them being made of plastic.

I'm sure we've had at least two minifigs on RMOTD that have been from 10255

And that set, I think was the last from the modular building collection to have this face.

Ooh, Assembly Square is such a nice modular. I know some people like the classic faces, but on this figure it looks a bit off. The quality of printing and hair mold mean the face looks too plain.
It's not as much of a problem with the older simpler prints and hair pieces.

@Miyakan:
We've become so conditioned to eyelashes and lipstick being code for "female" that the classic smiley reads as "male" unless it's paired with a vintage torso print.

Too much forehead for me.

@PurpleDave said:
" @Miyakan:
We've become so conditioned to eyelashes and lipstick being code for "female" that the classic smiley reads as "male" unless it's paired with a vintage torso print."

Maybe it's a male. Maybe it's a female. Who knows?

@kyrodes said:
" @PurpleDave said:
" @Miyakan :
We've become so conditioned to eyelashes and lipstick being code for "female" that the classic smiley reads as "male" unless it's paired with a vintage torso print."

Maybe it's a male. Maybe it's a female. Who knows?"
And who cares? Shouldn't that be the point?

At least this person has the classic smiley face, which is how the face of any minifig in a Modular should be imho.
All this stupid hogwash nowadays about something "being read as" female/male/other only leads to division, hate and many more problems.

Classic smiley faces were so great imho because they could be used to display anyone. Same with torsos and hair. Every style (and there weren't that many to begin with) could be anyone. Want a guy with pigtails? No problem. Want a woman with short hair? No problem either. Want something in between? Use that classic undefined hairpiece ( https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=4530&utm_source=rebrickable T=S). Yes, on Bricklink it is called "female" hairpiece, but it looks like a hairstyle many of my (male) friends had in the 80s too. So there.

These days everything has to be spelled out in detail it seems for kids to be able to play out a specific scenario. What's happened to imagination?

Or, more to the point, this minifig can be female, male or anything else really, depending on what kids want it to be. That's the beauty of the classic smiley face to me.

There’s something slightly off about having such an old school plain face with such ‘modern’ detailed torso and hair pieces. I think if either of them were less stylised it would work better (use the hairpiece we got on the Random Minifig three days ago, for example) but the contrast here is a little jarring, makes it look a bit mannequin-esque

Is that Rajesh Koothrappali?

@AustinPowers: I always thought of that hairpiece as female as a kid, but I also used to give the classic male hairpiece AKA https://brickset.com/parts/design-3901 to the woman in 6552, more so than to the man. Both the piece you linked to and the piece I linked to have been used as Luke Skywalker's hair, amusingly enough.

@AustinPowers:
Sure, and we can just give kids stacks of 2x4 bricks and tell them to pretend they’re trains, or have Technic functions. I mean, they can just use their imagination, right?

It matters because it matters to someone, even if that someone isn’t you. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t be doing it. And if it didn’t matter, there wouldn’t be two generations of girls who grew up in the US either believing or being told that LEGO sets weren’t for them to play with because they had the wrong chromosome.

We’ve now got minifigs with modern prosthetics, with vitiligo, with hearing aids, and even with an eyepatch used to treat amblyopia because current LEGO employees may have grown up not feeling adequately represented. We have wheelchairs (three different designs), and seeing eye dogs, because someone felt those were important enough to create.

When I was growing up, there were barely any female minifigs in sets (and usually only in the largest sets where they were outnumbered at least 3:1 by males). But there _were_ female minifigs, going all the way back to faceless miniquins, which only makes it that much more obvious when there aren’t any coded as female. And when that coding is lacking, people tend to read them as male. Ask anyone how many female CMFs were in S1, and most would tell you only two. Several others are coded neutrally enough that you could use them as female (maybe not the Caveman), and the Robot technically has no gender, but that doesn’t stop people from cataloging them as either M or F. And as long as people keep doing that, they’re kind of stuck having to encode gender equitably.