Harry Potter Advent Calendar - Day 5

May have to find this advent calendar after the holidays.

@beanjo68 said:
"Why did LEGO make their dresses so weird again?"

That may be how they decided to make dresses with medium legs instead of creating another mould.

They should just use the standard dress piece for figures like this. Turn Hogwarts into a school of Amazonian women.

"Unfortunately, her subsequent minifigures have featured the same skin tone and that continues here. I suppose this consistency should be applauded"

If I make a mistake and refuse to rectify it (heck, even double down on it), my boss will not applaud me for my consistency. Same should apply here.

The skin tone thing bugs a little me cos Cho Chang is pretty pale in the films

Hi,

I’m not sure that I understand the debacle over this minifigure’s skin color. Cho Chang in the movies is of Oriental descent; this color seems to make sense to me. Perhaps it could have been a little lighter, leaving this tone for those of Indian (from India) descent, like the Patil sisters. I think this mini figure is fantastic and LEGO has done a great job capturing this supporting character.

Sigh, I always cringe when I see people get asian skin tones very wrong. First of all I'm asian, My entire family is a bit tan. But some of of them are Super Pale. Paler than most white people. As their normal Skin tone. Cho Chang was quite pale. ( of course I shouldn't be surprised, As her name is literally Cho Chang. The most stereotypical name ever)

@beanjo68:
Minifig leg selection is currently limited to short legs (3 plates high), midi legs (4 plates high), and regular legs (5 plates high). The boys from Harry Potter's year have been using the midi legs for sets based on the movie this HPAC is based on, so the girls all have to match their height. The new skirt element is 5 plates tall, so they'd all tower over their dates otherwise, and there's no way they're going to make a new, less useful skirt piece just for an Advent Calendar. Of course, now that I said this, they will naturally come out with a shorter skirt that will never be used to reproduce these minifigs, just like what happened with Bat-Wizard.

@country_rob:
It's...complicated. Yellow used to be the standard for every minifig, until they started doing aliens, skeletons, and horror movie monsters. The NBA player minifigs and the first Lando minifig pressed the issue when they started depicting skintones. At the time, the problem was that the Nougat color was too saturated for white people, so they introduced Light Nougat. Since then, Light Nougat has largely been restricted to use for people of European descent, so using it for a POC would be problematic from that perspective. However, Katie Leung does have very light skin, so making Cho Chang have the same skin color as the Patil twins creates the opposite problem.

The stupid thing is, people are complaining about the wrong problem. Compared to someone like Bonnie Wright, Katie Leung does have noticeably darker skin, so the Nougat skintone makes sense in that regard. However, Afshan Azad and Sitara Shah have skin that's even darker than Medium Nougat, so the real problem here is that they chose to give the Patil twins Nougat parts like Cho. They don't seem to like using Medium Nougat for human minifigs, though.

While I agree with many fellow Bricksetters that the skin tone is not ideal here, it is for my wife, and she's been limited to the Cho and Jasmine collectable minifigures for sig-fig representation--she used the head of Raj from The Big Bang Theory for a while. She is thrilled by this Advent Calendar for its Cho and Patils as they provide her with more heads, hands, and bare arms--plus the new outfits are nice and so is this alternate expression!