I'm glad that the elves are the minidolls. I can't imagine anyone thinking they would look better as minifigs.

Another unrealistic standard of beauty

Would a certain review by Mike Fahey on Kotaku have anything to do with this post?

Would a certain review by Mike Fahey on Kotaku have anything to do with this post?

In part, yes. The review at least managed to avoid calling the mini-dolls anorexic (at least, the text did; I didn't watch the video), but many of the commenters weren't above that kind of silliness.

I try to be fairly progressive when it comes to gender issues, but a lot of people seem less offended by the mini-doll because it's "for girls" than because (to them) it's "not real LEGO". And there's also a lot of willful ignorance being displayed by many LEGO Friends critics. I've seen comics that portray the LEGO Friends designers as out-of-touch old men, ignoring that many of the most influential designers for LEGO Friends and LEGO Elves are highly successful women. And I've seen posts that start with the assumption that LEGO is a stupid, thoughtless company that never even thought to ask girls what they wanted, when in fact the LEGO Friends development process began four years in advance of the theme's release with an in-depth anthropological study of 600 girls and their families (real observational research, not just surveys or focus testing).

People are more prepared to believe the ridiculous scenario that LEGO impulsively wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on an entirely new figure design based on nothing more than "conventional wisdom" than that LEGO designers actually did their research and had to FIGHT for these kinds of changes. A lot of the higher-ups at LEGO were naturally very worried about replacing the minifigure, which has long been one of the brand's most powerful symbols. But there was enough hard evidence supporting a new figure design to convince the company to take that risk.

All that effort has paid off enormously — LEGO Friends is now their third best-selling theme, after the unshakeable City and Star Wars. But far too many LEGO fans still insist, against all odds, that the theme would have been better with minifigures, as if they have some kind of secret market insight that no amount of research from LEGO could overrule.