Open letter to LEGO on behalf of my 12-year-old daughter

Dear LEGO,

You rock. Pretty much all the time. You rock hard.

Your toys have rocked my world for so long my 4 kids have already figured out that dad will pretty much say yes to whatever they ask for if it’s LEGO.

Any video game produced under the LEGO name gets an immediate green-light in our home.

My 5-year-old boy recently saved up his $10/month allowance for 8 months straight in order to buy LEGO Dimensions (then found it on sale for $50 and was ecstatic). LEGO can even help teach a toddler Dave Ramsey lessons in fiduciary responsibility!

My mom saved all my LEGO, so half of my kids’ LEGO come from my stash of blue spaceships and grey castles from the '80s.

My oldest (the 12-year-old girl) has played with my LEGO and hers for around 12 years now. It’s one of her (and her 3 brothers’) favorite activities. We have big bins full of LEGO for custom builds, and special places designated around the house to display fixed set builds.

Admittedly, it was a harsh moment for me when I realized I was the bad guy in The LEGO Movie.

Then came LEGO Friends. Look — I’m not here to talk about the feminist movement or anything, I’m not qualified. I thought LEGO Friends were kind of lame myself. I’m not into pushing my view of what a girl should or shouldn’t play with or what she should like. My daughter plays with Barbies. And microscopes. And Bugs. And Hello Kitty. She loves pink. And Science. She reads Manga. She watches Anime. And Disney princesses. And Star Wars. She plays AND watches AND listens to Minecraft things.

But my daughter LOVES LEGO. And frankly, she loves LEGO Friends too. Heck, Nerf does the same thing with their Rebelle line (and my daughter loves those too). I’d rather she be like the little girl in the ad above, and not playing with stylized minifigs in hair salons, but building large hadron colliders w/ multi-colored bricks and custom-built minifigs of her own devising, but I’m also not going to stop her from playing the little girl. She decides, and that’s cool.

That’s what makes this letter so hard to write.

Remember when I said my 5-year-old boy saved up and bought LEGO Dimensions with his own money? Well, we (I) couldn’t get enough of all the sweet level sets, so we sat down as a group and picked out all the levels and fun packs we wanted to buy. When we’d picked out what we thought was a good selection my daughter says —

Why aren’t there any girls?

There are girls — see? It comes with Wyldstyle!

I don’t really like her. She’s kind of annoying.

Well, how about Unikitty? You love her…

Not for a game-play character.

I play as a girl all the time, why not play as Batman or something?

Because I’m tired of playing as boy characters — I want to play as a cool girl.

Well, I’m sure there are more — let’s find them!

And so we set about looking for the girls. We found all of them (including the two already mentioned):

• Wyldstyle

• Unikitty

• Wonder Woman

• Harley Quinn

• Chell

• Nya

• Wicked Witch of the West

Aaaaaand that’s it. We looked again, and again, and again — that was it. Of the 44 playable characters offered, only 7 are female. About 1 girl for every 7 boys. Of those 7, none of them were very appealing to her except for Wonder Woman (Nya is so tied to Ninjago — which her brothers worship, that she doesn’t really like her on principle). The store we were in didn’t even carry Wonder Woman or Chell (whom she’d never heard of, having never played Portal — I know, that’s my fault). In the end, my daughter quickly lost interest and went looking for a Sword Art Online game.

Now I’m no mathematician, but I believe close to 50% of the population of the planet is female. Even if only a fraction of them play LEGO games, that’s still a huge number. Is it 17% — the percentage of female characters in LEGO Dimensions? Perhaps, but in my opinion that doesn’t justify such an appallingly low count of interesting female characters available for play.

My daughter had her first glass-ceiling experience on her 12th birthday with a LEGO product

Is this LEGO’s fault? Is it the licensing? I don’t know. It’s not like they didn’t have a pantheon of female characters to select from — I mean, check out all of the 49 female characters in the game itself! From that list alone you’ve got a good 6 more characters who’d fit into the existing levels and fun packs (and have already been built into the game):

Doctor Who: Clara Oswald and Amelia Pond

Scooby-Doo: Daphne and Velma

Ghostbusters: Dana Barret

The Simpsons: Lisa

Yes, my daughter LOVES LEGO. So it kills me that she had her first glass-ceiling experience on her 12th birthday with a LEGO product she desperately wanted to play. She realized that girls were underrepresented. And I watched her as her heart sunk…and she became a little more jaded; a little less daddy’s little girl, more daddy’s young woman — against whom the odds are stacked, even when playing with toys.

I don’t know what this is, but it isn’t beautiful. Perhaps what it is, is pitiful.

Sincerely, and with hope,

Brandon