A Hot, Controversial Take On LEGO’s Lord of the Rings, Rivendell Set
Is LEGO’s new $500 set worth the price-tag, or is it blatant exploitation of fandom?
My YouTube and Instagram feed suddenly got so overtaken by LEGO photos and videos, that even I, a hard-core fan, after 30 years of building with the most popular plastic bricks of all time, have decided that enough is enough, and the Danish toymaker has gone too far this time. Their Lord of the Rings: Rivendell set announced for an 8th of March release is to me probably the most controversial set of the last decade. Not only that, but it also highlights some if not all of The LEGO Group’s many issues I have mentioned in a previous article. In a single sentence, as much as I love LEGO, the Rivendell set is the poster-child of every possible tone-deaf decision the toy company could make.
Full disclosure, I don’t care at all about The Lord of the Rings, which makes me particularly apt for expressing my unbiased thoughts about this LEGO set, as exactly what it’s meant to be — a LEGO set. I appreciate that some might even very vehemently disagree with me in the comments, stating that half the value of this particular set comes from being a Lord of the Rings fan. To that, I say bullshit. That was never the case. That is a line that every fan tells themselves when they run out of reasons to justify an exorbitantly priced purchase, which brings me to my first point.
Price
At 500 bucks, you’re either going to expect the sun and the moon, and a couple of extra planets thrown in there too for good measure, or a literal bucketload of pieces. And they call Apple expensive… I know I wrote about the similarities between LEGO and Apple, but I didn’t expect to be this accurate in my assessment! $500 or euros will actually get you about half of whatever Apple has to sell in its stores. A refurbished Mac mini for instance, is something you can easily pick up for 500 bucks. Half the iPads are cheaper, most of the AirPods are cheaper, the Apple Watch, the Apple TV, you can even get a new iPhone and I haven’t even touched on accessories.
$500 is a lot of money and if you’re going to argue that the set has 15 exclusive minifigs and some equally exclusive statue minifigs, I am going to stop you right there and beg you to do some basic maths for once. A standalone minifig costs exactly $4, and those are collectible minifigs, not just any ol’ LEGO persons. Most of them even come with little accessories like a pony, bird, sword, gun, and a bunch of other things. At best, the 15 minifigs sold with the Rivendell set are worth 50 bucks. So, now you’re looking at a set sold for $450 for which you get a little over 6000 pieces. That number, however, is very deceptive.
I am a LEGO fan, but not an idiot, so I do like to spend my money the best way I can, and that often involves getting LEGO the cheap way. Guess what, I wrote about that too! Now, look at the Rivendell set, and tell me if you notice something, like the many and colourful 1×1 tiles on the roof, the tiny 1×1 round foliage pieces, the tiny sausage pieces making up the chairs, the small omnipresent leaf pieces, the little white pipe pieces and I could go on and on. This set is chock-full of tiny pieces, and that’s a big problem.
If you ever bought LEGO pieces in a Pick-A-Brick cup, you might know, the large ones are fantastic value for money. They can fit about 3000 1×1 tiles. That is nuts! All for the low-low price of $18. Eye-balling the set, I’d say the total bricks value there is no more than $250 worth. But sure, let’s add some profit margin there for LEGO, some licensing cost, and you get to $350. What do you get for that $150 up to that exorbitant 500? A bit fat nothing, apart from the satisfaction that now you own a Lord of the Rings Rivendell set.
Size
You might think, oh God, here he comes again, complaining it’s a huge set that nobody has space for in the home; he should just get a bigger home already. Trust me, I want to get a bigger home, it would be really nice to have an entire wing dedicated to just LEGO. I would have a much easier job explaining to the girls that do end up wondering into my man-cave why half the apartment is covered in LEGO. But no, on this occasion, I don’t think the set is too big. I think it’s too damn small! My honest to God, gut reaction when I saw the first images — even the leaked blurred ones — was: “Is this it? This is all you get for 500 bucks?!?”.
I expected something breathtaking. LEGO’s Rivendell set is anything but… Very disappointed.
Absolute rip-off for starters, but it also just feels underwhelming. I am not even into Lord of the Rings, I fell asleep in the arms of one of my ex-girlfriend’s watching some walking trees. That’s all I can remember. But even I expected something a lot more majestic, imposing, jaw-dropping. And I am not alone. My fellow engineer colleague and LEGO fan, Tamás, felt exactly the same, at which point I decided this article had to become reality.
This was the moment to create something to wipe all other sets out with, and instead, this is what LEGO fans got. This anticlimactic “thing” that screams of a severely overpriced play-set. Both the Hogwarts Castle and The Disney Castle look infinitely more impressive, and they both cost less! Let’s not even mention The Lion Knights Castle, which, I think, is far superior in every possible way. And I’ll even go one step further and objectively call the Titanic the one large set that truly deserves its 680 bucks price-tag. I am very tempted to get it, and the only reason I don’t, is because I still want to keep the couch in the living-room for when I have a female visitor. It’s painful enough stepping on LEGO, you don’t want it getting in the way when the l’amour is about to begin. 😉
Fan exploitation
Just a few months ago, I was praising LEGO for finally coming up with some superb sets that don’t cost an arm and a leg, have both great design and piece per dollar ratio. But it also seems that the Danish toymaker is struggling to cope with its internal Jekyll and Hyde identity conflict, and the very moment it launches a reasonable set, it does so knowing it’s about to open a closet full of crazy skeleton sets that everyone will want, but few will have the money to buy. Not to worry though, because want will almost always trump needs, and selling a kidney, a slice of one’s liver is still a good deal for that huge Hogwarts Express, the obnoxiously large Millennium Falcon, the giant Hulkbuster and now the Rivendell. Why? Because all of these sets have a built-in audience, and not just any kind of audience, but the super-fans, the ones that are borderline religious zealots.
These are not LEGO sets any more. The Lord of the Rings Rivendell set being made of LEGO is purely incidental. This isn’t a LEGO set. This is a LEGO-branded replica of something that many Lord of the Rings fans can’t help themselves, but want, and will do everything in their power, get an extra job, rob a bank, rob a homeless person or a busker, skip their Insulin tablets, whatever it takes, just to get it. It’ll hurt, every single dollar of those 500 will be painful to hand over, but LEGO won’t give a flying brick about it, because the way they’ll look at it is just giving fans what fans want, and that’s exactly where the exploitation begins.
Fans rarely are responsible enough to stop themselves. They’ll always want. It’s LEGO’s social and ethical responsibility not to take advantage of that.
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.