Haven't watched the video, because I'm at work, but I looked at the Lego Friends sets on the Lego website.
I played with a lot of Legos as a kid, in very much the way you describe-- I built settings and staged stories in them. I had about equal amounts of the Space, Castle, and City legos. And poking around the website-- the space sets and the castle sets have gotten more and more elaborate since I was little, but the city sets are just gone. The lego city now consists of transportation and emergency services and nothing else.
I'm not happy with the size disparity between the Friends figures and the regular Legos, which will make it harder to integrate the Friends sets with a larger lego collection; and I'm not thrilled that the sets mostly offer the same approved girly interests as any other toy marked to girls (salon, veterinary clinic, cafe, yawn.)
But if gendering the sets was the only way they could manage to reintroduce cafes and clinics and houses and any modern buildings that are not emergency services and transport hubs to the line-- better that than nothing.
That lineup actually makes me much sadder for the boys growing up today, than for the girls. If the sets that I grew up playing with-- a house with a garden, a minifig assortment that had a mailman with letters and a baker in a toque and a construction worker in a hardhat and a janitor with a broom, a delivery van, a garage with a lift and a tow truck and a mechanic with a wrench-- if those have all been retired as insufficiently masculine for a male-gendered toy line, then what's left?
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I played with a lot of Legos as a kid, in very much the way you describe-- I built settings and staged stories in them. I had about equal amounts of the Space, Castle, and City legos. And poking around the website-- the space sets and the castle sets have gotten more and more elaborate since I was little, but the city sets are just gone. The lego city now consists of transportation and emergency services and nothing else.
I'm not happy with the size disparity between the Friends figures and the regular Legos, which will make it harder to integrate the Friends sets with a larger lego collection; and I'm not thrilled that the sets mostly offer the same approved girly interests as any other toy marked to girls (salon, veterinary clinic, cafe, yawn.)
But if gendering the sets was the only way they could manage to reintroduce cafes and clinics and houses and any modern buildings that are not emergency services and transport hubs to the line-- better that than nothing.
That lineup actually makes me much sadder for the boys growing up today, than for the girls. If the sets that I grew up playing with-- a house with a garden, a minifig assortment that had a mailman with letters and a baker in a toque and a construction worker in a hardhat and a janitor with a broom, a delivery van, a garage with a lift and a tow truck and a mechanic with a wrench-- if those have all been retired as insufficiently masculine for a male-gendered toy line, then what's left?