Today I Learned

Ghibli movies always appealed to me growing up because their female protagonists were very grounded, weren't hyper-feminine to a comical degree, and actually did interesting things, like go on adventures. Their stories also did not focus solely on falling in love with a male character, and focused a lot on their unique internal struggles.

I would strongly suggest that anyone with a daughter give them the opportunity to see Ghibli movies. "Howl's Moving Castle", "Kiki's Delivery Service", "My Neighbor Totoro", "Porco Rosso", "Whisper of the Heart", "The Cat Returns", and "Castle in the Sky" were important to me in my formative years. Boys may like them, too! My son particularly loves "Porco Rosso", "Ponyo", and "Spirited Away."

Definitely give your kids a chance to see them.

As a boy I liked reading about boys going on adventures, but I also liked pirates, aliens, superheroes, knights, robots, etc. I think I liked all those more than I liked boys going on adventures. The ideal was a combination of the two, like Treasure Island. A girl going on an adventure was also more interesting if the girl was a princess, and in fact I liked Disney movies.

I don't think I would have liked Ghibli movies when I was a kid. Nausicaa and Mononoke would have been too scary and the others would have been boring. (But I confess that as an adult I only like those two scary ones and I think the others are boring, which is an opinion other people tend not to share.)

And how much were they sold to boys cause idiotic families pushed them only on the boys?

Sure, but what was Lego supposed to do about that? They could have started a multi-decade advertising campaign to try to change social perceptions of girls vs boys toys, and maybe that would have eventually paid off. Or they could just make specific "girl" Legos.

As a business that wants to make money, they went with the latter option and it worked really well. And realistically, I don't think we should expect individual companies to try changing society instead of just targeting their products to society as it is.

It's also worth mentioning that when Lego did studies on it, they found that girls played with their toys differently. The girl Legos were designed to be based around a different type of play, that was supposed to be more appealing. It wasn't as simple as this is in pink and has girly lettering on the box.

Cracks me up that it took Lego several years to barely scratch the surface of your well-made point. This is what happens when you have a male dominated corporate world and and you know when they hire women, they're either hiring women who will agree with them or they're not actually listening to the women that disagree with them.

I'm not into long boobs but you do you.

To be fair, they are quite unmasculine too. Inhuman, one might say.

Idk dawg, flat chested buff ladies are where it’s at.

Even better. I've got that set.

Smurfette Perri

1 seems to be a lack of female smurfs.