I wouldn't be so down on Lego Friends. My oldest daughter is a huge fan of Lego and has different sets that are Friends and some that are Star Wars. She combines them and plays with them together. Han Solo has a dog and a cat. One of the girls flies the X-wing. It's pretty cute.

Girls love role-playing and Friends provides another outlet for them. My oldest daughter loves building and then she plays with what she created quite extensively.

I find girl/boy toy segregation sad too, but I'm a woman and when I was 4 my first post-Duplo Lego sets were the early 80s "Lego Fabuland" series: anthropomorphic animal minifigs in gingerbread-looking houses with furniture and cookers and tiles with pictures of food on.

A few years later I was asking for every Lego Space set going and building planes and spaceships. The Fabuland bricks went in the big Lego bucket and would sometimes be repurposed as space station decor. So as an introduction to Lego for younger girls I don't really see a problem with it... though I'd prefer them to be less overwhelmingly pink.

I have twin 5-yo daughters and have bought only the space-themed LEGO sets for them. They've seen the "Friends" sets but really just want to build spaceships, airplanes, and cars. I guess I'm doing something right :)

I also have to admit that one of the reasons I bought the space sets was in case they didn't like LEGOs. That way at least I could have some fun with them. Now I have to share...

Lego was almost bankrupt a decade or so ago, and partnering with first Star Wars and then other properties helped save them. Don't blame them because kids have brands/IP shoved down their throat now.

Personally, as a child, I would have loved the tie-ins because of all of the new specialized pieces that they make for them. The original sets never lasted for a super long time before it was all just component parts for building whatever I was building.

It's a shame the older stuff has gone out of fashion, but they had to do something to keep going. At one point a few years ago it seemed like they wouldn't survive. Fortunately it seems that the film tie-ins have worked so I'm grateful for that.

"what I loved as a kid wasn't that I was building a replica of some fictional universe, it was that I could create the universe in my head as I was building it."

Completely agree, this really saddens me too. Played with lego so much as a kid and I never tried to build things from films. It should be about your own imagination