For better or worse, LEGO Icons 10375 How to Train Your Dragon: Toothless redefines what it means to be an 18+ LEGO set, moving away from difficulty and into new territory.
On the official LEGO store, the LEGO Group defines 18+ builds as 'advanced' and 'complex' LEGO sets – but that appears to be changing. The reveal of 10375 How to Train Your Dragon: Toothless subverted what a lot of people expected from the set, leaning into a more chibi style than an authentic cinematic one.
Despite the cutesy, cartoonish look, the LEGO Icons set comes with the mature all-black 18+ branding, a decision that informed every aspect of the design, according to Toothless' designer, Jae Won Lee.
"The building experience is the most important factor for this model," he explained in a roundtable Brick Fanatics was present for. "A big consideration for a designer is to try to satisfy our existing fans and future fans at the same time. After a lot of research and benchmarking, and after several meetings with our IP partners, our strategy was a small and compact model for 18+ fans."
A build experience geared towards 18+ fans once, by the LEGO Group's own definition above, would have been a complex build – but that's also not true for 10375 How to Train Your Dragon: Toothless. Jae highlights that, although there are a lot of ball joints and a turntable included to capture the movement of the head, 'the main point of the model was not to have tricky functions'. His goal with the set was to create 'a good build experience for everyone', including families.
"When I design a LEGO set, I always consider the family build experience," Jae explained. "Parents and kids can build parts of this model separately: the head, the neck, the body, the feet, the wings, and the tail."
That leaves us with an 18+ set that has a cartoonish look and relatively simple build that is geared just as much towards younger builders as it is adults. So what about it, then, is 18+?
This appears to be a shift in the definition of the age range that goes back years, moving further and further away from being related to difficulty. In June 2022, LEGO Creator Expert rebranded to Icons, taking the 'Expert' that implied trickier sets out of the name entirely. At the time, the LEGO Group said the new label is intended to ‘help our adult consumers easily to find new, immersive builds or models that link to their interests and passions’.
Over the years since then, more and more sets have appeared in LEGO Icons that aren't necessarily difficult to build, but rather geared towards adult interests or display, like the meteoric growth of the Botanical Collection into its own theme and more recent releases like 10331 Kingfisher Bird and 10391 Over the Moon with Pharrell Williams.
For years now, the LEGO Group has been deepening its adult market, with that demographic growing and becoming less homogenous than before. That diversity of adult fans of LEGO means that there needs to be more diversity in the products offered in the 18+ range, to cater to all of those tastes.
That brings us back to 10375 How to Train Your Dragon: Toothless and why some fans were surprised to see the cartoonish style and small build dubbed 18+. It makes a lot more sense when you take the larger picture of the LEGO Group's growing adult market and the more diverse customers it needs to cater to in recent years. Toothless might not be for the same adult builders who want to buy a modular building or 10316 The Lord of the Rings: Rivendell – but it certainly still keeps a different sector of the adult market in mind.
Its release marks a clear point in the timeline of the 18+ age range, but isn't a sudden change by any means. It's merely the next step in the ever-changing world of adult LEGO fans and their tastes.
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