3931 Emma's Splash Pool

For twenty years--or twenty-one consecutive Christmases now--LEGO has been a major part of the Christmas present experience for me, ever since I got my very first set, 3654 Country Cottage, as a Christmas present in 1992. And while there have been nudges away from a primary focus on LEGO over the years, I continue to look forward to Christmas as a time to add to my LEGO collection. Thanks to the fact that my in-laws all know of my LEGO habit, this year was no different. Slightly overshadowed in size among my "take" was a stocking-stuffer Friends set, 3931 Emma's Splash Pool. Ever since Friends came out, about a year ago now, I've been defending the theme as "not reprehensible" to my wife, who has since softened her hardline stance of "pink toys for girls is always bad stereotyping" approach to the theme. Nonetheless, Emma's Splash Pool is the first Friends set in our house, and including it in my stocking was a subtle joke on my behalf. Nonetheless, I rather love the little set--though possibly not for the reasons its designers intended--and I'm glad to have it. As a younger builder, I always wanted to have "at least one set" of each theme LEGO produced, a goal that has been mostly left to the wayside in more recent years, though it remains a subconscious factor in my desire to pick up small sets in themes outside my chief areas of interest.

For what it is (little more than an impulse set), Emma's Splash Pool is a reasonable collection of parts. Other than Emma herself, there isn't a single piece in this set that comes close to being a single-use part, and I am a public fan of the colours now more widely available as a result of the Friends line. Nonetheless, without getting a much larger collection of Friends-generic pieces, some of these pieces (most notably the azure "macaroni" bricks) will be difficult to integrate into other creations, due to a general lack of other pieces in the same colour. The extent to which this is something to fault LEGO for is something I do not have a firm opinion on. I also adore Emma herself more than I expected to. Her more limited articulation vis-a-vis a regular minifig (no rotating wrists or separated legs) remains one of the (if not the) strongest complaint against the design of the Friends line, but there is no getting around the fact that the Friends-figs are CUTE! Since I do not subscribe to the "pointed ears" camp of Elf-fans, I was able to re-equip Emma to be even cuter:

Note that this is not an original idea to me. At the very least, my brother did it before me. It works much too well to pass up.