If Food Had Feelings: Morbidly Fun Character Builds
When you meet Loke (byggi_l on Instagram) on the street, or at a Swedish fan event, or at LEGO House (where he’s been exhibiting as of late), you’ll be having a pleasant conversation with a bright TFOL. Full of great ideas, Loke will excitedly talk about the 50s- and 60s-band he’s playing in, or what sets he’s looking forward to building next. But little do you notice what comes out the second he sits down to build his own creations.
See… Technically Loke is known for amazingly cute builds full of humor. Colorful, expressive MOCs where objects come to life. Creations with a second layer to them, always telling a story. And… creations that regularly murder or at least mutilate their cast. It’s dark humor, grim at times, and while NBC’s Hannibal was played by a Scandinavian, this cheerful Swedish teenager really doesn’t look the part!
Where others would simply build a replica of a pencil sharpener, in Loke’s world it grows a pair of eyes and grimly munches on screaming pencils. A jolly dinosaur is being visited by a fiery asteroid (with eyebrows straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon), and an avocado realizes what happened to its friend when a group of tacos enjoys some guacamole.
“Brutal but cute,“ he calls it, this trademark juxtaposition that results in these hilarious creations. Always in it to make people laugh, adults and kids alike, Loke is very conscious about the subject matter. Humans or animals are off limits—but a bowl of fruits or a chocolate bar is a murder spree waiting to happen.
It all started with an episode of LEGO Masters Sweden. The teams on TV were tasked with building a funny story featuring a pear, with the person that was building being blindfolded. Loke quickly wanted to build his own pear character, and when he gave it eyes and a mouth, he suddenly realized that a happy mouth could very well also be a screaming one.
Now what would cause a pear to scream, he asked, introducing a big knife stuck in the pear’s friend, the apple. An expressive scene, colorful and fun, the build really resonated with people. Loke had found his thing and would continue his murderous stroll through the vegetable aisle and pantry, making his way all the way to stationary and office supplies, leaving a trail of mixel-eyed characters in peril, often traumatizing their bystanding friends in the process.
You can’t force ideas, obviously. So Loke walks through life imagining what would happen if food had feelings, trying to look at food through the eyes of a psychopath, he jokes. He says sometimes it just clicks and he picks up the bricks. But often Loke will write down his ideas first and then actively think as to how he’d go about building them. Having never placed a BrickLink order in his life and relying on a LEGO collection primarily fueled by birthday and Christmas gifts, he has to be smart with the limited selection he has at hand.
Once he thinks something is buildable, he will sit down and do so, but often there’s a specific part that needs solving first, not knowing if it can be built with the bricks Loke has access to. Finding alternative solutions is a big part of the fun, he says, enjoying working within the limits his collection sets him.
The secret to his success? Practice, Loke says, and lots of it. “The only way to get better is to have something bad to compare to“—wise beyond his years, Loke explains his journey with creating characters: Initially starting out with drawings he transitioned into building characters in the 3D space, adding complexity as he grew as a builder. Once comfortable with three-dimensional characters, he branched out into humanoids and tried his hands at new techniques and NPU. But he’s also quick to mention that he actively seeks out feedback from other builders, praising the Builder Improvement Initiative server on Discord which has helped him improve tremendously. In this day and age, it seems easier than ever to grow as a builder, as Loke so clearly displays.
To anyone wanting to give character builds a shot, he recommends focusing on the head. The face is what will create the character and ultimately the story, also setting the scale and the style of the rest of the scene. He has a way of making it sound easy!
Did you enjoy Loke’s builds as much as we did – and do you also feel like sticking googly eyes onto everything now? What inanimate object would you turn into a character?
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