Weapon Wednesday and the joy of LEGO rituals [Guest Feature]

Hello! I’m ASortaOkayBuilder, and I am a sorta’ okay builder. Two of my passions in life are LEGO and Dungeons & Dragons, and I will combine the two at any given opportunity.

For me, one of the most fun things to build is tiny little fantasy weapons. Swords, spears, axes, hammers, staves, incredibly cursed artifacts–The works! I post a collection of 10+ Weapons each Wednesday for a little thing I like to call “Weapon Wednesday.” Some of these I will actually use in the DnD sessions I run, but most of them are built just for the love of the game. 

In the process of posting these each week, I’ve come to learn the term “knolling”! 

Knolling.org , a real life actual website, defnes it as “the practice of arranging similar objects in a precise, perpendicular manner. The goal of knolling is to create a sense of order and clarity in a space by aligning and organizing the objects within it”… Which I guess I accidentally started doing to satisfy my own longing for precision! It is very satisfying though, isn’t it? 

People frequently ask how I come up with ideas for weapons, and I always answer the same way. It’s rarely about planning to make a specific armament or implement at any given time, and more about sitting down with a bin of the fiddliest little Lego pieces I own, and clicking things together until it looks cool. Typically, I try to make things at least semi-believable as a proportionate weapon for a minifigure, but we also know that everyone loves some Giant Anime Swords, so some of them do get a little outta’ control. 

Rarely are weapons made with specific weeks in mind. When building, I tend to create as many little builds as I can make look nice, and keep them in a big pile, waiting to be used in a future collection. It’s frankly horrifying. 

When when I sit down to actually lay out the post, I pick my background color. This immediately helps dictate what weapons I might want to use that week, as I try to avoid putting black weapons on a black background, for example, or maybe I’ll put blue on a pink background for that extra pop! From there, I start with a few weapons that I’m excited to highlight, or that feel thematically appropriate together. Then it’s just a matter of building around that, using shapes and sizes that fit together like a puzzle. Sometimes fun prints of 1×1 and 1×2 tiles help to fill in those awkward gaps where a full weapon wouldn’t fit. 

One of my favorite pieces to use has gotta be the delightfully unexpected Mini Doll Shoulder Pads (Item No: 5106). They make for such an excellent crossguard on swords, and really fit a lot of detail and shape into such a small shape. More than any other piece, it’s the one I get asked about. 

One of my personal favorite swords I’ve ever made highlights that part quite well! I’ve included it in a few minifigure characters over the years, including recently for my interpretation of Galahad of the Round Table for the collaboration y’all featured recently. It just feels like legendary sword from myth, y’know? Gold, shiny, a radiant gemstone… What’s not to like? 

It’s been crazy to see any sort of traction on a hashtag, but #weaponwednesday is still picking up speed. When I first started posting on Instagram, the hashtag was almost entirely showcasing guns and knives, but now, over a year later, it’s slowly but surely starting to be filled with… Uh. Tiny, plastic guns and knives (And other more fantastical weapons, obviously).

Big shout out to @AmorphousBricks, who’s been posting Weapon Wednesdays right alongside me since essentially the beginning. We even hosted a Battle Axe tournament last March to see who had the baddest axe in all the land, with @k2_kilo being the winner with an icy snowflake/sawblade inspired axe. Maybe we should do another contest sometime soon?

I’d also pay a lot of credit to the entire crew of the Umbasa_LUG for the continuous inspiration. @jdm_bricks is the realest one. @beyondb0nes is hugely underrated and makes some of the cleanest and cohesive figures out there, if you ask me. @_motherofcatdragons_, too! Gosh, I really could keep going… So I will.@haon.brx, @2p_figs, @brickbot_studio…  There’s so many cool and creative builders that I’ve gotten to know in the last year! And finally, a whoop and a holler for @masterbuilderalec. He’ll know why.

All-in-all, though, posting things weekly has been a wonderful little comfort in the tumultuous times that seem ever present these days. It’s a tiny ritual that I get to share with everyone, and all I gotta do is hope they enjoy it! I’m truly always delighted to see what folks come up with or what ideas for weapons they have to share.

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