The people have spoken: LEGO Star Wars characters look way better with normal eyes

09/07/202409/07/2024 Chris Wharfe 467 Views 1 Comment

A LEGO Star Wars fan has mocked up three recent minifigures with regular eyes, and the verdict across the community is almost unanimous: they’re so much better.

The LEGO Star Wars team has slowly started shifting the design language of its minifigures across recent sets, swapping out the standard black irises for different colours. We’ve predominantly seen this across non-human minifigures such as Ahsoka Tano and the Fifth Brother, as well as Sith characters including Emperor Palpatine and Darth Maul. But it’s now set to branch out to humans, too.

75385 Ahsoka Tano’s Battle on Peridea includes our first Ezra Bridger minifigure based on his appearance in the Disney+ series Ahsoka, as portrayed by Eman Esfandi. The actor wore blue contact lenses in the show to recreate Ezra’s sparkling eyes in Star Wars Rebels, and the LEGO Group has translated this to his minifigure with light blue irises.

The result has confounded the LEGO Star Wars community – to the point that X (formerly Twitter) user ahsokasconvor has mocked up images of Ezra, Ahsoka and Hera Syndulla with regular eyes instead. The replies to that tweet, and in a subsequent discussion thread on reddit, are almost unanimous: the regular eyes are a vast improvement over the current minifigures.

“Looks 10 times better in my opinion,” wrote redditor proudowlz, while JimboS101 added: “Damn, I can’t unsee how bad they look in reality compared to having normal eyes.” The sentiment is pretty much the same over on X, with plenty of people chiming in that the edited image looks ‘much better’ and ‘nicer’. A handful of users say that Ahsoka and Hera are okay as-is, but Ezra is pretty much universally preferred with regular LEGO eyes.

That’s partly because – as a few fans have pointed out – the blue irises suggest that the minifigure is visually-impaired. “Those eyes would actually work for a blind character because they look like cataracts,” Carddealer5000 wrote. It’s a technique the LEGO Star Wars team has used previously for Kanan Jarrus and Chirrut Imwe, so it is quite jarring to see it used for fully-sighted minifigures.

For now, this does seem to be the direction in which the LEGO Star Wars theme is heading. But its design language is famously flexible – remember those short-lived, hyper-detailed LEGO Star Wars minifigures around 2014? – so it’s certainly not guaranteed to stay on that path forever. And the designers do pay attention to the community, so fingers crossed a future Ezra Bridger minifigure at least gives us the choice of regular eyes…

75385 Ahsoka Tano’s Battle on Peridea launches August 1, 2024 for £49.99 / $54.99 / €54.99. Check out our detailed review right here.

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Chris Wharfe

I like to think of myself as a journalist first, LEGO fan second, but we all know that’s not really the case. Journalism does run through my veins, though, like some kind of weird literary blood – the sort that will no doubt one day lead to a stress-induced heart malfunction. It’s like smoking, only worse. Thankfully, I get to write about LEGO until then.