Rise of the LEGO® Cult

## History

Player 1 Icons

Player 2 Icons

Claire

Corn

Cosmic

Cow

Doxxer

Kenny

Kooky

Lyfrassir

Nadav

Speed Lion

Zapatos

Unselected Icons

On January 6th, 2020, Brando was casually invited by a friend of his on another server to join in on their antics. What was it? Well, to change their profile picture to a character icon that appears in "LEGO® Star Wars: The Complete Saga", as well as changing their name to math their profile picture. Brando’s love for both LEGO® and Pre-Disney Star Wars compelled him to join, and as a joke, he chose to be Indiana Jones, as he was indeed a playable character within the game, and as such, counted.

Naturally, since he had changed his profile picture, it appeared in every server he was in, including the Comedy Hitmen. The next logical step was to also change his nickname in every server to “LEGO® Indiana Jones”. Upon doing so, Brando introduced himself as “LEGO® Indiana Jones from LEGO® Star Wars: The Complete Saga”.

As much as Brando loved pretending to be his favorite adventuring archaeologist, he decided that he wanted to add his own touch to the joke. So he found a way to make his character into a LEGO® minifigure. Brando had a program long before the the beggining of these events that allowed him to create 3D models of these minifigures. He could choose everything from what head and hair piece he wanted, to what color he wanted each individual piece to be. After rendering the model, Brando got to work on making the decals to add to his minifigure. By the 11th of January, he revealed his own version of the character icon in the #original-content channel; though that wasn’t the final version of it. He would go on to make minor changes throughout the next few days until he was finally satisfied with how it looked.

However, like most things, he didn’t stop there. On January 13th, Brando had revealed that he had created a character icon for Cow, and by the end of the day, had also created one for Lyfrassir, his bot Speed Lion, and Cosmic. By the end of the week, Brando had made a total of 16 different character icons, each of which having three different versions. The blue icons meant that Player 1 was hovering over the character in the character selection screen, green was Player 2, and the tan one was for when neither player was hovering over the character.

The story doesn’t end there. On January 15th, Brando had created a new icon for the server. It was the Comedy Hitmen logo that was made out of LEGO® bricks (despite the server no longer being associated with the subreddit). He asked Cosmic for permission to update the server icon to the brick version, a request that Cosmic granted. Lyfrassir later changed the server name to “LEGO® Cult”. On the 17th, Kooky decided to make, in his words, “the soundtrack for the LEGO® ComedyHitmen game”. A day later, he already had a theme song ready, so obviously, Brando made an album cover for it. A day after that, Kooky had released another two songs for the soundtrack, promising that there was still more to come.

Since then, the cult has largely died out, with very few members still using both their character icons and having "LEGO®" in their nickname. The server icon and name has since changed.

## Trivia

* Brando eventually created enough character icons that he made a fake character selection screen.
* Lyfrassir’s reason for joining in was due to “peer pressure”, though no one actually bugged him to do so.
* Kenny used his character icon for a total of one day before switching back to his old profile picture. Despite this, he still kept his nickname as “LEGO® Kenny” for quite some time.
* Nadav is the only user to have a character icon that wasn’t made by Brando. His was made independently.
* Though Cosmic was late to the fad, he was one of the first people to revert back to a normal profile picture. He, like Kenny, also kept the nickname “LEGO® cosmic” for awhile.
* Aiming for Gaming changed his profile picture as I was writing about Cosmic’s trivia entry. He too kept the nickname “LEGO® друг”.
* Zapatos and Claire, former members of the server, are the only ones to have hopped on the bandwagon and not have a character icon.
* Quite a few joke characters were made into icons, including Gamer Yoda, Japanese Spider-Man, and the Power Rangers.
	+ Gamer Yoda was inspired by a post Brando had seen on r/GamersRiseUp, a subreddit that was banned shortly after the icon's creation.
* Jeff Wynis and Aux requested an icon be made of them on February 25, long after the cult had started to die off, mostly due to them barely having found out about it. Although they requested it on the 25th, they didn't get an icon until a bit later due to time zones making it hard for them to sit down and co-create the model that Jeff and Aux wanted for themselves.
* A Crusader Knight is one of the few members that didn't request for an icon to be made of them. Instead, Brando approached him about it, stating that he was sure the program he used to render the models had LEGO® pieces of a knight's armor. It's been stated by Brando himself that Crusader's icon is his favorite one he's made.
* Brando made Javi a character icon, despite the fact that Javi would never be able to use it due to the fact that he passed away. This is also why he isn't listed as one of the cultists, as the cult started long after Javi's passing.
* A select few people have multiple variants of their character icon.
* On May 30th, 2020, the cult officially died out when NathanIsntReal changed the server's icon back to it's non-LEGO version after a server-wide puzzle event had ended.
	+ Though the cult has long since died, Brando has continued making icons for those who want one.
	+ Brando himself officially left the cult on November 27th, 2021. He changed his profile picture to a gif he worked on for about 2 hours.
	+ Brando went on to make a Reddit post explaining how he makes these custom character icons, though it went mostly unnoticed.