I don't know if this topic has already been done.... but it just occurred to me...
I prefer good old fashioned classic castle back during the 80s and 90s and such.
I mean, don't get me wrong, some of the new stuff is okay, but it feels like they became a little stereotypical as of the last decade.
What I mean to say is, back when we had Castle 6075, Black Falcon's Fortress, and Black Monarch's Castle, there was more anonymity among the factions, from what I could tell. Sometimes the woodsmen were labeled as 'outlaws' or 'troublemakers' (See: Dungeon Hunters 6042, etc), but otherwise, they didn't have this stereotypical, clear-cut 'good and evil' nonsense you see in kid's cartoons. If you bought King's Castle 6080, you remember that they had a prison, and you could lock a prisoner in the dungeon, except that the prisoner actually had the same emblem as the rest of the king's men.
Now, the woodsmen weren't really these horrible, awful folk, but just got into mischief and it was hinted they broke the law here and there.
But when Fright Knights came along, suddenly Lego Castle themes continuously got into this good and evil stuff, which was followed up by Cedric the Bull in Knight's Kingdom, and then in Knight's Kingdom 2, you had Lord Vladek.... and then you had grim reapers dressed in black, trolls with black armor... And more recently, Castle involves a 'dark wizard' with black knights at his disposal, black castles.
I don't know if it's just me seeing this, but it seems to me as though there's this two-party dichotomy with your simplistic themes of good versus evil, and I miss the days when the black knight and the red knight(Knight's Tournament: 6083) had the option of being rivals, being blood enemies, or just being involved in a friendly competition, without the one-dimensional alignments of 'good and evil' automatically assigned to them because this guy is in black armor and this other dude is in light colors, and one guy has a mean look on his face while the other has brave, confident resolve.
Sure, the variety in facial expressions has changed some things, yet, from my point of view, some of the creativity that used to go into the imagination has been robbed for those sticking to the canons of today's Castle, because their pre-established gear, combined with their demeanors makes it overly obvious who is an aggressor/antagonist, and who is a good guy.
I personally like a little bit more complexity in character concepts, and while it's not a terrible thing to have black and white, a bit of grey breaks up the stark contrast that sometimes feels overpowering when you have this very bland, one versus the other, and nothing that's morally ambiguous... such as a neutral faction.
I hope I'm not breaking any rules by ranting about this(I'm very new here), but this has been on my mind for some time and I really wish Lego would go back to having multiple factions like we had in the 80s, as is the case in the very first series of castle systems(Yellow castle era), then the age when the Crusaders, Falcons, and Black Knights(black monarch's men?), and the Forestmen all competed within a diverse ecosystem.
I personally feel that the Wolfpack was the beginning of all this(they seemed to have replaced the woodsmen), and it gradually led to the Fright Knights, and then other stuff like that.
Thoughts/Feelings/Comments/Criticisms/Complaints/Compliments?
EDIT: I'm kind of wondering if Blacktron vs Space Police was the precursor for all of this, since that predated Wolf Pack.