Let the stones have vengeance too! It is not too late!

When we entered our dark age, we expected the laygoes community to behave and not rock the boat in our absence, but THEY HAVE NOT. New sets and new colors and new MOCs and new trends have emerged.

César Soares is a standout builder of this trend, his work championed by Bro-Bricks time and again.

His Blue Water Castle is also worth a look.

Today we examine an emerging castle aesthetic, which henceforth shall be dubbed Craggy.  It oozes with a fanciful and majickal sensibility.

Luke Watkins Hutchinson was blogged before, and is likely the most prolific Craggy builder.

These creations have texture.  Their creators mastered the techniques required to conceal the stud, and can now move on to embracing the stud strategically, using it to create ruinous and organic forms.*  Walls are askance, roofs curve and crumble, and the ground is alive.

David Hensel has an extensive library of Crag.  His Falling Water is an interesting non-castle Craggy moc, that feels more restrained and careful in crag application that these others.

And yet, for all this, we find that we cannot fully embrace it.  Conscious of the potential hypocrisy on our part, we feel these MOCs too affected.  They are self-consciously fiddly in their craft, noisy when subtlety would serve, overwrought, indulgent in displays of technical skill.

JaapXaap's Crag mocs boldly declare "dark purple is in"

The builders are good, though, and so we hope that the best parts of Craggy can be extracted and used in the next trend, as the community forever strives towards just rebuilding this beauty over and over again in rarer and rarer colors.

*These builders owe a perhaps unknown debt to the pioneering work of Steve DeCraemer, the builder of craggy robot Jesus, craggy gothick castle, and craggy other castle, being the only one of which we could find pics, and unfortunately the least whelming as well, if memory serves.