I can’t do this anymore.
It is true that initially I only joined the TTV message boards to enter the ‘Brickonicle’ contest, but the reason I stayed on was because at the time I still believed TTV was a legit group. I really became invested in them back when Bionicle was speculated to return and I found comfort in their lighthearted and at times excited conversations and speculations; the staff sounded like real, normal people just having fun discussing a franchise they loved just as much as me. We didn’t see eye-to-eye at times, but I never faulted them for that; its human to disagree.
I stood by them in their optimism towards Gen2 and along with them admired all the it could have been at the time, and while I didn’t quite agree with their views after Gen2 ended, I didn’t quit. But the their Brickonicle Project got started, and at first it seemed pretty legit, I was onboard with this fan-project and much of their vision of it.
But then came the things that I didn’t quite agree with, simple things in retrospect that made all the difference, things that I in fact had a few quick-fixes for [as well as many others]. However, when it came to addressing these criticisms, the staff did something arguably worse than straight-up ignoring them; they cherry-picked them. They took only the strawman arguments and debunked them while laughing like hyenas and acted as though those were the best criticisms we could come up with, and at times even lightly touching upon actual critiques but twisting them in such ways or leaving out crucial pieces to make us [the critics] look dumb.
I realize that its here where it all fell apart for me.
As time went on and the project became harder and harder to get even remotely invested in, I stopped watching the channel altogether, podcasts and all. Meanwhile, any arguments I lodged at them in the message boards were met with single comment arguments that were written in such ways as though I was an idiot and short-sighted; I was treated like an idiot and then disregarded by the staff.
I realize now that not once was I ever treated like a fellow human being by them, and I realized that other critics of them were met in the same fashion; it didn’t matter if any of us were valid or invalid; if we didn’t have anything positive to say, we didn’t matter, we served only to be ignored or mocked.
Not once did they ever try to talk to me as though I were a human just like them; only a dope who couldn’t think logically. Not once did they ever try to actually reason with me, only give me statements and act like I was inarguably wrong.
And I can’t imagine I’m the only one.
I understand that the TTV staff are now a sort of business [I’m not too familiar with the finer details] and that that does make them superior to the lesser like me, but there’s only so much abuse from the top I can take before I leave.
I realize now that the greatest problem is that it isn’t about Bionicle anymore, TTV, I mean. Once, those initials stood for ‘The Three Virtues’, but upon changing the name to simply the initials, I realize those values –Unity, Duty, Destiny, are now meaningless to them.
And with those values, what truly made Bionicle ‘Bionicle’ has also gone from the channel.
As much as they try to paint Brickonicle as Bionicle Gen3 [however unofficial it really is] it just isn’t Bionicle anymore. What it really is is Ninjago, Legends of Chima, and Nexo Knights. Not Bionicle. I understand why they’re taking the approach they are in developing their project [that being as business execs would] but in doing so, the staff have forgotten what made the franchise what it was, what made it truly special, what made it unique, what made it stand out from any other Lego series before, at the time, and after.
Now it just looks like every other Lego series about colorful teams of young heroes. [And do I even need to say how much better ‘Project Afterman’ is to your pitch?]
Indeed, I acted most unprofessionally about my Mask of Time theory and asking Greg about it, and I have already issued him an apology for that.
But I have no reason to stick around on this platform anymore. The staff are rude, haughty, and impersonal, the feeling and essence of Bionicle is long gone, and posting theories, MOCs, and stories and such is something you can already do and I have done on DeviantArt. There’s nothing left for me here, not as a Bionicle fan, not even as a human being.
Therefore; I’m done. I’m logging off and never coming back. I’ll find Bionicle elsewhere, because wherever it is, I know I’ll never find it again here.
No, spare me your ‘Goodbye; you won’t be missed’, TTV. That was a sentiment you flung at me a long time ago
I think a big pre-issue here with the Brickonicle/Bionicle G3 project is that people’s expectations of the project are based off their experience with other fan “continuation” projects, and what they thought it was going to be. We’ve addressed this several times, but I want to do it again before we get into this, because it will give context to my clarification of your points later on in this post.
Brickonicle is not a community project, it is a TTV Project that we let fans suggest contributions to. And make no mistake, the fans are responsible for a lot of the direction or suggestions that we’ve decided to include in this project. Many artists like Oomatu and Ragdoll have given amazing contributions to the look of this world, many writers and pitches have contributed to what we want to do. But not all community contributions are considered equal. Some don’t mesh with what we want for the show, some just aren’t that great.
But even more importantly, Bionicle G3 is just a show about creating this Bionicle reboot. It is not a project for a Bionicle reboot. The main point is to have something for us, the cast, to talk about. This is why we keep the arguments and the discussion on recording, this is why we don’t “take a break” and then pitch our final story. It is a show, and the moment we finish our conceptual breakdown is the moment the show ends. We are interested primarily in creating an ongoing show with an engaging premise for our channel that our cast contributes to as well as the fans. So if our cast all agrees on something, that’s going to be the main input moving the show forward. The fans help us, but they don’t direct the project. That’s why the polls that we used to do on our forum didn’t “decide” what to do with the project, they were just a focus group to add validity to our arguments.
So this is the main disconnect I’m seeing here, and I get it, because you’re on the other side of the equation. Because this is our project, we as a group agree on a good number of things that we know that not everyone in the community might agree with. That’s just impossible.
And it’s not that we think that criticism is always invalid, but as creators, you get a ton of criticism about everything. Your videos, your voice, your editing, your subject matter, everything gets criticized. And a lot of the times, it just doesn’t hold up. The reasoning is flawed, or the logic isn’t consistent, or it’s clearly there because of a bias towards how things were done before, or any number of reasons. And you might have the same reaction to the things we say.
We both express our frustration in the same way: by addressing them. The only issue, however, and one that really can’t be solved is that we do have a bigger platform to do it on. And unless you are a Patreon, it’s explicitly a one-way platform. On the boards it’s two-way, and we try to keep active to address comments that we feel have some legitimacy to what they’re talking about. But the podcast by nature is one-way, and it’s a group of about five of us to a group of maybe five thousand on a good episode.
What you address as “cherry-picking” and “strawman arguments” I think might be because of how we choose to handle the audience. We, special circumstances aside, generally do not like to start witchhunts or blast people. And while we have directly responded to specific posts on the podcast in the past, we generally try not to name specific people or members to this audience of possibly five thousand other people. So we will make a generic claim like “I saw some posts that said…” or “There was a comment that said something like…” and to you, it may seem like we’re trying to cherry pick the weakest comments to prove our point, when in reality we’re doing our best to address some of the more ridiculous points we’ve seen without outing the member in question.
Opinions, like I’ve said before, can stem from a lot of preferences. Things you liked in Bionicle G1/G2, things you’re pre-disposed to, things you prefer in media. But opinions are just thoughts in your heard. You need to convey them verbally in order to put them into other people’s heads, and how you do that is the only thing that the other person will see of what you think. When we view other’s opinions, we really view the presentation of them.
Everyone views their own opinions as valid, that’s why we have them to begin with. But presentation is how people engage with those opinions, and some presentations are much better than others.
I believe everyone has a right to an opinion, but I don’t believe that means that all opinions have to be equally valued. That is to say, some opinions can be misinformed, inconsistent, invalidated, or possibly just straight-up wrong. And sometimes, the opinion might have a bit of validity, but the presentation is misinformed, inconsistent, invalidated or possibly just straight-up wrong.
Now, that absolutely does not include every negative or critical comment regarding us, because many of those criticisms can be valid. But I think you might be implying that “treating you like a fellow human being” means “valuing my opinions are as equally valid, as well-presented, and holding up exactly the same way that yours do”, and I just don’t think that’s always going to be true. After years of experience on discussion boards and YouTube, I know that that isn’t going to be true.
There are some people who really want the gender ratio to remain. They have a right to that opinion, sure, but I think that it doesn’t hold up. It has never been presented to me in a form that I have been able to easily reason against. That’s an opinion that I believe everyone on the podcast shares, so we don’t waste time trying to give validity to something we all already agree upon isn’t true. Instead, we address all of the reasons we won’t be doing that and move on.
If you are one of the people that believe the gender ratio should remain, then obviously you’re not going to be happy about that and think that we’re wrong and be frustrated that we’re ignoring you. Additionally, because you share the same opinion, you might look at a moment where we pick apart someone’s presentation of it and call that a strawman, because maybe it isn’t exactly how you would have said it.
But the honest truth is that we’ve looked at all of the arguments for that subject, and we just don’t think any of them hold up. That is only our opinion, but our opinion is what moves the show forward, and until we hear a better one that’s the one we stick to. It’s also the one that is probably going to see the most approval from our fanbase, because we’ve talked about it and are going forward with it and we’ve had the opportunity to present it to five thousand people.
I think it’s reasonable that the more your opinion deviates from us, the less invested you are in the show. No show is going to please everybody, and there are certain people that want certain things that we think is just not going to work on the show. But caving into that just to keep people around wouldn’t help anyone. This is, again, our show and our project. We think what we’re doing makes sense.
It’s statements like this, honestly, that exemplify why we might have disagreed with your opinions in the past, or possibly “ridiculed” (in your opinion) what you had to say.
It stems back to what I said about presentation. You believe that we don’t listen to criticism - that’s a fair opinion to have - and you’ve outlined your personal experience and reasoning behind why you think that’s true.
But this is perhaps the most blatant moment where the opinion and presentation have a disconnect. You’re trying to make this appeal to emotion, to paint us as abandoning our roots as well as becoming souless sellouts. What used to be virtues are meaningless to us now, you say.
But they’re not. Because they’ve never actually meant anything to us to begin with. “Unity, Duty, and Destiny” are taglines that someone in a writer’s room came up with for a slogan for a toyline. Bionicle isn’t a religion, it’s not our mantra, it’s not what we “believe” in. “The Three Virtues” name wasn’t chosen because we felt those three virtues were the core belief that we adhered our lives to. It was because it was a recognizable Bionicle phrase and this was a Bionicle fan podcast and we didn’t want to rip off the BZPower brand again like we did with iBZP. That’s all it’s ever been.
We changed to the initials because we felt that “The Three Virtues” would be hard to trademark because it’s so generic, and that “TTV” was better for branding because it was shorter and took up less space on logos. And I feel like most of our audience gets that, too.
Which is why when you present this “rebranding” as proof that we’ve veered from our “roots”, the ridiculousness of how much you’re reading into something so trivial hurts your presentation of your opinion. When you say we’re not a “legit” group, without even defining what a “legit group” is supposed to be, you look like you’re adding hyperbole to a meaningless statement. And if you have a tendency to do that often in your arguments, if we were to address a post you made on the podcast, that is something that we can easily counter, and it is something that we will point out as ridiculous. That all ties back into the presentation.
We have different ideas of what it means to be “Bionicle”. That’s fine. We’ve explained why our idea of what it means to be “Bionicle” makes more sense of the others. You can still disagree with that, but it won’t change what we’re doing.
We are always going to have opinions that aren’t seen eye-to-eye with every member of the fanbase. But the reason why we have these opinions is that we do think that they are well thought-out, researched, valid and correct opinions. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have them.
That doesn’t mean that yours are automatically wrong, but if you disagree with something we say, that does usually mean we think you’re wrong. And that still doesn’t actually mean anything, outside of the fact that we will present to our audience why we think we’re right, and that we will move on with the show under the premise that we are right.
For every person solidified in their opinion, there are multiple other people who are on the fence about it. When we present an opposing viewpoint as wrong, we know that the person who is set in it is unlikely to change their opinion. But we feel we can present a stronger case for our own opinion to the greater number of people, and that’s why we continue to address poorer arguments and opinions that disagree with us on recording.
And finally, I do want to reiterate that we do listen to critique and we do change things to fit them if we feel like the argument holds up. For example, recently, we’ve begun dating the podcasts due to a comment on our channel that brought up some criticisms that we felt had a lot of validity to them. He also gave a solution that we didn’t think of, which is a huge advantage to your presentation if you ever mean to constructively criticize something. Var brought up in the latest G3 discussion we recorded (it’s coming out soon) that people thought we were delving in too deep into side characters last episode, and they were right. We adjusted the next episode to readjust where the focus was going: back to the TV show.
All in all, I can understand why you feel a disconnect in the project, and I feel it’s only natural. Many others have fallen off too, because they had a different vision and ours wasn’t matching up to that, and I think that’s perfectly fine. But hopefully I’ve addressed some of the complaints you’ve mentioned, and given you a bit of a different perspective as to why these things happen.
And if not, well, goodbye and good luck. Like I said before, this post is not just directed at you, but at the other people who might have something alongside the same opinions as you do, but are on the fence about it. With any luck, this presentation might sway them, even if it does nothing for you. That’s the point of running the show, after all.
To be fair, Bionicle started as a team of 6 young heroes who have appeared to save the land from mr. Bad guy. Ninjago started out pretty similar, and so did Chima, albeit with different number of protagonists. They were in different settings, with different styles, but at the root the archetype is there.
I’m gonna admit that I never really became a huge fan of Brickonicle so maybe I didn’t experience what you did but I’ve never really considered abandoning the boards or anything because I do still like the community even if I’m not the biggest supporter in the world of the podcast.
Now as an outsider I’ve seen TTV ignore certain suggestions and take others. I can sympathize with them because I’m actively creating a video game. I get suggestions all the time that people think will improve my game but in all honesty they wont. I flat out refuse certain ideas while I significantly change others because at the end of the day it has to fit my vision of the game and it’s the same way with Brickonicle.
TTV is doing brickonicle for fun so expecting them to take what we suggest and redefine their vision around it is like telling someone that their hobby is bad and they should get a new one.
It’s all fine and dandy to put forth your ideas and TTV does encourage sharing ideas but we simply need to realize that they are the driving force of this.
In addition I feel like expanding on @squeaverking’s point. Y’see these boards have never been specific to Brickonicle but rather they are a place for many aspects of Bionicle and Lego discussion. We even have an RP and literature section where you can do things completely unrelated to Lego.
I really can’t change minds but I do hope I’ve added to this discussion.
Bionicle didn’t have a super complicated story in the beginning, something I feel people forget. It just started with 6 colorful people who try to save blank from blank.
i don’t like ttv that much but i’ve stayed on this website for, what, close to 3 years now?
brickonicle isn’t a big part of the boards, it’s only, like, less than a tenth of the boards or something?
there’s a lot of things to do here and a lot of potential friends to meet.
if you’re sure you’re leaving, then go ahead, i respect your decision. if you’re not sure, though, consider staying, and explore more of what these boards have to offer.
If you don’t like how Brickonicle is going, then by all means, there’s no reason to stay there. Post some creations, or just don’t do anything BIONICLE related on the boards. I prefer posting on non-BIONICLE related things now because whenever I do, I derail the conversation with just dumb opinions and reasonings. For crying out loud, I thought buying sets even if they were terrible would save BIONICLE. I didn’t feel like I was doing anything in that section, and so I think it’s better that I act more reasonably in other sections.
As for the staff, I think Kahi’s advice would help. I respect them because they’re of a high authority and they usually know what they’re talking about; doesn’t mean I 100% agree with them and sometimes I think they might act like cops. If you don’t like them, then don’t provoke or just imagine yourself in their shoes. They have a ton of critiques to go through, and they have to make a lot of calls on what has to happen and what doesn’t.
Not gonna lie, with the amount of joking there’s been about the fact this is an unofficial project, this comment just makes them saying it more funny to me.
Along with this, who said there was a rule book that Bionicle had to 100% abide by? Literally no one. You’re allowed to not like some decisions but that doesn’t make them “not Bionicle”. While I don’t agree with every single decision made for G3, I can actually see a lot of effort put into it. If you hate it so much, start your own G3 if you really feel the need.
I don’t think anyone can tell you what you should and shouldn’t do, and you seem to have made up your mind already. If you joined for the “g3 brickonicle” and don’t like the direction its heading, then I respect your decision to leave. It isn’t the same to you as it once was. If you prefer Project Afterman, follow it, improve it, enjoy it. If it fits more in line with your ideas of Bionicle then I’m sure nobody will stop you.
I’m just gonna say that i have not followed brickonicle at all so i don’t much about it more than it is a project arranged by TTV and in a way i can relate to the frustraition of @TrotterNuva with this i hope to come of as a middleman.
So i have been reading all posts on this topic so far and i find most points here to be valid and are fair counter arguments to @TrotterNuva points. Thou i have some things i disagree or agree on and i will go through them based on the order of the post. So with out further ado here is number 1.
Jon in all respect i do not really think what you said is justifying to what @TrotterNuva meant with his statement of not being treated like a “fellow human being” and it may not have to do as much with him having diffrent opinons. Instead rather he and these “others” he refers to are felling treated rudely or with disrespect. When it comes to his opinons i think that you and the other cast members have the rights to dismiss his ideas if as you said it had to do with the fact that they did not manage to convice you and the others of the ttv podcast. But i think everyone on the internat sould learn to firstly concidering how they approach others and those who reads it must also respect other people as much as the writers and not enrage over smallest disagreaments. Otherwise i think you made some fair points anyway keep making videos.
Again as Jon said you as a creator have the rigth to dismiss any ideas or suggestions but just do not do it in a way that migth come of as rude etc I know it is hard to do since people seems to get offended by everything these days.
May i ask migth you be Jocool the creator of Bionicle masks of power?
As @HewksDKowlihad said why ruin a chance of meeting great people and make friends because TTV disagrees with your opinion
Or if he wants to do bionicle related stuff he could talk about G1/G2 in the bionicle section or make reviews in the community reviews section.
Yeah if you are truly leaving @TrotterNuva the as @Invader_Rose said![
Yeah probaply the easiest route to take.
It is true what you said but as many other stated the boards offers quite more than just brickonicle.
Sorry if not grammaticly correct english is not my nativ language.
edit: grammar changes
Opinions can be wrong. For example, saying “in my opinion Henry VII was never a king of England,” your opinion would be wrong, for it is a fact that he was.