Should the Toa and Matoran be the same height? [POLL]

fair point

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No, it doesn’t. The Matoran were arguably the main focus of 2001 and they were all the shorter characters. Matoran in G3 can have large, prevalent roles, but still be smaller in size. Height does not determine what importance someone has to the story, but does dictate power levels.

Thanks. :relaxed:

Yah, I agree. My point was going to be that its kind of difficult to scale, especially concerning the kind of medium you are using.

With the scales displayed here, Lego would have (and has already) portrayed both heights using standard mini-figs, in spite of the differences in the story, because its more about proportions than scale.

I probably should have used Spartans from Halo as a reference, as that’s more well-known.


Let’s say hypothetically that Lego was going to make a Halo line, and the Spartans were going to be normal-size Mini-Figs, would you give the “normal” human marines small legs?

I didn’t mean the dwarves could be taken seriously in the movies, I meant the actual minifigures. With the right printing a unproportional figure could look really cool and not silly. The short legs could still make a character look serious, and just because they have short legs won’t necessarily make them spear as “children”. And jeez this topic exploded today!

All the dwarves have beards, which is as far as I can tell, the only way to remove the child-like appearance; TTV has made it clear that the Matoran will not have facial hair.

So, I’ve been following this little argument, and I think I found the proper statement that will support the stance of keeping everyone the same height:
#Onua

Image credits go to VonDoom and the TTV, respectively

Seriously, if all the matoran are to be short-legged, how on earth do you explain the hunchback Onua-Axel hybrid figure?

Axel-fig Onua:
I’m not advocating to make him the same size in the minifig form, but I’m just saying going straight from short-legs to special mold, and skipping the next height entirely is pretty strange. It would make more sense, I think, if the matoran were the same size as the toa, so that there would be no real dramatic change with the Axel-fig.
BUT that still leaves the problem of explaining why Onua increased in size when the other toa didn’t. The solution? - Axel-figs make no sense.

The power the toa recieve is elemental energy. Not height upgrades.
Making them all the same height would, I think, make sense naturally. After all, the matoran are receiving ELEMENTAL energy to become toa. How on earth does this power after height? In G1 it was never explained, and it doesn’t make sense either way. Plus, as it’s been stated before, toa and matoran, in this G3, are the same species, and members’ of a species are only different heights by age, not strength, power, etc.

Turaga-like figures:
Lastly, assuming that sets will include members of the government (AKA- Turaga), how would you differentiate them, as well? The only remaining options are woody legs or the HF mini-fig legs. You could give them capes, or armor, or something, the the toa will also have that now/in the future.
Considering the fact that, again, they are all the same species, so it wouldn’t really make sense to make this group taller/shorter than the rest, the only real option would be to do something with aesthetics (AKA: Have really fancy prints, probably with gold/silver)

Short legs=No prints:
There have been no short legs with prints on them. They’ve gotten double molding, but no prints, which would make them look as though they’re missing something, even if their overall prints weren’t de-specialized/dumbed down.

In short, here’s my solution:

Yes my digital art skills are this bad.

Here we have the Ta-region’s king (named Vohon an actual ta-matoran from G1; Vohon would but heads with Tahu, a subject/soldier, as they are both hot-headed and don’t rationalize when they need to. The queen, Maglya (antother G1 matoran), is more understanding and is a person more fit to rule than he. ) , Jaller (Yes, I made the character a she), and Tahu.
Besides the fact that Jaller is a bright yellow, Tahu kind of sticks out more due to the blue prints all over him. Regular Ta-Matoran could have just orange or red prints, and the King would have silver, or dark gold or something.

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Not exactly. If you remove the beards they still don’t look at all like children.

The earth matoran could have been bulkier to begin with which would explain Onua’s larger size. Unless just Onua was bulky before being "transformed "

Edited for Double Post - Slime
hey peppy
don’t double post
read this topic
thanks

What if the regular military uses the special colors of the McToran (Yellow for the fire tribe, purple for Earth, Teal for Air, Medium blue for Ice, Medium Brown for Sand, Light blue for Water).

The Elders (ether chiefs or just regular old people) will have dark metru colors (including dark brown, dark grey, dark bluish grey)

The regular citizens have a mix of both Metru colors and very light colors introduced in Friends depending on their age (teens, young adults, adults, near elder adults).

The kids would have the friends line colors for their scheme.

Only the Toa would have the current red, blue, burnt orange, green, azure, white, black in their color scheme. and also use trans colors for their body parts.

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Yes, they do evoke a child-ish appearance without the beards. Especially if you spend a lot of time with system and are used to their short-hands. (although, this may be somewhat a matter of opinion)

I just think it would interfere with marketing to a system audience.

No they will look like very old children…with wrinkle like appearance of their biomechanical faces.

They could be bulkier, but how could one show that with a standard minifigure? Possibly with armor, but I think the TTV wants to use it only for toa. It’s hard to show bulkiness on a regular mini-fig, let alone one with shorter legs.[quote=“TeslaEffect, post:112, topic:35702, full:true”]
What if the regular military uses the special colors of the McToran (Yellow for the fire tribe, purple for Earth, Teal for Air, Medium blue for Ice, Medium Brown for Sand, Light blue for Water).

The Elders (ether cheifs or just regular old people) will have dark metru colors (including dark brown, dark grey, dark bluish grey)

The regular citizens have a mix of both Metru colors and very light colors introduced in Friends depending on their age (teens, young adults, adults, near elder adults).

The kids would have the friends line colors for their scheme.

Only the Toa would have the current red, blue, burnt orange, green, azure, white, black in their color scheme.
[/quote]

Pretty neat concept! Though I think just using different colors to represent ranks alone rather than ranks and age would work better (especially for the Ta-matoran, being more military-like).
I could definitely see this being used for blind-bags as TTV suggested.

I suppose it doesn’t have to be bulky, but perhaps just a little larger than the other matoran (maybe even normal minifigure legs) just to show some size difference between an earth matoran and other matoran. Also is the ta/ onu/ ko prefix thing in G3 for the matoran? Forgive me for asking but I don’t remember if the cast discussed that yet.

I think the main reason that people are voting for shorter matoran is that they are used to how they were shorter in G1 and G2, where they would basically offer standard articulation because they were constraction figures. However, for a system theme, having them be shorter would limit their articulation. I think that it would be more practical for the matoran to be the same height and would be realistic like, for example, with warriors and everyday citizens. Besides, this is a new generation where everything does not have to be the same as previous ones.

3 Likes

Yes part of this reasoning is because of nostalgia, but not all of it. Think about it. If someone were given powers by the gods, wouldn’t it make sense for their bodies to be altered as well to become more effective in battle? I would just find it a little underwhelming if the six matoran were chosen by the gods and came out looking pretty much the same but with more patterns on their armor. The size isn’t just the nostalgia, it makes a lot of sense too! Also just saying, some of the original matoran lacked a lot of the articulation in a normal minifigure. Just sayin

Personally the hieght depends on the age of matorans to be more percise with this topic
If you think that matorans are the same species but are more like the juveniles of the species then they should be shorter than the Toa. But that can also apply to the theory that there aren’t the same species as they could possibly start short but then grow just like you and me (unless you’re a robot) only that the theory would be about 50%ish accurate.

But hey, that’s just a theory…
A bionicle theory

I see you point, however, I said it would be more practical for the matoran and realistic. Also, I am still not fully on board with the gods stuff.

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A lot of people seem to be using the argument that the Matoran should stay shorter so that the Toa feel more powerful, in some cases people have even said that the Matoran should be basically helpless. To be blunt, I find this idea to be stupid.

We are creating characters who are handed powers by the gods. Are they expected to show up and deal with every Rahi attack and Dark Hunter miscreant? To put it simply, no. It’s completely unreasonable to think that the Matoran would just cower in their huts while the Toa do everything. Or even most things. Some people are even saying that the Toa haven’t been around for a while. I don’t think the Matoran have spent that time hiding and wishing that Toa were still a thing to save them.

Instead, someone above compared this to super heroes, which I agree with. For the most part, the military or police or just hard working citizens can deal with the problems. But when you have some maniac trying to destroy the island, you need a Toa.

Now, this is only a small portion of the arguments, just one I wanted to deal with first because it annoyed me. Others argue for smaller Matoran to allow our heroes to stand out (I voted for both being the same size, if you haven’t figured that out yet). I don’t think that’s necessary. Look, once more, at super heroes. Batman doesn’t need to actually be larger than a normal man to be Batman. The same goes for Spiderman, and Superman, and Wonder Woman, and every other super hero whose power doesn’t involve a physical transformation. They, instead, are differentiated by their use of costumes. Or, for another example, the Jedi and Sith from Star Wars. Without even knowing a character, a fan could tell you whether or not they’re a Jedi or Sith. There’s no physical difference; both groups span a range of species (though I will admit that Sith tend to look pretty dark). Instead, you can tell who they are by their use of a lightsaber. In both cases, you can tell the powerful heroes from the citizens without the heroes needing to be bigger. Both of these examples have already been shown to work in Lego sets.

Now, some people made the argument that we need to make the difference really obvious for the target audience: young children. Counterpoint: G2. People hated how dumbed down G2 was. They pointed to G1 as an example of how you could write something for kids without having it be extremely simplistic. They pointed to a number of things that showed that children’s intelligence doesn’t need to be underestimated. So why is making it obvious for the kids any sort of argument?

Sorry for the wall of text; TL;DR: Having the Matoran be the same size as the Toa doesn’t make the Toa useless, there are other ways to tell them apart, and worrying about whether kids will understand the difference isn’t too relevant a point.

3 Likes

Here’s my idea: the Matoran are shorter than the Toa, however instead of them being generic villagers, we take a page from G1 and make five or six unique characters and add/replace one or two every year.

after thinking about this for some time, i think i found a much better idea to show the difference betwine a Toa and a Matoran while still have the two be the same size.

namely that the Toa have a physicaly fit printing while the Matorans have a normal build printing:

Toa

Matoran

(i found these images on Google)

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This is a fan made and fictional theme. It doesn’t have to be realistic.