I’d say worldbuilding, because it truly is what makes Bionicle unique, but it feels like when one person says “Worldbuilding is important to make Bionicle what it is”, many people actually mean “A tropical island is important to make Bionicle what it is”, and as someone who joined Bionicle after '03, it feels like that sort of minimizes the Bionicle experience I’ve had— makes it sound like the “true fans” are those who started on Mata Nui, and like Bionicle can’t exist without a mysterious tropical island. Which, personally, I obviously don’t feel to be the case.
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I share the sentiments of others, while the core of BIONICLE for me is the atmosphere, it wouldn’t be BIONICLE without any of these things.
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The core of BIONICLE as a whole is the atmosphere, story and all that, but I only really care about getting more CCBS.
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Drat, I can’t choose more than one. I’m stuck between World building and Story. Because here’s the thing, world building is great and all, but without a decent or good story to go along with it, all the world building is for naught. This can also work vice versa, but more often than not you can have a good story, but complete lack, if nonexistent, world building.
So, for example, I’ll use Minecraft. It’s a game I could never wrap my head around or understand what was the point in playing it. Indeed, I have this problem with pretty much every crafting-survival game. And my main problem is that there’s no purpose or point to anything. Yeah, sure, the world is nice and allows me to build and create to my hearts content, but without a story, without a purpose, I just don’t care. I’ll leave it alone and never touch it.
In contrast, I’ll use Subnautica as an example. It has an incredible world, full of strange creatures, vibrant colors, horrifying monsters and like Minecraft is a crafting-survival game. Although you can’t build to your hearts content like Minecraft, Subnautica does have a story, it has more of a purpose. Why are you trying to survive? Because your ship got shot down and you’re trying to get a signal out for a rescue. Then you learn about another ship that came here and was also shot down. So if you weren’t trying to learn how your ship crashed before, you most likely definitely trying to find out how and why the ships were shot down now. So on and so forth.
Story gives purpose, it gives direction. Without it, all you have is a nice pretty world and nothing more. So, I guess I’ll vote for the Story portion. Though I do believe the core of Bionicle to be a blend of Story and World Building, with sets just below the two.
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Well, that probably depends entirely on personal taste, but in theory I’d say that if you have a defined world, you can make up your own stories pretty easily to fill that gap.
But yeah, only story and world together make the basic thing really complete.
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You’re saying this like you can’t actually find the core of a cake. But you can.
If you make a red velvet cake, the core of that cake is red velvet. If you make an ice cream cake, the core of that cake is the ice cream. If you make apple pie, the core of that pie is the apples.
You’re also asking this as if you can’t actually answer the question.
It’s the brain. Your brain is the core of you. You can replace all almost all of the other organs with machines (pacemaker, etc.), but the core of you, what makes you alive, is in the brain.
A lot of people seem to be saying that Bionicle’s core is a mix out of all of the elements listed. Here’s my thing: If you have a mix out of all of the elements of Bionicle, you don’t get the core of Bionicle. You just have straight up Bionicle.
Bionicle is the combination of all of these elements, that much is plain. And a lot of the elements that go into it are important, including the story, characters, worldbuilding and sets.
But the core of it isn’t the combination of all of that - again, that’s what makes the whole. If you stripped everything extra about Bionicle away and got to the core of the franchise, what do you think would remain? The four options make up the four most likely answers people would have.
If the poll allowed for multiple choices, more than likely everyone would choose some combination of the four because they would mistakenly misinterpret the question (as a lot of people apparently have) and think about what aspects of Bionicle are done well, or what they liked best about the line. I’ve seen some people say that they really just like the sets, so the sets is what is the “core” of the line for them. It isn’t necessarily about what you liked about it, it’s about what feature you think Bionicle boils down to, what makes it actually unique as opposed to other franchises.
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All this talk over cores makes me think of hero factory.
Sorry, just had to say it!
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Your argument is incorrect. What you’re saying is not that those elements aren’t needed, just that they can be replaced and need to be replaced. And even the brain can be replaced, it isn’t needed either.
If you want the so called “core”, the soul of Bionicle if you will, then what separates won’t be one thing. If it was just one thing, then Ninjago and Nexo Knights are all exactly the same.
Ninjago:
World Building: A medieval world with high tech.
Characters: A band of warriors with objects that grant special powers.
Story: Heroes out to defeat evil.
Sets: Building bricks, mostly vehicle based with some buildings
Nexo Knights:
World Building: A medieval world with high tech.
Characters: A band of warriors with objects that grant special powers.
Story: Heroes out to defeat evil.
Sets: Building bricks, mostly vehicles with some buildings.
Even Legends of Chima are almost exactly the same with one minor difference.
Legends of Chima:
World Building: A primitive tribe world with high tech
Characters: A band of warriors with objects that grant them special powers
Story: Heroes out to defeat evil.
Sets: Building brick, mostly vehicles with some buildings
World building, the same. A past period of history with futuristic vehicles. Story, follows the same plot. Characters are essential the same characters. Sets are at their core the same. By themselves, none of them make the core of their theme. Its a combination of elements that separate them.
If you want to find only one thing, then I guess the only core difference between Avatar: The Last Aribender and Ninjago is that one of them spins.
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I think I see what you mean, but…
Emphasis on “Bionicle is the combination of all these elements” and “If you stripped everything extra about Bionicle away and got to the core of the franchise, what do you think would remain?”
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If you know that Bionicle is the combination of these four (five) elements, and you post these options on a poll with the intention of picking one and “stripping everything extra”, you’re not distilling the franchise. You’re implying that most of the elements that define Bionicle aren’t necessary.
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If you know that Bionicle is the combination of these four (five) elements, then why is it necessary to find out what the core is anyway?
Sure, the arbitrary core of a chocolate cake is chocolate. But that doesn’t teach you how to make chocolate cake - and without eggs, flour, and milk, it’s not gonna get made.
It takes more effort than a poll result to find what truly defines a franchise. If this poll is for the sake of the Generation 3 discussion, it takes way, way more effort than taking one aspect and running with it to make a successful toyline. Look at where that got Gen 2.
What’s the core of Harry Potter? What about Lord of the Rings? And Star Wars? I doubt the real answer is as simple as “the characters” or “the setting”. Bionicle’s core doesn’t have to be simple.
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Those would be additions, without the actual cake combined of the aspects that created it, you’d just have red velvet, ice cream or apples - which would’nt draw you into eating because you were hungry for a cake. What you are saying is that the core is essentially an element that is not integral to the structure.
@Political_Slime gets it perfectly right here, without each of these elements Bionicle would not have been Bionicle. World building is pointless without characters to inhabit the world. Story means nothing without characters. Sets would have had less appeal if they had’nt got characters. Etc…
A core of Bionicle doesnt exist, its just whatever aspects that a fan feels is what intrigued them the most about Bionicle. Yet chances are they would’nt have liked Bionicle in the first place without all the aspects coming together.
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There were actually 4 Mad Max movies. Mad Max, Mad Max 2, Beyond Thunderdome and Fury Road. Fury Road was a recent reboot. You should always do a little bit of research before making assumptions.
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Yeah, I really should!
Either way though, Lego knows that themes with stories sell better than themes without (except for City of course). And with stories comes plots. Mad Max is one example of a story without a plot. But there are many more examples of stories with plots that sold better - Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. People usually remember stories with plots more than stories without them, anyways, as something big actually occurred during the stories with plots.
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Not really.
Sure the plot isn’t 5 star but it has one.
In fact I probably wouldn’t be interested if it wasn’t about max’s story.
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Simply acting as an integral aspect of an item does not make the other aspects irrelevant. Life is rarely that simple.
In actuality, Kahi, I would say that you are free to run a poll using whatever definition of the word core is best for the circumstance. It doesn’t really matter. But when you start making analogies to defend the integrity of the poll, they just come across as wrong.
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“Unity. Duty. Destiny. It starts with Unity.” - Norik to Vakama, Bionicle III.
In order for a third generation to be as if not more successful than the first, all four of these components need to work together excellently. The sets need to be outstanding, and they need to be of characters that the audience will care for. The story needs to be engaging, not too simple like generation 2, but maybe not super complex either (take the early years of generation 1 for example). The world-building, like the other three characteristics, needs to be handled extremely well, and not just island after island. The later years of Bionicle Generation 1, I’d say, did the world building best, with different environments, such as an underwater city and a civilization built on a giant stalactite in the core of the universe. Or was it a stalagmite? It’s been a while since I’ve seen it.
However, say that the sets and world-building are utter garbage, like the main characters are the Vahki fighting the summer sets from 2015, and the matoran were all in the Av-Matoran build, and they only ever stayed on the planet of Bara Magna. The characters, likewise, are garbage as well, like Jar-Jar Binks meets Divergent and Twilight level garbage (I won’t apologize for that one). As long as the story is phenomenal, then maybe, just maybe, the line might survive just long enough for the creators to realize the mistakes and fix them. The story is what is at the core of Bionicle, and since the story in generation 2 was not great, on top of the characters and half of the waves being bad, the line failed.
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My argument is that, unlike the implication that you can’t choose an organ as the core of you, you definitely can and it’s your brain.
Okay what
I really hope brain cells can be replaced because I might have just lost some
Yes.
…?
Bionicle as a whole is the combination of numerous facets. It has a particular facet that is the core of what the franchise is. These statements are not contradictory. A lot of people are making posts like they are.
“Bionicle’s core is X” and “Bionicle has a combination of many great facets working together” do not conflict as statements. The whole implication of there being a core is that there’s multiple other factors that surround it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be the core, it would be the actual whole.
It’s not arbitrary? It’s very clearly what makes a chocolate cake a chocolate cake. It’s the key ingredient of the cake, and it’s what makes it a unique, distinct style of cake. And when you’re redesigning a recepie chocolate cake and are seeing if you can tweak the amount of eggs, or change from butter to margarine, it’s important to remember, hey, chocolate is the core of this cake.
It is, and it isn’t.
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It’s not like the proposed Generation 3 isn’t going to have characters, story or sets. This idea that for some reason, this poll means that we aren’t talking about the other components is this weird assumption that a lot of people are making,
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The G3 discussion is going to be influenced by this poll but not changed by it.
Characters
Worldbuilding
Story
Core aspect does not mean that the other aspects are irrelevant. I don’t know where people are getting this idea that the core aspect means that you can’t have any other aspect in Bionicle, or that they are discarded, or that you don’t think that they’re important.
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I don’t know why, but this poll just has a off feeling with me. I will do my best to explain.
I believe I am a fan of Bionicle because of many of these aspects, and therefore cannot pick one in the poll because to me, that would be shunning the rest. I also believe that some aspects have been left out of the poll that I feel are also important, like the fanbase. Some Mocs were accepted by the Bionicle team in Rahi Beasts and Dark Hunters and added to the canon. The fanbase contributed to the sets, characters, story, and world-building.
Personally, I kind of don’t want to put any of these on a pedestal. The poll says to pick something “that everything else can change around”. I kind of don’t want other aspects to change just because I feel one of them is the core. I like Bionicle the way it was, both generations in fact. If, say, I hold worldbuilding as the core, I don’t know how the other aspects would change around that. To me, they’ll always be the way they were which is the way I enjoyed them as.
To me, the most important part of Bionicle is all of it, I cannot choose any aspect that is more important to me than the rest. I may be wrong, it may not work that way, but I feel that as the person who, no matter what happened, enjoyed Bionicle as a whole, despite some things I didn’t like about it, I can’t really pick anything or claim something as the “core” of Bionicle. Of course, with G2, things could always have changed for the better, but for G1, I can’t really decide since all of it was memorable. Every aspect affected me in a different way, sure, but that doesn’t mean one is better than the other to me.
Maybe that’s why I have an off feeling about this: every aspect affected me differently. The sets have a different impact on me than the world-building, for example. The sets didn’t tell the story or taught me about the world of Bionicle, I just enjoyed playing with them and building them, whereas the worldbuilidng immersed me and got me into the world the story, characters, and sets were in. Since every aspect had a different impact, it’s hard for me to choose a core for the franchise. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t choose what they think is the core, I’m just saying that I feel like my experience with Bionicle as a whole has affected me in a way that a poll like this, while something to think about, is something I cannot partake in because I believe that it would do no justice whatsoever to the franchise for me.
Sorry about the long reply, I just want to explain myself and my reason for not choosing an answer.
I also don’t know what brains, chocolate cake, or Harry Potter has to do with this, but I like those things as well.
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People are getting that idea because you only let them vote for one. Notice almost every complaint is that people can’t decide on just one? That they feel if they choose one, and only one, they have forsaken the rest? If you had given them the choice of two or three out of the four people would be happier because they could choose the things that are most important to them about Bionicle rather than the on singular thing that is it’s “core.” (I use quotations here because of the massive dispute over this word seen above, it in no way indicates my feelings on the use of the term) You see by attempting to choose one thing that is the be all and end all, you will fall into the same pit as G2, were they obviously decided to focus on the sets (specifically the hero sets) above all else, and Bionicle suffered for it. I’m not saying they are or aren’t all equally important, or that there is or isn’t a definitive “core” of Bionicle. I’m saying this poll is obviously meant to gather data for the next podcast episode on what your theoretical G3 should focus on, and you’ll get better more accurate if you let people narrow it down to a couple of things that are more important to them rather than forcing them to try and decied what exactly was the most important overall. That way you will find out which things were most important to the most people.
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To be fair, if you could do all of them, everyone would do all of them and the poll would be literally useless.
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I would also like to add that this should regard to the fanbase as well. In G2 the community was heavily devided and this very much so hurt Bionicle.
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