Why doesn’t anyone get LEGO anymore except for me and @Toa_Radrix?
Simple. There are two types of Bionicle fans:
- The all Lego ones, who prefer to stay in the Lego sphere and rarely get out of it. This type will almost always buy only Lego. You and @Toa_Radrix fit in this category perfectly, together with the TTV Cast (I think. I gave up watching TTV a long time ago) and most of the new fans. However, since Bionicle got cancelled again, the doors to the Bionicle Fandom were closed, leaving only us inside, with no new fans. This is one reason you see less “Look what dope Lego set I got” replies. Because there are no new all Lego fans to join the fandom.
- The ones that moved on, or the ones that were not all Lego fans in the first place. The explorers. After Bionicle ended again, people lost interest in it and decided to move on to other franchises. To find their new Bionicle. Transformers seems to be the most proeminent minority on this site. I was a hardcore Bionicle fan when I joined the TTV MB and you can see it from my early replies, but right now I am deeper on the Transformers spectrum, if you get what I mean. Much, much deeper.
So, TLDR, people don’t like Bionicle anymore. Or at least not how they used to. Very few people are still interested into buying sets. This happens out of numerous reasons: no more new fans, the wish of moving on, the age (if you would look on that topic with face reveals, you would see that almost everybody there is an adult), etc. For me personally, the idea of remaining stuck on an dead franchise just because you liked it when you were younger is childish and bad. It means that you can’t deal with the present and that you live in the past. I am not saying that you and the other ones that are still all Lego fans are bad, I am saying that this may be one of the reasons the former Bionicle fans converted to other franchises, like Transformers.
Unless they were Transformers fans since their childhood.
That’s a whole other story.
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To be honest, I don’t care if Bionicle is dead or not. I will still be a fan of it in years to come, and even if I manage to get every single Bionicle set ever made as Eljay did, I will move on to Hero Factory, or whatever. LEGO can not care about them as much as they want, the sets they made in the past are still out there for me to collect. I can understand why some people have gived up, but I am not that type of person. I was never into Transformers, so I can’t start now just because Bionicle is no more.
Though it’s weird how a few mouths ago this topic was all about the newest LEGOs people got and only now all of the sudden Transfromers becomes popular here.
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Actually, no. The oldest proof that Transformers fans were around was MaximusPrimal’s first Transformers rp, who was a thing before I joined the boards, which was two years ago.
Returning to your point, nobody forces you to join the tf community if you don’t even like tf. The thing is that… At least 30% of the active users of the boards did so.
I respect the idea of getting all the Bionicle and hf sets, but you can’t expect the rest of the community to have the same goal.
Also what “type of person”? Most people just got bored of being Bionicle-focused after it ended twice.
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For me personally I’m a bit of both. I still enjoy Lego but I’m not really a fan of system sets, though there were a few themes I liked. I love Bionicle because it was do different and because of the characters. I did grow up with Transformers while I grew up with Bionicle, but honestly I grew more tired of Transformers than I did of Bionicle. I only recently became active in Transformers again, mainly because of TF Prime. The reason I even thought of watching Prime was because of a clip on YouTube, spoiling Bumblebee’s death. That kinda gave me interest and I soon watched the show. When Bionicle ended it didn’t really “end” for me. I found a friend and was able to introduce him to it, so for the next few years Bionicle was basically normal for me, despite it’s death. I created my own stories and my friend and I built on the stories. It was fun, soon after he lost interest Bionicle G2 was revealed and for me it began again. I bought a set, though didn’t have as much money to by more. All during that time I forgot about Transformers and honestly didn’t care for them at the time. The only real thing I really liked about TF was the story, I honestly didn’t care about the toys the story were about. With Bionicle I was planning out MOCs and thinking of sets to buy off of Bricklink or some other site. I immersed my self in Bionicle’s comics and ended up rewatching the movies. Other than Bionicle I basically drifted for a while, looking at different anime, manga, shows, and comics. I eventually found interest in Gundam and Gunpla which right is basically my new Bionicle.
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i buy lego
just not all the time
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Personally, I just don’t have the time for it. Since I’m now at college 9-10 months out of the year, I don’t really have the time to build and I don’t want to have to lug Lego around when I go back and forth between college and home. I still ask for Lego @ Christmas and birthdays, but aside from that, I don’t really buy it.
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I don’t know why you would think that. I still get LEGO, I just don’t post about it.
well, I don’t really share it here, mainly because I didn’t get anything since the storm fighter and I wasn’t already on the message board, but I do collect many other lego ^^ and other things like these “treasure X” sets which I don’t have any yet but I’ll probably buy some day
i purchase lego. but dont have the time to build. got a year backlog of sets. in a bag. i need to make more.
I don’t think anyone here has enough money to buy a company as big as LEGO.
Some people might buy Lego sets though.
/s
~W12~
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I buy them.
Yeah, I understand this idea, but I am proof that it isn’t 100% true…
It might have to do with the relative minority of System fans compared to Bionicle on the site. Since Bionicle is kind of what kicked this whole thing off, not many of those fans were also hardcore System fans.
I might also say that a good majority of the people you see making frequent topics these days are a lot older (high school to college age). The plain and simple truth is that not too many people are interested in showing off a LEGO set they just bought, especially when it’s not that hard for people to find pictures or reviews of the exact same set online at any time.
To that end, it might seem like people don’t buy LEGO anymore, but I don’t really think that’s the case. It’s just that you don’t really see people saying they did.
I wouldn’t say that. People still like Bionicle, and I’d wager a lot are into Bionicle exactly as much as they used to be. The only reason it might seem like we don’t like it as much is, again, because we don’t have anything to post about, nothing new to discuss. There aren’t sets anymore, so what else is there to do but MOC and make creative works? And frankly, I’d say a majority of the content on this site are those things.
I have to respectfully disagree with this sentiment. There’s nothing inherently childish with maintaining appreciation for something from your childhood, and certainly nothing bad about still holding love in your heart for something that has long since past in popularity. Where that becomes an issue is when those old interests become debilitating obsessions, but for most of us they serve only to inspire us.
And I might also add that Transformers as a franchise, while still immensely popular, is no where near as popular as it was back in the 80s. So to consider Transformers a “modern” franchise that people get into because they don’t want to live in the past is a bit off the mark with Transformers history.
"To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
- C.S. Lewis
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I don’t have any money
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Not all of us can buy lego, not to mention we have multiple hobbies, most recent thing I bought was a book to read. Lego can be quite expansive these days as well, at least for the sets I’m looking at. Plus I use LDD and Stud.io, I’m still building and enjoying Lego, just not physically.
I think making a generalized comment in this form was a bad idea.
I’ve picked up maybe 40 Bionicle sets over the last year/year and a half, I just don’t have much reason to post about it
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i don’t buy it because i have no credit card.
also i still have lots of parts already, and i barely moc
because of MINECRAFT and summoner’s war (phone game)
and homework.
i’m working on a version 2 right as i got home.
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I don’t hink you got my point. What you described is nostalgia. I would be surprised if somebody would disagree with my next statement: Bionicle is slowly turning into nostalgia only. I have nothing against it. Hell! 70% of my Bionicle fanhood was stored in the nostalgia part of my brain already! I am not saying by any means that nostalgia is a bad thing. However living in a nostalgic word is not really a good thing. I have multiple nostalgic franchises and I often go back to them, almost to the point where the line between old nostalgic franchises and modern franchises is irrelevant. However, this doesn’t mean that we need to live in that area only. When I was an infant I loved Sessame (?) Street. Does this mean that I buy old toys just to keep myself into it? No. I moved on. Again, I want to be clear that it isn’t a bad thing to live in nostalgia, but as you just said, it may turn into obssession, one that you are not even aware of.
Yes, the Bionicle community is still breathing. Yes, some new fans still join the fandom (although the numbers are dropping every year). And yes, we still love Bionicle, and we will always do. It completely changed our last 19 years of life, almost two decades. But no, remaining fused with the idea that “I love Bionicle, therefore I must stick with this franchise” is not good. Yes, you can still be a Bionicle fan, but you can and should look out for a new, fresh Bionicle.
Who knows? Maybe G3 is going to happen. And maybe it will be good! Maybe DC will decide to make Bionicle comics again (I thought at this multiple times: DC has the rights, why don’t they just make their own version of Bionicle?). Maybe even better things will happen that we can’t even think at. However, until that point, if it will ever come, you can’t just stay on your couch, with a Tahu Mata in hand saying “Yup. Bionicle will became relevant any moment now!” because 1) You will be saw as obssessed (so many s, did I spelled it properly?) and 2) You may be very dissapointed. G2 was a miracle, one that failed, and one that may never happen again.
This is why I, and a lot of other fans, moved on. Not entirely. I don’t want my walls of texts to say “I am not a Bionicle fan and you should not be either”. I am still a Bionicle fan. I would probably yell of happyness if Bionicle would return. But until that moment, I need a new Bionicle, a new HF, which I found under the names of Marvel or Transformers.
Also, when you talk about ‘Transformers’ you talk about a franchise with at least seven sub-franchises. As a result, saying that “Transformers then it was better than Transformers now” is only partially correct. If you refer at the G1 era, then yes. It was definetely more succesful than other eras. But if you talk about present Transformers, what are you refering at? Travisverse? Bayverse? Cyberverse? Aligned? Prime Wars?
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With all due respect, how old are most of you guys? I’m 16, and I’m deep into buying guitars, basses, microphones and recording systems, etc. It seems like the rest of you are still buying plastic toys. Please don’t massacre me for saying that.
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Uhm… Aren’t you here in the first place because you like a franchise based on plastic toys?
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