That’s not how evolution works. Individuals do not evolve. Evolution only happens through reproduction and the passing along of certain genes. Therefore, while you as an individual are not evolving, your children will be a small step towards the “next stage of humanity”, and so on.
However, we know from the way that the Makuta “evolved”, the stuff I mentioned above isn’t how it seems to work in the Bionicle universe. Individuals clearly are capable of changing and adapting over time, but it’s never explained how…
Also, as @Eljay said, I thought that Velika granted the Matoran intelligence and free will. I’m not 100% sure if I’m remembering correctly though.
Ah, good point, but individuals still play a part in evolution, as the whole is but a collection of parts. You yourself may not be directly evolving, but you are playing a role and are a part moving forward. And there’s more than one way of evolving. Mental evolution is different, and humans are experiencing changes far more dramatically than ever before because of technology and our newly developed ability to communicate at incredible speeds. Our minds are more at work at every moment, and the youth learn more and more every day than those before them ever did.
As has been mentioned, romantic love is an extension of love and unity as we know it. It’s an off set of love, as emotions aren’t exact and defined. The chemicals you produce to feel love (or the joy that comes with it, as love is a very abstract concept) aren’t unique to that of all other positive feelings, as a lot of it is about context as well. Love can also be the saddest and most painful thing in the world, so it still makes sense that it would develop. Through time minds tend to evolve to expand and become more intelligent, rather than the opposite, so it makes no sense that their minds would be selective and limit themselves to feeling a certain type of love but not all others.
To be able to access the extremes of our emotional spectrums is important and helps us reach to all other perspectives. For some gaining the ability to feel stronger attachments like romantic love is actually more useful, as it gives them something to attach to and have a mental sense of security.
As to Velika… well, I sort of personally consider the serials half-canon. They bring up a lot of cool ideas and are really important to how they affect the Bionicle universe but they’re completely unfinished and leave Bionicle in a very awkward spot where there are more questions than answers, but the kind that don’t make the story any better.
But I feel my theory still holds up. Velika could’ve started the evolutionary process, but after that first push the rest of the dominoes must fall on their own! I tend to look at things from a story-teller’s perspective so these things make sense to me lol.
I disagree! I think I may even be under selling this! Bionicle has always been about the individual and their relationship with the whole, and this theory not only changes, but makes sense how we view that. It strengthens the core themes of the story!
Love is a powerful thing in stories, because it’s able to have people relate to the characters on this emotional level. The theme of romantic love fueling someone or being a subplot really helps add an extra layer of dimension and character. It can be done wrong, sure, but so can time travel alternate universes and look where we ended up with Krakua and Tuyet.
I’m also lumping in romantic love with the concept that the Matoran can’t reproduce - which I feel is a huge error on whoever made that decision. See, when you cut out the ability to reproduce, you cut out the majority of the relationships that the kid audience can relate to. Kids have families, they have fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts and grandparents. They have friends and teachers and frenemies and bullies and crushes…they have all of these relationships that tie and fuel them. So when you have those same relationships in your story, it’s easier for them to relate to the myriad of different relationships that mimic the ones they already have.
Plus, the potential for story and dynamic between the characters is much better once you introduce relations. There’s much more possibilities there. Imagine the relationship between a father and son, between a brother and sister, between a lover and a friend. When you cut that out, when you neuter it to only being platonic friend relationships, you get rid of all of the possible dynamics and leave only one.
I mean, how would Ninjago be if Lloyd and Garmadon were just “good friends”? What if Wu and Garmadon both considered Misako a “sister”? We see the dynamics in Ninjago, and they fundementally shape the story like nothing else could. It’s not always done well - the Cole/Jay/Nya subplot was too forced and was pushed in your face too much. But you look at shows like The Last Airbender, with Zuko and the Fire Lord and Azula and their mother, and you tell me that getting rid of those fundamental relationships does not ruin those characters and what they go through.
This is why I dont care about “official” canon and make my own which has sense to me, like one that has love cause love is important to a sentient being, specifically humanoid near human beings…which Bionicle is.
Despite them being Biomechanical beings from a fictional world…we still put tropes, elements, and emotions of humans on them so as to make them more relatable to us and love is one of the key elements that makes us human. To remove that is to remove a large chuck of what makes us a species, and doing so in a setting like this which arguably has shown examples of love on many occasions fundamentally makes no logical sense when you go deeper into what kind of loves we are talking about here.
This is something I never understood personally. Why is reproduction required for relationships? Adoption, mentorship, and other such relationships don’t require reproduction in order for them to work. You can have a father-son relationship with Turaga/Toa and Matoran, you can still have teacher student relationships, “frenemies,” bullies, etc. all without reproduction. Romantic love and reproduction is not required for children to understand or get attached to characters and their relationship with one another.
That is illogical. Bionicle, with the Matoran Universe, only eliminates romantic love and thus every relationship you gave, except for lover and friend, exist. Brotherly, or platonic, love is a far more powerful and truer form of love than romantic love. “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” That is truly caring and loving someone, not romantic love. Romantic love is nothing more than wanting to sleep with a person, nothing more.
Even taking all forms of love away, you can still have dynamic relationships between characters. Bitter rivalries, hatred, fear, sadness, confusion, etc. Many, many different emotions and ways to have characters react to others based on their relation with one another. A character what was tortured by another and later meets their torturer are going to have feelings of hate, fear, pity, etc. depending on the character and situation. Love isn’t necessary for any of that, nor is it enhance by love. Sticking and focusing on love, especially romantic love, is true death of dynamic character relationships.
First off, Ninjago is terrible from a story perspective and most of the relationship between the characters only makes that story even worse. I don’t have time to explain all my problems with Ninjago’s story and why it is so terrible, that will be for another day. However, all of those relationships can be done without reproduction and even romantic love to an extent. See Tom King’s run of Marvel Comic’s character the Vision and his family for a reference point.
Or better yet, just look at robots/androids. They often consider their creator to be their father or mother and in turn their creator considers them to be a son/daughter. Other robots or creations made by the same creator or someone related to the creator are/could be considered to be a sibling to the first robot. And more can easily be done, all without reproduction or blood lines. Now if you for some reason still want terrible love triangles and romance, then yes, romantic love is require for those two-three relationship types that exist. But for the most part, a majority of relationships exist with at least platonic love if love is involved at all.
This is interesting and fun to think about, but thanks to your “it’s another reason to love Bionicle” comment it just seems like you only wrote this only looking at one side of the spectrum. I agree with @chilly, you’re seeing trying to see things that aren’t there.
I don’t think the issue here is love, it’s Greg himself. He contradicts himself nonstop, and thanks to that your thoughts, even though they could make for some very compelling character interactions and development, couldn’t work. He said love isn’t canon, but he said it’s because Matoran Universe inhabitants have no reason to love. Just because they can’t do each other doesn’t mean they don’t have love. I strongly believe Greg just went with the simple “love isn’t canon” way of saying things because saying “sex and by extensionsion love isn’t canon because Matoran weren’t made with reproductive parts” probably wouldn’t fly with Lego. When Greg had to find a way of saying love doesn’t exist for Matoran, people lost it because they don’t read into the story and they need to be spoon-fed everything. Different characters clearly have deep emotional bonds, and while that doesn’t automatically extend to romantic feelings it doesn’t mean the love and affection isn’t there. The Matoran just don’t know what love is because it wasn’t programmed into them. They didn’t know anything beyond work before Velika messed around, they learned and grew. But confined to the Mata Nui robot they would’ve never discovered love because there was nothing in the universe for them to observe and learn what love is. They may have had those feelings, but it would be unexplainable until they arrived on Spherus Magna.
On a personal note, I strongly believe love in all forms should’ve been canon for Matoran Universe inhabitants just because love can really mess with a person(or bio mechanical beings) and lead to interesting arcs for characters.
“Romantic love is nothing more than wanting to sleep with a person, nothing more.”
You’re mixing up romance with sexual attraction man. They coexist, but aren’t even close to being the same thing.
The only other definition of romantic love is that of perceiving a false reality. Imagination or envisioning someone/something else in a more ideal appearance than what it actually is. Or thinking you know or have a deeper relationship with someone when one doesn’t exist.
Now you’re trying to bring logic into love, which is silly because no textbook definition is going to tell you what love feels like. If you love someone, you love them and you just know. You accept everything about them, and if you spend all your time pretending they’re better then they actually are it’s not real love, it’s superficial. Again, there is a difference between sex and romance. Just because they go hand in hand doesn’t make them the same thing.
Acceptance of faults others have and spending time with them because you care is what has always been defined to me as brotherly love.
And I’m a detached machine of a person, so I’m going to try and bring reasoning to everything. I only have dictionaries and media to reference after all.
But… you quite literally just quoted back my idea to me and said that I’m “trying to see things that aren’t there.”
I don’t know if you read the entirety of what I wrote, but I fully explained how the matoran are evolving and growing to feel and understand things like love.
And I’m not going to fool myself into believing in something that wasn’t there. The matoran and their evolution are real themes that are important and relevant in Bionicle. I’m not adding or taking anything away with this theory, rather I’m just taking a more detailed and realistic look at what there is. Maybe it wasn’t a deliberate and brilliant move by Greg to de-canonize love, but it ended up having a pholosophical and meaningful impact that in my opinion, makes the story just a little bit more intersting.
I agree to an extent, but not completely. When I speak about love here, I talk about it in a basic, vague story-telling sense. In reality, people don’t really understand love because love itself doesn’t make sense. There’s no hidden definition, it’s a feeling, and feelings themselves are imperfect and irrational. To an extent as humans, sexuality is greatly closely tied together with romantic love, as it can be seen as a by product to make us want to find a mate more to survive and bring off-spring.
But that doesn’t explain why people stay together when one of the two is infertile, or why we have homosexuality. What’s happened is that humans are changing and evolving, separating from nature. Romantic love has become a separate entity from sexual feelings, or else I wouldn’t be paying attention to women’s personalities and would only be looking at the width of their hips.
And yes, love itself like all emotion makes no sense. But realistically, nothing about humans does. All that really makes sense is our drive to improve and understand. In our quest to do precisely, we will be completely separate from primitive drives, and things like romantic love will change drastically, and eventually disappear as we are driven by the universe itself. But right now, we are in that awkward stage in evolution, where our minds are expanding and the world is divided. That divide will only continue to expand into the next generations, but for now we can only be the best that we are and do our best to train for the future, and the future of humanity, even if we ourselves as individuals aren’t what’s changing.
There was marriage in G1. Roodaka and sidorak were king and queen by marriage.
If there’s marriage, why is love not canon?
I’m a bit unusual in that I experience a separation of the two. I cannot and have never felt romantic attraction, but I am attracted to the opposite sex. So I’m an aromantic heterosexual.
The answer to that is that until 2005, love was canon. We had things like Hewkii and Macku, Jaller and Hahli’s obvious flirting in MoL, Matau trying to flirt with Nokama in LoMN, right up to WoS.
2005 featured a femme fatale villain in Roodaka, who Sidorak clearly had the hots for, and she not only played him like a harp but also pretty much seduced Vakama and really wanted to have a thing with Teridax.
Then Greg decanonized love and pretended that 90% of that didn’t happen. When asked about the marriage, he said it was a political alliance, which made pretty much zero sense since Roodaka wasn’t a political leader of any kind, and Sidorak only got power because he took credit for mutating the Rahaga. And his power was over a bunch of semi-sentient spiders that he was borrowing from Terry.
It should be noted that Greg’s approach to retroactive continuity was pretty bad. He basically just decanonized everything that didn’t sit right with his vision of the franchise on that particular day and said “Okay, sure” to whatever nuttiness the Ask Greg thread on BZP or the Lego Message Boards churned up.
I’ve been editing the video for the next Behind the Brick, which focuses on this topic of love not being canon. So I’m not going to reply to everything so as not to spoil it. This post is missing a conclusion, because it’s basically the ending of the video. But there are some specific things I want to address real quick:
I really find it odd that you’re using Tom King’s the Visions as your example for your point. If anything, it’s the strongest argument for my points that’s come out in comics in recent memory. The entire point of the book is that Vision has built himself a family in order for him to completely understand familial relationships because he can’t achieve the same relationships just with his platonic friends. He wants to explore more human and deeper relationships and creates his family to do it. They in turn all try to become more human through the course of this series, taking an analytical approach to common human elements (the concept of pre-eminence, the ironic state of “seeming nice”).
The idea is that the Visions, alongside almost all robot and androids in pop culture and media, are presented as outsiders and contrasted against humans. They come from an exclusively logical perspective and are commonly taught human emotions, including love, over the course of their development for the series. This is true of the Vision himself, as he started as an emotionless android, then in a pivotal iconic moment from Avengers history, found emotion and soon love by being with his team, and then wanted to explore the deepest human relationships by being a husband and a father.
tell me if this have been brought up before, but in the Transformers franchise, there is also love. Now depending on the continuity, love is ither the family variation where in cybertronians can have children. But for the most part its in the non family variation, sort of. You see Transformers can fall in love with one another, and they don’t care if they can make babies or not, to them, new transformers are ither built or created from protoforms. In the IDW canon, love is common for transformers and its not a thing that they where introduced to while on Earth, it was something that was normal to them, infact they introduced the Conjunx Endura idea, which put simply is the transformer version of marriage.
I think romance has little to no place in Bionicle when I look at it from the logical perspective BUT as a Person and someone dedicated to developing characters, I feel the need to say that absence of love can make characters less interesting than they would be with it’s presence.
