Are Toa of Plasma Not White?

LEGO BIONICLE
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For reasons that I no longer remember, I was recently browsing through the BS01 pages for various Matoran types, when this caught my eye:

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I noticed that the “white” part of the Su-Matoran colour scheme was uncited, and I figured that it would be pretty simple to kill some time by going through the Greg Archives and finding the citation.

It wasn’t.

After going through every single Greg Quote containing the words “plasma” and “white”, as well as “plasma” and “su”, I could not find a single one in which Greg actually says that Toa or Matoran of Plasma have white as a secondary colour.

Here’s what I was able to find.

For starters, orange was confirmed as a Plasma colour in December of 2009:

Then, the first ever quote to ever ask if Toa of Plasma are white is this one in January of 2010, to which Greg replies that he doesn’t know:

Disclaimer

Right out of the gate, this could be where I went wrong; because of the timing of the questions, as well as the fact that Greg didn’t have an answer for the second one, the rest of my research was done under the assumption that the Plasma colour scheme was completely unknown before late 2009, and, as such, I didn’t really look in any older quotes or other media for an answer. If the colour scheme was in fact addressed in earlier quotes, then I missed it because never really looked there, though I still went through most of the quotes.

The next quote to use the words “plasma” and “white” is this one in February 2010, in which a user mentions a preference for one shade of orange over another, in order to “look[s] great with white”

However, there is not a single quote in between the two that uses the word “plasma” in which Greg addresses the colour scheme in any way.

After that, there was a three year gap before another question was asked which associates white with Plasma:

This is almost kind of a secondhand confirmation, but I’d be hesitant to take the oversight of an supplementary example based on assumptions as hard canon.

From there, we’re just left with other users answering question with the apparently-faulty info:

(Props to ryannui for asking the question.)

Also, that second guy says it was mentioned in the books, but I’m not sure if I believe that; I couldn’t find anything in the books, but I’ll admit that it’s harder to search by word through those. The main reason I don’t believe that claim, though, is the fact that the colour scheme was being asked about in 2009, which is way later than any book would have mentioned a Toa of Plasma.

So… that’s about it. Have we all just been making an assumption about Plasma colours for the last decade, or did I miss a source? The only thing I can think of that I might have missed is the “S&T Poll” mentioned on BS01, since I don’t really know how to navigate BZPower, but a rough search didn’t turn up anything.

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I also found this regarding that poll

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I sure hope not…

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Jesus, first Sonics and Magnetism, now Plasma? Someone help us

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I guess those never were explicitly confirmed, were they? At least we had visual representations of characters of those Elements to work with, though; Plasma doesn’t even have that.

Side Tangent

That reminds me why I was going through the different Matoran types in the first place; I was double-checking which Elements had Toa or Matoran appear in the story, to see if we could potentially have canon contests to get a visual representation of at least one Toa of every Element.

If anyone’s curious, Plasma, Gravity, and Plantlife will eventually be the only Elements without a visual representation of a Toa (besides Shadow, obviously), but none of those three really had any Canon-Contest-worthy characters (unless you count the Toa Mangai of The Green).

There seems to have been discussions on the Greg Archives about having a poll for those two colour schemes, but, like Plasma’s secondary colour, I can’t find anything to indicate that the polls were actually carried out.

Although, another interesting thing that I’ve found while researching Plasma is that the colour schemes of the original six Elements have about as much explicit confirmation as Sonics and Magnetism; Greg’s never actually said “Water is blue”, for example, and all six colour schemes are currently uncited on BS01. All eight of the above Elements’s “official” colour schemes have instead been derived from existing models and appearances, though I will point out that the original six Elements have a much larger sample pool.

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Dorek said here that this is the Plasma color poll, but it was lost.

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That’s what I was worried about.

Does anyone who was around at the time remember what happened with that? Did it ever get finished? Was it canonized before BZPower did whatever it did to lose a bunch of stuff?

I’d assume not, because it probably would have been reported somewhere we could find, but I wouldn’t know for sure.

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Maybe someone should ask Greg himself? It would be very unfortunate if the only source came from the deleted bzpower archives.

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I say “Sonics and Magnetism” because beyond “Grey” from NOGLB, there has been no explicit confirmation of the colors of either element. Greg has said that Jovan and Krakua were only colored the way they were because those were the parts on hand, not because those colors were canon.

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Should probably be updated with a note.

Edit: Done that for the Su-Matoran page.

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Should there also be notes on the De-Matoran and Fa-Matoran pages, explaining that the colour schemes were not officially confirmed and are instead taken from existing models?

Or could the models be used as citations?

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No, they can’t. See the notes on the Magnetism and Sonics pages. These notes should be added to the respective Matoran pages, though.

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Headcanon:
Plasma should be white and literally any other bright color because plasma is superheated gas and it just depends on the gas

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Yes, but also…

… it’s BIONICLE

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Yeah while going through those Greg quotes I read one where Greg said lightning didn’t exist in the GSR so… take that as you will

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It’s mentioned in one of the books - I can’t remember which one but it was in Mahri Nui so it must have been like half-way through the Legends books I guess - that matoran and toa of plasma weren’t accepted in Pridak’s territories in the Seven Kingdoms, which elsewhere were implied to be based on white ethnonationalism, so from that we can probably infer that white wasn’t one of their canon colours.

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I don’t remember reading this.

I just did CTRL + F for the word “plasma” in an old version of the Biological Chronicle project, and it was never once used in reference to Pridak’s army.

Again, I don’t remember reading or hearing about anything like this, and it doesn’t seem like something that Bionicle would have done.

Plus, it was the League of Six Kingdoms, not Seven. Are you sure you aren’t just remembering a fanfiction story?

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I can confirm, the BZPower poll to determine Plasma’s secondary color did actually happen. It got a lot of attention and furor, and ultimately, white won. Unfortunately, BZPower crashed several times in the interim, and no one thought to preserve the records. After that mess, BZP admins sort of took control of canon color schemes out of the hands of the masses.

Source: I’m Angel Bob.

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Didn’t realize those notes weren’t on there.

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-mic drop-

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