I figured this subject would just get moved here, so I’m posting here. TL;DR the direction for Psionics was handled in entirely the wrong way.
A while back, I posted a thread asking for some element ideas, and one interesting topic was the idea of Psionics being reworked to control some sort of “mind matter” which Toa of Psionics would control much like other Toa control matter/energy. I objected to this on the grounds that it’d need further explanation and wasn’t intuitive enough, unlike Fire, for example. I’d have to decide all the properties of this meta-substance myself, and that’d just be its own magic system.
But recently, the idea crept back into my mind, and it hit me: Psionics can be a proper material element, one controlled like any “proper” one. This “mind matter” can have intuitive, easy-to-understand properties, and it’s all based around one core principle which kind of exists in G1, but gets upstaged by the element’s other powers: it doesn’t exist.
Psionics, as an element, can be anything you want. It can be solid, liquid, gas, energy. It looks like whatever you want it to and can have any properties. It’s not just something in one person’s mind, either; you make it, and everyone else sees it. There’s one big caveat, though, and that is that it’s not real stuff, but the illusion of stuff.
This is hard to explain without an example, so I’ll give one. Let’s say Orde wants to kick your ■■■. To this end, he puts a ramp between you and him, and you have to scale it to get to him if you want to beat him. So you go to climb the ramp, but as you try to step on it, even though your mind is telling you that your foot stops on the ramp and cannot go through it, in reality, there is no ramp, so you just take a step forward. This jarring split between what’s happening and what your senses tell you will throw off your balance unless you can figure out what’s going on and you have enough willpower to force yourself to see through the illusion. Even if you consciously know there is no ramp, you’ll really need to work to get your instincts on the same page.
What’s more, everyone spectating the fight will see you climbing the ramp, but stumbling for no obvious reason until they realize the ramp isn’t real–at which point, they’ll see you walking through it.
Another example: Orde decides to produce a spear from thin air and throws it at you. It’s not real, so if he wants it to connect, of course it does. You suffer no injury, but you still feel the pain and see/feel yourself bleed out, and you sense the object stuck in you until Orde decides it doesn’t need to be there anymore. This causes your body to react as though you were injured, which will mess with your immune and cardiovascular systems. If he decides to land a killing blow, you may even perceive yourself dying and, therefore, your body will shut down, making your death real. (This breaks the Toa Code in most cases, of course, but this is more to show how this element works.)
BS01 mentions that the element can produce powerful illusions, but this isn’t really expanded upon too much in canon unless I’m forgetting something. With the potential applications I describe here, Psionics becomes an element that brings dreams into reality. Stuff starts and stops existing or happening, and whole locales can change at a whim, so long as the wielder of the element has the energy to keep going. Of course, the most potent and long-lasting illusions drain the most elemental energy, so Toa of Psionics couldn’t make all the best illusions possible all the time in the same way that a Toa of Earth can’t move a continent; and the greater a foe’s intelligence and willpower, the more energy needs to go into the illusion for it to keep working as intended, since the strongest foes can just ignore the illusions. But especially with teammates, the ability to mask what is and isn’t real can be incredibly useful in a way that no other element is, especially in a surprise attack.