Bionicle Elements Discussion

LEGO BIONICLE
126

Statement:
Onua absolutely can use a dirt ramp to lift Pohatu.

Proof:
First off, Pohatu is not running downward. He is running forward. the ramp doesn’t have to resist the force of his run, it just has to hold him up and keep him moving forward. His speed does not matter as much, and in fact would help keep him from sinking in to the dirt – each time he starts to sink, he moves before his feet sink very far.

Second, can he stop? The mask of speed probably allows him to slow to a stop, but not instantaneously stop. If you’ve ever tried to stop while running very fast, it isn’t easy to do. Stopping instantly, at the speed Pohatu is running, would probably damage him a lot.

So the dirt simply needs to act like the dirt Pohatu was running on before he hits the ramp: hold him up, and keep him moving forward. Can a dirt hill do that?

Probably not. In fact, it would likely fall apart even without Pohatu running on it. But this is not a normal dirt hill. It’s one being controlled by Onua.

Pohatu is going to sink into the dirt, sure, but at the speed he’s going, that isn’t an issue. The issue is that his feet will push the dirt backwards as he runs, effectively digging through the dirt. However, all Onua needs to do is keep pulling more in to replace it. Ironically, digging through the soft dirt with each step will also slow Pohatu down, but not enough to stop him: again he’s going too fast.

With each step, Pohatu will dig through the dirt, until his foot encounters enough resistance to propel him forward. Maybe not at full speed, but he’s running really fast already. If this were normal dirt, he’d eventually dig through it, but for all the dirt he displaces, Onua pulls in more to replace it. Pohatu does still dig a trench through it, and it can only go up so high before structural integrity makes the top unstable, but it still succeeds in its purpose: moving Pohatu’s trajectory upward, which causes him to go flying.

Also, and this is something none of you have taken in to account: there are tree roots entwined in this dirt. This will help the structural integrity even more, even if Pohatu’s feet never hit them, by providing more resistance.

And finally: even if an earth Toa can solidify their element (which is not necessary for this earth ramp trick) it still doesn’t defeat the purpose of separate elements. Onua and Pohatu can both create a wall of their element, but when they stop focusing on it, Onua’s wall crumbles while Pohatu’s wall stays up.

Now, with all that said, should the earth ramp have worked on the speeding boat in Voyage of Fear? No. Just no.

However, this time there was a Toa of stone present, who helped make the ramp. With the strength of rock mixed in, this ramp…

Still shouldn’t have made the boat fly over the whirlpool. Even if it lifted it up, which is still questionable. Boats don’t do that.

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127

Technically the Vahki transport is a land vehicle that was acting as a boat. But… [scrolls up] by my earlier calculations, it possibly weighs 12,700 pounds. However, I don’t really remember the details of that scene. Where can I find the passage from Voyage of Fear that you are describing?

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Voyage of Fear, pages 34-35.

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[reads pages] Yeah, I’m with you on this one-but for a different reason. The Vahki transport would need quite a bit of velocity to make the jump across the whirlpool-more than what it can generate using its legs as oars.

130

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.

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131

To be honest, I think that everything you have included here is already covered under ‘illusions’.

You just got into way more detail.

But while we’re on the topic of redesigning Psionics, I would remove their telekinetic ability. Sure, telekinesis is a power that requires sufficient willpower to operate, but it never really seemed like a ‘mind power’ to me.

To me, Psionics should be illusions like you described, mind reading, mind control, and mental shielding.

I’m sure that they already have all of these powers, I just removed the telekinesis.

Perhaps, to make up for the removal of telekinesis, you could increase the scope of their other powers. Maybe they can mind control someone to do something against their morals, or they could gain the ability to absorb Psionic energy to recharge their powers.

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132

Say, guys, what do you think of an “ash” element? Like, smoke, ash, soot, that stuff. It’d be distinct as an element (smoke clouds to hinder vision and particles to just be annoying and even suffocate a foe), but idk if it really feels like a proper element. I can understand if you think it’d go under Fire or Earth, but I’m more talking about what the merits of being its own element would be.

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That… actually isn’t bad. I don’t think smoke or ash/charcoal/soot would really be covered under any other elements.

There is a point where an element becomes too specific (Toa of Steam), or the list of elements gets too crowded with pointless elements (Toa of Plastic, Glass, Positive Thoughts, etc.), but I don’t think this element cross that line.

It has a reasonably broad range of applications, is based on natural elements, and isn’t really made redundant by any other elemental powers.

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134

Uh…

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Why did you remember that I said that? Even I didn’t remember saying that. Also, I’m talking about the guy named Ash, and referencing the “smoke” element from Ninjago, which–from my understanding–is more limited in scope than what I’m proposing, and gives the user the ability to turn teleport and into a smoke cloud. For some reason. It’s designed so weirdly and, in a Bionicle power battle, Ash is still going to lose because he has so little offensive capability in a context like this.

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Well, because in the context of that discussion, it felt like you were saying that smoke was a stupid idea for an element-and frankly, I found myself agreeing with you.

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I would chalk that up to me not really considering that smoke is actually physical debris and its rather nonsensical implementation in Ninjago. And I’m not really just saying smoke for an Ash element–I’m talking lots and lots of the stuff, not necessarily just a little puff like we see in Ninjago, but ash to bury a person under. Choking people out, obscuring vision, even using it as a sort of substitute for Earth are among the combat applications of Ash. Skyrim actually has some cool ash destruction spells; you can cake people in ash to immobilize them.

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If it were up to me, first I would merge gravity and magnetism with psionics. Gravity manipulation and shaping metal can easily be the affects of telepathy which is a psychic ability.
The second thing I would do is to remove plasma entirely. The element is way too similar to fire and lightning that it may as well be a combination of the two. Plus plasma is harder to depict in set form.
The last thing is that I’d merge plantlife with Earth since Earth and Stone are too similar for either to stand out. Not only that but plantlife really complements Onua’s gentle giant stature and the diversity of mask colors on the onu tribe. This could also work for lore reasons as the onu matoran would prefer to use digital files or stone scriptures for their archives to save their trees from being cut down for heavy books.
Psionics, Sonics and Iron would stay because those are unique enough to stand on their own but I would add teal as an optional color for the iron element to reflect copper but also because it would be really nice to get teal parts if lego made iron toa sets.

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139

You know, there’s something about that line that sells the idea of an ash element to me - seems fitting with the themes of Bionicle that one of the elements is the burnt and destroyed remnants of one of the other elements.

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140

You mean telekinesis? Telepathy is just reading minds (which is already a Kanohi power), whereas telekinesis is…well, the Matatu. I would say that basically giving Toa the Force doesn’t really work as an element to begin with.

Magnetism involves magnetic fields, which is more redundant to Iron than anything else but could ultimately be merged with Lightning, since electricity and magnetism come from the same force.

Gravity is entirely different–it comes from the distortion of spacetime and can be thought of as objects in space exerting a force on space itself over a 4th-dimensional axis. Wherever you exert that force, everything in a radius of that point is pulled towards it. It’s therefore less precise than telekinesis, but in theory, manipulating spacetime itself could enable the user to make wormholes.

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141

Well, that same discussion seemed to prove that, in general, Ninjago doesn’t play on the highest tier in terms of power, so…yeah.

You could make the argument that Ash from Ninjago could do that stuff, we just didn’t see it…though it would’ve REALLY come in handy in the battle with the cultists-turned-Anacondrai. You’d think he would’ve used those powers, if he did have them (or knew he had them?).

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