Right. I’ve been watching this discussion go down and frankly, I’m genuinely surprised with just how wack some of these takes - and how poor some of these arguments are. I’m sure when it comes time there’ll be no restriction on the torso construction anyway and people will be allowed to use whatever amalgamation of parts that they want to, but that goes against the point of calling this a “canon” contest, rather than just some custom build, or revamp contest if you ask me.
The idea is to get the canon depiction of these characters, and I’d personally consider actively going against what canon details we already have for these characters for the sake of being ‘creative’ to be in bad faith.
The remaining Toa Hagah are of a Metru build, like Toa Norik and Toa Iruni, and Greg has clarified this; specifically talking about their body. - Pretty cut and dry.
Norik and Iruni have different armour to the Toa Metru and Lhikan sets, as well as different armour to each other. This is also the case for their lower limbs. As far as identifying what exactly makes a “Metru build”, I’d say it’s a good place to start with the similarities between all the sets that are considered one, but I think you could safely boil it down to just the torso piece, and roughly similar scale/proportions.
If I were to propose a rule for the Hagah contests, it would be:
“Your build must use 1 (no more, no less) Metru torso gearbox piece (part: 47395) in the torso’s construction, and scale with the existing Toa Hagah canister sets.
(basically don’t build a titan and just hide the torso piece inside)”
IMO, that should balance having a restriction to ensure the winning entry is canon-compliant (as a canon model should be) - with all the room for creative freedom everywhere else, within reason.
I mean, have you seen what people are able to do around a Metru build anyway?
What the people advocating for “muh creativity” need to understand is this is a Hagah contest. We already have 2/6 of them, and we know the rest should have the same body build, and look pretty similar. The end result should be a whole team that fits next to the official sets, not have any that stick out like a sore thumb literally just for the sake of it.
None of the custom torsos I’ve seen here even do anything that the Metru torso doesn’t already accomplish - actually, most of them are inferior as they can’t accommodate a working gearbox.
But beyond that, what is the point of a custom torso completely replicating the original?
The argument that it doesn’t matter so long as the art portion (if we even have a separate art portion for this contest…) changes the appearance to use a Metru torso piece is redundant - if it’s going to look like it should in the end anyway, there’s no reason for it to look different at any point in between, and potentially have the “canon model” be non-canon from the moment it was entered. It’s also a ridiculous double standard to enforce such a restriction on the artists, but not on the builders.