I’m quickly realizing how tiresome this discussion is.
To sum up a few of my thoughts:
-
The Hagah are canonically Metru builds, and it’s redundant to even attempt to canonize anything but. There are plenty of other character contests down the road for characters we don’t already have a very solid idea of how they should look that are fair game for people to scratch their custom torso itch.
-
The only valid argument there is for allowing it anyway is going on the assumption that there will be an art contest to fix it, and that in which case the moc won’t be the canon depiction, yet people still refer to Double’s Helryx and Wombat’s Artakha as the “canon models” and are what most people will build if they recreate them - bar the masks.
It would make everyone’s jobs easier if it didn’t need to be fixed to begin with. I also believe it shouldn’t fall on the artists’ to fix the design that didn’t want to comply with canon, nor is it fair to restrict the artists’ ‘creative freedom’, but not the builders’. -
And finally, there is next to no point to even using a custom torso, especially if they’re all just trying to emulate the Metru piece anyway - just use the Metru torso piece.
To me it just seems like a combination of people desperately wanting to leave a bigger mark on these character’s appearances than just their limbs, armour and masks and weapons, and clinging to the age old rhetoric of “custom = better”.
Again, this is a canon contest to decide the depiction of the Toa Hagah, not a some other moc or revamp contest, 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, regardless of what is or isn’t explicitly allowed.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone building their own moc of the Hagah with a different torso construction, but this contest is not the place for it.