This, I think, sums up why I don’t think there’s any real movement that’s happened here with Faber’s stuff. As has been talked about prior (long in the past) Faber is inviting us to join him all on his ship… but we have no clue that he’s at dock 19 in Stockholm.
However.
This is the thing I’ve latched onto the most from your post:
Faber’s new and wild approach to Bionicle is the thing I’m most interested in from Biovival. These sketches of strange and unexplored lands make me want to explore. Using the framework of the biomechanical chronicle to develop and explore ideas that weren’t around for G1, in ways that aren’t quite yet around today.
And this is the thing that seems to differentiate me from most of the people in this thread: I’m very interested in seeing Faber’s work outside of Bionicle. Interest in Rebel Nature doesn’t seem very high, and the suggestion of a Bionicle spiritual successor from the original creator of Bionicle results in responses like this:
Being offered one thing and given another is, of course, reason for legitimate outrage, but what’s to say that Legally Distinct Bionicle:tm: is not “the good stuff?” Prior experience with G2? This isn’t quite that. If Faber manages to start this massive movement, working with us , then why does it need to be Bionicle specifically?
What stops us from enjoying something that is Bionicle in all but name?
Yeah, I could see how Stockholm Syndrome could be a thing here. He doesn’t realize the level of debate and criticism and dissection that this community has reached, and so he’s trapped. On one hand, he has all of these great Bionicle ideas inside of his head that are begging to be created, and on the other hand those ideas are being held hostage by the attitudes of the fan community and Lego’s financial quandary.
Said quandary is that the Bionicle fanbase is big enough to shout for Bionicle’s return, but not big enough to be profitable for a huge company like Lego.
Because this is the Bionicle fan community and he slapped the Bionicle logo on it. Now if old Faber was trying to make a new story series that wasn’t Rebel Nature or Bionicle, maybe I’d pay it some passing attention. But I didn’t come here for some other movement - I really don’t care for environmentalism.
Bionicle is the story series that told a young abuse victim - me - that I could be powerful. It taught me that boys have feelings and weaknesses and that they aren’t faceless enemies, which was two lessons I badly needed to learn. Now you can argue the fact that I had to learn both of those lessons from a children’s toyline is pathetic. It is pathetic, but the fact is that Bionicle means a lot to me, in the way that Rebel Nature or whatever else doesn’t. Now if you’re into environmentalism and like Faber’s new direction? Props to you. But I came here for 6 Toa fighting bad guys and having feelings, so Legally Distinct Bionicle Rebel-Nature-mix just doesn’t appeal to me.
And frankly, I’ve read so many stories with elemental powers at this point, wielded by humans or otherwise, and have enjoyed many of them. I’m just really really tired of fantasy elemental power stories with obvious political agendas behind them. If I wanted that, I’d go back to studying children’s literature at the university. Bionicle isn’t that, so it has more of an appeal.
Now Faber does have some storytelling credentials in my mind - he made the brilliant concept behind Bionicle, but Advance and Faber also made that cringe-worthy Invasion From Below episode in Hero Factory. I’m wondering whether he just got lucky (or unlucky, in the case of that awful tumor) and thus isn’t as sharp a storyteller as he might appear. This would go back into the huge forest of storyline quality debate that we have had in the Bionicle fandom ever since G1 ended. If his work is low-quality, I’m not inclined to trust it. It depends on what writer he gets for his story. I’m not sure I trust him off the chain.
Actually though, that part might not be Faber’s fault though; the ending got changed because someone at Advance felt the beasts weren’t scary enough. Them making peace with the beasts may very well have been Faber’s concept.
Lack of plot and character substance - the beginning really felt like a product commercial instead of a story. The genocide part was the icing on the cake.
The best part was the landscape of the underground tunnels, which we know that Faber made, I think.
No, really
the entire plot got changed before the deadline, there was an interview talking about the episode on lego’s youtube channel back in the day that confirmed this and people who worked on it were rushed
I don’t know when this topic got so needlessly combative, but I guess I’m jumping into the fire now…
I don’t think anyone is of that opinion. That would imply that something already exists and is ready to go and that all Faber has to do is pull the trigger on it. From what we’ve seen for a long time now, I don’t think that’s the case at all.
In fact, as you yourself have argued, I don’t even think there is any sort of product at this time, just sort of soupy ideas.
And yea, this here is exactly what Ghid is “arguing” for. I wouldn’t even say arguing, I don’t think I’ve ever really seen him here trying to force people to agree with him, just see what he’s saying.
Yes.
I’m not because I’ve well and truly stopped caring about this entire Faber business about a year and a half ago, but I would say that generally, yes, it’s a reasonable reaction to be mad at Faber for attempting to leverage the emotions and nostalgia and hype of a fanbase without saying why.
Entirely in the same way that a Nintendo fan would be angry at Nintendo if that company were to start posting nebulous Mario concept art and then, in response to the question “is there a new Mario game coming out?” get the answer “we’re riding the winds with the sails of the Odyssey and reaching new heights and Galaxies. We don’t know where it will take us, but we’ll find it together as Super Stars!”
For three years. With no official announcements.
I’d almost be inclined to believe you if it weren’t for the fact that nowhere in anything Faber has posted has he asked directly for feedback, ideas, or specific products people would want to see.
He’s gotten a sure heck of a lot of that anyway from people projecting their pipedreams of G1 returning or G3 or what have you, but he’s never explicitly used his posts to poll or gauge the community. All he’s ever done is ask for vague “support,” which for many people fed up with all of this has seemed to mean “blindly follow everything I’m doing with this and say yes to all of it.”
Is some of the stuff he’s putting out cool? Yes, I’ve been personally inspired by it in some ways. But I’ve never gotten a sense that he’s attempting to figure out what we want, and he’s never expressed that either. It feels more like he’s doing something and wants us to follow him on that ride.
And I think it’s reasonable for people to react to being leveraged in a negative manner when they don’t know for what purpose.
My reaction, as always: This looks cool, but what actually is that?And where in Hero Factory does destruction play an actual thematic role in opposition to creation?
How do we know we are being leveraged at all, or that the interaction is negative?
That is the core of the problem: we don’t know anything. You’d think after 3 years we would know something, if there was something worth knowing. This whole argument seems to be the fan community claiming that Faber is hiding something below the surface and demanding to know what it is, when he’s just posting concept art to influence the community.
I mean, that’s all it is until we know otherwise, so that’s what it is.
This whole debate is people getting mad because they don’t know stuff. After 3 years, we still don’t know anything about what Faber’s doing, as if Faber actually owns Bionicle (he doesn’t) or we own Bionicle (we don’t) and Faber is trying to wrest intellectual ownership of it from us or something. The Bionicle community feels threatened when Lego or someone else tries to do official Bionicle wrong, so Faber’s cageyness increases the community’s ire.
We don’t know what Faber’s doing, so we view him as a possible threat to Bionicle. This is what this debate has been about. The community reacts negatively to not knowing because we see the unknown as a threat.
Yeah I certainly don’t view his activities as a threat to bionicle. More like something that for my own hopes is best to just not get too excited over now
You can threaten to change that. I can certainly think of things I would’ve preferred left in the past yet were revived anyway, to their detriment.
Bionicle for one. Even someone like me, who’s as close to a Faber simp as this thread gets, is worried about the possibility of anything Faber manages to do turning out like G2, or worse.
It’s happened before, in other places and other times.
And it will happen again, countless more.
What’s kinda sad is that Faber has been being mysterious and cryptic for over 3 years now- and we still don’t really know anything about what he’s doing. It seems to me now like we might not get anything from him. That’s not to say i was expecting anything- we Bonkle fans have been very lucky, while G2 may have been lackluster in it’s story, we got some really great sets, (Mask Maker Ekimu, Umarak the Hunter, etc) and it was a miracle from Mata Nui to get a reboot at all. If Faber isn’t reviving Bionicle in any way, i feel like he should just tell us, Instead of continuously hinting at some sort of G3.
Of course, it could be that in 6 years We’ll get Faberonicle G3 and everyone will laugh about how we criticized him
Firstly, we’re being leveraged because he’s told us. He’s asked for support. He’s not just going “hey, look at this cool thing I made.” He’s showing us things that are meant to be developmental sneak-peeks to get us excited and interested in what he’s doing. Fairly certain back when talks with LEGO were a thing he was making statements that our support would be seen and heard by them and would help him in his endeavors. That’s leveraging.
What I wrote was that some people are reacting negatively to being leveraged, not that Faber is being negative. As in some people are upset that their emotions and nostalgia are being pandered to for what has, so far, amounted to nothing.
Which you seem to agree with:
Which results in the issue here:
Again, as I said before in defense of Ghid, no it isn’t.Nobody here thinks Faber’s hoarding some sort of content goldmine that he’s just electing to withhold from us. We’re demanding to know what he’s doing, yes, but not because we’re entitled to said imaginary content, but because clearly our emotions and nostalgia have been pandered to for 3 years for nothing.
And what I was trying to get across in my first response is that I think it’s totally within our rights to be disappointed and, yes, even a little angry at that. Have you ever been told that it’s rude to pretend to have a ball in front of a dog, and to fake throwing it? That you shouldn’t tease the dog with something you don’t have? We’re the dog here.
Bionicle fans have been so ungodly desperate for “official” content (or in Faber’s case, content from one of the original creators that’s either one-to-one or spiritually related) that we latch ourselves onto any avenue for it. The canon contests, the LEGO Ideas pitches, the 90th Anniversary. Whether or not that’s a healthy state for a community to be in is another discussion entirely, but that’s the basis of why everyone was so initially interested in whatever Faber is doing. So, yes, when you keep faking that dog out for 3 years, I imagine that dog is going to lose interest. And for us, human beings with emotional attachment to the thing we were being teased with? We react with disappointment and anger at being manipulated.
And this makes the situation even worse. It’s easy to come to it as some sort of defense for the situation. “We shouldn’t be mad because it was never his intention to give us anything, he just wants to inspire us.”
The only thing is, we’ve been doing that. For nearly thirteen years now. Other people have said it, if all Faber’s goal has been this entire time was to rally a grieving, demure little community behind him to continue the legacy through art and creation, he failed because we’ve been doing that for years without him.
So, pick your poison, really. Either Faber has been trying to hype us up for 3 years for something he’s refused to even offer an idea of what it wants to be, or he’s stepped up to “lead” and “inspire” a community who hasn’t needed his help in over a decade.
I honestly have no idea where this came from.
Our desire to want to know what he’s doing has never been because we want to make sure it’s kosher Bionicle. It’s been because if he wants to do something and wants us to support him, we should probably know what it is so we know how to support it.
I couldn’t care any less if it was G3, a fan project, a reimagining, a reboot, a continuation. I don’t even care if he decided he wanted to make toothbrushes. If you want people to be on board with your idea, you can’t just give them vague poetry statements and expect them to stay with you until the end.
Now if old Faber was trying to make a new story series that wasn’t Rebel Nature or Bionicle, maybe I’d pay it some passing attention. But I didn’t come here for some other movement - I really don’t care for environmentalism.