We all know that Botar died in a very lame and anticlimactic fashion just to be replaced by “Botar’s Replacement” which is just Botar again for all intents and purposes.
So my idea would be - what if the Order just has a bunch of vat-grown Botar clones around and each time Botar gets killed (and this has happened more than once in this scenario) they just take a new one.
Idk, it feels like a better idea than “they just happened to find a new guy that is exactly the same as the previous one”.
I think it wouldn’t make sense for them to keep a bunch of Botars around and use them one at a time. If they had ready access to a number of Botars, why wouldn’t they use all of them at once?
Convincing an entire isolated race to join your shadowy governmental organization and policing the universe is a lot harder than telling the clones you make to do so. Botar was insanely efficient and very dedicated; perhaps the reason more of his species weren’t recruited was because he was a bit of an exception.
Then, when Botar got eliminated, it forced them to bring in a much less capable member of his species because of how much their plans relied on Botar to work. There’s a number of explanations for why his entire species wasn’t annexed into the OoMN, but very few explanations for why clones would be kept around and not used.
I like to think that Botar never really died, the order faked his death just to keep him more of a secret. And then when it became obvious that they needed him to do more open missions involving the Toa Nuva and others, rather than admit that they lied, they came up with the excuse that it wasn’t really him.
With his grand entrance in Legends 6 City of the Lost, and how shaken Teridax seemed about his sudden appearance and abduction of the Barraki, I’m rather curious when the Brotherhood’s idea of Botor changed from him being this “boogieman” who could snatch you away to a fate worse than death to Icarax finding him and almost unceremoniously offing him.
Perhaps it was more a gut reaction to seeing the creature of your nightmares suddenly appear. Icarax has never been shown crushing anyone to death with magnetism before or since, so it seems possible that he would have not wiped him off the face of the MU otherwise.
Now I’m imagining Icarax telling the other Makuta of how he defeated the myth known as Botar. They are all impressed with his bravery to face a creature so enigmatic and fear-inducing. But what Icarax is not telling them is that he wasn’t hunting for Botar at all. Botar appeared suddenly, and Icarax shrieked in fear, only accidentally using his magnetism as a reflex.
The simplest solution to me is that Botar’s Replacement is Botar. Gaardus set a precedent of being being able to teleport to and (probably) from the Red Star, so maybe Botar did so after he was repaired and revived.
Greg has said that Botar’s mind was too scrambled to teleport after he was revived, but if we’re just spitballing fun theories, this seems like the simplest. Plus it could also work as “foreshadowing” for the Red Star’s revival function if Botar just comes back out of nowhere.
If you really wanted to stretch it, you could even argue that Botar looks slightly different due to the repairs and has memory loss of his former life, though you then run into the reverse issue of Botar’s Replacement: instead of “why kill Botar if you’re going to bring in an identical character”, it’s “why bring Botar back if he’s effectively a different character”.
After the death of Botar, courier and law enforcer of the Order of Mata Nui, the organization sought out a replacement for him, and recruited a member of his species to help them. The replacement began performing similar tasks, including teleporting irredeemable beings to the Pit.
Easiest answer is to call his replacement Punished Botar and leave it up to interpretation if he’s the same guy or not
New idea for an alternate timeline, Botar is revived and his mind is scrambled so he believes the entire universe is messed up and everyone needs to be banished to the Pit. He starts grabbing random people across the universe including some of the main characters and they have to band together to either convince Hydraxon and Lesovikk (who’s helping Hydraxon catch runners) they’re innocent or perform the largest prison break in MU history.
Questions like this really highlight the issue with bionicle’s stories. I’ll spare any mention of the Olmak, which should be a legendary Kanohi, and just muse that if you had a clone army of Botars… Why not use them all at once? Why not teleport anyone you don’t like outside of the MU and into space? I believe this could’ve easily been done in 2008 when there were a half dozen Makuta menacing the Toa Nuva.
Ultimately, I do not think Botar should have been able to teleport at all and Brutaka’s mask should have had a different power. Heck, why didn’t Brutaka just leave the prime universe and go somewhere where everyone wanted him to rule?
We know this isn’t canon and even if it were I would argue it still has just as many problems. Not to say that having overpowered bionicles is a bad thing in the story, but I would argue it just needed better writing and power scaling than we got from Dr. Farshtey.
makuta can survive in space, at least for a little while, due to their nature. Botar, however, cannot. Being in space is different from being underwater, you can’t just hold your breath. Maybe Botar could teleport there, drop his prey, and leave before he dies, but it’s a big risk.
you can’t teleport through the shields of Karda Nui, unless you have an olmak or warp space like Artakha.
makuta can teleport too. If botar or brutaka sent a makuta to space, they’d just come back.
Botar is still vulnerable to being attacked, as we see when Icarax kills him. If the makuta was incapacitated, maybe Botar could take him, but the only one that go incapacitated was icarax. Aka the one that had killed Botar. I doubt his replacement is eager to go for that, even if he could.
would they even know space is there? These are people who spent most of their history in a world of domes, and only recently discovered the outside world. The only time we see them talking about going into space is in the Kingdom, where they spent several millennia outside the MU.
In 2008, Brutaka is busy with several adventures and has a broken mask, and Botar is dead and the Order is scrambling for a replacement. You don’t send a newbie after a Makuta.
Abandon the universe you know for one unknown
Find a world where the people want a complete stranger from another universe to rule over them
And also no one in that world has taken advantage of the people’s willingness to be ruled by whoever and already rules.
And also hope the Brutaka of that world, if there is one, either goes along with this, or you manage to defeat someone who is literally just as powerful as you are.
Even assuming he does succeed, someone could try and stop him. There is still another olmak in the prime reality, albeit in the hands of the Makuta at the moment, and there is also a great being who can find dimensional travellers and freeze the world around them while imprisoned in a tower on Bota Magna.
Dark Mirror Tuyet was willing to try the whole “find a world where they want you to rule” idea because she had the Nui stone, she already has great power. She also knows how to subjugate a people already, having done so once.
I think the easiest answer is that they only managed to make one clone, perhaps due to time or resources.
But here’s a crazy idea: what if they DID use them all? What if there have always been multiple people going around being called Botar, and they just avoid each other so you never realize there are more than one? All Icarax did was kill one of the Botars.
Of course, none of this is canon, but i think it would be the most fun way to write it. But then you still have the question of why Axonn doesn’t recognize the new Botar.