I honestly just default to this; gold is too rare in my collection.
Strongly agree with both of these, though. A lot of the charm and interest in Bionicle comes from the creativity, so you get a lot more out of it if you treat the “rules” a bit more loosely. They’re more like guidelines, anyways. 
Hey, original color schemes are cool.
But if thinkink of something weird and strange I can give even a couple of set examples - Pridak, Carapar, Mata Nui, Roporak, Pohatu Fantoka.
I always find it cool if rare colours are used, such as Sand Green, Very Light Bluish Grey, Turqoise, Tan, Yellow (not Keetorange). Not that they are reallly outstanding, but I think they actually improve color palettes for elements, while keeping consistency.
Now just my weird colors ideas: yellow for lightning (Surge, actually), pink for water (coral), Transculent colors for earth (crystals/diamonds), Platinum for Iron, Light Blue for Plasma (I don’t know why).
Only one of those is a Toa, and he matches his Element’s “official” colour scheme.
Are you referring to the Platinum Avohkii?
That’s definitely a rare colour…
For some reason I used to think that the green was green and brown
And for the non-canon element of vacuum I used green and white (no idea how green and white equals ‘vacuum’ in my head 
)
Prolly because Vacuum is air on its day off so checks out.
Black+Yellow is selling vacuum.
Black+Yellow is obviously Batman
I personally think it depends on what you’re going for.
I personally like the elemental genders, and have adhered to them when building plenty of the MOCs that I’ve made. Also, though, there were times when I wanted to give a character a color scheme that didn’t fit within those of the canon MU elements, but I did so anyway, and was satisfied with the way the MOCs looked.
for me the canon comes first. if something doesn’t fit with canon in my mocs, i fix it so that it does. got a white female toa? slap some blue on there, call it electricity.
Slapping blue on every single female Toa of yours can get boring really fast
Or, alternatively, having to make every single blue character of yours female.
That’s where toa of light come in.
That’s still kinda limiting, having to make every Toa whose colors or gender don’t conform a Toa of Light because they’re the only ones allowed to break from the mold. More interesting to just bend the rules, imo.
but the thing is that, if you want a canon-compliant character, the rules can’t be bent.
The point is to not care so much about making a canon-compliant character, for the sake of creativity, storyline, or (in my case) lack of parts.
Seconded what Winger said. I’ve never been the sort of person to strictly follow canon when making my own stuff; being “canon-compliant” to the letter just isn’t as much fun.
you two make me sad
Even the canon doesn’t care about the canon. There’s a male Toa of Psionics. There are no rules, only suggestions.
… which led to an explanation justifying the separation of Elements by gender, thereby proving that Elemental gender is not an arbitrary thing.
Again, Orde’s backstory proves without a doubt that there are rules; the Great Beings intentionally separated the Elements by gender due to “gentleness”.
I can see that quite a few people want to move away from gender-separated Elements, and I’m not going to try to stop you, but Orde’s case isn’t the best justification for it.
