I’m basically coming here to let some steam off for how I feel.
If you haven’t heard or seen by now then let me give you a little information.
At Lego Con ( at least I think it was Lego Con ) they showed the 90th anniversary celebratory set “The Lion knights castle” and the classic spaceship. So out of the 4 contenders ( Castle, Space, Pirates, and Bionicle ) 2 have gotten different sets. The last pirates set that came out was the pirates of barracuda bay which retired in later 2021 I think. And Bionicle which won the first fan vote has still been no where to be seen since G2 retired( and no mini tahu does not count, a full return to bionicle, a bionicle set is what counts). So whats with lego? Do they just not care anymore. We have multiple online forums communities and threads and yet it is almost like lego treats it like a stain on its history. That they were only doing it for money and they weren’t thinking right. Because system blocks are what lego is and needs to be. Have we really been forgotten about? I love bionicle and yet seeing it like this almost breaks me. No matter how many Fans create contests and MOCs it doesn’t feel complete. That missing piece is Legos support and the fact that we have a future for bionicle.
I’m sorry if you don’t care about anything I really had to say I just had to get this off my chest. But I’ll leave you with a question. Are we forgotten because there are no main line sets for bionicle, or have we been forgotten on purpose.
Thank you for listening to my TED talk
There are employees at lego who care about bionicle. It’s not treated like a stain in lego’s history. Christian Faber, Greg Farshtey and the gang gave us more than enough bionicle. If seeing bionicle like this “breaks you” then you need to get a life…
It’s hard to forget Bionicle fans when they’re still yelling BIONICLE at the top of their collective lungs. Why do you think Tahu got a build in the 90th classic set if not to feed the fans of that series?
If you can find a way to make Bionicle without a single Bionicle piece and prove fans will actually want to buy it, then LEGO has no excuse not to seriously consider your pitch. But as it is, Bionicle fans are very picky, very salty, and beg constantly for a return to form. The fact that we get anything is impressive.
I am going to go ahead and say what I probably should have said.
At the end of the day Lego is still a business, they need to be making money. If lines aren’t selling well enough then they have to be retired and I agree with Ghid on the fact that we are picky and salty so when we see bionicle we are reluctant to buy it, that could be seen with G2. So in the end maybe lego does have a special place for bionicle but unless they see some money rolling in it probably won’t be the bionicle we know.
I think Ghid summed it up nicely. Lego is as any company is these days: not a producer, so much as a reactor, and it’s waiting to react to an audience that indicates a positive response. Greg Farshtey and Christian Faber have both said it a hundred times, each in their own way: this thing is completely in our hands. Until we collectively learn to broaden our pallettes and accept the thing we love in it’s variable forms, we will never really be given another form. Just look at the 90th Tahu backlash; it wasn’t even billed as a true return and it got dragged.
Bionicle fans, in a general sense, may be a little too spoiled rotten to deserve a new iteration of Bionicle. I mean, we love it and sustain it on sites like this, but any time Lego tries to offer an olive branch, the community slaps it away because they still like their noodles plain with butter and refuse to eat anything else.
Granted, maybe that part of the community isn’t quite as large as it seems- the voice of hate is frequently the loudest voice in the room- but it’s loud enough to keep us on spinning wheels.
The future of Bionicle may be in our hands, but I don’t think that means the hands of the community- I think that really refers to us as individuals, and it calls on us to reevaluate what we define as ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’. Until we broaden our horizons, we likely will never reach them.
Something to note is that lego doesn’t give attention to most retired original themes other than huge generic themes like space and castle. To my knowledge, there’s been little mention of fan favorites like power Miners, Chima, Alpha Team, Exo-Force, Mars Mission, space/castle subthemes, etc…
Bionicle had it pretty good with a 10 year run, and a reboot on top of that.
But no matter what, bionicle and all of the other beloved themes will forever live on through the passion of us fans
I don’t know what it is with Bionicle, but I don’t really agree with this idea.
Fan communities, even for “dead” franchises, can and do exist. And they can exist without the direct support of the original IP holder.
I don’t at all believe that something needs to be actively being produced/worked on/updated to be special and engaging. I don’t think something needs to “feel like there’s a future” for it for it to still thrive.
But for some reason, this idea is pervasive in the Bionicle community. I understand that a lot of us were younger when it ended, and we never got closure for that. And then G2 came along and did the exact same.
But a fact of life is that things end. Nothing lasts forever. Franchises die. Products get discontinued. But that doesn’t mean you need to forget about them, even if others might.
If it matters to you, and you’re inspired by it, then do something with that. You don’t need LEGO to give you more Bionicle. You don’t even need them to care.
Personally I’d like Lego to create more Bionicle pieces in new colors but also it’d be great if they can just continue making technic based constraction sets. Technic itself is a pretty successful non brick theme so why can’t Lego do the same with Bionicle?
Personally don’t mind the 90yop Tahu. I like it its cute, its better than nothing and from what I’ve seen that has been the common sentiment around the community.
However I don’t feel like LEGO should have made more sets than one of the poll results. (That’s is if the castle even was based on the poll. According to designer during LEGO con it has been in the works for 9 years)
The problem with this is that some fans are going to feel neglected because LEGO clearly showed that they had a budget to do more sets but deliberately decided to only do 2. Now I’ll let y’all judge if it was fair or in the spirit of the poll or not but personally I find it upsetting not because LEGO didn’t make a BIONICLE set but because they made a conscious decision to change the outcome of their poll.
Which makes me wonder once more: Why was the poll required? Why did people rally up to get their favourite set get the first place when the set was already there? Was this whole thing necessary?
Everybody knows castles and spaceships are popular. They weren’t featured in the Lego Movie just by coincidence. The poll was probably the most toxic way this could have went. Especially how bad they selected the choices and the resulting adjustments for round two. The winners are not unforseen and Bionicle and Pirates fans got disappointed. Just imagine they wanted to launch the castle and noticed that castle lost in the vote.
Bionicle as an official Lego IP is dead, long live Ninjago. The reboot was a mixed bag and I can understand anybody dismissing it after watching Journey to One. The new Bionicle disregarded a lot of things that made the matrix of Bionicle. Greg Farshtey’s works to establish the world of Bionicle barely find any resonance in G2, as does Faber’s cryptic and metaphorical visual storytelling.
Ninjago’s story is too similar to G1 for a Bionicle G3 to not be considered an inferior version, and Lego certainly doesn’t want to be its own competitor, as it would only result in the loss of profit of one theme in favor for another.
Lego apparently doesn’t really know what Bionicle actually was. Considering how many times this gets discussed in fan forums the fans -including me- do neither. So whatever move, googly eyes, canon contests, ignoring it, demanding to bring it back, trusting in Biovival is a considered move to the wrong direction by one fan or another.
Sets are difficult to make, as there are no parts left anymore and the new mech systems are too expensive for a collection-based theme.
Small nods like googly Tahu are probably the best thing we will get from Lego for a long time.
Bionicle to me these last few months was talking with people about the stuff I love and seeing other people show their passion for Bionicle. And yeah I will not see the day where Bionicle can rival with the MCU in terms of being a pop-cultural phenomenon. The likeliness that I will be able to randomly start conversations with people I see IRL about Bonkle is downright zero. But the internet is a thing bs01, Mask of Destiny, Duckbricks’ Contest, the Biological Chronicle, 810nicle, BioCup, TTV and BZP. Even if sometimes there are moments where I wish for something more, well, official, there is enough out there to explore and build.
If Lego came around tomorrow and would say G3 is now a thing I would die of hype within the first week and my remains would then be scared of what is to come, because G2 already showed that it’s not all gold that glitters. So much that I’d probably immediately silently start to complain when something new would get revealed. That’s maybe not rational, but has been like that, always.
