Heyahs, I'm new here and a bit at a crossroads with my interest in Lego Ninjago

[nya_theJotunn]

Heyahs, I’ve been an on again, off again member of the online Lego community since around 2011 and have always been a tad active in the Lego community at large since then, my peek probably being back with the Official Lego Message Boards were a thing and the period of time that Tumblr was a good place for the fandom. I’ve always been interested in Ninjago since the pilots and Chima, with a mild passing interest in Bionicle. I Have a good amount of sets from my time until I kinda stopped around 2018-19 mainly due to wanting to spend my spare cash on other things besides Lego at the time. I still have a flare of passion for the themes I spent so much time, love and energy on from time to time but honestly ever since the Hands of Times season I’ve just been feeling kinda meh on the series and Lego as a whole. I can acknowledge that the writing of the newer seasons has at times surpassed the original pre-movie era but it just never felt the same to me again.

I’ve let myself dwell on why I feel that way about and I think my innate feeling is that of a desire to see more of an expansion to the ideas and themes and the feel of the OG seasons rather than a constant re thread of plots and character beats we’ve been over and over again, completely dropping them at a moments notice with little substantial change to the characters at their core for literal years at this point. I do want them to reflect being fundamentally changed as characters due to their personal experiences throughout the years of being frank, very extreme physical, emotional and personal scenarios that have gone down through the runtime of the show. Nothing like super mature, dark, edgy or anything like but other shows that have the same target audience as Ninjago have done a much better job at thematic consistency and emotional depth that being honest we haven’t seen since the end of Rise of the Snakes back in 2012 and those heights haven’t been reached again since.

So to put it bluntly, the way I’ll put it, at large it just feels extremely superficial with wasted character moments and growth and bad emotional payoff. So I’ve kinda just dropped it maybe catching a few eps here and there.

What really made it for me back in the day was my community involvement, how we as a collective just made it more emotionally fulfilling and expanded on concepts and ideas brought up in the show and I just don’t really have that anymore. I miss it more than anything and I’d like to give it another shot here and see if I stick around and it does anything for me. It’s just a sucky feeling to still have a craving of the days bygone for this series but also being so apathetic to it at large and being left with disappointment everytime I find myself wandering back to the spaces I used to call home back in my teen years.

Hope y’all got something out of this and I’d like to know if you experience a similar sort of apathy yet longing for what Ninjago could of been, See yahs for now

[Ghid]

First off, welcome to the Boards!

Secondly, I kind of agree with you here - Ninjago’s show never has been really that emotionally investing, but that might also be because of the way the sets’ story was written - or perhaps it’s the inverse? oftentimes in recent Ninjago history the villains are some nefarious ne’er-do-well who just happens to inconvenience the heroes a little more than they can handle, and push them just enough to get new macguffins or vehicles. It’s an annoying trend, and it’s why I’ve seen almost nothing of the television show.

[The_Blue_Panda]

Lego wasn’t afraid to venture deeper into lore-building with Bionicle, so it’s a kind of shame that Ninjago isn’t what it could have been. Bionicle wasn’t afraid to be dark and serious especially during the Inika and Mahri years, and it didn’t stray away from killing characters, and I think that it definitely contributed to being very popular. Aside from maybe only the Oni trilogy, Ninjago as a whole is just generally light hearted, which granted it’s just a kids show, but sometimes it gets across the wrong message. Sure, there are some emotional scenes, but most of it really isn’t too emotionally investing, like @Ghid said. And, as you said, newer Ninjago is definitely repeating itself over again, and I really don’t like that all that much. Prime Empire is in many aspects a rehash of Skybound, Seabound is just a much inferior copy of Rise of the Snakes, and Crystallized was essentially Legacy of the Green Ninja but without the fun episodes. The main problem with this show is that it doesn’t want to be serious and explore characters more, and that it cannot handle death of a protagonist properly at all. Imagine how bad Bionicle would have been if Matoro just showed up during the Toa Nuva’s fight with the Makuta in Karda Nui after sacrificing himself in the previous year. Ninjago just cannot handle death properly at all, and that’s a major step in developing the show into a more mature series. The writers also have a tendency to stray away from giving the characters tangible consequences, as Crystallized’s ending made it abundantly clear. We get it, it’s a kids show, but you can’t just have the most cliche and happy ending ever and expect people to be happy with it.