Hello everybody! This is my first time posting a MOC on here, hopefully won’t be the last, but I’m just really proud of what I’ve accomplished here today. I’ve had this character built for years on my shelf, but she was an extremely basic Inika build with only a few alterations, so I decided to completely reconstruct her from the ground up today, and I think I did a phenomenal job. (I don’t have a “before” picture because I neglected to take any)
This is Makuta Beres, whose moniker as the “Mother of Beasts” comes from her enjoyment of creating new Rahi species, which other Makuta would rarely share. She carries the Staff of Summoning, which lets her summon, similarly to a Kanohi Zatth, any of the Rahi she has previously created, which she would then command to do her bidding with her Rahi Control power (though she’s just as likely to use the staff as a bonking stick if cornered). In her other hand she wields a dagger coated in a paralytic poison, which she could use to subdue enemies without outright killing them, in case they might be useful to the Brotherhood later. She wears the Kanohi Meruna, the Mask of Attraction - not the kind of attraction you think, but rather it allows her to pull objects or beings to herself, or cause two objects or beings to be uncontrollably pulled towards each other (and stay stuck together while she wills it).
(She is rather difficult to pose due to being very top-heavy and also I’m kind of new to taking photos of my MOCs)
During Teridax’s rebellion, Beres sided with him, not out of a sense of loyalty or ambition but rather self-preservation; she was subsequently assigned the role of Destral’s chief of security, far away from any of her own Rahi and instead forced to watch over armies of Visorak and Rahkshi. For this, Beres began to resent Teridax, but chose small acts of dissent over outright rebellion, such as not purging her inner light when the rest of the Brotherhood eventually did. Come the Great Cataclysm, Beres was performing her duty of guarding Destral, when the whole fortress was leveled by the quakes caused by the Great Spirit Robot crashing down onto Aqua Magna. Beres herself was never found, not even her armor remained in the rubble, and so the rest of the Brotherhood assumed she simply perished in the chaos… but did she really?
Build-wise I’m quite chuffed with how she came out; there’s a lot of elements that I wanted to preserve from her old build (namely the Ehlek spines and Kongu Mahri’s torso) that I think I integrated pretty well into the new build. She uses the Phantoka Makuta torso as the core of her torso assembly (where before it was just an Inika torso… has the word torso lost all meaning yet), with some additional pieces to beef it up. The various trans green bits, like the Bohrok eyes and CCBS ribcage from Umarak, in my opinion, work very well with the Ehlek spines visually; the eyes inside her mask, meanwhile, are the glow in the dark variant (in her old form they were trans bright orange). I also bulked up her mask a bit; originally it was just Matau Hordika’s mask with the horns, but I added on the bit on the back to make it work better with her new size. Plus it makes her look a bit more lizardy, which is a plus.
She is what could conceivably be referred to as “titan scale” - maybe not as tall as Icarax even, but definitely taller than an Inika build (the Toa in the image is about Inika height). Overall I think I’ve accomplished the “beastly” look I was going for pretty well, though my favorite part of the build has to be the way I’ve integrated the ribcage, with a few extra ribs on top made out of claw pieces.
Unfortunately she’s not perfect; like I mentioned earlier she’s rather top heavy, which makes her look odd in certain poses given her comparatively thin legs. She also features some limited waist articulation, but that tends to be more of a hindrance, again due to the sheer weight of her upper body that one balljoint tends to have a hard time supporting. The arms are also quite basic and not very custom; they’re the part that saw the least alteration from her prior build, with only a few pieces swapped out or added on but ultimately still rather lacking in anything super creative.
What’s a bit interesting to note is that the upper leg assembly actually features an illegal connection that’s only possible because of the cracked post-08 joints; normally the squared-ends sockets wouldn’t be able to have a balljoint piece inside them which has an axle through it that also goes through the holes on the sides of the balljoint itself. The pre-08 balljoints could accomplish this, but I found that using them gave the assembly a lot less friction, so the legs would have ended up unstable, even with the CCBS shell placed over the balljoint. I do quite enjoy finding uses for the brittle parts that don’t involve putting too much stress on them, as you can also see from how I’ve used av-toran limbs to bulk up her torso a bit (though that may have been a mistake given I’ve now mentioned twice how top heavy she ended up being).
That’s all from me for now! I look forward to seeing what all you fine folks of the forum have to say. (And pray refrain from commenting on the Toa yet, I’ll make a whole topic on him later ;3)
EDIT: noobie question, but how do I make it so that the first image is a preview for the topic? EDIT2: nvm figured it out
