I’m a bit surprised I hadn’t seen a topic for this posted, so I thought “why not drop my first topic in a good two or three years?”
For context, 810nicle Day 2023 brought with it a slew of announcements for community projects, ranging from fangames, to collectibles, to art-related endeavors. However, perhaps the most interesting of all was the announcement that Litestone Studios would continue the unfinished story serials from 2010-2011 under their Vision of the Great Beings project, writing The Yesterday Quest and The Powers That Be to completion… but with Greg Farshtey’s supervision. Though these story chapters aren’t and shouldn’t be considered official canon in any sort of way, they are the closest we can get to Greg’s original vision for how these stories were supposed to end, and they’re a part of a much bigger effort to cap off the G1 storyline with input from Greg.
I’ve been reading these for a good while now—a couple months, really—and they’ve served to ease me back into Bionicle and its fanbase every couple weeks when a new chapter releases. I was wondering if anyone else had actually checked these out. They can be found on the Myths and Legacy website, under the Vision of the Great Beings category.
(As a side note, apologies in advance if this is the wrong section for this topic! I’ve gotta get used to the Boards again.)
Haha yes! The Powers that Be finale actually had me tearing up a bit.
It looks like a few of their other fan stories are also considered part of this project. ‘Mazeka’ was a satisfying conclusion to the whole Melding!Teridax and Shadow!Takanuva plot and ‘Reign of Shadows: the Untold Stories’ was much closer to how I always thought that serial should have gone. RoS proper always felt like it was just going in circles.
All these meta references can be a bit jarring. I love the Slizer and Roborider cameo but stuff like the ‘unnamed canister builder’ explaining why no one new he died is a bit too ‘wink wink,nudge nudge’. And the EL of Earth, I love her inclusion but the implication that she came after the others doesn’t work with what we know about the ELs being created in shifts in the same lab.
It’s honestly really awesome to see plot progression happening for G1’s Velika plot, though it’s at the cost of quite a few characters that I was sad to see go. Lesovikk’s sacrifice left me kinda miffed, and Artakha dying to Velika and spending his last few moments with the Toa Nuva actually got me a little choked up. Then there’s Tuyet dying to Marendar earlier in The Yesterday Quest(?) which was horrifying in two ways, both because it’s main universe Tuyet biting it this time, and because it was a complete curbstomp. Tuyet didn’t stand a chance.
A lot of story developments are shocking, but not necessarily in a bad way. In fact, I think I’m more hooked than anything, haha.
What’s more horrifying is that the EL of Earth apparently want to turn her corpse into power armour. These stories do not shy away from the body horror.
I remember hearing about this offhandedly, but I could never find any information about it. I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to finally learn more.
I have some questions, too: Are these stories completed, or are there future chapters still to come? Are there any plans to even start new serials from scratch with Greg’s help?
On that note, does anyone know exactly what Greg’s involvement is? Are these stories based on decade-old unreleased plot points, or are they working together to develop the story with fresh ideas?
I’m not sure how involved Greg has been past the initial talks but The Powers That Be just uploaded it’s last two chapters last week so I’d expect The Yesterday Quest to conclude soon. Probably this week.
After that they are supposedly going to invite the community to get more involved with suggestions and possibly story submissions.
So far, The Powers That Be is the only Greg story serial that has been completed, though The Yesterday Quest seems to be gearing up to conclude in the next chapter or so since TPTB ended in about the same number of chapters. I believe a blog post released on Mask of Destiny’s website stated that they’ll be working on more story serials with Greg’s supervision, too.
A little bit of both, it seems. Greg himself is doing no writing as far as I know, though there’s several plot points that Greg set up/intended to set up before the story got canned that are/will likely be reused and repurposed. Biosector01 added a number of Greg’s intended plot developments to their Spherus Magna timeline here.
i just finished Powers that Be and the bit with Lewa in essential a hula dress and hula hoop just vibing with some jungle agori - and then the others thinking he’s been captured/tortured/mind controlled only to learn he’s there by choice and having fun is hilarious
This has most of the answers to your questions, but basically:
The Powers That Be is finished, The Yesterday quest has one more chapter (and possibly an epilogue, since The Powers That Be had one)
Future stories will be written with feedback from Greg, or at least that’s what this seems to imply.
The stories are written independent of Greg, he is just reviewing them, giving his notes and feedback. Greg is essentially an editor.
Although it does sound like Greg is giving a few new ideas on things he would have done, such as revealing the location of the Great Beings.
Personally, as I’ve always wanted to see a conclusion to the story serial plotlines, I’ve been following this over the past month or two. I have considered offering my skills as a writer to contribute to this, haven’t decided though.
We don’t know how long these “shifts” were. It’s possible that means they were created years apart from each other (possibly even decades or centuries, given Bionicle’s ridiculous time-scales)
Personally, I’m annoyed to see the death of everyone on the Red Star. I know Greg has said that that was his intention, but I’ll just say it was a dumb intention. Greg introduces a whole new society of revived people, with tons of new story potential, they only get to interact with Kopaka and Pohatu and Lesovikk, and then they all get killed off, not a single survivor, within the space of a single story serial? Yes, the Red Star itself has to be destroyed, and it’s fine if most of the revived beings go with it, but there should be some survivors. This is a waste of a plot point, it shouldn’t have been set up this way if no one was going to survive anyway, and it is one case where I will say that if that was Greg’s plan, then it was a dumb decision.
Well, sorta. Kopaka and Pohatu get rescued by Preston Stormer, but then Pohatu disappears into one of Von Nebula’s black holes, so Kopaka has gone off to find him and help the heroes defeat the villain factory. The epilogue seems to suggest that Pohatu is at the Monastery of Spinjitzu, so that’s really interesting–
What do you mean I’m making this up?
True but I meant more that her being the last one doesn’t work unless we override one or two Greg quotes. We know all seven were created in the Tajun lab, witch only has six chambers. When we saw the lab in 09 none of the chambers were configured for the EL of Earth.
Narrative typically supersedes quotes anyway so I’m not overly upset. We could say she was created elsewhere. Or one of the original ELs failed and had to replaced.
Fire, jungle, and either ice/water are seen in the movie.
The same three are shown here, in addition to sand and a fifth that is hard to make out. The canonicity of concept art is debatable, but even still, there’s one chamber we don’t see at all.
If the Element Lord of Earth was created significantly later as a separate part of the project, isn’t it possible that the Great Beings used a new setup?
Since the question was asking about the number of chambers, not the number of Element Lords, I would take that to mean “since they weren’t all made in the same time and place, there could have been other chambers besides those six”.
Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time that the exact grammar and/or subject of a quote got muddled, so I’m certainly not trying to claim that my reading was Greg’s definite intentions. The quote definitely seems to hint at what we now know about the Element Lord of Earth, but we don’t know when, or by who (amongst the story team), it was decided that the Earth Lord was created later than the others, so taking “likely intentions” into account isn’t really possible.
