So would I but there’s a lot who didn’t. Which I think is a shame but that’s just my opinion lol
yeah, you hit the nail on the head. I suppose a better way to say it would be that people tend to conflate Bionicle aesthetic with canon compliant when they say that creative liberties can’t coexist with adherence to canon. Which I would disagree with.
the gigachad bonkles we didn’t know we needed 
I mean, don’t mind me I’m just making a jedi dressed stormtrooper with a tusken head and say its canon now.
If that was my headcanon I wouldn’t bat an eye to it but if that was actually canon as in approved by Disney it would bother me. Not only is it a complete subvertion of expectation but not in a good way its also completely nonsensical and wouldn’t fit the astehtic of the empires army in anyway and would come across as a cheap photoshop and ruin the immersion of the world.
I get the want to be creative but a living breathing world would have rules and guidelines for what works for certain characters visually. Breaking away from that breaks immersion and strains the suspension of disbelief. So if I had to attribute the lose of some of the mocs you brought up as examples it would be just that they simply failed at keeping a familiar visual identity with canon.
Two more star wars parallells I can think of is for example how dumb it would be to make a battle droid in the shape of a protocol droid and no I don’t mean the way a battle droid head got wealded to c3po’s body in attack of the clones but more like replacing the entire army with cookie cutter episode 1 c3po’s with laser guns instead of the regular battle droid designs. So be honest with me would you be able to take that seriously?
The second example is the modders and their speeder bikes from book of boba. The modders aren’t exactly the problem in this example, they still look weird but if you squint they look star warsy enough. The main problem is actually their bikes having a very 50s inspired design language something that is very connected to the real world and has a historical significance unrelated to star wars which makes them stand out like a sore thumb and just in general break immersion, due to them being alien to the setting and the universe visual identity.
My point is creativity is cool and all but there is more to characters in an established world than just making something that looks cool. When designing canon characters you should probably consider that you are designing for that world and the people who enjoy the world and not just the ones who enjoy the crazy builds you can do with the toys.(when I say “you” I’m speaking generally and I am not referring to you CZQ).
However in the case of a contest where the result have no bearing on canon all of what I just said could be disregarded but this is why how mocs looked visually mattered so much in the Hagah, Helryx and Arthaka contests.
a’sharad hett
Not even close to what I meant tbh.
First of he’s a human, second not really a stormtrooper, thirdly not aligned with the galactic empire.
Lastly a tusken jedi can exist. Any being can be jedi. However a stormtrooper wouldn’t be a tusken jedi because it wouldn’t make canonical sense based on what we know of stormtroopers and the empires armies.
Edit: yes he is affiliated with the tuskens(group) but he is not a tusken(being) and yes he is affiliated with the dark side but still not a stormtrooper. Also its legends(right?) so not really canon anymore.
As a quick aside, as Jerminator said, in my previous posts I should’ve said Bionicle aesthtic in most instances where I said canon compliant/adherence to canon, so I’ll try to use both terms with more purpose from here on.
Maybe to some, and that’s certainly valid, but I think that kind of proves my point about people conflating their vision of Bionicle aesthetic with canon compliant.
I agree, and I will stand by that the MOCs I highlighted are more than simply cool and could fit well into G1.
Unless you’re referring to MOCs that are near identical to official sets then this is what I mean by conflating bionicle aesthetic with canon compliant.
But you bring up a good point. Brand identity is important, and I understand the desire for it, but IMO this is a great opportunity to expand the possibilities in the Bionicle universe. Bionicle characters have taken many forms in both official sets and formerly canonized designs. Who’s to say we’ve seen every possibility? There’s no precedent for designs like these, so why not set precedent?
While I’m not a fan myself (and couldn’t really back this up without some help lol), from what I understand, the Transformers series has gotten a lot of backlash for how many reboots have been derivative of G1, while some of the more inventive reboots are the most praised.
Just as an aside here, I think Star Wars was a funny example because almost everything that fans like has been derivative of what was established in the original trilogy. The series has struggled to grow because new ideas are almost always met with backlash. A 50s biker gang in Star Wars sounds kinda cool to me personally lol.
back on topic. trying not to repeat myself here but that’s why the open collab works. If there’s a MOC that you think fits the brand identity, then you can decide that that entry is the official “canon” design. If there are some that don’t to you then you can disregard them and let others decide for themselves. Likewise, I’m using “you” in a general sense lol.
I don’t want to come across like people’s nostalgia/attachments/biases to certain design choices is illegitimate or unfounded, so I wanted to suggest something that takes that kind of mindset into account.
So there’s been a lot more discussion happening here, and I wanted to actually run this by people since it appears there’s enough interest in the concept.
I know Duckbricks is maybe going to run some kind of fanon contests on a separate site, and if they occur they’ll likely get incorporated into some major fan projects like RSG or whatever continuation stuff is happening will Wall of History or whatever. I hope it goes well for him and everyone involved.
But that’s the thing - it’s going to be treated with the utmost seriousness despite being non-canon so it can fit into as many pre-established works as possible. While for some people this is the perfect possible outcome, with no vested interest in any of these works I can’t help but feel decidedly disinterested in participating when it’s going to be taken rather seriously by the community - it’d become the primary answer to the gaps in official canon to look to the first, the biggest, the most supported answer first.
So here’s my proposition.
GHIDONICLE™️ Fanon Contests
-two weeks of entries
-one week of voting
-the winner receives a $10 LEGO gift card
I’d need to set things up with the staff because I have no access to the kind of voting system they used (as far as I know, anyway). Masters can host a maximum of three contests a year and it would be an incredibly small expenditure on my part. I greatly doubt they would attract the same infamy the past contests did since they don’t alter canon and have no pre-existing guaranteed use by any major projects, so it would serve solely as another source of inspiration for people.
I would refine things quite a bit further before they would actually occur, like instituting the custom part/mask policy TTV had in place, and I have no idea if an art contest would be popular enough to have occur (it would double the number of contests, so I couldn’t actually do that on my own) but I’d like to know people’s thoughts.
What do you think? Would it be worth it to have occur?
people wanted these contests as a way to breathe new life into a 20-year-old franchise yet (IMO) squandered the opportunity by choosing the entries that most reflected these norms.
Dude the G1 Mask of Creation is literally just a G2 Hau with Coliseum spires on it. Helryx’s mask is a roborider head mixed with the mask of light. The fans collectively seem to want more of the same.
Having said that, Anthony’s Helryx and Mitch’s Artakha are too far removed from the core tropes. They’re too anthromorphized. Helryx has hair, for instance, even though no Toa has hair. The design doesn’t quite fit her characterization either. Helryx has mismatched horns, even though a serious, no nonsense character like her would likely have them fixed.
I’m somewhere in the middle on this debate.
I’d be down to doing this. It seems like a fun way for people to build characters that they wanted to for the contests.
sounds interesting
what is this ghidonicle™️ and where do I get it?
Isn’t “core tropes” just another way of saying “the aesthetic that I like”?
Sure, there are canon limitations to how a character looks.
But looking like mass-produced toys of a certain complexity and price point was LEGO’s limitation, not ours, and not a part of canon.
No reason why such an ancient / significant character couldn’t have acquired extra clothing / adornments like a hair-like headdress. In-universe there are fabrics, pouches, capes, scarves etc. Using them can make a build / the lore richer IMO.
Worrying minutely about their appearance seems like the sort of thing a no-nonsense character wouldn’t do, unless it impacted their goals. Helryx is canonically “frail”, which she hasn’t had fixed, for example.
It isn’t.
looking like mass-produced toys of a certain complexity and price point was LEGO’s limitation, not ours, and not a part of canon.
The canon visual designs are a result of lego limitations. All of the Toa have gears on their backs in comic #1.
No reason why such an ancient / significant character couldn’t have acquired extra clothing / adornments like a hair-like headdress.
Some official characters like vezon do have capes. The clothing here is fine. Long hair on females in fiction is typically a sign of youth so the hair or thing representing hair doesn’t work here imo.
Worrying minutely about their appearance seems like the sort of thing a no-nonsense character wouldn’t do, unless it impacted their goals.
It’s not worried about minutely, the horns are very different in size. Helryx’s goal is to lead a secret group. Her goal as leader is to act and look professional so her followers can take her seriously and having one comically large horn doesn’t fit.
Or age. An old person with long hair (and a beard if it’s a guy) is a trope too.
I dunno, if I see someone with one horn broken off, I don’t think “that looks silly”, I think “they’ve really been through Karzahni”.
(Though it does raises the question of whether breaking off a horn counts as breaking the mask and would render it non-functional. Maybe it was made that way specifically?)
breaking off a horn counts as breaking the mask and would render it non-functional. Maybe it was made that way specifically?)
It wasn’t broken, the small horn still has a point on it. One of the horns was replaced or the creature that had the horns had them that way to begin with. Or the horns were just cast that way when the mask was forged. But whatever, the contests are over, Greg got laid off, it’s just a bad situation all around.
I think this is where people disagree.
It’s commonly said by some that the set designs are “highest canon” (excluding Greg statements). So many people think characters look exactly like the toys in-universe.
But a more accurate wording would be “those elements of the sets that are not a result of toy limitations are canon”. For example The Great Archives summarise it as
A reasonable interpretation of this is that sets tell us that Tahu is a red robotic humanoid with a particular sword and mask, but he doesn’t necessarily look like he’s made of LEGO in-universe.
The rest of the canon tells us details like “Tahu is biomechanical”, “Toa armour is removable” etc. which conflict with non-canon aspects of the sets.
(As an amusing side-note, even the exact set colours often aren’t canon. It can be inferred that the Metru and Mata colour palettes look the same in-universe. Meanwhile the ceremonial gold on Iruini is a different colour in canon to the natural Ta gold on Lhikan according to Greg.)
Well from my point of view the Toa are evil.
Well then you are lost
from your locally approved ghidonicle™️ dealer coming soon to theaters near you
Fun - that’s the entire point of these.
There’s be some rules to prevent eight-foot rainbow parts collections with the name Tuyet slapped on, and I’d most likely adopt the majority of TTV’s custom mask policy, but overall I just want these to be as fun and as creative as possible - no torso mandates, no random scrutiny on the minute details, just people voting and building what they think is the coolest/most appropriate depiction of the character.
Plus, you get a WHOPPING TEN US DOLLARS in LEGO credit to fuel that [insert lego theme] addiction we all know you have. Yes, you, reader. I’ve seen your purchase history.