Prove to me why Teridax is intelligent.

So I’m kind of curious your opinions on something, is Teridax according to you actually that intelligent? I don’t have all the facts as I have read minimal books and many character bios but I think, It took him 1000+ years to complete a plan anyone of you smart individuals here could accomplish in about a month of planning, he lost quite literally every battle for the sake of his plan when half of the toa he battled were of no actual need to keep around especially since the mask of time was already completed. He kills literally every majorly powerful ally he had in Karda Nui (who most of were extremely loyal to Teridax and his cause, save for Icarax) when he would have had a much greater amount of success in the final battle then what the rahkshi could accomplish, then he could have killed them after. Instead of sending Mata Nui into space in the opposite direction of Bara Magna he sends Mata Nui and the Mask Of Life right towards the only planet that has a second great spirit robot. There also may be a slew of many other things that are highly questionable along the way throughout the story but I don’t know of any. Anyone else agree with this or am I completely wrong? Probably wrong haha.

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Yes.

Are you sure about that? He had to make sure that absolutely no one knew what he was doing. He had to fool the Toa, the Order of Mata Nui, even the other Makuta. No one could know what his plan was, even if it meant taking extra time to be extra careful.

Real-life military plans don’t get drawn up in a month, never mind plans to take over the entire known universe.

Besides, most of that 1000 years was waiting for Mata Nui to die; he wasn’t doing anything then except keeping the Matoran away from Metru Nui.

What battles are you referring to? He lost to the Metru because he didn’t have the Mask of Time yet (and because he was busy fighting Nidhiki and Krekka on the inside), at which point his whole plan changed; he never planned to lose to the Metru.

And his fight against Takanuva was rigged because he needed the Toa to start the process of awakening Mata Nui; what was he supposed to do, kill them?

He didn’t have allies, he had equals. Notoriously selfish, jealous equals who knew what he did and how to do it right back at him. Killing the rest of the Makuta was one of the smartest parts of his whole plan.

He didn’t know about the other robot, or even where Bara Magna was. He just shot the Ignika (and Mata Nui) wherever he felt.

I suppose it might have made sense for him to destroy the Ignika right then and there, but he might not have had the capabilities to do so; he was still getting used to his new body, and the Ignika is extremely powerful. And it’s not like he could have just waited until he was powerful enough, either; the Ignika would have started its universe-killing countdown pretty much as soon as it realized Teridax was in charge.

The only flaw I can find in his plan is him not going for full control of the robot right from the start.

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Ah I see your points, I guess I need to read more books haha, I haven’t read them in years and am obviously forgetting a few details.

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Something really important to note is that Teridax’s main character trait is overplanning everything. If he’s going to betray someone he’s going to overthink and overcalculate every single detail which could exist. The one written copy of his plan which was confirmed to exist was hidden inside a room entirely sealed off outside of a microscopic hole in one of the walls, and his ultimate defeat revolved entirely around the simplest option of retaliation which involved Mata Nui pushing him into a planet despite him holding all the cards and leveraging the lives of an entire universe against him. Whether or not Teridax is smart is definitely up for debate, but he is undeniably intelligent in that he formed and executed a plan to take control of a planet’s worth of peoples and dethrone the Matoran Universe’s god so he could take the position for himself, and outside of a couple hiccoughs, it worked.

In other media where certain individuals have to either challenge or defeat a god, the definition of ‘god’ changes to become mortal and attainable so the defeat is believable. But in Bionicle, Mata Nui has far more deity-esqe attributes and capabilities and absolutely could’ve wiped Teridax off the map for looking at him wrong. But Teridax carefully studied Mata Nui’s personality, his attention to details when it came to monitoring the universe, and cut directly under his nose every single time. Every setback in his plan was nothing more than a mild inconvenience because he had every possible outcome already mapped out.

Now, to also address the points brought up here:

It didn’t take him a thousand years, it took him about two and a half.

The setback of the loss of Metru Nui and the Mask of Time ending up in Vakama’s hands meant Teridax had to instead wait on the systems of the GSR to send the Toa Mata on its own instead of being able to manually launch them. During this period, the rest of the universe kept on moving, so he was partially tied up with making sure no outside forces arrived on either Mata Nui or Metru Nui so he could maintain a controlled environment.

As the time neared its end, he began leveraging the Rahi against the Matoran to make the Toa’s arrival all the more timely and set up their eventual victory over him. From there, every piece fell neatly into place.

Not having the Mask of Time and trying to digest his food definitely made fighting the Toa Metru problematic, although the movie does an awful job depicting this (like with most things the movies do). Takanuva defeating him was planned, but as he implied later on, the way it occurred was not. But that doesn’t mean a lack of intelligence or capability; Teridax went toe-to-toe with some of the universe’s strongest, fighting Brutaka to a standstill, defeating the Shadowed One, and taking a head-on assault from over 100,000 sea creatures under the command of the Barraki, not only surviving the latter of these encounters, but limping off like it was no big deal.

And Krika, and Bitil… And like Jerminator said as well, all were military masters with enough wherewithal to seriously derail certain events of his plan if they had even the slightest suspicion of what was occurring. Only Gorast and Mutran were specifically loyal to him, the former being religiously dedicated to the vague plan which she never heard anything of and Mutran being at least slightly off the deep end after his encounter with Tren Krom, and the rest either following orders and nothing more or harboring feelings of either dissent of Teridax’s reign or pity for the opposing forces.

Plus, by that point, it’s extremely obvious that Teridax has no need for allegiances or associates when one final act of obedience from his servants is all that is required to become the universe.

The biggest problem there is he ran the risk of them finding out and trying to reverse things before the battle ended, as by that point the core was about to ignite, and it was a convenient way to eliminate all his pesky cohorts with very little effort. Plus, his goal was to have the remainder of his armies lose to the OoMN, and sending in a Makuta would dramatically change the outcome of the battle. Teridax is the master of losing to win, losing to manipulate his opponents, or losing only to send the next phase of his plan into action.

Let’s assume, for a moment, that he did know the other robot was present. If he could convince Mata Nui to utilize it and join forces with him, his power would literally double, and the entire planet of people - along with the creators of his universe - would be helpless under his thumb. Surely they could devise a way to eliminate one machine, but separated and monitoring a planet, could they hope to take down two at once?

And if Mata Nui chose to fight, Teridax had every single member of the universe living inside his new form. Very powerful leverage allowing him to hit Mata Nui and not get hit back. And by taking control of the GSR, I doubt Teridax could have still been unaware of the planet’s existence.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to see what else there is.

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I should have apparently made the title of the post: Prove to me why Teridax is intelligent since I have not read the books entirely and mostly only read character pages on Biosector01 and have no idea what I’m talking about. Hahahaha. So I changed it. But truly thank you all for elaborating why I was wrong. I’m actually glad I’m wrong as I really like Teridax. I just needed confirmation.

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Not getting deep into the lore like the other replies have but Terridax was smart he was just extremely arrogant. He pretty much saw himself at the top of the food chain with everyone else as a possible threat to him.

As for the time frame, time is not indicative of intelligence, especially when a being could practically live forever, he was playing the long game making sure that all the pieces were in the exact right positions for him to create a checkmate situation.

The only reason he lost was because he got so over confident in his new abilities at the end, if he hadn’t gone after Mata-Nui to flex his giant robo muscles then he probably wouldn’t have been beaten.

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“Prove to me that Teridax is inteligent.”

Um… the Bionicle story happened.

PS: actually detailed answers above.

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He just is. Case closed.

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I’m lead to mostly agree with you, though i have a slightly different conclusion. For as smart as he might have been, he was also extremely arrogant. In most interaction he had with Toa or other heroes he had a thing for grandstanding, but in private he was indeed calculating. I think maybe he was smart to a certain point, but he’d always assume complete victory was his a little early and get careless. Thus how he lost the battle against the Toa Metru, and again that he fired the Ignika towards Bara Magna. I’m not sure how to best say it… “smart plan, but he always jumps the gun and then he has to start over again”

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This wasn’t really grandstanding. What else was he supposed to do? He couldn’t destroy it, not only because it would probably kill everyone inside of him, but because the Ignika was extremely powerful and Teridax was just getting used to his powers.

Even if he could destroy the Ignika while keeping everyone alive, he didn’t have time to do so; the Ignika would have killed everyone on its own once it realized Teridax was in control.

His only option was to get it as far away as possible, as soon as possible, and even then he didn’t take it for granted that the Ignika would be destroyed; once he gained more control over the Great Spirit Robot, Teridax tracked the Ignika down to personally ensure its destruction.

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Oh yeah, the Ignika could have killed everyone instantly if it went black. I forget how scary that thing really is. Perhaps that wasn’t grandstanding, but making a giant “Mask of Shadows” constellation in the sky of Metru Nui certainly is.

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