So ever since that whole elements poll a while back, it’s been TTV canon that there will be a 7th Toa of Lightning, introduced at a later point in the series. Since the genders poll, it’s also been detirmined to make this Toa female. I’m totally on board with both of those decisions. However, recently people have been throwing around the name of Voriki for this Toa. IMO, this is not what this new Toa should be named, nor should it take any inspiration from Voriki. Don’t get me wrong, I love the concept of canonizing a meme, but here’s why I think it’s a bad idea.
1) Voriki is male, this Toa is female. I know it’s not a very compelling argument given Lewa, but I feel it’s still relevant. The idea behind naming this Toa “Voriki” is to make a reference to the original meme. The farther you travel from that concept, the less it makes sense to make the reference at all.
2) A purple Toa of Lightning would not work. I gave my case about adding a Toa of Lightning a while back during the Elements poll. In that discussion, I brought up which colors are most closely associated with electricity. Yellow is clearly what people associate most with lightning, while purple is rarely depicted as such. The other 6 Toa (minus Lewa possibly) have colors that clearly state their element. Red? Fire. Blue? Water. Brown? Rocks. Making a Toa of Lightning purple would break that flow, and likely create confusion among kids. So why not just make Voriki yellow? Well again, the further you travel from the reference, the less it makes sense. Voriki’s defining attribute was being purple. He had no other attributes. Without it, there’s no reference minus the name.
As such, I propose that a new name be selected for this Toa of Lightning. Unlike the main 6 Mata, we don’t need to be tied to the name Voriki. It can be literally anything else; Eitra, Rikali, Abouru, I don’t care. Just anything but Voriki.
Anyway, I know I’m really jumping the gun on this, and that TTV will probably go more in depth about this when they get to characters. It’s just that this topic has been on my mind, and I wanted to see how others reacted to it.
tl;dr make toa of lightning anything but voriki