Yeah here. While I havent given many comments about each contest myself I enjoy them very much yes. Have always followed them with quite the interest almost daily.
Of course I cant speak for anyone else but… im at least one example for that and I doubt im that much of an exception
Allow everything that isn’t simply made in bad faith/as a pure joke (Hoseryx)
Let the voters decide the rest, if they think the moc has too much system well then they won’t vote for it. The Greg quotes should work as guidelines and inspiration. not as rules written in stone.
That’s not how canon works. Greg quotes are established facts about the canon so yes they are rules. Also its not like Greg is super specific about stuff all the time in those quotes so there is still room to do out of the box things.
What the voters vote on doesn’t matter much if non of the models actually attempts to be faithful to the canon in the first place aka the written word not what parts ratio it has.
And by this logic the most “canon friendly” entry would win if that’s what voters want.
Unless you think the voters choose “wrong” when presented with options
Yes.
I won’t lie, if there was an option to have Greg just whip up an appearance on his own and say “this is canon now”, I would take that option. But as long as these contests continue to fulfill their stated goal of giving appearances to unseen characters, I will continue to support them and do what I can to keep them going.
I don’t really know what point you’re trying to make here. Why is “participating in the contests in any way” included in “things that you only like if you like getting in internet fights”?
Every single point you addressed could just as well fit under “things you do if you enjoy/care about the Bionicle canon”.
… if they choose to.
It has been well-established that the people contributing to the discussion on these boards, on both sides of any disagreement, are a small portion of the people participating in the contests.
Equating the techniques used in the build with objective descriptions of character’s appearance isn’t really a fair comparison. No one is suggesting that any kind of System ratio should be enforced. Greg has occasionally given descriptions that should be merely taken as inspiration (“Helryx is frail”), but there are others that are far more objective (“Tuyet is blue”).
I absolutely believe that it is a possibility.
I don’t think it is realistic to expect voters to know every single aspect of a character’s given description, nor is it realistic to expect the average person on the internet to care. As such, that type of stuff should be enforced early on.
There’s also this:
If there were to ever be something that would destroy the legitimacy of the contests, it would be to give the anti-contest/anti-TTV/“toxic” group an entry to vote for that says “this entry is the exact opposite of what these contests stand for”.
Your implying that everyone who voted for Hoseryx, vote on it because it was the most canon compliant helryx?
What the voters determine to be an accurate representation of Lariska doesn’t matter if that representation excludes her prostetic arm or make her a centaur. Because it directly contradicts canon and some of her most defining features on her apperance that we are aware of in canon is that she is bipedal and has a prostetic arm.
Having every piece of information about a character in the rules will also help people not to exclude any important canonical details about said characters apperance when building their entry. How you achieve those features are another story but excluding them or actively pretending that no restrictions should be in place and that you can pick and choose what canon elements to keep in a contest that will directly influence canon is rather ignorant and counterproductive.
I third this
To a reasonable degree, I used Hoseryx as an example that shouldn’t be allowed to enter, but we have witnessed such absurd lenghts as complaining about a foot color of a Hagah and Bomonga holding his shield “wrong” Not to forget the aftermath of asking Helryx’s blue be changed.
Everything known about a character should be a rule in other words
Not gonna lie, I agree that some of the Hagah rules did have pretty shaky footing, canon-wise.
I still don’t see why that means we should start treating Greg Quotes as “suggestions”, though; the issue with the rules you mentioned is that there weren’t any Greg Quotes backing them up, not that the Quotes were being overenforced. For example, if there was a Quote saying “all the Hagah have metallic feet”, I would have no issue with that rule, but there wasn’t.
Let’s be fair, a lot of Bionicle’s canon information isn’t exactly enshrined in law. Most of it is just “Things the writers didn’t think about until some kid asked a leading question about it on BZP/the LMBs, at which point Greg threw together a quick answer that was probably contradicted by one of the actual books, and also a previous Greg post that Greg himself forgot about.” That’s how you end up with Helryx, the Mata build who is completely unrecognisable to Takanuva, who is also a Mata build, and knew all six of the only other known Mata builds in the universe.
The Bionicle fandom’s obsession with having every detail 100% confirmed by Greg has done it absolutely zero favours, because it’s ended with things like “There are two separate universes, the set/game/comic/Advance/Ghost universe where the characters have magnetic plates for hands, and the book/movie universe where they have fingers” because Greg decided to say that the toy designs were 100% canon with zero alterations, except his own books depict the characters with digits.
I do care about Bionicle canon, but it’s a bloody great Quantum Canon, where everything makes sense as long as you aren’t looking too closely at it. But the moment you start scrutinising it, it all collapses into a self-contradictory mess, because the guy that wrote it didn’t like doing plans, played favourites with the characters, and had to use a wiki to keep abreast of the lore. A wiki that uses his posts as their primary references for everything. And unfortunately, the Bionicle fandom insists on going over the entire lore with a magnifying glass.
I got aa lot of respect for Greg. He’s answered far more fan questions than he should ever have been expected to. But this is a guy who has admitted to having aphantasia, to being unable to visualise things in his head, and then we sit here and go “But what does this character look like?”
He doesn’t know! He’s never known! He has a rough idea of muscle mass and maybe colour, and that’s it. And I’m not knocking him as a writer. He did an absolutely brilliant job with most of the books, comics, all the serials before the middle of 2008 and a handful of the ones after that, and anything else I’m forgetting. But he didn’t have any idea what the non-set characters looked like. And most of the lore questions he got would’ve been things that he never considered.
Basically:
Also like, there’s a full two years of stuff we just don’t have access to anymore because of the Dataclysm. It’s not even in the Archives, it’s just gone.
Also all three contests have changed canon and gone against Greg statements in either big or small ways.
I meant to clear this up in the original finger discussion but forgot.
There aren’t two different universes; Greg has said before that every rendition of the characters, be it sets, movies, novels, etc. is just an “artistic representation” of their “true” appearances, which we can never truly see.
The book forms and set forms aren’t alternate universe representations of each other, they are just different “approximations” of the character’s one “true” form.
EDIT: This reply would actually probably be better in the other topic.
In the interest of staying on topic here, I’ll say that I agree with your points for some characters, but not others.
I can see why you’d be hesitant to take an answer to a leading question as undeniable canon, but not all of his answers are like that. There are some (such as Chiara’s Volitak) where Greg was asked a legitimate, open-ended question about a character’s appearance, and he came up with his own answer.
Plus there’s the fact that Greg was known to say “I don’t know” to a question. Even if his answer was to a leading question, he must have thought it fit in some way to actually agree with it.
…I like it, I made a whole post about it earlier
I mean, I think the Hagah contest was a one off exception because we have sets of existing team members but it’s still a valid point that they could be wearing armour in different places.
As regards the rest of this thread, please understand things are going to change. TTV doesn’t try foster a bad environment, all one can do is avoid bringing in any negativity with them.
Yes. We’ve just gone through what will probably be 2 of the worst ones, the first one (which was gonna be rough no matter what) and the Hagah (which was kinda complex and got out of hand). I don’t wanna jinx it, but I really don’t know how this could possibly go downhill from here.
Helryx is not a Mata build by any stretch of the imagination. She is a foot with legs.
Greg did that long, long before TTV began the contests. The worldbuilding went downhill from 2004 onward, and by 2010 it was just downright bad. He could have chosen to decline all the overly-specific questions and breed this culture of “ask and ye shall receive,” but he didn’t. He admitted defeat often, but he gave his “sure” enough to do irreparable damage to the subculture surrounding Bionicle.
TTV didn’t ruin Bionicle’s worldbuilding. It had already been a giant pile of nonsensical details for years, due in no small part to the deeds of a man who doesn’t know what a mammal is.
I believe that @ToaArcan was referring to possible contradictions in Greg Quotes, rather than the outcome of the contest. There is a quote from 2010 where Greg says that Helryx in set form would “probably [have] something close to a Mata build”.
Debatably, Helryx is “close to a Mata build” because she shared some of the same details and proportions as the Toa Mata. The “contradiction” here is shaky at best.
You’re judging the success of the contest on the merits of the results, while I’m judging the contests on whether the participation and actual contest itself is fun to participate in or watch. Sure, we’re getting results, but we could have gotten results any other numbers of ways and have results. To judge the contest on the fact we’re getting results is flawed and glosses over all the strife that’s been occurring.
Again, we can get results, but I don’t believe the process through which we get results will necessarily be pleasant to participate in.
oh I’m not using it as an anti-contest argument. It’s just me stating that I’m happy I stayed uninvolved in this mess.
and yeah, this was mostly what I was trying to get to when I stated I think the contests are mostly unsalvageable. Considering that, based on what I’ve heard, Hoseryx nearly won is a fairly strong indication, to me at least, that these contests won’t just become enjoyable overnight and that there are enough active participants acting in bad faith to prevent anything of that sort happening suddenly.
I’m probably being a bit cynical here, perhaps overly so, but I’ve seen very little to convince me to not be this way in regards to all this. Between stuff I’ve heard here and elsewhere, the idea that these contests can suddenly become an enjoyable thing to partake in and not be some painful drawn out argument seems unrealistically optimistic to me.
Its a canon contest not a ‘Contest of holding contests contest’
Being satisfied with the fact that they fulfilled their purpose is not flawed.
This. If I want to make homemade fried chicken, I have to buy some breasts, the breading, the flour, some eggs, and some oil. I need to whip out several dishes and spend a lot of time cooking before the food is even safe to eat, let alone good. It would be easier to buy some nugs, or simply not cook. But even if I have to slave over some oil for an hour and spend like 20 bucks, I get to eat fried chicken, and maybe the end result makes the whole endeavor worth it, even if it was difficult and even strenuous.
Not everything we do feels worth it until we get to step back and look at the fruits of our labor. Some things are fun until they’re over, and some are best once they’ve ended. That’s life, and I knew going into this that we’d have to be patient, that there’d be humps to get over, but it’d give me some closure when it was done, and however long I’m on Mr. Bones’s Wild Ride, I’m keeping my eyes on the prize.
