The reveal of the Great Spirit Robot completely recontextualized the entire story leading up to that point. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
If you had a great attachment to the tribal themes of original Bionicle, then yes. You will be disappointed.
But for fans like me, who got into Bionicle later, we were exposed to the non-tribal elements at the same time as everything else. Then, to us, the big reveal wasn’t so much “completely destroying our idea of Bionicle” as an awesome plot twist.
Opinions on the big reveal from fan to fan. but it isn’t really fair to say that it objectively ruined Bionicle.
Then you’re missing out on some of the best parts of the story.
If you remove the midichlorians from your headcanon Luke dies
Twitter
I disagree mostly because the comparison is way too flawed.
People disliked Ep 7’s rehashing because rather than just reusing one plot element or perhaps two, they reused the entire story practically beat for beat, with some elements directly lifted. Voya Nui used only the macguffin; the golden mask of power they needed to find, and everything else about the story is wildly different from the one that came before.
2001-03: The Matoran in a jungle-island paradise wait forever for their saviors to arrive, the Toa, who immediately begin overestimating themselves and their capabilities. By forcing themselves to work together, they overcome Makuta’s evil; by trusting each other, they defeat the Bahrag; by learning not to elevate themselves with their power, they defeated the Kal, and by believing in prophecy they saved the island.
2006: The Matoran in a jungle-island wasteland wait forever for their saviors to arrive, but are deceived by the Piraka, who twist their society from survivors on the brink of extinction to mindless slaves in an orwellian-esqe labor empire. The Toa arrive - deformed, bizarre versions of the prophetic heroes, who immediately begin underestimating and second-guessing themselves. The old heroes fell easily to this new threat, attacked by the Matoran they seek to protect, and now at the mercy of these monstrous impostors. The Inika shatter the imposed reality, fight monster after monster, and rescue the mask only to have it snatched from their hands at the very moment of triumph.
Hardly an equal comparison whatsoever.
Not to mention the fans whose perceptions would’ve been ruined by this reveal got their perceptions ruined when it was revealed there were actually hundreds of Toa, Makuta was a species and not an individual, the islanders actually hailed from a technological empire, and the wise old sages wereoriginally Toa themselves, ruining the prophesied savior meta the series had been building on for three years.
There’s a difference between a major worldbuilding secret that the lore is built off of, and the success of the line and story.
Why can’t it be both?
Furthermore, even if we define BIONICLE as within a sterile genre, the s h i f t from fantasy to sci-fi just testifies to the complexity of the worldbuilding. If the story pitch is “XYZ living on an island that’s secretly the face of a giant robot”, proper worldbuilding (if such a thing exists) would be to develop that as a religion that has evolved from the truth: the inhabitants, in the however many hundreds of thousands of years it has been since the Great Cataclysm - now worship the robot as a deity.
Additionally, it’s not as if the entire plot was set out by the writers from the beginning - they had no idea that it would be as successful as it was. As such, the stakes and scope evolved over time as the line progressed.
You just said that it’s a fantasy world turned sci fi, and then claim that it’s unrealistic?
It’s called a plot twist. One that makes you realize that you don’t have all the answers, that the world is much bigger than you thought it was, and that ties together the subtle mysteries previously introduced (the impenetrable layer of “rock” discussed by Onu-Matoran in MNOG, your aforementioned maori translations, the entire three virtues symbol, etc)
That is not the only thing. Things that also would be decanonized would be:
Onu-Matoran, who can not dig below a certain point
the logic of the existence of Metru Nui (depends on how much 2003 story is cut, because the Turaga are hinting to know more about everything that is going on
the explanation for the Bohrok tunnels, the energized protodermis, the “clean it all” etc., literally anything about the Bohrok
Bionicles icon for the three virtues
Yeah. It is science fantasy after all
The Matoran could choose between living on Mata Nui and beeing terrorized by Makuta another thousand years or living in Metru Nui in safety. Also Mata Nui’s system was shutting down forever. There was no pressure to make it in time, because the crisis had already struck.
That was basically Faber’s original vision for the entire story.
I think the fundamental flaw in this argument is that you’re staking that the island is more important than its inhabitants.
The islands may have been doomed from the start, but their inhabitants were not. Mask of Light saw the Matoran population return to their true home, albeit one they had no memory of, and from there returned to Spherus Magna once their mission was complete.
I can see your arguments are generally based on 2003 and prior. The answers to some of those questions were fleshed out down the line. For instance, the Toa couldn’t actually awaken Mata Nui because that had to occur in Karda Nui, and they had to get through Metru Nui in order to reach it. Plus, the Scroll of Awakening necessitated the evacuation of Mata Nui before his awakening, among other tasks.
Also, I don’t know if you’re new to the boards, but political/religious discussion isn’t allowed, so I’d steer away from those comparisons.
Thanks for your comments! I’ll try to address each point separately, as I view it:
Thank you for understanding where I’m coming from! In turn, I can of course see how somebody who got into the storyline later, e.g., with the Toa Inika, got less attached to the tribal themes. As I just heard again in one of the TTV videos on YouTube how Lego deliberately cut back on the spiritual themes in later years to avoid accusations of religious themes in Bionicle.
To clarify, the prequel movies are still part of my head canon (and I’ve said that in another thread as well), because they play before “Mask of Light” chronologically, obviously. I stopped at the Hordika because I didn’t want to go along with yet another Toa transformation that was just an obvious cashgrab for me, especially for heroes deliberately designed to look “ugly” (as Matau sees himself), and the movie about them just being an optional insert nested in the second one. The Inika were a return to the present, but for me, having been there from the beginning in 2001, they looked largely like a rehashing of the previous recipe.
Good comparison! I grew up with the Star Wars prequels, obviously (but only after having seen the original three movies, of course). So I never minded the concept of midichlorians. But for older fans, that was precisely one of those “technological explanations that disenchant the myth of the Force”, too.
Haha, good retort . But since it’s human beings posting on Twitter, I think a lot of the interactions taking place there can neither be described as “artifical” - nor as “intelligence”…
Thanks for elaborating on the details of the differences between the plots. My main exposure to Voya Nui was through the game Bionicle Heroes, which was of course only a shooter that didn’t bother to depict the societal structure the Piraka had set up there.
That said, I don’t find the explanation why the Toa Nuva failed against the Piraka particularly deep or satisfying. The Toa Nuva had faced such issues of self-doubt before, e.g., when they were up against the Bohrok-Kal without their elemental powers.
Lego obviously needed some type of justification to sell yet another new line of toys. And they did so by having the Nuva fail at something that the Inika would then be better at, implying they were either overall stronger fighters and/or had more character strength than the heroes we had been rooting for so far.
Coincidentally, the concept of denigrating your franchise’s old heroes to buff up the new ones is also something the Star Wars sequels did, so now I think the comparison applies even more !
That also ruined yet another thing for a “2001er” like me. At that time, the “revelation” that Makuta were an entire species to me just sounded like Lego had run out of names for their “teams” of villains, so now they decided to retcon one they already had. They just as easily could have called the species “Teridax” and let Teridax keep his original name “Makuta” . That would have made things a lot less complicated.
Just like they probably should have named the Turaga “Tohunga”, during the early time when they still wanted to use that term at all - given that “Tohunga” means something like “priest”, and the Turaga are precisely that.
In English (for example in the video games and MNOG), the setup for Makuta being a species was prepared a little better, since even while there was only one of them (Teridax), Matoran and Turaga would often refer to him as the Makuta. In the German version, he was always just called “Makuta”, as a proper name, without an article. Given how important names were made in Bionicle lore, with even big ceremonies for renaming select Matoran (and yes, I am aware that was just because of the outside-world Maori controversy), having the long-established villain “lose” his proper name and making him one out of many kind of weakened the fear and respect I had for Makuta as a villain for a while.
It’s basically as if Star Wars hadn’t coined the term “Sith”, but instead re-purposed the term “Vader” as a name for the entire group.
Yes, but my point is that knowledge of this major worldbuilding secret is not at all required to enjoy the story. In fact, for me it probably would have been easier to keep enjoying the story to this day if I had never found out about this reveal.
I don’t know how many copies “Mask of Light” sold overall, but I’m pretty sure there are more people who have seen that movie than there are people who kept reading the comics all the way up to the end. Just like a lot more people have only seen the Star Wars movies, without having gone on to read the Expanded-Universe novels. Since the comparisons I’m making between the later years of Bionicle and Star Wars refer to the movies only, it’s a lot easier to miss and thereby blissfully ignore the later canon of Bionicle than it is to wipe the botched Star Wars sequels from one’s memory, given that the latter got full-on movies instead of just paper releases.
I agree that it would make perfect sense for this knowledge to be forgotten over so many generations. But as far as I understood it, the Matorans, since they don’t procreate, remained the same across that immensely long time span. So there is no slow change of the myth as parents tell the story to their children, who then tell it to their children in a slightly different way, and so on. The Matoran having their memories of Metru Nui wiped explains some things, but the Turaga were around the entire time still knowing of these events.
I don’t quite remember why they never talked to the Matoran about Metru Nui (and why they suddenly decided to do so after Mask of Light), but even if the Turaga wanted to keep that information a secret, over such a long time span, it would have been very likely that some sneaky Matoran could have found out by accident, e.g., by overhearing two Turaga talk about Metru Nui when they thought they were in private. If it’s really the same population for several thousand years, there simply can’t be as much loss of knowledge as if older generations regularly die and take all their experience with them.
This is a common reply whenever somebody criticises how convincing a fantasy or sci-fi story is. Suspension of disbelief is a gradient. The audience can go along with certain things, but others will be so over-the-top that the disbelief can no longer be suspended.
Especially when you move a story from Fantasy into SciFi, the “Science” part of Science Fiction naturally puts higher standards on the “realistic-ness” of your story than if you remain inside the Fantasy genre, where it’s more readily acceptable that supernatural, magical things happen that can’t necessarily be explained at all. Keeping things a mystery is one way to go, providing more materialistic explanations based on some level of science is another. But retroactively making up pseudo-scientific claims as the “actual” explanations for events formerly shrouded in mystery, that’s an easy way to make a story sound more ridiculous than if the answer had just remained “it’s magic, duh”.
I know what a plot twist is. How convincing it is depends on a) how well it is set up, and b) how far it stretches the imagination compared to where it was before. There definitely was some setup for this reveal, but the revelation itself required the audience to give up so many previous assumptions at the same time that it really felt more like a sudden major retcon than a genius “and now the pieces are coming together” moment.
I’d wager that a good plot twist is one you can see coming if you’re paying attention before it occurs. For example, my father always predicted that Snape in Harry Potter was actually a good guy, and that’s how it came. Game of Thrones provided the same incentive for fan theories for a long time - and it didn’t matter that most of them didn’t come true, as long as at least someone clever enough was there who called it. When the GoT authors decided to circumvent that by deliberately pulling plot twists out of Mangaia just to surprise everyone (there we go with “subverting expectations” again), that’s how they ruined the final season.
Yes, I am aware of the images from the Faber files. However, they all have a copyright from 2012. It’s hard for me to determine in hindsight when they might actually have been created. Of course, the authors claim a lot of things were planned from the beginning - but well, I’d be doing that as well if I was one of the authors. Because as an author, you obviously have in interest to create the impression that your story as a whole was a lot more consistent than it might actually have been at the time of creation.
They wouldn’t be the first ones to do major retcons once their storyline got extended well beyond the point they originally imagined. For example, I also maintain that Terry Goodkind’s “Sword of Truth” series (on which the TV show “Legend of the Seeker” was loosely based) should have ended after the first book, “Wizard’s First Rule”. He basically had to retcon some stuff every book. And while he largely came up with new villains for each novel, just like Bionicle for each line of toys, at the end of each “subsection” of his books, he would often return to things that had implications for the very setup of his story in the first book. And then, sometimes he would even have to retcon those.
The Onu-Matoran hitting that impenetrable layer is one of the few strong foreshadowings I am aware of (and it was never actively present in my memory from MNOG, I just vaguely recalled it when somebody brought it up to me for the first time). So it never felt like a loose end to me personally. However, for those who did always remember this and were wondering about it: I also think Onu-Wahi creates one of the major plotholes with this foreshadowing - together with Ta-Wahi:
If even the Onu-Matoran can’t go beneath a certain point, if they can never dig into the soil of Aqua Magna, then where does the volcano Mangai and all the lava in Ta-Wahi come from? From inside the robot? Why would a robot have lava inside it? That’s a pretty destructive thing to put in there.
In contrast, if Metru Nui were just underground, with Ta-Metru right beneath Ta-Koro, then it would make sense for Ta-Metru to have “access” to lava as well, lots of it, actually - given that the lava reaches all the way up to Ta-Wahi.
I just checked out the comics from the Bohrok era on the Biomedia project again (I might still have my original paper versions in German here somewhere, but that website is certainly gold for quick access for such “checking” purposes). “Clean it all” is not a phrase I ever associated with the Bohrok for all the years, only now in hindsight. In the comics, they only speak about “Mata Nui returning to how it was before time”. The only beings who even mention the “cleansing” are the Bahrag. Of course, given that Greg co-wrote these comics, now I understand these hints in hindsight. But from the perspective of somebody who read them back in the day, “cleansing” could just as well mean they want to “purge” all the Matoran from the island, so that just Rahi and Bohrok remain, returning the island to its “natural” wildlife state.
More importantly, both the comics and the movie Mask of Life imply that it was Makuta who sent the Bohrok - not the Toa’s attempt to awaken Mata Nui after their first encounter with him. (Actually, the scene in the comics that depicts this even uses the exact same dialogue as the scene in the movie when Makuta releases the first three Rahkshi.)
So I wasn’t anymore confused by the presence of Bohrok tunnels than I was by the existence of anything else in Makuta’s lair, like the chambers that bred the Rahkshi. The Bohrok were simply another wave of enemies Makuta hurled at the Toa, judging by how the comics portrayed it back then.
Why does that need a special “cosmic” explanation? It could just have been some tribal symbol created by the Turaga to represent the virtues when teaching them to the Matoran.
How about just defeating Makuta, without awakening Mata Nui afterwards, and continuing to live on an island no longer plagued by infected Rahi, Bohrok, or Rahkshi? It’s not like everyone left Middle Earth at the end of Lord of the Rings either; only the Elves and Frodo did.
Preventing Mata Nui from dying was only necessary so as to still have the robot available and “ready for takeoff” in case of an apocalyptic event. Like the Slizer meteor hitting Aqua Magna . If Mata Nui dies forever, that would mean the Matoran and everyone else are stranded on Aqua Magna until it gets destroyed eventually. But without any impending apocalypse, there was no reason to awaken him as long as none of the inhabitants had any plans to leave Aqua Magna.
In fact, I think this would have been an easy way to make the Bionicle story much more inspiring: Makuta’s jealousy (as established in 2001) could have come to a point where he would have decided that if the Matoran don’t want to worship him, nobody else should get their adoration either, and he could have decided to cause some apocalyptic event on Aqua Magna to wipe them all out. Now the only way to escape certain doom would have been for the noble heroes to awaken Mata Nui so that they could leave the planet. Of course, the Matoran still wouldn’t have known about this: They just would have prayed that their creator, their “God”, would somehow save them, without knowing what this “saving” would look like. So there would still have been a twist in terms of “I can’t actually save your world, but I can save you, let’s leave”. The island of Mata Nui would still have been destroyed as the robot rose. But it would have been much more justified, a) because of the impending danger, and b) because apocalypse would destroy the island anyway. With that context, losing the island of Mata Nui would have been a bittersweet ending, instead of just being a pointless casualty of heroes acting without sufficient information.
I know, I actually found that quite sweet. It’s the story you tell little children to get them to take their medicine: “There are brave warriors in these capsules that are going to fight the monsters inside your body.” I don’t have a problem with that, actually. I don’t even mind the premise of Mata Nui being a robot per se. I just have a problem with his face being under the island, so that his resurrection inevitably destroys it.
When I first read the comic depicting his ascension, I thought he was standing above the island, as if he had rested in the ocean right next to it, instead of under it. Basically, there are two options I could easily get comfortable with:
the robot lies in the ocean next to the island and is resurrected in its physical form
the robot does indeed have his face under the island (solving the Onu-Koro, the Mount Ihu and the name of volcano Mangai issue, albeit causing the question of where the lava comes from). But it’s not his physical body that is resurrected, only his consciousness that is being transferred to elsewhere (as I proposed, a satellite, a “cloud”, which would probably just mean “in Heaven” from the Matoran’s perspective).
This could even be justified in terms of freeing his consciousness from the body it had been trapped in so far - harking back to Makuta’s statement how Mata Nui would “suffer while awake”. Obviously, lying underwater with an island on your face while being conscious would not be particularly pleasant.
No, I’m not putting the existence of the island over the life of the inhabitants - I’m stating that the inhabitants seem to have been happier living on Mata Nui than in Metru Nui. (Harking back to Hahli’s speech about her love for her home and what a paradise the island is in her view - to which everyone in the audience at Kini Nui agrees.)
And from an early fan’s perspective, the environment of Mata Nui is what drew us into the story. So the idea that Metru Nui is where the Matoran did not only come from, but where they were actually meant to live again, was already hard to believe for me back then. If for no other reasons than the obvious worldbuilding issues in terms of naming inconsistencies (why are the Metrus still called “Ta-Metru” etc., instead of “Va-Metru” or “Lhi-Metru”, for example? ).
But even for somebody who maybe got into Bionicle first in 2004 and therefore might have preferred Metru Nui over the island of Mata Nui: Well, Metru Nui was destroyed as well, wasn’t it? Together with everything else in the hijacked Great Spirit robot.
Instead, the world that got “saved” was one we knew next to nothing about. And it wouldn’t even be a great place to live at all if it hadn’t been for Mata Nui pulling another deus ex machina and going “oh yeah, by the way, here’s some lush vegetation and ample water supply for you folks, see ya!” on his way out.
Who says Spherus Magna is a world that should have been reunited in the first place? Its former inhabitants messed it up badly; maybe it deserved to remain split apart. They could have had a different space robot fix the broken Slizer planet again instead!
Thanks, I saw your post while writing this current one and scrapped a short section, which was largely about a Star Wars reference again anyway, though. I’ve been trying to look for official rules threads, yet was only directed to the Terms of Service repeatedly and thought that was all.
I’ve slightly edited my opening post, rephrased a couple of sentences and removed some short paragraphs. I hope everything is fine with the way I stated my ideas now, rules-wise.
Also, all the other movies I’m referencing in this post have been out for several years, and they are pretty famous ones, so I hope these are not “spoiler-relevant” either .
What is then the logic of Metru Nui beeing below Mata Nui?
So are the books not canon in your headcanon? Because that phrase was used over and over in “Beware the Bohrok”, a book that came out in 2003.
The shape is quite convenient for that.
Have you read the short story “The Kingdom”? It depicts what would have happened if Mata Nui had actually died. It’s very interesting.
Generally I think your “improved” headcanon leaves quite a few big plottholes and the explanations you give seem overly forced. If you like it, stick to it. But I can’t find anything satisfying for me in this. But maybe that’s because I am a fan from the “Ignition” generation.
bruh don’t you get carpal tunnel from typing colon W-I-N-K colon so many times
several hundred thousand years, right? It makes sense that memories would degrade or whatever.
come back to me in 302,021 and tell me all that’s transpired between now and then.
Additionally, you have to take into account the difference between worldbuilding explanations and real-world explanations, and you have to accept that those are sometimes irreconcilable. The writers didn’t know BIONICLE was going to be as popular as it was. Naturally, as the line continued and the scope of it expanded, there would be inevitable plotholes.
This is hardly the kind of unrealism that stops suspension of disbelief. As far as I am aware wasn’t it Mata Nui who was controlling the reformation of Spherus Magna to keep from a global extinction?
If Onu-Koro already is an underground city / village, I wouldn’t find it implausible to assume that the Matoran could have built another city even further down below.
How Metru Nui had a sky, that is something I never found easy to explain, with either account. Even if that was all just a simulation created inside the robot’s head - such simulations are rarely perfect. Consider how many failures the holo decks on the Enterprise have had over the course of Star Trek: The Next Generation!
Some Matoran living in Metru Nui should have found “holes” in the illusion by accident, looking at a wall of metal right in the middle of the sky or something. But for all I could tell in the second movie, the Matoran of Metru Nui were not aware they were living inside a giant robot?
No, for a very simple reason: The books, at least these early ones, for all I can tell, were never translated into German - only the comics and movies were. I was a 9-year-old kid in 2003, i.e. in third grade. That was the earliest when English classes started in German schools back then (nowadays they might start in 1st grade already, I’m not sure).
So I only had the comics and the online resources to work with - you know, these “newspaper-style” articles on the Bionicle homepage: “Victory Party Cancelled”, “The Tahnok Surround Po-Koro”, etc. Those were also translated into German, albeit usually with quite some delay. Impatient to see how the story would continue, I sometimes watched the English versions, trying to make sense of the subtitles with whatever limited vocabulary I had back then . That’s how it went until Mask of Light finally came out.
We actually had a dedicated Lego shop in a major city near where I lived, and despite the countless times I’ve been there, I don’t remember ever having seen any such books there. I even wrote my own Bionicle fan fiction because I couldn’t find any actual official books about it (instead of just comics).
And no, my own fan fiction from back then is obviously not (or at least no longer) part of my head canon . I don’t even quite remember how it went. Except that it included the Toa Mata performing as a band at Kini Nui. I thought that was pretty ridiculous in hindsight… and then I recently discovered the remake of the “Legend of Mata Nui” game, and saw how they made all the Toa dance in the Takari …
Also, the internet at that time was of course in a much more “infant” state at that time; now I could just order any of this stuff online and read it in English, obviously. However, of course that would still mean I’d be reading these stories in hindsight now, irrespective of their date of publishing. I can’t transfer the content back into my 2003 child mind.
I just find it odd that neither the comics nor the movies dropped such clear hints about the official mission of the Bohrok. I do think the scene from Mask of Light where Makuta mentions the past threats he confronted the Toa with (the Rahi and the Bohrok) was cut out, I remember it from the deleted scenes compilation. Though I think that was mainly done to keep the pace of the movie, not to avoid plot inconsistencies - given that this exact same scene was also part of the comic, word for word, and that comic was co-written by Greg.
But I’m not sure if it was cut out of the movie, because the German version of the movie was shortened by a whopping 4 minutes, and that scene where he introduces the first three Rahkshi was one of the scenes they shortened. Only via YouTube could I even find out these scenes were longer. I had always been wondering why Gali and Tahu gave up Ta-Koro so quickly … well, turns out they didn’t surrender quite as quickly as I thought they did. Though it still seemed like a rather feeble effort to defend the city.
They were mostly trying to cut out some of the violence, of course - but some important plot points were missing from the German version of the movie, as a consequence. (For example, the setup of Tuurahk’s intimidation power, as he applies it to Pohatu in Onu-Koro; to me, being aware of the Rahkshi’s powers, it wasn’t a surprise when he did that to Takua in the end, but for many others, it must have come out of nowhere.)
You think so? I’ve always perceived the three ellipses more as ovals than as round, planet-like shapes. Even when I saw the depiction of the symbol in the stars in the opening of “The Legend Reborn”, to me it looked more like “ah well, a new take on the logo, that’s cute” instead of “finally an explanation for why it looks this way”. I could just as wel ask myself why the Matoran writing system looks the way it does. Or why it changed from circular outlines to polygons somewhere down the line.
I quickly skimmed over it right now. For a moment I thought the island might disappear if the vegetation is no longer being created by Mata Nui’s camouflage system. But then it states in the story explicitly that they did not only find a way to maintain, but even expand it with actual land mass.
As I understand it, the main problem with this alternate timeline is that Makuta thrives when Mata Nui, “the light”, is dead. But to me it seems like that’s only possible because they never managed to kill Makuta for good in the first place (as he was in fact still alive even during the original events of the Mahri Nui era).
After all, at the very end of the story, when everyone is on Spherus Magna, to my understanding, neither Makuta nor Mata Nui exist anymore. So the absence of Mata Nui doesn’t seem to be a problem as long as Makuta is definitely absent as well.
I said it’s a gradient, and by that I meant between individuals. It certainly stopped my suspension of disbelief. Both the mythological and the technological explanation are supernatural, of course, but the mythological explanation is not as needlessly complex as the technological one. Ockham’s razor applied.
The idea that it’s even remotely possible to build a robot of this size? How large it would have to be in relation to the size of the Matoran and the Toa? Whether it could survive the impact of falling onto Aqua Magna from the orbit, or whether its inhabitants could survive that impact. Let alone the idea of preventing total destruction of the planet surfaces as the three fragments are being merged back into one.
Or pushing Teridax “against one of the moons”, which is probably the most over-the-top part. Considering that Teridax is inside Mata Nui’s body at that point, and that body could just stand somewhere on Aqua Magna before, “pushing him into” Bota Magna would rather mean he falls into its orbit and accelerates down to its surface. Not just like a giant boulder dropping onto his head.
That Mata Nui is a giant robot? Yes, that by itself you could see coming. In fact, I always imagined Mata Nui as the deity of the Matoran universe, and so, I thought he would have created the Matoran “in his own image”. The Matoran and Toa look like robots, so I always expected Mata Nui to look like one, too. But “Great Beings”? Spherus Magna, a planet that split into three parts? Elemental Lords? How would you have seen that coming in the early years from, say, 2001 to 2006?
I already addressed that and clarified my stance on this.
Those still aren’t the best parts. (Hint: It’s the serials)
You could, though. There were people theorizing it before it happened.
And the “suns” closing in Metru Nui when Teridax put Mata Nui to sleep.
It’s not the soil of Aqua Magna, it’s Mata Nui’s face.
From burst molten protodermis pipes in Mata Nui’s face.
Are you sure you’ve read the story? That is literally the catchphrase of the Bohrok, and basically the most iconic part about them as a group.
Because then Mata Nui dies, everyone else in the Matoran Universe dies, and the island of Mata Nui eventually collapses.
Again, Mata Nui’s death would eventually lead to the collapse of the island into the sea, as shown in The Kingdom.
Again, have you actually read the story? The Toa knew the island was going to get trashed.
No, they weren’t.
Sure, their living situation seems odd to us, but they have nothing to compare it to. Why would they question it?
Are you kidding me?
You can’t just ignore one of the most important lore sources and then declare that the lore doesn’t make sense. I don’t care why you didn’t read the books, but you can’t just neglect them.
Both the comics and the novels did. Don’t you find it odd that the Bohrok would always ignore the beings around them and only destroy structures?
Read. The. Story.
Yes, when he first arrives, Takanuva is told that the island has been stabilized. But, later, when talking with one of the leaders, he is told that the island is starting to collapse and that they are covering it up until they can get a solution.
Not exactly. The absence of Mata Nui is no longer a problem because his mission has been completed and his inhabitants no longer rely on his body for survival.
I’ll give you a pass here, since this exact detail has been described in multiple ways. But the canon version is that it was only a small piece of a moon.
I mean that’s more consistent than it could be otherwise, since the elemental prefixes (Ta, Ga, Le, Po, Onu, Ko) haven’t changed, and it is the same population.
That is a compelling argument. Then again, we were barely exposed to the Spherus Magnans, now Bara and Bota Magnans. BIONICLE fans are much more exposed to the Toa and Matoran than the Glatorian and Agori, so we have more understanding and sympathy for the Matoran’s motivations.
I ain’t disagreeing with you there, but it isn’t as cut and dried as your description - or even the general summary of the Bionicle timeline - makes it seem.
The main answer was “Don’t fight all of them at once and especially not when Brutaka is standing right there” but a lot of it had to do with the extremely atypical abilities of the Piraka being toppled by the extremely atypical abilities of the Inika. The Nuva really weren’t used to opponents whose abilities ranged from animating inanimate objects to fight for them to getting knocked the height of a building into the air and consequentially becoming immune to physical strikes from below.
The glorious masks of the heroes weren’t about defending each other, adapting to their environment, or increasing their own capabilities, but about performing acrobatic stunts, perceiving the unseen, literally dying, and hearing the thoughts of everyone around you. The flawless Toa were now freaks of nature, despised being Toa, second-guessed themselves at every turn, and more often than not got wiped by the very villains they were supposed to beat.
Except they didn’t.
The Toa Nuva also lost to a group of deformed malnourished Matoran who drove Gali insane and nearly forced Kopaka into breaking the Toa code. This wasn’t their setting or their typical threats; the mold formed around the preconceived rules of the world was once again broken, and the only way to master the threats laid against them was to conform and break it from the inside. If you haven’t read any of the books of that particular portion of Bionicle’s lore I highly recommend you do; they’re some of the best in the whole series and honestly do a far better job of defending the decision making on Greg’s part than I can.
It ruined the world for a few other fans as well, including a rather notable one I had the opportunity to speak to. He semi-bowed out of the series at that point.
It wouldn’t matter which one got that name as there’d be a lawsuit about it nonetheless.
Uh… They did.
Darth.
It became the title for every sith lord in spite of originating with that character and even being referred to as such by Obi-Wan.
That… Cool. Nobody’s arguing that. Nobody needs to know Darth Vader is Luke’s father to enjoy A New Hope, but decisions were made based on that fact which kind of, y’know, determined Vader’s relationship with Luke and what kind of character he was.
You don’t need to know the GSR is sleeping under the island in order to appreciate the story, but with that bit of info decisions in the worldbuilding set up since the very literal beginning of it all suddenly make sense, because it was hinted at very slightly for the greater amount of eight years and major plot points - the Bahrag, Metru Nui, the physics of Voya Nui’s ascent and descent, why Mata Nui could die, you take out the GSR’s existence and suddenly a lot of things are inexplicable, mysterious, and unanswered, because Faber and later Farshtey built everything on its reveal.
No, you don’t need to know about it. If 2009 and 2010 sucked that’s not because the concept of the GSR was invented in 2001. I personally think that if Bionicle ended in 2008, with Makuta taking over the universe and winning - or, as was originally intended, with Mata Nui reawakening and the universe being saved - it would’ve been a better ending than what we got. But I blame that on story direction for 09-10, not on the biggest plot twist in all of Bionicle.
Well uh, that’s a bummer. Because the books were absolutely the best way to learn about the lore. I’d definitely read them now if you have the opportunity.
It also means Tahu’s name is literally ‘fire something’
I don’t know, if anything, the mythology laid out in the early years of Bionicle turning out to be true, in a sense, is to me part of the wonder and awe of the reveal of the GSR.
Like others have said, it was always planned, and hints were dropped from year one that there was more beneath the surface (literally). I find things like the Three Finger Islands (that ultimately didn’t make it, but were planned for), the Onu-Matoran reaching an unbreakable layer beneath Mata-Nui, and even just the island looking like a face are all super interesting and mysterious.
Of course, this is all subjective, and I do agree that the laters years of Bionicle, in exploring the science fiction side more closely, did sort of lose a lot of the intrigue that made the early years so enthralling. It was a natural consequence of exploring that mystery over time, though.
But I don’t agree that it actively ruins the mythology. Nothing that was stated is inherently false or even ultimately untrue. I actually made a post of my own a little while ago pointing out the payoff between the original legends and the final battle proper:
The belief system didn’t fail, it was just a little more simplified than it is was in reality.
And in terms of the points you made about why it ruins the mythology:
True, but isn’t “awakening” basically the same thing as booting up a computer? Does a biological brain not, in a sense, “boot up” when it awakes? We put our computers on “sleep” mode on occasion. Fundamentally, they’re just two different ways of describing the same thing.
Again, the same issue of semantics. You could view the Toa as “just an anti-virus,” but that’s not what they literally are. It’s an allegory, and just because they are inspired by/based on/serve a similar function as that allegory doesn’t mean their in-story importance or mystery is ruined.
Well, maybe. Spherus Magna is actively experiencing a catastrophe as it’s been shattered and the beings on the shards are suffering because of it. Mata-Nui’s return would be the end of a terrible period in time for the inhabitants.
And in the more immediate Matoran Universe, Mata-Nui’s sleeping would ultimately result in his death. The Toa are on a time limit for the death of the universe.
Those are just my thoughts, though. I echo the sentiments of wanting more of the tribal aesthetic in the later years of Bionicle, but I find the GSR reveal actually quite interesting.
I’m about to contribute aggressively.
But this topic is far too interesting to not warrant an extended discussion, in my opinion.
OK, so I’ll begin with ample context.
Yes, I got into the line in '07.
That said, I did experience games like MNOG before I really understood the GSR reveal.
I also believe that it’s not just my age or point of introduction to the franchise that contributes to my enjoyment of the reveal.
Even though I quite vehemently disagree with the argument you’ve made, I still thoroughly enjoyed reading your post. It’s a fascinating opinion, and I’m looking forward to adding my own opinions to the discussion as well now. So thank you very much for sharing such a lengthy post.
I’ll address most of this topic in order of the arguments made, but first off, I think it’s necessary to establish something:
[quote=“Strato_Incendus, post:8, topic:58040”]
You might be interested in this (it’s less than 20 seconds long, don’t worry):
There’s also stuff like the twin suns in Metru Nui, the rock layer, the very fact Toa are basically in pill-shaped canisters. There’s very little doubt that this was planned from the very beginning. It’s the very foundation upon which the rest of the story was built. That much, at the very least, is all but definitive.
So when Greg says that:
…he’s referring to the idea that the overall purpose of the story was to present this idea, and that without it you kind of end up in a situation where you have to reconcile or ignore many of the things that made Bionicle… Bionicle. Kids can enjoy any part of the story, yes. But it’s like saying “I just liked “A New Hope” until the part where they blew up the Death Star” - it undermines the whole “point” of the story. You can enjoy it for other reasons (perhaps you only liked the bit where they escaped the Death Star), but it doesn’t mean that the story was ruined by that reveal or that it makes much sense as an overall entity without that context.
You don’t need to know the time signature to listen to a piece of music - but you need to know it to write that music. Same situation here - just because you can enjoy Bionicle without knowing this, doesn’t mean you could have created Bionicle without it. In fact, many fan “Bionicle-alike” or even fan reboot concepts I’ve read seem overly contextless and vague for what I suspect is this very reason.
That’s not really the main goal of the story. And they only wanted to save the island before they knew there were alternative islands to visit. The physical island’s destruction is not something that really matters when nothing was living on it. It’s just a big rock, at the end of the day. It’s value is only superficial and material compared to the things the Toa were truly trying to save - the Matoran, and (unkowingly) the inhabitants of Spherus Magna.
It would be as if that had happened after a full-scale evacuation of Tatooine. What’s left there of importance?
What’s wrong with that…? The Toa still successfully:
Ended the thousand-year “dark time” of oppression for the Matoran
Saved their lived from the Bohrok
Returned to their true, ancestral home
Saved them from being mutated by the Visorak
Stopped life in the universe itself from ending
Saved Mata-Nui’s life
(Indirectly) Saved Spherus Magna and restored it to it’s former paradise
Defeated the Makuta and stopped his tyrannical quest against the Matoran.
I think the destruction of an uninhabited island or two is kind of insignificant by comparison, in all fairness.
Is that actually an issue though? I’d argue that’s what a great deal of people liked about having bio-mechanical life forms wielding elemental powers on ancient islands.
No, it’s an example of a successful one - one that was grounded in the truth.
There’s absolutely no reason a story can’t have added depth to it. I think some people thoroughly enjoyed that Bionicle was able to follow through on it’s promise of mystery, rather than just pull a J.J.Abrams-esque “Mystery Box” and write things as it went along.
Not true.
The Toa Mata were literally responsible for awakening the Robot in the climax of basically the whole story.
Takanuva… ok, he didn’t do much.
The Metru prevented Makuta from reigning over a city of brainwashed matoran, and also saved them from the Visorak.
The Inika stopped the universe from dying.
These are all really important moments in the story that would have lead to critical consequences if they didn’t play out.
Nitpicking here - but Deus ex Machina is used to swoop in and resolve a conflict in an unsatisfying way. The Toa Nuva resolved their conflict - of awakening the great spirit - the next part of the story was logically Mata Nui’s quest to undertake, not theirs. He didn’t swoop in and save them.
[Lord of the Rings spoilers in this paragraph]
Tolkein (who kind of knew what he was doing when it came to writing fantasy/escapist stories ) provides a really great example. It would be “Deus Ex Machina” if the eagles are responsible for dropping the ring into the volcano and finishing what Frodo couldn’t, but they’re not - they just save our characters once their quest was finished. Even Gollum’s involvement is a direct consequence to Frodo’s decision to spare his life earlier in their journey - so that isn’t just a “get out of jail free” either.
While I agree the jealous brother aspect to his character could have been more front-and-center, it wasn’t retconned. As long as there was no biological reproduction, he was never going to be a literal brother. And I’d argue that jealousy just looks an awful lot like lust for power when the person you’re jealous of happens to be an entire universe.
I’m sure that the same energies that manipulated the orbits of two planets and restored life, rivers, vegetation and landscaping to an entire planet can also prevent the atmospheric fallout.
The story intentionally and deliberately toys with the idea of Vakama’s repeated attempts and secrecy and lying to be a damaging thing - there’s no pretense that the Turaga were right to be keeping secrets or misleading the Matoran about the matters which they knew more about. This is a deliberate character flaw the story plays with - you’re supposed to feel like the Toa when they’re going “We want answers, how’d you know what a Bohrok was!”
If you explain “The Matrix” as just a dream Neo has, it makes more logical sense. It also strips the story of any purpose and meaning beyond “cool, he can dodge bullets!”
Keep in mind Mata-Nui’s story got considerably abridged when the line ended - we were going to get a lot more time to explore and flesh out that story, originally.
STOP. RIGHT. THERE.
Bionicle Heroes is a non-canon game that often gets criticised for steering very far away from the actual story. It’s a relatively fun game, but don’t use it as a story source for anything (other than the trivia information in the trophy room, which was fact-checked by both Greg and a community of Bionicle fans, if I remember the credits correctly).
The Inika never actually beat the Piraka, either. They just beat the guy who beats them.
100% agree with you here - this is headcanon for me, actually. Kind of tangential to the main point, though. (And I don’t have issue with the species itself - just the naming of it.)
Keep in mind that the original Toa’s names - being arguably the first team of six Toa created - could have been named after these prefixes, rather than the other way around.
That’s kind of what the robot was actually built to do, though… it’s definitely not Deus ex Machina to have the protagonist use a powerful artifact (that he’s had for the whole story) to help him complete his main plot goal.
Then this should be an opinion/rant about Lego’s poor catering to international audiences (something I’d totally agree with). But just because the marketing team failed to deliver the whole story, doesn’t mean that the story itself is to blame. You’ve gotten a fractured version of the story, and that’s not fair - but it’s also not fair to then say that a story reveal (which was almost exclusively in the books, anyway) was a mistake when there were considerable portions of the story that you didn’t get to experience.
People were talking about the Great Beings as early as 2003 - they were a very common topic in Greg discussions on BZPower.
(Emphasis mine)
That’s a… bold claim.
I won’t say you’re wrong, but the presence of background lava in an artificial volcano on an artificial island in a fantasy/sci-fi series is hardly what I’d consider a “major plot hole”. It’s about as insignificant as a plot hole could possibly be.
And finally:
Where did you hear this? I’m not questioning you - I’m genuinely curious. It’s news to me.
One nitpick here: They beat Vezok, and by extension they beat the super-powered Hakann and Thok alongside the rest of the Piraka, but it’s hardly a solo victory.
I’ll try to address each point separately, as I view it:
In turn, I can of course see how somebody who got into the storyline later, e.g., with the Toa Inika, got less attached to the tribal themes. As I just heard again in one of the TTV videos on YouTube how Lego deliberately cut back on the spiritual themes in later years to avoid accusations of religious themes in Bionicle.
!
…
I’ve always perceived the three ellipses more as ovals than as round, planet-like shapes. Even when I saw the depiction of the symbol in the stars in the opening of “The Legend Reborn”, to me it looked more like “ah well, a new take on the logo, that’s cute” instead of “finally an explanation for why it looks this way”. I could just as wel ask myself why the Matoran writing system looks the way it does. Or why it changed from circular outlines to polygons somewhere down the line.
Both the mythological and the technological explanation are supernatural, of course, but the mythological explanation is not as needlessly complex as the technological one. Ockham’s razor applied.