I’m curious, what kind of stories do you usually like to read/watch? Personally, I’m someone who likes a good mystery in a story, and from that perspective it’s quite common - and honestly kinda exciting - to see mysteries stretched out throughout the story. Hints and new information trickle in slowly over the course of the story, adding suspense and clues before the big reveal. Granted, not every story ends up quite as long-form as Bionicle, but I don’t think that invalidates the way its story works. You may not like the way the mystery was handled, but there is nothing inherently wrong with the way the story was written.
Two points here: first, 2001 and 2003 barely count as false alarms, and most of that is the movie’s fault. I cannot recall the 2001 story ever framing the Toa’s immediate goal as awakening Mata Nui. That was their eventual goal, yes, but at this point they had a more immediate goal: fight and stop Makuta. Any of the comics, books, and games that I can remember only ever posed the battle under Kini Nui as a fight to defeat Makuta, not an earnest attempt to awaken Mata Nui.
Of course, 2003 is a bit of a separate issue. It poses the whole “Seventh Toa” thing as being to the end of defeating Makuta at first, but then throws that for a loop when they explicitly say that they’re going to awaken the great spirit and undergo a complete ritual. All I can guess there is that the movie writers made that decision without consulting the story team, especially since future story was already planned at this point. Even if this clearly wasn’t the end of the story and it became clear pretty quick that Mata Nui was not, in fact, awake, that’s kind of a big whoops on the story team’s part.
However, my second point: 2008 was very heavily marketed as “the final battle”. They made it clear that, whatever happened next, this was the endgame. The Toa’s goal was finally explicitly to awaken the great spirit, a battle in the core of the universe with the fate of everything in the balance. I understand that you weren’t following the story as closely (if at all) at this point, but anyone who was still invested in the story in 2008 could have been assumed to have known that the end was coming, in some form or another.
Hi, I’m someone who got my first Bionicle set in 2002/2003 (I was smol, I don’t remember what year it was ) and started closely following the story in 2006 and 2007. Your constructed narrative is nothing like my experience. It’s overly critical of things that I found interesting, exciting, or intriguing. Seeing new characters and settings wasn’t disappointing or annoying, it was exciting. Maybe that wasn’t your experience, but it seemed to be shared between myself and several friends who enjoyed the theme at the time.
I mean, you didn’t need to buy the toys or the novels to follow the story; bionicle.com and bioniclestory.com gave you a nice primer on the story for free through games, character blurbs, and so on. For specifics you had the comics, which came free with the also free Lego Magazine. They didn’t always tell the whole story (the early and late years of the line were especially bad with this), but from 2006-2008 all of the main events were chronicled in the comics; that’s how I read of iconic events such as Matoro’s sacrifice and the debated robot reveal.
To me, it’s starting to feel like you’re nitpicking and generalizing in an attempt to dig in your heels and validate your points. You are allowed to have your opinions; no one here is or should be trying to take that away from you. However, please try and understand that your opinions and the experiences they draw from aren’t universal, and you shouldn’t try and make them universal to try and validate your points.
@Strato_Incendus I would emphasis what Jerminator said here, even if you have replied to it. Believe it or not but the people writing the story weren’t the ones designing he sets, in fact the sets were designed before and then often had to have relevance tacked on. So it’s not always the writer’s fault (sometimes they could have done better damage control but that’s beyond the point) they did the best they could to make these sets work.
As to your complaints about the transformations, sure the numerous changes may seem repetitive but after a while one sees it as a normal part of the Mataron universe, there is already the cycle of mataron-toa-turaga and any transformations beyond that are reasonable as it seems to be a intentional design feature and things like the “normal H2O” you mentioned is clearly stated as pit mutagen and is infected water, it’s pretty cool IMO and it was mentioned as linked to the cataclysm thus not being confusing but being intriguing instead.
You claim that the numerous transformations and some repeated villains threw fans off. The majority of the Bionicle community managed to hold on for the ride even if it did get bumpy and I’ve explained how the transformations were a continuous theme that was well grounded in the Mataron way of life/mataron universe.
I’ll illustrate using other franchises. No one writes off the entire Star Wars universe because ohhh they keep making up new vehicles for each movie or the empire makes yet another giant space station, sure it ticks me off the repetition but I just ignore those parts and enjoy the overall universe that has been built.
Okay, I’ve purposefully resisted talking on this entire topic as your attacking something rather dear to my heart (the GSR) but I think I might as will give a go at explaining my viewpoint.
Every franchise has it’s distinct aspects that makes it stand out from the crowd, Star Wars has clone armies, Death Stars and the force. Transformers has well its transformations (that is vehicle modes etc) a mechanical planet and Unicron. No one goes “you know what fam I’m out, I’m calling bull on Unicron, how can he be that big?”
Same with The Mata Nui robot. It’s a distinct idea-a world repairing robot with islands inside, fighting against a cancer of sorts, no other franchise has that. Same with the many other strange but fun aspects like the cycle of Mataron to toa to turaga. And sure a giant robot is not scientifically possible, but then again it’s called science-fiction for a reason plus doesn’t that fit into the realm of fantasy that you so like?
Personally I think the robot can be explained, it fires gravity beams thus showing control over gravity, therefore it can manipulate gravity internally to avoid structural weak points and avoiding the horror of the squared cube law.
Sorry that I’m yet another person disagreeing with you and contradicting your opinion but I just really don’t understand your fixation with the island of Mata Nui and dislike for the wider story, we all liked the island, MNOG made us all fall in love with it, but when we learnt about the larger universe and what was at stake the loss of the island was really only “a small price to pay for salvation”
Once again apologies if my paragraphs are messy, I hope my ideas have been conveyed right, the Mata Nui robot and systems is a real passion of mine
This is a thing a big part of the Bionicle community does, and I’ve never understood it.
“What do you mean, there’s an explanation? I wanted it to be mysterious!”
“What do you mean, there’s no explanation? That’s scientifically impossible!”
There is a lot of this thread and I don’t know if its already been pointed out, but the Great Spirit robot was not only planned from the beginning it was revealed in the beginning.
This was our first physical look at the surface of the Great Spirit Robot in MNOG back in 2001. We didn’t know that it was a giant robot at the time, but the “great layer of unbreakable strata beneath the whole island” was already established. Nixie ponders, “why would a sundial be built underground?” in the game, dialogue that hints at the space faring nature of the GSR with the faux island on top of it.
The game’s dialogue also hints at this. A lot of comments that felt metaphorical or allegorical (Kapura: “Mata Nui fell from the sky.” Nokama: “The ocean surrounds Mata Nui as he sleeps.” etc.) are actually very blunt and direct references to the Great Spirit Robot.
The GSR is again visible in some overhead views of the island such as this one. Notice that the shallow water areas show the remainder of the GSR’s head and Mata Nui’s neck and shoulders.
The earliest use of that art I can find (albeit very pixelated) is from 2001 in Lego’s “design a Bionicle fan website” contest where Lego provided media kits to fans to design a website around. The winner, Binkmeister’s Mata Nui Expedition One is still up online and shows us the pixelated version of the above art, very strongly proving the “Mata Nui Shoulders” art was in circulation in 2001.
Here is an ad for Bionicle.com from the 2002 comic books that has just barely visible the “Mata Nui Shoulders” art on it again showing the piece was in circulation on official Bionicle websites and media material at the time.
The design language of the GSR being both a natural and artificial thing was used in Bionicle Mask of Light. Its why many of the natural features of the island have subtle technological patterns on them, to highlight they are artificially created and somehow the technology of the GSR is taking over the “nature” of the island.
Of course there are more references to the GSR from other era concepts and cancelled story ideas. The Bohrok as revealed by Christian Faber were originally going to come from “Three Finger Island” which would be the GSR’s partially submerged left hand peaking out from the waves after the Toa defeated Makuta as seen in this Faber artwork from 1999. The idea was cut prior to the 2002 release of the Bohrok, perhaps for foreshadowing to bluntly the GSR’s existance.
That is why the GSR reveal amazes me… it was always there. We don’t need to take Greg’s anecdotal word for it that it was always planned from the beginning. The evidence is all there plain to see even back in 2001 with MNOG and other story material subtly referring to the robot. The genius of it though was that Lego told it so subtly that it flew over 99.99% of kids heads until the big 2008 reveal finally spoiled the secret. Saying that the reveal somehow ruined Bionicle’s mythology is flawed to me because the GSR always was the mythology.
Of course the GSR’s purpose did change, Alastair Swinnerton has made it clear that it was originally a lifeboat, a celestial ark for a dying race that was being kept in stasis inside the robot. The purpose of the Matoran was both to maintain the robot but also terraform the planet it landed on to be suitable for its inhabitants to live on. Some early Bionicle names that Faber mentioned were in the works such as “Afterman” really leaned into the sci-fi bent of a doomed society fleeing in the GSR. Faber and Swinnerton are both credited as creators of the GSR concept, and they have made it very clear it was something they were talking about well before the theme launched. When 2008-2009 came around and after the Matoran Universe was much more fleshed out that all got retconned into the dying race (Glatorian and Agori) sending the GSR out not as an ark but instead a research vessel to return to save their dying world (although the two Glatorian pilots kept in stasis in the GSR are arguably a nod to the original story intent). This doesn’t negate the fact though the GSR was always there underneath the island since Bionicle’s first set hit store shelves in 2001.
I have been silently lurking around the topic because the arguments and counter-arguments are too interesting for me to entirely wash my hands of, but sir
Wow. I knew there was a lot of this type of stuff, but I’ve never seen it all in one place before. This is nuts.
Also, how canon is the image showing the layout of Voya Nui relative to the robot? That’s always been a point of uncertainty when drawing maps, so it would be nice to know for sure.
Voya Nui’s also a lot smaller than I expected. This smaller version makes more sense though; it explains why Karda Nui didn’t fill up in 1000 years, as well as making Mata Nui’s “bullet wound” a lot more realistic to repair.
Side Note:
How did those characters know? Or were they meta references, and the characters didn’t actually know?
Not that that has any impact on your point, since it was intentional from the creators either way, but now I’m curious.
EDIT: I found this. Super cool ideas. Maybe a little too obvious though, especially with that bottom picture.
EDIT 2: I’m down the rabbit hole now. I can’t believe they even had the Bohrok-are-Matoran twist planned from back then.
I don’t know about the whole image (I think it’s semi/non-canon because it’s just concept art) but the scale of Voya Nui is roughly accurate (if potentially not it’s placement). It’s really small.
Presumably the prophecies came from Vakama’s visions. That would explain why they related to the true nature of the GSR without anyone actually understanding what they were talking about. The characters (no doubt Vakama included) would have thought those quotes were no more literal than we did, at first.
Interesting that they’re in MNOG, though - suggests that Templar was in on the secret.
I think there was a connection of some sort established - the exact nature of it was fleshed out by Greg. I think original concept was going to be more integral to the Matoran than the final result ended up being.
Those enormous spiders are Bahrag concepts, by the way - the Bohrok were going to be carried on their backs like giant eggs! Awesome (though I also liked the giant-larva approach they ended up going with).
First of all, a big thanks to @xboxtravis7992 for posting an overview over some further graphics relating to the Great Spirit Robot!
I know it was always planned, but precisely because Lego was so careful about not spoiling it, they apparently never considered that they were creating an entirely different “surrogate narrative” in the meantime.
In particular, they were drawing in a certain portion of the audience that loved Bionicle for its Fantasy themes, precisely because only few people were able to piece together (literally) that there was a Giant Space Robot under Mata Nui. When you lure people in with this sort of “false promise”, it’s bound to result in disappointment. Especially considering the consequences of that reveal in terms of damage to the existing environment.
Actually, Kapura’s quote is precisely one of those examples where the 2001 story had it bckwards: It implies that Mata Nui landed first, and then Makuta came an made him fall asleep. Instead of Mata Nui falling from the sky only being a result of Makuta making him fall asleep.
This scene has been brought up several times in this thread now, and only so as another hint, but certainly not as a “reveal” of the Great Robot. Of course, once again, in hindsight you all know you’re looking at the surface of Mata Nui’s face here. So yes, technically a part of his face has been “revealed”.
But back then, with knowledge maybe reaching up to 2002/2003, my best guess was that it was some thick layer of frozen Protodermis that they couldn’t dig through. (Protodermis being something I only heard of for the first time in the context of the Toa Nuva.)
Perhaps you don’t understand it because I think you might be conflating two things:
“No explanation” does not go into the same breath as “scientifically impossible”. “No explanation” rather belongs in the “it’s magic, duh” category. That is still often a cop-out for lazy writing, but at least there is no pretension going on that there were a reasonable and scientific explanation for this given thing happening.
In contrast, “scientifically impossible” becomes an objection when the story claims to be Science Fiction - because, you know, then science needs to be at least a factor in it, otherwise it were just “fiction”.
When you set up a magical / mystical explanation at first (which is of course by definition somewhat unbelievable, i.e. already requires the audience to suspend their disbelief to some extent), and then you scrap that explanation for what is supposed to be the actual, reasonable, and thereby more realistic explanation (within the borders of your fictional setting), but that “real” explanation requires an even greater amount of suspension of disbelief, I don’t think you’ve won anything. You just made your story more complex and even harder to believe.
Even though it may have cleared up some things that didn’t seem to make sense before - like the Bohrok’s cleaning mission, Metru Nui being under Mata Nui etc. - if the premise of “island sits on face of robot that was built 100,000 years ago on a planet that split in three parts, contains an entire universe, and its inhabitants survived a crash-landing from orbit” is harder to believe than “there is a Fantasy island somewhere that is inhabited by sentient robots”, your big reveal has created more questions than it answered.
Now, I’m not saying everything that somehow involves space automatically needs science as a justification for everything. Star Wars being the most famous example of a “space fairytale”.
As such, compared to more “hard-science based” franchises, like Star Trek or now The Expanse, it has similar problems with regards to how certain things can even be constructed, like the Death Star (and then even a second one of them). But for the longest time, it kept its science elements and its mystical elements - namely, the Force - very distinct from each other. I guess this is why so many old fans didn’t like the concept of midichlorians, even though I didn’t mind them because of course, I came to Star Wars much later than the generation before me.
And regarding the plausibility of the Death Star itself, as ridiculous as that concept is, the sequels took this too a whole other level, with the hollowed-out planet for the Starkiller Base.
This is also something where you could say “Well, the Death Star was already unrealistic, so now you also have to accept the Starkiller Base as a plausible thing.” But in comparison, the Death Star, being only the size of a moon, was at least still more plausible than the Starkiller Base. Once again demonstrating how suspension of disbelief is a gradient.
Speaking of Star Wars again:
The big difference here is that the Death Star was something introduced in the very first movie Star Wars fans ever got to see. So right from the getgo, they had all seen it with their own eyes. The Great Spirit Robot, in contrast, while it was technically there from the beginning, too, it only existed in the minds of the authors - because they deliberately hid this information from all the fans.
That’s as if Star Wars had actually begun with Episode I, made Rogue I a crucial turning point, and then pulled the Death Star out of the hat much later. By that point, viewers would have gotten much more used to battles between fleets of smaller space ships, so one giant space station with the power to blow up an entire planet would have seemed much more “overkill” (literally) in comparison.
If you do want to compare the Giant Spirit Robot to the Death Star, though, then as I said before, the island of Mata Nui is Tatooine. It’s the place where it all started.
You think Star Wars fans would have forgiven the authors if many years later down the road, i.e. in the sequels, they had used a new Death Star, or a different, even less believable thing like the Starkiller Base, to blow up Tatooine (whether evacuated or not)?
And I’d argue Tatooine is much less interesting in terms of landscape than the island of Mata Nui. But you can only enjoy that legendary view into the two-suns-sunset when standing on its surface. And for all their flaws, at least that’s something the sequels got right, because that is precisely where Episode IX ends.
I think it’s fair to say that Bionicle’s most iconic place is Kini Nui. And even though it was spared by the Bohrok during the cleansing, like the telescope, it obviously was destroyed along with anything else once Mata Nui actually rose to his feet.
There’s another big difference between merely creating new vehicles for existing characters, like the Exo-Toa or those vehicles the Toa Nuva used in Karda Nui, and revamping the characters themselves so that you don’t physically recognize them anymore. Especially the drastic changes to the mask physique were crucial here. After all, Kanohi literally means “face”.
For example, I can still recognise CallanLoF’s rebuilt versions of the Toa Mata as those characters, because they wear their standard Kanohi for the vast majority of screentime. In contrast, nobody looking at even the Toa Mata vs. the Toa Nuva without any context knowledge would necessarily assume that those are the same characters. They could just as easily belong to different Toa teams, just like Toa Hagah vs. Toa Metru, or West Coast vs. East Coast Avengers.
And that is another crucial difference: Merely expanding the cast with new characters until you eventually end up with Bionicle: Infinity War for the big climax, that is much easier to digest than replacing / transforming the same character visually in a drastic way. Not only because it constantly keeps creating built-in obsolescence for the older toys.
There is a reason Spider-Man eventually ditched his black-white alien symbiote costume and went back to the classic blue-red one the fans had first gotten to know him in. And sure, they found a way to justify this decision in the story itself, but something incentivizes coming up with such a change in the first place.
The costume is actually more important for superheroes than changing the actor, since most superheroes, like Bionicles, wear masks for the majority of time. However, when wearing that mask, the superhero always looks more or less the same: You will recognise Spider-Man’s or Batman’s outfit no matter what the face of the actor inside it looks like. This is perhaps an even more tangible example how the mask can become the character’s “face”, and this is something Lego utterly failed to give consideration to.
With Star Wars, with the characters showing their faces for the majority of time (except for Darth Vader and the droids, which once again allowed to exchange the actors inside those shells without changing their visual appeal), the main difference in visuals was of course the actors’ age. So obviously, when the prequels came, going back in time required different actors for the younger versions of Obi-Wan and Anakin in particular. For the sequels however, they of course enlisted the original three again, Luke, Han, and Leia. They could also have recast them with younger actors instead, which would have allowed them to pick up with the story right after “Return of the Jedi”, instead of jumping so far into the future that a whole bunch of stuff that happened in between remained unexplained (mainly where the “First Order” came from). But no, they didn’t.
They also didn’t bring back Darth Vader and put him into a new outfit - they gave that new outfit to a different, entirely new antagonist, Kylo Renn. And for all the fuss about “Baby Yoda” in The Mandalorian, it’s a good thing they didn’t actually rejuvenate Yoda himself, but created a new character that just happens to be of the same species. And the name just arose because nobody knew the name of that species, nor the name of Baby Yoda himself (at least during the first season of The Mandalorian).
Bruh you literally sidestepped my actual points and nit picked my poor choice of comparison.
.I gave a fine explanation about the transformations being a consistent theme.
(Added point here, the era you like strato, from 2001 to 2003 even has plenty enough transformations to set the pattern and tone moving forward, so why would you get thrown off later? And don’t say you get thrown off because the characters don’t resemble prior versions, I stated that the set designers and writers were seperate jobs and that the writers didn’t always get a say, plus masks and armour are things that are interchangeable and so although it’s like ow my face has been changed we except it as masks are a part of life in the Bionicle world)
.How the robot melds into the Bionicle universe and is another element that makes it stand out from the crowd.
.How it can make sense scientifically at a stretch (yet that isn’t important as we never hear proper explanations in any franchise)
And need I repeat my last sentence? That the loss of the island of Mata Nui was “a small price to pay for salvation”?
I still don’t know what you’re talking about here.
For the entire main story, the narrative was that they were going to awaken Mata Nui. In the end, the awakened Mata Nui. What’s the alternate narrative?
Again, what’s the “false promise”? The “promise” that it would be a fantasy theme? The “promise” that there wouldn’t be any space stuff?
I agree that the overall “feel” of Bionicle moved away from pure fantasy, but that was happening long before the big reveal, and it continued long after.
I don’t think there was ever supposed to be a “realistic” explanation for anything. The later years certainly recontextualized the early years, explaining how they fit into the “rules” of the larger universe, but there was never an attempt to make them “realistic”. They just shifted from “because the world is magic” to “because the Great Beings are magic”.
This is you. You’re the one complaining about how the new story “ruined the fantasy” of the old story.
Again, you’re making the assertation that a story has to give you the most extreme thing right up front. I see no problem with a story bringing out an ultimate superweapon later in the story.
Isn’t that basically what Star Wars did with Starkiller Base? That thing dwarfed the Death Star, both in terms of size and power. There’s a lot of things that I don’t like about that movie, but “Starkiller Base is unrealistic” isn’t one of them.
Maybe? This isn’t the “gotcha” question that you think it is. I’m not a very big Star Wars fan, so I couldn’t tell you for sure. But I don’t think everyone would immediately turn on the authours based on principle. It would depend on why, and how.
It’s because the symbiote arc was over.
The difference between these big franchises and Bionicle is that the big franchises are made up of a bunch of mostly independent arcs. Bionicle, on the other hand, is one big interconnected story. Complaining about the Toa Mata changing appearance would be like complaining about Spiderman wearing his black suit during a single symbiote arc.
At the end of the day, if you want to complain about the various transformations, go ahead. But it has nothing to do with your claim that the later years of Bionicle ruined the fantasy or simplicity of the original years; transformations have been part of Bionicle since the beginning.
Ah, okay, thanks for the correction. I’ve read something else on the Biosector Wiki, namely that all the pillars and the Matoran-made parts were “ejected” from the robot when he stood up. Either way, all of this doesn’t make much of a difference now, because since the Giant Space Robot is gone and everyone is living on Spherus Magna, Kini Nui, if we can agree that it is Bionicle’s most iconic place across all those years, is still no longer accessible. Nor is the Great Temple inside Metru Nui.
Given how frequently the Turaga liked to go “back” to an Amaja circle (with the Amaja Nui at Kini Nui of course also being gone now) to retell their tales, this seem very odd - no modern Matoran can ever revisit any of the sites for a “history lesson”.
Obviously they were, because they were an easy and consistent way to sell new toys. My point was not claiming that it were inconsistent, on the contrary: Precisely because they did it so often that at some point, you could predict that any set of Toa you bought would get thrown out and become unusable for the current state of the plot in just 1-2 years. Built-in obsolescence, as I said. In other words, each individual set of Toa was a “bad investment” in terms of long-term playability.
On a purely monetary level, of course most of the Bionicle sets are worth much more now than they were at the time we bought them. But I doubt anyone of us is considering selling his most beloved toys.
Depends on your definition of “salvation”. According to the BioSector wiki about the Great Spirit Robot, “Many of the inhabitants evacuated to the reformed planet of Spherus Magna.” In other words, not all of them. So a lot of people still must have died in the destruction of the (Makuta-inhabited) Giant Space Robot.
I also have yet to be convinced that Spherus Magna is a better place to live than the island of Mata Nui. Metru Nui maybe would have been, on a purely technological level. But Metru Nui has been destroyed as well, now, since it was part of the robot. Spherus Magna, on the other hand, to me just looks like an oversized version of the island of Mata Nui, still split up into something resembling elemental regions, yet with none of the well-known history attached to those regions that both Mata Nui and Metru Nui had.
And this whole idea of “you know that everything would have died together with Mata Nui if he had died”: How exactly? The Matoran were his maintenance workers, for all I can tell, the crew of the spaceship. The crew of a spaceship doesn’t automatically die if the spaceship is destroyed - provided it doesn’t do so in space, of course. If you remain inside the Enterprise (=Metru Nui or any other internal location) when the life support systems fail, yes, obviously then you will run out of air eventually. But not when you live on top of the surface of the wreckage of your ship.
Did the Matoran and any other bionic creature get some type of constant, wire-less power supply from Mata Nui (that would have stopped if the source of that energy seized)? If so, that must have been a constant drain on his body. How did he recharge while still conscious, then? On a more cruel note, that would have implied that sacrificing some Matoran could have been used to extend his lifespan as the Toa Inika/Mahri were searching for the Mask of Life on a tight schedule. Imagine the Turaga rounding up Matorans and telling some of them they must sacrifice themselves for the greater good…
Finally, as I said before, there would have been the option of keeping Mata Nui alive, but asleep. And according to the early plans told in that BZPower link I shared earlier, that’s similar to what was indeed the original idea: That Mata Nui would eventually return to being asleep, and everyone would continue living on Aqua Magna, on the re-formed island of Mata Nui.
As I understood the Mahri arc, they were slightly too slow, so that he did in fact die, but then the Mask of Life could be used to actually reanimate him, instead of just keeping him alive. Mmh, maybe the Toa Mahri would have had a little more time if they had indeed sacrificed a couple dozen Matoran… Then the robot never would have died, and keeping him alive wouldn’t have awakened him automatically (like rebooting a computer).
That the Matoran and Toa realize what pursuing their main goal would do to their island, and then pause and reconsider. Bionicle already had such moments of “horrific insight” and people trying to prevent what was happening:
Rahaga Norik in Web of Shadows realizes Vakama shooting at Roodaka will give her the last elemental power she needs to free Makuta, and tells him to stop
Krika learns about what the energy storms will do in Karda-Nui and tries to inform the other Makuta. And I’ve heard he even found out about Teridax’s plans to take over Mata Nui’s body, and tried to prevent that as well?
Both of these attempts tragically fail, but at least they were made.
Yes. Stories establish what they are going to be about in the very beginning - usually without ever explicitly stating it; it is demonstrated instead (“show, don’t tell”). This is a “promise” to the reader so that they know what they’re getting themselves into. If that promise is broken and the reader finds out they were actually reading a story about something completely different than they initially thought, that is basically “false advertising”.
One comparison frequently brought up in the circles of modern-day Star Wars & Star Trek criticism is that of New Coke completely replacing the old Coca Cola recipe for a while. That tanked Coca Cola’s earnings and for the first time allowed Pepsi to catch up with them.
Why? Because customers who had got used to the old recipe could no longer find it anywhere. The new thing had outright replaced the old thing that had made the brand so popular in the first place. Fortunately for Coca Cola, they realised this early enough and reverted the change.
One thing that a story establishes early on is of course the main goal: Harry Potter will eventually have to face Voldemort, Frodo must take the ring to Mount Doom, Mata Nui must be reawakened.
The other thing however that is established early on is the genre. Lord of the Rings makes clear early on, through the appearance of hobbits and a wizard, that it is going to be a medieval-looking Fantasy story. Harry Potter makes clear it’s going to be Fantasy set in the modern world, with actual locations in the UK, and with a little boy going to wizard school.
I’m pretty sure Tolkien never thought it would be a great idea to reveal at the end of Lord of the Rings that the ring was actually an artifact made by some ancient alien civilisation, and that Sauron was a former Emperor Palpatine who is now stuck on Middle Earth, and that the inhabitants of Middle Earth originally came from Middle Mars.
If you think that comparison sounds ridiculous, G.R.R. Martin actually brought something like this up explicitly, with regards to his own “Song of Ice and Fire”. When talking about plot twists, he said (I’m paraphrasing): “Sure, I could have aliens come down into Westeros, nobody would have predicted that.”
For full context, G.R.R. Martin also famously made the statement that “if you planned your book that the butler did it, and then you read online that somebody found out that the butler did it, and then you change everything so that it’s now the chambermaid who did it - then you screw up the whole book, basically”, because things happen that you haven’t done the proper foreshadowing for.
Bionicle was of course planned with the existence of a giant robot and his face under the island of Mata Nui. So of course, that thing was foreshadowed at several points, as we’ve discussed here. However, as the BZPower statements about the original plan by Faber et al. suggest, how this core tenant of the plan was eventually going to pan out in the end wasn’t clear from the beginning:
It easily could have been “Yes, there is a giant space robot under the island of Mata Nui, and we need to awaken him to chase his dark brother away, but eventually, the purpose of that robot is indeed to be asleep. So that he can serve as a surface for the inhabitants (including the Great Beings themselves) to live on.”
You’re right this might not make much of a difference in pragmatic terms. But I do think it’s vital for attribution of events that take place, and for the perception of the characters’ agency. The more the story resorts to explaining things in terms of elusive, aloof, close-to-almighty external actors (Great Beings, Elemental Lords, Botar, the Order of Mata Nui, the Brotherhood of Makuta etc.), many of which never received sets of their own, the more the whole thing starts feeling like a giant Deus ex Machina, in which many of the world-defining events were outside the main characters’ control. And the Toa Nuva just become reduced to a small grain of sand that finds itself in the right place at the right time to tip the balance in Mata Nui’s instead of Teridax’s favour.
I am completely aware of this. Except that I’d dare to say the impact of midichlorians on the events of Star Wars as a whole is negligible compared to what the giant robot does to the entire universe almost casually.
The mere statement “there are midichlorians responsible for someone’s Force sensitivity” or “Mata Nui is a giant robot and that’s why all life forms in this world look like machines” is not what I have a problem with. Nor with the island being on top of his face. Nor with him having to be awakened.
It’s only when you put the three together (big robot + face under island + wake him up) that the story’s main goal suddenly turns into “Would you be so kind as to destroy your own home, please?”
I think you’ve found a possible root of our disagreement here, because I for one think the Starkiller Base is a plothole as huge as the central cannon at its equator : How do you even aim at anything when your base is a planet? It can neither turn at will, nor move to a different solar system easily. A part of what made the Death Star so dangerous was, though it may sound ironic compared to the much more agile X-Wings and Tie Fighters, its mobility.
Then there is the question where and how you even find the resources and materials to build such a thing? Where did the First Order even come from in the first place? If it formed from remnants of the fallen Empire (as the presence of Storm Troops suggests, as well as the retcon in Episode IX that Palpatine was behind it all yet again), it’s even harder to believe that, after two Death Stars having been destroyed already, they would be able to gather even more resources for an even larger base.
The Starkiller Base to me is just one of many examples of J. J. Abram’s lack of creativity: He takes something that was already there, invented by somebody else, and simply makes it bigger. A Death Star that can shoot a planet? Well, here’s a much larger one that can shoot five planets at once. A Star Destroyer? Well, here are Star Destroyers which each have their own Death-Star cannon attached to them.
Introducing such a thing late in the story so that it could be compared to everything that came before it, that didn’t exactly help the situation.
Well, there were several different cuts of Episode IX, and they tried out various scenes with different test audiences. None of them included blowing up Tatooine, but…
…in that scene when Palpatine raises up his hands and starts shooting lightning into the sky, taking out spaceships all by himself, there was supposedly a version in which he blew up the Millennium falcon this way. Aboard the falcon were Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian, C3PO, in short: All the remaining characters from the original trilogy. And he would have blown them up all at once. This scene is said to have made the test audience leave the theater where the test screening took place in huge numbers.
Of course, the death of the characters will have played a huge role in this. But the destruction of the iconic ship that is the Millennium Falcon itself as well. After all, all of the most beloved characters (Han, Luke, and Leia) were already dead at this point anyway. So in some sense, there wasn’t that much more to lose.
And why was the symbiote arc ended? Maybe because the authors realised that Spider-Man is more iconic in blue and red, shooting his webs with a “heavy metal” gesture instead of from the back of his hand? And that the web should be made by Peter’s own genius, instead of just being the extension of some alien life form?
This is also one of the many reasons why I don’t like the MCU Spider-Man with his suit made by Iron Man. It drastically reduces Peter’s own intellectual strength (which was always one of his main qualities even before becoming Spider-Man - you know, he’s your typical nerd). And it equipped him with a bunch of ridiculous technological abilities that you would indeed associate with Iron Man, but not with Spider-Man. Finally, it makes Peter rather dependent on Iron Man and, by extent, the other Avengers - but Spider-Man had always been a solo hero.
Going back to the symbiote: They even made a second attempt at the black suit: Black Cat (Felicia Hardy) of course found Spider-Man more attractive in his black symbiote suit, so she made him one out of regular textiles.
So now there was a Spider-Man who still shot his webs the traditional, “heavy-metal fist” way, and who still had to create his webs with his own effort, instead of having the additional aid by an alien symbiote. (The symbiote of course also gave him additional strength, which was now absent again, too.) So he had some features of the traditional Spider-Man, but was swinging around in his black suit again. Still… that thing didn’t last. It only provides the option of having him show up in black whenever needed. That is completely fine, it just adds ways to mix things up.
But the black Spider-Man didn’t outright replace the blue-red Spider-Man for good. Think back of the New-Coke example.
In contrast, each Bionicle transformation, with the exception of the Hordika, replaced the old models for good (and the Toa Metru then went on to be transformed into Turaga, so even these Toa obviously didn’t last).
If Bionicle hadn’t been cancelled early, we would have known Sphersus Magna a lot better.
Unless the ships camouflage system is to fragile to carry the whole ships population.
So the Matoran should ignore their virtues? The whole mission is pretty much their purpose of life.
Still the Bohrok were executed directly as in concept. The whole Bara Magna thing may have come later. But the mission, origins and functionality of the Matoran was clear:
Unity: unifying the planet
Duty: Matoran as workers…
Destiny: doing everything to achieve the mission, including the awakening of the GSR.
Again wrong context. Deus ex machina is when someone who was barely involved with the story just appears in the very last moment, snaps his fingers and makes everything fine again. There have been moments in Bionicle where that happened. But most of the “Destiny war” was a real struggle for the protagonists. Also the only characters without a set ,that are super important later, are Tuyet, who is a villain, Alternate Teridax, who was somewhat of a Deus ex machina in the conflict between Vultraz and Mazeka, Helryx…, she just told people where to go…, and the remaining Toa Hagah, who at some point got some form as a set. People like Miserix, Tren Krom, Arthaka and the Elemental Lords achieved barely anything important, but they were nice for world building. Just as many creators of the franchise said: It feels more like toys for a story than storys for a toy that way.
Actually, my bad, I looked it up and it turns out Kini-Nui was in fact destroyed when Mata Nui stood up. I believed it retracted back, but looks like I was wrong.
However, the very same Wiki states that “the structure could be recreated by the camouflage system.” So it’s not like the destruction of Kini-Nui was a big deal at that moment. And even though the GSR was eventually dismantled, what’s stopping the Matoran from building a new Kini-nui on Spherus Magna?
You mentioned the Great Temple which was destroyed as well - well, it was in fact destroyed once before the final battle between Mata Nui and Makuta, during the Visorak arc. Yet that didn’t stop the Matoran from rebuilding it once they returned to the city, and I doubt anything will stop them from rebuilding it once again on Spherus Magna, if they wish to do so.
On Bara Magna, the city of Atero was destroyed, yet that didn’t stop the Agori and Matoran from looking for a place to establish New Atero on the newly-reformed Spherus Magna. Just because something was destroyed doesn’t mean it can’t be rebuilt, especially if it’s a building or a structure. Heck, in real life, many temples, churches, sanctuaries or even entire cities were destroyed or damaged over time, but most of them were rebuilt and still serve their purpose, without losing their cultural and/or historical singificance.
Sorry, no offence, but that’s utter bull-■■■■ and it sounds like you’re trying way too hard to bend the reality to fit your narrative. Most kids just wanted new toys. I mean, yeah, sure, some people might’ve thought that replacing the Nuva with someone else made them obsolete, but changing the main cast of characters is a common thing in many beloved franchises (Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Transformers etc.). In fact, it’s advised to do so to prevent the story from becoming stale. If you stay with only one cast of characters throughout the entire story, at a certain point you just don’t give a crap because so much has happened to those characters that it’s hard to keep track of.
Obviously there are some exceptions, like, idk, the main character of Pokemon is always Ash, but the premise of Pokemon is so basic and simple that you don’t need to know the entire backstory of Ash to jump in at any moment and enjoy the story. But even Pokemon switched Ash’s companions every now and then. Bionicle story is much more complex so no wonder Lego tried to make it easier for people to jump into it at any time by introducing new main casts of characters. Sure, most of them were already established characters, but their role was often so miniscule that it could’ve been easily ignored (i.e. the only thing that Hahli did before becoming a Toa was playing a weird hockey knock-off on Mata Nui).
And even then, Bionicle often gets the flack because the characters’ backstories are so long and convoluted. I mean, look at any Biosector page for one of the main Toa teams’ members, these are ridiculously long. Imagine what would’ve happened if we stayed with one Toa Team (i.e. Toa Mata/Nuva) throughout the entire run of Bionicle.
That’s why I don’t get why Ninjago hasn’t changed its main cast even once since season 1. The story is already catching up to Bionicle in terms of its convolution. I guess it’s cuz kids love ninjas and the theme will sell no matter what, but I long ago gave up trying to keep up with the story and its characters.
Like, I get it, you think the absence of Toa Nuva in some years makes them obsolete, but I just can’t agree with that. Look, I’m a huge Mass Effect fan and while I love characters like Wrex and was very disappointed that he didn’t show up in the 2nd and 3rd game (except for some very brief moments), I’m also very glad that the franchise introduced new characters in place of the old ones. It kept the story fresh. Sure, there were some characters that stayed with you throughout all three games (like Garrus and Tali), but the presence of new characters next to them prevented the story from getting stale. Would I still have loved the series as much as I do now if the main crew didn’t change once? Well, prolly, but I don’t know. I certainly don’t mind new characters replacing the old ones, in fact I, and many people, prefer that over sticking to only one cast forever.
No Lego toy is a bad investment in terms of long-term playability. Even if Toa Nuva didn’t appear once after the first 2001-2003 arc, you could still make your own stories with them, or just sacrifice them for parts and make your own characters. Lego is all about imagination and creativity. The official “canon” story is always just an addition, nothing more.
I mean, yeah, but a lot of them also died during Makuta’s rule, or even before, during the Brotherhood-Order war, or even before that… I mean, people died all the time in the story, and that’s just normal. That’s why I find Greg’s statement that not a single Matoran has died during the entire 1000-year long timespan on Mata Nui very hard to believe.
So yeah it’s not like you have an argument here that the GSR is bad because some people died when it got destroyed. I mean yeah no ■■■■ some characters lost their lives, but it’s not like this is the only instance where a character has died. And yes, the Mata Nui island was destroyed as well, but STILL that’s a small price to pay for “salvation”, especially if that salvation means a prospering future not only for the Matoran Universe inhabitants, but for the Agori and the Glatorian as well.
I’m from Poland and imagine if someone said “well I don’t like that Poland is a free and independent country because some people died during the fights for its indepedence”. Same can be applied to USA. Or any other country or place that had its people fight for a better future.
Well, that’s just because we (as the readers) haven’t spent as much time on Spherus/Bara Magna as we did on Mata Nui. But in-universe, Spherus Magna has a much longer and richer story than Mata Nui. Also, if we take history into consideration, then Mata Nui seems like a terrible place to live in. Makuta lurking underground, natural disasters, infected Kanohi, constant Rahi attacks, it was a nightmare to live in. Sure, the landscapes were pretty, but that’s about it.
Matoran (and other beings inside the Matoran Universe) needed to recharge their energy in order to function properly. There were charging stations in Metru Nui and possibly in other places as well. Sure, those energy resources would have become depleted eventually, but Mata Nui had to return on Spherus Magna at some point anyway.
And with Mata Nui dead, there would be no places to draw energy from, which would result in the death of every single MU inhabitant. The Matoran from Mata Nui drew energy from fruits and such, but the island’s population was fairly small. If the entire population of the GSR had to migrate to the island of Mata Nui, I imagine the energy resources would be much scarcer. Plus there’s a fact that the island would eventually fall apart (as described in “Kindgom”).
Yeah but then Spherus Magna would have never been put back together. And that was the ultimate goal of Mata Nui, and thus it was the goal of every single being living inside of him as well.
But destroying the island was a necessary sacrifice. They had to do it in order the awaken Mata Nui. Preventing it was pointless and would eventually doom them all, if they kept postponing Mata Nui’s awakening. That doesn’t really apply to the examples you listed. Releasing Makuta free wasn’t the necessary sacrifice for defeating Roodaka lol.
Also as I mentioned earlier Gali did feel bad about releasing the Bohrok and had her doubts so I don’t know why you’re still going on about that aaaaaah.
But Mata Nui being a giant sleeping robot was foreshadowed? Multiple times? As pointed out in this thread many times? I don’t know what’s the point you’re trying to make here man.
But that wasn’t the story goal. The goal was to wake the giant, at all costs. Even if it meant detroying the old home of the Matoran (which at that point was already abandoned). That was the bitterness of (what seemed to be at that time) the happy ending.
Like, I don’t get your weird fixation on Mata Nui. Sure, I also didn’t like that (spoiler) Asgard was destroyed at the end of Thor: Ragnarok. Or that (spoiler) I had to sacrifice the entire race of geth to save the Milky Way in Mass Effect. But sometimes things need to be sacrificed for the greater good. In fact, the Asgard’s destruction is summed up pretty well in the movie: Asgard is not a place, it’s people. And the same thing applies to Mata Nui. The island may be gone, but its residents live on - and that’s what matters.
The difference is, in what you wrote, the Millennium Falcon crew died for nothing, essentially. If they sacrificed themselves so that, say, the Resistance could win, I’m sure many more people would’ve been ok with that. But they walked out of that screening because the deaths of those characters were a total ■■■-pull and didn’t serve any purpose other than pure shock value.
Nobody was throwing tauntrums over Obi-Wan’s death in Episode IV, because he sacrificed himself to slow down Vader so that Luke and co. could escape. And if you instist on using the sequel trilogy as an example, Han, Luke and Leia all died sacrificing themselves for the greater good. Well, Han maybe not so much, but I guess he kinda slowed down Kylo Ren? Idk, yeah, his death seemed kinda pointless ngl. But the destruction of Mata Nui had a purpose - it was destroyed so that Mata Nui (the Great Spirit) could rise.
Also, I wouldn’t really cite the sequel trilogy as an example of anything other than bad writing. Those movies were a mess.
I don’t see what you’re talking about here. My Toa Mata sets are coming up on 20 years old, and their gear functions still work just fine.
Or, to continue the Star Wars parallels: would you say that the release of Old Luke action figures makes the Young Luke action figures obsolete?
Yes. When the ultimate villain becomes the universe, people tend to die. Characters also died extremely violent deaths before the reveal of the robot.
So is it worse than Mata Nui or not?
Make sure you read the whole thing this time, instead of just skimming.
The only thing that the Toa knew they were doing was releasing the Bohrok. And they knew from experience that the island would still be there afterwards.
From an audience view, sure, it sucks to see the island destroyed. But that hardly matters, since it was destroyed by the awakening of Mata Nui himself. It’s not like the Toa had to blow up the island themselves before the big reveal in the hope that Mata Nui would be awakened.
Man, you’re right. If Bionicle wanted to establish itself as a sci-fi theme, they should have had something sci-fi the the opening years, like robots or something.
Yup. The universe doesn’t revolve around the Toa. Perhaps the Great Spirit Robot itself does, but the society inside of it doesn’t.
And the Toa Mata only show up in the last year of the 100,000 year story of Mata Nui. Do you think all the power players were just twiddling their thumbs waiting for the Mata to show up?
Their job was to awaken the robot. They did their job. After that, they just become another group of Toa on the run.
I don’t see how you can say this when your entire point has been that the big reveal ruined the mythological aspect of Bionicle.
Midichlorians absolutely destroyed the mythological aspects of Star Wars. The Force went from “ancient space magic” to “aliens in your blood”.
I suspect that this scene would have been better-received if the Falcon was sacrificed doing something heroic, like taking out Palpatine, or something.
Sure. Good point. But this still has nothing to do with the later years ruining the early years of Bionicle.
I’m chiming out of the main discussion here since at this point it’s just going around in circles - I think most of the interesting points have already come out.
Technically it would be the Great Beings who filled that role. Alternate Teridax was just part of the outcome - removing him from that story has no effect on the plot.
There’s a lot of mis-usage of that term in this topic, as I’ve mentioned (in fact, that goes for the internet in general. It’s a very specific term and a lot of people use it just to mean “oh, that’s plot convenience” or even “that’s bad writing”. Same as terms like MacGuffin and whatnot).
The idea of a Mata-Metru-Atero Nui on SM is a really, really cool thought, tbh.
Since this discussion partly seems to revolve around the question of what draws you into a story the most - the worldbuilding / setting, the characters, or the plot itself - let me preface this by addressing the “repeated transformations” / “changing the cast” issue again.
I’ve already shortened this post by 16,000 characters. I hope you appreciate . Also, I’ve read the Hapka books and I’m currently at the beginning of the first one by Greg, “Tales of the Masks”. My thoughts on those will go in a separate thread.
I’ll split up and invert one quote by @Voxovan here, because I want to address the second part of that paragraph first:
This is extremely dependent on what is the main focus of your story: The world, the characters, or the plot itself.
A great plot can pull you through a story even if you don’t know particularly much about the characters, yes. So in such a case, the characters are more easily replaceable as long as the plot keeps moving forward. But in my perception, such stories are an absolute rarity. One of the few examples I can think of is one of my all-time favourite movies, Inception.
In the vast majority of cases however, it seems to be the other way round: If you have fallen in love with the characters, you will keep following them, like over the course of several seasons of a series, even if the plot gets progressively worse, i.e. more and more contrived.
An interim example between the two would be House, M.D., which went through several “team changes”: The focus of each episode is obviously a medical problem, but that just provides a background for developing the relationships between the characters. So the composition of the team, and how likeable the respective new characters are, as well as how well developed, will still drastically affect the perceived quality of the story, even though it’s not the main focus.
And finally, a story that draws you in via its worldbuilding can sacrifice characters more liberally. The most famous example of this is of course Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire. But the characters definitely came close behind that - otherwise, their deaths wouldn’t be as hard-hitting, obviously. The plot came last - there was no one fix way it had to end in order to be satisfying.
I can’t comment on Ninjago, Pokemon, or Mass Effect, since I’ve never watched any of these series.
I do agree to the extent that at a certain point, you think a given character has suffered enough, and should finally get their peace. This is especially the case when the cast is very small, very focused on its main characters because of that, and the stakes are constantly high / the suffering the characters experience is very intense.
This is the main reason why I stated earlier in this thread that e.g. Terry Goodkind’s “Sword of Truth” series should have ended as early as after the first book, “Wizard’s First Rule”.
Of course, kids want new toys. And there are several different ways of selling new toys:
New villains for our beloved heroes to fight against? Yes.
New heroes? If it’s a prequel (Toa Metru) or “Next-Generation” approach (Toa Inika), then why not? As long as it doesn’t happen at the cost of established characters.
Changing existing characters so that they’re barely recognisable? Tread very carefully. If you change something that a lot of people find vital about an established character, you can easily step into young-Luke-old-Luke territory, or in New Coke vs. Classic Coke territory.
Well, if the solution you propose to “the canon made the old toys obsolete” is “ignore canon and make up your own stories”, I think that might actually be a point in favour of my position rather than against it …
You can also always make up your own stories with Star Wars figures. Yet people mainly buy them because of what they represent in the (canon) story. This might be one of the reasons why the figures from the Sequel trilogy are absolute shelf-huggers… So to insert my answer to one of @Jerminator’s questions here:
No, because nobody likes Old Luke. Not even Mark Hamill himself. He coined the name “Jake Skywalker” for a reason. In this special case, I’d argue Young Luke makes Old Luke obsolete. If you need any evidence of that, consider how the fans reacted to the second season of The Mandalorian.
Yes, there was obviously a lot of rebuilding going on, both in Metru Nui, on Mata Nui, and in real life. However, the vast majority of these rebuilds happened in the same position as the original. It is very rare for a historical site to be moved and rebuilt somewhere completely different, and still retain its historical significance. You can do that with historic ships, cars, and other types of vehicles. But with architecture?
The Matoran were certainly local patriots when it came to their villages - be it as soldiers defending them, or in sports competitions against other villages, like with Kolhii. Now, all of that is gone.
Then I’d assume you understand the issues I have with the two most prominent countries in Bionicle lore - the island nation of Mata Nui and the city state of Metru Nui - being wiped off the map, despite all the sacrifices of those who fought to preserve them. It’s not just the geography that gets lost: It’s also the culture of the individual Koros and Metrus, and their relationships to each other.
Indeed - but it’s not the readers’ fault if we don’t care about Spherus Magna. It’s the author’s job to make the readers care about the world and characters they create. For example, if the Toa Mata hadn’t lost all of their memories as they arrived on Mata Nui - if they had instead had vague memories of an even better past living on a unified Spherus Magna. That would have given them an internal motivation to restore it. Instead of just some externally-imposed “duty”.
As I said, my example of an ideal “end state” was living on the island of Mata Nui after Makuta had been defeated, with a living, but asleep Great Spirit. So we can scrap all the threats related to Makuta himself from this scenario, along with the Kraata, which means no infected Kanohi and no Rahkshi. (Which is also relevant for the “Kingdom” story, since Makuta still does get killed at the end of it, so the Rahkshi threats should stop coming after that.)
Natural disasters can also occur on Spherus Magna. Either way, the Toa, with their elemental powers, will be needed as the main force to keep them in check.
That leaves the rahi as the only remaining main threat on Mata Nui.
Here we already have an inconsistency just within the first 3-4 books:
In “Tale of the Toa”, it is implied that rahi become harmless if you only remove their infected masks - which is used to incentivise the Toa not to kill the rahi, but merely peel off their masks. This is in line with MNOG, in which I think Maku mentions that the rahi used to work together with the Matoran, and it was only Makuta who made them turn against them. (Kind of like the Bohrok are used as workers in the villages once the Bahrag have been defeated.)
Later during the Bohrok-Kal arc (don’t remember if it was in “Makuta’s Revenge” or in Farshtey’s “Tales of the Masks”, since the two overlap), Kopaka is threatened by a Muaka. You know, the only creature that actually came with visibly infected masks as a toy. Yet, there is no mention of this Muaka being infected, and the Toa don’t make any effort of removing any masks from it either. It’s just implied to be dangerous with common sense, because, well, it’s a tiger, obviously. That by itself would be plausible, of course - if it didn’t conflict with the earlier example.
But if the rahi continue to be wild beasts, why would there be no rahi attacks on Spherus Magna? Were the rahi not evacuated into the inside of the robot (Metru Nui and other places) along with all the Matoran? If they were, that must have been a monumental task, catching all of them - and it implies that no rahi on Mata Nui was so dangerous that it couldn’t eventually be overcome by Toa or even Matoran.
On the other hand, if the rahi weren’t evacuated from the island, then either the Bohrok must have wiped them out, or they just fell into the sea and drowned when Mata Nui rose. That kind of makes all of the Toa Mata’s environmental-protection efforts described in the books covering the rahi- and Bohrok arc (don’t kill them, just remove their masks; don’t strike down a tree to get a Kanohi you need etc.) completely superfluous.
I’ve read the entire Kingdom story now, I didn’t see this recharging implied anywhere?
Well apparently, as of the beginning of “Kingdom”, the Matoran have been living in their new surface home with Mata Nui dead for 10,000 years already. May I ask how long their batteries last?
It is indeed mentioned that the island won’t last, but the Matoran in the Kingdom are making efforts to create new landmass. This is something that we can already do in the real world. Even if Aqua Magna doesn’t have any natural landmass, it does still have an ocean floor that doesn’t seem to be too far below. (As opposed to many actual water worlds out there in space, presumably, which are usually larger than Earth, and therefore probably something in between a rock planet and a gas giant.) Onua could put on a Kaukau, go for a dive, and use his frequently-demonstrated “Earth wave” elemental powers to make the sand rise up.
Also, the Matoran seem to be making efforts at space travel. And while it would have been hard to believe a “primitive” society, such as the tribes living on primordial Mata-Nui island, could ever succeed at that in time, the Kingdom seems to be a much more developed place. As far as I understood it, they made Metru Nui rise to the surface, so they have all the technological gimmicks of that city. Plus, they’re living on the wreckage of a deactivated giant spaceship (the robot), so all the technology is there, they just need to “strip mine” the robot for it. In short, the chances of successful, autonomous Matoran space travel don’t look too slim in the Kingdom.
Now, that is a twist from Fantasy to Science Fiction that I can get behind! Because it preserves and even expands the Matoran’s agency.
In contrast, the whole “duty / destiny” aspect seems to turn more and more from a virtue into a stand-in for lazy writing at best, and into a justification for slavery at worst - with the mythology just turning into some euphemism to disguise that. “Follow your destiny” sounds much better than "follow your programming”.
Part of the mystery was never being quite sure in the early days whether the Toa and Matoran were actually supposed to be robots or not. And the movies only amplified that, by giving them more organic textures, and even visible muscles, instead of just hydraulics. The first time you look at a Bionicle, of course you tend to assume it’s a robot - which is why I didn’t find the idea itself of Mata Nui being a robot all that revealing to begin with, just its size and its position under the island. But the more you get into the early mythology, the more you start perceiving them as people, with personalities, flaws, and feelings.
Thus, the worst part of the robot reveal about the characters is the idea of reducing all the Matoran and even the Toa to these worker drones with a pre-defined purpose set by somebody else, who didn’t even seem to be able to question whether what they were doing would ultimately be to their own benefit. The revelation that your initial layman perception was right - they are just robots, after all - not only removes the “biological or technological” mystery; it also drastically reduces the characters’ agency, and thus my ability to relate to them. Even though they still have feelings.
In contrast, Lt. Commander Data from Star Trek is in my opinion the best character in all of TNG. And he explicitly doesn’t have feelings. But he does have agency. His “duty” to Starfleet is a self-chosen one, and so is his eventual “destiny” - as he sacrifices himself in the very last movie “Nemesis”. Even though he is a robot, he doesn’t follow a deterministic programming. Which really seems to be what “duty” and “destiny” actually mean in Bionicle, as @Makutros outlined:
Again, I’ve never been given a single reason to care on an emotional level for the Great Beings that constructed Mata Nui and gave the Matoran their “duty”, nor for their home planet of Spherus Magna that they destroyed with their excessive resource consumption. Instead, I’ve been made to care about the Matoran, the Turaga, and the Toa.
So now I should accept that the characters I do care about need to sacrifice all the locations they ever called their homes - Mata Nui, Metru Nui, Voya Nui, Mahri Nui, eventually the entire universe they live in - and many of them also sacrificed their lives, to achieve a purpose forced upon them by external creators that I don’t care about?
People we never met in the story, that never existed as toys, that apparently wrecked their own planet through their own greed, and then created a civilisation of robot slaves to fix their problems for them?
Hell no! This is a terrible disservice to any character. We’ve been made to empathise with the Toa and the Matoran. Even Commander Data is nobody’s property, and there is a great episode in Star Trek: TNG discussing precisely that issue. And he doesn’t even have feelings. Bionicle characters do have feelings, they are capable of suffering, so how can we think that it was acceptable for the Great Beings to enslave them for their own purposes?
I never claimed Spherus Magna were a worse environment to live in than the island of Mata Nui; I just said I’m not convinced it is better and therefore “worth all the sacrifices”.
Regarding the “longevity” of the different locations:
the Kingdom (or at least parts of it) may eventually crumble due to Mata Nui being dead. But the Matoran have the option to create new landmasses, whether made of metal or by raising the sea floor, and they might soon have the option of traveling space themselves. So if anything happens to their new home world, they can find a new one.
Spherus Magna, on the other hand, will eventually die as well - together with its host star, like everything else. Yet now its inhabitants sit on a big rock with a primordial landscape, without any foreseeable option of leaving it. This is usually not something human beings consider relevant, but given the huge time spans Matorans have already been existing for, not just as civilisations, but as individuals (over 100,000 years now and counting), most of them will live to see that day. Especially considering that the host star of Spherus Magna must be much older than our own sun: It has already hosted an entire preceding civilisation (the Great Beings), and it took another 100,000 years until the Matoran could even start living on the re-constructed planet again. By Bionicle standards, there may not be that much time left before Solis Magna goes red giant.
They knew from experience the island would still be there? They had been fighting the Bohrok themselves, so they never saw what the island would look like afterwards if the Bohrok had been able to complete their task - and how much of the island would be left.
Anyway, I think this is nitpicking, since other habitates indeed got fully destroyed (Voya Nui and Mahri Nui), and releasing the Bohrok without knowing what purpose they’re good for so that they can level every mountain and uproot every tree on Mata Nui is basically as close as it gets to “blowing up the island merely hoping that Mata Nui will awaken”. That was precisely my question in a previous comment, why the Toa had to have the island cleaned to early. He still could have died at this point.
So technically, by the time he did die in “Kingdom”, the island of Mata Nui should already have been cleaned. Whether it was, that didn’t become completely apparent to me from reading the story, there seemed to be more Metru Nui locations mentioned instead.
I’ve put all of these statements together, as in my view, they basically all express some form of justification for the Great Beings enslaving the species of the Matoran. Again, if they were not sentient beings, if they were just machines - like the Bohrok shells (not the Krana), or maybe the Vahki - I could see that point. But not for characters I’ve been made to care about as individuals.
Now we’re back with the artificial-intelligence debate I mentioned in the very beginning. Except now it’s about ethics.
You took that out of context and ignored the paragraph I wrote right after that. I know my posts are long, but I printed that paragraph almost entirely in bold for a reason, so it should have been much harder to overlook just by accident:
For someone who saw the original movies when they first came out and had lots of time to project their own ideas onto the Force mythology - yes, I can see that absolutely.
As far as the plot relevance of midichlorians go, though, I don’t think they’re in any way comparable to the damage the Big Robot does to all the settings we’ve become accustomed to. I’m not even sure midichlorians ever get mentioned again in any of the Star Wars movies after Episode I. Only in the books, of course.
Yes, sacrifices for a purpose are always preferrable to random deaths, at least when it comes to main characters. Han Solo’s death in Episode VII is precisely one example how not to do it. Just as Voxovan acknowledged:
And what is the purpose of Mata Nui rising? What improves for those already living inside it anyway (assuming Makuta hadn’t taken over the robot immediately)? As you said, slowing down an opponent so that others can escape can also be a worthwhile purpose for a sacrifice. It all depends on the context in which you frame it.
In Episode VII, it did’t seem worthwhile. And for the Big Robot and its purpose to put Spherus Magna back together, they way it’s being justified as mainly in the interest of the Great Beings makes it that much harder for me to perceive it as worthwhile. Especially if I now need to assume that the only reason why the Toa and Matoran think it’s going to be worthwhile is because they were programmed by the Great Beings to think this way.
That is precisely the reason why I do keep citing them. That and their obsession with “subverting viewer expectations”. I think Bionicle made a lot of the same mistakes. And this may or may not have been responsible for its decline, and ultimate termination of the franchise.
Muaka are territorial tigers. That is also established down the line. These creatures are still wild animals and not pets. The reason they don’t attack in 2001is probably just because they are just thankful to be free of the masks.
There’s probably a a source that confirms it. But the Rahi most probably fled when the Bohrok returned. I mean, the reason they even migrated to Mata Nui was the Visorak invasion.
Matoran, like Skakdi can eat to regain energy. Usually they prefer not to. But we know, that Matoran on Mata Nui ate vegetables.
The Great Beings are not flawless. They are pretty much responsible for everything. Even the Glatorian community despises them. They made huge mistakes and created some of the greatest threats to the Glatorian: the Baterra (thus indirectly they are responsible for the Skrall attacking Atero) and the Elemental Lords.
They are no saints. Some of the GBs are shown to have villainous tendencies. If the story had continued after the cancellation they would have been the main antagonists. But many wanted to safe their people from a life in despair.
Were the people of the MU okay with helping them? We don’t know. But for Mata Nui himself it was then a duty to help his newfound friends.( Also the GSR was already destroyed at that point, so there weren’t many alternatives.
They were. Nobody intended them to have sentience. One individual tampered with the programming.
Wait, do you mean the Bohrok and Vahki? Or were the Matoran never made to have sentience either?
That may work as another hindsight justification for the actions of the Great Beings. But not from the authors’ perspective. My point is that they made us care about the Matoran, Turaga, and Toa as sentient individuals, and at the end we’re supposed to accept that they were worker drones and slaves, and be fine with that.
Even if it was an accident, with that background, I don’t think the Matoran owe the Great Beings anything. It would have been awesome to see them break free from their deterministic programming. I guess you could argue that’s what happened in “The Kingdom”, and thus I’m not actually convinced that “The Kingdom” is a worse alternative future.
With TV series like Real Humans, the British remake Humans, and Westworld, there have of course been more than enough stories about artifical intelligences breaking free from their initial “slavery”. And those are just the ones in recent memory, there have of course been many more before. It’s of course amplified in these cases due to the robots looking like humans. But while it may be harder to do for outsiders, anyone who followed the Bionicle characters for a while will have learned to empathize with these more machine-like-looking characters, too - simply because they had personalities, human flaws, and emotions. And that makes it hard to regard their blind servitude to the will of the Great Beings, and even more so, their active glorification of that servitude in a whole mythology, as a good thing.
) and started closely following the story in 2006 and 2007. Your constructed narrative is nothing like my experience. It’s overly critical of things that I found interesting, exciting, or intriguing. Seeing new characters and settings wasn’t disappointing or annoying, it was exciting. Maybe that wasn’t your experience, but it seemed to be shared between myself and several friends who enjoyed the theme at the time.
Because it preserves and even expands the Matoran’s agency.
Again, if they were not sentient beings, if they were just machines - like the Bohrok shells (not the Krana), or maybe the Vahki - I could see that point. But not for characters I’ve been made to care about as individuals.