That is somewhat true, however the main reason people dislike the Old Luke is because he acts completely out of character (and the New Coke since it tastes different, but I can’t really use that as an example). The new iterations of the Toa did stay true to their previously established personalities and traits, the only issue is that they didn’t look like their former selves.
And, mind you, that is a big problem a lot of people in the community have with that (me included). That’s because the designers were designing these sets without any particular characters in mind (and they also had to please the test audiences). So while yes, that’s a bummer, I don’t think many people who were already invested in the story found that off-putting, since those were still the same Toa we knew and loved, they just looked different.
I mean, yeah? That’s what Lego is all about - making your own stuff. And if you aren’t able to buy the new toys for whatever reason, you don’t really have any other options. Lego wouldn’t release the same toys over and over again, that would lose them tons of money lol.
I don’t see how that’s in favour of your position. You’re stating the the canon made the toys a bad long-time investment. If you can’t buy the new Toa Mahri then just make up your own stories with the Inika while they’re still on the island, build mocs with them, just do whatever you want with them, they’re toys. I mean, hell, people are still playing with their G1 Optimus Prime figures even though the cartoon hasn’t been airing for decades.
Yes, but they can build new ones? The geographical location is the least important factor that decides a certain structure’s significance. It’s the cultural impact and memories associated with it. I don’t see how a Kini-Nui built on Spherus Magna, serving the same purpose as the original one, would be less culturally significant for the Matoran than the original one, other than “well it’s not standing the exact same spot lol”.
If I had to sacrifice one city to save an entire nation (or one island to save an entire freaking universe) I wouldn’t bat an eye.
How? Literally how? The geography is the only thing that gets lost. The culture of the individual Koros and Metrus is preserved, because it comes from the people who lived in those settlements - the people that are still very much alive, and so is their culture.
I’ll bring up my own country as an example - our culture didn’t vanish when we lost our geographical territory for a whopping 123 years. We still held onto our culture and the nation prevailed thanks to that, even though or country in geographical/territorial sense was gone.
I mean, the authors can’t really do much when the line is suddenly prematurely ending because that’s what the higher-ups demand. But I’d still argue that the writers did their best to flesh out the world of Spherus Magna (or at least Bara Magna) all things considered. In fact, I’d argue it’s even more of an exciting setting to have the story take place in, as there are still many mysteries and secrets left to be discovered and explored (which can’t be said about Mata Nui).
Because it’s a big-■■■ planet and there’s more space for the Rahi and MU/BM inhabitants to live separately from each other
Well then shucks, if something wasn’t mentioned in one (1) story then I guess it isn’t an actual thing right? Then I guess the Matoran Feeding Point in Ga-Metru was just for show?
Well it’s not like they haven’t recharged their energy for those 10,000 years right? And considering every single being in the Matoran Universe is around 100,000 years old, then yeah I’d assume they’re designed to last pretty long. Still, with Mata Nui dead, the energy resources (be it natural like fruits or fish, or artificial) would eventually be depleted.
Yeah but if you have to go through all this trouble just to make a place liveable, why would living on Spherus Magna, a newly-reformed planet with land that isn’t going to sunk into the ocean, be worse? Like, you’re trying to prove that Mata Nui is better to live in than Spherus Magna, citing “The Kingdom” as a proof, yet the living conditions on Mata Nui in that story were much worse than on Spherus Magna.
I think you have a misconception that the Matoran from Mata Nui were the only Matoran in the entire Matoran Universe. That isn’t true. There were thousands of other Matoran living on different islands, like the Nynrah Ghosts, who were skilled crafters and inventors, and a plethora of other species, for example the Vortixx, who were also technologically advanced.
I mean, you’re literally making arguments that destroying the island of Mata Nui destroys their legacy and culture, but if the entire Matoran Universe is destroyed, but the island prevails, that’s suddenly ok for you? Ok buddy.
I mean, the Matoran were basically programmed biomechanical beings, so it checks out either way.
The Matoran and Toa are described as being partially organic as early as the Hapka novels, they were also described as needing to breathe in the early comics.
So do you care about the characters, or the locations? Because all (well, at least most) of the characters that you care about are still alive and well.
I mean, the Great Beings didn’t cause the Shattering, it was the Elemental Lords. In fact, the Great Beings did try to stop the Lords from continuing the war, knowing it would lead to a planet-breaking disaster, but were unable to do so.
Well, yeah. Their old home is gone so they’re building a new one. Which is exactly what happens in-canon on Spherus Magna
I mean, so will every single other planet, eventually? But that would happend in billions of years, and by that time all of the original Matoran Universe inhabitants would be dead. Your argument doesn’t make sense. By that logic, every single planet, no, the entire universe isn’t a viable place to live, because everything will eventually die out, everything will eventually turn to nothing and come tumbling down tumbling down tumbling down.
Dude, what the hell? If they were able to build a rocket on crumbling Mata Nui, why wouldn’t they be able to do so on Spherus Magna? On the very same planet that a giant space-travelling robot holding an entire universe inside of it was built on?
Will they though? 100,000 years is still nothing compared to billions of years that it takes for the star to become a red giant.
Even if, even if, they are still capable of travelling through dimensions. So if everything else fails, they can just turn the Olmak on and hop to a different dimension. Hell, they might even invent time travel or some other bull-■■■■.
I mean, the Matoran and the rest of the species living inside of the GSR weren’t supposed to be sentient - at least not as sentient as they ended up being (that was all caused by Velika). So yeah, they were essentially just automatons programmed to perform specific tasks.
Nothing, but it’s not supposed to. And it’s improving a lot (or going to improve) for those living on the shattered Spherus Magna - those that built the robot specifically so it could fix their broken world.
I mean, sucks to be you I guess, but it’s the Great Beings that build the robot (it’s theirs, so they can do whatever they want with it). And not just for themselves, but for the millions? billions? idk how many, but for all the people living on Spherus Magna, the Agori, the Glatorian, the Skrall, the Vorox, the Bone Hunters and possibly many more.
Sure, Bionicle writing wasn’t perfect by any means, but it had a goal established since the very beginning, and the writers (Faber and then Farshtey) did stick to that goal, the very one you’re critizing right now. The sequels, on the other hand, didn’t. So there’s a difference.
I think the makers of the Star Wars toys disagree . You can easily keep selling different versions of the same character as long as Luke still looks like Luke, and Spider-Man still looks like Spider-Man. I don’t even know how many different blue-red Spider-Men I have in various superhero boxes, each made for different situations.
This is why I said they should have upgraded the previous Toa Mata models. Like CallanLoF did, or - believe it or not - the Tahu from the final line of G1 products, Bionicle Stars. He had his original Kanohi Hau and a flame sword again. He didn’t look the same as the 2001 model, but close enough. And I believe he was much more posable (I never owned that model, but it looked to me like it had flexible ellbow and knee joints).
The Toa Mahri had the same names as the Inika, so it’s hard to reconcile those with the idea of Toa Inika and Toa Mahri existing in parallel. Same with Toa Mata/Nuva or Toa Metru/Hordika. Unless you jump into straight-up alternate-reality stuff. And if you dismember the Toa Mahri to build your own creations, you might just as well get one of those 500-pieces cannisters and build your own characters from scratch.
Either way, if you dropped the canon, you no longer had a story-wise incentive to keep buying Lego’s newest line of Toa or villains. Unless you bought a given model just for its looks, but as I said: That only worked on Axonn and Brutaka for me. Because I didn’t care about those characters, I wanted to build my own Great Spirit Robot out of them (before I even knew the Great Spirit Robot was a thing ).
Does the Eiffel tower in Las Vegas have the same significance as the one in Paris? Does the French smaller original of the Statue of Liberty have the same significance as the big one in New York? Is the Cologne Cathedral still Cologne Cathedral if it’s no longer in Cologne? The locals would strongly disagree. They even have a song about this idea, translating to “We keep the Cathedral in Cologne”, with the chorus describing how it wouldn’t make any sense elsewhere.
Kini Nui was the entrance to Makuta’s lair, and by extension, to Metru Nui, and the Great Spirit Robot as a whole. Without the historic conotation, “this is where the Toa entered the realm of their villain”, it’s just a bunch of pillars and stones. A replica of a historical site.
Well, in the end, they did end up losing their entire universe. Because the rest of the Great Spirit Robot is gone as well: Metru Nui, Voya Nui, Karda Nui, all the smaller islands like Artakha’s island, Xia, the home of the Skakdi, and many other places. The island of Mata Nui was just the first in line to fall. Even if the story had ended in 2008 (presumably then without Makuta taking over the robot at the end), then it would still have been Mata Nui, Voya Nui, and Mahri Nui that got sacrificed. But at least then we could have said that it was actually the universe inside the robot itself that got saved this way. And regarding its inhabitants, definitely more Matoran and others would have survived until this point, compared to how many didn’t make it out in time when “Makuta Nui” was destroyed by the Prototype Robot.
I’m just personally attached to the island of Mata Nui, but if you’re someone who joined in 2004/2005 for Metru Nui, or in 2006 for Voya Nui, or maybe even 2007 for Mahri Nui, you could still make basically the same argument as I - except that for Metru Nui, it’s the reunification of Spherus Magna and destruction of the Great Spirit Robot that destroyed the place where it all started for you, as opposed to its awakening, which is when the other three places were destroyed.
My default assumption is that the Matoran would intermingle with the Agori and other species, as well as among each other. New villages and cities will be built on Spherus Magna, and thus there will also be new cultures. Old empires fall and new ones rise. I’m not saying this is a bad thing - it’s just something that we as the audience don’t have any connection to whatsoever. So we have no reason to care.
A cute example of a cultural exchange within the confines of Mata Nui was how the Po-Matoran adapted Kohlii from what was basically football to hockey, after they had paid an extended visit to Ga-Koro during the Bohrok arc. At the same time, we still don’t know how “intermingling” between Matoran would actually look like, especially with that “love is not canon” thing.
If Macku had moved to Po-Koro to live with Hewkii (whether romantically or “just as friends”), would she have turned brown and be a female Po-Matoran? In the reverse case, would Hewkii have turned blue and become a male Ga-Matoran? Those things could exist, according to Greg, after all - they somehow just never did.
But at the time of the Toa Mata’s arrival, the Koros had already existed for 1,000 years, and yet they all looked like ethno states. Maybe Matorans are just a particularly “elementalist” bunch. That would imply they would sort themselves into their old tribes again on Spherus Magna. Then I could indeed imagine them recreating the Koros and Metrus, but it doesn’t sound like a particularly nice future. (“Hey, you are green, just like me, come, let’s rebuild Le-Koro; no, you not, you Ta-Matoran redhead, go back to your own tribe, where you came from!” )
Poland may not have been a sovereign state from 1795 to 1918, but the people were still living in roughly the same area. Of course, borders get shifted, rulers change, and some people even get expelled and relocated. But what we’re talking about here is more like taking at six different European countries, with vastly different climates that influenced their cultures, and then relocating them all to a terraformed Mars.
The closest realistic thing we have on Earth are probably people of various other origins that immigrated to the US. And that was just a couple hundred years ago. Would you say Irish Americans, or Polish Americans, still have the same culture as the countries they came from? Probably not.
Now of course, with human beings you have the added fact of new generations being born and old generations dying out. With (age-wise) immortal Matoran, there’s only the different environment to influence them, but it will influence them nonetheless.
Mysteries are only required as long as the story is still ongoing, not when it’s ending. I can easily turn that into an argument against Spherus Magna: It’s a place we know next to nothing about, as I said, and thus, there are so many open questions at the end that it can feel unsatisfying just based on those open questions alone. An ending is satisfying when it reaches closure. There is no need for even more mysteries that could serve as even further potential plot hooks.
You mean they put all the rahi in one place, and all the Matoran, Agori, Glatorians etc. in a different one? In other words, all rahi live in a zoo now? Even if, it’s not like Metru Nui didn’t have those already, and the rahi still managed to escape it and wreak havoc after the Great Cataclysm.
I didn’t know about that specific feeding point, but I did know that Matorans, Toa and others could eat, obviously. However, if they can eat like biological organisms, that means they can find other sources of nutrition than such artificially created by the Great Spirit Robot. They also could breathe the natural air of Aqua Magna, after all - not just the air inside the robot. So their organs can be assumed to be regular biological ones.
Your link about the Matoran Feeding Point says they had to go there to recharge once a year. By that logic, their batteries should have been “empty” in the Kingdom story for over 10,000 years.
If you have to go through all the trouble just to make Spherus Magna liveable, why not create your own landmass to live on instead? After all, at least that is something I know is possible in real life - so it’s much more plausible to me than the alternative… And in this case, when looking for a pragmatic solution to a problem, Ockham’s razor actually applies even for the Matoran themselves.
I know they weren’t the only ones. The Kingdom story describes how many were evacuated from within the robot when it died - just that not everyone made it. Since the robot was also destroyed at the end of the main story, and we know not everbody made it out of it in that timeline either, now we’d basically have to compare the death tolls that were specifically due to the robot dying one way vs another.
As I just said, the entire Matoran Universe was still destroyed eventually in the main plot. It’s just a question of how many of its inhabitants made it out before it was too late, and how much else could be preserved after the robot’s death / destruction. As it turns out in the Kingdom, much more than I (and Takanuva as well, apparently) expected!
Yes, we knew they were not completely mechanical. We could also assume they partly consisted of metal. We had no reason to assume they were straight-up robots in the sense that they were programmed by somebody else. In fact, “partly organic” suggests the opposite. At least if their brain was also partly organic. And the Krana were probably the best early examples of organic brains existing in the Matoran Universe.
Both. Because I care about the characters, I think it would be nice if they hadn’t lost their home. Not just one home (the island of Mata Nui), but all their homes.
As far as I could tell, in the Kingdom there were a lot of remnants of their old homes (Mata Nui and Metru Nui) that they used to create a new one. Some things had never been destroyed, after all. On Spherus Magna, in contrast, they start from scratch.
Yep, but up to that point, the best a species can do to survive long-term is “planet hopping”. Going from one to the next whenever the old one becomes uninhabitable. This is where the supposed original ending, with Mata Nui lying down again voluntarily on Aqua Magna, comes in. They could have lived on Aqua Magna as long as possible, then activate Mata Nui to start the spaceship that is the giant robot, go to a different planet with it, have him lie down again, and start anew from there. This particular ship even includes its own terraforming system in form of the camouflage vegetation system that created the island of Mata Nui. That’s much more than your average space settler can hope for.
Long-term, this is indeed the truth - even the universe itself will die. That connects to the way how I basically understood 2003 Makuta. I don’t know how he spent his time down there in his lair, but some things he said in Mask of Light nowadays make me think he might have read some Schopenhauer down there .
Because they no longer have the technology from Metru Nui, and the space robot at large, as they could use it in the Kingdom. The Great Beings seem to be around on Spherus Magna, though. Maybe they can build a second giant space robot. This time hopefully with non-sentient robots inside. And if the Matoran find out about that, and figure that the Great Beings actually enslaved them, prepare for a big uprising .
From the audience’s perspective, the central goal the characters aspire towards absolutely is supposed to lead to an improvement for the characters we care about. Which are not the Great Beings.
Yes, technically even Mata Nui himself, the deity of the Matoran universe, is a slave to the Great Beings. That makes it so much better… oh wait, no, it actually makes it worse.
Indeed, a lack of planning is a big reason why the sequel trilogy failed. But Game of Thrones Season 8, the other big infamous example of “subverting expectations”, shows you can have a clear end point for the plot in mind and still fail to get there in a convincing way.
First you’re saying that no one likes the new Toa figures because they change the original characters, but then you say that Old Luke doesn’t count because no one likes him.
Which is it?
I really think you missed the point of the second movie.
Do you really think that that culture came from the geographical location? Or did it come from the differences in values between the different Matoran?
Those cultural differences will continue to exist between the new villages on Spherus Magna.
I’m sure there would be. But there’s a difference between “wild animals acting on instinct” and “coordinated armies of Rahi being directly controlled by Teridax”.
The Rahi went back to Metru Nui of their own accord. Most, if not all, of the Rahi on Mata Nui immigrated there from Metru Nui after the Great Cataclysm. I see no reason they couldn’t get back if Mata Nui was facing similar hardships.
Not quite…
While the Great Beings did initially program their creations as mindless drones, they didn’t stay that way. Velika gave all of the Matoran and other beings sentience during The Awakening. Their characterization isn’t a result of the Great Beings’s programming. It’s true sentience.
How is Mata Nui any better?
No.
Our own sun has also hosted an entire civilization (us), and it still has around 5 billion years before it explodes. The lifespan of a Matoran is only 250,000-ish years. Perhaps it could be made longer through constant repair, but there is no way that any Matoran lives for more than a million years.
Yes, they did. It would look like a flat island with no sign of life. Why would they think the Bohrok would destory the island itself?
Yeah, probably.
When your plan is to move an entire universe onto a single island, and also add a bunch more land to the island, I don’t think it matters whether or not that little starting bit has plants on it.
Yes. And it comes back to the Awakening I mentioned previously.
This is exactly how the Great Beings saw those in the Matoran Universe. That is how they were originally designed. The Great Beings are ethically in the clear here. Maybe except Velika, since he’s the one who caused The Awakening.
Of course not. But not because of the geographical location.
The one in Paris is more significant because of its history, while the one in Vegas is just designed to be a copy of the important one.
If Parisians were forced to tear down and evacuate their city, and they moved to Las Vegas and rebuilt the Eiffel Tower, it would be just as significant as the original.
So then why do we have a connection to the original cultures?
I think you’ve horribly misunderstood what Greg meant with that statement. He said that, hypothetically, a new Matoran could be built from scratch with a “misaligned” gender. He said nothing about Matoran changing Elements.
What are you even trying to say here? Because, to me, it seems like you are attacking the original years of Bionicle now as well. Or you’re admitting that the villages and cultures would probably be rebuilt on Spherus Magna?
Either way, I don’t see how it helps your argument.
Because you still have to go through the effort of making it livable, except now you have the added burden of making the landmass as well.
Are you sure about that? There’s also a lot of things that haven’t been destroyed in the main canon as well.
What makes you think they can move buildings from the Matoran Universe to Mata Nui, but not from the Matoran Universe to Spherus Magna?
Why not? It’s not like everyone suddenly forgot eveything they learned in Metru Nui.
And besides, even if you’re right, they still have the technology on Spherus Magna, which was used to build the technology that built the technology on Metru Nui. I’d say that’s an upgrade.
Do they though? They don’t sell the same toys, they sell new toys of the same characters, but those are still new toys. That being said, it doesn’t make the old toys obsolete.
It doesn’t apply just for the figures, but for the vehicles as well. A kid can still buy and enjoy a model of the Naboo N-1 Starfighter even though that thing hasn’t appeared in a movie since 2002.
Yes, and I think we can all agree on that - as I said, the Mistika/Phantoka looking nothing like the previous forms of those characters is disliked by many. But, again, as I said, those are still the same characters, so at least there’s that.
Yeah. But the existence of those 500-pieces canisters (which I never saw in any shop in my entire life btw) doesn’t mean that I mustn’t disassemble my other figures, right? Those are all Lego bricks at their core.
Let me tell you, I can bet $10 that the majority of Bionicle’s target audience bought the sets just for the looks. Hell, I did that. In 2006, we didn’t have any lore sources aside from some activity books (and the lore info was very scarce there) or some vague descriptions in the Lego catalogues.
So yeah, I bought the sets mostly for the looks and made up my own stories with them based on the basic premise that I got from whatever canon information I managed to gather. I don’t remember much, other than I made Brutaka the main bad guy and the boss of Piraka. Also, I remember that some of my custom MOCs were part of those stories as well.
Hell, I didn’t even know that the Toa Inika (besides Jaller) were the Matoran from Mata Nui. Mostly due to language differences, I always pronounced the name “Hahli” with both Hs (since that’s how you pronounce things in Polish, there are no silent letters), so I just assumed it’s a different character from the “Hali” from the MoL movie. But did that stop me from enjoying the toys? No.
If it was built by the same people that built the original one, after the original one was destroyed? Yeah, it probably would have the same significance to them.
Yeah, but for the Matoran from Mata Nui it was just a temple they gathered in to worship the Great Spirit, listen to legends or something like that.
Yeah but they didn’t at the time of Mata Nui’s awakening
I joined in 2003 and yeah, I could make the same arguments, but I don’t, because the characters that I grew up with live on, I don’t care that their homes are destroyed, because they found themselves a new one.
Yeah, and that’s a good thing. New cultures need to exist, if our culture didn’t evolve we’d be still stuck in the middle ages. But it’s not like everything from our old cultures is gone, a lot of it (I mean non-physical things) prevailed.
Besides, I doubt that every single new settlement on Spherus Magna would be multicultural. The planet has a very varied environment, I don’t imagine Ko-Matoran living alongside Ta-Matoran or Jungle Agori in White Quartz Mountains, just like I don’t imagine the Ko-Matoran to live in Vulcanus.
No, she wouldn’t.
No, he wouldn’t.
No? What? When did he say that?
In what world, in what dimension would the situation you just described actually happen? Yet again you bring up some exaggerated examples to justify your narrative.
Yeah? Most of them still cultivate their customs.
Hell, you can’t be bringing that up when places like Chinatowns exist all around the world - those places look like they’re taken straight out of China, with people living in them cultivating Chinese culture, customs and celebrating Chinese holidays, like the Chinese New Year.
You know why? Because it’s the people, no the place, that creates the culture.
Do you even know how creativity and imagination works?
Obviously, nobody is forcing you to make up your own mysteries and stories on Spherus Magna. But the planet has the potential for that. Based on that potential alone, it is a much better place for any future Bionicle story, be it a canon one (which is most likely not going to happen, ever) or a fanon one, than any of the other established locations in the lore (well, maybe except for the Southern Islands) to take place in.
Mata Nui is done and gone. Meanwhile you can still tell thousands of unique stories on Spherus Magna. Obviously none of them are canon, but that’s the beauty of Bionicle (or any other Lego series) - that you can break the boundaries of canon and go beyond what has happened in the “official” story (which was, once again, just an addition to the imagination-sparking toys).
No, I mean that they don’t have to live as close to the Rahi as they did on Mata Nui.
Well, technically they didn’t “eat”, they sucked the energy out of food. But they only did that if they couldn’t recharge in a more “civilized” way (i.e. the Feeding Point). They don’t have stomachs, they can’t digest, they have organic lungs so they breathe, but they don’t exactly “eat”.
Just because they had been going there once a year, that didn’t mean their “batteries” lasted only for one year. And they could feed off of energy from other sources, as I stated already couple of times, so I don’t know what’s the point you’re trying to make. Yeah they could use other energy sources, but I imagine they’d have a hard time feeding the entire population of the GSR without those Feeding Points.
But the GSR inhabitants don’t have to make through all that trouble to live on Spherus Magna. They just need to build their houses I guess.
This entire argument is debating which is the better alternative - living on Mata Nui after the Great Spirit’s death (or with him being asleep) or living on Spherus Magna. I’d choose Spherus Magna.
So why would you bring this up then:
Yes, but its residents live on in their new home Without needing to worry that the ground they’re living on will eventually fall apart and they’ll all die.
Again, as I said, a place is just a place. Sure it sucks that their old homes are gone, but it’s better than them all being dead.
???
Literally what?
The GSR inhabitants used the robot’s remnants to build their new homes.
Yeah but that would still require the island on the robot’s face to be destroyed every time it moved to a different planet, and all you keep crying about is the destruction of the island on its face, so surely you wouldn’t prefer that original ending either, right?
Again, they literally dismantled the robot to build their new homes. What do you think happened to not one, but two (!) gigantic robots lying on the surface of Spherus Magna? They just evaporated? Or did the Matoran decide not to do anything with them and let all that precious technology inside them go to waste?
If you care about a character, one would assume you’d cheer on them to fulfill their goal.
Also, I think you’re bringing up “The Kingdom” as the ultimate “gotcha” card way too often - keep in mind that the Kingdom is an alternate universe, meaning it’s only one of the countless possibilites of what would have happened after Mata Nui’s death. It’s just as possible that nobody inside GSR managed to escape to the surface and they all died inside of the cold and dark shell of the dead robot.
But now we don’t have to worry about that, because we know they have a new paradise home to live on.
That is a valuable piece of information right there. I thought people who enjoy the 2008 storyline would also enjoy the figures “required” to re-enact it. If you didn’t, did you re-enact (or re-imagine) this story taking place with the Toa Nuva in their old 2003 forms? How were they able to fly then?
I do think Old Luke and the 2008 Toa Nuva are exact inverses in terms of what people like and what they don’t like, though:
with the 2008 Toa Nuva, fans at large seem to have enjoyed the story and the characters’ personality, just not the way they looked
with Old Luke, they didn’t mind his new look - obviously, it was clear that Mark Hamill had aged in the meantime, and many were even hoping for him to become the new wise mentor, Obi-Wan 2.0. What they hated about him was his defeatist personality, and the student overshadowing the supposed master right from the getgo. As well as, you know, that thing about attempting to murder his student Kylo Renn in his sleep . So for this particular character, if Star Wars fans didn’t buy figures of Old Luke, it’s because they absolutely despised what he represented in-story. About the new characters created for the sequel trilogy, in contrast (Rey, Finn, Poe, Kylo, and especially Rose), people simply didn’t seem to care that much. Which probably best describes my attitude to the Inika/Mahri period back then.
You mean that the Matoran are the heart of Metru Nui, not Toa Lhikan? Both are characters, neither is a place. If you want to imply by this that the Matoran are more important than Metru Nui, while I obviously agree to that, this does not go along with what the first two movies were trying to sell us, imho:
Back then, the messaging went to great lengths to convince us that Metru Nui was the Matoran’s true home, and the better place for them to live than the island of Mata Nui. That already wasn’t an easy argument to make towards people who had gotten used to Mata Nui for 3 years so far. But at least Metru Nui got two movies worth of opportunities to sell itself to the audience. At the end however, they hand to convince everyone again that Spherus Magna was a better place to live than both Mata Nui and Metru Nui, and therefore worth all the sacrifices made to get there. Which, as I said before, I’m still not conviced of to this day.
Yes, of course they were influenced by the environment. It starts with the Matoran’s jobs in the respective Koros, and their freetime activities: Lavafarming and -surfing in Ta-Koro, flaxmaking and fishing in Ga-Koro, Huai Snowball Sling in Ko-Koro, Ussal-riding in Onu-Koro, and Kohlii, while eventually played by all villagers in the hockey variant, was originally just played in Po-Koro, kicking rocks around. You think these cultures would have developed this way if the Matoran hadn’t been living in their respective environments for 1,000 years? With all memories of Metru Nui lost?
I’d argue that even the cultures of the six Metrus were already vastly different from those of the Koros. Matau, for example, was a test pilot for some mechanical flying vehicles. In Le-Koro, he would have had to learn to ride a Gukko bird, or some other type of flying rahi, to do something vaguely resembling his former job.
Who knows what tasks will have to be done on Spherus Magna? It’s an entirely new environment with entirely new requirements. So the culture will inevitably change. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, especially not in terms of real-world comparisons. I’m just saying we as the audience don’t have a connection to this new stuff, we have no way of witnessing it, so we have no reason to care. And with as little as we know about Spherus Magna in its reformed state, there aren’t even that many starting points to get our own imagination hooked on coming up with something new. All I know is that the matching equivalents I did care about, in terms of location and culture, are gone. And even the Toa themselves are barely recognizable anymore: They look different, they have different tools, some completely different mask powers (the Toa Mahri should still be in that shape, aren’t they?). That is not the good type of “I don’t recognize this character anymore” in the sense of “they’ve gone through a great character development”. The most important changes to characters in Bionicle always happen in sudden shifts, i.e. physical transformation.
Then it’s the same as in my alternate-reality scenario of “Makuta defeated, Mata Nui alive but asleep”. In other words, what was probably the originally intended ending to the story. (Whether Mata Nui would have returned to sleep voluntarily after having been awakened once, or whether he would never have been awakened in the first place.) In such a setting, there couldn’t be coordinated attacks by controlled armies of rahi either.
Well, one reason would be that Makuta blocked the entrance to his lair after all the Matoran had come into it. And the gate that Takutanuva held up also came crashing down again behind the Matoran (and onto him). I don’t think your average Rahi would have an easy time getting through that. At least the Rahkshi bust Kini Nui open, so the animals didn’t have to worry about how to get access to that thing anymore.
Oh, this is a great little detail, thanks! Now we’re getting into the hot-button issue of whether the bigger crime was the creation of the robots itself, or the creation of sentience. If we decide that creation of sentience is a crime… oh, boy, I think 2003 Makuta, Mr. “Sleep-spares-him-pain-Awake-he-suffers”, might have some thoughts on that…
Yes and no. Earth will become uninhabitable to human life much sooner. It is expected that all the water will already have boiled away in about 1 billion years (we all know at which temperature water boils, so guess how hot it will be on Earth by then), and most higher life forms will probably already die out in half that time, leaving Earth to lower life forms, such as insects, in the meantime (prepare for our own Visorak invasion! And yes, I know that spiders aren’t insects, but Visoraks aren’t spiders either, because they only have four legs ).
500 million years is still a lot of time, but there are lots of things that could wipe out human life much sooner. Gamma ray bursts, supernovae by sufficiently close neighbouring stars, or meteor impacts (hello Slizer planet) are just the cosmic ones, ignoring a species’ own potential to wreck its home planet (as the Great Beings have already demonstrated it previously).
That said, I was operating off the assumption that Matoran were indeed immortal (age-wise) and could only be killed through active destruction of their bodies. I think I got that from some other Bionicle Wiki.
Because if the robot is alive but asleep, like a de-activated space ship, they can activate it and leave at short notice if there is an impending cosmic threat. In that original intended ending described in the BZPower thread, the “real” term for the mythological goal of “awakening Mata Nui” was, that is, in Space-Robot terms, “activating the Doomsday protocol”. In other words, it was only supposed to be done in case of emergency, i.e. if the new home world the robot spaceship had found was in danger of becoming uninhabitable.
This was supposed to be what the Toa accidentally did after their first encounter with Makuta. Hence, the Bohrok were freed. The Doomsday protocol starts with the Bohrok clearing the island away, allowing the robot to rise up, and the leave. The robot wasn’t supposed to just stand upright on Aqua Magna.
How did that not mess up gravity inside the robot, anyway? Everything should have turned by 90 degrees all of a sudden .
Anyways: In the Kingdom storyline, leaving the planet is harder, obviously, because the space robot itself no longer works - the Matoran can only try to strip mine and/or copy its technology. Just like they would have to do now on Spherus Magna - with the possible help of the Great Beings, even though they don’t seem to care about the Matoran’s well-being that much and might just regard them as disposable machines they could easily leave behind if Spherus Magna were to somehow be destroyed yet again.
So yes, the Kingdom (Mata Nui dead) would obviously have been a worse option than “Mata Nui alive, but asleep”, since the latter means “I have a spaceship optimally equipped for evacuating an entire planet under my feet, all set-up and ready to go any time we need”. But so is Spherus Magna - no ready-to-use robot available. Only two wreckages that can be stripped for parts.
Who says “cleaning it all” does not mean “polishing the surface of Mata Nui’s face until it’s spick and span in the sun”? If even the Matoran could dig down all the way until hitting the “skin” of his face, why shouldn’t the Bohrok, who had the explicit task, and only task, to get the island off of Mata Nui’s face?
You mean the original cultures of Mata Nui and Metru Nui? Because we saw those in action for several years, maybe?
Ah, okay, thanks for clarifying. I didn’t really expect any Matoran to “get a new finish / paint” applied to them like to a car body.
Then it’s weird though that you never see any permanent residents originating from other villages in a given Koro; only merchants, Kolhii players, and other travellers, like Kapura.
The cancelled official video game for 2001, Legend of Mata Nui, featured Matoran in every village though who stated they would prefer to live in a different one (a Ko-Matoran who found his village too cold and wanted to live in Po-Koro, a Ga-Matoran who found hers too wet, a Po-Matoran who found his too hot, and so on). Who prevented them from doing that - the Turaga?
I was implying that on Mata Nui, the geographical locations served as a reason for why the Matorans of the respective Koros largely preferred to stay among their tribes. They were competitive with, but not hostile to the Matoran of other villages. The Ga-Matoran welcomed the Po-Matoran as they were fleeing from the Bohrok, yet apparently no Po-Matoran wanted to stay longterm - not even Hewkii.
If they wanted to re-create that on Spherus Magna, which they now share with completely different species, such as the Agori and the Glatorians, that would require the Matoran to become rather… xenophobic:
“Hey, you, Agori, Glatorian; get out of our new-found jungle; Le-Koro Nuva is for Le-Matoran only!”
“But Spherus Magna is our home now, too! And some of us have been living in this jungle, formerly known as Bota Magna, for ages before!”
“We don’t toleratewant your cruelviolent fightcombat athletesport here. And you can’t even speaktalk our language!”
“Ah yeah? Maybe we should settle this in the arena!”
I can already see, Spherus Magna is totally going to be an absolute haven of peace…
You need to factor in all the efforts they had to make to save Mata Nui in the first place.
You mean inside the Great Spirit Robot, there are things that survived “Makuta Nui” taking a moon to the face? Even if so, if e.g. you could revisit Metru Nui now, since the robot is now “dead”, I thought that means nobody can survive inside the robot?
The precedent of Voya Nui just “shooting out of the robot” and then being carried to the water surface by itself. It seems like this idea of island parts floating to the surface made it easier to get them out of the robot on a water planet than on the dry land where the two giant robots fought their final battle. How many people wearing a functioning Kanohi Matatu would be required to transport the Giant Space Robot into some ocean on Spherus Magna with telekinesis?
Ehm… memory wipe?
Of course, there is episodic and procedural memory. You can remember skills without remembering having ever practised them, or without remembering certain other events in your life. But it’s one thing to apply that to motion skills and language - and another thing to apply that to the high-level explicit knowledge required for rocket science - or, in this case, robot science.
I’d figure a lot of that was destroyed during the Shattering. The more important helping factor is probably having the Great Beings around now… but as I said, they might not care as much about the Matoran as the Matoran care about them.
At least now I find that line by Kiina in The Legend Reborn throwing shade on the Great Beings (much to Mata Nui’s dismay) somewhat gratifying. Had completely forgotten about that. As I’ve forgotten about most things that happened in “The Legend Reborn”.
In the original ending, as outlined in the BZPower thread, it seems like the Matoran would have lived on Mata Nui alongside the Great Beings - because preparing the surface for the Great Beings was the Matoran’s main job, not taking the robot back into space and having him fix the broken world. I think this is a much more forward-looking message: “We’ve messed up our own world, now let’s try to not mess up this new world.” Not “let’s force a robot species to sacrifice everything on their own home world to fix the one that we have ruined with our own actions for us”.
That’s what I said: I happily would have bought new and improved versions of the Toa Mata (like with neck articulation and flexible knee and ellbow joints), if they had still actually looked like the Toa Mata. Or maybe Toa Nuva. If they had brought back all six of them for Bionicle Stars, instead of just Tahu, I’m pretty sure I would have gotten them.
Absolutely true. I just don’t get attached to vehicles as much as to characters. Losing an old character almost feels like the soul of that model “died”, and now lives on in a new one.
Well, if I don’t like the way the new models look, then I obviously don’t want my favourite characters to look like that. I have an active incentive not to accept them as the same characters that I hold dear.
No, it just means you don’t necessarily have an active reason to go out and buy e.g. the Toa Mahri figures specifically, if you could buy literally anything else from Lego Technic. Like something that provides you with both a greater quantity and variety of pieces. Especially when they kept changing the way the masks were applied, so that you e.g. couldn’t put Inika masks on older models, the options for custom creations out of new and old models was reduced quite a bit.
Well, you’ve already established that a lot of people didn’t like the Phantoka/Mistika looks, so no reason to get them for looks reasons either. And the Hordika were deliberately made to be ugly for story reasons, and the Mahri weren’t much better visually, in my opinion. The only ones I somewhat regret not getting back in the day are the Toa Inika - and the major reason for that comes from me playing Bionicle Heroes. Which, as we’ve established, does not reflect the Voya Nui story at all.
No, at that time they just lost their universe to Makuta, which is arguably even worse. Better to die a free Matoran than to live as Makuta’s slave.
But also, you kept citing the reunification of Spherus Magna as the Matoran’s and Mata Nui’s ultimate purpose. After which the Great Spirit Robot would no longer be needed, so one could argue the eventual loss of the Matoran Universe was indeed also always part of the plan.
The customs as they were when they left. Starting from that point, they start developing independently of each other. Icelanders for example descended from Norwegian vikings and Irish women (who they kidnapped). After that, the language and culture developed differently. Modern Icelanders can sometimes still understand texts written in Old Norse; Norwegians and other Scandinavians can’t.
(Skipping some quotes now because they partly overlap with things I already responded to under Jerminator’s comments.)
Again, a scenario in which Mata Nui doesn’t awake does not automatically equate all the Matoran dying: You can have the Kingdom, or you can have the better alternative to that, which is Mata Nui alive but asleep.
In fact, I would, as I’ve stated earlier: If Aqua Magna had actually been in danger of destruction, so an activation of the Doomsday protocol (awakening Mata Nui) had been required for the Matoran’s survival, the destruction of the island would have been much more justified, in my opinion. But Aqua Magna wasn’t in danger. And the survival of the Matoran wasn’t predicated on Mata Nui being awake, only alive (and maybe not even that, but we’ve discussed the Kingdom extensively now). So the Toa only woke him up because their programming, made by the Great Beings, forced them to.
The Bionicle Fandom Wiki says the Prototype robot disintegrated. I thought the Great Spirit Robot had been tossed into space by Mata Nui as he hurled Makuta against the moon. But on this the same Wiki states “the Matoran Universe fell onto Spherus Magna”. If that means the robot literally crashed down on the surface, then I can only say once again that a much smaller meteor was enough to wipe out the dinosaurs. Spherus Magna should be toast if that was the case.
Not if I come to the conclusion that the characters’ goal is pointless or counterproductive. Then their continued pursuit of it will eventually just make me think they’re stupid.
There are lots of characters which need to give up their primary goal over the course of the plot. This is commonly referred to as the difference between a character’s “want” and “need”. For example, a lot of heroes start out merely wanting revenge against the bad guy who killed their family or whatever. But in the end, their need is something else, usually something related to a personal flaw of their own that they need to overcome, and the villain is just an obstacle on that path.
Yep, just like it’s possible that Mata Nui would never have been awakened - that Matoro would have been a little faster instead of a little too slow (as in the Kingdom). Then Mata Nui never would have died, Matoro wouldn’t have had to sacrifice himself, and the robot could have been kept alive without being woken up.
I can honestly say that I have never once reenacted a story scene with my figures. Never in my life.
The tasks required will be those necessary to survive in a given region. The Matoran are going to gravitate to certain environmental regions. As such, the tasks on Spherus Magna will be similar to those on Mata Nui.
That didn’t seal the entrance though. After that scene, the Matoran returned to the surface to collect their belongings and build boats. The Rahi just took whatever tunnels the Matoran used to get back down afterwards.
And we know from the novels that there’s more than one route to Metru Nui.
… thereby destroying the island anyways.
What you are describing is no different than the robot leaving for everyone to go live on Spherus Magna, except your version doesn’t have any kind of entertaining expanded lore.
That probably has (at least partially) something to do with the fact that Matoran are designed to thrive in one environment or another.
Yes. This is true. I don’t really get what your point is here.
Would it though? You just said it yourself: they stayed separate because they each preferred different environments, not because they hated each other. As long as the Le-Matoran are in a jungle, I don’t think they really care if anyone else wants to stay there with them.
Yes. If I get punched in the face, my legs are unharmed. It’s true that there was an earthquake from the robot hitting the ground, but it would be far less severe than the Great Cataclysm.
Same goes for The Kingdom though.
In both cases, Mata Nui has died, and the Matoran move buildings out of him. Why does it matter if they’re moving them to Mata Nui or to Spherus Magna?
What in the actual heck does Voya Nui have to do with any of this? How does Voya Nui leaving the robot make it easier to move buildings out of Mata Nui in The Kingdom vs. on Spherus Magna?
Mata Nui awakening was also critical for the Matoran’s survival as well though. Even if Matoro’s sacrifice saved him from death, and the Toa Nuva just didn’t awaken him, he would have started dying again pretty quickly.
And The Kingdom shows us what happens when Mata Nui dies.
And don’t say “but they would have left on a rocket ship!” Such a statement from you is extremely hypocritical, given how important the island of Mata Nui is in your mind. After they leave on a rocket ship, the island crumbles.
Either way, the island gets broken. At least in the main storyline, it was for a good cause.
It was reduced to a pile of scrap metal, which is still usable. (Also, on an unrelated note, the Bionicle Wiki has a history of uncited and/or speculative information, especially surrounding the less-mainstream story.)
It fell from a standing position, and it was guided down by the Prototype Robot. And who knows what kind of automatic crash systems it had in place?
We already saw the Robot actually fall only Aqua Magna, which is much smaller than Spherus Magna.
… and then they have to do the whole thing again in another 1000 years. Probably less, given that Matoro didn’t restore him to full health. For someone who was concerned about the Matoran being wiped out by the collapse of the sun, you seem to be awfully flippant about sacrificing someone every couple hundred years.
How long do you think that’ll last before their non-reproducing population dies out?
TheJerminator addressed a lot of these points pretty well and I agree with most of what he said, but I’d still like to throw my two cents in.
You know there are other ways to play with your toys other than re-enacting canon events right?
Exactly! See how it’s the Matoran that are the heart of Metru Nui, not the Coliseum or any other structure.
And Spherus Magna (or Bara Magna more sepcifically, although a little bit of Bota Magna as well) got one movie, two (I think?) novels and a couple of story serials worth of opportunities to sell itself to the audience. Seeing how you’re the only person I’ve seen so far who dislikes Spherus Magna, I think it’s safe to assume that the majority of people do like it as a setting, therefore the writers did their job.
You literally said it yourself that Spherus Magna is just “a bigger Mata Nui”. So it is the same setting, or is it different? There are jungles, there’s a desert, there’s a vulcanic arena, there are snowy mountains, there’s a giant ocean, I don’t see how it’s that much different from where the Matoran used to live.
Obviously there will be some multicultural tribes (as there were back in the Matoran Universe), but it’s not like the Matoran lives will do a total 180 and change completely.
The Toa Nuva still look like Toa Nuva from 2002 (their adaptive armor only changed in Karda Nui, but now it should go back to its “default” state), and Toa Mahri still look like Toa Mahri (before the reformation of Spherus Magna we had 3 full years to get used to their new looks).
Yeah no offense to however’s a contributor there, but Bionicle Wiki isn’t the most reliable source of information. You’d better use Biosector01 instead.
And yes, the Matoran aren’t immortal. They are partially organic and all organic matter will eventually die. Sure, they have long lifespans, but even if their planet is going to become inhabitable not in 5 billion years, but 1 billion, they’re still probably not gonna live long enough to witness that.
That’s because most of the Matoran prefer to live in the environment their villages were built in, what’s so weird about it?
Was it though? Most of it remained intact on Bara Magna, and god knows what was left on Bota Magna.
You misenderstood. People who were familiar with the story didn’t like the new looks of the Nuva because they didn’t resemble their old 2002 forms, but for the most people, the majority, the Phantoka/Mistika looked just like cool robots. So most kids didn’t care that Lewa Phantoka didn’t look like Lewa Nuva from 2002, they just wanted to buy a cool green robot with jetpacks and a giant sword.
??? But what if the Mahri have the pieces I want to use in my mocs? I don’t know if you noticed, but most Technic sets are built with beams and panels, not balljoints, sockets, masks, weapons and armor. Are you seriously trying to convince me that people shouldn’t disassemble their Bionicle figures to make custom ones? Then what’s the point of them being Lego?
No, I said people didn’t like the new looks of the Toa Nuva. But the sets, stripped of their canon indentity, probably look cool to most kids.
I mean, yeah they were made “ugly”, but they still looked pretty cool in my opinion. Kids like the “beasty” aspect of some figures, because it makes those figures look “cool” and dare I say, “edgy”. If kids didn’t like sets that look “ugly” or “beasty” then all villain sets would flop hard.
Well, that’s like, your opinion man, I’m pretty sure most people prefer the Mahri over the Inika. But you’re entitled to your own opinion of course
No. At that specific time they knew they had to sacrifice the island of Mata Nui to wake up the giant and save the universe. At the moment of Mata Nui’s desctruction and the GSR’s awakening, everybody believed the sacrifice paid off. And it did - the robot was awake, regardless if Makuta took it over later on or not.
Yeah, because it was indeed always part of the plan.
I like how you completely ingored my Chinatown example, as it is a perfect proof that certain cultures can prevail outside of their home region territory.
A scenario in which Mata Nui doesn’t awake also does not automatically equate all Matoran migrating to Mata Nui (the island). We can go back and forth forever on this, but you can’t convince me that halting Mata Nui’s true purpose, which is creating a new homeworld for both the Matoran and the Agori and Glatorian, is somehow worse than letting Mata Nui die or sleep forever (which would result in him dying anyway).
Aqua Magna wasn’t in danger of desctruction. The Matoran Universe was.
Again, don’t use the Bionicle Wiki as the source, use BS01 instead. Every single article about a Matoran Universe location states that the robot was dismantled and used to build new homes and shelters on Spherus Magna.
Bara Magna was like 100 times bigger than Aqua Magna
The robot didn’t crash land from outer space, it just fell on the ground.
Both robots could manipulate gravity, one would assume that either Mata Nui in Prototype Robot or the Great Spirit Robot itself (somehow, maybe due to automated systems or something) slowed down the fall to prevent any serious cataclysm.
Both robots had the ability to terraform planets, I’m pretty sure the Matoran, Glatorian and Agori would’ve found a way to use that technology to prevent any harm done to their new homeworld (same could apply to the atmospherical changes you mentioned earlier in your post).
How is what they did counterproductive? The goal of the story has always been to awaken Mata Nui. They did that, and then even went a step further and helped him defeat Makuta and put Spherus Magna back together.
Again, he would eventually start dying again, so what’s the point?
Alright, I have reached Hapka’s novelization of “Mask of Light” now, so I will see how this is conveyed in written form compared to the movies. If there are other ways of getting into Metru Nui, and even in and out of it repeatedly, that kind of renders Takutanuva’s sacrifice pointless.
Sure they are, I just found it weird that what would have been Lego’s first official PC game about Bionicle featured Matoran wishing they would live in a specific other village, and did so in each of the six villages. Even some Ko-Matoran find Ko-Koro too cold, apparently, and even some Po-Matoran find Po-Koro too hot. Yet they’ve been living there for 1,000 years, supposedly. Why did they never leave if they don’t like it there?
Well, Earth got punched in the Gulf of Mexico, yet the dinosaurs were still wiped out on the entire globe. If a lot of the robot’s most important systems were in its head, the damage caused to it can be assumed to also have affected the rest of its body.
It means you don’t have to move an island from within the robot to the outside world “manually” (or via telekinesis) if there’s water surrounding the robot that does the job of lifting the island to the surface for you.
That’s a pretty big assumption, I’d say. Even if that was explicitly stated in current canon somewhere, using it as an argument requires to accept current canon as if these details - not just the robot and its location itself - had always been planned from the beginning as well. But the BZPower thread gives us reason to assume it was not: If the original plan was for Mata Nui to return to sleep, and for the Great Beings and the Matoran to live side by side on the “surface”, i.e. the island of Mata Nui, then him being asleep can hardly have been equivalent to him dying from the beginning.
Otherwise, why even make the distinction between “sleeping” and “dying”? They could have started the 2001 storyline right away with “Makuta poisoned Mata Nui” or so, implying something much more deadly than slumber.
If “sleep would have meant Mata Nui’s eventual death” is an explanation the authors provided in hindsight - to retroactively justify why the characters had to take the actions they took - instead of something that was established at the beginning and therefore forced the plot to move in this direction, then we cannot say it would have happened “anyway”.
Again, you’re treating the events described in The Kingdom as a-priori facts. As far as I can tell, it was written in 2008. Therefore, it could be used retroactively to illustrate why the Toa Mahri had to prevent Mata Nui from dying. But due to this retroactive nature, it forced the authors to come up with various additional explanations in 2008 for why e.g. the island would crumble, to stuff plot holes.
You’re using these retroactive explanations with which the authors had to justify their decisions, given in a story from 2008, as if they had always been there as facts of the worldbuilding itself - so that the story basically couldn’t even have taken another turn at this point, even if the authors had wanted to. When it seems to be the other way round: The death of the robot has these specific consequences because the authors needed it to have these specific consequences, otherwise they couldn’t have justified the necessity of the plot they had already delivered.
For example, my default expectation would be that an island sitting on a giant chunk of metal (Mata Nui’s face) doesn’t simply drop into the ocean, even if the machine inside that chunk of metal is no longer active. Is the entire island a holographic projection created by the robot itself (its “camouflage / vegetation system”)? Then it should have disappeared immediately after Mata Nui’s death, not continue to exist for 10,000 years and slowly fade away.
Btw, if the absence of Matoran feeding points was one of the problems, due to a lack of power supply from the robot, that is another issue the Matoran face on Spherus Magna now, too, isn’t it? If it’s not enough for them to just absorb food, but they do indeed need these energy stations - who provides them for them now? The Great Beings who have this long track record of caring about the well-being of their robot slaves?
I think you’ve misunderstood my point. I explicitly said that I don’t mind Mata Nui being destroyed if I can be convinced it’s necessary.
And “it was their duty / purpose imposed upon them by the Great Beings”, “awakening Mata Nui was always the main plot goal”, or “they would have died inevitably if Mata Nui had died or even just remained asleep, and there would have been nothing they could have done about it”, those explanations simply don’t cut it for me.
An apocalyptic threat to Aqua Magna, making the destruction of the island inevitable from the outside, is a realistic threat that doesn’t need to be conjured up, and it goes especially well with the idea of “awakening Mata Nui” being specifically “a Doomsday protocol”. The Matoran, Toa, and even Turaga still could have remained ignorant to the true nature of the Great Spirit, and what awakening it would mean in practice. They would have prayed to their creator to save them, and for the Toa to enable that salvation. Hoping for the salvation of their home island and planet, of course, but always having the possibility of its destruction in front of their noses - as an external threat.
The awakening of Mata Nui still would have been a huge twist, because it then would have meant: “Yes, I can save you, as you asked me to - I just can’t save your home world.” That would also have required the robot to be not quite as unbelievably busted, with the power to merge several planet pieces into one - because obviously, such a robot could use that power to divert an asteroid, too.
Such a plot structure would have made it much clearer from the getgo that the destruction of the island of Mata Nui was a possibility.
It still would have kept the premise that “the Matoran are the actual heart of Mata Nui”.
It still would have been a bittersweet ending: Matoran saved, home world lost.
But the necessity for the destruction of the home island would have been much more apparent to everyone, because impending doom doesn’t get more apparent than a meteor headed for your planet.
In contrast, with the account "Mata Nui’s sleep would have inevitably lead to his death, and his death would have inevitably lead to the demise of the Matoran", you need to go to much greater lengths and jump through a lot more hoops to even come close to creating that same sense of urgency. As I’ve stated, I’ve heard all your arguments for this premise, the “canon” arguments - but if that’s all, I still find them extremely contrived. Much more forced, needlessly complex, and less dramatic than the Ockham’s razor alternative for justifying thedestruction of the island.
The scenarios relating to what would have happened in case of Mata Nui’s death to me sound like the authors had to rule out every possible alternative scenario in hindsight that would have created plotholes otherwise. And they certainly tried their best to make these alternative scenarios look worse. But I’m still not convinced the Kingdom is an objectively worse future.
As such, the main thing I can see that went missing in the Kingdom is plot armour. For example, it is mentioned that Hewkii and Pohatu got killed as they were trying to prevent some Rahkshi from breaking through a light barrier. I guess that’s supposed to make you go “oh no, one of the main six heroes died, this can’t possibly be a better future”. Well, except that in the original story, one of the six Toa Inika also died - sucks just as much for the kids who joined in 2006. Of course, I think Matoro got a glorious death, whereas Pohatu’s and Hewkii’s in the Kingdom was framed as “casual” and thus “unnecessary”. But such deaths could have happened in the original storyline just as easily - it’s just that, if that is the story you want to sell… I mean, tell, then you can always resort to plot armour to justify why this course of events is better - without this actually being necessarily related to the events themselves.
Now you’re assuming the existence of something that the story itself, judging by your way of phrasing this, apparently never bothered to mention. No offence, but I call this classic “fan apologetics” mode. We’ve discovered a plot hole, and so the fans start doing what would have been the author’s job.
Also, I find it curious that you seem to find it easier to postulate an automatic crash-landing system for the Great Spirit Robot, even as it is being destroyed, than a plain-old “standby mode”, as many machines have it, that would allow the robot to stay asleep without automatically dying as a consequence.
Fair point, but hitting solid terrain right away is different from being slowed down by water before landing on the sea floor. The landing on Aqua Magna probably did the most damage to the Great Spirit Robot when it hit the water surface (since when falling from sufficient height, the water surface can basically be as hard as stone). However, that doesn’t damage that planet itself yet - hitting its soil does.
You’re working off the premise here that Mata Nui being asleep automatically leads to him dying. But since I’ve rejected the plausibility of that very premise above (unless you can provide further justification for it), your plan of sacrificing another Matoro every 1000 years, and the attitude towards the Matoran you accuse me of as a consequence, don’t apply - at least not yet.
In what seems to have been the original storyline outlined in that BZPower discussion, the Great Spirit Robot deactivated himself voluntarily at least once - at the very end, when he returned to being asleep to serve as the surface for the Great Beings and the Matoran. Some part in this thread also mentions the idea that his first deactivation was an intended one. This would be in line with the original sequencing of the story: Mata Nui falls from the sky first, forms the island of Mata Nui, the Matoran name it after him, and only then Makuta arrives (and infects the robot with his virus).
Even if we stick to "Mata Nui fell from the sky because of Makuta’s virus, that would imply the first sleep (the eventually deadly one) was an involuntary malfunction, caused by Makuta, after all, whereas the eventual voluntary deactivation was a proper and planned shutdown of the systems. Your computer can be permanently destroyed by a virus, but it doesn’t automatically crash for good just by being in standby mode.
That would have been a nice message if the story had ended there and then. If the Matoran’s well-being had remained what was driving the actions of the heroes. But as both of you have stated, the most important thing was for the Matoran to “do their duty” and make Mata Nui piece Spherus Magna back together, because that’s what the Great Beings forced them to do. The Matoran are definitely not the heart of Spherus Magna; they’re its working arms and legs, while the Great Beings sit back and stare into the fire they themselves have caused.
And the fact that Bionicle tanked enough in popularity to get cancelled while the writers were setting up that whole Spherus-Magna thing (by moving the plot to Bara Magna for the very first time in 2009) does not factor into your judgement of the authors’ success here?
Again, I think there’s a lot of self-selection taking place here. The only people who still stuck with Bionicle in 2009 and beyond were the ones who still enjoyed the story, or kept buying the toys for their looks, or both. Everyone else had dropped out. Otherwise, the sales would have remained high, and Bionicle could have continued for much longer.
Because of this self-selection, most Bionicle “normies” will probably think the plot ended either with Mask of Light (since that was the latest movie, in story chronology, until The Legend Reborn at the very end, which doesn’t bother at all to bridge the gap between Mask of Light and itself), or, if they followed the comics, with Makuta taking over the universe.
At least that comic was the last one that got published here in Germany, for all I know. And it doesn’t actually depict the Great Spirit Robot destroying the island of Mata Nui with his face as he rises. So I hadn’t just overlooked or forgotten about it; it genuinely wasn’t shown. Given that they also never dropped the “clean it all” line during the Bohrok arc in 2002, these comics clearly had weird priorities when it came to their most central plot points…
Finally, any “normie” who did actually still manage to see The Legend Reborn, and understand its relevance to the overall plot, instead of seeing it as a standalone Bionicle movie for the next generation of kids, will probably have thought the whole franchise ended with a cliffhanger when it got cancelled.
Spherus Magna is about as much a bigger Mata Nui as the Slizer planet is : Has jungles, has deserts, has water, ice, and fire areas… but none of the context remains.
Thanks to both of you for the clarification!
I never said you shouldn’t do that. I merely said that for somebody wanting to create own Lego Technic characters from scratch, many different sets will fullfil that purpose. Unless you’re looking for one specific mask or so. But even various masks were thrown into those 500 pieces cannisters, and since the cannisters were transparent, you could look for specific ones. In short, all I’m saying is there is less of an incentive for someone who is used to creating their own characters anyway to buy a particular Toa Mahri, than for somebody who says “I want that character!”
That said, I personally actually rarely built other figures out of my Bionicles, including the Kaita versions - I found most of their story uses contrived back then already, it seemed like they had to appear in the story for just a few minutes, merely because it could be done with the toys, not because it benefited the story itself. Heck, even some standalone toys like the Exo-Toa never got their time in the limelight - they were only a hinderance to the Toa’s elemental powers when fighting the Bahrag, and the only thing helpful they did was when they had already been destroyed - with their scraps shredding Gahlok-Kal to pieces .
Again, I was into the toys because of the characters they represented. The only wave of Bionicles I bought because they “looked like cool robots” was the very first one, the Toa Mata. And even from among them, probably only Toa Lewa. Because once I had him, I already started finding out about the lore, due to the mini CD, and thus, my incentive for getting the other Toa Mata was already “I want those characters!”
Far from it. Villains can often look way cooler than the good guys. I mean, c’mon, just compare what Luke Skywalker looks like to what Darth Vader looks like. The Rahkshi, the Bohrok, the Piraka, and even the “fillers” that were the Bohrok-Kal all look much more slick than the Toa Hordika, Toa Mahri, or Toa Phantoka/Mistika, in my view. The Barraki are somewhere in the middle; I think they look kind of awesome now, but back then I didn’t find them particularly memorable. The only one whose shape I could remember back then was Kalmah.
In fact I think there are major differences between US Chinatowns and actual China - and all of that starts with the different economic systems these cultures are embedded in. But everything beyond that would cross the red line into “political discussion”, I’m sure.
See above, I don’t find the premise of “letting Mata Nui sleep (after Matoro’s sacrifice to save his life) will still lead to his death inevitably” convincing at all. And I had no reason to care about the Agori or Glatorian before Mata Nui was awakened in the first place, so they cannot count as justification for a 2008 audience that needs to stomach the island’s destruction.
And Matoro fixed that problem by sacrificing his life to revive the robot. Why the need to have him stand up? What’s the benefit between a lying living robot and a standing living robot for the people inside of it? Except that a standing robot needs to use much more of his gravity-manipulation powers to prevent everything inside him from turning by 90 degrees…
Toa teams also had the task of protecting their respective island. Or so we thought, given that we always got new Toa teams for a new Matoran habitat.
Again: Who says that would happen inevitably? Greg?
Even if so, while everything that Greg says may somehow become canon by definition, that doesn’t mean everything he says becomes plausible by definition.
This isn’t a fair comparison. The impact in Mexico didn’t kill the dinosaurs. The impact kicked dust and debris into the atmosphere, which killed the plants, which killed the herbivores, which killed the carnivores.
There were no such side effects when the Aqua Magna fragment hit the Robot.
No, actually, that can’t be assumed. Why would the destruction of the Core Processor lead to catastrophic damage in the Southern Islands?
It’s true that the life support went offline, but everyone had time to evacuate before that became fatal.
I still don’t see how that’s relevant. No one was lifting anything through water, either in The Kingdom or on Spherus Magna.
You can’t use preliminary brainstorm ideas as evidence against the official canon.
I see what you’re trying to say, but I can’t agree with you.
It seems to me like you’re trying to play both sides here.
You’re saying that they shouldn’t have awakened Mata Nui because they had no reason to, but then when you’re given a reason, you say it doesn’t count because you didn’t know about it beforehand.
Even if the authours didn’t have all of these details worked out when they started the 2006 arc, they definitely established that bad things would happen if Mata Nui died.
Who said it wasn’t? There’s no shortage of organic life on Spherus Magna for them to draw from.
If you think the story should have gone in another direction, that’s fine. You have a lot of really good ideas. But don’t try and convince everyone that you’re objectively right because “bad writing”.
… which only exists in your headcanon.
Again, if you’re disappointed that the story didn’t go where you thought it would, that’s fine. But your ideas are no objectively better or worse than the final canon.
I’ll give you this: that is an extremely good version of events. Now I kind of want to see a full alternate universe where that happens.
Okay, sure. So there’s no automatic crash systems.
The fact still remains that it has been shown to survive and much, much larger fall.
Again, it was slowed down on Spherus Magna by the Prototype Robot.
And, with a bit of research, I see I was wrong:
So, I suppose that letting Mata Nui sleep isn’t as bad of an idea as I had previously believed.
What context?
Again, just to be clear, Mata Nui would NOT start dying again. Myself and @Voxovan jumped the gun there.
At the end of the day, you have shown me two very good alternate directions that the story could have gone, one of which is almost a complete redo (Asteroid Doom scenario), and the other of which is a realistic alternate universe (let Mata Nui sleep). I would certainly be interested in reading more fleshed-out versions of what you have described (especially the asteroid one).
What you have not convinced me of, though, is that the official prime universe canon is somehow any worse than those other two, from a reader’s perspective.
While your two alternate retellings certainly have a more conclusive “happy ending”, on top of other more traditional writing techniques, they miss out on the complex multi-layeredness of the official canon. I like that the canon moves the focus away from the Toa. I like that the Toa and Matoran are going to have to find their way on Spherus Magna.
Plus, the Spherus Magna arc explains where the robot came from, while your versions don’t. (At least not that you have shared)
In summary: I’m not necessarily saying that the official canon is any better than how you believe the story should have gone, but it also isn’t any worse. (And it’s the only one that I can actually read)
I’m not going to reply to the whole post by @Strato_Incendus again, cuz honestly I’m too tired for that and I have an exam in an hour, so I’ll just say that for the most part I agree with @TheJerminator
He pointed out that Mata Nui wouldn’t start dying again after Matoro revived him - I’m gonna be honest here, I had no idea that was the case. I always assumed sleeping for such a long time wouldn’t be good for the Great Spirit’s health (after all, human bodies aren’t in the greatest shape when they’re in coma; granted, humans are not giant space-travelling robots hosting entire universes inside them, so that can be easily disregarded anyway).
One could make an argument that Mata Nui’s health was linked to the work of the Matoran and other species - we saw that during the Matoran Civil War, when Mata Nui actually started dying because of the great disruption the conflict caused. After the Great Cataclysm (which put Mata Nui to sleep), we know that some beings lost their faith in the Great Spirit (for example Brutaka). I imagine that if Mata Nui slept for even longer, more beings would start to lose faith, halting their work and causing Mata Nui’s death anyway.
This is all speculation, though, so it doesn’t really matter anything.
However. However!
I can’t believe we all somehow missed that. By the time of the events in Karda Nui, Kanohi Ignika had already started its doomsday clock countdown. If Mata Nui wasn’t awakened, the mask would wipe out all live in the Matoran Universe. So the Toa Nuva had no choice but to awaken the Great Spirit.
The only alternative I could think of now is letting Mata Nui wake up (stopping the countdown) and then… putting him back to sleep? And that seems very counterproductive to me. If Mata Nui was already awake, why not let him finish his mission and put Spherus Magna back together? We know that the whole “doomsday protocol” of the Ignika was prompted by the unbalance inside the GSR. I imagine Mata Nui sleeping for eternity would cause great unbalance as well.
Besides, the Matoran halting Mata Nui’s awakening and causing him to sleep forever/never return to his (and their) homeworld seems very selfish to me.
That’s something I can’t agree with. Sure, it may be a “happy ending” for the Matoran, but not so much for the entire population of shattered Spherus Magna
To expand on leaving Mata Nui asleep - keep in mind that it’s not a “natural” sleep, but an artificially-induced coma caused by a Makuta virus. It’s essentially a metaphor for a disease - it’s not meant to be something good.
Bionicle’s original conception came from this very idea. If I took medicine to get out of a coma, and the medicine decided that it would be better leaving me in the coma because it likes to hang around on my face, and it can’t do that while I’m awake - I’m not going to be too pleased about it.
I can’t do my job, however important it might be (such as saving a planet). I’m not even going to have a conscious, waking life anymore. All because my medicine/immune system/blood cells decided that they have a slightly better quality of living as long as I’m in a coma.
I know Mata Nui is a robot, so we’re not talking about a direct comparison, but he (and our Biological Chronicle) were conceived out of this idea. It undermines the premise of the story to leave him asleep.
It’s actually the same issue I had with Toy Story 4, when [SPOILER] Woody leaves the toys behind so that he can live out his own life with Bo Peep. Toy Story has always been a story about Toys, and the personification of them as characters - that’s why Andy was so important, despite his low screentime. An ending where Woody decides to go off and live an independent life not only conflicts with his established character, but undermines the very premise of the story. Now it’s just a story about little sentient people who just happen to be Toys - it’s not about what it means to be a toy, anymore.
In order for Bionicle to work thematically, Mata Nui has to wake up - or our heroes have to die trying. Waking him up should be a primary goal of at least the Toa Mata. They can question it, doubt it, even. But in the end, if they ultimately choose not to wake him up - what’s the story been about, this whole time?
All this is putting aside the very valid point Voxovan raised about there being a universal Kill Switch that would have gone off if Mata Nui stayed asleep.
I completely forgot about this. Teridax’s virus was killing Mata Nui despite the Matoran still doing their work, but the removal of the virus doesn’t remove his dependence on their work.
If the Matoran just abandoned Metru Nui to live on the island, Mata Nui would indeed start dying again, though the circumstances would be different.
Hopefully these retellings would completely avoid any mention of Spherus Magna, and instead go with the “lifeboat” approach.
Thanks a lot! Now I’m kind of inspired to maybe turn this into a fan fiction story one day… you know, a more cohesive one than the ones I was writing up as a child…
Thanks a lot for that link - and props to you for going out of your way to actively try and falsify your own point! That’s good scientific practice, so I guess the term “research” really applies here…
That settles whether it’s a bad idea to let Mata Nui sleep from a pragmatic (i.e. the Matoran’s own) perspective. Now we can of course still talk about whether it would have been a good idea to end the story this way from a thematic (i.e. the authors’ perspective). And I’ll happily entertain @Toa-of-Snow 's objections to this further down below, because I believe he might have a point there.
And in turn, I’ll concede this point to you.
Maybe someone still feels nerdy enough to do a mathematical calculation of impact velocity, factoring in fall height during the Great Cataclysm vs. during the final landing on Spherus Magna, the respective size of the planets, the resulting difference in G forces, and so on. But I doubt we have sufficient reliable canonized information for those numbers…
I know, we discussed the dinosaur extinction earlier - I was just using it to illustrate how damage in one place can cause unforeseen damage elsewhere. And even more drastic example would probably be the butterfly effect.
Anyways, in this case I was mainly referring to the shutdown of life support systems inside the robot, indeed. So if you say this
does that mean there were further escape doors at the robot’s hands and feet?
The main reason the “reasons” don’t count for me is because I find most of them much more contrived than many alternative ones. The high likelihood that at least some of these reasons were created in hindsight just amplifies that impression.
I never got the impression that there was a shortage of organic life on Mata Nui either, in terms of vegetation and such. Especially considering that the original population of the island consisted of only 75 Matoran. Mask of Light then drastically increased the implied number of inhabitants, yet now I’ve heard that movie is considered semi-canon. I can read up on how it’s framed in the novelization, but since that one was written by Hapka again, not Farshtey himself, I guess that makes it semi-canon as well?
I never claimed objectivity for any of this. This thread has “opinion” in its title, after all. I do think there can be some objective standards for writing quality, yes. But the fan reaction will always be subjective.
No, the term “Doomsday protocol” specifically stems from the BZPower thread describing the early plans for the story:
Thus, this whole idea of only awakening Mata Nui in case of a threat to the planet of Aqua Magna was technically not my own; I just expanded on the original premise.
The historical context that the audience got to experience first hand. We know nothing about the history of the elemental regions on the Slizer planet, and we don’t know much more about the respective elemental regions on Spherus Magna.
Well, good thing then that alternate realities as a general concept are already canon! I guess they had to, if for no other reason than to reconcile the “hard canon” of Bionicle with the overarching Lego premise of exploration and creativity on the toy owners’ part.
That’s completely fine, I’m not intending to convince anyone who is deeply fond of the canon story the way it is. Just like it will probably be hard for anyone to convince me, in turn, that destroying the island of Mata Nui specifically for Spherus Magna / Great Beings purposes was worth it.
I’m rather putting this out there for people who are maybe a little luke-warm about the official ending of Bionicle, or maybe dropped out at some point because they no longer enjoyed the story as much, yet might not have identified for themselves yet why they no longer enjoyed it. For those people, my stance on the events after the Ignition story might provide one of many possible answers to that question.
As I understand this, one of the main reasons you seem to enjoy Bionicle to this day is its complex worldbuilding. So basically the type of storytelling for which I cited Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire earlier as a prime example. Nothing wrong with that.
Don’t worry, I never meant to imply my ideas were better. In fact, as I said above, it looks like it was the early Bionicle authors who came up with that setup framing the awakening of Mata Nui as a “Doomsday protocol” of the giant robot.
So I don’t actually think I would have known better than Greg & Co.; I think they themselves had a better idea in the beginning, and decided to scrap it for something more complex, but not necessarily something more gratifying.
This is just another test, Toa of Pandas. You must learn to channel the power of the Kanohi Vahi and of the Kanohi Rau at the same time, to overcome the big walls of text that separate the canon timeline from the vast multiverse of alternate realities…
Good idea, but I think the more important thing that happened after the Great Cataclysm was the exodus from Metru Nui. As @TheJerminator alluded to:
With no more Matoran remaining inside of it, the only one remaining there after the Great Cataclysm, according to my knowledge, was Turaga Dume. So there was simply not enough “staff” there to do maintenance work for the 1,000 years after the Great Cataclysm. I don’t think it was a problem of faith, since the Matoran living on the surface of the island had certainly preserved their faith in Mata Nui, through the legends the Turaga kept telling to them.
Yes, there were other “islands” inside the robot during those 1,000 years, but Metru Nui was literally occupying pretty much its entire head from within. Assuming this is where the robot’s consciousness is located, if nobody is doing maintenance work inside the head for 1,000 years, even if they keep doing so everywhere else - yeah, that is bound to backfire.
I don’t think the Matoran could have stopped his phase of dying, given that the robot was basically still infected by a virus (Makuta’s curse) at that point.
But they might have been able to prolong his phase of dying if some had stayed back in Metru Nui, which then could have given the Toa Inika/Mahri more time to find the Mask of Life. Maybe enough time so that Matoro wouldn’t have had to sacrifice himself to revive the robot.
There you go, another alternate reality! I’d suggest cutting out the Hordika arc to establish this one (and no, not just because I don’t like the Hordika from a visual standpoint): The Toa Metru failed to go back to Metru Nui to save the remaining Matoran, so they woke up by themselves a few decades or so later, and started repairing some of the damage that Great Cataclysm had caused.
I was wondering anyway who polished up Metru Nui after “Mask of Light”. It basically still must have looked like in Web of Shadows when all the Matoran arrived there - not as shiny and pretty as it does at the end of Mask of Light, when Takanuva looks across the sea of protodermis…
Long story short: After the events of Mask of Light, especially since @Voxovan and @TheJerminator have established you could go back and forth between Mata Nui and Metru Nui, and that there were several tunnels allowing to do so, I would imagine the most plausible thing would be that some Matoran would prefer to live in the newly rediscovered city of Metru Nui, while others would like to return to their homes on Mata Nui and keep living there. So there would indeed be maintenance workers living inside the head of the robot - anyone living in any of the other internal areas never got to leave in the first place - and some would keep cultivating the surface.
In the BZPower thread outlining the original concept, it is said that after Mask of Light, they don’t meet Turaga Dume waiting for them in Metru Nui, but the Great Beings - who ask them if they have prepared the surface for colonization. So with that premise, it’s obvious that the maintenance work inside the robot would have been done by the Great Beings themselves, who continued to live there during Mata Nui’s 1,000-year slumber.
So the Mask of Life was also the Mask of Death at the same time? “Destroy all your settlements outside the robot and bring him back to space to fix Spherus Magna, or I’ll kill you all?”
The Biosector Wiki says it was the Great Beings who created the Mask of Life, so… this sounds like just another move by them to force the Matoran to do their will, irrespective of whether it benefited the Matoran themselves or not.
Going “meta” again, this “had no choice” framing once more assumes that this doomsday clock had been an a-priori established property of the Mask of Life. Was this already established during the Piraka / Toa Inika arc?
If not, then it just looks like yet another thing that the authors must have shoehorned in there to make their preferred version of the story seem like the only possible option …
That is basicaly what seems to have been planned to happen in the original outline for the story, according to the BZPower thread:
So he gets up and doesn’t lie back down again right away; he still ends up being taken over by Makuta, and he still ends up going to space. Giving you the option to insert the entire Bara Magna plot here.
a) In the scenario illustrated above, the Great Beings live together with the Matoran on Aqua Magna. Seems like there was indeed no intention of having them return to Spherus Magna.
Thus, it was the Great Being’s home planet that got wrecked (and by their own fault), not the home planet of the Matoran (Aqua Magna), who hadn’t done anything wrong simply by living there. So I think it’s fair that this original storyline, if it even already included the concept of Spherus Magna at all, would indeed consider the home world of the Great Beings “lost”; Aqua Magna was where they were trying to start anew.
The premise of a planet shattering into three pieces is already obscure enough. No need to make it twice as contrived by putting the planet back together again, too . Splitting planets into parts, as weird as it seems, is at least something older Lego Technic (Slizer) fans had had time to got used to before Bionicle came around.
b) The “selfish” ones in either scenario are clearly the Great Beings: They were the ones who created the Matoran and forced them to do work for them (even in this scenario of the original story plan, they can still be accused of that).
The Matoran, being at least partly biological, have the same interest as any other biological lifeform to look after their own interests first. They don’t owe their creators anything, because without their creators, they wouldn’t have any of these problems.
Of course, they wouldn’t get to experience any “joy” without their creators either, but there is no need to experience joy for those who don’t exist yet. And experiencing joy clearly wasn’t the purpose for which the Matoran had been created, in either scenario: They were made primarily to perform a certain task (awaken Mata Nui to fix Spherus Magna or cultivate the surface of Aqua Magna) for their creators.
And if the Great Beings really even went so far as to build a ticking timebomb into the Mask of Life, as you said - well, that just puts their selfishness on a whole new level!
As I said before: Maybe the civilization that caused the destruction of Spherus Magna in the first place didn’t deserve a happy ending after all. The Matoran did nothing wrong.
If any characters from Spherus Magna, mourning for the loss of their planet and making own efforts to try and fix what was broken, had been introduced somewhere earlier throughout the story, maybe I would have had a reason to care for them as well. Or, as I said, if the Toa themselves or some of the Matoran or Turaga had experienced flashbacks / good memories from their own time on Spherus Magna - then I in turn would have started caring about Spherus Magna early on, because the Toa and Matoran cared about it.
As it stands, though, it looks like the homeworld of primarily greedy douchebags who failed to take responsibility for their own actions, but instead created a race of robot slaves to fix the problems they themselves had caused for them.
Here we go, this is the type of “theme discussion” that I enjoy the most!
I am aware of the original Faber concept, and I think it’s pretty awesome on its own. However, I don’t think it goes particularly well with the face-under-the-island setup - which apparently was planned from the beginning, too, and was what they decided to put more emphasis on in the end. Otherwise, how do you factor the eventual destruction of both spirit robots into the disease metaphor? Would you sacrifice your own life to save the antibodies that fought the virus for you?
Even before that, where do you keep your medicine if you’re sick? Probably on your bed stand. Not on top of your own face.
This was indeed how I understood Bionicle when I read the last comic of the Ignition saga for the first time. Since, as I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t actually show Mata Nui’s face breaking through the island, only him standing over the ocean, I thought he had been lying in the water next to the island all along, and was now towering above it, looking down on it. Just that the Toa and Matoran couldn’t see him, because they were in Metru Nui, i.e. under the island. And Makuta’s takeover of the universe I understood as “Well, he took over the robot who is essentially the deity of this universe, so he can bend it to its will”. I did not perceive him as actually being the universe itself.
Finally, I think this whole disease metaphor would have had required narration from Mata Nui’s own point of you much earlier. Like from the perspective of a patient lying in vigilant coma, desperately trying to communicate with his relatives, however only being able to do so via some vague and ambiguous signs. Signs which the Turaga would then try to interpret, and which they could obviously misunderstand easily. And then you’d get to experience Mata Nui’s desperation from his “locked-in” state: No, you fools, what are you doing… That actually could have created a lot of sympathy for Mata Nui himself.
Instead, the story spent the majority of its time humanizing the “medicine” in this metaphor - the Toa in their “capsules”, plus the Matoran and Turaga - while dehumanizing the “human”, the body they were trying to fix, by having them be this aloof, divine character in the background. The later-revealed background story then even made Mata Nui less likeable, by giving him a particular flaw. Flaws need to be there for rounded characters, of course, and can serve to make them more likeable - however, Mata Nui’s main flaw was that he ignored the people inside his universe for too long, taking their services for granted (much like the Great Beings themselves), while focusing his attention on other civilizations on the outside instead.
In contrast, Andy in Toy Story, who you brought up, always treated his toys with love, care, and respect. This was the prime quality about him, clearly highlighted in the very first Toy Story movie by contrasting him with the sadistic child named Sid. The “code of the toys” was that existence as a toy is only worth something if you’re being loved by a child - but by the right kind of child (little pun here for German speakers ). Children like Andy (and some of the girls introduced in later Toy Story movies) were the ones whose love the toys aspired to earn; tyrants like Sid were the ones they were trying to escape from, or who even made them ready to break their holiest of rules and reveal to him that they were actually sentient.
Sid might be the “Makuta” of Toy Story, but Mata Nui is definitely not its Andy. He reminds me more of one of the Olympic Gods, who had human flaws and whims, and sometimes were straight-up negligent towards their own creations.
For Mata Nui, that flaw is of course rectified in the end, by having him make the ultimate sacrifice for his people. So he does get a character arc of his own here.
Still, it’s hard to suddenly humanize a character and make him the new protagonist of your story (starting in 2009) if you’ve spent 8 years before that building him up as almost a literal God. Specifically, one who was spending the majority of his time not helping his worshippers, but playing Sleeping Beauty (or maybe in this case: Sleeping Duty ), falling asleep again or even proceeding into death throes whenever you thought the characters had finally done enough to wake him up.
I agree that he probably had to wake up at least once. That was the “Chekhov’s Gun” introduced in 2001; don’t introduce one if you don’t intend to “fire it” eventually. What consequences this waking-up has, and what happens afterwards, though, that could have gone into a multitude of directions:
Mata Nui rises, but his face is not actually under the island, so he doesn’t destroy it (this would have been my “expected” ending as a child, and even the comic didn’t give me reason to doubt that, as I said, because it lacked an image showing the crucial moment of the face breaking through the island)
Mata Nui’s body is under the island, but only his spirit awakens (“gets resurrected”) and ascends to the Heavens above the island, from where he can now watch over his people and his creation again
Mata Nui’s body rises from beneath the island, destroying it indeed, but he eventually returns to reform it - either by raising actual terrain from Aqua Magna (something a robot which can move entire planet fragments and fertilize their soil surely could have done easily), or by lying down again voluntarily after the final confrontation with Makuta (as in the early plans for the story)
Let’s keep in mind that even the canon story ends with Mata Nui leaving: The robots are destroyed, and his spirit retreats into the Kanohi Ignika. The Matoran basically need to live self-determined lives now. We don’t actually ever get to see an ending where the awakened Mata Nui watches over his creation and thus restores the peaceful times that supposedly, according to the 2001 legend, existed while he was awake before Makuta came.
Coincidentally, I watched this really hilarious video summing up the entire Bionicle storyline in under two minutes. And it ends with the words “Your planet is fixed. Now, it’s nap time again!” (The speaker speaks so fast that it’s hard to understand, but someone in the comments spelled it out for everyone to see, and yes, that does indeed seem to be what he’s saying.) Implying there isn’t actually that much of a difference between Mata Nui voluntarily returning to sleep on Aqua Magna - as in the early plans for the story - and his body getting destroyed with him retreating into the Inika:
In either case, he leaves his people alone in the end. In other words: He gets to ignore them again, just like he did back when he was still awake !
Do not attempt to circumvent the word filter. -Eljay
EDIT: Thanks, I removed the word entirely now, because I wasn’t feeling comfortable with the ‘replacement word’ either.
In the feet for sure, yes. That’s how Teridax’s forces exit the robot in the Battle of Bara Magna.
Maybe. It was established at the beginning of the 2006 story (both in-story and to the readers) that, if Mata Nui died, everyone in the universe would perish.
The mask started turning silver around 2006, although the countdown was not explicitly recognized by the story until 2008. There may have been an earlier reference to the mask “ending the universe” at some point, but I forget when it would have been.
I cannot state for sure when the idea of a countdown was conceived by the writers, though it wouldn’t be hard to believe that they came up with it in 2006.
You can’t introduce a universe-sized robot without having the robot do something. Your other two suggestions are fine though.
What I’m getting from this (and later comments) is that Mata-Nui should have had his true nature more clear to the character from the beginning? Or at the very least the characters would be inside him and not on top.
That’s fair enough, I suppose. But I don’t feel like the fact that Bionicle chose otherwise really hurt things in any significant way - it feels like a somewhat inconsequential change.
(Also, there was the nice parallels - the Toa are first introduced as hunting for hidden masks, and the reader doesn’t realize that the island represents the biggest “hidden mask” of all. It’s not a critical part of the story, but it’s a nice touch that would be lost if everything went inside.)
The “neglect” of Mata Nui’s internal functioning is kind of a parallel to “neglect of health” - the sort of thing that can lead to an infection in the first place. So even though the literal metaphor begins to break down, having him fight the “disease/cancer” (Makuta) and save the Matoran (his body) still ultimately is a very high-concept, sci-fi metaphor for the original idea.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that Mata Nui is not the prime character the reader is supposed to relate to, even though the direct metaphor appears to make him the most obvious choice. Bionicle basically raises the question “What if these pills had little warriors in them? What if my blood cells had hopes, dreams, and personalities? What if I was a “blood cell” and didn’t even know it?” and if Mata-Nui was the only character to be personified, we’d lose what made Bionicle so unique and fascinating.
Not all the answers that come from those questions are directly linked to the metaphor - Bionicle explores ideas like morality, good/evil, sentience, and destiny, to name a few. Not everything has to give us a real-life applicable “answer” for what we should do when we’re sick, or a moral to takeaway. But those ideas all stem from the “root” concept that Faber had, even though Mata Nui was never the main character (and the story probably would have been more one-note if he was).
True, but that’s not really a significant aspect of the metaphor. If we’re nitpicking, we could say that I’m not a robot, either, but that doesn’t make the metaphor less true.
While it’s always a nice touch when the symbolism lines up with the reality (and Bionicle did plenty of this, especially with the islands) the most important part of the theme, at the end of the day, isn’t where the Toa come from. It’s what they do when they get there.
I think the comparison is still valid. They’re not alike in personality (lol) but they serve a similar story role. Both are the most obvious real-world comparisons for us to relate to (I assume nobody reading this post happens to be a Toy or a pharmaceutical capsule or anything) yet neither are the focus of their stories. They’re super critical (Toy Story falls apart without Andy) but they’re not where the spotlight shines - they are the foundational characters upon which the story is built. I actually can’t think of a better storytelling parallel for Mata Nui, offhand (at least regarding his role in the story).
Indeed, and '09 showed that Bionicle struggled really hard to do this. Yet if it had of been done right (or even if we’d had more time to explore his character), post '08 Mata Nui could have been an enormously fascinating character to explore. He was a veritable goldmine for original and fascinating storytelling - but also, one that was very hard to pull off (and Bionicle didn’t get ample opportunity to really do him justice in the end, I’d say).
That said, if you strip away the build-up to him, what makes him interesting anymore? If Toy Story centered around Andy, it would have been dreadfully boring.
All valid, but also all more complicated - and it sort of raises the question of why? I still don’t quite follow why the preservation of the island is so important, and that’s kind of the issue at the heart of this topic (that’s gone off on nearly every other tangent it can, at this stage). The whole discussion is about how the story could have played out to stop the island from being destroyed - and indeed, you are correct, it could have - but I don’t think that destroying the island Ruined Bionicle’s Mythology, either.
For what it’s worth, seeing Mata Nui rise up out of the original island was something I found to be a striking visual, and it communicates a number of implicit ideas without dialogue quite cleverly:
This big robot is “Mata Nui” (because his face is, well, Mata Nui)
He’s enormous, and everything else in the story took place on or in him.
That’s not actually an easy thing to explain period, let alone in a dialogue-free scene. And while there were definitely some confused people, I think it would have been way more confusing if it played out differently.
I feel like we can safely say it was no later than mid-07 - Teridax has a very direct moment of foreshadowing when he’s talking to Pridak in Downfall (“Suppose I create a weapon capable of ending all life in the universe…”)
. You can easily keep selling different versions of the same character as long as Luke still looks like Luke, and Spider-Man still looks like Spider-Man. I don’t even know how many different blue-red Spider-Men I have in various superhero boxes, each made for different situations.
)
).
So I hadn’t just overlooked or forgotten about it; it genuinely wasn’t shown. Given that they also never dropped the “clean it all” line during the Bohrok arc in 2002, these comics clearly had weird priorities when it came to their most central plot points… 
That’s good scientific practice, so I guess the term “research” really applies here… 