I’ve been meaning to post these MOCs sooner but the timing wasn’t quite right.
This is my first real “team” of MOCs and these are my oldest MOCs. I still have all of them except for Mototaur(more on that below). These are the MOCs I really cut my teeth as a Bionicle MOCer when I first really got into it around 2004. So that means that by concept Ryakk is 10 years old. Without further ado, here’s The insurgence of Darkness.
Group shot(circa 2011)
This is the last photo I have of the complete team. With the exception for Remaku being his older form and Mototaur being disassembled its still the same.
Group shot(circa 2006)
As you can tell from the two shots, all these MOCs had come a long way just from 2006-2011. The MOC “standing in” for Mototaur is what could be considered a prototype. At this point I had five out of six and I wanted to complete the team before heading to Comic Con(where I knew Greg would be). So I kinda just threw this together before I had to leave. Even then though I knew I wanted a Minotaur to be my sixth member and second colossus figure. The prototype is based on the skeletal form of the Boss Minotaur from God of War, after you strip all his armor off. It wasn’t until some time in 2007 that I got Mototaur up on his wheels(actually treads at the time).
Now lets take a look at the individual team members.
Remaku
Firs off is the leader Remaku. He is the the only MOC in this group to get an overhaul in recent years. All the other MOCs have been left relatively the same for quite a while or simply disassembled to eventually get the same complete overhaul as Remaku did. Sadly I don’t have any single photos of Remaku in his first form. Only the group photo from 06. In fact that’s the only photo I have of any of them from their early stages. I didn’t get a computer and a camera of my own until 2009.
V2 So here’s technically “version 2” of Remaku. I had redone his armor, gave him new weapons and also added Wings. This was mostly inspired by Makuta Teridax from Legends of Metru Nui. More on Remaku’s and the other’s bios can be read by clicking through to their deviations on Deviantart so that this post isn’t overly long.
V3 Version 3 is the complete overhaul I was talking about. After deciding I could and should rebuild Remaku to be more menacing and foreboding, I decided to completely dismantle him keep him apart for a good couple of months as to not be able to even look at the old version in person, and then rebuild him. After some time, I decided I was ready to bring him back. This is the final result.
Even though he was revamped last year I made it a point to keep Hero Factory parts off of him as a way of challenging myself to go back to an old school Bionicle build after working with HF for a while. The Black Pearl Sails and Construct-A-Zurg capes are newer elements but I still wanted to keep HF’s specific look off of the new form of Remaku. I also made a Bricklink order specifically for Remaku to complete the wings. His body was made with what I had on hand at the time though.
When It came time to build the wings I wasn’t going to settle for cutting one of the many old black T-shirts I have lying around. I’m pretty much a snow white purist in my MOCing nowadays, so that meant I had to find a pure solution for his wings. Ultimately I used only two cloth elements, Black Pearl sails and Construct-A-Zurg Capes. Not only did the MOC get an overhaul but his Bio did as well.
Ryakk
Although I’m not exactly sure when I first created some of these MOCs, I know without a doubt Ryakk is the oldest. Ryakk first started out as a Kikanalo that I had modified the head and hands on. From there its actually rather simple…he just kinda grew from there to the form he has now.
The changes made to Ryakk from the earlier form pictured in the 2006 photo were mainly his upper body and arms. Since then though his changes have been rather subtle. This is another MOC where even though I’ve worked on him since then, I self impose a limitation of only using 2006 or older elements. The biggest change to Ryakk hasn’t really been to him, its mostly been his weapon.
V2
His old weapon was a drill like staff. It utilized the mechanic found on Roodaka and Keetongu’s weapons. However it was always too flimsy so I did away with it after it got severely bent when I moved.
V3
V3 got a stronger neck, a few tweaks to the hands and mainly a new lighter and sturdier axe. This update happened earlier this year in fact.
O-jin
O-jin is one of the MOCs I’m not quite sure when I built the original form of him, but it was sometime after Ryakk and Remaku, but before Mototaur, so that could be anywhere from late 04-06. Either way, his original form was inspired by the Oni masks Samurai warriors would wear to insight fear into the enemy as well as the Oni of Japanese folklore.
V2
his second form was changed to incorporate themes of Japanese oni, an ice demon, and Death(skeletal form with scythe). I was inspired to change him up from being a kind of Ninja to being an Oni after playing the PS2 Game Onimusha. An interesting note about his hat is that it is actually worn like a rice hat with a rubber band strap. Its not physically connected to his head. Being one of my older MOCs he still has some very basic construction and technique to him. I’m not 100% certain whether I should leave him as is or if I should overhaul him as well. If I do decide I believe he’ll be next to get an update.
Ootei
I remember Ootei being one of the earlier MOCs. The inspiration behind him was the bulky shoulder pads football players wear. Then Onimusha was also a bit of an inspiration on him as well. I based his weapon on Samanoske’s third weapon, the double sided staff blade with the wind element(I forget it’s name). It later got made bigger and had a rhoutuka spinner incorporated into it because I thought it fit the theme well.
V2
Now I know I said I’m a purist, but this has been my one major discrepancy in that, and because I haven’t really done anything with this MOC it still stands. The faux pas here is that I cut the head off of a zaktan spine and used just the spine part and wrapped it over his shoulders. I admittedly still like the way that looks and always thought the only thing keeping the Piraka from being the best sets ever was the fact the head was connected to the spine. So in this way I made the two parts as I thought they always should have been anyways.
Vhisora
Vhisora is again one of the later to come MOCs but not the last. Vhisorah is neither male nor female so I simply refer to it as well…it Though Vhisora’s name is based on the Matoran Vhisola, and the word visceral. This MOC’s story was ever evolving. it initially was some monstrous spirit or entity sealed away in a more controllable form but if unleashed would wreak havoc on anything near it. Kind of The Hulk in a spiky can with limbs. But I later changed it to be a failed experiment also created by Mutranz that was later given to Remaku since he had use for it and could control it well enough to suit his purposes.
This MOC was last updated in 2007 and I’ve decided that I will keep it in this form permanently.
V2 
The inspiration for this MOC was if a Star Wars Clone Wars Super Battle droid was outfitted to be an underwater droid. So its just that, Super Battle Droid meets submarine, with a little shredder/wolverine thrown in for good measure. Any which way you attack this thing, its got something sharp and pointy to stab you with, meaning when its in all out thrashing mode, its a force to be reckoned with.
Mototaur
Okay I’ll be honest, I saved him for last. Do I really need to introduce Mototaur? I mean the guy’s everywhere in the Bionicle MOCing community. He’s without a doubt my most popular and talked about MOC. I don’t quite have my finger on every pulse in the MOCing community but I get the sense that at least someone from every niche online knows of Mototaur.
As you saw in the 2006 photo his prototype was nothing compared to the version that followed. Though the one documented wasn’t actually the first version. The proper first version of Mototaur had a vastly different torso at first. So actually the version I’ll show next is more like Version 3 or 4(depending on if you count “Proto-taur”). But again because of no camera or computer till later on, these early versions weren’t documented. 
V2…ish
Sadly these first photos are very blurry because I had no idea what the hell I was doing with my aunt’s camera.
V3…I suppose And because I like this site, I’ll actually post a photo of the biggie that’s never been posted before. The one of this version that’s floating around out there is like a 3/4 view of him which actually shows him off better.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was actually the most stable version of him. In this version I believe I mostly updated the feet and lower legs.
V 4 but I’ve been calling it V3 when its probably more like V5 or 6
This is the other version of Mototaur everyone’s probably most familiar with. This is also the last form of Mototaur I had before I decided to dismantle him. This version got mostly overhauled. New arms legs and I reworked the torso a lot to. The updates were pretty extensive on this version.
The reason I took apart Mototaur is for the same exact reason I took Remaku apart. I do plan on rebuilding the big lug some day, its just that when I do, I want to go all out like I’ve never done before. No expense will be spared for this guy and all my self imposed rules and philosophies will be broken. I will MOC with what I need instead of what I have, and not only will I Make him for myself, but for everyone else who’s ever enjoyed seeing this MOC, for anyone else who’s been inspired to MOC because they saw this. So ya know…no pressure. I got this. 
Anywho. Another major reason I dismantled Moto is he was actually a lot less stable in this form than he was his previous. While I think he looked better, he was more difficult just to get standing up right, and posing, forget it. If a cat farted in his general direction it would have toppled him over. Then when I sat down to fix that I realized that to fix one thing I’d have to tear into another section and another and another, all the way to his core. So I opted to scrap him and start over. But since then I’ve used some of those parts to build other MOCs and now I really wanna do the return of Mototaur right. So it’ll all comes down to money. I wanna dump a good deal of money into his rebirth and Money is one thing I don’t have much of. Though when I finally land a steady job(I’ve worked before but only temporary seasonal stuff), I think bringing Moto back will be my first major money fueled project.
Well here we are again at the end of a very long post by yours truly. If anyone read all of that then you are awesome and deserve a hug or a like or something nice. 
Thanks for all the support and praise of these MOCs, its been a wonderful 5 years thanks to people who appreciated what I did sitting around as a kid/teenager by myself in my bedroom as a hobby. And here I thought when I posted Ryakk and Mototaur for the first time on DA that most people would think they were stupid because they were just bionicles and no one else I knew at the time even liked bionicles. 
Boy was I wrong. 
Their back stories take place at different points in the canon bionicle story line, but converge into the team after the reformation and migration to Spherus Magna. Like about 20-50 years later, give or take. Its my way of making my own story line without messing with the canon too much. I like weaving my characters in on the fringes and not just rewriting it or changing it.