Do you have any evidence for this idea? As far as I can tell, they’re reassuring us that Sokoda’s submission wasn’t rejected because it was Bionicle. From what I can see, your reading of the comment carries about as much weight as if I were to claim that they’re telling us we’re guaranteed a win next time. Sure, it could mean that, but it requires us to assume that this individual is being purposefully vague and misleading on his own account for the company’s sake.
Personally, I take the comment as such: a Bionicle submission will not be rejected because it’s Bionicle. If we play our cards right, and give them something they feel like they could market and make money off of, they’re more than willing to humor us. We just need to not fall apart in the meantime.
You have to remember that this community has two readings when it comes to LEGO’s annoucement of G2’s cancellation. That they were telling the truth and pulled a theme that sold well so it’s decline would not harm the brand… to those who read it as LEGO saving face to the fan base after they cancelled a theme that ultimatly flopped and cost them money.
Ultimatly, for as much as people will try to argue about Bionicle’s title as “the theme that saved LEGO” it doesn’t seem like the higher up’s at LEGO shares that view.
Not gonna lie, I kind of miss the days where “supporting” was a bit of a larger commitment than just clicking a button. It was less about supporting and more about “would you actually consider buying this set?” It would as what you believed the ideal price range and target market would be, as well as the difficulty in the building experience.
I feel a major problem LEGO has with Bionicle is that they believe it’s not likely to sell as well as it once did, and just having 10,000 people click a button doesn’t seem to say as much as it used to.
I guess I could look on the bright side. Now I can spend more money on the Mario sets.
That isn’t evidence. I’m looking for facts - a time that Lego has outright stated what you are saying, or at the very least a coherent set of proven facts that could reasonably imply what you’ve said. Yes, I know the Bionicle fandom is prone to cynicism and pessimism - I’ve been here a while. Still, until you can provide facts to back up your claims, you’re just making things up.
That’s an entirely different circumstance. Lego had very different priorities on the line when making that statement. That was (potentially, allegedly, according to some theorists on these boards and elsewhere which I’ve never fully agreed with) a financial disaster, and when you reach that point in a company as big as Lego, you want to save face. You don’t want to say you did badly, that ticks off shareholders and makes toy stores not want to buy your stock.
They have absolutely nothing to lose by telling us “we cancelled this ideas set because it’s Bionicle and only because it’s Bionicle, and we will never ever accept a Bionicle ideas set ever”. They owe us nothing. We already don’t buy their sets, so we’re of no interest to them as a focus group. Why bend over backwards for us in the first place? The fact that they haven’t said any of this outright is indicative of the fact that this is nothing more than petulant whining and grasping at straws. We failed, we get it. We can try again. Get out of this absurd bubble of yours.
You basically quoted me reiterating this point. All I was saying is that our display piece was not flawed for being a display piece in and of itself (which is what it looked like you were saying at first), it was flawed because it wasn’t as iconic as the Seinfeld one, and had less play space, as you’ve also pointed out. So… thanks for proving my point, I guess?
A vocal minority reviled it, myself included, initially, until most of us calmed down. Of course, the angriest voices shout the loudest, you can never shut the whiners up completely. In retrospect, it was definitely far from perfect (I could go all day poking holes in it, but I don’t really care at this point), but for most of its run I remember just being happy that Bionicle was back at all, as did many people I talked to. It was incredibly rejuvenating for the community, and shockingly even some new fans were brought in (rarely)!
See, there in is the reason for my more pessimistic view of this. When Sokoda posted the Anniversary set, almost everyone in the community started to spread the word around to gatter up support so that it could get the chance to be reviewed by LEGO. I was one of the many who voted for it. But i don’t see the same thing will happen a second time, at least for now.
Not with that attitude it won’t. Pessimism breeds inaction. “Well if it’s pointless, why bother?”. Here’s some advice: get out there and do things. There’s a post on this board, even, compiling the different Bionicle projects on Ideas right now. Support them all, spread the post around, make it a disease. Post until the internet is sick of it. We don’t solve anything by lying down and convincing ourselves it was all for nothing.
Don’t think it would be any better to talk about Bionicle so much that people go: “would you please stop talking about that old LEGO theme. We’re begging you to stop.”
I see no reason not to convince a few people to click some buttons. What do we really have to lose? It’s true that a lot of people put far too much stock in and reliance on this entry’s success, but there’s no saying that another can’t make the 10k spot. What’s the harm in trying?
So I’ve already laid out my thoughts in another post, but I felt like I had to make another one due to this ongoing discussion. It’s time for another essay from Bio
I feel like this community has, in some cases, slowly devolved into a shadow of its former self. Now, I’ve only been really into the Bionicle community for the last 5 years or so (before that I was more of an outside fan), but from what I’ve experienced over the past couple of years, it is clear that this community has some problems which it needs to sort out. Over these past five years, it feels like this community has slowly become pessimistic, argumentative, quick to anger, craving anything that might have the chance of filling their desires, and overall, divided. This has become especially prevalent over the last year or so with some examples which I’ll discuss a little bit later. Now I’m not saying we’re as bad as say, the Star Wars community (which I’m not even going to touch with a ten-foot pole), but this community is one, that if this behavior continues for much longer, I might not want to be a part of for much longer. Now onto my examples (in somewhat chronological order):
Biovival/3IONICLE/14B2020: When Christian Faber first teased this on April 1st of last year, people kinda took this as a little joke, but when he started putting out more images showing that this wasn’t a joke, it feels like some people almost immediately jumped on the hype train and just knew that this was going to happen. I refrained from getting caught up in all the hype and I still have yet to get on the train. It felt like people were getting on a train which could go off the rails at any moment as nobody knew where the train was going. Because of all this hype and having the specific date for everything to be announced (April 1st, 2020), Faber probably felt pressured to put out that live stream, even with everything going on in the world and him not being able to sort out meetings. Some of the community seemed to be kinda disappointed by this and thought this was going to be Bionicle G3 when it probably won’t be.
DOTS/LEAF: While this mainly only applies to these here message boards, I still feel like a good enough chunk of the community was here for this to be considered an example. The problem was that when info on these two themes first leaked, some people immediately jumped on the idea that one of these was going to be a revival of construction even though we had little info on either theme. For DOTS, I believe all we had was piece counts and possible names, while for LEAF, we had nothing (no piece counts, no set prices, no names of sets), only a possible number of sets, but there were people still adamant that this was going to be a revival of constraction and when it turned out not to be and was instead intended for the new Super Mario sets people weren’t happy. I think the main reasoning for this is that we wanted constraction to come back as it had been a big part of our childhoods and lasted for about 20 years (if you count Slizers/Throwbots as the start) so we felt it must be coming back at some point
Other Bionicle Related Controversies: While I don’t have the most info on any of these events I still wanted to include them as they illustrate my point about how divided this community has somewhat become in the past couple of months. These include the canon contests, the Quest for Mata Nui game. Now I’m not going to go into depth in each of these but I’ll try and provide a little summary for each one. Firstly, the canon contents for the forms of different characters in the Bionicle G1 universe that never got any kind of physical representation, which seemed to divide the community on whether they should happen or not, although as you can tell, the “yes this should happen crowd” came out on top. Next, the Quest For Mata Nui game controversy, was that the game was basically a “mod” for Starcraft II, which angered many people as they felt they had been lied to.
The Lego IDEAS Results: I’m not going to go into detail on this, as this is the focus of this topic. As I’ve said before, while yes I’m disappointed that Bionicle didn’t get a chance to be made, I can kinda understand why some of the other ideas won. While yes, Bionicle does have a somewhat large community, it certainly isn’t as big as the Seinfeld and Home Alone communities and the theme only really appeals to fans of Lego, not people outside of the community like Seinfeld and Home Alone do. Bionicle is a very niche market and while Lego would definitely be able to sell some of the sets, they probably wouldn’t sell as many as they would with Home Alone and Seinfeld. You’ve got to remember that Lego is a company and will usually make the decisions that are best for them, not just for the fans. You’ve also got to think about all the other sets that didn’t make the cut like Ratatouille, Futurama, and Zelda and how their fans must feel about not having their project selected, especially the Zelda fans, who have had a long line of projects on Ideas either get close to or all the way to 10,000 supporters, only to miss the cut or be rejected before they even hit 10k. While yes, the typewriter does seem like the outlier of the three approved sets (and also includes an illegal building technique), I’m still interested to see how it turns out even though there’s a very good chance I won’t be buying it
All in all, I feel like, we as a community need to go into somewhat of a self-reflection period and realize that while yes, there have been many decisions that haven’t gone our way, the fact that we had these chances shows how dedicated this community can be when it comes together as one. While many people have felt like Lego doesn’t care about Bionicle, it’s easy to see that they still do. The fact that we even got a G2 is kind of a miracle as the only other theme that’s been able to do that in the past two decades is Ninjago, which means we’re in some pretty rare company. Also, Bionicle has had some references in the two main Lego movies (during the flashing of images of many different themes in the first movie and I believe the inclusion on the movie theater in the second movie) and Takanuva almost even made it into the second movie at some point in production meaning that Lego knows its an important part of their history. Also, with designers like ToothDominoes and BrickThing, we’ve managed to get a bunch of references to Bionicle in other themes in the past couple of years (and we’re getting two more references in this summer wave as I mentioned before). Finally, I wanted to say, go out and support other Bionicle projects on Lego Ideas (I know somebody recently made a topic with links to some of them) and vote in the canon contests and show that we as a community are more connected then we are divided
This isn’t the bionicle community. This is one guy being an idiot, and a few people falling for his lies. Anyone who actually knows anything about TTV knows they don’t hate stop-motion animators, so no controversy there. And the guy apparently has never liked the TTV group to begin with.
I don’t care how much you wanted the set, that’s ridiculous. If you’re extremely dissatisfied, you can stop buying new product, but outright giving up Lego building altogether because “they’re not selling this set” is, no matter how you look at it, an overreaction, I think.
Sokoda’s set was not marketable. That’s not at all a criticism of it’s quality - he’s an incredibly talented MoC designer, and I totally would have wanted that set - but your average person does not see anything they want to buy in it. Bionicle fans love it, but nobody else will be interested
First off, I want to extend both my condolences and my support to you. This MOC is amazing, and your hard work to make this and spread it around revitalized this community like nothing else had before it. If nothing else, you’ve done everyone a great service (and made a name for yourself in the community, for sure)! You’re a great MOCist, a great community member, and I sincerely thank you!
In the interest of preserving this coming together of the community, is there any chance of releasing the official instructions for this set, if they don’t already exist somewhere else (I haven’t seen any, to my knowledge)? It’d be super cool to allow us to have this MOC with us in any way we can, even if we can’t buy it, and even if the custom prints aren’t there!
Either way I respect your decision, this MOC is amazing and deserves to be immortalized in our community. Thanks again for everything, and know you did something great through all your work!
Scrolling through the topic, I see a lot of people saying that Sokoda’s project didn’t have any good play features, and it wasn’t that marketable. The other projects that got selected didn’t have those problems. But none of you seem to be considering HOW a Bionicle project could fix those problems.
The Seinfeld set, and the Friends set, and the Big Bang Theory set were all dioramas that could double as display pieces or a sandbox, so to speak, where you can act out comedy sketches from the shows (or you own creation). There could very well be a Bionicle diorama like that. Perhaps a model of the Kini-Nui temple that came with all six Toa Mata, or a Metru Nui build with all the Toa Metru. And no, I’m not talking about this.
Not a playset-a diorama. And preferably not with glorified chess pieces doubling as minifigures.
The best hope we have at this point for officially celebrating 20 years of Bionicle, is that LEGO is working on a commemorative set on their own for May/June 2021.
My guess, it would be a brick-built Tahu (or simply the Hau) with a nameplate (like the SW and Marvel helmets), S@H exclusive, likely GWP of $50/$80/$99 or more, like the 60 Years of the Brick, Hot Rod, Trains 40th Anniversary, Minifigure Factory or more that follow the self-referential GWP set nature.
