For me it’s the realization that g2 is older than some of the kids i teach.
And I’m just now realizing that G1 Bionicles are old enough for my teachers (If I didn’t do schooling online) to have played with them.
I mean I knew I was young for a bionicle fan but it never occurred to me that G1 kids are now doing „adult stuff“
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Keep in mind, as I mentioned before, LEGO was really into The LEGO Movie 2 and thought it would be a smash hit (it wasn’t, that movie sucked). They probably didn’t see giving Bionicle a budget greater than that of the standard theme as justifiable when their glorious film sequel was going to make so much money for them.
Gotta say, I really did not like the Toa Uniters in execution. In concept, they were pretty sweet, but what we got felt like they did the few things the Masters were lacking and then forgot what they were doing entirely for the rest of it. Onua Uniter’s mask is a much better mask for him than Onua Master’s, but Kopaka Master’s mask is leagues better than his Uniter one.
At least all the Toa of the first wave went to college.
Very likely, but constraction itself might not have lasted that long.
Honestly same 
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Earlier this year, I was looking in a recent LEGO magazine just in case it had anything interesting about the then-upcoming season of Ninjago, and saw this heartwarming /s message waiting for me:
“What year were you born in NINJAGO history?”
It astounds me that the current LEGO target audience is so young that LEGO can assume any Ninjago fan reading the 8+ magazine was born since 2011.
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I mean… The LEGO target audience has always been between the ages of 5 to 15, with the exception of the adult-oriented sets. Since 2011 was fifteen years ago, it’s a pretty safe bet.
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It still feels weird to see it pointed out like that.
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I mean… I was 11 years old at the time G2 came out, still within the target audience. So I could say I also technically “grew up with G2”. My younger siblings, who were 8 and 6 years old respectively at the time, also got several of the G2 sets, so they technically also "grew up* with it too. My younger sibling that was 6 at the time actually got more of the G2 sets than I did, interestingly enough.
So, contrary to what the older fans might think, there were indeed definitely some kids who got into G2 (I would say, the majority of them probably were kids who had previously liked Hero Factory and got into G2 because of its similarity to it, just like I and my siblings did), so G2 while it may have failed to appeal to the older G1 fans, I think it did at least succeed in attracting kids from the Hero Factory sphere, even if not from other places unfortunately.
With the Exception of G1 and Ninjago, I don’t think any LEGO theme has actually had any truly good story. If they received TV Shows, like in the case of Chima and Nexo Knights, they usually consisted mostly of filler episodes that hardly formed any overarching story ark, had sub-par voice acting, and just in general not as well thought out plan for where the theme will go, and all those other themes that did not receive a full TV series, like Hidden Side, their story, if you can call it that, consists mostly of just random YouTube web-shorts where the characters just go around having random adventures. Ironically, I think G2 actually had a better story than most LEGO themes with a comparable advertising budget actually did.
I think part of the problem is that to this day, LEGO has still not understood the power that good stories have to actually make a toy line popular. In their mind, it’s all about the toys, and the media is just extended advertisement… So for them, they don’t actually care whether the story is good or not, what they care about is just having some side media that will sell their sets.
The reason G1 and Ninjago were different was because LEGO just happened to be lucky and have people working on those that were not just in it for the money and who actually had talent, and cared about telling a good story. What Bob Thompson, Christian Faber, and Greg Farshety were for Bionicle, Tommy Anderson and The Hagemen brothers were for Ninjago. LEGO just happened to be lucky and hired the right people, which unfortunately simply was not the case with some of their other themes.
I am genuinely curious if the current generation of people working at LEGO, who grew up with themes like Bionicle and Ninjago, could perhaps care more about telling good stories? Maybe if we’re lucky, we might actually get that down the line in future LEGO original themes. Though I am also worried that the increasingly soulless corporate mentality that LEGO has been slowly adopting over the years will get in the way of that, even if they have genuine talent working for them.
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It’s crazy that Greg also did the writing for Ninjago’s graphic novels (which are actually pretty good compared to the show, as they utilize a lot more stealth warfare and actual ninja stuff in the comics). Did G2 have anything similar? I feel like BioSector01 had something about there being G2 comics made by Papercutz (Lego’s publisher under DC comics), but they just never saw widespread release.
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There were a few G2 books that were released, which even gave actual names to the Protectors. I am not sure whether Greg Farshety worked on them. But they never saw widespread release and they were never advertised anywhere. I myself never even had any idea that they even existed except after G2 had already ended.
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I bought my first Bionicle set (the Protector of Water) years before I ever heard about Hero Factory. Is that anecdotal evidence? Sure, but it does show that it could attract non-Hero Factory fans.
I remember my first actual exposure to Bionicle was 5002941, the Hero Pack polybag, which had an exclusive version of Tahu’s mask, a blue Skull Spider, and posters about Bionicle–and they were giving it away for free! Or maybe it was a gift-with-purchase; I wasn’t the one buying things back then. That was at least a few years after I had received my first LEGO set, and I already had at least a few Ninjago sets and a number of City and Star Wars ones at that point.
Ninjago’s graphic novels are by and far some of the best Ninjago media, whether the Greg Farshtey ones or the more recent Tri Vuong/Cameron Chittock ones. (Although the writing on some of the Greg Farshtey ones, like The Phantom Ninja, is surprisingly bland in retrospect, others, like Mask of the Sensei and Stone Cold, are pretty good, and Tri Vuong’s Garmadon and Shatterspin, and Cameron Chittock’s Strike of the Serpentine are better than a good number of Bionicle books, although they are still imperfect. Blasphemy doesn’t have to be untrue.)
He did not work on them. I think the novels are still available to buy for Kindle, and the graphic novels are on BioMedia Project.
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What astounds me is that Ninjago has been going on since 2011. But I also tell people it’s basically Bionicle’s spiritual successor in that it has a deep storyline, elemental heroes, and it’s length is incredible. I remember back in 2014 thinking Ninjago would end by that point since most Lego themes don’t last more than 3 years.
But nope. It’s been 15 years. It’s as cemented as Lego Star Wars now.
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same! that was also my first set, i bought loss at the same time!
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After thinking about it a little, how would fan reception cause G2 to fail? Just like G1 did, G2 should have brought in new fans that knew nothing about bionicle. And even if old fans didnt like the new sets this wouldn’t effect new kids opinions because they most likely wouldn’t be in the right places to hear the hate. Also, given the whole 5-15 age group Lego goes after, most G1 fans we’re older than the target audience anyway.
I don’t think fans caused G2s downfall, I think it was just another one of the LEGO themes that never took off cause of bad marketing or uninteresting story telling.
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It’s not as simple as people not liking it. The Bionicle community has always been home to bad actors who go above and beyond to cause trouble; the negative attitude at the time that Chronicler cited and like myself was present for enabled them.
The most recent example of similar behavior I can cite is the theft and subsequent burying of the original Hoseryx moc - an unrealistic amount of effort for nothing tangible in return.
Not by too much. It had only been five years, and if there’s one thing about Bionicle fans, they don’t ever grow up
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The what?
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Taking my older brother for example, who was born in 2000, he only kind of got into some of the later G1 sets before they where cancelled, and he never got into G2. Five years isn’t long but to a child it is, and it’s definitely long enough for a kid to get into something new.
Yeah it’s not impossible for someone to have grown up with both but in general it was either one or the other.
A minority of a community ruining something for everyone else? No that would never happen.
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I have made the mistake of assuming everyone knew about the most pathetic drama in the community again (you clearly live a much happier life than I do )
Long story short, the original Hoseryx (it seems as though the original images were hosted on discord but I’m sure they’re out there somewhere) was on display at a convention and some people stole it, drove it out into the middle of nowhere, and buried it at the side of the road for no good or sensible reason. They even filmed it.
If anyone ever doubts that Bionicle fans contain some of the most unhinged bad actors in any community, there’s definitely worse stories to tell, but none that paint a clearer picture.
I’m older than your older brother is, and I definitely grew up with both, although I really wasn’t involved in the greater community until shortly before G2 came around. I do agree, though, that you’re mostly gonna find folks in either one camp or the other.
My point was moreso that five years isn’t enough time to guarantee enough of the fanbase grew out of the theme. For me G2 was less a childhood experience and more like glorified pandering that I ate up like cocai-
uhh children’s website hmm
Like… yummy sprinkles. With my nose. Off the back of a mirror.
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That’s horrible! I’m no Hoseryx fan, but that is way too far. Did the creator seek legal charges against the thieves?
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I didn’t even know about this, but yeah. More evidence of the worst parts of this community.
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Just an “old” guy opinion here, but I think more then G1’s fan hating G2, it was just not caring (it wasn’t the right time for a reboot), plus the non existent advertisement.
Here I present my, somehow unusual, experience (I apologize for the long read):
Me and my brother grew up on G1 and as kids that didn’t have access to internet and weren’t into reading books (not that we even knew they existed and were the most comprehensive media storywise) we were big fans till 2006 (the mini comics that came with the sets, three movies and two videogames helped a lot), we more or less sticked around for 2007 because we liked some of the sets, but were turned down by the redesigns of 2008, by 2009 we had no idea of what was going on after Mahrii-Nui (not that we actually knew what happened in there too) and we only got Malum (me) and Gresh (my brother) since we found them extremely cool. I discovered how the story ended (just the fight between the two GSR) I believe in 2011 because while at the library’s computer, I had the random thought to look how Bionicle ended.
At the time I was obviously aware of Hero Factory and while I didn’t know anything about the story or characters, I didn’t like it aesthetically and becase I thought that Bionicle was cancelled to launch this new line (despite all, I still liked Bionicle).
Fast forward to late 2015 / early 2016, I finally had access to internet at home (by couple of years, it’s so fun to live in a technologically advanced country like Italy), but I would have never find out about it if I didn’t had the random thought to go check the lego site to see if there was still online something about the good old days of Bionicle and instead I was confronted with the fact that G2 had happened.
At the time I was 20 and my brother 17. He had already moved on from collecting toys, but he felt so much of that nostalgia effect that Lego was aiming for, that he got the Protector of Earth for like less then 5 bucks from Amazon, built it, thought it was neat, put it back in the box and never looked back at it. I thought that the new designs were cool even if they “stinked” of Hero Factory due to the CCBS, but at the time I was getting into Mastepiece and 3rd Party Transformers (and was already collecting PlayStation games), so since every cent counted, my scarce economic resources were directed elsewhere and I didn’t get any set.
While every 2015 Toa felt unique, the 2016 looked all the same to me and weren’t appealing. I wanted to follow at least the story, since I wasn’t buying the sets, but I found it boring, too much kid oriented (I believe those were the years when that started to mean extremely simple and watered down, like all the kids are mentally impaired) and poorly executed.
So in conclusion, G2 was poorly advertised, the story wasn’t appealing neither for the kids, nor for the G1’s fans and was launched too early to cater to the nostalgia effect for the latter (and for them to already have working adult money to throw at them).
Just think of what G2 could have been if lauched in this day and age when we are literally going crazy for a minifigure of a Tahu cosplayer.
P.S. I hope that it’s clear when I try to be ironic, since english is not my first language.
P.P.S. I clearly left behind my personal Bionicle’s dark age a couple of years ago and I have now consumed all the related media available, got into MOCing and bought all the 2015 Masters and Protectors plus 2016 Emiku (I still don’t like Uniters).
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