I have for the longest time wondered this. Three Makuta in Karda nui lost their eyesight when Matoro sacrificed his life to save Mata Nui. This forced them to carry a shadow matoran on their back in order to use their eyes through telepathy.
Why did they do so? Makuta are shapeshifters. Couldn’t they grow another set of eyes? Or absorb a matoran in order to have necessary energy to do so.
One of the kraata powers is healing. They can heal serious injuries on themselves and on other beings. I assume this would include regenerating missing limbs.
Also, Makuta are made of gaseous antidermis which lacks eyes. Biosector states antidermis heals up when it is within makuta armor. Not to mention How could an antidemis even become blinded when it was safely inside the makuta armor when the blinding light hit them.
Well Makuta do have eyes, even though they are a gas in their base form it still doesn’t mean that their physically body don’t have any limits. Take for example Maxilos the body Teridax posses has eyes thusly its the same eyes Teridax uses to see meaning would they get destroyed he would be blinded. Also as I understands it the antidermis must also be contained to a physical body to be conscious, as the antidermis from Teridax appered to be both dormant and trapped in the Pirakas vat meaning that antidermis can only change host once their body is destroyed or wounded. Because of this the gas is confined to the limitation of its host which would conclude that the damage made to the host body affects the Makuta. Basically antidermis is just the Makuta’s conciousness and that conciousness is transferred to the body when the antidermis has a host.
As for why they couldn’t heal themselves though I have no clue, maybe it had something to do with the blinding light from the ignika.
Also as I understands it the antidermis must also be contained to a physical body to be conscious.
Makuta are fully conscious while they are in their gas form. Makuta Teridax could manipulate Piraka in Mangaia, go to mahri nui and go to Mata Nui’s command center while he was nothing but a cloud of dark green smoke.
Maxilos body = makuta armor?
A theory: Maybe eyes in makuta armor are artificial. like robot eyes of Maxilos. They could not regenerate them since they were artificial and not biomechanical. And lacked the resources to replace them while in Karda Nui.
Also it might be their healing powers only worked on when they were biomechanical. Makuta Teridax of Melding universe needed to physically patch his armor. He could not regenerate it.
Although this does not explain why he didn’t just change his shape to seal the wound.
I mean, that’s literally what they did in 08 for the Makuta, blinding the 3 in Karda Nui, and having the 3 in the swamp mutate so they lose a vast majority of the Kraata powers. Otherwise, they could probably defeat all 6 without a scratch.
Which is strange because they could of just as easily said not all Makuta have access to ALL of the kraata powers and had said only Teridax/the leader of the brotherhood has full power or something like that
Greg once said that the Makuta didn’t have enough time for repairing their eyes, as they were just a part of their armor, because the Toa Nuva arrived, and they spent their time keeping under the Toa check, rather than spending it with repairing their armor, and giving the Toa opportunity to strike them when they didn’t want them to. I guess they could have used their Quick Healing ability, but it was said that it needs time to heal the injuries, and they didn’t want to waste any on this. It was more simple just to use shadow matoran with mental connection, and keep doing their job.
It’s possible that Quick healing only really works on the body, rather than external or inhabited armour. This would mean it actually became a somewhat redundant power after they became antidermis.
It wasn’t open. The receptors of the armor burnt out, like if you overcharge/discharge an electrical object e.g. the batteries of the tv controller runs out, but if you don’t change or charge them, the useless batteries will still be there and the controller won’t work, until you change them. And so did the eyes/eye receptors of the Makuta. The inmense amount of light burnt the receptors out, they were still there, but were useless, - like a battery which already run out of power - and they would have needed to change them, but they didn’t had time.
I mean think about it. If a sun just pop up in the front of you with an inmense amout of light, you would be blinded, because our eyes couldn’t handle it, and you would need a surgery to fix them. The same thing happened to them, except that their eyes are mechanical, so they would have needed to call an engineer to fix them.
this is really just a case of sets>story. They needed to be blind so that we could have the kra-matoran as sets, and have a reason for being on the makuta’s backs.