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The Mahri were pretty weak as sets? Honestly, I have to disagree there. 2007 was a great year for sets in general, and the Mahri were one example of that year's design brilliance. They were the first Toa with really creative, non-repetitive builds (or at least, creative by BIONICLE canister set standards), and they embraced that. Matoro and Kongu were the first Toa with really distinctive physiques since Pohatu Nuva and Onua Nuva in 2002. Jaller was the first Toa with an animal companion. Their piece counts were also rather impressive, even when you take away the ten ammo pieces (or sixteen in Kongu's case) that artificially inflated them. They also had some quite nice mask and weapon designs.

 

Don't get me wrong. When I first saw the Toa Mahri... I really, really disliked them. For one thing, I had really liked the Toa Inika masks, so the return to traditional masks didn't get me as excited as it did for other people. But furthermore, as an artist, I had gotten used to Toa teams having an overwhelming sense of uniformity. Some parts were specifically "Toa Metru parts", others were specifically "Toa Nuva parts", and still more were specifically "Toa Inika parts". These new Toa dispensed with that rigid formula: there was not one piece of armor that was standard across all six Toa, and two of the Toa even used Piraka torsos, a non-Toa torso piece!

 

Over time, though, I realized that this kind of rigid thinking had been holding both me and the BIONICLE theme back, and that overcoming it was a necessary step for the sets to advance beyond repetitive "clone sets" that only varied in terms of their masks, weapons, minor variations in their armor, and on extremely rare occasions, posture/physique. Not only was this liberating as a fan and an artist, it was liberating as a MOCist. Parts of all kinds, whether or not they originated on Toa, were now fair game! And members of a Toa team were allowed an unprecedented level of originality.

 

Did the sets have drawbacks? Sure, as did all Toa teams. Most of the Toa Mahri's drawbacks dealt with their terribly unrealistic proportions — gangly arms and legs, arms of uneven length in some cases, excessively wide shoulders, lack of a right hand joint for Toa Mahri Hewkii, gappy torsos on Hewkii and Hahli. Nevertheless, I feel like they were a step the BIONICLE theme had to take. All constraction heroes since 2007 owed a great debt to the Toa Mahri for breaking all the rules previous Toa teams had established.

 

Hero Factory has had a funny relationship with "clone sets". No team of heroes has been quite as radically diverse as the Toa Mahri. For starters, they generally share a torso armor design. But at the same time, some lessons from the Toa Mahri still hold true for them. Members of a team can have very different armor configurations, as was demonstrated to great effect in the Breakout series. Masks are not always in the character's primary color, like with Breez in the Brain Attack series. And not every character has a completely unique signature weapon. Sometimes, in design, things do get worse before they get better. Sometimes the old rules have to be erased completely before you can know for sure which parts of them are really necessary and worth holding onto in the future.

OMNIMON!

 

Ah Omnimon such a large part of my childhood.

 

This feels needed here: