The BaseBlog

For nine years, LEGO put out the BIONICLE theme. For most of those years, BZPower (or BZCommunity and KanohiPower) was there discussing, speculating, reviewing, and all-in-all enjoying this mix of toys and story that made up BIONICLE. We had fun. We had positive outlooks, and positive looks back. And for those of you who don't remember, we had a lot of negativity also. Remember the complaints about silver? Inika builds? Cheesy films? We've offered both praise and criticism for BIONICLE long before Hero Factory was a mere idea in some LEGO executive somewhere.

And criticism is not a bad thing. Many of us are looking back, noticing things about the line that we never noticed before. We have new perspective, and with that perspective, we are reexamining BIONICLE. GregF was awesome, back in the day, but we're older now. We've read more books, invested in more stories, and we now find that, as a book author, Mr. Farshtey was not the great literary giant we once saw him as. We see him as a talented author, whose books were entertaining, but not exactly as incredible as some of the authors we have read as we moved on past books with 200 pages or less and with easy-to-read text.

We also look back on BIONICLE's story, and now that we have expanded our view of entertainment, it is no longer the grand epic we thought once we have read true epics, and engaged in other mythologies. BIONICLE was great for what it was, but it is still a kid's toy line.

We follow Hero Factory and Ninjago now, because those are what are being made now, and when they're complete as BIONICLE is, we will move on to whatever is next. It's not negativity, it is a healthful contentedness, while we also look back favorably and sometimes with a more critical eye towards what our past has been.

But we don't need to coddle BIONICLE and cling to hope of its return to be happy, or to be positive. If it returns, I will give the shouts of victory with all the rest, but just as I enjoy and discuss BIONICLE today, two years after it gave up the ghost, I will enjoy and discuss the new guard of LEGO themes. I also will talk about BIONICLE in ways that examine its weak points. "How could this have been done better? Was this really as impressive as it seemed, or was it simply the novelty? Does this make sense?" One does not need to coddle BIONICLE to be positive. In fact, this discussion of BIONICLE's strong and weak suits are inherently positive, because even though we are looking at it with minds that have absorbed things that may be more impressive, we are still talking about it.

As people who have seen things come and go, and as folks who have had things they love give their swan song, we understand that BIONICLE is very likely gone, but that does not mean we wouldn't like it back. And we understand from the past that LEGO rarely brings back themes without radically changing them, which, in many cases, alienates those who followed the theme before. (See Alpha Team: Mission "Deep Freeze", so-called)

It is in fact, another very positive thing when we look forward to what the LEGO Company has in mind. They gave us BIONICLE, so why do so many, in the name of that very theme, often bear a negative attitude towards anything the company puts out, if it doesn't have the name "BIONICLE" on it.

Discussion is positive. Rejecting the present and future in nostalgia for the past is negative.

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