Franchises do this all the time. There must be 500 different versions of Spider-Man. All the stories are pretty much different, but the characters retain their names and general personalities. True, but they attribute it to parallel universes and don't completely discard the old universes like LEGO did herein. On the other hand, when DC Comics did their "New 52" thing, it was a reboot of the main DC universe and even DC's alternate universes, like Earth-2. It's not unprecedented. But, as many have said, you can always interpret this story as an AU. BIONICLE's main story always left that as a possibility. I figured I'd just do that. Took me a while to properly clear my head. I'm not in my happy place