Jump to content

Chip Wiseman

Members
  • Posts

    125
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Chip Wiseman

  1. Excellent work! I'd love to see the Unmasked books at some point, as they have some exclusive behind-the-scenes interviews.
  2. Ooh, nice work with the multimedia update! Gathered Friends will definitely use those versions from now on. Speaking of the podcast, here are a couple of issues I found while reading Book 2. Not many this time! Chapter 3: "The Toa 'gaped' in amazement" "Gasped", perhaps? Wall of History, Last-Moment Save: "Until the threat of the swarms 'is past'." Should be "has passed".
  3. I've started reading this all from the beginning with some friends, so I'll keep you posted with any errors/points of confusion along the way. So far, up to the end of Book 1. For reference, I'm using the Complete Collection, "Complete" edition, up to date as of December 21st 2018. Book 1, Chapter 23 (page 104) Everything from "Then it is settled" to "I think... that 'Charge!' is not a plan" This section wasn't in the original Tale of the Toa and feels awkwardly placed, specifically with how it leads into the next section. I'm not sure where this section comes from, but the moment it builds to (the raid on the Nui-Jaga nest in the jungle) is never resolved and it just hard cuts to Pohatu's group recovering a mask from a lone Jaga in Po-Wahi. Also, since Kopaka both ends this section and starts the next one by telling Lewa that a plan is foolish, the boundary between the two sections is blurred. On a first read, it seems like the two sections just tell one continuous scene, but that doesn't make sense either. I vote to cut the section entirely, unless there is an existing second half to that scene that got lost in the shuffle. Should be "fling it against the wall" as the Manas is the one being flung and is always referred to as "it". Should be "I say to Puku." or, "I say to the crab." as Takua is clearly addressing Puku and not just speaking to himself. Should be "but notices that Matau is trapped inside it" or "but notices Matau trapped inside it" Hope that helps! As an aside, I gotta say that re-reading from the beginning really highlights how rough the early story is. Even when the grammar is perfect, the characterisation is very barebones and the Tales of the Tohunga transcription really messes with the canon as established by the comics and books. Good call making that epilogue optional!
  4. Yeah, I wouldn't expect something similar for G2 until at least 2020 at the earliest. If you want to contribute, you could always start converting the G2 books you own into digital text files, either by scanning them and using OCR or by manually typing them out. That way, if such a project does end up happening, you could provide the raw text as a base. Also, happy one-year anniversary to the initial publication of this topic!
  5. Good to see the project is still going well, just thought I'd bump the topic to avoid it dying. That said, do you think the slower update schedule is indicative that editing is almost done? I'm planning on having a hardcover copy made of each book (for personal use, not to sell ) but I wanna be sure that it won't be made obsolete by a newer edition mere days later.
  6. Whew, lad! This is a fantastic service you've done for the community. Truth be told, I've always wanted to do something similar, but I'm far too lazy to actually do so. Glad to see you had the commitment to pull it off, and also to continue working on it past release to make it the best that it can be! Hmm, after this is all done, I can just envision the completed tomes lining a shelf... ooh, the chills!
  7. I feel like this would work better on /r/bioniclememes than the BZP boards.
  8. Why not Creeping in My Soul? It's practically the same song!
  9. It's great seeing our little franchise getting mainstream recognition, as much as Reddit can provide, anyway. The sudden influx of memes is as inexplicable as it is amusing, and I look forward to what else lies in store before something new obscures it.
  10. There are, in fact, other planets in the Solis Magna system. Certain story materials do show the GSR visiting other planets, and Greg has confirmed that it never left the star system. As for space travel? That's difficult to say. The Matoran Universe inhabitants were relatively technologically advanced, but knew that they were confined to the domes that housed their islands, so they would not invest time and resources into a fruitless effort. On the other hand, the Bara Magna inhabitants had precious few resources to work with, and the Bota Magna inhabitants were mostly savages from what we've heard. Now that the three planets have become one, and the cultures merged under the starry skies of Solis Magna, it may be possible that they could engineer space travel within a few hundred years. After all, the GSR itself is a space-faring vessel, and the Great Beings' knowledge is not lost to the ages.
  11. If I recall correctly, the Matoran knew that islands were contained within domes and that each dome was linked to other domes. They likely also noticed that the domes' relative positions to one another occasionally changed (such as, unbeknownst to them, when the robot moved its arms) so I imagine cartography was mostly done on a dome-by-dome basis rather than a full universe map.
  12. Nice to see you getting back into this! It'll be interesting to see where the story goes in this rebooted continuity of yours. Oh, and I think I see a familiar colour palette on our friend Doc, there
  13. Bows could have been made a lot more poseable in G2. Like Bfahome said, some kind of variable-length axle (maybe it pushes through the centre of the bow, and acts like an arrow) would have helped matters. But the weapon variety was much, much appreciated. G1 was extremely over-saturated with swords and spears, and many of the other weapons just functioned as swords of a slightly different shape, for example, the Toa Inika weapons. Axonn's axe, Gali's hooks... we could have done with more variety like that.
  14. Wow, that is really cool. What could we do as a community to mark the event? A massive Discord chat? A post-pictures-of-the-sky topic? Saying a prayer to Mata Nui in the language of the Matoran?
  15. A quick google search reveals that Invincibility Robot actually continued all the way up to and including the Stars, believe it or nay. Star Soldier/Brick Soldier may or may not be made by the same company, but they existed in one form or another from knock-off 2005 sets through Hero Factory and even 2015 Bionicle.
  16. Personally, I'm a firm believer in the novels' canon over the movies'. So for the question "Why did Lhikan die?" I'd respond with "Teridax shot a lethal shadow beam at Vakama and Lhikan intercepted it." But in terms of the movie specifically, many things could have happened. Blunt force trauma, shadow energy 'leaking' around the shield and onto Lhikan... but whatever the case, the real-life reason is that the producers didn't want to give him a violent on-screen death.
  17. Your work codifying and constructing the Matoran language is absolutely phenomenal! How far along are you with the dictionary 3rd edition?

    1. JRRT

      JRRT

      Glad you like it! I estimate the 3rd Edition is about 60% done.

  18. Is there any particular reason for the servant and slave classes of Steltian to be separate? As far as I can tell, the only difference is physical size, which can be easily hand-waved by saying slaves are just slightly bigger servants. Size variation within species does exist, after all, and the difference between servant and slave does not seem as drastic as between Upper Class and servant. Basically, I'm suggesting that these two are merged into a single class.
  19. This topic probably belongs more in the Creative Outlet than S&T, perhaps the Library?
  20. The second movie has a lot of strengths. While the first movie suffered from an inconsistent tone and very little character development, and the third completely re-wrote certain characters (read: Vakama) to facilitate a poorly-thought-out betrayal plot, the second movie for the most part is solid. It knew what parts of the 2004 story to keep, and which parts to gloss over (though some acknowledgement of the struggle against the Morbuzakh would have been nice). As for The Legend Reborn... it was the prologue to a trilogy that never was. And they took some MAJOR liberties with the visual representations of characters and events.
  21. Many of the voice actors who worked on the first three Bionicle movies came from the Ocean Group, and had previously worked on anime dubs such as Dragon Ball Z. A surprisingly large number of them later went on to voice characters in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Greg Farshtey used to (still does?) play World of Warcraft; he named a lot of his WoW characters after characters from Bionicle. Some say that the inverse is true for Teridax, who was supposedly Greg's WoW character first and then later the name given to Metru Nui's Makuta. The prototype design for the Kanohi Ignika seen in the console versions of Bionicle Heroes was later canonised as the Ignika's original form before it fused with Vezon's face.
  22. These are really nice! I especially like the way you bulked up Nilkuu without losing the original's aesthetic, and the way you represented 'skull infection' on Pohatu with the trans lime parts. You're right when you say Nilkuu is the main attraction though, his presence really overpowers Pohatu's!
  23. This all depends about the subject of your question. G1 or G2? They both have at least some ambiguity. In G2 especially, we have the graphic novels, the chapter books, the 2015 animations and Journey to One, all of which cover different points in time (there is some overlap with the chapter books, but I'm basing this off product descriptions so I don't know the details) As far as I know, there is no official word on what the canon priority is. Does JtO supersede the books, etc? We may never know. As for G1, there is a bit more clarity. In terms of story details, the list is as follows: 1: Greg. Greg Farshtey (through direct sources such as the 'Chat with Greg' thread on the Lego Message Boards) has ultimate power, unless his words contradict stuff he said previously. However, this still supersedes all other tiers. 2: Books. The chapter books and encyclopedias are the next most canon source, and this includes web serials published on bioniclestory.com. 3: Comics. The visual designs are not-so-canon, because they are based off of the sets, but the story is canon unless contradicted by the books. 4: Movies. Because all the movies got novelizations, the movies themselves only serve to fill in the gaps and give us a better idea of what the characters look like, although descriptions in the books are still more accurate. 5: Semi-canon sources such as the MNOG and MNOG II. Certain parts of these are considered canon while others aren't.
  24. This really is an interesting topic. At first I thought "What if their mental processes are slowed down to compensate for their longevity, like a tortoise?" But then I remembered: we have characters that treat each day as being just as long as an Earth day. If their brains were slower than ours, days would appear to move much faster to them. So I guess we can debunk that theory. What if they use a base-6 numbering system? Then, 100,000 years in their numbers would be only 7,777 in ours. Still very long, but more manageable. I say base-6 specifically, because 6 is an arc number in Bionicle, and there are multiple theories out there that provide a strong case as to why this may be their number base. Perhaps Glatorian reach mental maturity comparatively early on (like you say, anywhere between 20 and 10,000 years) but they don't reach... ahem... breeding maturity until much later, like at 100,000 years? Maybe that's why the older Glatorian regard Gresh as a kid, not because he exhibits traits that we humans associate with young adulthood.
  25. I like Bionicle G1 for most of the same reasons I like Steven Universe now: A low-fantasy worldCharacters that are human-like, but very alienSome of the coolest powers ever thought upExcellent villains and heroes alikeA constant stream of information revealing more about the world, while also keeping the sense of mysteryUnexpected plot twistsFusions!But above all, I am invested in the characters. Much like Greg did when writing them, we get to know the characters as we read about them. Despite there being a huge cast of friendly and unfriendly faces, none of them feel like clones of one another. (Aside from the earlier sets, of course!) In G2, the characters feel very by-the-book and cliché, at least what we've seen so far. I haven't read any of the Ryder Windham books, but it doesn't seem like there's anywhere near the amount of character development and world-building that the G1 books had. I can only hope that G2 pulls what G1 did and really ramps up the storytelling in its third year.
×
×
  • Create New...