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What did Makuta mean in Mask of Light?


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What is the meaning behind this dialogue in the Mask of Light movie:

 

Makuta: Well played, Toa. Now, I will protect Mata-Nui from you.

 

Takanuva: Protect him?

 

Makuta: Sleep spares him pain. Awake, he suffers.

 

Takanuva: You - are not protecting him!

 

Makuta: My duty is to the Mask of Shadows!

 

How is Makuta "protecting" Mata-Nui from the Toa? How would Mata-Nui suffer if awake? And what does Makuta mean that his duty is to the Kraahkan?

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Well as soon as Mata Nui awakens, he gets forced out of his own body by Makuta and gets stranded on a desert planet. So I'd say that sleep DOES spare him pain. Makuta is mocking Takanuva and everyone else without them realizing because they don't know Makuta's plan.

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Most of that dialogue was written before the rest of the story was fleshed out, for one thing. Originally, LEGO had planned Bionicle just like any other theme, with a projected lifespan of three years. In the original concept, defeating Makuta would awaken Mata Nui. So, in the context of that original plan, when the screenplay was written, it would have made more sense. After they decided to keep it going for a lot longer, we saw things from a whole new perspective, and that bit of dialogue doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

 

That said, Teridax was mainly mocking Takanuva, trying to make him question things and hesitate. Teridax perceived Mata Nui's ignorance of his people to be worthy of punishment, in a really messed up sense. Also, Teridax needed Mata Nui to die, at least long enough for his spirit to leave his body so that Teridax could take over. For that to happen, MN's health had to deteriorate, and Teridax had been monitoring that to the best of his abilities. So, he was protecting the part of his Plan that involved Mata Nui. If the Toa woke him up too soon, his Plan would fail. In that context, the line makes more sense. The "suffering" part was just him being deceptive and dramatic.

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I'm theorycrafting/over-reading a bit, but at the time, it was one of our earlier hints that he might have broader motive. Prior, he was simply evil, with jealously as his primary motivation. This line reads almost as self-justification. "It's easier this way." Merciful.

 

Pure evil is easier to identify than evil that argues it's actually doing a good thing. Similar arguments appear as justification for leading the Matoran elsewhere in Bionicle, iirc.

 

Could also be that Mata Nui would be pretty upset at the goings-on of the last thousand years. Better that he just stays asleep.

 

The "duty to the mask of shadows" line was always awkward. I guess it's another justification (mask made me do it)?

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Let's tackle this with a heavy dose of over-analyzation and misinterpretation:

 

"My duty is to the Mask of Shadows!"

 

The Kraahkan is a universal symbol of the Makuta - thus he is in more literal terms saying, "My duty is to accomplish the tasks set forth for the Makuta race by Mata Nui."

 

Sleep spares him pain. Awake, he suffers.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if Teridax was aware that Mata Nui was on his way to report back to the Great Beings. Sleep keeps Mata Nui alive, whereas he would be deactivated upon returning to Solis Magna. After all, is the duty of a Makuta not to preserve Mata Nui's place as Great Spirit of the universe? In a twisted way, Teridax is doing just that, and the entire MU likely owes their lives to him.

 

The truth is that the writers had no clue what the 2008 "twist" would be and made up some stuff that would sound deep and sophisticated to the mind of a 10-year-old. If you want to try to make more out of less and give actual credibility to these statements, I think I've done an all-right job.

Edited by TheSkeletonMan939
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The truth is that the writers had no clue what the 2008 "twist" would be and made up some stuff that would sound deep and sophisticated to the mind of a 10-year-old. If you want to try to make more out of less and give actual credibility to these statements, I think I've done an all-right job.

Wrong. Faber and Farshety confirmed that the giant robot thing was planned from the very beginning. The writers knew that. A background character even says the line "he's a giant robot" after Hahli makes her speech towards the end. Had 2003 ended the way they would have originally planned, we would have seen the GSR rising up at the end of Mask of Light. 

 

On the "duty is to the mask of shadows" bit, since I didn't address it before, it could mean any number of things. As was already suggested, the Kraahkan is the symbol of the Makuta, and so he could have meant that he was doing the task his race was assigned to. However, a wildly different perspective comes into play when you read the novelization. In the book, Teridax says "my duty is to the shadows." No hint of a mask. In this context, he's specifically referring to himself and the other Makuta, since they are the most common bearers of the element of Shadow.

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The truth is that the writers had no clue what the 2008 "twist" would be and made up some stuff that would sound deep and sophisticated to the mind of a 10-year-old. If you want to try to make more out of less and give actual credibility to these statements, I think I've done an all-right job.

 

Wrong. Faber and Farshety confirmed that the giant robot thing was planned from the very beginning. The writers knew that. A background character even says the line "he's a giant robot" after Hahli makes her speech towards the end.

 

Neither of them were writers for the film.

They may have made general contributions to the narrative but the nitty-gritty dialogue was not their own. Unless Greg or Bob Thompson or someone on the actual story team made the "Mata Nui is a giant robot!" thing clear to whoever wrote the screenplay, there's no reason to assume the twist had any real bearing on the film's plot.

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Let's tackle this with a heavy dose of over-analyzation and misinterpretation:

 

"My duty is to the Mask of Shadows!"

 

The Kraahkan is a universal symbol of the Makuta - thus he is in more literal terms saying, "My duty is to accomplish the tasks set forth for the Makuta race by Mata Nui."

 

Sleep spares him pain. Awake, he suffers.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if Teridax was aware that Mata Nui was on his way to report back to the Great Beings. Sleep keeps Mata Nui alive, whereas he would be deactivated upon returning to Solis Magna. After all, is the duty of a Makuta not to preserve Mata Nui's place as Great Spirit of the universe? In a twisted way, Teridax is doing just that, and the entire MU likely owes their lives to him.

 

The truth is that the writers had no clue what the 2008 "twist" would be and made up some stuff that would sound deep and sophisticated to the mind of a 10-year-old. If you want to try to make more out of less and give actual credibility to these statements, I think I've done an all-right job.

 

I heard that, instead of deactivating Mata-Nui, the Great Beings were going to transfer his soul into a an even bigger robot, and Makuta would have assumed control of the MU- this was back when he was good, of course.

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The truth is that the writers had no clue what the 2008 "twist" would be and made up some stuff that would sound deep and sophisticated to the mind of a 10-year-old. If you want to try to make more out of less and give actual credibility to these statements, I think I've done an all-right job.

 

Wrong. Faber and Farshety confirmed that the giant robot thing was planned from the very beginning. The writers knew that. A background character even says the line "he's a giant robot" after Hahli makes her speech towards the end.

 

Neither of them were writers for the film.

They may have made general contributions to the narrative but the nitty-gritty dialogue was not their own. Unless Greg or Bob Thompson or someone on the actual story team made the "Mata Nui is a giant robot!" thing clear to whoever wrote the screenplay, there's no reason to assume the twist had any real bearing on the film's plot.

 

Greg was a consultant for the script. He reviewed the whole thing. 

But not just him. There were other members of the story team that were heavily involved in every aspect of the movies. Didn't you watch the extras on the DVDs? Robot was planned from the beginning, but they couldn't explicitly say so back then because it would have spoiled it. I named Greg and Faber because they confirmed that the robot was planned from the beginning, 2 years before the movie began production. 

 

Timeline time!

 

1. Bionicle concept is developed, including the "MN is a giant robot" part

2. sets are developed and story is fleshed out

3. 2001

4. 2002/production of movie begins

5. 2003/movie is released

6. prequel arc

7. Ignition arc

8. Robot is revealed to the rest of the world

 

Clear?

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Robot was planned from the beginning, but they couldn't explicitly say so back then because it would have spoiled it.

 

Yes, we all know the robot was planned from the beginning. I'm confident that the writers of this film didn't know that though. Whether or not Greg was a consultant is irrelevant.

 

If the writers had known this marvelous revelation about who Mata Nui was, don't you think the ending would have been a little less sloppy and confusing? The Matoran et al. go to "awaken Mata Nui" and lift up a rock door and something happens (read: nothing happens), because in reality the writers had no clue who this nebulous "Mata Nui" guy was, and thought that having some bright lights go off was ambiguous enough to hide their ignorance.

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Funnily enough, the line "my duty is to the mask of shadows" was actually originally scripted as "my duty remains to the shadows", but was accidentally mixed up by the writers to the current one. This was revealed in one of those really old Bzp news articles, though I don't know which one. The original line can also be seen in the novelization of the film, in which it is correct. I remember the article saying that they kept the mix-up as it was because they "thought it was funny".

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  • 2 weeks later...

I like to think that the Kraahkan was at least partially sentient and that it fed Teridax's sense of bitterness and envy over the millennia.

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  • 3 weeks later...

 

 

Greg was a consultant for the script. He reviewed the whole thing. 

 

...was he? Because I distinctly remember him saying that he thought characterization was way off the mark from their Story Bible (especially for Pohatu and Lewa). If he had any sort of serious input on the story I thought that wouldn't have been the case.

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There's a TTV article theorizing that BIONICLE G2 took certain notes from BIONICLE G1 that weren't ultimately used, specifically that the Kraahkan did corrupt Makuta and make him believe he was doing the right thing, like the Mask of Ultimate Power corrupting G2 Makuta.

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  • 5 years later...

Before the ret Canon Makuta was a natural destructive force and wasn't pure veil. We can't clearly know what would become but we know that the giant Mata-Nui body was already planned and he was already sick by Makuta's shadows, may be Makuta was a natural Matanui's mechanism that was corrupted creating all this "cancer"

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