So a while ago Lucina put up this excellent blog entry about a tantalizing piece of dialogue that we got from Makuta in Mask of Light, that never really went anywhere. It's a nice little piece of "what if" to consider, but ultimately the existence of the dialogue could be fairly well explained as another example of all of the weird nonsense that was going on at the end of Mask of Light. "We'll awaken Mata Nui, except we won't!" "All of the island's inhabitants must gather at the Kini-Nui and then come underground, except not really!" etc.

Or at least, that's what I thought until Torsti put up the ISOs for the CDs in his BIONICLE Style Guide. There is an extremely interesting note made in the introduction:

The Rahi are beasts influenced by the infected masks they wear; the Bohrok are carrying out a legitimate mission, and only lack of understanding of the part of others makes them seem bad. Even Makuta will eventually be shown to have good reasons for his seemingly nasty behavior... it is his methods that are at fault more than his motivation.

Now, try to rectify that with the "bwahaha I will put Mata Nui to sleep and take over the world because I'm evil" Makuta we got. It's impossible. There is simply no way to cover both with one character. So I'm going to put forth a theory: it would seem that up to and through 2003, Makuta had a legitimate and potentially very interesting motivation for plaguing the islanders. By the point Legends of Metru Nui came out in 2004, the story team had rewritten him to be a more "kid-friendly" villain fitting into a black-and-white paradigm.

But that leaves us to wonder what Makuta's original motivation was. The line from MoL explains why he is doing what he is doing, at least (he believes that Mata Nui's reawakening will cause him pain, and so he does his best to prevent the people trying to awaken him from achieving their goal). But then why does he believe that Mata Nui's reawakening will be to his detriment? Why did he send him to sleep in the first place?

Like, really, if you have an idea, let me know. Without seeing something like the 2001 story bible, which would contain the core plot as it was initially conceived., it may just be one of those things that is impossible to know.