Elemental Transcendence
Entry posted by ToM Dracone
546 views
This was an idea I came up with yesterday.
What if, for every element, there was one single Toa in the course of Bionicle history whose control of it went above and beyond just the element itself? So the Toa would not merely control his or her element to its fullest extent possible, but could actually affect things that aren't strictly part of it, but are just associated with it? It's hard to explain in abstraction.
I got the idea with the image of a Toa of the Green leading an army of trees into battle, but being able to call on the aid of Rahi that lived in the trees and forests as well. Or perhaps he would be able to use some of the powers of plants himself, even without a bunch of them at his side – like being able to break and tear apart solid rock, like the Ents do to Isengard. So, he would transcend the element of Plant Life and become a Toa of the Forest, because everything in the realm of his element is in his power besides only plants themselves. (And yes, I have been reading The Two Towers recently. But I got the idea for this while reading The Things They Carried, which is about the Vietnam war, of all things.)
And then I thought that Hahli might well be the perfect Toa of Water to have this sort of power. She can breathe underwater, she has fins, she can swim incredibly fast – all without the aid of a Kaukau or Kakama. She's already truly "one with the sea", as it were. I also remembered the end of BL7, where she leads Mantax's army, and though I forget how that came about, it gave me the idea that she could make sea Rahi do her bidding. So, she would assume the title of Toa of the Sea.
I hope you see what I'm thinking of by now. For other elements it sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. For fire, for instance, you could have a Toa who can control magma and lava, even though those aren't strictly fire, and at the height of his power he could even cause a volcano to erupt, or stop one – that sort of thing. A Toa of the Volcano.
And so on. The idea seems less apt for the current storyline as it is, where there's little sense of mysticism or fate or legends left around Toa. But if you extend the original incarnation of Toa, as legendary heroes come to save the Matoran, and can apply that sense to a world where there have been many Toa in the course of history, and will be many more in the future, then it doesn't seem odd that there would be certain Toa of legend who can do so much more than the others of their element.
It's just a thought. I would like to use it somewhere, but it doesn't fit in the world of Quest for Lost Dreams, because there have only been three teams of Toa in that... But maybe it would work in Janus's Bionicle: Imagine.
~ ToM
19 Comments
Recommended Comments