Hau1

Very eerie and excellent colours and shaping.

Lhikan and Kikinalo. There are standalone cannister Toa I **might** take over Lhikan in a nostalgia/favourite character matchup (Tahu, basically), but the Metru are the best over all Toa: scale, poseability, and masks, and Lhikan is The Red One and The Gold One and The Mentor. So he'd be in contention if he were a cannister set. But he's also got a full-blown Rahi making him a titan set? My favourite, hands-down.

I can't decide if "collecting" is the right word or the wrong word for my relationship with Bionicle sets/parts. On the one hand, I harbour zero ambitions of getting everything: every set, every mask, every etc. The only sets that I really have ambitions of pursuing are the ones I sold off in my dark age--and there's not THAT many of them left. On the other hand... the best kind of used LEGO to luck into these days for me is Bionicle, and I can't go shopping on a Bricklink site without checking out at least two categories of part on every site: "Bionicle" and "Bionicle: Kanohi." So my "collection" is still something I enjoy finding and acquiring and adding to.

Pretty much my actual top three Toa! (For sets/figures anyway--characters is another matter. But we wouldn't have had 5 Tahus in a character head-to-head.)

Getting strong Gadunka vibes (big teeth and dark blue on a fish will do that).

It's a combination of belonging to one of the first two Series of Collectible Minifigures--from before they figured out what the demand would really be and they were nearly impossible to find--mixed with the fact that it was probably the most Army Building Desireable of the first two waves: people didn't just want one or two, they wanted ten or twenty or a hundred. Mixed low availability with high demand and you get... high prices.

I've never had the income and interest at the same time to truly collect: the first few years of Bionicle, when I had high school money and full interest in the sets was probably closest (and I never did get many of the larger sets), but I've definitely noticed a slowing of interest in new sets in the past few years, and it has been quite liberating. Not that there's been a loss of interest in LEGO, but the space I have for it is fairly well filled and I have ample parts for what I do, so it's been mostly a case of looking for used LEGO and filling in holes on Bricklink. The used LEGO thing scratches my LEGO itch better for a couple reasons. First, it's generally cheaper. Second, it skews a lot closer to my childhood, which is where my locus of interests are (although LEGO's nostalgia-driven sets of late: Black Falcons, Barracuda Bay, etc.--are trying to distract me here. Third, and the real draw, is that it's kind of like a lottery: you never know what you've got and there's the thrill of the hunt. Looking at the ever-cranking-up parade of multi-hundred-dollar sets LEGO is releasing, it is EXHAUSTING to think of trying to chase all that, or even some of it.

I realise that working for LEGO undoubtedly means one can't disclose anything about what one is working on, but there is part of me that just likes knowing that LEGO is hiring a Bionicle/Constraction builder as a set designer. Even if you only ever get to work on Classic boxes of bricks without instructions, it's still got to be a great day in your life and this is a worthy celebration.

To make a sports analogy: "can [MEDIOCRE TEAM X] beat [SUPERSTAR TEAM Y]?" Yes. That's why they play the game. In other words, I dislike the video-gamifying idea that you can assign a rank/stat/power level to different characters, and a question like this verges on that: we're not talking about "could a Matoran defeat the GSR?" but about whether one warrior creature could beat a similarly-sized second warrior creature. Even if you can determine that Creature A is stronger/faster/more powerful than Creature B, that doesn't mean that Creature A would always win. If it did, there'd be no underdogs winning, no upsets.

I'm also not really into the canonisation contests. I've tried to keep an open mind about not judging other people's fun, but I just can't get into it. @Master Inikais right that the time since Gen1 ended matters, and I would add that it's not just that mental pictures have ossified, but it's also that the contest isn't a PART of Gen1, but something being tacked on by a subset of fans with the authorisation of one of the creators years later. And "ossified" is the word I think is most important. As long as Gen1 was running, things could still be added in or new vistas opened up, and even things that had already occurred could be retconned away. Now there's no real chance of either new vistas or retconning: it's just trying to paint in more and more detail into the crevices. At the risk of bringing up a fandom that is not exactly everyone's favourite, it's trying to "Pottermore" Bionicle. I say this too, as someone ever-ready to dig up more wastepaper basket notes on Middle-earth, so it's not that I don't like new content. But there's a difference between new content by the creator(s) and canonised fan-art. At my gut, Bionicle is LEGO to me: a physical toy. The only real way to expand the canon in my mind is for LEGO to develop more sets. Everything else is alt-canon, fanon. Not that fan-canon is bad! But I'd like the contests a whole lot more if it were "here's a character LEGO never made: go nuts and show us your version!" than "here's a character LEGO never made--make your own and we'll find one to arbitrarily elevate as Real." Which is less fun, at least for me, sounds potentially divisive, since it's easy to have two awesome builds with differing takes, and still isn't "a new set from LEGO."

It sort of depends where you draw the line... I had a hardcore Bionicle Dark Age (2010-2020), but I never had a generalised LEGO Dark Age. In general, I'd draw the line when I made the decision to take all my sets apart and keep them apart, after a childhood of always reverting to keeping my sets built. Granted, over the last 15 years or so, I've been rebuilding more and more, so that most of my childhood sets are restored, but that was the big dividing line: 2004. It also matched up with the brown and grey colour changes, my first online activity as a fan, and I was in high school (and my college years were my Dimmest Ages). So... I guess I'd say that the Orient Expedition theme is the last one I remember getting sets from before that cut-off. Though it did straddle it and I picked up more during/after the Great Take-Apart. Honestly, the last big LEGO theme I got into as a kid was Bionicle itself, which probably crested for me around Mask of Light in late 2003.

Alas, no Bionicles for me for Christmas in about 12 years now, but I've now had 30 consecutive Christmases getting LEGO (1992-2021), partly off the luck of never having had a true dark age and partly off the luck of having in-laws who are Gift People and need suggestions for me. I almost can't imagine Christas without building something. My very first LEGO set was a Christmas present, and the biggest LEGO days of them all in my childhood were Christmases--and spending that Christmas cash in the days that followed.

If there were other members to Keetongu's species, I could see some variants looking something like this--it's very well done: solid in a way that Bionicle sets rarely were, but still having the "look."

It's all in how you phrase the question and define your terms: if you put the emphasis on "need," well, yes, of course it isn't needed. If you say "should LEGO do this?" it turns into pure opinion: the only thing LEGO should do is make toys out of plastic bricks in a profitable manner (arguably, I'd say LEGO has added a "do it ethically" clause to their self-mandate, which they're striving to add in, but that's a sidebar). But would I like them to go back to the Bionicle well? Yes, yes I would. (Full disclosure: I'm one of those "returning out of nostalgia" old fans and my boys will be just old enough to buy constraction figures for in about 3-5 years). I would like a System reboot or a constraction reboot or a books-and-websites-only niche expansion of the lore (gotta keep the trademark, right?). I'd enjoy a single Toa thrown into a series of Collectible Minifigs. I don't need it, though.

If it's the character I assume it is, then it's minor indeed. Like... "only in the Appendices, in the peripheral bits to create the illusion it was an ancient text"-peripheral. I approve! My own name is far more mundane: it was gifted me by my younger brothers as an Internet-safe pseudonym by which to refer to me (I was oldest brother, hence the 1, and a Tahu/Lhikan/Jaller fan, hence the Hau), but I liked it.