Anyone know why Iruini actually quit his team?

[Aderia]

I've been having trouble pinning down the reasoning behind the quitting.
 

Bionicle Wiki, Iruini's page:
 

1) Toa Hagah raid Destral.
2) Iruini quits - believes team spends too much time on big problems instead of little ones. (thus escapes initial Rahaga-ification)
3) Gets Rahaga-zapped anyways. 



BS01, Iruini's page: 

These two essentially say the same thing, which kind of leads me toward this version of events being the more likely. (it also says citation is needed, though, so not sure where that leaves us.)

 

However, the BS01 Toa Hagah page says this: 

The important part being: 
"Iruini had resigned the team due to his belief they did not allot adequate time dealing with serious threats." This seems to contradict what the other two pages say.

A possible solution is that Iruini and the rest of his team had different definitions of what constituted a "serious threat", with Iruini thinking the 'ever-present dangers' were the serious threat, and the rest of the team thinking the big baddies were the serious threat. But that still leaves things ambiguous at best. Am I just misreading things? I've been stumped for a while now. 


The timeline stays consistent, but the phrasing on the Toa Hagah's BS01 page is throwing me off. I've tried looking through the PDF comics (specifically comic 25, Birth of the Rahaga) and stuff, but no avail.  Does anyone have more of a final word on why Iruini quit the team? 

Edited August 6, 2020 by Aderia

[Hahli, the Chronicler]

1 hour ago, Aderia said:

A possible solution is that Iruini and the rest of his team had different definitions of what constituted a "serious threat"

I think what you said right there is the closest you'll get to an answer.

 

Iruini had some fight with the rest of the team about what they were doing, something so serious that he abandoned (or at least planned to abandon) his Hagah teammates (though Comic 25 makes it seem like he never actually left, implying that the Hagah were captured during the raid instead of after). Iruini was on another Toa team before being reassigned to the Toa Hagah by the Brotherhood, the same organization that he was now fighting against; it's possible that he missed his old Toa team and manifested that in a resentment for his new teammates, teammates who he only fought alongside because the once-good Makuta had ordered him to. BS01 says he thought the Hagah were chasing after "large threats" and ignoring "ever-present dangers." This is extremely vague wording (and is seemingly contradicted on BS01's "Raid on Destral Fortress" page). I interpret this as the Hagah, dizzy with success having just raided Destral Fortress - the Makuta HQ, protected by the Dark Hunters, seemingly impregnable, yet defeated by the Hagah - deciding to immediately begin chasing other major Makuta/DH targets, convinced that they were nigh untouchable. Iruini alone believed that the six Toa were still vulnerable, and perhaps wanted to recruit other Toa to their cause before launching another attack (perhaps he wanted his old Toa team to fight alongside them or at least wanted to ensure they were protected against possible Makuta retaliations against Toa teams). I think this theory makes the most sense, given what we know - even after having captured the Mask of Light, the key to defeating the Makuta, Iruini still asks in Comic 25: "Is this thing really worth all this?" It seems like Iruini would have preferred a more cautious approach, letting the Makuta keep the Mask of Light indefinitely while the Toa assembled a stronger, more effective fighting force to oppose them.

Whatever the reason, it seems that Iruini was at least partially right - the "overconfident" Toa Hagah had ignored "ever-present dangers" - they were ambushed, captured, and mutated, imprisoned by those they had just successfully raided. Norik is also partially right in saying that the Mask of Light was worth the risk, although perhaps the assault would have gone much smoother if they had spent a few days or weeks recruiting others to their cause.

 

We don't get to see Iruini's initial disagreement with the team, but we do know that he had a strong enough sense of duty to the Hagah that Norik was able to persuade him to help free the now-mutated Toa Hagah, a mission that succeeded at the cost of mutating both Iruini and Norik.

The now-mutated Rahaga Iruini then had a second serious disagreement with his teammates - he was the only Rahaga who didn't believe in the existence of Keetongu, and was therefore convinced that the Rahaga's search for him would be pointless and vain. He probably once again thought that the Rahaga were wasting their time chasing a major but unachievable goal (finding a non-existent magic Rahi) when they could work much better by focusing all their efforts on the immediate threats - namely, beating the Visorak horde. Crucially, though, Iruini this time never told his teammates that he thought they were wrong, and he never left them even though his new mission seemed impossible.

And I think that the reason he stayed is because he felt strong remorse and guilt over having left the Toa Hagah all those years ago, and probably blamed himself for their capture and transformation into the Rahaga. Any resentment he might have had for his teammates probably disappeared when they were captured, and he became closer than ever to them when the Hagah were all stuck as transformed Rahaga, no longer Toa but not yet Rahi, unable or unwilling to converse with anyone sentient until the Toa Hordika were mutated.

[TheZOMBIEJ]

huh! this i never even knew! well that just prove how much i know! (lol) 

honestly i don't even know what to make ov this! i do agree with Hahli, the Chronicler tho! so the basically lay within your own post, however anyone can interpret the information (on the BS01 pages) as mis-information! really it comes down to this; draw your own conclusions! that's all i got for ya!  

[That Matoran with a Vahi]

It doesn't answer the question; but his abilities and traits section, further down his BS01 page, elaborates at least a little more on what it meant by big and little problems:

Though, again, that's [citation needed] too, so I couldn't say how accurate it is. I hadn't even heard about his quitting the team, besides the tiny amount we got given in comic 25, until I was looking at the Rahaga pages on BS01 earlier this week.

[Zestanor]

Unfortunately BS01 can be wrong, which is a doom they brought upon themselves by not requiring extensive citations from the beginning. Besides this, the wiki is built on the the premise that there is one true canon for Bionicle, and that everything can be documented as though there were no contradictions. That’s very wishful thinking!

If there’s nothing in that one comic about Iruini quitting, then you can assume it’s fake news. It’s a shame how easy it is for fake stuff like this to be propagated  everywhere. BS01 is overdue for a complete rewrite, and a complete change in philosophy. It reads like an in-universe history textbook (or worse, a reference for fanficcers) but this is silly, because Bionicle’s canon is full of errors, contradictions, and retcons which ought to be documented extensively instead of relegated to “trivia” (a subsection that serious wikis phased out over ten years ago).

Edited August 7, 2020 by Zestanor

[Aderia]

@Hahli, the Chronicler, I wasn't expecting so much insight into Iruini's character,  but I really like your point/interpretation about how Iruini's views as a Rahaga mirror the ones he held as a Toa, but as a Rahaga, he's learned, more or less, from his mistakes. I also hadn't though to check the Raid on Destral page, which seems to have a better timeline of events that I was looking for - in particular, tying to piece together when the other Toa Hagah were captured and mutated. 

This is a common question I see on the forums - how would you redo or reboot Bionicle and I'd love to see expaned Matoran Universe history. League of Six Kingdoms, Toa Hagah, Toa Mangai, etc. Your theory of the Raid of Destral, and the fall of the Toa Hagah and the inter-team tensions not only seems plausible, but also would be the kind of turbulent Toa team I'd love to see again. Alternatively, picking up where G1 left off, these team dynamics might have worked well trying to build new lives on Sphereus Magna. 
 

3 hours ago, That Matoran with a Vahi said:

It doesn't answer the question; but his abilities and traits section, further down his BS01 page, elaborates at least a little more on what it meant by big and little problems:

Though, again, that's [citation needed] too, so I couldn't say how accurate it is. I hadn't even heard about his quitting the team, besides the tiny amount we got given in comic 25, until I was looking at the Rahaga pages on BS01 earlier this week.

Yes, those darn [citation needed]s. I could have sworn that a story about the Toa Hagah was somewhere in a Bionicle Encyclopedia somewhere, but the more I look, the more I'm thinking it was the one about Lhikan and his team instead. Yeah, you and Hahli have each added a tally to a different side of why Iruini quit. The part that still confuses me is how long did it take for the other Hagah to be captured? It sounds like they had time enough to grow overconfident as a team and time enough for tension to grow enough that Iruini left, and whatever else. Initially it almost sounded like the other Hagah (eg, not Iruini, not Norik) were snagged by Roodaka on their way out of the fortress, but clearly that's not the case. It's a bit hard to imagine the Brotherhood taking their time going after them, though.  Possible contributors, pure speculation: 1) the BoM was hurt badly enough that they needed significant recuperation time, at least enough to allow the Hagah to get away and regroup a bit, or 2) the MU generally thinks the Makuta are good, or at least, not evil, at this point, and due to the sensitive nature of the information the Hagah had (Makoki stone, and evidence of the Brotherhood's previous raid of Artakha), they couldn't risk letting the Toa know they were being hunted, and potentially triggering the Toa to spill their (Brotherhood's) secret to the world. 

Haha I suppose Z and Z ( @TheZOMBIEJ and @Zestanor) have the strongest argument here, that the best we'll ever get is ambiguity. 

[Master Inika]

I'm not home right now, but when I am, I'll check it out. I have every comic and guide, so the answer has to be somewhere.

I'm turning into the Tahtorak looking for this answer, lol.