Alyska

Another way to toggle the ratios: Swap the teams around. Hero Factory had the right idea here, though poorly executed in the gender department.  Have two of the original Toa, another from a fan favourite team, couple of random renegades, etc, and a misfit bunch of Matoran, Turaga, and small cute Rahi as the six supporting characters. Would also help avoid the "sameyness" that stuff like the Inika build fell into.

Eh, they're not licensed to LEGO just yet, but I just thought of Adam and Jamie as master builders and now the thought won't go away...

Toa of Earth would be pretty OP underground too. 

Same goes for Toa of Iron or Magnetism if you're wearing metal armour. (Such as the Makuta)

I think its pretty well established that everyone has some metal in their armour or bodies. A Toa-Code Toa would fling your body against the wall or pin you to the ground. A non-Toa Coder would tear your body open, crush you like an aluminum can, or stab you to death with the sharpest metal objects he could summon.

I say again: The biggest challenge of using Toa powers is NOT killing all your opponents with them.

Toa of Water can easily kill people on dry land- it only takes a couple of litres in the lungs to drown somebody, (as Gali did in the Dark Mirror story), and control over water can prevent your opponent choking it back up again. Pushing opponents away was an underutilised tactic during the Mahri arc, but Hahli did once threaten a Matoran by taking away his air supply, if I remember correctly. Crushing is a fairly impractical way to kill someone, since you have to apply pressure from all directions, and Gravity, Iron and Stone do it easily regardless of environment.

Water in general is underutilised for its lethal capabilities- you'd think Helryx and Tuyet would have used those tactics more often- but being in water doesn't give you more capacity to kill someone apart from more pushing power (Shove them into sharp objects, or scoop up rocks and drop them on people). It's a moot point with most Toa of Water, since they have to find creative ways to deal with opponents in accordance with the Toa Code. (This is true of most real-life fighting techniques, by the way- it's easy to apply enough force to kill someone, but the challenges are in learning to fight without causing serious harm.)

Going back to the pushing thing- Anyone else think Jaller should have asked Hahli to do a nova blast in Mahri Nui rather than trying to do one himself? A fire blast would certainly kill everyone in a short radius, fellow Toa included, but it wouldn't travel very far in water, and would probably take out less than half the enemies. We know, however, it's easy to survive a Water nova as long as you can breathe in water- the enemies would have been blasted miles away, and the Toa would all be okay... 

Half male, half female. Add a gay couple. Probably several. Even add characters with defects to give a moral that nobody is perfect. One of the main characters being killed off. And leaving every story arc at a suspenseful cliffhanger. Like a character about to fall into lava or the destruction of a village.

I was thinking half and half too, though I'd also want a more diverse range of aesthetic styles to maximise cross-gender appeal (like, have a big, clunky, steampunky looking Toa of Iron, while the Toa of Ice looks like s/he was designed by Apple.) A gay couple would be nice, but part of me doesn't want Lego's first gay couple to be non-human characters (but hopefully that will be a moot point ten years from now, since Gandalf x Dumbledore totally needs to get canonised in the Lego movie sequels).

Slight tangent, but I'd also want a reboot to have a full animated series. When I think about the huge appeal of the Avatar: The Last Airbender franchise across age groups and genders, I can't help but think that Bionicle could have had all that if they'd just done a few things differently.

Okay, so we've had a few topics related to gender recently, spawning some lively discussion, interesting headcanons, and some creative interpretations of the gender ratios and dynamics in G1 and 2, but I'm wondering what people would choose given the opportunity to start from scratch.

So here's a scenario...

Ten years from now, a couple of years after G2 finished, you've been appointed head of the story team for the new Bionicle reboot. All you've been given is a list of character names that have been cleared by the legal team, consisting of most of the old favourites and plenty of new ones. They say you're welcome to look through any of the old story bibles, but they would like "a fresh start". Your only instruction is to make it appealing to 7-12 year old boys, though appeal for a periphery demographic is not unwelcome.

You could bring back all your favourite characters exactly as they were before- "No need to mess with perfection," and all that.

You could gender-swap characters or groups of characters to toggle the ratio.

You could start over with a new set of characters.

Or some combination thereof... or something else entirely? 

What would you do?

Eh, it's one of those things like how Clara was a timelord once but remembers none of it, and if she was the one who recommended the Doctor steal that TARDIS, why the heck did he listen to her unless he knew who she was? Furthermore, it seems to counteract the description of events in "The Doctor's Wife" which is my favourite episode, and you DO NOT mess with my favourite episode-

(Stops, takes deep breath, repeats "Wibbly wobbly, wibbly wobbly, timey wimey..." until calm)

There are things that are there for an episode's plot, and there are things that are there for an arc's plot. Pretty sure this was the former, and will be largely forgotten. Besides, the Doctor has crossed his own time stream plenty of times, with no ill effects other than amnesia. This time, the Doctor never even left the TARDIS, which is a dimension unto itself and doesn't seem to affect the external timestream (see: Journey to the Centre of the Tardis).

CHTrilogy- Just enjoy what you can, and if it helps, look at some episode recaps and reviews online- that's certainly helped my understanding a few times, and increased my enjoyment. Don't worry about how much you know- fandom is meant to be fun, and if the "Gotta watch 'em all" mentality starts to feel like a chore, it's probably not worth doing. If people you meet are still criticising you for not knowing what colour the Doctor's toothbrush is, then, well, I'm not going to say that they're "bad fans" or "not true Whovians" or anything like that, but I will say that they are probably horrible people, and that your time could be spent in more welcoming company. Fandom should never be a superiority contest.

Uh, do you visit these threads with the sole intention of annoying yourself, then? You've already indicated that you don't like them... or are you referring to the type of discussion, as opposed to the subject itself?

The proposal I'm in favour of is changing the gender-lock to gender-dominance. The elements exist as is, with the majority of every element except water, lightning and psionics being masculine, but there are about 30% (max) of the matoran made since the MU came online that exhibit more traits of the opposite gender. If you want a reasoning, call it programming glitches. A 'Good Bad Bug', to trope it out. It could even be caused as a side effect of Velika raising the drones to full sentience.

 

Wham, bam, done. Gender balance more equal while allowing canon to remain unmolested.

This, basically.

Defining a gender in terms of "traits" is a tad inaccurate, since really the only thing that truly defines a person's gender is what they choose to identify as, but I like the idea of it being only a majority. I think Greg eventually canonised something like this after the Orde debacle, saying that there potentially are Matoran that identify as something other than what they were programmed to be, though the numbers would be far smaller than 30%. 

Sort of agree with the above, though I tend to think that the GBs modelled some of the structure/programming off male and female Agori brains, so the gendered aspects were somewhat intentional, and then because they were socially regressive old fuddy-duddies, the GBs decided to distribute the programs based on what they thought would be best for the jobs that each Matoran type was designed to do. They also decided that "male" brains were generally more useful for most jobs, hence the overabundance of male Matoran. 

Nightwolf- I get where you're coming from- it is very easy to get an "ordinary" person- with no particular inclination towards evil- to do abominable things to other humans, be it by having it ingrained in their culture, by exerting authority, by removing their sense of personal agency, by teaching them that the other lives don't matter or that some people are less than human, etc. and I agree with you that our ideas about right and wrong are largely social constructs, but I think if we evaluate actions on the basis of "how much does this help/hurt other people?", we can get a bit closer to an "objective" sense of good and evil. 

It's not a perfect model, of course, since you can reasonably argue that even the most mundane actions are causing harm to others, but it's a start. Another problem is of course, ignorance, which historically has been arguably responsible for just as much death and suffering as evil itself. Not so much a problem in the Bionicle stories, since Greg tends to like intelligent and well-informed villains who know exactly what they are doing, but worth considering the different factors that can make someone behave as they do.

I'm of the opinion that bi-gendered elements would be best- it would allow for a more diverse cast, and you wouldn't get the sense that, say, all Toa of Air were copies of Lewa. It also allows them to toggle the ratios of new teams to account for changes in the audience's preferences. Literally nothing is gained from having monogender elements, save for having a quick way to determine a new character's gender if the designers are too lazy to make that clear in other ways- it just results in an over-reliance on stereotypes and lack of diversity within elements.

I think it's worth giving Greg some credit for writing an in-universe explanation for it, but not enough was done to establish that the in-universe model was incredibly flawed. In our world, it's a thing born of laziness from a long-gone story team, and I find it kind of amazing that it persisted throughout ten years of story- even the Glatorian storyline still had the only woman being coloured blue out of force of habit. When you look at the success of things like Avatar:The Last Airbender and its derivative works, with a diverse cast and huge following of both genders, I can't help but wonder if the mismanagement of gender dynamics might have contributed to the death of Gen 1. 

And I have yet to see a canonically gay LEGO character.

 

Well, Dumbledore made it into the Lego Movie. And he was spending a lot of time with Gandalf... 

Yeah, that's probably as close as we'll get for another ten years or so.

As great as it would be to see trans representation, I don't think Bionicle is the best place for Lego to introduce it. Make it a human character, a normal human, who is a fully fledged character and not a walking punchline, who just happens to be trans. I've seen complaints from actual trans people over things like the trans-Tamaru headcanon, which I initially thought of as quite progressive, but now realise might offend people by playing to certain stereotypes, as well as the overall problem of using a little green robot to represent transgender people instead of an actual human person.

Re the actual topic- I'd quite like a female Pohatu- that is, a female version of G1 Pohatu. Toph in ATLA came close, but I really just want a big, boisterous female character that gets along with everyone and has a very blunt approach to things like morality and problem solving, cracking jokes along the way.

I tend to agree on the idea of starting again with a new cast over changing the genders, though. It's nice when female characters can exist in their own right rather than being genderswapped knockoffs of somebody else (looking at you, DC and Marvel...)

Used to like Jaller/Hahli, but kinda fell apart after they became Toa and showed very little affection for each other, even as a friendship. Hahli/Matoro would have worked better, I think... I am liking the idea of Jaller/Takua, though. There's definitely a lot to work with there.

I would have liked to see more of Hewkii and Macku hanging out together, even played out as a purely platonic friendship.( I just want a big ugly Toa running around with a lil blue Matoran sitting on his shoulder sassing him, okay?)

Probably my crackiest one was Nuparu/Berix. I also like the idea of Gelu fancying Chiara, but maybe not being reciprocated. Or maybe Gelu/Kiina. Or Chiara/Kiina.

But the one that I had the most emotional investment in was Lesovikk/Nikila. I was so happy when I heard about the Red Star thing, because Lesovikk had appeared in that storyline, and if anyone tries to tell me that Kopaka and Pohatu didn't discover Nikila alive and (mostly) sane up there, help her and the others escape and then reunite her with Lesovikk, I will fight them.

I like the idea of villains who are villains by accident, by circumstance, by misunderstanding, by toxic views inherited from others- that, to me, is much more realistic than the take-over-the-world, killing for fun type. Bionicle has a lot of villains that are evil just because. The Piraka are evil because all Skakdi are brutal by nature and their culture encourages it. The Makuta are all evil because they drained out their light. The Barraki are evil because... uh... they're just jerks, okay? When characters are evil because they just are, it's hard to find a believable motivation for them to want to live a virtuous life. But if their "evil" is a product of circumstance, it's more plausible that the good part of their nature could come out if circumstances changed.

Bionicle is set up the way it is for a reason- the baddies have to be a different species from the good guys because the Toa are stand-ins for humans, and Lego has policies against the depiction of humans committing violence against humans. But it also leads to the implication that people are evil because of the way they are born, not because of the choices that they make or the influence of external factors. There have been exceptions in the serials and other "side" stories, but these tend to be good guys gone bad (Nidhiki, Tuyet) rather than the other way around. So, clearly it's in part the nature of the toy-driven storyline at play, and partly Greg's personal preference.

That said, there is a huge spectrum of morality present in Bionicle. One "evil" character with the potential for redemption is Lariska. She's killed Toa, under orders and maybe for her own purposes as well, but she's also been shown to develop genuine friendships (e.g.with Nidhiki, possibly Brutaka), and be motivated by vengence over what as done to Nidhiki. She's never been in direct opposition to the protagonists, and last we saw she was teamed up with Tahu, trying to fight Makuta. I can definitely see her finding a place in Spherus Magna society, though I doubt she'd ever be completely opposed to killing enemies when keeping them alive is inconvenient.

I think the deciding factor here is the character's ability to actually care about others- if a character is lacking that, then there is simply no path to redemption. That's not to say anyone who cares about anyone can be redeemed (I still don't buy the widespread posthumous forgiveness of Darth Vader just because he didn't kill his own son, in spite of the millions of other lives he took), but it's definitely a start. Villains who care are not common in Bionicle as far as established canon goes, though it'd be interesting to see a few headcanons on this... 

I think that Bionicle so far is making all the same mistakes as HF, but oddly enough, is making them to an even greater extent. There's so little characterisation, we don't even know the Protectors' names, let alone personality, gender, etc. There's no demonstration of why the Skull Spiders are bad or why it's okay for the heroes to kill hundreds of them, and their boss is defeated far too quickly. The characters never struggle with any problem for more than 30 seconds. When you give the audience only the bare bones of the story's events, you miss a lot of potential for thrills, drama, laughs and heart.

Hero Factory kind of had that problem, too, with certain characters being shilled beyond what seemed deserved, while others were shoved to the sidelines, but there was still quite a bit of supplementary material to round it out, and the Hero Factory FM podcast was gold.

It seems that LEGO is much less inclined to take risks or spend money on its constraction themes nowadays, so it becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy when the audience loses interest.

The recent map of Okoto gave little descriptions for each region, and seemed to talk about "the protectors" in each region. So, either they're (maybe mistakenly?) using the word "protector" to mean all villagers, OR each village is run and guarded by a council of protectors, who all look more or less the same as each other and possibly quite similar to normal villagers.

Yes, each Toa had one specific protector following them when they went to get their mask, but I think the role of those individual protectors has ended for now- it's likely going to be all about the Toa from now on. Unless the books want to flesh out the mask hunt and assign a gender and personality to each of those protectors, I think we have to assume that they have no gender or personality. Or, if you want to take the "father-to-son" thing literally, you can assume that they're all male with no established personality.

Legolas. Who has to, at some point, become separated from his lower half. For obvious reasons.

That's why I tend to think characters with short hair, buns or ponytails as molded hairpieces would be a better choice for constraction figures- not that the Elves characters couldn't have an alternative style where they wear their hair up for the constraction line- and having detachable ponytails/braids in a range of styles would add playability and customisation potential. 

Ah, well, that's that, then... for now.Thanks for the link.

That would be amazing! However, keep in mind that the announcement was referring to the whole promotional campaign, not just the LEGO products. So by "action figures", it could have been referring to other brands of non-buildable action figures. Still, I do hope that LEGO's license is broad enough and successful enough for them to expand into constraction sets! It'd certainly help make up for the feeble gender ratios of the original three DC Super Heroes constraction sets (not to mention I'd expect the design quality of the sets to be much better, just as the design quality of other constraction sets has improved since those days)

In all probability, the action figures would be just regular action figures produced by another company, as the idea of marketing CCBS to girls seems like a bigger risk than what LEGO traditionally takes. That said, if they were to try it, I would expect they'd run with an established brand- either a successful one of their own, like Elves, or a licensed theme like this.

What I'm interested in is playability potential. I see no point pretending that a majority of girls would play with female action figures the way most boys play with male ones- flying them round the room, bashing them into one another, launching projectiles, etc, so I'd be looking more at poseability, customisation and the potential for story-based play.

When I typically picture a girl-focused constraction theme, I tend to picture plastic hair, but in several swappable pieces. So, you've got the basic scalp and bangs piece, with small holes so that you can attach braids, ponytails or just accessories to- slightly complicated by the fact that the elves tend to wear their hair down. When I see girls play with dolls, the most common activities seem to be dressing and brushing, so it's interesting to think of whether you try and imitate that kind of playability, or encourage a different playstyle altogether.

I can picture the Elves gaining some sort of magical "super mode" further down the track, with some ornate light armour added on. That might make a good constraction set,  and skirts and capes would certainly not be out of place there. I think the hair should be a separate piece to the heads,and could have small holes to add accessories, tiaras, etc (Doll-like hair would be interesting to consider, but I think durability would be compromised...)

... I've just remembered an old "fashion designer Barbie" software thing that one of my friends had when I was a kid, where you could print clothing designs onto special fabric,ct it out and make doll clothes. Imagine something like that with an Elves constraction line...

So, it's recently been announced that DC Comics is introducing a new series aimed at young girls, and that Lego will be heavily involved with the merchandise. While I think it's reasonable to expect some minidoll sets out of this, I'm wondering if there's anything else in the works.

What particularly caught my eye in the announcement was the mention of poseable, free-standing action figures to be produced in addition to more traditional "dolls."  The use of the term "action figure" in relation to a toy for girls is pretty much unheard of, so I'm wondering if Lego is going to be involved with this. Their recent forays into more humanoid CCBS builds- particularly Star Wars- make me think that they are more capable than ever before of pulling off something like that.

... thoughts?

Yes yes yes yes yes. Interesting that they mention "action figures" in addition to dolls. Given Lego's forays into more humanlike CCBS figures, I wonder if we'll finally get a female-focused CCBS line?

My only objection is that the character designs in the promo image all look a bit "samey" in terms of facial features and body types, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

Sooo insecure teenage girls with low self-esteem are somehow more 'empowering' than a strong self-leading woman? Riiiiiiiiight. Just like how water is bad for you and soda doesn't dehydrate you.

Ah, see, this boils down to the good old "strong female character" argument. There's no doubt that what we need more of is strong female characters. The trouble is, there are at least two different definitions of what this term actually means, and thus it's actually two groups of people wanting two different things.

Definition 1- A female character who is physically and/or psychologically strong, and can accomplish any task set to them, overcome any hardship with dignity and confidence.

Definition 2- A female character with strong characterization. Now she might be smart or dim, brave or cowardly, strong or weak, kind or selfish, or some mixture of the lot, but we want to watch her because she's a fascinating character- maybe we relate to her and empathise, or maybe makes us go "What the heck is this thing?", but she's engaging to us as a character, not just as a piece of eye candy. 

Both are important for young girls to see. It's entirely possible to do both at the same time, but I would argue that it is much more important to see a varied range of personalities than it is for all the female characters to be hypercompetent perfectly-adjusted Mary Sues who never make mistakes, never doubt themselves, never show fear or depth or complexity or anything even remotely realistic and human.

You do not overcome gender stereotypes by making the female characters "perfect" or "the sane one" or otherwise less flawed than their male counterparts. You do it by writing them as people, with any of the realistic flaws and failings that that implies. Even if they have superpowers- Peter Parker struggles with confidence and money, Tony Stark has basically had an existiential crisis, Bruce Banner has to accomodate the monster within- why shouldn't female characters be allowed to have that kind of personal struggle?