Lielac

"You can not talk about the leaks or link them. But hey, going on lego's server and publishing a hidden picture they clearly didn't want people to see it is perfectly fine"

 

Nice logic.

It's not really hidden, though. No non-disclosure agreements were violated, no hacking into password-locked anything; it was a simple case of recognizing a pattern in image naming and doing a find-and-replace. Like Aanchir said, if you replace the instances of "minecraft" in this link with "bionicle", you get the product image in the original news post. It's not linked to anywhere on the Lego site, no, but it's a public image that anyone can look at if they have the link. If they didn't want people to figure it out, they should have waited to put it up somewhere anyone with pattern-recognition skills and enough boredom to try could find it.

My half-cent on the reboot/continuation issue: reboot. Basically what Lyichir's been saying.

Now for something completely different: new fans, and how likely they are to be younger than Bionicle!

My older younger sister is 13, and she's a current Bionicle fan. Not as raving as I am, but she's a couple months younger than Bionicle and I dragged her into that whole "being a Bionicle fan" thing from the moment she was old enough to understand what I was rambling about. She's been being mildly apathetic about my flailing since the first whiff of this popped up, and has quite patiently listened to my incoherent shrieks of delight in the past 24 hours.

 time

... so. Ah. Where was I? Oh, yes. Bionicle's target demographics is/was tweens last I checked, so yeah it's likely any new fans will have been in their infancy at the same time as Bionicle Classic. And even some old fans, too, because younger siblings of fanatical fans tend to learn about these things just to understand what their siblings are ranting about all day.

I've always thought of Matoran as averaging a little less than half the height of Toa, or about 3'6". Not coincidentally at all, this is the average height of a hobbit. And it's movie-accurate, and I've always leaned towards the first three movies' designs when crafting mental images of characters.

Turaga, though, my mental image tends to fluctuate on. Vakama's a bit taller than Jaller in MoL (and he's slouching; bad Turaga, worst posture!), but I remember way back when I was 11 or 12 I took the average of Matoran's heights and Toa's and decided that was the height of Turaga: 1.2 bio, or a little less than 5'5". But now I think that's silly, and have revised my opinion to thinking they're somewhere between 0.8 and 1 bio.

WOOHOO!

 

Kiina moment aside, I love the crown-like appearance of the mask. If it ain't brand-new, I could see it as the Mask of Creation.

 

Great news!

Naw, man, indulge in your Kiina moments! The Kiina moments are distilled excitement! WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

As for the mask being "brand-new" and therefore not the Mask of Creation, we've never actually seen what the MoC looks like. I think this could well be that Mask.

I definitely don't think it's the Ignika (for anyone who does, not directed at Disciple), because while the Ignika has changed shapes, it's never... not had... the... Vitruvian... figure...

Okay, it's not had the Vitruvian figure twice. But the first was in the questionably canonical VNOG and BIONICLE Heroes, and the second was fused to Vezon's head, and the Mask of Hype is significantly different from any canonical appearance of the Ignika on its own, so I strongly suspect they're not the same thing.

While it's possible that a decision might be made to change the Ignika's appearance, I don't think it would be worth the trouble, and I think it would annoy a lot of old fans and be received ambivalently by new ones. I think, if the Ignika does return in Bionicle 2015, it'll be as a brief cameo: maybe hanging on a wall in New Atero if this is a far-flung continuation, or in legends if it's a reboot... or heck, in legends if it's a far-flung continuation, because ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN IN A COUPLE THOUSAND YEARS, EH? EHHHH?

Also, for anyone who thinks it's the Ignika, we just got done chasing that around, it hasn't been long enough for people to forget, and Mata Nui is napping. That'd be a boring, overused plot. Now, chasing the Mask of Creation around... ehehehe. Okay, maybe not chasing it around. Maybe Epic Scavenger Hunts could use a bit of a rest. But the Mask of Hype is pretty clearly a central focus for Bionicle 2015, so it's got to be something Important and Special.

... oh Mata Nui help me I'm writing five paragraph essays about this, it's official, I'm hyped

My throat's sore from all the high-pitched shrieking I've been doing lately. I appear to turn into a boiling tea kettle when overflowing with excitement.

So! Bionicle! It's a thing! I AM SLIGHTLY INCOHERENT WITH EXCITEMENT OH MATA NUI YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS

I hope it's a reboot. Hard, soft, whatever; the story became a tangled mess of literary kudzu in its later years, and I want a return to simpler times. That'll be easier to rope friends into, too, hehehe. And mystery! I like a few minor mysteries, usually. And I will sacrifice a Mukau for a better gender ratio in named and plot-relevant characters.

Also, I'd greatly appreciate a storyline that's not scattered across half a dozen different forms of media. Or however many it was. Books, movies, comics, online serials, online comics, online games, Flash animations... as a fanfic writer and general lore fiend, I want to be able to collate story information without having to scramble all over the place to find what I'm looking for.

If we get the Toa Mata, theoretically, I wouldn't want them in darker colors; I'd want them in as close to the original shades as possible. Yes, it's just for nostalgia, but after the Mistika, I'm not prepared to gamble with my favorite characters again.

Agreed. The Toa Mata are bright colors, dang it! There are lots of shades Toa can come in, but unless they're Toa of Light one Toa should really have one color scheme and stick to it.

On the brain structure thing- the biggest differences are in the amount of grey and white matter, and in things like the relative size of the frontal lobe (problem solving, decision making-larger in women) and the parietal cortex (spacial reasoning- larger in men), so there are some observable differences- but, that said, how these structural differences translate to actual abilities and personality traits varies immensely. As you said, the differences in traits and abilities between this woman and that woman will be greater than the differences between all women and all men.

Akay! Interesting information, that.

Agreeing SO MUCH on the sexism-worldbuilding thing. There is certainly a place for stories about a "woman in a man's world," but these all treat said woman like she's something remarkable and rare just for doing what she wants to/what she feels is right. In a historical context, sure, it's realistic, but when it's inserted into a fantasy environment for a lazy bit of backstory or motivation, it can come across as rather condescending or cheesy. Strong women need to be normalised, not treated as special exceptions to be pointed out and put on a pedestal (although vulnerable women can appear as well- like I've said before, a character's flaws are just as important as their strengths) . And the normalisation of these kinds of characters is something that's important for both boys and girls to see.  Having more than one female character also allows for showcasing different kinds of strength- you can have female adventurers, spies, soldiers, barbarians, rogues, inventors, hermits, scientists, rebels, minions, detectives, pacifists, lunatics, sages, etc. all with their own unique talents as well as their own unique shortcomings. Their gender does not need to be the most important or memorable thing about them.

Yesssssssssssss. Write strong women, write weak women, write women who need validation, women who don't, women who are book-smart or street-smart or naive or anything -- and for the love of Mata Nui, have a few distinctly different women around, because we're varied. We're complicated and weird and so is every other gender, and boys and girls and kids of all genders deserve to see that variety shown to them from a young age. Because even if we're writing about magic robots on an island paradise with 6 drastically different biomes in an area the size of Newfoundland, what's important is their hearts and souls, and those hearts and souls should reflect the variety of hearts and souls out in the world of the readers.

@Alyska: Hmm. This is an intriguing piece of theory! I mean, I'm pretty sure I read that there's more variation in the brains of humans in the same or similar gender(s) than there is between genders, but yeah. The GBs are unconsciously sexist, Agori society has a lot of humanity's failings, and things make sense again. For a certain definition of sense that includes sexism existing at all, but whatevs.

Now, for a kid's toyline, I don't think we need to get into anything heavy like that (the poor souls can learn the hard truth about the world a liiiittle bit later, if they don't already know; we're here for magic robots kicking bad guy butt and talkin' 'bout teamwork), and the best way to avoid heavy society things is to make 'em a non-issue in a fictional society. My suggestion? Multiple ladies to a team-up and not treating them differently from the guys! Especially the multiple ladies to a team-up thing. I will get on my hands and knees and beg if I need to. Boys can learn early on that girls don't have cooties, and I think the best way to do that is to normalize girls existing in stories, and then casually revealing the oh-so-shocking (not) truth that girls don't actually think all that differently from boys after all.

I think the users-viewing list doesn't refresh instantly, so some of the people who were on it weren't actually reading the thread. Me, I decided to go write fanfic instead of compulsive F5ing, because whether Bionicle returns or not I will always have fun writing yet another AU that starts in the '01 era.

... and I hope any Bionicle reboot recaptures the science fantasy mystical aura stuff of '01-'03, because, yeah, I'll be honest, I think that era was the most awesome. Straightforward but not boring, neat concept... no guns... (no I will never like zamor spheres or cordak blasters or anything like 'em, and I'm not sorry.)

Gorgeous! I actually really like the combination of smooth pieces with the Pakari, and one of my main complaints about HF is the sleekness of the pieces as compared to Bionicle.

I'd say my only real complaint is her shoulders and how they seem unnaturally wide, and how the end of the piece(s?) you used for the shoulder part of the torso juts out and looks all spindly and lonely. Otherwise she's awesome. I really like her breasts and how they're tastefully added, making for a visible change without being overpowering.

Writing a character and then deciding what gender they identify as seems like a good plan to me. There are lots of tropes and shorthands that can be used that aren't linked to gender! And it looks a lot less stereotypical if there's more than one girl in a group and they have different personalities. And everybody gets approximately equal screen time and plot importance.

The same question above applies here as well, but I am interested in this. What do you consider to be acceptable "tropes and shorthands" shorthands and on what criteria do you differentiate?

 

Well, let's see. The "femme fatale" trope, for instance, is very much gender-linked. Being a flirt, on the other hand, is not, although male and female flirts are seen differently in western (English, specifically North American and European) society/culture because of stereotypes about things like acceptable expressions of sexuality. (Which is as far as I'll go on the topic unless a mod says otherwise.) If you have two flirts and one's a guy and one's a girl, and they act identically, then they'd ideally be treated identically by the narrative. The girl, say, wouldn't be treated worse, not if her flirting is objectively identical to the guy's. Or if they're both hot-headed, then they'd be reacted to the same, allowing for other factors like personal grudges or disagreement on the severity of an issue.

 

 

No, I said the exact opposite. Gender does not need to be defined by personality traits. In the end, in the Bionicle universe, all you should need to determine gender is either for the character to state it or to judge from pronouns. Otherwise, you are implying traits to be intrinsically linked to certain genders, which is wrong.

 

 

You're reading too much into my post. I did not say that gender needs to be defined by personality traits. I said that it commonly defined this way in media. I am also, in no way, trying to imply that traits are intrinsically linked to certain genders, in reality. Again, I was only stating that this is how it has been traditionally done in media for many years. It's up to you to decide if you think this is wrong.

 

However, if you do decide that it is wrong, I encourage you to offer alternatives or recommendations on how to handle this, especially considering the tight time constraints media producers have to define a character in a story. As a media producer, I would be very interested to read them.

 

Writing a character and then deciding what gender they identify as seems like a good plan to me. There are lots of tropes and shorthands that can be used that aren't linked to gender! And it looks a lot less stereotypical if there's more than one girl in a group and they have different personalities. And everybody gets approximately equal screen time and plot importance.

Whether he knows it or now, I think Burnmad is hitting on a topic those in media production have been struggling with for a long time. How do you define a character without the foundation of some stereotype, big or small? Gender protrayal in anthropomorphic is closely tied into this. Defining a character's gender in a form which is not anatomically different leaves only their character to define them. This is where stereotypes, and often the subversion of some of them, are an easy choice. I know it was suggested that the pronoun used to refer to them was another way gender could be defined, but this seems a rather flat definition. If a pronoun is all that defines the difference between a gender, the characters would seem to be trans-gendered. I guess that would be one way of removing gender stereotyes...

We-e-e-e-ell, being transgender is the state of having been assigned a gender by a state of your body and then disagreeing with that assignment. So if, say, a Ta-Matoran, this element being one that's "always" male, identified as female, then she'd be a trans woman. If gender isn't assigned by an outer trait, though, and was only a mental designation of "I am female, I answer to she/her", "I am male, I answer to he/him", "I am neither, I answer to they/them", "I don't care, I answer to my name or if I can tell through context that you're talking to about me", "my gender changes depending on my mood, I'll tell you what pronouns I prefer but in general they/them is OK", then there's no transness, because trans is, by definition, "opposite" something. If there's nothing to disagree with, then it's just... gender. Existing for its own sake. Which there's nothing wrong with.

I know not what to Google. If it's so easily found, humor one unenlightened with a link, a keyword, something.

 

As for the existence of gender, I was never arguing that, in the first place. I'm not really arguing anything, I'm just getting to these questions to see if here, I will finally find a person to answer them.

 

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I googled "what is gender" and the first result (besides the dictionary definition which is ehhh) seems pretty awesome. It's a site called "Gender Spectrum".

But now we're getting really off the rails, so... Story! Story is what kept me in Bionicle, and story is what I'd want from a reboot. S T O R Y. How were the Bohrok Animations animated? That seems like a really cool way to make a TV show. With voiceacting it would be euphoric okay maybe I'm exaggerating but imagine it

The argument of whether or not gender exists in Bionicle is useless; the whole Orde ordeal settled that once and for all. There would be nothing strange about a male Toa of Psionics if there was no such thing as male and female to Matoran/Toa/Turaga. Gender, without a doubt, is a thing in their society.

Perhaps unfortunately. When I'm not complaining about out-of-universe factors, I like to speculate that the Great Beings were just so concerned with gender that they just couldn't set it aside even when creating beings that weren't even supposed to be fully sentient. And were robots. And whose job didn't require anything involving gender at all. Like, if the elements didn't have attached genders set in stone, I'd be totally for all Matoran of Psionics all being naturally calm and level-headed because their Toa powers meant that anger would be dangerous and could easily screw up a species like the Zyglak were. But when they're one of only a few female elements, and like those other elements they play into stereotypes about feminine behavior... ... aaaaand I'm preaching to the choir here, aren't I.

 

 

 

What even makes a female bionicle female? MU inhabitants have no reproducing organs. 

 

the pronouns used to refer to them; ownership or absence of specific organs does not define who is what gender.

 

So, their gender is defined by which pronoun is used to refer to them, and which pronoun is used to refer to them is, presumably, determined by which gender they are.

 

 

-

 

 

gender is what the character expresses themself as (in extension human beings, though i am keeping this Bionicle related) -- what pronouns they prefer to use, how they prefer others to see them. (Bionicle characters don't have reproductive organs either way so i seriously fail to see what point you're trying to make, if one at all)

 

What, in the BIONICLE universe, is the difference between being identified as male or female, if they have no reproductive organs?

 

-

 

Pronoun preference, for Matoran. Status in society, for Vortixx. And Skakdi women are apparently more vicious and destructive.

 

As for natural differences between males and females that's a huge can of worms but since it's already been opened I'd argue that the elemental stereotypes and typical roles in a six-person hero team should have more weight on the personalities of the characters than their pronoun and... whatever else it is that differentiates male and female Toa.

You're right, and I'm glad that it was pointed out; it is a huge discussion that leaves plenty of room open for disagreement. I didn't want to give anyone the idea that I believed that all females were different from all males in certain ways; rather, I believe that the most natural way of writing any group of characters is to have them all be different from one another to some degree, with no thought to the genders of any of the characters unless the story or a part of the story concerns it. That's what a complete absence of stereotyping would look like to me.

 

Well, yeah. Write the character first, and in a universe like this where gender is essentially flavor text, add that bit at the end because it's not really important. In a universe where being a certain gender does color people's personality due to societal pressures, then it would be relevant to decide on a gender before the end of character creation, but Bionicle isn't really that kind of universe to me. At least, not intentionally, and not for Matoran. (For Vortixx, though...)

 

What even makes a female bionicle female? MU inhabitants have no reproducing organs. 

 

the pronouns used to refer to them; ownership or absence of specific organs does not define who is what gender.

 

So, their gender is defined by which pronoun is used to refer to them, and which pronoun is used to refer to them is, presumably, determined by which gender they are.

 

 

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I, uh, don't see the problem? If someone asks to be referred to with she/her pronouns, they (usually) identify as female. If someone asks to be refer to with he/him pronouns, they're usually male. They/them pronouns, neither (or both).

 

 

How to fix gender ratios in Bionicle:

-Reboot

-Have two more Toa referred to as "she" per team

-Remove element restrictions

-Otherwise leave personalities unchanged.

-Win at gender ratios and strong female characters.

Just to clarify, are you saying that you'd want there to be two more female Toa per team in addition to the average of one female member of each team already? That sounds like an awesome way of amending the gender ratios to me. I do want to add, though, that leaving the personalities of the new female characters as they would have been if all or most of them were male isn't what many of us might have had in mind. It's completely natural for their to be some differences in the personalities of male and female characters, and in fact doing otherwise is often considered to be a form of stereotyping in itself. A good amount of variety in personalities and traits seems the most intuitive and realistic way to create female characters in a franchise which is dominated by males.

 

Yup, add two, that makes it three. Doesn't have to be set in stone either, as long as it's 3 on average. So there could be one with two females, but then there'd have to be one with four females.

 

As for natural differences between males and females that's a huge can of worms but since it's already been opened I'd argue that the elemental stereotypes and typical roles in a six-person hero team should have more weight on the personalities of the characters than their pronoun and... whatever else it is that differentiates male and female Toa.

 

Basically just pronouns, yeah. Even with humans there are more variations within the genders than there are between them, so. Lady Tahu? Identical. The only differences people would probably see would be their own ideas of how women "should" act coloring how they'd read her.

i have heard this is a thread for the return of the lego original franchise "bionicles" and i would like to voice my support for ~trans girl tamaru defender of the jungle~

 

play well bzpower dot com family

 

-Tyler

YES. YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS yes yes yes yes yes lady Tamaru please yes yes yes yes yes yes yes ahem yeah. Scoot scoot, elemental gender restrictions, you limit the awesome people can do while staying within canon's rules, please don't be around if/when Bionicle comes back!

{Lielac snipped lots of stuff because she's really only replying to one sentence}

  And I'm hopeful that if Bionicle were to return, it would have better gender representation and less flat characters all-around.

 

Yes. In. DEED. More rounded characters! More ladies! More well-rounded lady characters!

1. Probably the same way humans do, I vaguely recall someone asking Greg and getting that answer, but don't quote me on that.

2. This is probably more suited to S&T.

Now I know this probably won't happen, but..

If the new Bionicle was to be a continuation of the old series and start right back where we left off, I think something along the lines of an Agori-Matoran war could be kind of cool. According to the serials they didn't exactly trust each others after the reunion.

Yeah, but all we saw was the very beginnings of their acclimation to each other. It could go either way, but I think with level-headed people like Ackar and Gali and basically every Turaga around, the end result would be the two groups living in harmony. I mean, rocky times initially? Heck yeah. Considering MU natives see the Great Beings as even more sacred than Mata Nui, while Spherus Magnans hate the GBs' guts, insults and fists would fly. But I think there would be enough reasonable, open-minded people on both sides that it wouldn't get past the petty squabbles stage.

... Probably. I hope. What can I say? I don't like the idea of civil war. I much prefer grudging alliances to beat up on a common enemy, and then learning to like each other while fighting side-by-side.

I also don't think a Bionicle reboot/continuation/what-have-you would pick up from where we left off anyway, because "where Bionicle left off" was a convoluted mess of tangled plot threads that was ludicrously difficult to get into if you hadn't been following it from the start or near enough to. Reboot in an alternate universe, reboot in the far-flung future of Spherus Magna when everyone we know and love has gone on to the "legend" bit of Matoran-Toa-Turaga-Legend, whatever.

... As for gender ratios, what Maphrox said. If nothing else (but I would love more), remove elemental gender restrictions. Although that happened with Spherus Magnans and look where that got us. Hi Tarix, hi Berix, I like you both but you're blue so i was slightly confused when you weren't ladies. (Oh, who am I kidding, I got used to that around Takadox.)

No more Makuta! Except maybe Makuta Miserix, he's pretty cool. But Teridax? No. He's dead. He's dead, he was crushed, whatever was left of his antidermis was so scattered that it couldn't have coalesced, ding dong Makuta's dead let's get somebody else to be evil next time.

... even if on some level I think it would be amusing to think that the reason Lewa wasn't teleported out of the GSR control room with the group was because Makuta wanted to hijack his body as a backup plan. Because "Lewa getting hijacked by the enemy" is a running gag... buuuuuut I'm happy to see Teridax dead for good. So no. No more TerryMak, please. Except as a legendary figure in a reboot's mythology... but not an actual present force to be fought.

 

the terrible sexist implications with the existence of Orde.

Whoa, whoa, whoa... what?

 

Orde is the only male Toa of Psionics, and indeed the only male Matoran/Toa/Turaga of Psionics period. This is because he got angry/frustrated once and accidentally made the Zyglax into the balls of unbridled hatred that they are today, and so the Great Beings made every other Ce-Matoran female because clearly women are so much more gentler and kinder than men.

... That last bit was sarcasm, if you couldn't tell. There is no ironclad difference between the genders, especially not at the personality level; Orde could have made the same mistake if he answered to she/her pronouns instead of he/him, and there is absolutely no guarantee that another Toa of Psionics with a similiar personality later down the line didn't make a mistake like that.

The idea that the genders are essentially different on some level is ridiculous, wrong, and really not a message that needs to be in the storyline of a kid's toyline, even if it was only in a web serial made near the end of that toyline's life. Also, Orde's whole thing and Chiara's response to it (to kill a lizard to make the point of "yeah, because ladies are all so sweet and kind. Not.") are only one of the reasons I, at least, find the web serials... subpar at best.

Aaaaaand, to stay on topic, that kind of stuff is why I really hope Bionicle gets rebooted instead of directly continued if it does return, because the last couple years really went downhill in more ways than convoluted plots. Who was it who said it was partially because GregF had too much free rein with the web serials? Because I agree with that person.

(And for Mata Nui's sake, don't make him a logic-breakingly large robot this time. And let Earth logic play! Earth logic is easy, we understand earth logic. Only suspend our disbelief in major ways, like, once. Twice maybe, if it's clearly connected to the first suspension.)

Whether Bionicle comes back or not, what's always kept me around was the story and the universe and the concept. Not the secret of the giant robot (nope nope nope nope noooope), but the... the magic robots on a tropical island fighting evil. The teamwork, and the little people being amazing even without magic powers (whoever said Matoran were helpless is wrong), and the mysteries to be explored. The science fiction slash high fantasy aspects, the GRANDNESS of it all. The remoteness from reality, and thus the depth of the escapism. Gun-lookalikes and trying to make everything have an explanation and such kinda soured the latter half of Bionicle for me, as well as said overexplaining making large enough plot/logic holes to fit the Mata Nui robot through with room to spare.

I think what I'd like the best would be maybe something like Jam Pot's idea of a far-flung-future post-apocalyptic Spherus Magna with the Agori and Matoran living together and all the characters we know being legends at best. Or a reboot that runs off in a different direction, and the reboot is in a different alternate universe-timeline-reality-thing from the original series. (Alternate universes are the best.)