Arcee

This rules, the molotov and jaller head are a great touch. I also love the cigar, reminds me of "Heckboy"

Is the head that hard plastic part of the canister?

Dirt is great, just recently got into AIC actually. 

I've been on a death metal kick as well, just recently saw Immolation live which may have been part of that. I've been especially getting into some older 90s stuff like Death and Sodom.

The best Gundam anime is War in the Pocket. This isn't a very fun answer because it's the one about civilian tragedy and doesn't happen to feature many robots prominently, but ****** it does the "war is bad" thing best out of all the series I've seen. 

I love the classic anime too. Been wanting to get more into Turn-A and G-Gundam.

Never built a Gunpla, but my goal is to one day do a pastel pink Zaku

This is a pretty broad topic, but since BZP isn't very active anymore I figured broad is better than specific. 

What metal bands/songs/albums are your favorites?

Some bands I'm into at the moment:

Acid Bath, Napalm Death, Chat Pile, Immolation, The Body, Cattle Decapitation, Darkthrone, Anaal Nathrakh, Mayhem's later work, Sepultra, Job For A Cowboy

Favorite albums would have to be:

Acid Bath - Paegan Terrorism Tactics & When The Kite String Pops

Immolation - Close To A World Below

Napalm Death - Utilitarian

Black Sabbath - Master Of Reality

Oh wow, I didn't know I needed a googly eye Tahu spinny until now!

I think I saw a CCBS gear floating around too, is that one of them?

3 minutes ago, BULiK said:

This is due to the temporary change of BZPower's front page to be on bzpower.info, while those links point to bzpower.com. if you click a link and then replace the url with .info, the image will appear.

As for it being outdated, I think that's just it being outdated.

Ah, ok!

Then changing the number gets me the spinny I was looking for. 

Thanks! Is this all of them?

... now if only I knew what those last two are supposed to be, lol

Seems like the Q&A page's spinny section is out of date. The embedded links aren't showing, and it only goes up to Gali G2

Does anybody have the full set of spinny gifs? Especially the newest ones, which are what I was looking for in the first place

Hey, great stuff so far. Very cinematic writing style, and I really like the more human-like traits the matoran/toa have. It's a good touch. 

I'll be keeping an eye out for more of this!

I was trying to design some Bionicle-inspired robot characters, but this one ended up being particularly Bionicley.

This guy is named Ludwig

hey yall! I'm home sick today so i did what any grown woman would do when faced with boredom. i played with bionicles!

i had half a skrall, most of a protector of ice, and change lying around so i made this lil friend

(also its eyes match my hair)

i dunno what this lil buddy does but it's an elephant with two legs and it shoots lasers from its tail. I'm not made of bricks!

It's cool to see an interview with Sayger after all this time, he's always been my favorite of the Bionicle illustrators. Always thought he was super underrated. Brought a really unique, really his-own style to Bionicle comics, and a unique take is really wonderful to see in comics about robots, who most artists will try to keep as on-model as possible at all times (it's what I love about Sarah Stone's and Alex Milne's Transformers books, is how unique and expressive their styles are...)

And really, that origin story of sorts at the beginning of the interview was great to read. I always figured he was a relatively unknown artist before Bionicle, but I didn't know it was, like, his first comics job outside self-published stuff.

Looking at his site now it looks like he's gone on to do some other smaller-scale comic books, it's good to see.

Of course thanks @ Stuart, ChocolateFrogs, and 55555 for this, I'm genuinely happy to read stuff like this.

I haven't read any of the novels or comics so I can't say for sure, but from what I gather from the '15 animations and JtO, Kopaka is a huge lovable goof. So, Kopaka for sure.

Haha, what a wild question.

I think the blinking in movies serves the same purpose as Bionicle eyebrows and the like: it humanizes the characters, it makes them more relatable, and in the process it makes them less spooky than a character who doesn't blink might be.

The same goes for the metal on the masks bending to make facial expressions. It doesn't make much sense but if it were realistic there would be either no emoting at all or it'd look like Bayformers.

I like the explanation that Bionicle eyelids exist for purposes like blocking out harsh light rather than blinking. I think that the blinking in movies could be considered a non-canon artistic liberty, again, for relatability purposes.

But like, canon gets weird when we start analyzing toy robot biology, y'know? Maybe stuff like this is better suited for a "they blink if it's convenient for them to blink in this particular medium" kinda deal.

Back in early 2004, I thought that Lhikan's team was still present on Metru Nui, only they had been transformed in some way or another.  We knew of Turaga Dume and we knew that Nidhiki was formerly a Toa.  For me, it stood to reason that they were Lhikan's Toa of Stone and Air, respectively.  Then we had Krekka, whom I assumed was a former Toa of Water or Ice.  And I guess the remaining Toa would be revealed later?

 

At any rate, I didn't even consider that when Vakama famously said "You are not the first Toa", what he meant was "you aren't even the second or third generation of Toa.  There's like a million Toa in the world."

 

But hey, all we had seen up until that point was teams of six.  Most of the mythology of the Dark Hunters wasn't even written until 2005.

 

It was the age of crazy theories!

Hey I made that assumption too! Well, I thought Krekka was one of Lhikan's teammates at least. And then I thought Sidorak and Roodaka were transformed members of that team when they were released... I wasn't too well-versed in any lore that didn't appear in the comics back then.

The thought of non-Matoran species was just so inconceivable back in '05 that everything had to be a Matoran/Toa/Turaga or a mutation of them.

I just picked up a lot at Goodwill with all the canister sets from 2009/2010 (at $20 in mint condition too! Crazy bargain!) so I've finally gotten a chance to see those sets up close after never owning any besides Pohatu '08 and Atakus.

I am really impressed with Krika's anatomy. Plus, those blended red/white parts are super creepy. Despite his overall bareness, I think Krika is one of the coolest Bionicle sets I've ever owned. '07-'09 had a lot of experimentation in builds, which sometimes failed or wasn't all that exciting, but I think Krika's paid off really well, even if he followed the Inika build pretty close.

Some titans might be impressive in size alone, but I think very few sets capture the personality of the character as well as Krika does. His simplicity knocks him down a few pegs IMO--there's very few Technic elements, not even any armor on his limbs--but he still manages to look cool.

I took this poll when I saw it on Tumblr earlier and had a thought...

How detailed does Strawpoll let you get with the data you collect? It might be cool if there were some variant options--what site you spend most of your time discussing Bionicle on, what you do most in terms of Bionicle discussion...

Seeing whether or not people like G2 compared to G1 is cool, but it might be even cooler to see how opinions stack up on BZPower vs Eurobricks vs Tumblr, or how MOCists vs G1 story theorists vs fanfic writers vs collectors see things! Maybe if Strawpoll can't do this stuff I'll look into making a similar poll with Google Forms because I'm curious now.

Anyway though, I love G2's sets and its story is alright IMO, so I said I like G2 overall.

Financially, I don't think Lego would take that kind of risk. I'm actually really surprised to hear the Ninjago movie is gonna be released theatrically, a single story-focused theme seems like far more of a risk than running with sort of a novel idea based on brand recognition (cmon, who wouldn't be interested in a movie just called "THE LEGO MOVIE").

On the other side of things though I think a theatrical film based on Bionicle would work as a movie. Mask of Light hasn't aged terribly well but I think it's the kind of animated movie people go to see in theaters. Bionicle (either generation IMO, all you really need to build a good story off of is a good backdrop) has more than enough potential to fill two hours with a self-sustained storyline.

The thing is it's probably safer and a better marketing strategy to put those two hours of story into a simple Netflix miniseries instead of going bigger than Mask of Light.

The Uniter torsos are a bit.............much, I'll agree with everyone. They're a lot much.

My biggest problem with the greebles though is how mismatched they sometimes look... I wish they'd toned down the mechanical look if they were gonna try making the Uniters look techno-organic or whatever through the textures/greebles alone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Making the Uniters get closer to nature or whatever was alright but if next year is the final incarnation of these Toa that we're getting, I'd like to see something more like a return to the emphasis on mechanical parts. Maybe just.......like, if they could do the sets with a dozen fewer molded-on pistons it'd be nice.

Re:recolors 

Personally, I like the thought of gold Tahu or orange Tahu, but I think the Uniters didn't do recoloring very well. Keeping the mask colors for characters (e.g. Tahu, Pohatu) who had little of that color elsewhere was a move that was a little too "safe" IMO. Recolors are a nice way to avoid the "why are we just getting the same heroes over and over?" complaint. It's seen with alt modes/redecoes in Transformers sometimes and is even reflected in the story occasionally (e.g. Prime Beast Hunters Bumblebee). So, a predominantly gold or orange Tahu would've been cool I thnk, but they played it so safe that it didn't work (that is, a red mask, an orange body, an overabundance of gold).

Assuming we get the same old Toa next year, I'm really hoping for some experimentation that's a bit more bold than this year's was.

I think the closest Lego will ever come to this is Uniters: animal friends who become armor. A small set which has no playability and exists only to augment bigger sets goes against the "impulse purchase" nature of the small sets I think.

Old Bionicle promo material is all so cool to look back on. So much glow! Everyone sure was liberal with their Photoshop filters back then, weren't they.

The best IMO were always in the comics though. As a kid with no access to the internet but a thorough knowledge of the Matoran alphabet, I remember waiting in absolute awe when I saw the end of this comic. Like, "why the heck does it say Vakama?" and "is this guy the new Toa?"

Dumb kid that I was, I thought the Kanoka shooter was a new version of Turaga Vakama, sitting on this guy's shoulder. Just, no clue at all that this shadowy guy was Vakama.

I'm pretty excited for the new Umarak and Flame Beast, but I'd like to get Umarak the Hunter, Gali, and Uxar before even touching the Summer wave.

 

This reminds me of Homestuck communities honestly. On MSPA's official forums they had to quarantine discussions about Vriska Serket to its own thread and it went on for years. That said though I'm not sure that's the best approach lol. It's irritating to have something so base-breaking that it completely derails every discussion on a forum, but maybe there's something less harsh as trying to corral all discussion into one chaotic place.

I was never really active on the MSPA forums, what were people freaking out over about Vriska? I know she was a pretty polarizing character at some points, but I'm guessing this was something more than that. Just curious lol.

It was basically that! As a polarizing character central to the storyline, nobody could agree on whether she was a "good guy" or a "bad guy", and from that discussion emerged a lot of more nuanced stuff like "if she's a complex character with good and bad points, were her bad points less severe and/or justified?" or "why do readers hate/love her so passionately?". In fact the thread was still active by the time the forums got shut down a month or two ago. The thing is, the more passionate about Vriska people got, the more dramatic I think their opinions got. Suddenly it was easy to declare that she was a complex character, but Vriska lovers and Vriska h8rs were just really adamant about yelling at each other and often turning it into a personal attack (which I guess makes sense, she was a bully character and most of us have more experience with bullies than we do, like, green skull monsters or whatever, so it is easier to take personally).

That's why the G1 vs G2 debate around here really reminds me of the Vriska debate on the MSPA forums (and to a degree the Dave x Karkat debate). I mean, any big fanbase is gonna have polarizing arguments like this... but it's a pretty big debate, IMO, if you can easily end any conversation by saying something like "Vriska Serket is a villain, all of her heroic acts were done out of selfishness" or "Bionicle Gen 2 shouldn't have ever happened, the story puts G1 to shame". One person's opinion (or trolling attempt!) is enough to essentially sabotage the thread starter without some form of moderator intervention.

This reminds me of Homestuck communities honestly. On MSPA's official forums they had to quarantine discussions about Vriska Serket to its own thread and it went on for years. That said though I'm not sure that's the best approach lol. It's irritating to have something so base-breaking that it completely derails every discussion on a forum, but maybe there's something less harsh as trying to corral all discussion into one chaotic place.

Forums are funny places. As a medium forums seem to value calm and civil discussions over people yelling at each other, but a forum is where someone goes when they're passionate enough about something to get mad about it. I think some level of not feeding trolls would be advisable in something like a discussion about toys but like, that's just my opinion I guess and something you can't really...enforce.

Something relevant to the discussion, though, since I want to contribute to the OP: I think G1 and G2 are apples and oranges in a way. Every time I miss G1 I have fan works to turn to! G2's building system is a lot of fun though. I think not having fun with Bionicle is against the very reason I still like Bionicle as a 23-year-old. It's an escape from real-world stress I guess. G1 and G2 are both fun and I hardly have any desire to compare them.

Edit: typo

(hehe, do I spy a JoCo quote in this article title...?)