Sir Keksalot

On April Fools' Day, Faber posted a mysterious image to his IG account apparently showing the first part of a Bionicle logo. He's never fully revealed what that was ever since, but he's been trickling out posts teasing bits and pieces of what he's doing. A recent update on his YT channel is the most telling bit: we know he's doing something with VR (this also goes for a Rebel Nature project), and he referred to the "Biological Chronicle" in the aforementioned video. He's gone and said this is not a Lego-sanctioned project, so it's still not quite clear what's happening, only that something is, indeed, happening.

I assumed it was something for animation/motion-tracking, but that could be very deliberate placement if you're right.

Stick around to the end. Faber name-drops the "Biological Chronicle." The hype train is in full throttle now.

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The Bohrok thing was in response to the Amazon fires, not part of this project. We know for a fact that it's not Lego-sanctioned; he's said as much outright.

I think it's safe to say Faber's entering his final form and we can expect to learn more about 3IONICLE soon™. The very earliest we might see it is early January; if it's much longer than that, it's weird that Faber would act as if he were ramping up the teases.

Faber posted a photo of a VR headset a while ago, but IIRC he didn't mention 3ION in that post and it was more for RN as far as anyone knew. I can't find the post now, so I can't verify that he didn't name the project, though.

So, he's definitely going into VR for something, but it's likely that RN will benefit from it, too. That he keeps evoking Bionicle suggests that it's probably 2 separate projects, but I can't imagine what's going on, here. 3IONICLE could just be some sort of proof-of-concept project.

Oh, wow, I didn't even realize that's what those were. They look super flat from this angle.

How'd you get all the "rays" to attach to those flex pipes?

Plot twist: the whole thing started out as an April Fools' joke, but people thought it was legit and Faber didn't have the heart to tell us, so he's scrambling to make something real behind the scenes.

Now he's just straight-up quoting the Barraki trailer. This is DEFINITELY Bionicle-related; we just don't know the direction, scope, or medium of the project. So, uh...anything substantial about it, really. But this post comes pretty quickly after the last one, and we are closing in on 2020 now, so we might finally get something out of the man soon.

"Light," scientifically-speaking, encompasses everything from radio waves to gamma radiation. What a Toa of Light can do depends on what the in-universe definition of "light" is. If he cannot make lasers, though, he doesn't have much offensive power, just illusions and blinding peeps. Shadow is honestly a dumb idea for an element. Shadows are just where light isn't; what power set comes from that? It feels like a bit of a "wastebin" element, much like Psionics, where a bunch of unrelated powers are thrown in for coolness. "Creation" is a woefully nebulous term, but "Life" is easier to pin down. It deals with imbuing things with sentience and willpower and manipulating the structure of organic entities. Time--and I'm being bold here, but just hear me out--should actually be lumped in with Gravity as a "spacetime" element; let's call it "Aether." See, gravity is caused by the warping of spacetime, and it affects time as well as space, which we can tell because time gets messy around black holes. So, therefore, a Toa of Aether should have *very* limited control over time; though not as much as the Vahi would grant. And then maybe they can make wormholes, too. Sadly, Lego did not do this admittedly epic thing.

It's still a reboot even if Lego doesn't officially sanction it. At worst, it'll be a spiritual successor to Bionicle, which still isn't a reboot, but also unlikely given that the project is named "BION-" something. Faber's doing something, and it's somehow linked to Bionicle; it cannot be "absolutely nothing" unless he quits.

Absolutely nothing Faber has posted indicates a continuation. This looks, for all the world, to be a fresh start. In any case, the future of Bionicle is in reboots, not continuations. G1 was a mess at its conclusion and there's no need to follow up on that.

So I think this is a good baseline for how to think about elements, and it's a good idea to consider that some elements can be multiple things, but I don't agree with where you've put some of the stuff. Given the choice, I'd group them like this: Energy-based: Fire, Light (it's literally just energy in wave form), Lightning, Magnetism (comes from the same force as electricity) Earthly: Earth (duh), Stone, Iron, The Green, Ice (debatable, but it does technically form part of the "land" at the poles) Fluid: Water, Air, Plasma (it's not energy, it's still physical stuff, just really hot stuff) Immaterial: Sonics (not sure where to put this tbh, it's kind of a dumb element idea), Psionics, Gravity, Shadow

Did I h*cking stutter?

Wh--how? How is electricity derived from water? Plasma is Air except spicy.

One thing I think it's worth considering is that a lot of real-world languages have strange, offshoot dialects. Treespeak wasn't bad in and of itself, but it was handled poorly in much of the media it featured in, and it came across as unnecessary and blatant. "If you ride with me, there'll be no foot-walking--just air-flying!" is a good example. The treespeak doesn't change the meaning of the sentence at all. It should have been exclusively used to succinctly convey more complex meanings. A more fluid use is: "Word is, deep-wood, that you seek the seventh Toa!" Here, "deep-wood" is just a shortening of "deep in the woods," and sounds like it could almost be a normal compound word. Words like "huge-big," "terrible-bad," and "rapid-quick" are useless and should have been cut from the dialect; while stuff like "wrong-turn," "bog-foot," and "life-dawn" sound like something that, given time, could be part of an actual English dialect. So, rather than just eliminating some of the lore, it makes more sense to retool it into something more believable.

Well, anything fits with duct tape.

It's be just easier to call ourselves "Free, the Band."

Nah, what we really need to do is form a band and make a nu metal cover of the rap to maximize the cringe.

HF wasn't made to last, just as a stand-in, and it never really did worse than Bionicle at its own worst. It simply wasn't essential for Lego to keep it around when they could reboot Bionicle (which, ironically, only did about as well as HF), and short of introducing the stronger joints of CCBS, it didn't really have much going for it. Bear in mind, G2 fell short for most of the same reasons as HF; namely, shoddy stories and characters and lousy marketing (though this owed at least partially to Lego having to un-cancel Ninjago, which sucked money out of other stuff). The only difference was that most HF sets were middle-of-the-pack in terms of quality, whereas G2 wildly fluctuated between really good and really bad sets. Both were also hugely overshadowed by Ninjago, which sold to the same audience. Really, HF and G2 both failed to take off like G1 did because of a variety of internal and external factors. Constraction isn't unviable, it's just that it doesn't have what it needs right now to succeed. If Ninjago bites it--and it eventually must--then it'll be constraction's time to rise.

You mean a Rahkshark? (Which, on closer inspection, it works really well as)

I believe the Minecraft set got confirmed more quickly, but this is still easily one of the fastest. They're all screwed. Only Sokoda's project has managed to get a good amount of support relative to time spent gathering it. Revamps are also not eligible for release (especially not ones that require molds Lego no longer has), the temple set is honestly just not that great, and UCS Tahu is lowky kinda bad. Right now, this one is our only real hope.