Takhamavahu

I'd be in favour of a reboot just as soon as all the loose ends and unfinsihed serials from 2011 are tied up. I gues they could start a new continuity and finish the old one off seperately.

The Vakhi were made to be scary and dystopian to promote the story year 2004 where Makuta had secretly taken over the city and between Morbuzak an the Drk Hunters, Metru Nui had been pretty dark and miserable lately, and the Toa were hoping to restore it to the utopian city it had been before all the Toa Mangai had been killed off. The oversight in the story is that even back in the good ol' days, Metru Nui still had a single, unelected leader and robot law-enforcers and everyone was bound to one job their whole life based on what colour they were. It's something which sounds just fine if you're a kid reading loose story updates and maybe a monthly comic. It's only we, the more active fandom who read deep enough into it to realise that should actualy be horrifying. Like how Pokemon is basically cockfighting. We just imagine our way around it because we don't want to ruin the fun of the story. I guess (pre-makuta) Metru-Nui is just that one communist dictatorship in a million that happened to work out alright for everyone.

The story came together over a few years and several writers who sorting plastic toys by their colour. It didn't ocur to them at the the time the implications that would be made if adult fans thought about it too hard. Hopefully should the story ever be rebooted, they will do away with things like sorting colours into districts and gender-specific elements. In the meantime, it's just kinda funny to think about that without realising it, the story team wrote their Utopia city to be a racially segregated communist dictatorship. And Vakama is so brainwashed in his devotion to it that he moved his people back from their tropical paradise to the crumbled ruins of their totalitarian slave-state. Yikes.

Lariska

Kongu

A company like Lego's primary concern is selling the most toys they can. The safe road, traditionally is to market Boys' toys to boys and Girls' toys to girls, and while they're happy to have female fans, Bionicle is marketed as a Boys' toy. They aren't concerned with being socially progressive if it's a business risk. Lately, companies like Hasbro, Marvel and even Disney are starting to realise that being diverse and inclusive is marketable, and they're starting to show that in their stories. Marvel is planning to have a woman take over as the lead in the main Thor comic series, Ms Marvel has taken over as Captain Marvel, and DC has been advertising their redisign of Batgirl's costume which is more practical and less sexual. Transformers: Windblade is reintroducing female transformers to the comic continuity, and is the first Transformers comic series written and drawn both by women. They're all finding that the business risk is worth it. So while Lego has been laying it safely old-fashioned for a while, hopefully they'll soon join in the trend that diversity and inclusiveness are marketable and hopefully we'll see some more balance in the future of lego themes including, if it returns, Bionicle. In the meantime, go read Transformers: Windblade. It's great.

It would have been nice. It was supposed to be a series of tributes to major parts of Bionicle, and I think a Bohrok deserved to be one of them rather than two characters from the same Glatorian series.

They were wiped out, and almost immediately brought back. Their absence had no effect on the story, and once brought back, they continued to have no effect on the story. So I would have like them to have stayed dead long enough for it to matter or else not bother with it at all.

It had no meaning at all. I don't even remember why they printed them. Just to be rare and collectible I guess. Lots of people use them in MOCs and I'm sure someone will end up with one in canon one of these days.

Where in the world did you get teal Hero Factory parts?

The comics and promo art and such are usually restricted to the current sets that the artist has available as a reference. The Mata Nui saga paintings are some of the worst offenders for getting the jist of it with currently selling sets rather than strict canon. Even though the Toa Nuva's armour should be frequently adapting to their environment, the artist only had the 2008 sets to work from, so they used that. It makes it easier for the artist and allows them to keep advertising old sets just in case they're still sitting on shelves in some stores. Those Toa on Bara Magna probably had a desert forme of some kind with weapons adapted to the battle. Greg described their adaptive armour's neutral/standard mode as looking like the 2002 Toa Nuva but in 2008's colour schemes. There's no official art, but take a look at my avatar and signature for my impressions of them.

I hope it's something where it starts more or less fresh but the history still counts. Like a new fan could start fresh from here and never need to find out why those old guys are always talking about how they beat some guy called Makuta if you didn' want to. "There goes ol' grandpa Hewki again, talking about Bohrok swarms- whatever those were."

You can headcanon that if you like, but the real reason is the set designers thought that it looked cool and that Toa are not bound to strict colour schemes. As long as she's mostly blue and looks watery, then that's all good. Even if that means a toa of water, lightning and ice could all walk into a room and you wouldn't know which was which until you asked them.

I'm betting its exact pose isn't something they're terribly fussy about, but the piece of Aqua Magna definitely hit him from behind, so at the very least, it's pretty universal that he fell forward.

A new story in the same continuity, but either in another place or a later time so that it can start pretty much fresh.

Velika was always a Great Being. When he put himself in the body of a Matoran, it functioned just like a real matoran's body, including the ability to become a Toa.

Does anybody have a clearer picture of that mini Exo-Toa Lewa?

It's an interesting possibility, but just because Vakama doesn't remember the story, or hadn't heard it the way Makuta tells it, doesn't mean he wasn't alive at the time. But it's entirely possible. New matoran were coming from Artakha every once in a while all the way up until Teridax replaced Dume and locked up the city, weren't they?

If someone became a Toa while wearing it then yes, the power upgrading their body would upgrade the mask as well.

The Great Beings considered the matoran's brains to be Artificial Intelligence, but they were so complex that certainly the lines between whether you would call them mechanical or organic were blurred. We have seen them have thoughts and feelings and be real people all the way through the story, something which the Great Beings didn't anticipate. Near the end of Bionicle's run, when Marendar was about to be introduced, one of the Great Beings was wondering to himself about whether the inhabitants of Mata Nui's body were truly sentient, living things. Evidently the planned story was going to explore that, with the inevitable moral being something asimovian about how they are real life forms with minds and souls despite being created arificially.

They knew there was a ceiling, but they had never known anything else. If you lived your whole life in a world where the sky has a finite end, you wouldn't think it was weird. Nobody in the Matoran Universe had ever heard of a sky that was just empty space forever. It wouldn't have occured to them to think there was something beyond the dome. To them, that was just where the edge of the Universe was.

Their primary masks were traded for adaptive ones, but their extras back at the suva are not. Also they couldn't access them through the sheilding around Karda Nui. Also Tahu doesn't have any.

It's also a story written to sell a toy to kids. They can have no understanding of robotics, but have one guy who can figure it out because he's a genius and you don't question it because you're ten. As adult fans, it's fun to try to make sense of it, but sometimes it just takes a little suspension of disbelief.

For the most part, they understand that their bodies are built, and that the mechanical parts don't grow naturally. But it's a piece of knowledge that is only preserved if they have a stable archive of knowledge and system of science education. On Mata Nui, their memories were wiped out. It's not necessarily clear what they did or didn't retain of their scientific knowledge, but I always thought that part of the appeal back in 2001 was that they were a primitive, tribal and supersticious culture, who beleived in spirits and legends and it was completely over their heads that their bodies are advanced technology. It was a mystery exactly where they came from, which, at that time, even we, the readers didn't know. If they had no concept of robotics, and nothing other than their own bodies looked like that, they would have no way to even suspect that there was anything weird about it.

The set designers were just being creative. Toa ae allowed minor variations as long as she's mostly blue. And I don't think the colour scheme for Lightning had been decided by the time the Toa Inika came out. There's no inside joke there.