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Cressona

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Year 16

About Cressona

  • Birthday 06/17/1993

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  1. My biggest doubt about this type of thing happening has just been the lack of actual story material-- it's pretty much a given that we won't see any skull spider controlling in the little animations, and it doesn't look like we'll have much else to go on. I suppose they good throw something like that into one of the chapter books (and in fact, if the books do go into the same type of depth as the old ones, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did), but of course by then the hype train will be gearing up for 2016
  2. EDIT: Just saw fisher64's post after posting this, checked the math, and he's right, the robot is a perfectly legitimate size. I have no complaints. I just don't think this is consistent with the suggestion we fans heard around that time when Greg said "there could even be continents in the domes". This was before we knew about the giant. It was fascinating -- why would there be such huge landmasses in domes like Metru Nui? When it became a 40 million feet tall giant robot, so big he has environments inside him for the maintenance workers, it clicked perfectly. Making them "actually just bigger islands" would rob that of its value. Greg gave no impression at all that "it's just how the characters in-story see it". And again, this isn't a Bionicle term -- it's an English word presented as it's always used in English. The imaginary "translators into English" didn't have to use it; two different words for something like "island" that don't exist in English are often translated as one word in many real translation scenarios. I argued, however, that the purpose of the story isn't to create a world very different from our own, but that, as a part of the good telling of any story, it will be made to be similar to our own in certain respects (in this case the size of Spherus Magna; to that I refer you to my previous posts). And it does sound like ultimately it'll come down to how big something has to be to be a continent. If you propose a lower bound, we can work out the minimum Great Spirit size that such a particularly sized continent can fit into, but if you're pre-committed to the 40 million foot tall Great Spirit, then your minimum required continent size is going to vary with that. I think if you put an English-speaking human inside a GSR that's significantly smaller than 40 million feet but still within my acceptable range and showed him one of the continents there, they'd be more than comfortable calling them continents, whether or not they are the same size as continents on earth, because they meet all the criteria I listed (again, refer to previous post). But, again, if you're pre-committed to a particular size of GSR, you're pre-committed to a particular continent size, and you're similarly pre-committed to a particularly massive Spherus Magna, and so you're already pre-committed to a setting or background for the Bionicle story that is fundamentally, disconcertingly different from our own world upon examination, and I believe that's something that makes for a sub-par story for many reasons, among which are the comfort of the audience within the world and their ability to fit the setting in some sense into an existing paradigm. This is why the settings of many years of the Bionicle story worked very well, because they were a tropical island, a city, an apocalyptic island (familiar in concept if not direct experience), underwater (the same thing), the skies/a swamp (maybe fairly abstract but still easily conceptualized within existing paradigms), and a desert planet. These are very simple examples, but the point is that there does have to be something simple to anchor the audience, concept-wise. Even when the nature of the GSR was revealed, because everything was on a scale we could understand and the world within the robot was one we could be familiar with, it wasn't disconcertingly different. Even when the setting switches to a different planet, it's not something that's completely foreign to us-- different planets are common settings in fiction, and we have a general cultural knowledge of what other planets are going to be like. To suddenly multiply the size of that planet into something massive beyond comprehension is to sweep the rug out from under the audience, to tell them they do not, in fact, actually understand what this setting is like, that it (or at least the experience of it) is something very much beyond your comprehension, that this story is taking place in a very foreign environment (of course by environment I mean the large-scale background of the setting). Perhaps I am alone in thinking that a supermassive Spherus Magna is unsatisfying in this way, but that is my charge.
  3. I know, but again, you won't really please the people who are reacting against his being "quite large" that way. Sure -- I'm just saying, that's not the primary goal of what Bionicle set out to do. Well, naturally-- the primary goal of what Bionicle set out to do was sell toys. I mean yeah obviously the goal isn't to make a world just like ours... but that's sort of a little bit of a goal in every well-told story, is a setting that feels familiar in some way. You can have very surreal, very out-there stories, but at the core of all the best ones will be something relatable, and the more relatable that setting is, the more the surreal or otherwise out-there elements are going to make an impact. It's a way to connect with the audience. So when I say I'm trying to solve the puzzle of doing that for Bionicle, I'm not claiming it as Bionicle's primary goal, I'm claiming it as an important element in any story; and, in fact, one that is already present in the canon Bionicle story-- because in that story, we have no references to super-massive planets or omniscient EP forming them, we get a planet that a giant robot stands up on and eventually pushes back together, and we get images to go along with that story that can make us imagine the robot doing that on earth, and it making sense. All I want to do is reconcile that very natural part of the Bionicle story with as much of the extra information we've been given, and my worry is that only one piece of that information (the 40 million feet number) doesn't fit into that otherwise very natural picture. The only other complaint seems to be how big a landmass has to be for it to be called a continent, and to me it just seems natural that all the really, really big landmasses (relative to the much much smaller islands everywhere else) in a given world would be called by that world's inhabitants the continents; and that these continents would have the property of being able to support lots of different, independent settlements that required significant travel time to go between and would have significant portions of their surface without coastal access. That is something that is obviously possible in a wide range of giant robot sizes, from the 40 million feet down to a lower bound that, while still fairly large, in no way needs to be within a few significant figures of the entire diameter of earth. If you or other defenders of the full-size Mata Nui want to insist on continents exactly or very nearly the same size as those on earth, then just by definition you can't arrive at anything other than the full-size GSR.
  4. I figured this would come up; funny how these topics always seem to follow the same lines, huh? Basically, we know the years are our years, but we don't know the days or months. However, I wouldn't rely on this in attempts to explain the travel times. Most likely the days and months are like ours for the same reason the years are -- to be easier to relate to for human audiences. Well, this is where we could dive off the next predictable line from past topics into my old "Greater Beings" planet-seeding theory, which described basically that sort of thing. Or something like it. But canonically, we don't know how the planet got this way, it's just a given that it is, and apparently many others are too. Well, not "continents" inside him, like I said. And most of the story took place inside him, so I'd say seriously downsizing the giant does indeed have a major impact on the story. You'd think that would affect their society in some ways; having two legitimate continents versus really little islands just called that would affect a lot. Not just population size (since the MU actually has a fairly small population for the land area, but that too makes sense as a lot would be automated, there'd be plenty of wilderness areas for environmental recycling, etc.) -- for one thing, it would affect... yeah... travel times. And there being so many secrets all over the place would seem pretty odd. Problem is, having weird twists on things like this is part of Bionicle's "genre." You could (and some have) make the same argument against the many-millenia lifespans, or the biomechanical nature, against mask powers, elemental powers, or anything about Bionicle that is different from our world. Some things do need to be like ours to be relatable, but it's more a matter of where you draw the line. I think that one probably comes down to the old issue of taste in a lot of ways. What to one person is "don't need weird stuff" is to another "boring, too much like our world", etc. And vice versa. I would suggest that generally it's a bad idea to base arguments on what should or shouldn't be in fiction like this on a "need to postulate", simply because that puts the primary focus on dry thought -- as much as I heart thought -- rather than where it really is for entertainment; what's more emotionally pleasing. If having a giant, and a planet, "unimaginably vast" is the emotion they're going for, then whatever needs postulated, as it were, to make it work, within reason, isn't really a bad thing anyways, but also fits into something else Bionicle intentionally tried to be -- "requiring work to understand." Er, as I said at the start, if slightly smaller is all you want, why bother? A giant only slightly less unimaginably vast is still unimaginably vast. Don't you mean continents that aren't really continents anymore? More to the point, this actually works against your argument as I see it. You're saying the benefit to your way is the continents are smaller; the downside is we don't get to use our brains and imaginations to try to solve a puzzle and we have to have a more "run of the mill" universe. I don't see why the upside is so worth it. Sounds like a lot of it comes down to taste about what you want out of a story -- if you aren't looking for things that feel "out there", they can seem like a problem, but if you are, they are the solution. And again, the "need to postulate" goes both ways. It may be that you haven't tried to think of what would need to be re-thought to force a smaller size into the story. Since that size was decided, and not just at the very end but some amount of time before the end, there could be any number of things in the latter part of the story that were built on it that you could easily be taking for granted. I think most of them would be in society and things like that. Look at how many topics have picked on just one oversight in that subject for 2009 -- the travel times. Now flip things on their head, and if we went through the whole thing carefully I bet we could come up with many more like it that would be hard to square with a small giant/planet. Also, not sure I really buy your descriptions of just how 'weird' this all is. This is a story that lasted ten years with powers, and EP was well known for a while, etc. Weird for Earth, yes, but for Bionicle, not at all. Actually, it seems like the Entity sort of inhabits EP, and does not control the results of transformations. If memory serves... But I do think that what does determine such destinies is living in a sense too. I'd comment more, but it's basically the theme of my retelling so I won't spoil anything more there. Suffice to say, what we know from the canon alone fits that anything that is needed, in a transformation, where EP actually is in contact with the thing, basically HAS to be done, or else the thing has to be destroyed. So logically, if gravity-nulling is needed, EP can either let gravity pull rock into it bit by bit, destroying the planet (choosing not to transform it), or transform it in the way needed. That's basically the rules, as I understand them. The other solution is that it's not SUPER huge but still has more gravity than Earth, and that seems to be the way Greg has chosen to go. Now I'm not suggesting that Mata Nui is so small that our "continents" become islands-- just that Mata Nui might not be 40 million feet tall. We don't need to shrink him down completely, he can still be quite large and still have very very large landmasses inside of him that any reasonable person would call "continents". It'd be sort of a middle ground between the full-sized Mata Nui that necessitates a massive Spherus Magna, and the pint-sized Mata Nui you have a problem with. My motivation, ultimately, is for Spherus Magna to be a sensible size instead of a super-planet, and that's because I think it's a more interesting story if it's more relatable to its audience, even if only in a minor way-- and that minor way is being in a similar universe with similar cosmological constraints with a background setting (in this case the planet) that operates, apart from those interesting changes relevant to the story, similar to the way our own planet operates. Maybe it's just a difference in taste, but I'd rather not have to postulate all sorts of additional, unmentioned goings-on in order to fit a massive Spherus Magna into a universe with otherwise ordinary laws of physics. I mean, of course it's fun to figure out, but I think it's also interesting to figure out the reverse puzzle-- how close can we make the Bionicle world to our own, and how close can we make it stick to our intuition of how it ought to be? Ultimately I suppose I just don't like the picture of Mata Nui standing next to earth, or wrapping himself head-to-toe around the planet when he sits down on it, and I want to get closer to the image I have of a giant robot standing up on a relatively earth-sized planet, and I just see the 40 million number thrown out there without any real, necessary story purpose (because, as I said, he doesn't have to be as huge for us to have things we can call "continents" in his chest, or for there to be large oceans and landmasses requiring significant travel time) as an obstacle to that.
  5. I agree with Lyichir, just because it isn't Farshtey doesn't mean it won't be classic Bionicle! The new author seems incredibly qualified and talented, and as long as he'll have some decent story material to work with (as far getting the feel of Bionicle right, like the atmosphere and the setting-- not plot details), I think it's got the potential to be a great success. I'm very interested to see the direction the books take the story. We haven't gotten very much story material so far, and it seems like the Toa are nearly operating in a void; assuming we don't get much more beyond the animations, the books will the only substantial story material of the year, and will have a major roll in shaping the story.
  6. This is the kind of connection theory I like-- it doesn't necessitate any overly burdensome links to the complexities of G1, leaves the difficulties with the past story in the past and insists that it'll be an entirely new story, but still allows for G2 to have a real link with G1 that makes sense and can appeal to fans (and I don't necessarily mean the nitpicking, S&T-browsing super-fans many of us are) who liked the original stuff to an extent and don't want to see it completely forgotten. I theorized upon first becoming familiar with the story material for G2 that it was a distant-past story or legend that inspired the G1 characters, and this sort of turns that on its head, making G1 an ancient legend in the distant past of G2 (maybe G1 took place in a mythical "time before time" eh?). That means that the stories that are passed down can be incomplete, can lose details or bits and pieces that had been forgotten over the years, and still retain the core idea, essentially that of six heroes arriving on an island to defeat an ancient evil force. And then G2 would be a literal re-living of those ancient Bionicle legends. Do you think perhaps the prophecy that foretold the coming of the toa was in fact a version of the legend of the original Toa Mata, passed down over time and eventually distorted or combined with some actual facts about the Okoto Toa and their imminent arrival to become a prediction?
  7. The part I bolded is just an assumption, though, that art we were shown is definitely canon for the sizes. It's unlikely the artists were concerned with these things when they drew those, or that the story team worried about them either. That's why I'm saying I don't think we should be making too much of artwork. Yes, I take it that way in my own personal headcanon (esp. for the retelling, which uses the gravity absorption thing), but canonically, we don't have anything clear. Yet, anyways. (Except that SM is bigger than Earth and has more surface gravity.) Yes we have -- because the theory was that it transformed the rock around it (and transforming or destroying is what it does ) to grant that power to it. What the results of transformations are follow almost no predictable patterns other than "what destiny needs to happen". In fact, since the EP didn't burn through all that rock just because it touched it, Karzahni-plant-style, it basically had to transform it somehow. And since it's also confirmed that the planet is larger, Ockham's Razor makes this the most likely theory (prior to Greg's denying the badly-worded version of it somebody threw at him) of what the transformation did. Doesn't mean it had to be done, but yeah. It's just not that simple -- because much of the story has been shaped around that number intentionally. It's best to try, first, to take every canon fact, and see how they can fit together, and only if they absolutely can't, take something out. And if you do, then you still can't just assume that just ignoring that one thing makes it all work. You have to consider downsides of that, too. And as I've pointed out here (some of it just for starters), there's several problems with ignoring that number in favor of something significantly shorter. So, really you have to warp a lot of things to try to ignore it. You would have to suggest a workable solution to at least, for example, there being "continents" in his chest, and that Mata Nui was called a "big" island, and even halving the giant to have his face fit under there leaves him massive, especially at the depicted 12-head-height ratio. If you change that ratio, you lose the feeling of his being unimaginably vast that that adds too... and you begin to see how your solution warps things just as much if not more. By contrast... gravity weirdness. One simple idea, no real "warping everything." Ah, fair, but for the EP to transform the rock of a planet so that the rock nullifies gravity... well, it'd have to somehow be the destiny of the rock, or EP would have to do so deliberately, and there'd need to be a planet-creation process in which the planet starts out at a reasonable, gravitationally-allowable size, and somehow grows as the EP in its core starts to imbibe the closest level of rock with that power.... so it would be very strange to imagine Spherus Magna actually coming into existence in the first place. Definitely not an assumption of mine that the robots were battling on a reasonable level plane, though... I mean look at the images, check out all the story material we've got and there's every indication that they are not carefully balancing on an oversized beach ball. If that artwork isn't relatively canon, what is? Also not at all clear on what aspects of the story are fundamental to the 40 million feet number? We can still have a tremendously huge Great Spirit Robot that isn't so tremendously huge that it'd have to wrap itself completely around the earth to sit down on it, and every element of the story would still make perfect sense. We get reasonably-sized planets, don't need to postulate extra weird stuff for EP to do, and don't need to figure out how such massive planets came to be through some weird combination of existing astrophysics and a convoluted involvement of EP. Whereas, if you were to ignore the 40 million feet number, what elements of canon exactly would be warped? Ah, the continents might be slightly smaller? The island of Mata Nui would be... well, exactly the same size, we could just fit more of the giant's face under it?
  8. The thing is, however you want to leave planet sizes up to interpretation, we've still got some facts about a giant robot fight that took place with both robots standing on the surface of the planet, in which it's pretty clear that they're on a fairly level plane relative to their sizes and not balancing on opposite sides of an exercise ball. Gravity-nullification of some kind might be the only way to save the massive planet sizes we need once we accept the 40 million number-- although turning Spherus Magna into a supermassive chunk of rock held to together with EP is, at least for me personally, less attractive than just accepting that the GSR isn't as tall as the earth is around; I'd rather the entire story not take place in a setting that's on such a hyper-inflated scale , and I'd be more comfortable ignoring one number than trying to warp everything in order to fit the number. The problem with gravity-nullification is that, well... does EP always do that? We haven't seen any evidence of it doing so anyplace else in the story, and just inventing a power that it has (especially if Greg wouldn't even agree to it) seems like just as much of a handwave as "a wizard did it!" You'd like to believe, wouldn't you, that somewhere down the line EP would make sense, and wouldn't just remain this haphazard collection of powers and abilities that fit whatever the plot needs it to do. This hypothesis puts additional stress on an already-nearly-broken concept.
  9. I like this-- it explains why, if Skull Grinder does have access to hordes of Skull Warriors and however many Scorpions or Slicers are at his disposal, LOSS ran around with nothing but a swarm of weak, fairly pathetic skull spiders. Then again, maybe the Skull Squad never cared all that much about terrorizing the inhabitants of Okoto, and their real mission involves the Ancient City (keeping Ekimu asleep/guarding his tomb?)-- then LOSS might have been sent out, not because he was looked down upon by the others, but because of his connection to the swarms, and their real purpose may have just been the guard the shrines of the golden masks to prevent anyone from getting at them, or to seek out the masks to bring them to the Ancient City in the first place.
  10. Interesting observation-- I like the thought that there's some relevance to G1 taking place in the "time before time", especially considering all the hints that G2 will be doing something involving time. I'm not sure it'll play out exactly as you described, but I'd bet the mask of time will be involved, and I certainly wouldn't rule out its ability to time-travel. Sure, nobody in G1 had enough control over the mask to make it do so, but the G2 version (presumably) will be the full version (not just the half-face Vahi) we've been hearing about, and it'll be in the hands of G2 characters who may be able to do more with the power of time than G1 ever dreamed. Whether this indicates some sort of direct temporal link between G1 and G2 is yet to be seen (and of course everyone's got a strong opinion on whether or not it ought to), but here's hoping that the "time before time" becomes relevant in some sense, even if only as homage.
  11. I think Skull Scorpio is cool! I won't be getting him, but I only ever get one or two sets per wave, and Skull Grinder vs Mask Maker is clearly my buy for the summer. But I think it's really refreshing to see a non-humanoid build, I think he looks considerably menacing, and I love the tail-functionality. He definitely could've been a lot better, but all things considered I think he's a great foray into the more interesting, more technic sides of Bionicle, and I hope Lego continues to switch things up and give us sets that aren't just standard CCBS builds with different armor shells. On a different note-- does anybody feel like insufficient hype was generated for Bionicle in 2015? Between the capacity for engagement with a really cool, unique story and the existing fanbase or at least general knowledge of its existence, there could've been a ton of hyping-up by the Lego group in anticipation of the release, with considerable teasers and viral marketing, and though there certainly was a bit of that, I can't help but feel that it may have been possible to generate even more excitement pre-January 2015 and end up driving sales even further. Pair that with significant story material to release piece-by-piece until the summer wave, and Lego rides the hype train into 2016... instead we're getting a series of super brief animations and, it appears, not much else. I just get the feeling, and I don't think I'm completely alone on this thought, that Lego wanted to play it safe with Bionicle and not take too many risks in case it failed again... and most of Bionicle's return was done with just a bit of work put into it, and meant to just fly under the radar and see what happens. And maybe they could've really gotten much higher sales with a good deal more work put into all the material for it; but maybe I'm way off base.
  12. What bothers me most about the 40 million feet number is how large Aqua Magna, Spherus Magna, et al. would have to be. Can you even have a solid planet with a radius 70x that of Jupiter? I mean, they certainly aren't all gas giants, but you'd think they'd have to be, based on those sizes... Although maybe we shouldn't expect the planets to obey ordinary rules of physics as we understand them anyway-- after all, the perfect three-way split of Spherus Magna might only be possible if we suspend ordinary cosmology and astronomy, and once we've done that, supermassive planets are perfectly fine. But that makes the setting almost completely alien, when we lose even the possibility of existing in a similar sort of universe, and I personally don't find that appealing.
  13. I'm not sure a television show would work, at least for most of this year's story-- maybe down the line, but for what has happened so far, the animations might be the best way to tell it. The toa arrive on the island alone, meet up with their protector, and then each pair individually battles swarms of skull spiders, reaches the shrine, gets their mask, and heads to the outskirts of the ancient city, where they all meet. I imagine it'd be pretty repetitive to show more or less the same thing six times (there really are no unique enemies to challenge the toa at this point, and character interactions would be limited with the fairly featureless protectors), or we'd only get one toa's viewpoint and the others would be excluded. Better to have quick clips that get the message across of what's going on without running into the problems of a long-form narrative.
  14. Hey, I know I was surprised to find out Ekimu would be coming out in the summer wave; fishers64 has a point that it seems awfully early for what we'd expect to be a main conflict (waking up Ekimu) to be resolved. I can see where Prowl Nightwolf is coming from too; maybe our set Ekimu is like a fantasy of what it'd be like if he were to wake up already, maybe the toa reach the forge and find his body but he still sleeps (and the set just puts that body into plastic form)... there's a lot of possibilities that can keep our little Mask Maker slumbering into the future. But ultimately, yeah, it's most likely Ekimu is waking up already. Which is why I like the idea that Skull Grinder = Makuta, it sets up an epic confrontation between the two brothers, and right in the first year too! I was actually thinking-- we don't really know what happens to Makuta after the battle with Ekimu, right? Ekimu's laid to rest in his fancy sarcophagus, but Makuta's just left to rot... and maybe that's exactly what happens-- he rots into a skeleton (maybe losing his red and black color scheme in the process, leaving only gunmetal bones) and re-emerges as the Skull Grinder. That'd explain his skeletal appearance, as well as maybe his name in the set, if the decaying and return were a rebirth of sorts.
  15. You know, I actually have to disagree with a few other posters; I can definitely see the resemblance to Roodaka. As far as a 2015, CCBS-style interpretation of the set goes, I think this nails it. Colors, overall shape, the way everything comes together-- I definitely see Roodaka there, and i think it's pretty clear. My big complaint, though, is just the simplicity of the build. It feels like the Roodaka imitation came together almost too easily (which is always a problem using CCBS), and as a result a lot of the little details that filled out the original set were simplified or disappeared. And maybe it's just because original Roodaka was a titan, and this interpretation takes a more canister-sized approximation of her, but I think a lot of the appeal of the '05 set was the intricacies of the build, the subtle complexity that gradually pulled itself together into something lithe, sleek, and dangerous-looking. In this 2015 version, we get the general outline pretty well, but (if only for size and the inherent constraints or simplifications of CCBS) we lose all those subtleties, and as a result lose the sleekness and style of the original. That said, very creative interpretation of a lot of Roodaka's key elements-- I love the concept of that head, and her claw-spinner-thing looks pretty sweet as well.
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