Wrinkledlion X

I'll reserve my opinions on the new backstory, but right now I'm busy fawning over Onua. I'm still puzzled about his gold+silver color scheme, but it actually looks strangely good in some of these pictures. I'm just really happy they made Onua the strongman of the group. That's how I always saw him, so I was never fond of that Greg-ism that "Pohatu's the strong one, Onua's just a regular-strength Toa with a Pakari." It always seemed very counter-intuitive to me. I also like that they're characterizing him as "sleepy"--I'm ambivalent about some of the Toa's new personality traits, but this is a good addition for Onua. They're making him even more like his element: dormant but immensely powerful.

Well, look for yourself: I spy gears

Some of the concept art here depicts a Defender/Protector in a Turaga-like role: https://twitter.com/RusBionicle/status/520276060433178624

My friends and I don't have a 50/50 eye color distribution either. your friends and you aren't a wave of LEGO sets I just like to have an even distribution among a Toa team, though even better would be returning to the days of unique eye colors. I do wish they had individual eye colors. (though I don't know if onua could handle any more colors)

I think there's a clear resemblance to his original mask, it just looks like it got half-eaten by a machine. You can see he has his original grin in the form of those wide holes around the mouth. You can see the design progression here, though I agree they lost something in the translation: https://twitter.com/BZP_Tweets/status/520261897892163584 I like that middle-top design; wish they had gone with that one.

Where do they use "Kanohi?"

It does seem almost certainly like a hard reboot, but I can live with that. Looks like they're trying to recapture some of the elegant simplicity of the early story.

OH YEAH. I forgot about that. That was because Vitara was subtly influencing him so that Krahiki would get himself Krana'd. Good times, my friend, good times.

pSHAW whatever man guess you'll go to your grave without seeing how Krahiki escapes his krana I mean I don't care but

nah, but I can give you spoilers if you're into that

Where's the flag?

Well the island is also, in effect, a giant mask that Mata Nui is wearing.

Don't bother convincing yourself of anything. Whether it's a reboot has nothing to do with what you believe, so you might as well roll with the punches instead of getting your hopes up.

I would love a somewhat more polished version of the MNOLG's style. It obviously looks a bit dated at this point and very Flash, but the aesthetic was really quite nice. If they polished that up and gave it a bit more proper animation, it could be made into something very watchable.

Pff, not at all. Kids LOVE spoilers. They aren't so cynical about the need to watch a story unfold "properly." I remember joining in January of 2003 and trying to find out all I could about the Kal, and then when word of the Rahkshi arrived, I jumped over to that and speculated with everybody else about what they could be. Every bit of leaked info was gold.

Everyone, please lighten up. The moment you start getting self-righteous on here, just calm yourself down and remind yourself that you're on a website devoted to children's building toys. That said, Trueshadow: sexualized Bionicles tend to be extremely awkward, especially when they're in a context that isn't appropriate. If you want to draw sexy ladies, I suggest you go the 1950s pinup route, where the sexualization is appropriate for the genre. You can have all the fun you want with your heavy-lidded eyes and feminine curves in that context. But when you're illustrating actual dramatic scenes and still inserting weird sexual stuff into them, it gives the impression that "highly sexualized" is the only way you know how to draw female characters. I go to an art school, and I know a guy like this. Everyone hates working with him on projects, because he can't help but inject his sexual fixations into everything he draws, and it comes across as pervy and gets in the way of the story being told. I like the female form as much as anybody, but trying to contort your characters into sexy poses and high heels when the scene apparently involves strangling (?) is just inappropriate and weird.

To be fair, the MNOLG-style animations from 2002 to 2003 were heavily influenced by anime. They employed limited animation and a lot of anime sound effects/staging: http://youtu.be/1xZH_Idw6dE?t=2m35s There are also a lot of anime hallmarks in the scenes between Huki and Maku during the Ga-Koro episodes. They get spots of blush on their cheeks when they're embarrassed, and I remember a giant drop of sweat appearing on one of the Matoran's masks when he gets nervous.

I was actually the first to connect the place names with facial features, way back in 2008. I posted a topic theorizing that Mata Nui the island and Mata Nui the character were one and the same. Unfortunately I didn't connect the theory to the MU below, or I'd have really been on the right track. (PlanetPerson hit the correct theory like a week after mine.) For those of you who are shocked that all this was planned out from the beginning, here's a post I made that highlights old concept work, which shows just how thoroughly the entire story was based around the giant robot reveal.

Where are you sourcing this from? ALSO: Lord Okkoto

Yeah, the cartoonishly bad attitudes of all the characters in the films kind of undermined the message they were trying to go for. Also the fact that "Destiny" in Bionicle is this absurdly complex, arbitrary, predetermined thing. I don't really mind that every character has a predetermined destiny, but it's kind of a bad thing to have in a slogan when it works that way.

You've got to be kidding me. This just makes me lose hope in the world... Have you actually thought about that saying and why it was put there? Is it just suppose to sound cool? NO Unity is your people, your tribe, those that you would fight for and that accept you. Without your unity you are weak. With it, you are strong. You work as a team for the benefit of not just yourself, but those in it. Duty is what you do for your unity. The sacrifices you make, the things you do for it, even if you don't want to. Duty keeps it working and the fundamentals of your unity intact, so it can continue to grow and be. It also gives the unity something to do, something it must commit to, because it should. Destiny, is what keeps the individuals, the parts, of the unity going. It opens up each members future, so not only does the unity matter, but their personal well-being as well. It gives each individual something to strive for and try to find. Destiny is a part of the individuals' story. And, the destiny of the unity, so that it continues to work to find what it really means. Together, the combination creates something amazing. Something that can be related to and understood by more than just robots. Unity, duty and destiny are simple and philosophical, and actually are IMPORTANT to the real world, which is part of what made Bionicle more than just a toy theme. It's what made it great. It taught me as a child what it is to be a hero and a good part of the world. Anyone who thinks they are meaningless and uninportant simply have not bothered to think about it enough. I don't care about the symbol so much, but taking out UDD is taking away so much of the core of Bionicle and would just make it a Hero Factory. And I don't believe it was ever overused. Sure, it was used often, but in the span of ten years not that much. And this slogan was part of the core of Bionicle's story, so saying it was overused is like saying the whole purpose of the story of the heroes fighting for what's right was excessive. Abandoning UDD means giving up, letting evil win. And no matter what people say, good and heroes are not overated. If anything, they are underated. Because they are the ones who fight for more than just themselves. They resist temptation, corruption, and fight for truth, justice, love, mercy, not just because they want to, but it is the right thing to do. Sorry if I sounded rude again, but I really really feel strongly about this. I only mean the best of things here. The first time they introduced UD&D was in Mask of Light, and I remember being weirded out by them constantly shouting it as one, with that awful voice-acting. It was odd how they acted as if it had always been a part of the lore. And I don't know how often Unity/Duty/Destiny actually comes up in real life, but I've never had to band together with my tribe to achieve some kind of grand destiny. It made sense in Bionicle, where everybody was part of a giant robot, but to me it sounds oddly fascist when taken out of the context of a kid's story. It would worry me a lot to hear a politician saying something like that—it's kind of like talking about "The Greater Good."

"Rolls off the tongue in a... childish manner". Really. The pretensions of this fanbase never cease to amaze me. God forbid anything we do sound childish to anyone, even for an utterly inane reason like how it "rolls off the tongue". The similarities to ponyfan (a term that, as a brony, I've scarcely ever heard anybody actually use) never once occurred to me, and I doubt they'd occur to most people. But if they did, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Unless, of course, we're so wrapped up in our delusions of being better and more mature than everyone else that we take offense to being compared to one of the most lively and productive fanbases on the Internet. I don't think this fandom necessarily NEEDS a name, but frankly all the reasons I've heard that people are opposed to a fandom name almost make me ashamed to consider myself a part of this fandom. So many people seem to have locked themselves up in an ivory tower and don't dare do anything that could be perceived as cute, childish, or silly. I don't see what everybody's so scared of — these kinds of lofty, ignorant pretensions are already more embarrassing to us as a community than any name would ever be. I can see you're point, and I mean you're right. Honestly, I do find myself to be outgrowing this, and I still hang back around icassionally now that Bionicle is coming back since I'm curious in which direction it will take off. A lot of things are percieved as cute childish and silly in this 7+ Lego theme, but I find that a name that (mostly) the older fans are trying to come up with should carry little less of that childishness with it. I see a name like "Bonklers" as a tacit admission that we all realize we're talking about a toy line aimed at children. It's slightly self-deprecating in a way that says, "Yeah, they're for kids, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy it." That degree of self-awareness is much more mature and respectable than desperately pretending that Bionicle isn't aimed at kids.

Yeah, page tabs would work well. Just out of curiosity, though, has there ever been an officially-sanctioned BS02? I feel like there was a site by that name back in like, 2004.

Perhaps it can inch around like a nasty, face-shaped slug. Or maybe like this?

I was suggesting it in the event that they do clash. If there are two unrelated, conflicting stories, I think BS01 would become very muddled trying to cover them both. For all characters who appear in both timelines, you could simply include a link to their page on the other wiki.