Pohaturon

Amid the torrent of promotion and cross promotion the various individuals involved with this, I'm confused. Is Liam Robertson the same individual as Vahkiti, who is also Liam, or is Vahkiti a different Liam?

I've been watching this unfold on Twitter. Monumental event in the history of Bionicle, and for the community.

A creative build which uses simplicity to its favour, great job!

For the BBC #75 Contest, I teamed up with Admiral Otohp (though new to BZP, he's known in the Bionicle Community as Dödke). Our decided common theme was building a pair of "bioformers", both of which have animal-based altmodes and whose colour schemes contrast each others'. Admiral Otohp: Morak, Judge of War and Peace Morak is the God of War and Peace in the mythos of the northern nomadic tribes. He is seen as both benevolent and malevolent, and the people revere and fear him equally. He is neither cruel nor merciful, but just to a fault. He reigns in the shadows of the night, for shadows see and hear everything. It is said that when conflicts erupt and wars are declared, Morak already knows who will win, who will lose, who will live and who will die. Flickr album for more photos. Pohaturon: Sahtet, Huntress of Life and Death Sahtet is a being deified by the wandering nomadic tribes of the frozen north where she hunts. The Huntress represents life and death - life in that hunters provide the tribe with food for eating and fur for clothes, and death because when she marks a target, it will surely perish. Sahtet's aim is always true, her arrows never miss - but they're never fatal, either. They only wound - Sahtet prefers to deliver the killing blow with tooth and claw in her snow panther form. It is said that Sahtet only hunts during dawn and dusk, as the rising and setting sun's low rays are blindingly reflected by the pristine snow of the northern frozen wastes - only this gleam can hide her golden armor amid the white snow. Flickr album for more photos.

Hoi, the Ga-Matoran fisherwoman, takes her pet Moke for a fishing trip in the early evening. It is the warm season on Mata Nui, and fish are bountiful. Fortune smiles upon Hoi, as she encounters an elusive and dangerous Tawa fish. She will not let this opportunity pass her by, and with her well-trained Moke, the Tawa soon falls. It was a good day.

The "main" version, meaning the one on PC and the major consoles, has some nice ideas, a fantastic soundtrack (of which you'll barely hear anything because the accursed hero mode 10 second music loop will be on constantly...), a great atmosphere and some questionable solutions. If you can get past the obvious lore issues of how the karzahni some of these characters are even alive and on Voya Nui, there is fun to be had. It isn't a visual masterpiece, but I personally really liked how the game looked - not in terms of graphical fidelity, but in terms of style and presentation. Hero mode is a major drawback, but just about the only one. This is one of those games that has fundamental design flaws, but endears itself in other ways. The other version I have played is the DS one, which I must say is one of my favorite games on that platform. It's an entirely different game than the main release, and also plays fast and loose with the lore, but is immense amounts of fun.

For what it's worth, anime can refer to either a TV show or a movie. "Princess Mononoke" and "Ghost in the Shell" are some examples of anime movies, while "Little Witch Academia" and "Dragon Ball Z" are some examples of anime TV shows. Strictly speaking, anime is not a style but just a catchall term for Japanese-made animated movies and series, which can have extremely varied styles. However, some people use it loosely to refer to other series that share common anime design cues such as the American-produced, Korean-animated "Avatar: The Last Airbender", "The Legend of Korra", and "Voltron: Legendary Defender". A lot of the backlash against the Transformers movies is borne out of their militaristic themes (including grants from the US Armed Forces to portray the military in a favorable light), raunchy humor and innuendo, baffling and incongruous storylines, superficial edginess, and emphasis on poorly developed human characters over the actual stars of the franchise. Saying that a Transformers-style gritty live-action movie series would not suit Bionicle is not the same as saying movies in general would be a poor fit. I see plenty of flak tossed at the aesthetic design of the Transformers themselves in the Bay films, and I really get where that's coming from. I too dislike 90% of the movie designs, because it goes so thoroughly against the design direction of everything that came before. Across the vast Transformers franchise, there were some distinct visual themes in the various toylines separating them from the rest, but there is a reason why visually and aesthetically there is a <i>huge</i> devide between the movie designs and.... well, everything else. Say, if Bionicle would get a live-action adaptation - I do not see the point, as there are no humans involved and even the real landscapes and backdrops would get healthy doses of CGI, so you might as well go 100% animation instead of 75% animation and 25% live-action - then changing the aesthetics from what they were like in the existing movies would be a colossal misstep. I personally don't mind the design alterations in the first three movies, and then TLR, for all its flaws, translated sets almost 1:1 and looked pretty neat. If things were to go into a 2D/cartoon/anime direction instead of a 3D cgi direction, I think going for a stylised aesthetic would be the way to go. I'd watch the absolute expletive out of a Bionicle movie or TV series done entirely in the MNOG/Bohrok Animations/MNOG2 (so, Templar studios) art style.

Counterpoint: Captain Underpants is hilarious. Which isn't to say that approach would work in any way whatsoever for Bionicle, though I'm sure plenty of people in the BZPower comedies forum back in the day gave it their best shot. Counter-counterpoint: One can write good humour without getting the other elements of storytelling right. And I did read a few of those books back when I was a wee lad and... well That said I would be curious about a timeline where Lego would secretly consult the BZP comedies subforum for concepts and tonal direction Well, Captain Underpants is mainly about humor. When it is targeted for children, it has a little bit of mature content. The book series that the movie in 2017 is based on has this kind of thing. Go look at The Angry Birds Movie in 2016, Samurai Jack’s Season 5, Kirby: Right Back at Ya!, and the Shrek movies, for examples. They’re like that, too, but with more mature content. Now, Bionicle, though, hmm..., well, the Zaktan-stabbing thing is one dark thing. If Bionicle were to be revived, it would be like the live-action Transformers movies because that’s how returning franchises evolve sometimes. Hero Factory is like Bionicle for how it utilizes a little bit mature content, like the part where Fire Lord’s hand got ripped out. Graphic =/= mature. The misconception that violence and viscerality renders a work mature is what tossed the world of video games into an intellectual dark hole and place of social stigma from which it had to work really had to crawl out of. An utterly non-violent piece of fiction may still be mature. Grimdark themes and violence are the shortest and cheapest way for something to be considered "mature". As someone higher up pointed out, Bionicle's story was fairly mature in G1 but this can in no way be attributed to the violence. And I bloody well wouldn't call the live-action Transformers films anywhere close to mature Bionicle's level of "maturity" in G1 was perfect, well balanced. It lost some of that in G2, but that doesn't mean that a hypothetical continuation/g3 needs to overcompensate for that.

Counterpoint: Captain Underpants is hilarious. Which isn't to say that approach would work in any way whatsoever for Bionicle, though I'm sure plenty of people in the BZPower comedies forum back in the day gave it their best shot. Counter-counterpoint: One can write good humour without getting the other elements of storytelling right. And I did read a few of those books back when I was a wee lad and... well That said I would be curious about a timeline where Lego would secretly consult the BZP comedies subforum for concepts and tonal direction

Can't wait to tune in! I do believe there is a typo in the announcement though - the 27th of April is today, Friday, and Saturday will be the 28th!

Suvae, maybe? Suvi? While I get that Suvas may not have been common, there still remains the option of simply carrying one or two masks around with you in a bag. It being harder to make Great Kanohi makes sense, but it was a very rare necessity to make them at all - Toa who are transformed from Matoran automatically have their Kanohi zapped into Great status, and based on the canon materials at our possession, mask loss and damage was rare even under combat. For all the wars and conflicts, it seemed to me that, not considering Matoran (who didn't use great masks anyway) there really wasn't a source of "new" Great Kanohi users in the MU, and most started out with said masks by default, giving the Matoran across the MU plenty of time to produce surplus even if Great Kanohi crafting is difficult. With all the transformations and mutations and fusions, I'd even hazard that over time the gross quantity of Great Kanohi users fell significantly over time, whilst the means of producing these masks were still present.

This reminds me of how often I think of how elemental powers in Bionicle could be used more creatively in combat than was depicted, due to the viscerality of said uses. With water, you could potentially instantly dessicate an enemy. With ice, you could freeze all fluid in their body, which would expand, probably ripping them open. Use air to inflate them until they rupture. nasty stuff, elemental powers. Probably why the Toa had a code they abided by. And Piraka could only use powers in conjunction (which it was established almost never happens...) Sure, but plenty of non-Toa and non-Piraka also had elemental powers, right? Order of Mata Nui members, for example, who had no reservations against killing. Dark Hunters too.

Ah, thanks for pointing that out! I've seen several ideas of how people interpreted how the multiple masks of the Mata/Nuva worked - even here on BZP I've seen ideas that the masks were physically stacked on one another, with the Toa walking around with horizontal towers of masks protruding from their faces. If Kanohi need be physically carried, that would explain why not every user has all of them on hand, but still, it would be logical for them to carry around two or three others, right? It shouldn't be that huge a weight, especially considering that most being capable of using mask powers are usually quite strong physically. Like have a Kakama and a Kaukau on you besides your primary mask in case you need to hurry somewhere or stay underwater for long.

A number of recent topics made on BZP were in some way related to masks, and they got me thinking about a few things, leading me to this thread. Now, plenty of examples in the lore suggests that beings who used Kanohi masks often and freely switched between them, or at least would have been capable of doing this. While I have many thoughts buzzing about in my head about the matter, my basic question boils down to this - were Kanohi Masks, or at least Great Kanohi Masks, scarce? See, in Metru Nui, the mask making forges were constantly in production, however I get the sense that the Matoran population was, more or less, stable in the MU at all times. Of course, replacement masks needed to be on-hand if some Matoran damages theirs, but for Metru Nui to actually need such a quantity of masks, this should be something that happens really often - like twice a week per Matoran or something - and yet this is not alluded to. Does Metru Nui supply all of the MU inhabitants with masks? If not, then there must be a large amount of mask surplus, right? Now, since the Hapka novels, and much of the 2001/2002 material has been rendered non- or semi-canon, I'm not clear on how the Toa Mata and their masks worked. Most of the media suggested that when finding a new mask, they placed it upon their default mask and it "melded" together. Whenever they needed a different mask power, the physical mask on their face shapeshifted into that form (as seen in MNOG) and they would use it. The novels stated that the masks could "un-meld", such as when they were placed one by one onto the Suva. So, if having/wearing multiple masks doesn't require additional space, doesn't add additional weight, and so on, and hypothetically there was an abundance of masks, why didn't mask-using beings just have a bunch of them on hand? Like, thinking of general-purpose masks the powers of which would be useful in everyday life - Kakama, Kaukau, Akaku - not just in combat. Why didn't basically everyone have these on hand? Now, from a storytelling perspective, the answer is obviously to avoid characters being overpowered, and that mask powers were an identifying trait of many characters, but from a logical and immersion standpoint. Were there any canon references to Great Kanohi being at least rare enough for their being some kind of unspoken "one mask per being" rule, barring special circumstances? Why didn't Toa, during their numerous conflicts, simply have the Ta-Metru forges mass produce Great Kanohi and equip every Toa with every mask? Sure, mask powers aren't everything, but they do lend significant advantages. Were Kanoka discs scarce? Since they were used for all things from defense, recreation to mask-making, I'd think not. BS01 states that Kanoka were forged all over Metru Nui, from liquid protodermis, so there shouldn't be a scarcity of that either. There isn't too much data about the economy of the MU, but were Kanohi commercial products meaning there is some financial barrier to collecting masks (meta much)? Even then, one would assume that Toa, for example, being protectors of the realm, would be granted multiple masks even if not all. Was having multiple masks a symbol of status? Status symbols are usually used to display power, and Kanohi are objects that literally empower their users. Now, there are some references to masks having some sentimental value - such as certain Toa shaping their masks after fallen heroes whom they wish to honor. Maybe having multiple masks was a taboo, or some cultural barrier prevented this from becoming common? In this case, is it possible that the Toa Mata/Nuva were discriminated against in some way due to using multiple masks? Maybe "polykanohism" was frowned upon due to some underlying programming the Great Beings coded into every being to prevent them from becoming too powerful to control? I know most of these questions venture into a part of lore which wasn't thoroughly explored, and most of these questions don't have answers that can be backed by sources, so basically I'm just waiting for interesting speculation here.

This reminds me of how often I think of how elemental powers in Bionicle could be used more creatively in combat than was depicted, due to the viscerality of said uses. With water, you could potentially instantly dessicate an enemy. With ice, you could freeze all fluid in their body, which would expand, probably ripping them open. Use air to inflate them until they rupture. nasty stuff, elemental powers.

It would make sense. I mean, if you have 42 powers by default, it's easy to get carried away with even more Though in all seriousness, since Toa are known to use multiple masks as well, and many Kanohi covering purposes that do not fall into the 42 Makuta powers, why would they restrict themselves from using multiple masks depending on the situation and what is needed?

I'm really sorry, but with that colour scheme I can't not think of Winnie the Pooh. The build is really impressive though!

I wonder, is my display name, profile picture and signature a dead giveaway?

Funny thing that, for the first time in my life I got a MOC request today. There is a Hungarian Facebook group dedicated to Bionicle and we have an RP going there, and someone asked me to build a "fire god"-esque MOC who will act as a mentor to their Toa of Fire. Never made MOCs to other people's specifications before, likely because I'm not that good a MOCist to warrant requests.

I want that Range Trooper buildable figure because it looks cool. I need that Han Solo buildable figure as a parts pack. All that glorious brown! Already thinking of ways to make those parts work on a stone-element Bionicle MOC.

Do both halves of the team-up need to be BZP members? I mean, the partner I have in mind can just sign up now, but would that be an issue that they weren't members beforehand?

I'd love for this to happen, but even if it would, it would never come to Hungary so I'd never actually get a chance to see it I did write to show my support, though. Everything Bionicle related that is keeping the legend alive deserves support.

The Takanuva/Lhikan/Iruini brand of dull gold has to be my favorite, to be honest. However, on that note, weren't the off-color weird shiny/swirly colors used by the Rahkshi attempting to go for a metallic effect? I have a love/hate relationship with those pieces, as on one hand they look great, but on the other no other parts share those colors so MOCing with them is really bloody difficult.

Great review! I'm also miffed by the price, but the figure overall is fantastic. I'm a fan of the character, and all the little details the figure sports are really welcome. The cape and the colours particularly make this an attractive figure, and I'm almost certainly going to pick him up if I find him discounted sometime.

I'm happy to have seen this review here, as I'm contemplating on picking up this set. Unlike most people, I usually look at sets for the build and not the figures (to the point of sometimes selling off the minifigs and keeping the vehicle/building/scenery) and I really liked the look of this speeder. The price does seem a bit steep, but seeing the innards, I just might pick it up!