Pomegranate

 

 

 

1. You missed the part where it shows them having big fancy weapons.

 

 

Any old fool can own a weapon. That doesn't necessarily mean they can use it, especially without practice.

 

Then it's a good thing Tahu is a mighty warrior of fire and determination!

 

Oh wait. He's a wimp who can't shake down a few spiders. My bad. 

 

 

You keep drastically understating the volume of spiders here, to the extent that I'm wondering if you even watched the episode.

 

I'm gonna have to second that; it was a very fast moving swarm, and it didn't show signs of stopping. The whole reason they went there was to retrieve the Golden Mask, and fighting an ambiguously endless horde isn't going to help anyone, and would be a waste of time.

It's unreasonable to claim you understand a character better than his writers in a new story that has barely begun. I'm sorry to break your heart, but it looks like Tahu isn't some incredible warrior that never backs down from a fight anymore/yet.

Do you not at least remember that back when it all began, Tahu was on a quest for a mask and was confronted by an enormous swarm of insects and decided that the best way to overcome that obstacle was to literally shake them off and get away from them? The fine details are different but it sounds like it's treading the same path to me.

 

It's almost like we're only two weeks into the official release and these animations are only a minute and a half long and have only just begun to come out. They're meant to be watched together, a year from now new kiddies can sit down and watch everything unfold for the first time without having "already seen it several times" in commercials and promos that no longer air. 

 

Be patient and try to avoid feeling entitled to a certain level of quality or haste from a toyline aimed at the 7-14 demographic that is, for all intents and purposes, brand new and just starting to develop-- especially since these animations and commercials are planned, created, and released by folks whose job it is to know what they're doing.

7 and 14 year olds (for the most part anyway) are smart enough to know that when they see Tahu kicking butt in one video and then running away in another that something has been lost in translation.

 

If they wanted to portray Tahu as vulnerable they shouldn't have made him look all cool in an advertisement they show and turn around to make him wimpy in their 'story' videos. 

 

Which, if you think about it, is all one big ad. So that ad/story segregation theory goes out the window.

 

 

7-14 year olds are smart enough to know that when a story has just begun and the characters aren't acting the way they do in teasers, they'll have to wait and see how they change. The whole point of an episodic format is to tell a story in small doses and take as long as necessary to naturally let the plot and characters advance. 

There's also the very basic fact that the commercials are not the primary means of storytelling and shouldn't not be taken at face value. They establish a premise and advertise the product, but there are infinite liberties than can be taken with the presentation.

You'll just have to wait and see how things progress and find out what is and isn't "official" like everyone else. Whatever your expectations were, I'd say it's time to lower them to a more reasonable standard.

It's almost like we're only two weeks into the official release and these animations are only a minute and a half long and have only just begun to come out. They're meant to be watched together and work as a standalone series; a year from now new kiddies can sit down and watch everything unfold without having "already seen it several times" in commercials and promos that no longer air.

Be patient and try to avoid feeling entitled to a certain level of quality or haste from a toyline aimed at the 7-14 demographic that is, for all intents and purposes, brand new and just starting to develop-- especially since these animations and commercials are planned, created, and released by folks whose job it is to know what they're doing. It comes across as incredibly obnoxious to start threatening abandonment of the reboot and calling others' attempts to explain themselves stupid and generally get so worked up over this.

Have faith, and remember that there are several different mediums through which the story and promotional content is spread and that none of it is aimed directly at adults or with the intention of telling the whole story while the starting gun is still smoking.

I feel like the "storm" isn't gonna hit until the second wave of sets/marketing, once Bionicle settles in and gets recognized as something that exists. It takes time for new lines to spread around to all potential customers around the globe and for 'em to accumulate enough content to sufficiently hook and entertain newcomers.

I think I like the regular forms more, they look less clunky and I like the Toa's regular weapons a lot.

Why do I keep seeing "Tamaru is trans?" I honestly don't get it.

That's fine, because what others headcanon and enjoy isn't really anyone's business but their own. There's nothing really to 'get' about it; that Matoran is headcanoned as trans by some. No particular reason, just some character traits and toying with the silly gender limitations amongst the Matoran tribes made some go "how about: this". It got popularized by the MOC that accompanied it, so it's spread around, which is why you might see it more than other random things.

There are enough inconsistencies in the comic to what we know of Okoto so far for me to say with confidence that it's nothing more than artistic license. Every page has evidence that the artist was either working with very outdated or insufficient references, or just didn't care. I doubt it's canonical; in fact, I have a feeling that the ways that the Toa get their golden masks is going to be depicted slightly differently in this comic, in the short comics in their instruction booklets, and in the animations. We have no clue what's really "official" and what isn't yet, but this comic is more likely than not an outlier adn should not be counted.

I'd really love to see them return, but they'd have to pull something interesting and new with them, because like others said, it's retreading the same ground. While everyone loves the Bohrok, bringing them into the new story too soon would be too safe a move and end up being really disappointing when we're expecting something new. 

Makes sense to me, that's what I assumed was the case at first, but I feel like if that was the case they'd have mentioned something about that somewhere, seems like too interesting and obvious of a trait not to make mention of. Could just be an asymmetrical design. An alternate theory of mine is that Pohatu is actually supposed to be completely silver, but has been skipping out on his baths and is thus extremely filthy and covered in dirt. #bathepohatu2015

Why do they have to be equal? Nothing is perfect.

For the premise of the topic. Just have some fun.

I wanna see more of these, cause this one is really simple and lacking flair but is still really cute -- I'd definitely wear it to a convention or something similarly lax. 

Onua, Kopaka, and Lewa stay how they are, with Tahu, Pohatu, and Gali as gals. No clear reason, just seems right.

I never even realized it was a pun cause I either read it wrong or just didn't sound it out, just sorta saw the word. Mukau is a brilliant name it shouldn't be touched

The Legend Reborn could easily be retooled into an on-ice performance. I can already picture the Tuma confrontation and Mata Nui's interpretive "crashing into the planet" dance

Some things don't need to be figured out; the obsession with reproduction in this discussion concerns me greatly. It's one of those things with unfortunate implications that don't need to be spelled out, like Pokemon eggs. They're franchises for children and we shouldn't be so worried about the nitty gritty of organic percentages and reproductive processes and such, and we definitely shouldn't see a failure to explain those as some kind of misstep by the story team - that's not what Bionicle is about and it's really not their priority in rebooting it.

In any case, we have absolutely no official word on what's going on underneath that armor, and picking apart semantics isn't gonna get us very far. I'm currently going with the assumption that it's just like the old Bionicle: mostly mechanical, organic as the storytelling requires (lungs and muscles make a lot of very useful and descriptive actions possible, such as gasping, getting fatigued, etc.)

Zamor, for sure. They had the most variety of any of the other launchers, with different colors for the launchers themselves as well as the Zamor Spheres to match their user's color scheme. They had good range and aim, and they were really detailed and just beautiful and had a lot of personality, I think. I'm disappointed the Inika Zamor Launchers are a separate category, but those extra ammo things didn't really look that great nor function too well (considering their only real improvement was that it was a little harder for the spheres to fall out while playing).

Always loved the Shadow Toa, but that wouldn't make for very good sets. I think some kind of elemental momstrosities like the kind the Toa were supposed to encounter in an earlier pre-2001 concept would be really cool, lots of potential for very cool and varied sets.

I don't celebrate but I'm spending the holiday with folks who do, so I did get a Christmas gift this year: A giraffe themed tea set, pumpkin spice chai to make with it, and a bag of pomegranate flavored chocolates. I'm very happy with 'em

I just remembered that I am definitely gonna take out any and all hideous yellow and sticking-out parts from the Toa and Protectors' action features because ick they're so unnecessary 

Head placement/attachment. I still have no idea what the proper configuration is for most of the Metru builds but I'm pretty sure the official ones are always too short or two long. Same for the axle placement of the Inika heads. Any set that included the Metru hips ended up getting rearranged for a better height and armor coverage.

Ended up voting for Lhikan and Kikanalo. Always loved that set, would still love to get it someday. 

I was never really a headcanon person, if I wanted to change something it was within the confines of individual stories. I think I always felt like there'd definitely be a few exceptions to the gender rule among matoran in their tribes, like some male Ga-Matoran somewhere out there, it just made sense and I thought it'd be interesting. I also always ignored the romance isn't canon deal, although I never paired any characters or attributed romance where there was none (except Huki and Maku).

The argument on headcanons in this thread is ridiculous. It doesn't matter how outlandish they are or how hard they break canon. That's the point of them: they're in your head and it doesn't affect anyone else, you don't expect anyone to know about them or accept them. You can believe anything you like and it really shouldn't matter to anyone cause you're just enjoying the story in your own way.

I've never been a fan of humans existing or being related in any way in Bionicle, and people have gone beyond private unspoken headcanons with ideas about that, and I haven't been losing my mind about it. Let everyone be and enjoy their own imagination and interpretation, my lord, is it really so hard? I don't remember when we ushered in the Canon Police.

The sets were getting stale and the story veered away from everything we knew and loved right as things came to a climax, focusing instead on an entirely new group of characters in what was, in my opinion, an extremely boring and tedious setting. It felt to me like everything suddenly ground to a halt, and we were suddenly expected to care about a bunch of really dreary scavengers and gladiators trying to survive in a largely featureless world, with no extraordinary powers to keep anything even superficially entertaining or any intrigue to offer other than the mystery of the giant robot parts strewn everywhere, which didn't take a genius to figure out and was pretty lackluster compared to the previous year's big reveal, and the magical gateways in the GB laboratory, which didn't really get any explanation or attention. With no books to tell the story, and anyone without the time, money, or convenient living situation to catch a few specific airing times or buy a DVD able to watch the movie, the story was basically limited to comics and web serials, losing a very rich and powerful story engine which almost every year prior had in piles. 2009 chugged along without much to offer to a big portion of the fanbase, and the sets' fighting game gimmick really just sort of existed without any fanfare to make it interesting for kids. It didn't help that Mata Nui, the only thing really tying the Glatorian story back to the original Bionicle, was just really poorly depicted; you'd think if they were gonna go for the "naive and pompous god learning to be a normal person in a strange land" thing they wouldn't be so half-hearted about it. Uniting the tribes really didn't have anything to do with his own character development and was really just a track for him to magically become an overall better person in parallel to it, and we never really got any indication other than prior knowledge that this was an ancient god spirit who seemed to largely stop paying attention to his own people and was used to general worship and a wide array of powers over reality, with ancient and infinite knowledge gained from a hundred thousand years of studying space and life, suffering betrayal by his own protectors and having just woken up from an insanely long coma that was followed by the trauma of crashing into a planetoid and then getting his life force yanked out of a 40 million foot tall body. He was a really boring fix it all and do no wrong character. And I have no idea why anyone likes the atrocious titan set he got.

I understand why some folks love 2009, but it's no mystery why some hate it. I wan't terribly disappointed by it, but... it was disappointing. And the sets were lazy. The thing about the Inika is that they looked coherent and complete. The Glatorian mostly looked unfinished, gappy, and hewn together from random old parts just to keep the Inika builds "diverse". After a year of black, grey, silver, and washed out hues adorning almost every set, throwing extremely vibrant multicolored sets into our faces was like a bright camera flash, it was very unpleasant and it definitely felt like they skipped right over the sweet spot in the middle. The vehicles were the only saving grace, although personally I never cared for them. We also had more av-matoran builds, which, as always, was a hit or miss deal. The fact that 2009 was the last pair of full waves of Bionicle we got before cancellation, combined with the story not getting a proper follow up, makes it a lot worse looking back than it was at the time.

I don't know about the sales figures since Lego never released anything more specific than the line being better or worse than expected, so I can't comment on that with any certainty.

Just my two seeds.

 

 

 

It's a bit too late for "no genders" since pronouns have already been set.

Where? The protector's bios were all generic, and I don't remember any gender pronouns being used for the Protectors. Now the Toa were all firmly established with pronouns, I'll agree on. Could be selective memory, though.

 

As for biology/PoE weirdness, it may be that the Protectors of Earth had those guns naturally, and the other tribes adapted them. Otherwise becoming the village leader might involve a messy surgery.

We're working under the assumption that the Toa and Protectors and the Mask Makers are all part of the same sort of species deal, aren't we?

 

I wasn't necessarily. I think the Toa are different species. The Mask Makers and the Protectors may be a part of the same species, but I'm not sure.  

 

Going off the gun thing, could be a species variation. Some of us have different colored eyes/skin, for example, so it could be that an adult Protector has a gun, and what type of Protector he is changes where the gun is located.  It would be harder to explain the Protector of Stone and Jungle's weapons using that theory though.

 

I meant species in that they were similarly functioning life forms, I didn't really know how else to say it 'cause we've been using 'species' for the Matoran/Toa/Turaga species and the like forever. If they're all generally the same sort of thing, then genders for one would mean genders for the other, since they're not really like... separate... things. Is my English going or am I just as confused on what words to use as everyone else?