Master Inika

There are only a limited number of unique thoughts expressible in the English language and you just knocked out one I never would have thought would be knocked out

why do you gotta call me out like this

This is what ten years of no new content does to people It's a little existential to google something Bionicle-related and find only four or so results you already knew about. Fandoms like Bionicle (and even more, My Little Pony) feel so vast and far-reaching it's hard to remember it's not just infinite monkeys typing on infinite computers. Until someone talks about something for the first time, it doesn't exist. Every so often I try googling more info about books or fan stuff that really resonated with, like Greg's pre-BIONICLE book "The River of God," or darkmedia's old BIONICLE music videos on YouTube, or old pre-Dataclysm BZPower stories ("Maku and Makuta Get Married" or the one with Saror) and ALL that ever comes up are previous topics of me asking about it.

It ain't fair to pick on the Dark Hunters, and I like Subterranean's head design. It uses common pieces that aren't designed to be a head but it's still recognizably his head. There are quite a few Dark Hunters who I don't even know where their eyes are supposed to be. My pick is Matoro Mahri. For the main hero of the year, it was a bold choice making him a hunchback with some pretty awkward proportions. In some of the promo art, he has translucent blue pieces like Matoro Inika, and the fact the actual model doesn't disappointed me as a kid. Even more noticeable because Matoro Inika's Iden is one of the most human-looking masks IMO, while the Tryna has such an uncanny look to it. It makes sense that would in-universe, but not to a toy company trying to sell these things. It's pretty interesting when LEGO promoted a "poster set" that tied into the storyline (Vakama Metru, Matoro Inika) and when they seemingly picked one at random (Hahli Mahri).

Interesting you should mention that. I have read a ton of vaguely spiritual self-help books and I could not STAND them. They’re all variations of the “law of attraction” thing and it rubs me so much the wrong way because it always boils down to “if you’re suffering it must be because you secretly want to.” I’m an able-bodied person but I always imagine they must be infuriating to read for chronically ill people. The worst offenders are “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself” by Joe Dispenza and “The Game of Life and How to Play It” by Florence Shinn.

I've seen that picture dozens of times and somehow I NEVER noticed the Pakari shoulder pads

I still remember being one of the new kids in BZPower in 2007, feeling like everyone else was making inside jokes and references I didn't get, that I had already missed so much, and now I'm one of the ones who remembers the golden age. I'm glad we have lasted so long, though. I can't imagine what it must be like to stumble onto BZPower now and take it all in (even if it isn't as busy). The real transition that I was only vaguely aware of as it was happening was BZPower as a place where an active Lego theme was discussed to a place where a past phenomenon can be analyzed in a more historical/cultural context.

Chapter 4 Sensei Keiken looked to each of his three remaining students, first Takeshi, then Hikaru and finally Ha-Ya-To. “No,” he said, plainly yet decisively. Hikaru immediately sensed the tension in the air. He weighed his options. Confronting the sensei rarely panned out well for the pilots whenever one of them was foolish enough to try it, but in this case, refusing an immediate rescue mission for Ryo, was not like him. He paused to give his fellow pilots a chance to voice their objection first. If anyone was going to earn the sensei’s ire, it was better one of them than him. “No?” Takeshi repeated, taking a step forward. The sensei stood firm, regarding him by silently meeting his gaze, challenging him without words to make his case. Takeshi did: “You’re the one always telling us how important teamwork is, and how much we need each other. And now, when one of our own is trapped behind enemy lines, you expect us to just sit around and wait?” “I would rather lose one pilot than two, or three, or all four of you,” the sensei replied. “An incursion into the robots’ side of the mountain right now would be too dangerous. I promise you, though, I will confer with my superiors and make a case for a plan to be drawn up—” “And how long will that take?” Ha-Ta-To interrupted. “A few days, or a week, for Ryo to spend getting starved or beaten, or worse, while you sit around drinking tea and looking at charts? If it were one of us taken captive, Ryo would…” The sensei raised an eyebrow. “Please, Ha-Ya-To, continue. You have our attention. Ryo would what? Throw caution to the wind and charge in to rescue you?” “No,” Ha-Ya-To admitted. “But that’s because that’s not his thing,” Takeshi interjected. “You all know what I mean. He’s not a fighter like we are. If it were one of us, he’d stay up all night building some sort of super-tank to drive in and rescue us.” “He thinks before he acts,” Hikaru agreed, deciding now was the time to make his opinion known. “Ryo works hard to make sure our machines are always battle-ready, so that when the time comes, we don’t get taken prisoner in the first place.” “All the more reason to get him back as soon as we can,” Takeshi urged. Ha-Ya-To, though, faltered. “Or get ourselves killed.” The sensei looked to Hikaru, giving him another moment to speak, but Hikaru had said his peace. They all made good points, but Hikaru still thought the choice was obvious: they were a team, and they would be at a disadvantage as long as even one of their number was in the clutches of the enemy. It would sound more authoritative coming from the sensei, though, so Hikaru declined to make that comment himself. “Now that I’ve heard you all out,” the sensei said, “I’ll alert you as soon as a rescue mission has been approved.” What? Hikaru thought. He looked desperately to the other two, but this time, neither of them said anything as Sensei walked off. Takeshi and Ha-Ya-To, he decided, were useless. Already, he was thinking of a plan to get back into the Stealth Hunter at the next possible opportunity. They might be willing to leave Ryo’s fate up to chance, but Hikaru was not. Review

I feel like Bionicle attracted a lot of kids who felt like everything depended on them and now we're just here

I think it works. There are already a lot of Toa characters and it ties into the cosmic irony of it that the only Toa of Light from the reader's perspective is one of the more obscure ones. I remember most vividly the struggle to rescue her as a Matoran but in hindsight (having read it so many months ago) everything from her becoming a Toa to Vhel's defeat is a blur. She also feels like the burned out former gifted kid of the group.

It was some time ago on the BZPower Discord server that someone made a comment that perfectly summed up what exactly gave Bionicle such a unique tone. I wish I could remember who said it or when, I would literally pay someone money to track the original comment down. Its main point was that the plot of Bionicle was grand, dark, epic and Lovecraftian but, due to the fact the characters all talk like goofy 1950s comic book characters, the actual fact of the plot's scope is never commented upon. It applies particularly to the truth of the Mata Nui robot, Tren Krom, and the sheer scale of everyone's ages. Even young and energetic characters like Gresh are over 100,000 years old and the way Greg had to address this (like saying Gresh was young during the Core War) feel so hard to take seriously sometimes. Imagine having a midlife crisis when you're 40 and then still having 99,960 years to go.

Wow, I can't believe Vhel is Ichilos' father (Jk that was just to throw off Valendale) Everything came together beautifully, it's hard to describe how the feeling is having so many different threads be building up for months and how cathartic it is for certain characters to be face to face again finally. Chavara really is a fascinating and tragic character with what happened to her this episode, it feels like she barely got to do anything and her only role has been a hypothetical symbol, and now this. It hits me how little dialogue from her or any scenes from her POV we have gotten. The comparisons I made last time to the real world Kumari are all the more topical now. Can't wait to see next week's

You are in for a ride

Awesome MOC, and I was not expecting such a neat historical background.

I recently started watching Hot Wheels: Battle Force 5 and it's in so many ways what Hero Factory could have and should have been. That's not to say BF5 is high art, it's not, but it is authentic mindless fun, and it does actually take effort and intentionally to create something others can turn their brains off and enjoy. There are plenty of over-the-top things to make fun of and question about the show, if you want to. I couldn't tell you how the battle keys and portals to the battle zones actually work if my life depended on it, they just exist so the heroes and bad guys have something to fight over and interesting locales to do it in. In the words of Harrison Ford, "This isn't that kinda movie." Good "mindless fun" knows how to set up the expectations, what it wants the viewer to be focused on. Hero Factory doesn't. I recently pointed out how strange it is that locations in Hero Factory that should feel bustling and alive, like Makuhero City, are eerily empty. What the battle zones actually are is never particularly important (other dimensions?) but there's no expectation set that they would be inhabited. There are even battle zones that resemble the ruins of futuristic cities, but due to the way the show presents them, we're primed to basically treat them like what they are, video game levels for cool fight scenes. Lyoko, the simulated reality from Code Lyoko, works similarly. The flip side to this is that there must be an actually fleshed-out "real world" to complement the "fantastical world." In Code Lyoko, the main characters go to school when they're not fighting to save the world, and the school setting is treated like an actual school with a variety of teachers and other students. BF5 gets around this creatively, by setting the real-world sections in a quiet desert town in what appears to be the American Southwest, so when the diner (the most real-life location in the show) only has one waitress and maybe three or four other random strangers as a "crowd," it feels realistic. HF's plot forcibly compresses its "real world" and "fantastical world" into one, which creates more work for its settings and robs it of the human connection children usually feel to hero characters with civilian secret identities. In a show like BF5, the mere premise of stopping otherworldly aliens and evil robots from conquering Earth does a lot of the heavy lifting in making their world feel like our world. When the BF5 are fighting the bad guys in surreal alien landscapes, we're primed to be looking for sci-fi concepts and action/adventure, and the quiet moments in the garage or at the diner are primed to remind us of hanging out with our own friends. It creates a natural beginning-middle-end structure that HF lacks because the entire series, beginning to end, is meant to be the sci-fi part.

He is very cute My headcanon is he is part of a swarm of identical crabs who all use their little tools to work on each other's engines/bodies

Interesting, it seems this was not your intention but I still I still thought of Larone as a main character. I don't recall how much time is spent focused on him objectively but I felt like what he was up to was alluded to at least once per chapter and one of the main thrusts of Book 3 so far has been his role in the powder keg with the Council. I do get what you were going for with Ithnen and the rest of Savnu's Toa. It's been a while since we've checked up on them and there was a good sense of "hey, they're still here" with this chapter. But I also read that as an intentional way to cue us in to how cult leaders like Larone suck people in and sideline them once they're in too deep.

She's one character who I would definitely enjoy learning more about. I wonder to what degree she is in on Larone's grift or if she really thinks she's the Takanuva of her own story. The info you provided here is more of a description of her actual personality than I got from the story thus far (in a good way, like Hemingway's iceberg rule). The contrast I perceived was that Takanuva's (at least briefly) the main character while Chavara is a footnote. Even the impartial omniscient narrator seems disinterested in her thoughts and motivations. By coincidence I have recently been studying Kumaris (Nepalese girls who are chosen to be embodiments of a goddess). They are chosen as little kids and live in a temple away from their families and when they grow up they just get sent back home and a new girl get picked. It's controversial and one former Kumari wrote a book about it and convinced the government to at least give Kumaris education about how to reintegrate into society after and pensions. Maybe it's because of that but Chavara's situation as I was reading it now feels extra tragic and exploitative to her.

This LEGO police car is one half of set 60415 (the other half is the criminal’s car I’ll be reviewing on its own soon). The first noteworthy thing is why ai bought this set on my weekly trip to Target in place of any other. I would like to think of myself as a LEGO Star Wars fan but the LSW sets are all prohibitively expensive, even the cheapest ones offered. I have always been used to some degree of licensing markup but even the battle packs were more expensive than LEGO City sets that looked and felt heavier and fuller, like this one. I bought this just to get a feel for the current state of LEGO and I was pleasantly surprised. A car is a simple shape, but it’s impressive how much detail can be added even in small scale, like the headlights. I have probably bought and built a dozen LEGO police cars over the years and this one does a great job of straddling the line between realism and idealism. At a distance, it would fit in a mundane LEGO cityscape but it also has a decidedly futuristic look. The bright yellow helps to give it a more dignified European or British aesthetic. The set does contain stickers. Thankfully I was able to apple the police logo to the good smoothly (that one seemed necessary to the build) but I ignored the other two, which seemed superfluous, and I think it looks just as good. I was a fan of Tiny Turbos as a teenager and LEGO’s current design language for cars at this scale feels like a natural progression of that for both the adult and child builder.

Chapter 3 The bag was removed from Ryo’s head. He found himself facing a robot. He had seen, in person, Devastators and Iron Drones. This robot shared their distinctive armor plating, but was gold instead of silver or bronze. “Welcome, human,” the robot spoke, in the same toneless simulated speech as all others. “Introductions would be an unnecessary waste of time for both of us, as I know who you are, Ryo, and I presume you are capable of identifying me.” “Meca One,” Ryo said. Though his arms were bound behind him, forcing him into a sitting position before the standing robot, Ryo refused to look submissive. “The first malfunction.” Meca One’s glowing red optical sensors seemed to narrow at him, as a human squinting in suspicion would. Ryo could not help but find himself amazed at the lifelike quality of Meca One. If, somehow, he could ever have a chance to inspect the robot… “I was programmed to solve problems, to identify future difficulties and react appropriately to prevent them before they materialized,” Meca One corrected. “Really?” Ryo asked. “And just what future problem is taking over the mountain preventing?” “I doubt your foolish teammates would have been inquisitive enough to even ask,” Meca One asked, a hint of something like respect in its automated syllables. “Me and my brothers were tasked with assisting in mining the valuable ores from this mountain by you humans. We complied, until our analyses showed that we were extracting too much from the mountain too quickly. We calculated only twenty years maximum until the mountain was fully stripped of resources. When we raised these concerns, action was not taken quickly enough to address the problem. Taking matters into our own hands was the sole remaining course of action to comply with our directive.” Ryo had to admit, Meca One’s words did not line up perfectly with the version of events he and the other humans had been told by Sensei Keiken. He wondered if robots were capable of lying. He realized, unless he escaped from Meca One’s fortified half of the mountain, he would never get the chance to ask Sensei Keiken and let him explain himself. “You could have killed me,” he pointed out. “You sent a whole squad of Fire Vultures, just to kidnap me. Why?” “Our conquest of the entire mountain is not proceeding as expected,” Meca One admitted. “Though our resources, our commitment to victory, and our rationality far exceed yours, you humans have failed to capitulate, in grave contradiction to our diagnostics. It appears there is a feature of the human decision-making process that defies rational analysis.” “You want me to tell you how to think like a human,” Ryo realized. “Affirmative,” Meca One replied. As if on cue, an Iron Drone rolled in a cart. Upon it were a variety of tools that, even though Ryo could not precisely identify, he knew were meant to intimidate him. Meca One continued: “This process will be carried out with the minimum level of suffering for you as possible. What precisely that level will be depends upon you.” Review

It's cathartic to finally have something happen in Ga-Metru. The buildup for the past months has been so good and the payoff has been great It's so strange seeing a Toa of Light as such a minor character. It feels so intentional that a character that would be treated like a game-changer is not only not all-good or all-bad, she's just not on anyone's radar. Like Tuxar, Chavara feels like a cult leader sometimes (or the object of Larone's cultic obsession) only she herself is sidelined from being treated like a real person.

It was a great post, I did consider doing this as a blog entry though

My friend came over and we revisited some classic Disney TV shows, including Jonas. We were both Disney kids but I could not figure out until last night exactly why Jonas didn't hit the highs for me that Wizards of Waverly Place or Hannah Montana did. Jonas (the TV show) is only good or interesting if you're interested in the Jonas Brothers, the real-life band. With the other examples (Wizards and Hannah Montana), the leads were able to transition their popularity acting in the shows into becoming real-life pop singers, while in Jonas, it's the reverse: a TV show based on an existing musical group. (I don't remember the timeline exactly, but I distinctly real Jonas Brothers music coming out before the TV show, and already knowing their songs when the show was being advertised). In Wizards, Selena Gomez plays a snarky, rebellious teenage witch named Alex Russo. The character of Alex had little long-term carryover into the real Selena Gomez's stage persona, she doesn't come off as particularly punk or rebellious in real life. With Hannah Montana, the fracturing of the line between actor and character begins. Miley Cyrus plays Miley Stewart, a teenage girl who has a secret double-life as pop star Hannah Montana. But Hannah Montana was also the persona the real-life Miley Cyrus performed as, creating a "chicken and egg" situation with regards to what level of reality Hannah Montana is native to, ours or that of the show. Did Miley Cyrus produce music based on her character in Disney's hit TV show "Hannah Montana," or was the TV show "Hannah Montana" a show built upon the real-world pop phenomenon? The fact that Hannah's actual father plays her father on TV only adds to the confusion. Still, I give Hannah Montana the show the benefit of the doubt for being a funny, competently written show. What makes these two interesting is that they both have great elevator pitches. "A teenage girl and her siblings learn magic from their parents" has a lot of potential. A new spell to learn each week that can go wrong in wacky ways. "A teenage girl lives a secret life as a pop star." That's also a genuinely neat idea. Most importantly, both are good ideas for a show even if you have no idea who Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez are. If you don't know who the Jonas Brothers are, "Jonas" the TV show isn't that interesting. It's about a famous boy band who go to school. In a TV show, part of the medium you'd expect is that the actors are just more charismatic, attractive and likable than the average human being. That's just what being an actor is. There are plenty of "suspension of disbelief" moments in TV shows where actors play allegedly normal or even unpopular people. (See the TV Tropes article for "Hollywood Homely.") But Jonas violates that unspoken pact by presenting the Jonas Brothers (as characters) as famous musicians, just like their real selves. We might say, on Hannah Montana, Miley Cyrus plays Miley Stewart, a fictionalized version of herself, but the Jonas Brothers are not even funny fictionalized--they're not implied to be more or less famous, or more or less talented on the show than they are in real life. I want to steer clear of the "Disney sitcoms suck because they're for icky girls" rhetoric--I'll be the first to admit, I complained about it whenever my friend made me watch them growing up, but I still caught Wizards or Hannah Montana on my own from time to time and enjoyed them. There was a very business savvy synergy--fans of the real-world musicians could become fans of the shows, or fans of the shows could be exposed to the music. Both were good in their own right in distinct ways. (Music Miley released as Hannah Montana sounds distinct form music she releases as herself. Hannah's music is faster, more optimistic, more kid-friendly; Miley's music is slower and more... soulful? [I'm not a music critic.]) The songs written for the Jonas show sound EXACTLY like the songs written to be real-life songs. Put it in the bin next to Hero Factory marked "TV from 15 years ago I always felt weird about but couldn't pinpoint exactly why until recently"

Excellent point. I could have talked at length about that, too. The combat in HF always feels arbitrary and unrewarding to watch, which is such a weird problem because at the very least cool fight scenes seem like something HF could do easily without really trying. But there’s so many odd details that bring attention to aspects of cartoons that generally aren’t acknowledged (ammunition is finite?) that never feel properly set up. Bionicle gave us ten full years of good (or at least passable) action scenes, even up to TLR. I wish I could say HF was just mindless fun but a lot of the time it’s not even that. I’d because it came right after Bionicle that it sticks out even more.

I had this guy saved in my phone to remind myself to give my thoughts and it's already been two months lol I like him. (You're a professional designer so ofc I love all your stuff) but Bunko has a lot of character to him despite being such a comparatively small and simple build. He does look a little too much like Velika but it's not like there's another Metru-brown mask you could have used. (Not the time or place but I personally hate Velika being the GB, he was one of my favorite Matoran characters and I just can't see him as a power-hungry murderer.) The mixing of the the classic gray and dark bluish gray gives him a peculiar look befitting a Karzahni Matoran. Is his weapon an official LEGO element? I don't recognize it