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Master Inika

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  1. Master Inika

    The Post-Bonkle Period

    By Master Inika,


    Thoughts on Thinking
    Consider this to be an addendum to my recent topic about the BIONICLE Dream. I tried my best to make that topic normal and not too depressing (and I will leave to you how successful I was).
    Since BIONICLE has ended (and by that I mean since 2010; G2 barely registered for me as an event), BIONICLE itself, the time from when I got my first set in 2003 to 2010, feels like my own personal "time before time." On one hand, it does feel like time existed as a BIONICLE fan, and even that BIONICLE is what made me aware of time. Before 2003 (when I was seven years old), my memories are emotional but do not take place in any particular order. After 2003, it feels much more structured, like each years builds up to the next. When someone says 2005, for example, even in a context related to a movie or something else from pop culture or current events, my first thought is Web of Shadows (along with Revenge of the Sith).
    I do remember, post-2010, each year feeling much less meaningful or distinct. I had learned to almost need a new wave of BIONICLE sets and lore to feel like a year has properly passed, as weird as that is to admit. I still feel that way now. I do suppose that those years, from ages 7 to 14, it is probably normal to feel that way about the passage of time, I just find it interesting how perfectly it synced up with BIONICLE.
    I recall from the MNOG behind-the-scenes documentary, the game designers knew that the kids into BIONICLE were not necessarily the popular kids, and that's why they chose the weirdos of each village (Taipu, the Onu-Matoran who liked sunlight; Tamaru, the Le-Matoran afraid of heights, etc.) to be the heroes of the day. In the case of characters like Kopeke, it feels sometimes like the Chronicler's Company was intentionally coded to be in some way neurodivergent, which might be why they resonated with us so much. Toa Matoro feels very similar, I always found it profound that he thought of himself and others too thought of him as "just a translator" before 2007.
    I have heard people who weren't raised with BIONICLE say it's just plastic toys and give me a side eye for my huge collection, and I suppose from a strictly reductionist sense they are correct, but from watching videos like the first BIONICLE pitch video (on Christian Faber's YouTube channel Quest for Future Creativity) it really does seem to be that BIONICLE was crafted as if it were a legitimate form of genuine modern mythology as opposed to trinkets to keep kids occupied.
    Perhaps it is only because I was an introspective child and feel somewhat cheated by public school and the world, but BIONICLE feels much more like it was building up to something gratifying than anything else that was going on during my upbringing. Maybe this is a common feeling, or maybe I am just losing it. I guess that is what I meant my BIONICLE being my own personal "time before time."
    I've also been binging Code Lyoko lately, which might explain my wistful escapism. Maybe I will make another blog entry about that show, which is also a powerful source of nostalgia (though not as much as BIONICLE).
  2. Master Inika

    Cartoons and Escapism

    By Master Inika,


    Thoughts on Thinking
    Originally, this blog post was going to focus on Code Lyoko, but I have decided to expand it to be about escapism and fiction in general, since I have recently begun watching (and binging) Twelve Forever. There is a lot of behind-the-scenes drama regarding the show's creator that I won't be talking about. The show was first recommended to me by a former friend I no longer talk to back when it aired around 2019, but I have not sat down to watch it until now.
    If you read my previous entry, in which I get all existential about BIONICLE and the passage of time, you won't be surprised to know that Twelve Forever resonates with me in a deep way. It captures in a visceral way how alluring and tempting remaining in childhood is. Personally, I think people have a bad habit of using "growing up" as a catch-all for a variety of unpleasant and frankly unnecessary aspects of modern life. It is nothing more than a thought-stopping technique meant to convince themselves that alienation from one's emotions is the norm and "adult." I never accepted it and never had any good reason to.
    Twelve Forever and Code Lyoko both focus on a group of children (three, to be exact) who regularly travel to an extraordinary land. In Code Lyoko, this escape-world is the digital realm of Lyoko, where they must travel to fight X.A.N.A. and his monsters to save the world. Naturally, since it's a children's action/adventure show, it glosses over a lot of the unpleasant aspects of Lyoko that I'm sure are there--there is a broadly accepted theory that every time they "die" in Lyoko and get rematerialized back in the real world, all their injuries "catch up" with them and put them out of commission for a while. The purpose of the show is that, despite the fact that the kids are in life-of-death situations that kids shouldn't be in for real, the show's aesthetic and the way it is framed make fighting on Lyoko look awesome. In this respect, there is a significant gap between how the escape-world is perceived by the characters in the show and how it is meant to be perceived by us. BIONICLE and especially Pokémon are other examples of this type of storytelling. (In the case of BIONICLE, it depends: the Toa, for instance, are coded as adults as opposed to children. When we watch Tahu fighting the Rahkshi, the child viewer is meant to understand that this is more appropriate than, say, Hahli or Turaga Vakama fighting a Rahkshi. That does not mean that, at other points such as MNOG, the combat between Matoran/children and dangers is not similarly idealized as in CL.)
    The Hunger Games is an example of a non-cartoon that does its best to subvert this kid-friendly combat aspect, to the point where it is something of a joke in the fandom that, if you glamorize and want to fight in the Games, you don't understand the point of the story. (Idealizing the violence is explicitly what the Capitol citizens, who while not evil are useless and naïve, do.)
    Twelve Forever is not like Code Lyoko or BIONICLE. Endless Island is an escape-world for the main characters in the same way that the show itself is written to be an escape-world for the viewer. This offers its own unique comparisons to BIONICLE, however. Perhaps I was just a weird kid, but I always found the aspects of BIONICLE that were mundane to the characters in the story, like their homes and occupations, just as interesting as the major plot events and battles. I was so fascinated by the idea of lava farming, or the various mining disputes in Onu-Koro. MNOG in particular leaned into the everyday aspects of life on Mata Nui, the kind of things whose real-world equivalents children find painfully boring. SpongeBob SquarePants is another example of this method of storytelling: how much narrative finesse it took that show's writers to make working at the Krusty Krab, a greasy fast food joint, feel exciting for kids to learn about. As I grew up and did work service jobs, I was stunned to realize just how much actual real-world aspects made it into SpongeBob, and yet how relatable it still felt to watch. That, I suppose, is the ideal mark of good children's entertainment, something that does have meaning for adult viewers to recognize but, if it is unrecognized, does not make itself known.
    The Fairly OddParents is on the other end of the SpongeBob spectrum. TFO is on a category of shows including Code Lyoko, Rick and Morty, or Regular Show, that are set in the "real" world until a catalyst, generally at the end of the first act, that signifies the "transition" to the fantastical. The difference here is that, at least in a show like TFO, the "point" is often that the fantastical has no meaning except in the ways that it mirrors the mundane. The show's formula involves Timmy having some problem, making a wish to try to fix it in an easy way, and the wish backfiring. The point of each episode is that Timmy either has to find a non-magical solution to his problems, or accept them as a fact of life. (At least at first, I haven't watched the show since Wishology.) In this way, Timmy Turner is the Zillennial's Sisyphus. In hindsight, what makes Cosmo and Wanda stand out most as characters is their status as Timmy godparents. They give him the emotional support that his actual parents are in most episodes too cartoony to meaningfully provide. The fact that they are magical beings feels almost like an afterthought, a non-personal role they just happen to fill.
    Another show which Twelve Forever will remind the viewer heavily of is Adventure Time, the difference being that Twelve Forever explicitly contrasts the mundane and extraordinary. In the case of Adventure Time, which takes place begin to end in the extraordinary, the responsibility falls to the viewer to supply their own mundane reality as a contrast to the whimsical world of Ooo. That does allow Ooo to have its own BIONICLE-esque "mundane within the extraordinary." In a show like Adventure Time, that throws so much nonsense in the viewer's face, what remains in my memory the most are small details about Finn and Jake's everyday life, like how they have a non-electric icebox as opposed to a fridge, but ice is apparently valuable enough in Ooo that an established social convention is guests bringing their own ice. Another interest point which has lived rent-free in my head is the delicious food Jake is always cooking, like the everything burrito or bacon pancakes--weirdly normal human food in a world devoid of other meaningful references to modern real-world location and concepts.
    There is a dark side to Forever Twelve. One thing which I have found vindicated in online reviews is just how weird, sometimes in a troubling way, Endless Island is. In the case of Adventure Time, since the weirdness is 24/7, it invites the viewer to "translate" the weirdness into a certain normality that Forever Twelve does not have, since Forever Twelve explicitly contrasts the weirdness with mundane reality. What Forever Twelve reminds me of most is Jack Stauber's OPAL. If you have not seen it, and enjoy psychologically unnerving horror, I strongly advise you to watch it. It's quite short and free on YouTube. All I will say is that, while the escape from reality into fantasy is normally whimsical and comforting in fiction, in the case of OPAL, it is horrifying. Forever Twelve takes place somewhere in the middle, with Reggie's dependence on Endless having a certain similarity to a drug addiction. The bland, colorless, and depressing way the real world is sometimes drawn in Forever Twelve only solidifies the concept. (See also: Coraline.)
    This entry ended up being a bit longer and more rambling than I anticipated. Most of these thoughts are thoughts I have had in some capacity for years, which Forever Twelve only recently gave me the impetus to put to text. I increasingly feel that I myself use outlets like BZPower as my own Endless Island, or Time Before Time, escaping the constraining loneliness of artificial modernity.
  3. Master Inika
    I will post a full review when I've finished the book, but so far, HFSM #5 is, intentionally or not, the funniest piece of HF media. One of the villains is punished because, in upside-down "evil is good" world, not robbing a bank when you have the chance to is a crime. The logical implications of this universe just make me laugh. The villain (I think it was Toxic Reapa) make it sound like an inconvenience, because he already robbed that bank twice that week and was tired.
    I'm not going to defend the Rise of the Rookies TV episodes as anything great, but Von Nebula had some gravitas to him. There's zero implication that, if he wins, the galaxy will turn into this Pythonesque bureaucratic state. It recasts a lot of Von Nebula's previous characterization to make him, if we take this premise seriously, ridiculously immature. Von Nebula doesn't really hate Stormer or anything, he hates an extremely abstract, watered-down idea of "heroism." It's funny to imagine how this universe function, like why banks even exist if robbing them is legally mandated.
    That being said, it's not a bad book. I was tempted to write, "Greg isn't even trying at this point," but that's not true. Some parts of the book, like describing Von Nebula's black-hole-corrupted body, are genuinely good and right up there with peak BIONICLE. It's more like, Greg is having fun. I feel like it was an open secret that HF wasn't going to be on shelves much longer, so no one was giving Greg much oversight on the Secret Mission books so Greg just pushed the envelope to see what Denmark would let him get away with. Stuff like this makes me wish the Secret Mission series did continue, just to see how surreal it would have gotten.
  4. Master Inika

    Early Hero Factory

    By Master Inika,


    Thoughts on Thinking
    Personally, I believe that Hero Factory 2010 captured a lot of what made both late BIONICLE and early Hero Factory kind of bad. The quality of the pieces themselves still suffered from that weird molding issue from 2008, which made them stiff, disjointed and prone to breaking. Furthermore, the main good guy sets (the Heroes) were incredibly difficult to pose. Stormer, Stringer, and Bulk suffered from the bizarre choice to integrate their weapons directly into their arms, and the dual-wielding Heroes (Furno [sort of], Breez, and Surge) suffered from their arms being too long and it almost feeling like their hands were their elbows, with their weapons being their lower arms, if that makes sense.
    Imo, the villains for that year fared much better. They were more experimental and interesting to look at, though they still had pretty heavy problems. The only one I actually own is Corroder, and he's impossible to pose. Those Avtoran limbs stuck in an eternal 90-degree angle are forgivable when used in Avtoran-sized sets, but attached to both a bulky torso and bulky handpieces, they just make him feel cluttered. In the TV show, he's seen jumping around like an agile, quick-moving villain, and his aesthetic (in still images) looks quick, but to hold in your hand, he's just as difficult to maneuver as Corroder or Krekka.
    I personally feel like the Makuta Mistika suffered from a subtle rationing away of parts. One cannot help but notice that Krika has a canister-sized body but Avtoran-sized limbs, while Bitil has normal limbs but a tiny body. (Gorast, at least, has six Avtoran-sized limbs, evening her out somewhat.) The Makuta Mistika are beautiful to look at, especially compared to the overly industrial-looking Toa Mistika, but it was a harbinger of things to come that LEGO seemed to think we would not notice. Like Corroder, Krika uses 90-degree Avtoran joints, but Krika's lithe body and long, thin weapons makes it work. Krika's in-hand physicality is close enough to a child's imagination to imagine Krika stalking the Swamp of Secrets. The only play scenario I can see a kid playing out with Corroder is "Hero Factory vs. Arthritis."
    I have never held Rotor, the Drop Ship, the Furno Bike or Von Nebula, but they at least looked like a step in the right direction. Reusing the maskpiece of Hydraxon (a fairly obscure 2007 set) for the year's Big Bad was an interesting choice, especially as, in silver, it looks somewhat neutral (as a jailer's mask should), but it suffices in black as the mask of evil incarnate. HF 2010 offers many such glorious BIONICLE recolors, from Meltdown's yellow Kalmah tentacle to XPlode's recolored Krika blades and Von Nebula's black-and-blue Tridax pod (I am surprised no one ever attempted to integrate into a Vamprah revamp. Re-Vamprah, haha.)
    Rotor and Von Nebula (aside from VN's weird tiny arms, which the box artist didn't even try to hide) fit right in among the great titans of BIONICLE 2005 and 2006. The Drop Ship, while commendable, looks overengineered, suffering from much the same flaw as the Darth Vader constraction figure: too many tiny pieces going to recreate a basic and uninteresting shape, creating extra work for the builder without a feeling of vindication as more intricate models (like the Ussanui, the Jetrax T6, or the Malevolence) would offer. The HF vehicles (which never returned, apparently turning no particular profit) feel like serious step downs from BIONICLE.
    2011, at least, allowed Hero Factory to develop its own identity. Whether it is better or worse than BIONICLE is for you to decide, but at least I can say with confidence that it was no longer simply a worse version of BIONICLE.
  5. Master Inika

    16 Years

    By Master Inika,


    Thoughts on Thinking
    Wow, as of today, I trade in my gold Mask of Control for a trans-blue Mask of Creation. I've been a BZPower member for 16 years, since October 7, 2007. I have been a BZPer for more than half of my life.
    The site definitely is not the bustling metropolis it used to be. I remember the almost overwhelming feeling of there being too much for me to ever consume. The first thing I would do when I got home from school is check BZP for new Set Reviews or BIONICLE sales. I'd browse the Set Database until I memorized all the sets that were released before I became a fan in 2003.
    I first became a member to write and publish comedies. I guess I don't do that as much anymore, but the memories are still salient. Hopefully, I have at least another 16 years of talking about plastic cyborgs with you people to look forward to.
  6. Master Inika

    You've Never Read an Entire Book

    By Master Inika,


    Thoughts on Thinking
    When you read, your eyes look at symbols that stand for sounds, and those sounds represent concepts. Reading requires both of these events (symbols-to-sounds, and sounds-to-concepts) to take place. It happens so quickly, we can ignore the middleman if we want. Writing systems like Chinese are called logographies as opposed to true alphabets, because Chinese characters don't stand for sounds at all, just concepts. You have to learn as many characters in Chinese as there are ideas. English sometimes works like that. Consider the difference between to, too, and two. In this case, different sets of symbols all produce the same sound. The only option the English-speaker has is to memorize separate what spelling corresponds to each idea.
    This is a lot of work, and your brain is doing it all the time. It's doing it right now, in fact. On top of that, you don't remember the symbols you've read for the rest of your life. I'm reading a book right now, and I'm in the middle portion, and I don't recall exactly the symbols it opened with, and I'll remember them even less precisely by the time I reach the end. And yet, the thoughts it made me think remain in my head. I still know what the book is about. It's not as though I've never read it.
    Now we introduce a third (potentially fourth) stopping pointing in the act of reading: symbols correspond to ideas (through the byway of sounds), but those ideas in turn correspond to an impression. The impression, most often, remains in the reader's mind long after most, or even all, of the symbols and sounds do not. You cannot recreate the physical, indisputable elements of the book, but you can still say what it was about. How can this be?
    This is to say nothing of the nuances that exist even within the individual letters and sounds, and how many things even simple combinations can mean. This has been just a little look at the act of reading, provided to you by the act of reading no less.
  7. Master Inika

    My History Project

    By Master Inika,


    My World History Book
    For a while, I've been working on something. It's a 100-page history of the entire world, beginning with the invention of writing in ancient Sumer and going all the way to the modern day. It has not been easy. I have been able to work on it twice a week and make 5-8 pages per session. I am 90% of the way done, and my mind is racing.
    This is something that part of me has always wanted to do. I loved watching The History Channel and asking my dad about the Civil War and American Revolution when I was a kid. Even then, I always wanted to somehow categorize all this knowledge, and now I'm actually doing it. Honestly, I was bored in history class in school. I always wanted to go deeper and look at more primary documents. But at the same time, whenever I tried to do my own research, I quickly found myself overwhelmed at all the books and articles I had access to. I never knew where to start.
    It is titled Elementary World History and one of the reasons I am writing it is to provide something I would have benefitted from as a child. It is a sampling of history, not going too deep into any of the topics I cover. (Getting the entirety of World War II into a single page was not easy, but I did it.) The finished book will be dedicated to my nephew, who is still a baby. I hope he grows up to love history and gets some enjoyment out of it. I'm going to print it out and put it in a binder for him.
    I don't know anything about actually getting stuff published. I've written novel-length stories before that none of the publishers I reached out to wanted. Honestly, I'd say the publishing aspect is harder than actually writing the book.
  8. Master Inika

    Atakus' Quote

    By Master Inika,


    Thoughts on Thinking
    Atakus' BIONICLE.com quote is: "No one rides into Roxtus without getting past me. And those that do, heh, never leave." It sounds intimidating at first, until you realize Atakus is admitting he's bad at his job.
    I thought more about the quote, too, and realized there's quite a bit more going on here than at the surface. When Atakus says "getting past" does he mean "sneaking past" or passing him at all? Are there certain people he is supposed to let in, or is he supposed to turn away everyone? I detect no fewer than three possibilities:
    1) Atakus' job is to prevent anyone from entering Roxtus, and those who do enter Roxtus without him knowing are caught and killed. (This interpretation doesn't work for character reasons. It makes Atakus sound incompetent for sometimes failing to keep people out. Sure, it makes me not want to try going to Roxtus, but because of whoever kills me once I get inside, not him specifically. The "heh" makes it sound like Atakus is trying to talk himself up.)
    2) Atakus' job is only to prevent some people from entering Roxtus, but some others are allowed in. (This interpretation fails because it indicates that even those who are allowed to visit end up getting killed.)
    3) Roxtus is such pleasant and welcoming place to live that everyone who visits inevitably chooses to stay there of their own accord. Atakus' job is to make Roxtus sound scary to stop everyone from trying to live there. (This is the least likely of the three possibilities, but as stated, Atakus' words do leave this a distinct possibility.)
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