Also, please be sure to check out the other works on Myths and Legacy, super talented people over there. Most recently they've wrapped up novelizations of the 2004 comics, but there's also plenty of canon compliant stories, other creator's works, and Vision of the Great Beings, a continuation storyline made with the advising of Greg Farshtey! Happy reading!
i am sorry to literally everyone who follows me but an old ghost from my childhood has awakened to infect my brain again (affectionate)
I always struggled with drawing bionicle, so naturally thought I'd warm up with a quick little doodle of uhhhhhhh *checks notes* seven of them... 😅 (plus some guests)
the Mahri were my favorite team, largely cause I always liked Hahli :) If they ever get their hands on a Toa stone I think they should recruit Macku... after all they're probably going to get saddled with all the sea missions now, another Toa of Water wouldn't hurt, right?
yes I believe that Roodaka was using romance or attraction as part of convincing Vakama. In Xia there are romance-adjacent relationships, marriage, and male-female pairings where the female is dominant, so for her to attempt to "seduce" Vakama and express interest in him is perfectly normal from her standpoint. but is that the culture Vakama comes from? is that what he was responding to? I would say his insecurity in that time really comes from the loss of Lhikan, a mentor who believed in him, and a lack of support from most of his friends.
So what I'm saying is the difference between her expecting him to want to be her romantic partner and him honestly just needing a wise older sister could really have caused issues in the long run. I'm guessing Roodaka has never been Turaga-zoned before. Vakama doesn't even know what a husband is tbh
Possible that Makuta also only understands the concept of Vortixx romance and marriage very vaguely. Roodaka painfully carved a chunk of crystal from his energy prison just to swear by it they would be together again and wear it over her heart, and he's there describing her as his most loyal and vicious henchman. Girl maybe you really should stick with Sidorak or something
I feel like back in the 90s/2000s Oakley, Alienware, Bionicle, etc shared this absolutely PEAK tribal/industrial aesthetic that I have never seen drawn attention to or referenced in any way since.
Is there a name for this trend? It feels too edgy to be Y2K, and too whimsical to be Industrial Gothic. If this is some kind of nameless fusion, I personally dub it "Ancient Aliens".
people always talk about evil clones like oooh a dark mirror oohh what if you saw what are cruel person you were/are capable of becoming. and well yes but what if you were the evil clone. what if you looked in the mirror and what you saw was so bright it blinded you. what if you had to know exactly how good you could have been.
This happens in Bionicle, when their equivalent of Deadpool convinces a version of the big bad from a parallel universe to come back to the main universe and confront himself.
The big bad gets so freaked out that it distracts him from the final battle and lets somebody throw an entire moon at his head.
Portraits for various Bionicle characters in the style of the Toa Disks from 2004! Most of them were traced from Studio screenshots (credits for any custom masks used are below)
More information below.
Image 1
Apart from Vakama's (which is a recreation of the print from the set, based on a picture from Bricklink), all the Metru disks are traced from on their respective Gold Canister designs from Bionicle Heroes, hence their shoulders connecting to the corner circles at different heights and some having sloped shoulders. Their background colours are based on their Turaga designs' primary colour.
@nattarthetimedragon suggested I do the Metrutoran disks, so I did. I decided to give Ehrye's mask a scope and remove Orkahm's.
The Mata were actually the second ones I did; I moved them down to accommodate the Metrutoran. The scratches around their icons are all the same ones, just rotated slightly. I couldn't be bothered to draw new ones, and I didn't put the scratches on any of the other ones.
I was going to do the Inika and the Mahri, but I couldn't get the set-accurate Inika masks to look good in this style, so I scrapped them. Remember this for later.
And by later, I mean now; instead of doing 1:1 adaptations of the Kadin and Suletu, I messed with the layout and design of their features to create my own personal "inorganic" designs for them; the Kadin's "mouth" is replaced with a pair of horizontal lines next to a mouth-hole, and the Suletu is symmetrical and has several Matatu-style mouth-lines angled to resemble the original mask's teeth. Their eyes have also been moved slightly. Originally, Varian's Calix was the same, but it didn't look good so I replaced it with Galva's Inorganic Calix Redux.
Image 2
The masks used as references for Gaaki, Bomonga, Pouks and Kualus are Rothanak's most recent interpretation of Gaaki's mask (which isn't actually meant to be what a Mask of Clairvoyance looks like, like it's canon that it's a Mask of Clairvoyance, but one in the shape of a different, unspecified mask), Galva's non-aquatic Faxon and champion Kakama, and Bigphan's Mask of Sensory Aptitude, respectively.
I wanted to do Nidhiki's mutated form, but I couldn't figure out how it would work in this style so instead I did an alternate version based on Rothanak's Kualsi/Volitak hybrid. Also Tuyet's designs are based on both of Galva's Mask of Intangibility designs (normal Tuyet is the original one, while Empress!Tuyet is the updated version).
I don't really have any notes for the third row. Moving on,
I worked on the fourth row simultaneously with the one below it. Also trying to differentiate Icarax from Teridax was pretty hard to figure out.
I'm not massively proud with how Gorast turned out, but otherwise. Yeah this is fine.
Image 3
For the Chronicler's Company, I went with their MNOG II masks and colour schemes.
@nattarthetimedragon also suggested that I do Turaga versions of the Metru Disks, so I did that. The boxy parts next to the "shoulders" are meant to evoke the way the Turaga robes look in the Miramax movies, as well as the Turaga's rectangular bodies in their sets.
Artakha's mask is based on Galva's canon Mask of Creation, and Karzahni's Olisi is based on Godfyr's Olisi (with elements of the original illustration). Tren Krom's icon is inspired by his description on Biosector, along with how I personally imagine him looking; also, unlike all the other icons, his colours aren't sampled from Studio. At this point I ran out of ideas, hence why the third image only has like two and a half rows instead of five.
"She caught a fish straight out the river with her teeth," Kiina said, head in her hands, thousand kio stare losing itself in the table.
"Ok," Ackar replied.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN, OK??" she immediately recuperated from her momentary trance to pierce him with a wide eyed glare: "I TELL YOU THE HOTTEST THING IN THE WORLD AND YOU JUST SAY, OK??"
"I'm pretty sure I can think of hotter things," Vastus yawned while Gresh elected to leave the house entirely to avoid the conversation.
"Like the sun," the Tapyri agreed.
"Or Tarix's tummy."
"Or lava."
"Or a good tongue?"
"Was about to say a grill, but that I can't deny."
"SHE CAUGHT A LIVE FISH," Kiina insisted: "SHE GLIMPSED IT IN THE STREAM, POINTED IT, DIVED IN, AND CAUGHT IT. WITH HER BARE TEETH."
"And?"
"YOU TROGLODYTES HAVE NO TASTE," she finally howled. She turned to Berix and Tarix, who had been blissfully unaware of the commotion due to working on dinner and were called to attention by her whistling in their direction: "I saw Gali catch a live fish out of a stream with her bare teeth."
"That's hot," the other two Gaquri agreed.
"SEE?!?"
"Hope I won't have to do that to get a child," was all Vastus replied.
-
Gali kicked her way into the room holding aloft a seven pound trout: "I caught this with my teeth!" she yelled giddily.
Her siblings erupted in various roars of congratulations.
"That's splendid!" Nokama clapped in very genuine awe and pride. "Please remember to knock next time. I think Turaga Dume is having a heart attack."
