One Tenth Scale Mata Nui
Mata Nui is a cool place, but did you ever feel that it was a bit...big for what it was?
The official maps put the island at 357 kio long, which if you take to be a stand in for kilometres¹, would make the island 357 kilometres long.
This lines up roughly with what we can see in the concept art: they say that Mata Nui is around the size of Denmark, the real measurement being 368km, and it matches with what we see in the Mata Nui Rising cgi video.
So that's all well and good, Mata Nui is 357km long, the GSR itself is 3300km tall, all hunky-dory, as long as you ignore some guy named Greggory yelling about how the robot is actually much bigger, but its fine to ignore him.
But now, actually consider what this means. Denmark is by no means a small country, it has a population of 6 million and would take hours to drive across by car on modern roads. Now that isn't an issue really, but in most media depicting the island its shown to be a place that can be traversed by foot or on animal back in a reasonable time frame.
But now let us look at this earlier map:
Initially the most interesting thing to me on this map was the 3rd measurement: the height of the Mangai volcano²
Now on the one hand, this was cool, now I know how tall to make the volcano, on the other hand... 23km seems pretty big.
It is. 23km is higher than Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the solar system, standing at only 21.9km. So that's pretty big. This made me start thinking about how far various things are apart and how long it would actually take and using some very VERY generous numbers I started plotting out how long it would take to actually get from place to place.
It wasn't very pretty. In the Mata Nui Online Game it would have taken Takua roughly 5 hours to walk from the beach to Ta-Koro, and another 18 to get to Onu-Koro using the highway. Now this would be fine in an epic like Lord of the Rings, but in Bionicle Mata Nui is consistently treated as a place people can pretty quickly get around on.
The Toa are running all over the place and bumping in to each other. Kopaka getting in to the Caldera at the top of the Mangai volcano isn't the equivalent of climbing 3 Mt Everests in a row, its just something he does [correction: It wasn't the caldera, but a lava pool half way up the mountain, so just 1.5 Mt Everests]. Takua travels all over the island in a pretty small amount of time, unless we're supposed to insert day long journeys in between every screen transition.
But then I noticed something. Something very interesting.
Now lets look at the two keys for the sizes on the released and the early map:
Seems pretty consistent, the sizes of the island are the same, a Toa is 1.6 bio on both (incidentally a real Toa figure is approximately 16cm tall), everything seems to match.
But then I counted the zeroes.
The old map has a kio being not 1000 bio, but 100!
You can even see it on the other version of the map.
Now this is incredibly interesting! This shrinks Mata Nui to 1/10th of its commonly accepted size! It goes from being the size of Denmark to being the size of the Isle of Man.
Which....really works a lot better! This turns Takua's trip from the beach from a 5 hour hike to a short half hour walk. This turns the cable car to Mt Ihu from a massive 70km mega structure to something that's dwarfed by real world constructions.
I don't think this is a mistake either, looking at the details of the map.
You have much finer details, such as these ice shelves collapsing in to small icebergs, whereas on the full sized map some of the larger chunks of ice are kilometres across.
One of the major things it includes are the mesas that can bee seen in many of the promotional renders set in Le-Wahi which are nowhere to be seen on the final map. At this 1/10 scale the plateaus seen would match up well with the massive mesas seen in monument valley in terms of size, but with the final size they would be absolutely massive (10 times as big if you can believe it!)
So suffice to say, I don't think this is just a case of a zero being dropped, it really seems to line up with the level of detail on this earlier map.
But what does this do to the GSR? I hear you cry, well it varies. Going by the earlier numbers it would simply be 1/10th the size, so 330km tall instead of 3300km, so still very large, but depending on the size relationship between the robot and the island it could be as "small" as 180km
The island in this picture is roughly the same size as normal, just covers more of the GSR. The final GSR's head is so proportionately tiny compared to its body that the Mata Nui island had to be very small to cover it. But in any case, a robot "only" 180km tall standing up is still going to tower over anything, its many times higher than airplanes fly, its taller than most clouds, really it would be quite consistent with this render:
So, in conclusion, an earlier concept of the island of Mata Nui has it being 1/10 of the size of the final, and that size seems to work better with what we see in various media from the time, and works better with the story.
Personally this is what I'll be going with in terms of the scale of the island going forward, as it really fits with my vision of the setting and works well with all the story and media from that time.
¹-I don't care about someone saying a bio is 4.375966487787¾ feet, feet aren't real and neither are you. ²-Mt Ihu is NOT the highest point on the island, the GSR isn't Pinocchio with a big pointy nose, this has never been reflected in any visual media.
thank you for reading/have a nice day
Update: I have made a companion post with many renders of George visiting places on the island to hopefully better illustrate the scale.
