Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
One Nice Bug Per Day
Today's Document
AnasAbdin
noise dept.
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RMH
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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cherry valley forever
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todays bird
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trying on a metaphor
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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
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@herora-nuva
awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
Korra in backless dress
My skinny scientist guy of choice
(print shop)
Last year JK Rowling personally funded a group called Sex Matters to amend UK law so that trans women *overnight* went from legally women to legally men. This has resulted in mass exclusion of the trans community from numerous organizations, along with ongoing violent assaults on both trans and cis women alike.
With the new Harry Potter series she will be making a reported $20 million per-season renewal + other performance dependent royalties. She has been open across multiple interviews regarding her intentions to use said funds to push forth even more trans targeted legislation in the years to come.
This isn’t a “she gets paid no matter what” situation. The more eyeballs on this show the more money she has to actively harm vulnerable communities. By engaging with it you are directly supporting this and otherwise making a conscious choice to consume HP over doing the literal very least possible to not destroy the lives of trans people across the world.
If my stating the objective facts above upsets you then feel free to unfriend and move along. Your nostalgia-goggles feelings for a tired, problematic franchise mean nothing to me compared to the welfare of my trans friends and loved ones."
If you care more about badly written children's books and imaginary wizards more than you do about real people in the real world do it far the fuck away from me.
Don't try to be in my life.
In fact, you are cordially invited to eat shit and die.
Were the Turaga Right to Lie about Metru Nui? (Video)
New deep dive up on my channel, check it out if you're interested!
So the Turaga get clowned on a lot for their decision to keep Metru Nui and their past as Toa from the Matoran and Toa Mata, and to a degree rightfully so. The kept their people in the dark about literally their entire history, and kept relevant secrets from the Toa that could've saved them a lot of trouble.
But if I'm being honest, I'm a bit a of Turaga apologist, because I have a hard time believing I would've done anything differently. They had multiple reasons for keeping things secret, both practical and personal.
The Matoran had their memories wiped, and they had to build a new civilization in the wilderness while also constantly under siege. Telling them about a paradise home they had no way to return to might've been cruel.
From the way the Turaga talk, it almost seems like their original plan was to tell the truth once the Toa Mata came to awaken the Great Spirit. But the Turaga clearly don't tell them then, and there are still good reasons. For one, the villages are still under siege and don't even fully trust each other, and the Toa have yet to prove themselves trustworthy with that kind of knowledge, especially since they also had their memories wiped and had to be brought up to date about the situation on the island.
There's an argument that they should've told the Toa Mata just before they went to face Makuta the first time, especially since Makuta knew all the truth and could use that against them. Plus, it was entirely possible the Toa could've captured him without letting him escape, and the Matoran could've returned right then. But the problem is in canon, it took the Turaga nearly 2 weeks to tell all the tales of Metru Nui, and there really wasn't much time to do that in the active battles happening.
The best time probably would've been right after the defeat of the Bohrok-Kal, but they were also still repairing the villages and recovering from the Bohrok War. And from a certain point of view, that was when they planned to tell them. They originally resolved to tell the truth after the Kohlii Tournament, but then the whole Mask of Light thing happened and they had to deal with that.
The secrets massively damaged the previous unshakable trust the Matoran had with their Turaga. The Matoran still clearly admired them, arguably even more so after learning what they went through. But there was also a new deep resentment, shown when Jaller became furious that the Turaga were keeping secrets again. And all the Matoran clearly felt this way, since they all joined a city wide strike until the Turaga told the truth.
The burden of secrecy also makes me wonder why Nuju thought it was worth it to keep up the need for a translator, knowing that Matoro would then be privy to the truth but forbidden to tell anyone. Intentionally putting Matoro in that position was almost cruel, and Nuju himself directly acknowledges that at points. And I find that it makes Nuju a little more interesting, that he did this thing that he himself thought wasn't completely right, though clearly he thought it was important. Adds nice nuance and depth to him.
Ultimately, the story doesn't give us a clear cut answer as to whether or not what they did was the right thing to do. They gave us plenty of deeply understandable reasons why they did it, but the story also makes it very clear that their lies had very real, negative, lasting consequences that they, the Matoran, and the Toa Nuva had to deal with. Its an open ended question, and I really enjoy that.
???????
see, this is actually a subtle reference to the fact that greg farshtey is fucking abysmal at worldbuilding
(and that the set design team and story team were absolutely not collaborating)
Can I just say, I think Greg was actually pretty good at worldbuilding when he actually sat down and wrote the story, just not when he was giving off-the-dome answers to the hundreds of forum questions he answered every week
When should the Turaga have told the truth about Metru Nui?
Right from the start when the Matoran arrived on Mata Nui
When the Toa Mata first arrived
Right before the Toa confronted Makuta
After the defeat of the Bohrok Kal
After the Kohlii Tournament (their plan in canon, before the Avohkii was found)
When Takanuva revealed the city (what happened in canon)
Never! They should've kept gaslighting them even after the city was refound!
Okay genuine question of my fellow Bionicle fans-
Since Spherus Magna is a super earth and has two night cycles from what I heard-
What is two night cycles because I cannot understand it properly and I tried to look it up it just gave me results how humans used to sleep twice in one night apparently
Like, I'm struggling to get a proper understanding of what a two night cycle is and I'm not seeing a lot of explanations of what it is
Who has been saying Spherus Magna has two night cycles? I haven't heard that before, and I'm not sure where someone would've gotten that. There's no direct evidence of that in canon.
The closest I can think of is maybe they were talking about the theory that Spherus Magna orbits a binary star? There's a video by @rahiwatching that talks about that, and in the vid they find a way to reconcile the fact that the novels always describe one sun, while at least two visual depictions show two suns in the sky. His explanation is that Spherus Magna orbits only one of the stars, which would imply that during part of the year where the planet is in between the two stars, the other star would appear in the night sky as a very dim sun (visually like a really bright moon). If not that, I'm not sure what they mean.
Idk who said it but I remember it was from comments of a post I made of the possibility the Spherus Magna inhabitants being nocturnal because of the desert temperatures of Bara Magna and they mentioned a type of awake cycle of being awake at sunrise and sunset for more comfortable temperatures, so maybe that it was used of
I probably misread it very wrong back then or remembered it very wrong so that could've been the issue so I'm sorry for that
OH, ok that makes a lot more sense. It sounds like they were just talking about the sleep cycles of SM inhabitants, not the actual day-night cycle of the planet. That they would essentially be asleep during the high heat of the day and the middle of the night, but active close to sunrise and sunset. There's a lot of real world animals like that. Interestingly, there's also evidence that human used to have two sleep cycles in at least some cultures, where we would go to sleep early in the evening, wake up and have a short period of activity in the middle of the night, then go back to sleep again until sunrise!
Okay genuine question of my fellow Bionicle fans-
Since Spherus Magna is a super earth and has two night cycles from what I heard-
What is two night cycles because I cannot understand it properly and I tried to look it up it just gave me results how humans used to sleep twice in one night apparently
Like, I'm struggling to get a proper understanding of what a two night cycle is and I'm not seeing a lot of explanations of what it is
Who has been saying Spherus Magna has two night cycles? I haven't heard that before, and I'm not sure where someone would've gotten that. There's no direct evidence of that in canon.
The closest I can think of is maybe they were talking about the theory that Spherus Magna orbits a binary star? There's a video by @rahiwatching that talks about that, and in the vid they find a way to reconcile the fact that the novels always describe one sun, while at least two visual depictions show two suns in the sky. His explanation is that Spherus Magna orbits only one of the stars, which would imply that during part of the year where the planet is in between the two stars, the other star would appear in the night sky as a very dim sun (visually like a really bright moon). If not that, I'm not sure what they mean.
Alright let's do this one last time
Hewkii, Toa of Stone
Bro has a literal granite chin
So I don't think about Bionicle 2009 much, to the point that when I responded to @herora-nuva's poll about whether romance exists with a big long ramble, just before the publication of their excellent video on the topic, I... completely forgot that 2009-10 had two canonical romance elements in it. In my defence, I was more focused on my screed about it being a definitive element in 2001-2005, whereas 2009 having romance be canon was settled fact 17 years ago, but still.
To me, 2009 was a weird year for Bionicle. It had (joints notwithstanding) one of the best toy ranges of the entire saga, the 09 figures and vehicles are fuckin' great. But the story... was lacking, and the more time passes, the more convinced I become that leaving the Matoran Universe so close to the end was a bad idea. It would've been better to tell a single, complete story of the Matoran than rush out the origins of Mata Nui and confine Teridax's reign to a single, very unfocused serial.
However, there is one consistent, coherent thought I have about the 2009 we got: Life Counters should've been diegetic.
The 2009 sets (or at least, the canister-size-and-up ones) all have these parts in them that exist for a Glatorian Battle Game or whatever they called it. I don't remember the exact rules but I think the idea was that you shot Thornax at the other player's life counter until it hit 0 (or Skull, as it were) and then they were out.
In-story these don't exist, they're present in the comics, but never addressed, even when they do awkward things to a character's design like give the Skrall and Vorox a weird growth on their left foot, and The Legend Reborn simply depicted them as back detail.
But personally, I think it would've been an interesting element to the story if the Life Counter was something that canonically existed.
I'm envisioning a more dystopian take on Bara Magna, as opposed to a kinda boring desert where the villages occasionally send their best wrestler to fight for magic water rocks. I heard the other day that, apparently, the white sets for 2009 were initially conceived of as being the Bone Hunters, with their white colouration being, well, bone rather than ice, something that seemingly ended when the set designers made all those sick ice parts. But that was the first time that I really thought about how weird it is that the setup for Bara Magna is that it's a huge desert with no resources, but also there's an ice village. And a water village. And a plant village. Like, Lego picked the desert year to switch the green guys to being plant-themed.
In this case, the resources would be present. The desert is artificially made much worse than it would otherwise be, the scarcity is created by the Skrall. Tuma already won before Mata Nui even arrives, and keeps the villages he now lords over poor and weak by extracting all their resources through brutal tithes and then making them fight for it. The battles also weaken the villages' ability to unite against the Skrall by giving them reasons to be mad at each other. Iconox needed that water, but Malum beat Strakk, and Tajun is mad at them both because it was their water to begin with. The arena matches are also a form of entertaining sport for the Skrall ruling class.
And that's where the canon Life Counter comes in: People, be they Glatorian, Skrall, Vorox, or even Agori that fight in Bara Magna's arenas are fitted with a device on their back or foot, and it ticks down by one every time they take a strong hit. When it hits zero, the device electrocutes the wearer and paralyses them, ending the fight.
This makes the battles more tense for the audience, especially when a fighter only has one or two hits left they can take before they're down.
The Skrall also feign participation in the system, creating the illusion that they're more fair than they're actually being. Because the Glatorian representing the villages are few in number, and they're all either battered, tired veterans like Ackar, who survived the Skrall War by the skin of his teeth, or rookies like Gresh, who is inexperienced and new to the whole thing. Meanwhile, Tuma sends his best warriors to represent the Skrall in the arena, ensuring that they always win, which additionally helps to keep the populace demoralised: Nobody has ever beaten a Skrall in the arena before, it makes them look invincible. And that's why Gresh being willing try and nearly succeeding in the first on-screen arena match of the arc matters so much. He didn't win, but for the first time, there's a crack in the Skrall's aura of invincibility, and the arrival of Mata Nui will tear that wide open.
But what then of Tuma? Because all of the 2009 sets had Life Counters, including Tuma. Well, that's easy. Tuma is basically Commodus.
I wager that most people are only familiar with Commodus from the movie Gladiator, but the movie isn't the most historically faithful. Absolute banger, but not accurate in the least. But one thing it was in the ballpark with is that Commodus did fight in the arena, and he didn't fight fair.
Commodus loved gladiator games, and later in his reign, as he became increasingly egotistical and megalomaniacal, he took to participating. Initially he armoured himself as a Secutor, a type of gladiator who fought with a helmet, partial armour, a sword, and a heavy shield, before later starting to dress up as Hercules (which is the correct spelling for once, since we're talking about a Roman). Per the writings of Herodian, this was generally frowned upon. A lot of gladiators started their careers as slaves, prisoners of war, or criminals (though the idea that they were all slaves for their entire career in the arena is an exaggeration). Fighting in the arena was seen as beneath the Emperor, and Commodus was viewed as besmirching the office of the Emperor for fighting in the arena.
"Fighting" however, may have been a bit generous to Commodus. According to Cassius Dio, Commodus ordered that the people on the streets who'd lost their feet due to injury or disease be brought into the arena, where they were tied together. Commodus would then march around in his Hercules costume and pretend they were giants while killing them with a club. In fact (according to Dio), Commodus was known for exclusively using deadly weapons and fighting to kill, which wasn't common for gladiators. Despite the pop culture image of gladiators fighting to the bloody death, it wasn't especially common for battles to end that way. Gladiators were both popular and expensive, killing them would've been fiscally irresponsible.
And this, then, is what I'm drawing on for Tuma. Because Tuma does fight in the arena. And Tuma does wear a Life Counter. But he has two. In addition to his gigantic, powerful body and unreasonably large sword, he also gives himself twice the "HP" of anyone trying to step to him, or rather, anyone unfortunate enough for Tuma to decide he wants to kill them in front of an audience.
This also kinda allows me to marry up the Tuma of the written material, who is a more calculating figure, with the posturing blowhard he was in TLR. Yes, he is normally a cold and calculated schemer, but he hams it up in front of an audience.
And if the titan Mata Nui set is worked into the narrative, perhaps as a transformation Mata Nui takes on during the final battle, well, that set also has two Life Counters. Meaning that, for the first time, Tuma is in a fair fight.
In this context, 2009 represents the Matoran Universe's situation, writ small. The Glatorian are few in number, much like how there's only forty Toa left. Tuma, like the Shadowed One before him, is Teridax in miniature, a grandstanding mad tyrant who has already won, but insists on continuing his cruelty because it amuses him, even to the point that it becomes counterproductive. And the key to beating him in the end is Unity, the first of the Three Virtues that Mata Nui (allegedly) imparted to the Matoran, just like it has been so many times previously. Well, Unity and a Toa with a god-mask giving everybody cool new powers. But it is a microcosm of what Mata Nui will have to do to save his people from Teridax's grip.
Oooh this is fascinating! I never really thought about the life counters before, but I'm kinda liking this! I've long thought the Bara Magna lore could use an overhaul.
Darth Vader is a Bionicle
My Ultimate Analysis of Romance in Bionicle! Let me know what you think!
My romance video is finally out! Link to it below! Its my complete analysis of romance in Bionicle canon, looking at it as holistically as I can! And its a monster of a video, over 1 hour talking about something that's not supposed to even exist :P
I make a lot of points in the video, some I went over in this post where I talk about how the fandom largely misinterpreted a lot of Greg's infamous posts about romance (he was mainly saying he wasn't going to write fleshed out romantic plots in his books).
I also talk about how the Matoran COMPLETELY break from heteronormativity, and that there's a real narrative reason for it. It wasn't to make them queer, unfortunately, but it did serve a really interesting purpose nonetheless. Matoran society, with its lopsided gender ratio living completely apart from each other, makes heteronormativity impossible, and the reason they were made this way was to make it clear through implication that the Matoran don't reproduce, while also keeping how new Matoran come into being a mystery. It ultimately served as foreshadowing to the fact that they were parts of a larger machine (Mata Nui) and created specifically to serve purposes within that machine.
I also go into what I consider to be the "main" romantic pairings in the series canon, the ones that were clearly meant to invoke the idea of romance, and how each of them represent a different era in the depiction of romance in the series:
The very cute, wholesome, almost schoolyard crush relationships of Hewkii x Macku and Hahli x Jaller;
The one-sided, notably more sexually charged dynamics of Matau x Nokama and Roodaka x Sidorak;
And the canonically confirmed yet tragically cut short romances of Kiina x Mata Nui and Sahmad and the woman he loved.
None of these characters ever "get together", even the Glatorian who had established lore that they could, which ultimately showed how Bionicle was not a romance story. It was aimed at elementary school boys, who would sometimes enjoy the hints of crushes that we saw, but would probably get icked out by anything more.
And so when we look at the Matoran Universe inhabitants as a whole, we come to the fact that some of them do have relationships that we might see as romantic, but also the institution of romance wouldn't exist at large (and I contend that romance is far more of a societal institution than an innate feeling), leaving their relationships very close, but undefined in the way that we see them.
And yet, they also still have a concept of marriage! Roodaka and Sidorak were engaged to be married, that's said in both the novels and movie! But their marriage is pure political alliance, like a medieval marriage between nobility except they don't need to produce an heir.
Its like they took the real world ideas of romance and adapted them to their own needs without even really knowing what the original versions of the concepts are. Bionicle as a whole handles romance very weirdly, and not very well in some places I have to admit. But I find it makes the worldbuilding very fascinating to think about, and I love it for that even if I see its flaws.
Happy Valentine's Day!!! Does Bionicle have romance? This is a question that has sparked heated debates in the Bionicle fandom for well ove
Does Bionicle have romance in it?
Yes
No
Maybe. I don't know. Can you repeat the question?
I'm really excited to engage with this comment, because everything you said is completely right! But I also think there's even more nuance to it! I go into it in MUCH more depth in my upcoming video, but I also really wanna dive into it here too!
You are completely right that fandom has spent decades valuing forum posts over the actual text of the story, in this but also many other things. But what's more is, the fandom has also largely misinterpreted those forum posts!
Because when looked at in context and as a whole, Greg's meaning when he made those statements was mainly telling people that Bionicle stories he was writing would not have romance plots in them. He never denied that hints of romance appeared in things like the Templar animations and the movies, he was primarily setting audience expectations about whether the characters would actually get together.
Because if you notice, despite all of those instances of characters having obvious hints of romantic feelings, none of those characters ever really "got together" in any meaningful way in canon. And in so many of his statements on romance, that's what Greg was really getting at. To not expect that there would be a fully explored romantic plot, because that's not what Bionicle is about, since it would alienate the core demographic of elementary school boys.
And interestingly, Greg also said multiple times that he thought the MU inhabitants would be capable of learning romance when interacting with the Spherus Magna inhabitants.
The other thing is that when we really look at the totality of the lore surrounding the Matoran, we have to realize that their society at large wouldn't have the preconceptions about what relationships are and what labels and structures they can have.
Because as you pointed out, there are tons of examples of the characters having feelings for each other. But romance isn't just a feeling, or even a relationship dynamic, but also a societal structure. It is about how the people in it present their relationship into the broader expectations of society around them. What we call romantic love wasn't even codified the way we think of it in many cultures of the past (and neither was sexual orientation).
And we have to acknowledge that our culture of romance was largely made by and built to accommodate the heterosexual, child-having majority. It was built around the idea that people pair bond as mates for the purpose of having kids and merging family groups.
Obviously yes some aspec people get into romance and tons of people who can't have or don't want kids enter into romantic relationships and those romances are just as deep and meaningful and valid as any other. But those groups weren't the ones that set the cultural standards of what romance is.
Without societal pressure to have kids and build families, can we honestly say that romance as we understand it would even develop? Close, affectionate bonds between people would absolutely develop, even ones that from the outside we would call romantic. But romance really is a very specific structure that developed to fulfill a very specific purpose. And while tons of people engage in romance without being limited by that, our idea of what romance can be is shaped by the dominant cultural narrative of heteronormativity. Remove that narrative, and why would those structures appear?
The Matoran were very meticulously designed to make heteonormativity impossible! The gender ratio is lopsided, they live in single-gender villages/districts, and they don't reproduce. The broad societal structure of romance logically wouldn't appear, even though there are plenty of individual relationship dynamics that are close enough to resemble romance. And while he didn't word it like that, I do believe at least some of that was the point Greg was trying to get at.
Ultimately, what the Matoran have can most accurately be described as queerplatontic relationships! And more than anything I think that aspect is something we in the fandom should explore more deeply! Because their relationship dynamics are not limited at all to our society's conception of romance, they can have a vast array of relationship types for us to explore when writing about them in our fan fiction and headcanons!
Does Bionicle have romance in it?
Yes
No
Maybe. I don't know. Can you repeat the question?
