What was Teridax’s Damage?
So, I saw this post about Miserix’s characterisation earlier and it got me thinking.
I want to say that first off, I do not like the idea that all of the Makuta were just made to be evil, that they popped out of the antidermis already predisposed to be power-hungry bastards. That Miserix apparently only didn’t try to take over the universe because he had power, and considered aiming for more to be too risky to himself, is boring.
Shit like this is why I maintain that Bionicle is a much better story if you never read Greg’s forum posts and just make your own inferences based on what’s actually in the text.
Still, the notion of the ‘curse’ and some other Greg Canon got me thinking about how they intersect, and I landed more or less at this.
According to Greg Lore, Teridax was destined to take over the MU. This is a controversial element, a lot of the fandom really don’t like the idea that Destiny was so immutable that even the story’s main antagonist was ultimately just following the plotted line laid out by the Great Beings, but there’s a part of this that has the potential to make Teridax significantly more interesting.
There’s some lore floating around- I’m uncertain if it’s been confirmed or not, but I like it so I’m going to for it- that Teridax wasn’t just a Makuta. He was a Great Spirit AI, intended to be given control of a second Great Spirit Robot, but when it became apparent that the planet would blow up before they could even make headway on the construction of GSR 2, the Great Beings just crammed Teridax’s AI into the GSR 1 and hoped that he would absorb the same information as Mata Nui did on his travels throughout the galaxy.
This may have had something to do with Teridax being granted Metru Nui as his region. We don’t have the full details of Miserix’s selection process, and how he decided which Makuta got what, but I would not be surprised if he read it in the stars that Metru Nui was where Teridax belonged. Certainly makes it more interesting than “Terry gets the MU’s most important location because of nepotism.”
I’ve seen it suggested that the purpose of the Ko-Matoran being astronomers and scholars was to make sure Mata Nui was studying the cultures of the galaxy and learning from them, that their observations of the stars and writing it down was how Mata Nui took on and processed that information. Shit just got a little scrambled when sentience was factored in.
Being close to the core processor, and having access to the information that Mata Nui was taking on board would certainly be benefits to giving Teridax Metru Nui.
Still, the whole “Teridax is MU 2 AI” thing does kinda contradict the established canon that Mata Nui created the Makuta within the MU, doesn’t it? Well, maybe not.
First of all, we have Vezon’s multiversal journey. In one of the AUs he lands on, he finds that Makuta is the GSR and Mata Nui is his scheming, ambitious brother. This shows that the Makuta name was something the GBs already had before Mata Nui ever made the species. The difference between this universe and the prime one isn’t just “The names are switched heehoo”, it’s that in this one, they decided to make Makuta the one in control of the GSR 1, and Mata Nui the passenger... and Mata Nui turned out just liked Teridax did in the main universe. Well, as much as we can tell from Vezon’s perspective, anyway.
This is the strongest evidence, IMO, that Teridax existed before the GSR was launched, and before the Makuta species was created.
Also, in this case he’s just called “Makuta”, and it’s not a species name. I’ll get to that later, for now we’re just going to look at Teridax the individual and not worry about his brothers and sisters. The Makuta species is an additional layer I’ll factor in after we’ve got the gist of how this changes Teridax himself.
Layer 1: Teridax the Individual
Here is my theory: Teridax was an AI before he was a Makuta, but he doesn’t remember it. He was crammed into Mata Nui’s brain, and when the Makuta were born, either Teridax slipped in himself, or Mata Nui intentionally tried to give his brother a body so that he could at least live as his own entity.
Still, downscaling from a GSR AI to a regular MU resident had... consequences, and Teridax lost most of his conscious memory of who he had been before. As far as he was aware, he was just a Makuta.
Still, there was a part of him that did remember. The thought that he should’ve been so much more than this would linger in the back of his head for millennia, gnawing away at him. He was a god forced to be small, for reasons he could no longer remember or understand.
Imagine if you were crammed in your entirety into a microbe and made to exist entirely within the body of another human. You weren’t able to understand why, but you knew you were meant to be more than this. Wouldn’t that just drive you crazy?
Yeah.
I don’t particularly like the idea of Destiny being this immutable force within the Bionicle story, I prefer to think of it as just “What the GBs made the characters for, and they’re somewhat predisposed to carrying that out, but post-awakening they’re fully capable of consciously going against it. That said, I have to admit that the idea of Teridax-the-diminished-Great-Spirit makes him way more interesting to me than Teridax-the-generic-evil-overlord-who-wants-power-for-power’s-sake.
It doesn’t really change his characterisation much, but it gives him a lot more depth and explains some of his actions, like styling himself as Mata Nui’s brother post-Cataclysm. There’s also the detail that the GSR AI in the AU Vezon visits is called Makuta, not Teridax. Which brings us neatly to the Makuta species.
Layer 2: The Brotherhood
As stated above, Pre-MU Teridax wasn’t called Teridax. He was just Makuta. Which raises a few questions, not all of which have answers.
Were the Makuta AI and the Makuta species linked before the former became one of the latter?
Did Mata Nui name the Makuta species after the Makuta AI, perhaps?
Are the Makuta species in the Great Spirit Makuta universe called the “Mata Nui species?”
My take on this is that... the Makuta species wasn’t an intentional creation on Mata Nui’s part. Makuta Teridax was intentional, but when his AI was put into the Antidermis pool, it was... refracted, and created 100 different individuals. They were given the purpose of maintaining order and stability within the Matoran Universe, because that was part of Mata Nui’s intent in giving Makuta a body within the MU to begin with: Makuta would take care of the inner workings of the MU while Mata Nui focused on his mission.
Having 100 of them rather than just one didn’t really stop the plan much, but what Mata Nui didn’t know was how badly Makuta’s AI had been shattered by the process.
This image from Bionicle: World always confused me as a kid. I wasn’t sure why the Makuta were being depicted as three Teridaxes. I mean I got that it was because the rest of them didn’t have designs yet, but now...
I think that this image represents them as they were originally formed. Originally, they all looked like this. When they were born, they were physically identical besides maybe masks. So Mata Nui didn’t realise that Makuta had been broken apart by the Antidermis, he just thought they were multiple incarnations of the same entity.
Still, the reason the Makuta are Like That, the only reasonable way to work in the supposed “Curse” of the Makuta species in my eyes, is that the Makuta species is actually the Makuta AI split across multiple individuals, fragments of the whole who forgot what they were meant to be and were left with a deep-rooted trauma spawned from being forced to be so much smaller than they were designed to be.
Some of them were affected more deeply than others. Miserix, and those that sided with him, were able to find purpose and satisfaction at their lot in life. But Teridax, who contained the largest portion of the original Makuta AI (I’ve always liked to think that he was the first one that emerged from the Antidermis Pool, personally), well, he didn’t take is so well.
And what’s the smoking gun?
This line from Destiny War.
"I... we are the essence of the Makuta species. We know what they were meant to know, but have forgotten. We see the error. The flaws. So much to repair; but it cannot be done. Spherus Magna, the Shattering. The three that must be one; the two that must make them one. He must remember, he must be made to see, or the journey of 100,000 years will be for nothing. He hides beneath, preparing to meet his destiny. We must go there, we must right the wrong. So many wrongs before the Shattering can end." — Antidermis through Brutaka, Destiny War.
The memories of their purpose didn’t just disappear. They were left in the dregs of the pool, and when Brutaka absorbed it, he was possessed by the remainder of the Makuta AI, the parts that did know what they were supposed to be, and they in turn tried to remind Teridax before it was too late.
The “Curse of the Makuta” isn’t that they’re all power-hungry bastards from birth. It’s that them being fragmented and compressed, and losing the memories of their original purpose left them with an intense, unremitting need to try and regain their lost stature that grew and grew.
