#destiny war

[toaarcan]

I'm back on my bullshit, I'm gonna ramble about one of the Bionicle story missteps that stands out the most to me.

So, Greg very much wanted to write Bionicle as a sweeping, large-scale epic where every major character has some contribution to the climax of the Matoran Universe arc. But the problem is that the A-plot is being told through some not-very-long-books and some very short comics. And those are primarily dedicated to selling the new toys.

The result of this is that Greg simply can't fit everyone in. There's this old fanart by @nicholas-anderson that depicted the Toa Nuva (and Takanuva and Ignika) being joined in the battle for Karda Nui by the Toa Hagah and the Toa Mahri, and I love that idea, but it's also the sort of thing that can only happen in fanart, because Greg already has eight Toa and three Matoran for heroes in 2008, he's never going to be allowed to double that number to include more characters, especially ones who aren't this year's toys. And he probably wouldn't be able to keep that many plates spinning.

The result of that is that these characters all get shunted off into Destiny War and Dwellers in Darkness, and the former in particular has to shoulder the weight of the entire war storyline, juggling dozens of characters and perspectives and pinballing around the Matoran Universe as it tries to cover all of them, in a way that it simply can't do adequately.

It doesn't help that some of these plot points are weird and don't make much sense. Like the Visorak. Web of Shadows ends with the Visorak being liberated from their service to the Brotherhood by Vakama, only for the 2008 serials to reintroduce them as once again under the Makuta's control, with Helryx ordering their extinction. This is carried out by the Toa Mahri.

And then, in Reign of Shadows, this turns out to have been entirely pointless, because Teridax simply recreates them. Which raises the question as to why he did that- That Teridax enforcing his conquest with Rahkshi and Visorak is, while on-brand, not exactly inkeeping with the "GSR is a Body" allegory. It's essentially the brain going "Hm yes I should give myself cysts and lice." Greg depicts the Visorak as uniformly destructive, invasive, and parasitic. How 2010 didn't come down to Teridax crash-landing on Bara Magna and going "Brother help me my head is full of werewolves" I don't know.

I'm getting off-track here.

As a story element, the Destiny War makes sense. Referring back to the body allegory, it's logical that the body's immune system (the Toa and the Order) fights back against the infection (that being the Makuta), as well as waiting for the medicine (the Toa Mata/Nuva) to cure the problem. What doesn't make sense is that the war doesn't go hot until 2008. The Toa Nuva and would-be Inika should be discovering that the rest of the MU is at war with the Brotherhood the moment they go south of the Sea Gates.

And that kinda does happen... Except that war is between the Brotherhood and the Dark Hunters, and this is a problem.

The Brotherhood/Dark Hunter War is one of the most pointless events in the entire Bionicle canon. It rages for thousands of years and the most that can be said for one of the sides is that they managed to annoy the other, while the other side didn't give a shit and were too busy scheming to exercise the drop of effort it would take to crush their assailants like insects.

And this is kind of a problem that the Dark Hunters have as a whole. Greg largely felt that, as contest-created characters whose designs and powers had been created by the fans, they were a little bit off-limits (except Guardian, apparently). The result is that he doesn't ever really do anything with anyone outside of the five set characters and Lariska. And I guess the Piraka if we're counting ex-members. This isn't exactly a helpful group of characters to have around in a story.

And they don't even fit into the body allegory- They can only exist in a post-Awakening GSR, Teridax is able to swarm Odina with Rahkshi and effectively destroy the Hunters as an organisation with no ill-effects, and most of their number consists of misfits, characters who were no longer doing their Great Beings-intended role.

The Shadowed One, Sentrakh, and Voporak do a great job of being villains for one book, forcing Vakama and Teridax to team up, and thus giving Greg a lot of scenes to properly establish his version of the character. And then they do basically nothing after that point, to the extent that I'm not sure if the story changes appreciably if instead of the ending we got, Teridax just fucking eats them.

TSO: Makuta, you have declared war on the Dark Hunters.

Teridax: This is not war. This is pest control.

Now, I don't think Greg was ever going to kill off TSO. He was essentially a second Teridax that Lego didn't care about and could thus be used in any way Greg liked. But he really doesn't do anything that isn't a flashback or a dead-end cliffhanger after 2005. And some of those things could've been other characters.

Does the story change much if, rather than ex-Hunters, the Piraka are ex-Brotherhood agents? If instead of randomly being turned into bugs by TSO's laser eyes, something that never happens again and is never explained, Zaktan is mutated by Roodaka in her role as a Brotherhood agent? Does it change much if the characters that conquer Xia and discover the virus weapons are the Barraki? Y'know, the organisation that actually does have universal conquest goals, and otherwise are just kinda spare parts in Destiny War and Reign of Shadows? Does anyone need to steal the Vahi at the end of 2008?

Instead of a Brotherhood/Hunter war, it should've been the Brotherhood/Order war from the get-go. The Toa head south of Metru Nui for the first time since the Cataclysm, and find that Mata Nui's agents are already doing their best to fight the Brotherhood, enabling them to focus on their missions of finding the Ignika to restore Mata Nui's life and reaching Karda Nui to awaken him. The war continues in the background of the entire Ignition Arc, with the Destiny War serial covering its final bloody battles, and focusing more tightly on the Order of Mata Nui members, with the non-Karda Nui Makuta characters serving as the primary antagonists and the leaders of the Brotherhood's war fleet, and the phantom hand of Teridax guiding everything into the correct position for his final victory.

[bringbackwendellvaughn]

[toaarcan]

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.

[bringbackwendellvaughn]

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