#tridax

[stoovano]

Made a Makuta Tridax today, was hard to work in his colors and make it look any good, lol

[sepublic]

What if we reimagined all of the other non-Teridax Makuta as eldritch horrors, just as Teridax was initially presented in the early years of Bionicle? What if we used each Makuta as a prompt of sorts; What if THEY were the big villain terrorizing an island, their individual name unknown so they’re just THE Makuta to the local Toa and Matoran? Make each one feel worthy of the title of Makuta, with their depictions in Karda Nui being akin to physical, humanoid avatars meant to interact with others, just as the scheming Teridax is like for the vortex from MNOG?

Like for example, Chirox! You have this swarm of spiders known as the Visorak, led by one massive spider, known as Makuta. The Visorak mutate their victims, before dragging them back to their master.

Makuta is a spider-like entity that emerges from a cave, using his spindly limbs to grapple with and analyze his victims... Potentially drawing upon them for inspiration, before tearing and prying them apart into their base pieces, adding them to his massive collection. From these recycled parts, Makuta creates more Visorak, or dreaded Rahi creatures that wreak havoc on the ecosystem. Like Makuta, they are poison, destruction incarnate; They always inherit his twisted spirit that destroys.

That’s all Makuta does, even when he does create; He inevitably just destroys. Instead of coming up with new things on his own, he relies on Fate to mutate the living into something random, hoping chance will eventually grant him a working design for Makuta to copy. You could say Makuta has no real ideas of his own, and is a gambler, a parasite, betting something will come along for him to take. 

But isn’t destruction the same as creation, isn’t destroying his victims necessary to make things? That’s where the imagery of the spider comes into play; Its long, spindly limbs? They’re fingers. Makuta is not just a spider, he is a hand; The same hand that reaches into the parts bin to make new creations, plays with MoCs before tearing them apart to make something new. Just as Teridax represents the parts bin, Chirox is the builder’s hand, like in the Lego Movie, or Super Smash Bros. 

Each Visorak is like a hand of its own, grabbing victims, reassembling them randomly with mutation. Dragging them back to Chirox, whose hand motif is also inspired from the fact that he is the only Makuta who can fully control his Shadow Hand. And Makuta’s spider-like form? It’s attached to something much, MUCH bigger... It is not just a hand metaphorically, it is a literal hand and when Makuta’s lair collapses around him, it reveals the massive figure he is attached to; His whole, true self, a titan more resembling the Chirox we are familiar with.

The others are different angles and facets to approach the myth, the legend of the Makuta; Different re-imaginings, just as people came up with their own G3 and their own take on Makuta. Just like the Makuta contest we had for G2. Vamprah can represent the animalistic side of Makuta; The raging, kicking, screaming beast he was once described as by Vakama. The apex predator, for if his minions are the Rahi beasts, he is the greatest of them all.

Or Bitil! A temporal entity, haunted by his past selves, constantly summoned by his future self. Always going through different iterations, just as a MoC is frequently edited, redone, rebuilt; You can track his transformation, his evolution across his many selves; Makuta represents the existential horror of the timeline, of the way things change. A ghost of the past, and also a vision of the future. If the Vahi is central to the tale of Bionicle as the Mask of Time, what about Makuta as someone who constantly exploits and distorts this force?

Those are some of my initial ideas. Makuta needn’t always be this faceless force of nature, they can be a humanized figure, like Krika, who can be a sympathetic, tragic villain doomed by the narrative, consigned to his role and aware of it as part of a meta discussion; Miserix is the mighty dragon our knights must slay; The Makuta of Stelt, a land of merchants and commerce, the all-consuming force of corporatism that stifles creativity, or a bargaining devil. Gorast is a fanatical priestess hoping to bring in a new age, Mutran the quintessential mad scientist who played god and flew too close to the sun in his obsession.

Spiriah is a corrupt lord seething over his failures, who transformed and resents his people the Skakdi and must be rebelled against; Tridax is a multiversal collector providing commentary on adaptations; The Vortixx hope to harness the ultimate weapon that is Antroz; Kojol is the arcane keeper of knowledge like Lucifer, who stole the Light of enlightenment from the land of thinkers and is burned for it; And Icarax? A completely straightforward dark lord to conquer, as he always intended to be. Each plays the role of Makuta, as the final villain, the ultimate evil who started this conflict, whom our protagonists must rise to eventually vanquish.

[toaarcan]

Bionicle in 2008: The creation of the Mask of Light terrified the Brotherhood of Makuta. They viewed the potential creation of a Toa of Light as an existential threat, one so severe that they were willing to launch a raid on the island of Artakha to steal the Avohkii, even though doing so could expose that they had fallen from grace before they were ready, in hope that it would prevent a Toa of Light ever being made.

Also Bionicle in 2008: Okay so a single Makuta has been kidnapping and corrupting AU versions of Takanuva. By himself. He's so good at it that he has an entire army of them, despite the creature he uses to do the corruption only being invented like a month ago. He's not even in the Top 8 Makuta Who Are Good At Shit that Terry wants to get rid of.

[teelguy]

just tridax things

[deepsearahi]

Chirox & Mutran are proud, but Tridax's love of shadow leeches is obsessive. They're far more than weapons to him; they're his darling children.

4/10 of Specters. Built with Stud.io

[mind-of-makuta]

Oh hey terridax. Question. Why did u kidnap and make several shadow takanuva. If one Toa of light was bad later a Toa of twilight. Why grab a tone of them

That was Tridax’s idea, not mine. But then, it is a little late to ask him now, isn’t it? 

[sepublic]

Do you think people ever misread Tridax as Teridax in-universe, and vice versa? They’ve even got specific rivalries with Takanuva, although despite being a C-tier Makuta, Tridax actually has an enormous success rate beating Takanuva, whereas Teridax with an E doesn’t.

And I don’t care if Greg undermined Mask of Light’s climax by retconning that Teridax let Takanuva win (only to emphasize how scared the Brotherhood was of Takanuva later on); At most, I’ll consider that Teridax secretly forfeited the match because he was scared of actually fighting Takanuva and getting killed in the process, so faking his death to skedaddle seemed like a safer bet. And even that ended with him losing his body, and having to hop between those of others’, never even getting a body that truly belonged to him in the end...

[sepublic]

It’s obviously incredibly dumb but with how barebones Tridax is as a character (Tridax without an E, not to be confused with Teridax) I think there’s a lot we could explore with his sort-of relationship to Takanuva. He’s defeated and brainwashed so many alternate timeline versions of him that he probably understands Takanuva as a person and how he thinks, inside-out. Despite having never met our Takanuva, y’know? What personal secrets was each Shadow Takanuva made to confess to their new master?

There’s room for angst, an AU or two, of our beloved Takanuva, once Takua, coming across Tridax as this enemy who is somehow already intimate with him as a person, has done so much to him but also nothing at the same time. Talking to Takanuva like they’ve met before, because they have. We could set up Tridax as the ultimate enemy for Takanuva, the Doomsday to his Superman, the one who can and will always defeat him even though Tobduk killed Tridax with a sneak attack.

What makes our Takanuva any more special than the rest, what makes this scenario any more different, enough to end differently? Tridax has seen all the routes Takanuva can take, in some ways he knows him better than Takua himself. Tridax could be such an existential threat for Takanuva who sows so much doubt and paranoia into him, the inevitability of fate... Not just a Hero Killer, but the Takanuva Killer, the one who slays the biggest hero like it’s nothing! Practically exists to torment, to personally target him... Not just this one-off dude who exists for Vezon to annoy. If we did Into the Takanuvaverse, Tridax should be the villain, the Morlun to his Spider-Man.