FORM VS. FUNCTION: BIONICLE, CREATIVITY, AND HOW WE MAKE THINGS FIT TOGETHER

it is nothing short of a small miracle that i haven't written much on BIONICLE in my time operating this website. for as much as i'll espouse the formative impact of toys and games like Transformers and Pokémon, i do think that BIONICLE might be THE thing. as a physical toy, it captured my attention and sparked my creativity like nothing else, and as a sprawling multi-media project, it got me interested in this strange device called the 'computer' that was a portal to not just understanding the story, but finding like-minded people who were even more invested in the whole thing than me. look at me now, trying to be an honest-to-god blogger in 2024! this is The LEGO Group's fault.

admittedly, there are a few things that i think have kept me from broaching the subject. even moreso than many of its notable strengths, i think whatever slim cultural footprint BIONICLE has these days is largely centered around how unexpectedly dense its story became over the years - perhaps one day it'd be fun to commit to a long haul through the chronicle, but it's not something i'd really commit to lightly, or even something i was following very closely as a kid. in terms of the actual physical objects, not only is my collection undoubtedly scattered throughout storage and probably half-broken, but they're probably in loose condition, because to me, one of the core appeals of BIONICLE was always taking things apart and making something new out of them.

lately, through a few stray whims, BIONICLE has been on my mind once again, and this time, i think i've finally cracked the code to sort of talking about one of the many, many facets of its legacy. i don't have the comprehensive mastery of its lore or the pristine museum of its physical toyline, but i do know this; i still have that same creative spark when i think about fiddling around with these toys, and i'm not the only one. the MOCing (that's 'my-own-creation'-ing, if you don't have the lingo in your veins) community is honestly still thriving, and some of the things that have happened within this side of the franchise after its many deaths and rebirths are honestly wild and fascinating. to dig a layer deeper, i think i've finally accumulated enough hindsight to understand how i've interfaced with that stuff throughout my life and how it's continued to influence my creative tendencies and preferences.

that's all a little cerebral and high-concept and personal, though, so let's take a few steps back and start from the top; what is BIONICLE and why do i like it so much?

to try and sum it up in the most basic terms i can, BIONICLE was an action figure line produced by LEGO, supported by a vast array of written, visual, and interactive narrative material. at the turn of the millenium, LEGO was in relatively dire straits, and in an attempt to create an in-house brand that could help sustain them, they tried a lot of things they'd never really gone all-in on before, whether it was using the historically vehicle-oriented Technic palette to create action-packed characters, or developing an extensive lore that contextualized everything from who these characters were to how their packaging was actually an in-universe function.

LEGO was always a household staple for me, going back even further than the literal beginning of my human memory, but BIONICLE was a pretty hefty step up in terms of complexity, so i didn't get into it until about halfway through its initial run. the first sets i distinctly remember owning were the 2005 Rahaga, with their adorably stumpy proportions and built-in spinner gimmick. looking back on them, they're clearly very simple, but having a toy that could pose like an action figure yet come apart like LEGO was mind-blowing to me, and i think that core concept still carries a lot more weight than people might give it credit for, especially when i think back on other big sets of the time. there was a sense of place and scale in building a giant castle or a police station, but when you got a BIONICLE set, you had like, a whole little guy, y'know? it's a very different pattern of play.

of course, having the set was only one of the many ways BIONICLE got its hooks into you. every set made sure to mention BIONICLE.com on its packaging, and logging on opened up an entirely new layer of play. Norik was no longer just 'the red one' - he had a whole story, a personality as a fearless leader and a lover of nature. did you know you can go watch him in BIONICLE 3: Web of Shadows, or see his adventures in the comics? wait, it's the third movie? what's all this story material from 2002 like? Matoran Alphabet? Rahi? Visorak? the Kanohi Avohkii?

that all probably sounds like nonsense, and it definitely kind of is - both in the sense that i pulled all those things at random and that they mean absolutely nothing to a normal well-adjusted adult. to a kid with nothing but free time and their first real consistent access to a computer, though? it was like being pulled into another world entirely. BIONICLE was not just a cool toy, it was an ongoing layered narrative, hitting you from every angle with books, comics, movies, and a surprising amount of directly accessible online content through the power of Flash.

i think when people approach the complexity of the story today, it's often through the lens of how vast things got at their absolute peak - in later years you had guidebooks, novels, and even a separate webdomain at BIONICLEstory.com, and all of these were purely written material, meaning they didn't have the same symbiotic relationship with iconography or interactivity. the nuance that gets lost when you start telling the story beginning at its most complex points is how the target demographic actually got invested in BIONICLE.

to use the Rahaga as an example; if you were to open up BIONICLEsector01 today, you would see that they have a pretty dense history, having once served under the Brotherhood of Makuta as the Toa Hagah, uncovering their betrayal, being mutated into their current forms, helping the Toa Hordika during the Visorak invasion of Metru Nui, and eventually finding new purpose as members of the Order of Mata Nui, getting entangled with characters like Helryx, Zaktan, Miserix, Brutaka, Tren Krom... again, all pretty dense, and this is just for tertiary characters.

what gets lost in the shuffle, though, is how, when, and where this information got filtered through. going to BIONICLE.com at the time of the toys' release would really only tell you about the Visorak thing, because that was the matter at hand in 2005's overarching plot. what actually mattered, at the time, was that the Rahaga were the wise sages helping the Toa Hordika out. they have cool Rhotuka spinners and are associated with the same core set of six elements as the Toa. if you happened to have a subscription to LEGO Magazine, you might get a hint of their time as the Toa Hagah through the included BIONICLE comics, but that was both decidedly in 'side story' territory, and it also still tied back around to a toy you could go buy, because Norik's original Toa form was a 'special edition' set. everything past these points is getting into the realm of that later written material, which was largely meant for superfans who wanted to know what these characters might be up to when they weren't necessarily earning attention by being contemporary marketable products.

i don't bring all this up to discredit that the complexity was an important facet of BIONICLE - it absolutely was, and i don't think it's hard to see why that complexity has become one of its most enduring cornerstones when people talk about the franchise today. what i mean to say is that i don't think revisiting these characters today, with all the hindsight in the world and all these complex facts laid out as if it's one continuous, cohesive piece of storytelling, accurately captures what it was like to be a kid getting into the world of BIONICLE. i did not need to know about the intricate tragedy and betrayal woven through Norik's past to enjoy him - i knew he was the fire Rahaga, so he paired nicely with Vakama. i knew his place in the story as portrayed through TV commercials and direct-to-DVD movies. i knew he had a cool little spinner, and that the spinners had cool powers.

at this point, you might be scratching your head because i said this wasn't going to be so much about the actual story, but this is all important set dressing to get to the actual point i'm making, i promise. the reason i've delved so much into the appeal of BIONICLE's world and drawn a distinction around the more digestible understanding presented through contemporary mass media is to emphasize something that i think goes underrated and unexamined when dissecting what people love about BIONICLE - it is a really compelling sandbox with just the right amount of 'rules' to invite the reader to start branching out.

for someone with no professional-grade interest in the field, i spend a LOT of time thinking about the psychology of playing with toys and the way creative fiction is designed around capitalistic interests like selling toys. BIONICLE happens to be both my personal ur-example of this phenomenon impacting my own experiences, and a particularly fascinating case study. there are lots of patterns with BIONICLE as a toy that get reflected back into the story and therefore projected back inwards into the play experience. the six affordable mid-range sets tend to be discrete teams of six characters within the fiction. they release in a similar set of six colors, and these colors get interpreted as the distinct visual palettes asssociated with their elemental powers. the uniquely designed 'face' of these characters is contextualized in-universe as a powerful Kanohi mask, granting them a secondary ability and, especially in the franchise's early years, encouraging fans to collect different masks and mix-and-match them.

long story short: knowing that Toa Tahu controls the element of fire and collects Kanohi with powers like shielding and X-ray vision, and knowing that Barbie's favorite color is pink and that her best friend is Midge? in my opinion, basically the same psychological response and positive feedback loop for kids, just framed through different genre trappings.

there's structure and a clear set of interactions and goals you can extrapolate out from the premise - there's a 'where' and 'why', but room to imagine your own 'how'. and, like all good pattern-based toy narratives, BIONICLE knew when to bend and break those patterns to generate excitement - you might know the six elements by heart, but what about the Toa of Light, who's powers are unique, foretold in legend, and necessary in the battle against darkness? now that's exciting, in the same primordial kid-brain sort of way that a new Power Ranger joining the team with their own equipment is.

where BIONICLE really had a leg up, though - and, indeed, the point i wish to examine in this article - is that it's also LEGO. a highly specialized subset of parts that don't share much overlap with the traditional bricks, yes, but still designed with all the same interconnectivity of the classic building toy. knowing the pattern didn't just reward you with enjoyment of the existing characters, but it also got gears turning in your head. if you happen to own a lot of red parts from buying Vakama or Norik or Sidorak, you might think to build your own Toa of fire out of those parts. new sets become exciting from a whole new angle, because you're not just getting a cool toy or delving deeper into the story, you're creating a cache of parts that allow you to spin it off in your own way.

honestly, the era of BIONICLE i first really sunk my teeth into was a bit of a golden age for this part of the play experience. the toyline had been running for a solid five years at this point, giving it plenty of time to develop its own palette of unique pieces and a consistent visual language that you could easily identify as BIONICLE. on a big-picture scale, building competitions were a fairly common sight in LEGO magazines, and a few of the series' guidebooks were dedicated solely to canonizing the cream of the crop when it came to fan creations. on a smaller, more personal scale, 2006 brought the advent of a 'gallery' section on BIONICLE.com, allowing fans to use their LEGO accounts to submit photos of their MOCs. making your own type of guy and imagining how they fit into the patterns of this vast universe really felt like a core pillar of the BIONICLE experience as a kid, and i feel that a lot of the official material at the time reflected that creative drive.

of course, with being a fan of something, you also tend to delve into the unofficial material, too, and throughout the 2000s, there was basically one true gathering place for the BIONICLE fandom - BZPower. BZPower was, in the truest sense of the word, a classic fan-site, equal parts community forum and news site for all things BIONICLE, and it's really hard to get across just how monolithic it was back then. all roads led into its community, and this is perhaps best exemplified by the site's unparalleled access to BIONICLE author Greg Farshtey.

Greg Farshtey's role in the franchise is very interesting. i'm about to say some things that might come across as downplaying his involvement, so to get this out of the way first, the man is absolutely one of the definitive authorities on the lore. Farshtey was an editor assigned to LEGO Magazine who, essentially on a whim, decided to submit a script for BIONICLE's first comic issue, securing the job when it became clear LEGO hadn't actually gotten anyone onboard to write the comic. over the next ten years, he wound up writing all 49 issues of the comic, 25 of the 29 novels, all of the guide books, and pretty much anything you could find through the franchise's multiple online outlets. if there is a singular author responsible for making BIONICLE's story what it is, i think it'd be hard to argue that it's anyone other than Greg Farshtey.

i do think a lot of modern re-evaluation from the fandom - with the benefit of artists being able to come forward with behind-the-scenes material and a more developed sense of media literacy - does steer a little further away from putting Farshtey on such a high pedestal, though. art director Christian Faber has shared extensive concept work that makes it really clear how much of a hand he had in setting up BIONICLE's eight-year core mystery, years before there were even toys on shelves. the Mata Nui Online Game, often hailed as one of the definitive tone setters in the early days of the franchise, is now much more clearly a bit of an outlier, developed by an external partner based on early story bibles and essentially having to be back-doored into the more cohesive canon of later years. the direct-to-DVD movies have always been a point of contention with a lot of Farshtey's least favorite story choices, but it's a lot easier to remember that they're a piece of BIONICLE history with their own distinct creative voice now that their screenwriter, Henry Gilroy, has much more famously gone on to work on shows like Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

all this is to say that like most stories being told at this scale, BIONICLE was a team effort and people have come to appreciate that more in the 2020s than during the actual initial run. nevertheless, Greg Farshtey was the most prolific of these creators and cemented his role in the fandom's consciousness as the author even further by being shockingly available online, taking questions on lore minutiae and reconciling the many hydra-like heads of BIONICLE's multi-media approach. some of this was done through LEGO's official channels, but just as much, if not more was done through Farshtey's BZPower account, where the real nerds could dig into the details. much of this is still being archived after multiple instances of BZPower's forum undergoing complete data wipes, but as someone who was there, it was absolutely regarded as very serious business, and the 'Ask Greg' thread was a surprisingly pivotal tool to parsing the increasingly dense lore of BIONICLE over the years.

so now, we just about have the stage set; an increasingly lucrative toyline with a premise that seems to invite a lot of hands-on creativity, and a story team that seems very capable of harnessing that community passion and even directing it back into the franchise in interesting ways. the missing ingredient to my larger point with this article is the way BIONICLE was evolving as a toy by the time i was really locked in as a superfan. BIONICLE had started as a very direct offshoot of LEGO Technic, and even as it developed into its own beast, it generally maintained some semblance of interesting mechanical design, usually by way of gear-driven functions. by 2006, though, the general priorities of set design had drifted more towards posable, articulated characters, and perhaps the strongest inflection point of this change was with the summer wave's Toa Inika.

personally. i liked the Toa Inika a lot, and i still do today. they've got a very distinct visual appeal and clear design language meant to set them apart as a new team of heroes, whether it's their light-up weapons or their strange, organic-styled rubber masks. they're cool and they listen to The All-American Rejects, for some reason. i don't have a perfect grip on what reactions to them were like at the time (again, the central hub of the community circa 2006 has gone through multiple complete server wipes), but what i can speak to is the growing discontent people had with the 'Inika build' over the years.

see, any given wave of BIONICLE sets was already generally similar in construction - you'd get a certain amount of new utilitarian body-building pieces for the year and the distinction, as toys, was largely in the finishing touches, like masks, weapons, and color schemes. all of this is also true of the Toa Inika, but there are a few key differences that i think led to people souring on this direction for BIONICLE. for starters, they lacked a lot of the familiar trappings of years past - no additional Technic functionality to their builds, and no real collectible aspect unless you want to count the extremely minor efforts to sell different colored 'Zamor sphere' marbles for their launchers. on top of this, their new pieces tended to feel a little more limited in their applicability - the Inika torso is designed with big, broad shoulders and enough of an offset that it's hard to use it as anything but a torso, with armor plates on top that are very specifically fitted to go with that singular piece. of course, it's not impossible to find alternative uses for these parts, but they did feel distinctly more tuned towards an intended use.

perhaps the biggest issue that arose out of the 'Inika build', though, was how long it stuck around. obviously, new parts continued to be introduced into the BIONICLE palette with every wave, but by and large, this basic body-type was the template going forward, from 2006 up until the toyline being discontinued in 2010. some amazingly creative things were done with these parts over the following years - i think the immediate follow-up wave of the 2007 Barraki is a great example of this - but for every Mantax or Strakk that was breaking the pattern, you had a very straight-forward intepretation of the build like, say, most of the 2008 Toa.

so, to connect this back into the broader points i've been trying to make - the trend towards more homogenous designs and the growing distaste towards the 'Inika build' template, at least in my personal experience, did some damage to that core pillar of low-level creative expression through MOCing. that loop of receiving new parts and excitedly working with what you had wasn't quite as satisfying when the fandom at large rejected the common foundational pieces as being a more lowbrow form of expression. owning some of the larger 'titan' sets could help give you a more robust parts pool, but those were more expensive, felt more 'special' and worth keeping assembled, and incorporating their more complex design elements made freeform MOCing a much more intensive undertaking.

it would be one thing if this was just a general fandom trend, but you also have to remember that these fan communities directly intersected with and received acknowledgement from the creative team behind BIONICLE. not only were the fandom's tastes trending towards increasingly elaborate bespoke Technic builds for the sake of avoiding common templates, but this was also being reinforced by the fact that these more complex builds tended to be the ones enshrined into actual BIONICLE canon.

i feel like it's important to try and hammer home a bit of tone here as we dig into an example of this phenomenon - i am not writing this as some kind of embittered call-out post towards the MOCing community. i don't think that the hodge-podge, messy, 'Matoran Nuva' i built back in 2006 is some unsung masterpiece that deserves to be slotted into the canon. there's absolutely incredibly valid reasons why people got a little tired of simpler building techniques, or why larger, more complex models had a better chance of catching someone's eye. the main thing i'm here to examine is something i think i had a hard time putting my finger on for years, but it's a consistent pattern across a surprising range of topics when it comes to my creative tastes and how i choose to express myself.

with that out of the way, i think my best chance at singling out an example of a highly complex MOC-turned-canon is Makuta Miserix, from the 2008 BrickMaster magazine contest. for starters, this build happens to be one of the most well-preserved; again, one of the primary social hubs for this very niche branch of LEGO hobbyists got erased multiple times over. luckily, not only is Miserix documented as a contest winner, but the community has actually managed to reverse-engineer a set of instructions for him, meaning you can find plenty of modern-grade video documentation of how to make your own at home, assuming you have the right parts. secondly, i think Miserix is one of the best representations of the echelon of character we're dealing with when we talk about things making the jump from contest winner to canon. if you're someone invested deeply in BIONICLE lore, he's an important figure to the history of this world, having once been a mentor to the main antagonist of the franchise before their evil ambitions turned them against one another. his continued exploits seem very central to a lot of the side story 'web serials', but at the same time, you can also safely ignore him if what you're concerned about is the immediate context of what the 2008 toys were up to. this was generally the bracket where contest winners landed - highly relevant to Greg Farshtey painting an expanded picture of BIONICLE's world, but also kept just off-screen from what the main retail line was focused on.

as i was just saying, i can totally see why a build like Miserix captured so much attention and won out in a building contest. he's fierce and imposing and clearly built at a massive scale befitting of such a major antagonist. his color scheme and theming are cohesive, and the build uses the available parts palette of its era to convey a lot of unique detail and shaping. you can say a lot of things about Miserix, but you cannot deny that he is a big, impressive chunk of BIONICLE.

what i think my kid-brain could always sort of intuitively guess at, and what modern video reviews like DuckBricks' confirm for me, is the other side of this coin - Miserix is a nightmare to actually play with. you know, playing? like, with toys? a lot of the impressive bulk and scale on display come at the cost of loose, fiddly, just-barely connections. armor flops around on some of the smallest compatible pieces in the LEGO catalog, limbs tend to buckle and break under their own sheer weight, and the whole thing seems to sway precariously at the slightest atmospheric disturbance. Miserix's primary purpose is to sit in place, look pretty, and never be handled again, which kind of sounds like all the things i associated BIONICLE with being really good at not doing, huh?

in some sense, none of this should be that much of a surprise. of course he's built for display over play, because it was a contest to create a visually impressive model. of course he doesn't match the rigorous engineering of a mass retail product, he was literally designed by a 12-year old. when you look at it from that angle, it's hard to really find any bones to pick with the build. i think where the dissonance starts to set in for me is that for basically everyone, from fans to community leaders to literally the professionals spearheading the franchise within LEGO, this type of build was regarded as 'good BIONICLE', as good creativity, as the thing that was worth aspiring to over simpler builds. furthermore, i would say that things have continued in that direction to this day.

there's another reason i've brought up Greg Farshtey throughout this article, and also perhaps tried to temper some of the view of him as BIONICLE's 'one true author'. see, while BIONICLE may have ended (and come back, and also ended again, long story), the passion of its fandom has never died down. it's taken different forms, found different homes, but there has always been a strong foundational core of people who still care about the franchise, both in terms of its story and its place amongst the LEGO pantheon as a creative outlet.

there's been a number of ups and downs, and points of contention with The LEGO Group, but overall, i think the scene has actually found itself in a pretty good place, all things considered. while BIONICLE as a franchise has been inert and the "constraction" niche it filled has largely died out as a major pillar of LEGO's output, there's also been parts introduced throughout the years that have proven surprisingly critical to expanding the potential of what you can do with BIONICLE. even more than that, though, changes like advancements in 3D printing and the growing prominence of BrickLink Studio have essentially created something of a post-death BIONICLE renaissance, with talented artists creating and physically manifesting new LEGO-compatible pieces to continue expanding the horizons of what MOCists can do.

and, for a brief, volatile window in time, we even had the contests back like it was the 2000s again, too. Greg Farshtey continued working at LEGO long after BIONICLE had ended, and though the tumultous state of the online community made it hard to settle down for a few years, he eventually did find a new home for interfacing with the fandom on the TTV Message Boards, one of the larger modern hubs for the community. here, he was once again able to dispense wisdom and declare rulings for those who were still attached to the franchise, particularly because, well, nobody else inside LEGO was doing anything with BIONICLE, so no harm in establishing canon for a story that hadn't been in active production in nearly a decade.

eventually, seeing the opportunity presented by Farshtey once again making himself a community fixture, the staff of TTV decided to approach him with the idea of running a new set of contests. since BIONICLE as a story was dormant, these competitions would instead be focused on diving back into its lore and creating MOCs of characters who had no visual representation, a practice which became increasingly common in the latter years of the initial run when the scale of the story grew past the relatively tight-knit cast of toys. with the condition of double-checking if the community wanted that (and about 80% of them did), Greg Farshtey agreed to play ball.

it was, in some ways, a largely symbolic gesture - the community were the ones self-selecting what would go in front of Farshtey, and given the nature of the franchise we're talking about, the real merit of the whole thing was just to rubber-stamp some designs to put in conspicuouly empty spaces on the BIONICLEsector01 wiki. nonetheless, it captured a lot of people's attention and excitement, giving the community's most talented builders an enticing new task with the reward of leaving a fingerprint on something that seemed set in stone. the first of these contests, fittingly centered around Helryx, the in-universe 'first Toa', was a major centralizing event for a much more fragmented BIONICLE fandom.

it was also, coincidentally, a bit of a nightmare, with debates on where 3D-printed custom parts should fit into 'canon' BIONICLE, and some grade-A lore lawyering about how to interpret Helryx's description as "disturbingly frail", leading to the logical conclusion of someone satirically submitting the thinnest MOC physically possible, dubbed 'Hoseryx' by the community and ultimately coming very close to first place. TTV is a branch of the BIONICLE community i've never really interacted with, and i'm only bringing this up because it feels like it's hard to talk about the contests at all without acknowledging the hardships they faced, partially because of the innate nature of a contest bringing forward a lot of clashing interpretations of canon. i have no interest in relitigating all of that, it's a whole ordeal in its own right you can go learn about somewhere else if you want. what i am here to talk about, though, is the actual winner of the Helryx contest, and how it fits into what i've been talking about.

aesthetically, i quite like the winning Helryx design. i think it quite smartly shows a lot of restraint, focusing on a core aesthetic inspired by the earliest days of BIONICLE to invoke that ancient, wise feeling the character is associated with. it feels like it was designed with a very deliberate eye for that kind of detail, right down to using Technic pieces from lines like Slizers and Roboriders, the immediate predecesors to BIONICLE. this fun little nod is only accentuated further by her custom-designed Mask of Psychometry, but even as pictured here with a placeholder Pakari, i think this MOC has a really clever approach to the design prompt that encapsulates a lot of fun LEGO history while also feeling like a natural fit for the world of BIONICLE.

of course, as with Miserix, the other shoe to drop here is that Helryx is absurdly hostile to the idea of being played with as a toy. once again, credit to DuckBricks for actually building and reviewing this model, but as someone who spent most of their childhood playing with BIONICLE pieces, i could tell pretty quickly upon first glance how this one was going to shake out. it's kind of unavoidable, when tasked with building a character who's primary in-universe signifier is being old and frail, but when your design's got people stuffing pin-thin joints with tissue just to keep limbs hanging on by a thread... it's a design direction i personally find pretty uninteresting and antithetical to why i like toys in the first place. people have designed their own further modifications to help mitigate these issues, but as it stands with the officially sanctioned, real-as-it-currently-gets model? good luck keeping Helryx's mace held over her head for an action pose.

one thing i've continually tried to reiterate throughout this article is the nature of Greg Farshtey's contributions to BIONICLE, and while i've obviously noted other writers and artists who left their mark on the franchise, i think one of the most crucial contributers that i've been holding back on mentioning is the set design team at LEGO. Farshtey did an absurd amount of work bringing the world to life, but BIONICLE was always also a toy. i have to imagine Farshtey has some amount of fondness and familiarity with LEGO, otherwise he wouldn't have been in the editorial position that led him to taking on his role in BIONICLE, but that's the thing - he's a writer. he didn't really have to worry about if Helryx was fun to play with, he had to worry about if she was an engaging character, and the fact that he was writing about non-toy characters in the first place shows that his priorities with BIONICLE were very centered on creating its enriching fiction, even when it increasingly meant stepping around what LEGO put in front of him through the toyline. the toy team and the story team weren't separate - in fact, i have to imagine they worked in very tight tandem in a lot of cases - but they were still people with different types of jobs, multiple pieces to a greater whole, and i think putting the job of MOC canonization solely on a writer is... fine for what purposes TTV and BS01 were looking for, but not ideal.

on a more unfortunate note, the newly revitalized canonization contests weren't long for this world as, after the first few attempts found their footing, Greg Farshtey was laid off after over twenty years with LEGO due to a restructuring of their editorial departments. in a bit of poetic symmetry to my story, the last competiton to be officially sanctioned as canon centered on the Rahaga who had been my first sets - specifically, creating the unseen Toa forms of those who hadn't received special edition sets. things went smoother, but it feels worthwhile to point out that there were definite debates within the community about whether or not they should try to match the simpler sets of 2005 or continue working in the same type of mode they approached characters like Helryx with.

i don't begrudge people for designing MOCs like Miserix and Helryx. i absolutely see the appeal in them, especially in the context they were created under, where you're looking for that one key screenshot that brings a character off the page and into plastic. they might not be entirely for me, but i don't think people are wrong to build things in that style - LEGO is fundamentally a creative medium, go for it in whatever way you like. what i think has brought this tirade out of me is that i've gotten better at identifying what is for me, and why.

something i think the Inika build doesn't get enough credit for, especially as someone who was, you know, a literal child engaging with these toys, is the fact that they play pretty well. yes, they're not the most complex building experience, but they wound up looking cohesive and articulating not only nicely, but better than most bespoke action figures i owned at the time. on top of all that, they're relatively easy to break down and reincorporate into your own creations - the rubber masks were a weird one-off feature that was kind of hard to work around, but the core skeleton tended to be flexible enough to support a myriad of aesthetic touches layered on top. the biggest caveat i can really think of outside of personal taste is the increasing issues with plastic fragility BIONICLE faced in its latter years, and that always seemed like a materials issue just as much as an engineering one.

yet another potent case in point is the 2015 wave that kicked off BIONICLE's short-lived second generation. this revival and the context behind it is its own can of worms, but to try to make its history make sense, the main thing you need to know is that between BIONICLE's discontinuation and return, LEGO had invested in an entirely new (but still backwards-compatible) palette of parts for buildable action figures, known as the Character and Creature Building System, or more often, just CCBS. it might be a bit of bias from getting caught up in the hype at the time, but honestly, i really do believe the winter 2015 wave to be, quite frankly, peak BIONICLE.

these sets took the classic 2001 Toa and reinterpreted them through an entirely new lens, finally giving them distinct silhouettes and even using the CCBS's dedicated heavy friction joint to pull off the seemingly impossible task of making them articulate nicely while still having a classic Technic gear function. they were an amazing mix of form and function, and... i mean, people did like them, but not enough, you know? the CCBS had already built up a mixed reputation for reasons similar to the classic Inika build, despite how many issues i genuinely think it solved with latter-day BIONICLE by creating more room for diverse build structures. i don't mean to say the CCBS or the sets produced in that style were perfect, but i do mean to say that i think when you are looking at BIONICLE as a toy, the 2015 sets had the best execution on a lot of the core principles of the franchise.

i think that in general, i place a ton of value upon the ability to play with a toy, because i think play is an important creative outlet for pretty much anyone and a fascinating structure within human psychology to study. conversely, i tend to bristle against 'high-end' toys that are overengineered to the point of being difficult to interact with. looking past BIONICLE, this kind of philosophy is the reason i've always been much more drawn to collecting mainline retail Transformers than the Masterpiece line. part of it is cost, i suppose, but it's just as much that i don't find the Masterpiece figures to be much fun. yes, Hasbro puts out flawed figures with weird gaps or messy vehicle modes or some lack of accessories, but i can also pick up a Generations figure and have a pretty good time messing with it.

this isn't to say that i can completely overlook flaws in toy design in service of some invisible 'fun factor' and always come out with a smile on my face. there are Transformers and BIONICLE sets alike that are too simple, or too dedicated to some gimmick that ends up narrowing their play potential, or i just flat-out don't like them for some other equally intangible reason. what i'm really trying to tackle here is a broader pattern that i see. when you put all your focus squarely on the dignified adult collector market - whether that is through creating products specifically for them or through the uniquely LEGO-tinged process of BIONICLE canonization contests being run for a largely grown-up fandom - i find that you tend to overengineer and discard the parts of these toys that i personally think got people hooked on them in the first place. for some people, i'm sure this isn't an issue at all, because we all look for different things out of our hobbies, but i think over the years, i've finally realized the simple fact that i just want to be able to play with BIONICLE and that's why a lot of the MOCing scene never sat right with me.

and, to perhaps get a little embarrassingly personal and introspective... maybe i picked up a bad habit or two from feeling like an outsider when i started diving more into the serious BIONICLE fandom? not that it was some kind of root for psychological issues, but more like a symptom i didn't know how to place until i started thinking about it as an adult in a larger framework. as a kid, it sucked to feel like my MOCs weren't cool enough to share with people, to try and puzzle out the kinds of complex builds i saw online but being just a few pieces short on a custom limb. i've never really described myself as a perfectionist, but i think when i sit down and look at the way i write even to this day, i still seem to pour over my work as though the mere amount of hours spent on it will make it exactly what i want, rather than identifying actual strengths that i think i can be proud of. i still worry about being overly shallow and simplistic in what i make, which can be a helpful impulse to have and helps guide me towards working on things i feel passionate about, but can also leave me feeling stuck when i can't add some additional layer of complexity to my takes.

again, really don't mean for this to slip into 'embittered call-out post' territory. it's more about noticing things within myself and taking a minute to reflect on them and how they've surfaced, even when i wasn't realizing it.

all that being said, i do think i've come a long way in working on that perfectionist streak. this very article was thrown together as mostly one train of thought over the course of a few days, and while i'm somewhat hesitant about how well it'll go over with people... eh, it's something i thought was interesting and i feel proud of it. doesn't have to be perfect. it does still feel like it could use a flashier denouement, though, doesn't it? trick question, i already have just the thing for you, i planned this all along and i'm also not talking to you because this is a blog post.

see, i didn't mention Studio and the custom parts community for nothing! one of my major nitpicks with digital LEGO building, historically, was always its lack of options for BIONICLE, and even if some of that is still sort of true for vanilla Studio, it's not hard to find not only extremely accurate recreations of many classic parts, but entirely new ones too, whether that's new Kanohi or core structural body parts, both of which i've incorporated into this little fella, who is, indeed, HYPERFIXT's Own Creation. much like this very article, i threw him together on a whim and mostly for my own amusement. i had an unseen canon character pulled up as reference, but i gotta admit, i've never read BIONICLE Legends #2: Dark Destiny, so think of that less as a definitive place in canon and more like a creative launchpad. are those colors more 'quirky Po-Matoran' or 'long-forgotten Av-Matoran'? who's to say, really.

he's definitely a little on the simple side, but i did throw in a few custom flairs that i happen to like, like using Technic cams for a more uniquely shaped thigh or slipping rubber tires onto CCBS bones to give them a little extra heft and detail. all of these pieces were picked out in legitimately available LEGO colors - one of the great things about Studio is that you can circumvent that, but it can be nice to work with that limitation in mind. kind of grounds the experience back to the good ol' days of sifting through a parts bin, doesn't it? as for his custom parts, he uses two from the Galvapack - a Mask of Projecting and the custom 'Matoran torso' liftarm, which you can see poking out on his back. there's a wide variety of parts being designed for just about any style of MOC you want to create, but i gravitated towards these because they really do feel like long-lost official BIONICLE pieces that slot seamlessly into the way i like to build. i also took the liberty of using Studio's built-in rendering tools to give him those gorgeous glowing eyes that, while not really an aspect of the physical toys, feels just right for the spirit of BIONICLE thanks to years of promotional material.

LEGO can be a costly and space-consuming hobby, and that might apply even moreso to BIONICLE - the sets are proper vintages now, with their physical plastics sometimes feeling like ticking time bombs. i might not have the meticulously sorted scrapyard of loose parts that became my workshop as a kid, but having Studio helps me tap back into that rich vein of creativity, and it feels weirdly empowering to make something just for fun and share it here. even moreso, it means a lot that the community has come together to keep the franchise alive in their own way. sure, there's sometimes friction about what's truly important about BIONICLE and how we all express that passion, but at the end of the day, these toys and the rich world that was created around them still mean something to a lot of people and it's heartening to see those people take it into their own hands.

oh, but while i have the platform to segue into it, and to break up all this schmaltz, let me get extremely petty for a minute. i don't have any illusions that this article will wind up in front of any of the big community parts pack makers, but on the extremely slim chance that it does - could you please stop routing free stuff through Gumroad? i get that sometimes you need a payment processor, and i think it's 100% valid to want to charge money for your labor as an artist, but i really don't want to give them my email after all that nonsense that went down when they got really into NFTs or whatever. if you're going to set the price at zero dollars anyway, please just link to a direct download page or something. i'd love to use your parts! people should check your work out! just like, have a second link or something, i am actually genuinely begging you.

overall, diving back into this subject has brought out some of my weirdest, nichest, most self-indulgent impulses as a writer and creator, and... i kind of love it. it's the type of thing i want to do here more often, because i'm not quite sure anyone else is. i'm sure that it won't be the last time i talk about LEGO or BIONICLE, either - you don't handle this much plastic without finding a thing or two to say. if there's any sort of nice little nugget of wisdom i hope people get out of this, it's that you should be creative, and find cool outlets for that creativity, and play with toys, and do all kinds of things that make you happy even if they aren't perfect. it's nice to strive to do your best, but remember to do something fun along the way too, and remember that sometimes, those two things might wind up being the same without you even noticing.