Thought Process of the Great Beings Regarding the Design of the Great Spirit Robot
This post is going to be a long one, so buckle up. Hopefully my ramblings below make sense to you all.
I’ve been thinking lately of the design of the GSR and how at first glance it doesn’t seem to make any sense. The Great Beings had two problems that they built the GSR to deal with:
Fixing the Shattering of their home planet into 3 pieces
Figuring out how to avoid the cataclysmic war that led to the shattering of the planet in the first place.
So, they build the GSR, a giant mechanical system that had the power to fix the planet (once the pieces stabilized and with the help of another mechanical) and could go out into space to observe other cultures to see how they deal with war. However, beyond that, the questions about why they made the GSR the way they did keep building up:
Why make it a giant humanoid robot? Wouldn’t other shapes be more efficient for the completion of the task?
If the nano-machines inside the robot that kept it running (the Matoran) were never meant to be sentient, why give them a universe inside the robot with diverse islands, seas, skies and wildlife for them to inhabit? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to just build the sections required to keep the robot running and then place service corridors etc. for the Matoran to travel between areas?
Why are there species inside the robot other than the Matoran when it appears that it’s only the Matoran that are essential to the functioning of the robot?
Why are the Toa needed at all? They are there to protect the Matoran and ensure they can keep working, but the Matoran Universe is a closed system, so why create a universe that would have dangers that the Matoran would need protecting from in the first place?
Why, when observing alien cultures, does the robot land in their world’s oceans and disguise itself with an island over its face? Surely observing them from space would be more efficient. Also, if you are wanting to observe their culture as it is, why introduce to their planet a very noticeable new landmass basically overnight? Wouldn’t that cause a massive disruption to the very culture you were trying to observe?
However, I think there is actually a very sound logic to all of this, and its all linked in with the secondary mission of the GSR – observing and documenting other alien cultures.
I think that nearly every non-Matoran / Non-Rahi species within the Matoran Universe (with notable exceptions such as the Makuta) are a biomechanical representation of one of the alien species that the GSR encountered along its 100,000-year journey through space, created within the Matoran Universe to act as a physical storage medium for the data gathered, as well as acting as a way of simulating that species and its culture for further study and experimentation once the GSR leaves their planet. This would explain why there are so many different species within the Matoran Universe, each one is a different alien observed by the GSR (I know canonically that the different species were all pre-programmed into the GSR by the Great Beings to be created later, but this could have easily just been the Great Beings loading the already known information about these species into the GSR for it to build upon later with actual observations). This would mean that the Vortixx, Skakdi etc., all exist in some form out there in the wider galactic universe, with biomechanical copies now also existing within the GSR.
If this were the case, it explains why the Matoran Universe needed to be an actual universe – it was not for the benefit of the Matoran at all, but instead so that the GSR could create a better simulation of the natural habitat of the copied species for their biomechanical representations to inhabit and thereby enabling further study to be as accurate to the real thing as possible. Mata-Nui can manipulate the universe inside the GSR to have any landscape or conditions that he wished, which means that each island can be shaped perfectly to match the conditions of the planet that species was copied from, allowing for a better simulation of the species going forwards. This can also explain why there was such a preference for islands within the Matoran Universe – each island in its own dome, linked by the silver sea, was analogous to planets in space. Each species (other than the Matoran and the other exceptions) was largely restricted to one island, but the potential for travel and mixing between the species was possible via sailing the silver sea, representing the possibility of these cultures developing space travel and going to each other’s planets. That way, Mata-Nui could simulate what would happen if these alien cultures were ever to meet and interact, something that would provide further valuable insight: would they go to war with one another? How would those wars be resolved?
This, by extension, explains the need of both the Rahi and the Toa. Rahi were created to better the simulations, filling these recreated worlds with wildlife and therefore making them more realistic and making the simulations more accurate. Toa were needed to make sure that the Rahi and the newly simulated species did not interfere with the work of the Matoran in keeping the whole GSR and Matoran Universe running. Though, the other species were still allowed non-disruptive interactions with the Matoran as this allowed for some simulation on how these other species might interact with the Agori society that the Matoran were based off of.
This mission to observe other cultures I think also explains why the GSR landed on planets and created an island above itself. The island didn’t just act as a way to disguise the face of the robot, but it also allowed for an extremely valuable research tool that wouldn’t have been available from other observation methods: a controlled environment. The sudden appearance of a large new island practically overnight would entice the populace of the planet being observed to travel to it to investigate it. They would likely also settle it as new land to expand into due to it being a new source of resources they could use. We already know from the canon that the island created by the GSR’s camouflage system can be fully manipulated as we saw Makuta Teridax do just that during the ’01-’03 storyline to create storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions etc. to challenge the Toa Mata with. So, Mata-Nui could use the exact same system to create situations for the newly settled alien cultures on the island to deal with and observe how they handle them, with all this feeding into the data gathered and being used to create their simulations within the Matoran Universe buried beneath them.
Because the island can be manipulated as Mata-Nui see’s fit, it can also be used to generate a situation that would allow him to re-create the starting conditions of the Core War, minus the Energized Protodermis. For example, if Mata-Nui observed that this planet/culture was lacking in a particular substance, he could manipulate his systems so that the island had an abundance of it. Once this was discovered, he could observe how the natives reacted – would they go to war? If so, how was the war resolved? If not, how was it avoided? By using the island as a controlled space from which he could manipulate certain aspects, Mata-Nui could experiment on the native population to gain insights into the answers he required, rather than just passively observing them and hoping the situation would come up (this is rather morally questionable of course, purposely starting wars and all, but hey, the Great Beings aren’t exactly known for their ethics).
All in all, while it may seem strange at first glance, a logic as to why the Great Beings made the GSR the way they did can be seen if you dig deeper. Did the story team intend for all of this to be the underlying in story reason for why things were they way they are? Almost certainly not. But its still fun to think about nonetheless.
And as for why the Great Beings built the GSR as a giant humanoid robot? Well, I think that the answer to that one is far simpler.
