#happyshoggoth

The language takes some getting used to. (The writer Lego hired originally based it off the language of the Māori tribes of New Zealand, got in a big lawsuit over that, and quickly learned not to appropriate other cultures, hahahaha. Only a few of the words come from them now, with their permission.) -- "matoran" means person or people, "toa" is a warrior, and "koro" is village. The prefix you add designates what element something belongs to. There's other words, mostly names for things, but most stuff is in English. They also have a writing system that's all in circles. I used to be able to write it.

The characters all believe in Mata Nui, who, in the end, turns out to not actually a god but a giant that was created* to explore the universe. The Matoran were created to keep him running. But Mata Nui's head guy, Teridax, shut him down. So Teridax is the big bad.

The Ta-Matoran are the fire/lava tribe, and they're a bunch of overcompetitive blacksmiths. They've got impressive fireproof tech that they use for the adrenaline-rush sport of lava surfing. Great job guys. Way to go. Couldn't have used that for anything better. Their toa is the leader of the toa team, and he starts out a prick, but he has character development. He also enjoys lava-surfing.

The Le-Matoran are the wind tribe. They chill in the jungle and wrestle bears and tame giant birds. My favorite thing is that no one actually knows how to get to their village. And that's the way they like it -- they're pretty close-knit. With a lot of difficulty, the Onu-Matoran managed to dig a tunnel near Le-Koro, and even then visitors STILL got carried off by wild animals in the hundred foot space between the tunnel exit and the village entrance. They only were walking a hundred fucking feet. Le-Matoran have their own grammatical slang, which is kind of rad. Basically if they can't find the right word or want to emphasize something, they'll combine two other words to get the meaning straight: Quickfast means extremely fast and as soon as possible. Samehearted is similar to empathetic. To secondthink is to think over what you're doing before you do it. Anyway, their toa is chill. His swords double as glider wings and has WAY too much fun with that.

Po-Matoran are the stone tribe. I don't know what they actually do other than play kohlii, which is kind of like soccer plus hockey plus boulders. Their toa actually wears his kohlii shoes as weapons because they're engineered to kick boulders. Yep, that's gonna break some ribs.

The Onu-Matoran are the ground tribe. They live underground and mine. They have one matoran who got sick of needing the toa to save them all the time, and built a vehicle/suit thing that used Toa Gali's boxing techniques to beat the shit out of baddies. Their toa is a big, sweet, gruff guy. And he has chainsaws. What more do you want.

The Ko-Matoran are the ice tribe. They're the intellectual archivers, scholars, and prophets. They like to talk in riddles, and their toa sits around in the snow and contemplates life.

The Ga-Matoran, the water tribe, are the only female ones*, although that doesn't mean much more than different pronouns and a slightly higher voice. They built their village out of giant leaves rigged up to water pumps so that it floats above a reef. And unlike the other villages, the path to their village isn't manned by any guards or anything -- they have a puzzle that opens the door. They also have prophets that aren't nuts. They study the stars. Their histories and prophecies are more folklore, so they're a lot easier to understand than Ko-scholars' riddles. Their toa, Gali, is a fucking badass. She knows when violence isn't the answer, she knows when teamwork is a must, and she doesn't take any of the leader's self-righteous shit (even though sometimes she should, because he is occasionally right). She also actually listens to her matoran. There's never a time where she comes back to find the buildings totally wrecked and has to wander around going, "OH NO, WHAT HAPPENED?" No no no. She knows what's up. She's beating the shit out of that brainwashed sea monster by the time anyone else has even figured out what's going on, and why did the beast attack the village? Who knows? Gali does. Look at this disease-ridden faceplate. Someone's gonna pay for hurting my motherfucking sea rahi. ...Yeah, I'll stop there. I could rave about Gali all day long.

The movies are out-of-character crap, and the storyline got a lot shittier after they traded out tools with guns for the sake of keeping the nerf-obsessed little shits interested, but the really old comics and the MNOG point and click game are great. I never managed to get through MNOG2, but that one featured a Ga-Matoran as the protagonist which I was SO excited about back then, because I only knew maybe two female protagonists at the time and they were both super sexualized.

*He was painstakingly built, possibly by humans, although who the "beings" are is never explained. They're some council of "brothers and sisters." Scholars who were gifted the position of supreme rulers because they designed so much for their people, but they hated politics and distracted themselves by engineering and learning more about the universe instead.