This whole scene was fucking awesome

Day 21: Rhinoceros

"Passing the Torch"

movie cover:

book cover:

This is a followup to my post about the apparent design revision to the Tarakava you can see in the cancelled game Bionicle, Legend of Mata Nui.

2003 was the pinnacle of my childhood Bionicle years (in part because my childhood was rapidly waning) and I didn’t really get into the lore of 2004 at the time. I saw the sets and the comics and, indeed, watched LOMN, but I wasn’t into ALL the lore.

The upshot of all this is that I somehow got the idea, and I think it was directly from watching the movie, that Nidhiki was female.

I never got the set and I got progressively less interested in Bionicle until about 2009, when I lost interest pretty much completely.

We are now in the Year 2021 and I'm in the midst of my Bionicle Renaissance and I'm watching LOMN on YouTube and memories of this come back. And if I mentally squint watching that movie, I still see it.

I know too much lore now to default to this, but it still kind of fascinates me a piece of memory (and, to tell the truth, once I was reminded of this, I began to have memories of insistent small children--my little brothers--telling me Nidhiki was a "he").

I think it was a triangulation of three things that made me see Nidhiki = female.

1. Spider. Spider isn't definitively female--even in the pop culture of the day, Aragog was only a few years old--but as a Tolkienist, big evil spiders mean Ungoliant and Shelob: female.

2. Green. You might think "green in Bionicle should mean Le, should mean make," but since Nidhiki wasn't part of a set of six, I didn't associate him with the Le-Matoran. Instead, green (particularly on a narrow head with sort of a medieval headdress/witch's hat crest behind it) made me think witch and witch magic. Blame the Wizard of Oz, I guess. And, honestly, I still like the idea of a green spider-witch.

3. Nidhiki doesn't really interact with anyone other than Krekka. I know, there's some exception to this, especially Lhikan at the beginning, but there isn't much mention of HIM, mostly just talking TO him. The main third-person reference that I can think of is Krekka saying "get Nidhiki." Overall, this third point probably says more about how much active attention I was paying to LOMN than about the movie itself. The main point is that Nidhiki isn't talked about in the movie enough to have the misconception beaten out of me.

So... having this misconception as an artefact of my younger Bionicle self, do I work it into my alt-canon?

Part of me WANTS to: the whole alt-canon idea is to shoehorn as much how-I-actually-played-with-Bionicles into a cohesive whole, and even besides that, a spider-witch fits exceptionally well into the leanims-fantasy-not-sci-fi vibe I'm going for, but...

While I'm willing to go nuts restructuring the history and the geography and the magical apparatus, I haven't (yet?) changed personalities yet. And while it might be fun to see if I could keep as much of the original Nidhiki's personality as possible in a totally changed context, that wouldn't fit with what I've done otherwise.

In particular, it would either blow up Nidhiki being a former Le-Toa or my emerging idea that the she/her/hers pronouns are used specifically of the Ga-tribes amongst the Matoran/Toa/Turaga. I'd either have to abandon this pronoun structure or change Nidhiki's backstory.

(Also possible: Nidhiki WAS a Le-Toa with standard pronouns, but his pronouns became her pronouns as a result of the mutations, since "he" was no longer recognisable as a Le-Toa, but as a new thing that... someone non-Matoran... Roodaka, maybe?... identified as "she?" Possible, but too ambitious for me, I think. And while interesting, it's definitely straying a long way from "keep the canon characterisation".)