#mata-nui

Uh oh! Local lesbians out for a stroll are disturbed to find a dismembered robot girl! Lewa doesn’t give a fuck.

An inexplicably tall Ai Hoshino tries to teach Bocchi to be a proper idol. It’s not going well.

A robot from Laputa comforts Bocchi. Not everyone is cut out for this kind of work.

Lewa tries sailing back to Mata-Nui on the back of a turtle. Try again Lewa! That guy is too little and tired!

The robot looks inside the angel box. What will it find? Loose change? Perhaps some weed?

Friends are inside!

Lewa tries flying back to Mata-Nui on a giant insect. This is a little more promising.

What the fuck are you even doing, Lewa? Can’t you fly on your own?

Double date!

Lewa has found a proper steed at last! Good luck getting home, Lewa!

Meet my new Bionicle oc! A Ko-matoran with a dark secret >:3

lore, full image, and doodle under cut

The Great Elementals of Mata-Nui

One Vatuka was trouble enough, when 3 join up they've become the biggest danger on the Island of Mata-Nui. The Toa will certainly have a challenge.

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.

It’s rad as hell.

Every so often I think about how I'd have done Bionicle in its later years, and one thing I tend to change the details of is The Destiny Wars (the time period where Makuta is ruling the Great Spirit Robot). This takes place during the final battle. Instead of just giving Tahu Gold Armor, the Gold Armor also "cleanses" Takanuva of his Shadow infection and he goes back into the Great Spirit Robot to confront Makuta himself in the concerted effort to stop him. As the inhabitants of the Great Spirit Robot are continuing to flee onto Bara Magna, Takua's old team from Mata-Nui is helping other Matoran get out but when they see him overwhlemed by the Rahkshi and Skakdi in Metru-Nui as he attempts to break into The Core Processor that Makuta's controlling everything from they charge towards him and inadvertently fuse into a Matoran-Nui to help him fend off the hordes of enemies. They'd prove formidible enough to hold their own against the onslaught and attempt to hold off the forces as Takanuva makes his way into the Core Processor to fight Makuta personally helping to complicate matters for Makuta and divert his attention a bit as he tries to keep fighting Mata-Nui outside with The Great Spirit Robot's body.  

If anyone’s interested, Patreon’s this-a-way: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=49390038

Dorn is literally the voice and body of Commander Worf, a warrior. When he speaks through the mouth of Mata-Nui, you hear a powerful, basey, booming voice--the voice of a god. Fitting, no?

But I take issue with the whole characterization of Mata-Nui as messianic and god-like. I think it's well established that Mata-Nui's physical power is derived from what they possess: the mask of Life. Without the Ignika, Mata-Nui would not only be powerless, but would literally be sand, a trapped consciousness in a mask, junk to be traded, a drifter, lost and unrecognized. The idea of a god being made of sand is profound, you are literally made of a practically worthless substance, of fleeting earth, that which is common and plentiful rather than divine.

The true divinity of Mata-Nui is in their ability to rally the people of Bara-Magna and unify the dissonant, competing tribes--to represent that which is common and undivine. It bothers me that Mata-Nui is given such an easy character arc. For someone who fulfilled the role of deity by virtual chance, it would have been so interesting to see Mata-Nui be forced to face their mortality, priviledge, and inadequacy over the course of a larger, bumpier arc and then rise as a leader from there.

This change would have given the Bara-Magna years a perfect synergy with the ending of the Ignition Trilogy; the end of 2008 was a brilliant subversion of the mythos and genre expectations for fantasy. It served as an atheistic response to the overly-clean and neat endings of other fantasy and children's media, a brilliant macro narrative about the nature of power operating under the surface of a standard good versus evil story. Instead of Mata-nui rising out of the sand, already with blade in hand clad in golden armor, we should have gotten a disgraced, ashamed Mata-Nui, one who doesn't understand the gravity and magnitude of mortal suffering. We needed someone to be a moral fool to Makuta, someone who started noble but was blinded by envy, and Mata-Nui, somone blinded by envious rage at being overthrown by Makuta who learns to realize that their purpose is to protect their people, not destroy their enemies.

Mata-Nui was effectively a god, but they were a nerd too (like the Makuta, in a way...); they spent the majority of their life studying from afar, exploring and immersing themselves in ideas, concepts. It's the PERFECT set up to throw a character like that into a world of consequences, systematic and wild, natural brutality alike.

The ending of Bionicle still reflects that possible route. Had we gotten more time to spend with Mata-Nui, watched them really stumble and grow instead of falling up and oozing macho leadership, we could have gotten a careful confrontation of what being a good leader actually means, and how to build a good, unified world. The final exchange of Bionicle is something unprecedented: it is a god giving up their life for their people rather than the other way around. The debt established by Matoro is repaid as one man learned to be good, and gifted that goodness back in the form of beauty.

Michael Dorn would have been an inspired choice had this been a different series and had he been cast as a different character, but we didn't need just another warrior, we needed a reason to hate and then care and then love the name that the matoran chanted and revered for years. We needed to know who Mata-Nui is and WHY they believe in the three virtues. In seeing how they came to that point, we too as the audience could have come to understand not just the words, but the weight and importance behind them.