#tmol

A little bit ago I started with the intent of writing a post about how I didn’t think early Teridax’s writing necessarily conflicted with his later canon motives and origin, but it turned into a whole retrospective on the divides in opinions over the direction of the story after 2003.  You can read that here.  But now to actually discuss what got my gears turning in the first place.

In the Mata Nui Online Game, we meet a manifestation of Makuta Teridax in an etherial form.  He appears as a mass of swirling disassembled Bionicle parts, and as an infected matoran.  The original intent we now know is that he was thought of as a destructive antithesis to Mata Nui’s creation; this idea would later be recycled for Makuta and Ekimu in G2 Bionicle.  Many have said that his statements that “[he is] nothing” and that he’s the darkness within everyone make no sense when we later learn he’s not some god, just a janitor/scientist who got too big for his britches and so on.  And when he continually refers to Mata Nui as his brother, and says he’s better off asleep than awake, because “awake he suffers”, well now that flies directly in the face of the whole 2006-8 story arc that focused on awakening Mata Nui.

I will concede, that under the framework given by Teridax in MNOG and TMoL among other sources, the later motives and origins of the character seem contradictory.  But, as I said in the previous post... this is entirely predicated on you believing everything Makuta Teridax said.  I don’t know what it says about my nature as a person, or what I was going through at the time Mask of Light came out, but by 2003 I was REALLY not willing to believe a word Teridax said.  When he called Mata Nui his “brother”, when everyone else revered Mata Nui as a god, and the intro even said that Makuta was jealous of “his brother”, I did not believe him, that he was on the same level as Mata Nui.  I saw a jealous, power hungry, vindictive entity who wanted control, and would lie to everyone around him to convince them that he deserved control.

So when a couple years later we learned his backstory, his motives, and his outlook as they were finalized by the writing team, I was not at all surprised at the direction they took the character, because that just made sense to me.  “I am nothing” was just an intimidation attempt to me as a child.  “Sleep spares him pain, awake he suffers” sounded like a very convenient lie someone very intent on keeping Mata Nui asleep would say.