#tridax

But isn’t destruction the same as creation, isn’t destroying his victims necessary to make things? That’s where the imagery of the spider comes into play; Its long, spindly limbs? They’re fingers. Makuta is not just a spider, he is a hand; The same hand that reaches into the parts bin to make new creations, plays with MoCs before tearing them apart to make something new. Just as Teridax represents the parts bin, Chirox is the builder’s hand, like in the Lego Movie, or Super Smash Bros. 

Each Visorak is like a hand of its own, grabbing victims, reassembling them randomly with mutation. Dragging them back to Chirox, whose hand motif is also inspired from the fact that he is the only Makuta who can fully control his Shadow Hand. And Makuta’s spider-like form? It’s attached to something much, MUCH bigger... It is not just a hand metaphorically, it is a literal hand and when Makuta’s lair collapses around him, it reveals the massive figure he is attached to; His whole, true self, a titan more resembling the Chirox we are familiar with.

The others are different angles and facets to approach the myth, the legend of the Makuta; Different re-imaginings, just as people came up with their own G3 and their own take on Makuta. Just like the Makuta contest we had for G2. Vamprah can represent the animalistic side of Makuta; The raging, kicking, screaming beast he was once described as by Vakama. The apex predator, for if his minions are the Rahi beasts, he is the greatest of them all.

Or Bitil! A temporal entity, haunted by his past selves, constantly summoned by his future self. Always going through different iterations, just as a MoC is frequently edited, redone, rebuilt; You can track his transformation, his evolution across his many selves; Makuta represents the existential horror of the timeline, of the way things change. A ghost of the past, and also a vision of the future. If the Vahi is central to the tale of Bionicle as the Mask of Time, what about Makuta as someone who constantly exploits and distorts this force?

Those are some of my initial ideas. Makuta needn’t always be this faceless force of nature, they can be a humanized figure, like Krika, who can be a sympathetic, tragic villain doomed by the narrative, consigned to his role and aware of it as part of a meta discussion; Miserix is the mighty dragon our knights must slay; The Makuta of Stelt, a land of merchants and commerce, the all-consuming force of corporatism that stifles creativity, or a bargaining devil. Gorast is a fanatical priestess hoping to bring in a new age, Mutran the quintessential mad scientist who played god and flew too close to the sun in his obsession.