A few weeks ago I reflected on how deeply ingrained the media we consume is in our lives. If that’s true for your typical college student, it goes double for kids. From my time working at a toy store, I know that pretty much every kid has a single all-consuming interest. Of course, I was no exception. If you subtract Bionicle from my childhood memories, basically all that’s left is my lesser devotion to Avatar: The Last Airbender and a whole lot of Sunday school (where I had compared Bible stories to the Bionicle mythos so often that there was a specific rule against it).
It’s hard to describe my obsession with Bionicle nowadays, because with my liberal arts student mindset, any explanation inevitably turns into an apology. My most recent one went something like this: “It was this Lego line of buildable action figures that ran for about ten years, and it was so awesome! It was about these robots living on this island and it had this really cool futuristic-tribal theme going, though actually it turned out that the whole thing was controversial and sort of cultural appropriation because the company used a lot of Maori culture and ended up getting sued for copyrighting words in their language. Also, the villages were gender-segregated and there was only one female for every five males, so that was weird. But the story was so cool and complex and really too long for anyone to understand, with all these alternate universes and time travel and in the end it just stopped making sense.” And then, while the person who I was trying to explain it to stared at me blankly, a random bystander who’d overheard the conversation walked up to us and said, “Hey, are you talking about Bionicle? Man, wasn’t that awesome!”
It’s become a sort of inside joke at this point. Everyone who was in on its ten year run thinks that it was the best story ever told, but no one can really articulate why. I’d be willing to stake my life that it was ten times better than Transformers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Club Penguin or any other kid obsession out there, but I have absolutely no reason for it. Maybe it’s just hard to divorce yourself from something when you lived and breathed it for ten of your most formative years, the way people whose apocalypse predictions don’t come true always say they were just wrong about the exact date. Because I immersed myself with Bionicle for as long as it was around. I didn’t just buy the toys and watch the movies, I had Bionicle notebooks, Bionicle shoes, I read the comics and played the video games and nearly memorized whole sections of the incredibly esoteric online serials.
Maybe I was so into it because it came into my life at such a critical period. I got my first Bionicle as a toy in a McDonald’s Happy Meal when a family friend took me out to lunch so my mom could spend time with her newborn baby. Then there were about ten years when I knew the lore well enough to rattle off the full biographies of even the most trivial characters. And then news broke that it was ending a few days before my parents announced that we would move to Minnesota.
It was a disorienting time for me, so I wallowed in what I knew. Unpacking my Bionicles was the first time our new house really began to feel like a place where I could live. Since I couldn’t buy new sets anymore, I started making my own, breaking down my massive collection, painstakingly organizing them piece-by-piece, and building my own models. At that time I was trying to rebel against the move in a variety of passionate and wildly ineffective ways, most notably avoiding the number thirteen (we’d moved on my thirteenth birthday), which no one noticed but eventually morphed into an acute case of triskaidekaphobia that I still haven’t managed to shake. Sinking into my Bionicle collection was the same sort of thing. By spending all my time with it, I was proudly announcing to no one in particular that the world where Bionicle was still around, the world where we still lived in Waco, the world where I was still in elementary school, the world of the past, was the world I wanted to live in.
At the time the Bionicle fan community was reacting in much the same way, with an explosion of sites trying to recapture the nostalgia for the story we’d all grown up with. There was a bandwagon of teens who had been with the toy line since it began and didn’t want to give it up making their own amateur Youtube channels showing off their own creations, and I was among their proudest, least successful members.
I think it’s actually the Bionicle Youtube community that killed the nostalgia. Seeing people make sex jokes and use slurs in the comments of videos about my beloved childhood merchandise got me get fed up with how they were taking the symbol of my perfect time in Waco and turning it into something as corrupt and ugly and adult as the stuff scrawled on the bathroom walls of my middle school. So I let the interest die, stuffed my sets in the closet, and started spending my days hanging out with classmates instead.
A few years later, I found out that Bionicle never was the perfect symbol of childhood in the first place, not even from the start. The guy who wrote the story had brain cancer, and he took pills every day to kill it. He got the idea for Bionicle when he imagined tiny soldiers inside the pills that would fight off the evil and some day let him rise again, healthy. Even from the inspiration for the story, that ugly adult world was there.
I don’t take out my Bionicles much anymore. Of course, I couldn’t take them to college, and even when I’m at home I’ve used the parts so much that most of them are snapped or on the verge of snapping, and I’ve still got enough of a reverence for them not to want to break my last sets. Still, I can name pretty much all of the main series characters (though I’ve forgotten most of the minor ones) and it’s still hard to think of my time in Waco without the brightly colored warrior robots I worshipped when I lived there jumping to mind. As much as I’ve outgrown them, I think I needed them when they were around, to provide an outlet for my childhood obsession, and even afterwards as a way to hold on to the past until I was ready to let go.
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