How Bionicle Explains the Bible

Since I’ve already dedicated two posts to the subject, it should be clear enough by now that I’ve had trouble letting go of Bionicle, even though it’s a Lego theme that’s been discontinued for almost a full decade by now. I’ve spent way too long pondering things I really don’t have the time to worry about, like if Bionicle really was as epic as I remember, or if it was on par with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Power Rangers, bizarre nostalgia properties that really only matter to a core crew of believers. It doesn’t help that, when you look at the Bionicle story from a zoomed-out perspective, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Last week I tried reading the Bionicle Wiki to get my childhood whimsy fix for the day, and the plot was strange, confusing, random, and dumb. Explaining why would take about three hours and show my obsession a little too openly, but trust me, even for the initiated, the story as a whole is a fiasco.

Though this might still be nostalgia talking, I think there’s something more to it, something I got from it that you can’t get from taking in the whole story in at once. And fact that one out of every ten people my age seems to have the same kind of deep knowledge as I do makes me think that there really is something more. Because even though we have the same kind of deep knowledge, none of us ever remember the same things. It’s like reading Greek myths, how some say that Narcissus got turned into a flower and other say that he stared at his own reflection for so long that he starved and a flower grew out of his grave. Some people remember that Lewa was mind-controlled by the Rahi infection, others remember that it was actually the Bohrok that got him*. I think the mythology example works really well, actually, because in the same way that myths are bound together from multiple sources, Bionicle never had a single medium. There were novels, comics, online serials, video games, and movies, all telling different scraps of the same story. But, if you put all of them together and try to iron out a coherent narrative, you see it for the mess that it is. Really the only way you can get that epic scope is if you enjoy it as a kid would: getting the bits that you can and filling in the rest with your own play.

That’s a good place to end, right? Set out a problem, proposed a solution, and tied it all up with a little bow, all without offending any major religious authorities.

Only I can’t end it there, because I have to point out that a lot of the same things I’ve seen in Bionicle, I also see in the Bible.

After taking a class on the Hebrew Bible for less than half a semester, I’m already pretty sure that everybody who claims that all of it is literally true has never actually read it. If so, they can’t be all that happy with the God and universe that they live in. They’d be living with a God who changes their mind constantly (mostly concerning whether or not to kill a lot of people), then firmly announces that God never changes their mind. They’d be living in a universe where human ingenuity is sometimes rewarded and sometimes answered by God scattering people across the globe and separating them into nations destined to fight each other for the rest of time. They’d also be commanded to ritualistically sacrifice animals at a temple that hasn’t existed for almost two millennia. 

All these bizarre inconsistencies arise because, according to most scholars, the Bible was never intended as a single document, but was written as separate narratives that were haphazardly stitched together years later, a lot like the Bionicle saga (except one of them is a holy text with billions of followers). And in both Bionicle and the Bible, much of the awe comes from the parts of the story that are left blank. Why does God choose Abraham to lead the Israelites? Why does God create humans in the first place if we screw up almost constantly? Is God even one being, or three, or more? We can search for answers all we want, and there are some fascinating and compelling ones out there, but the real power of faith doesn’t lie in its dogma, but in its mystery. And the act of approaching the answer, to me at least, feels a whole lot like what I felt when I was about five years old, my Bionicle collection sprawled out in front of me, and I picked them up one by one to play out the blank spots in the story.

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* Turns out that both are true, which makes Le-Korans seems really dumb for falling for the same trap twice.  See what I mean about the overall story being a fiasco?