New Bionicle

I know that Monday posts are usually archival stuff, but today I’m going to break tradition a bit and write something original about a topic that maybe only four or five people I know really care about, and excuse the narrow focus by saying that it’s only a Monday post. Granted, I don’t really need an excuse because it’s my blog and I can do whatever I want, but it’s a nice ego-inflator to assume I have a rabid and easily-offended fanbase who will riot if deviations from the schedule are not well-explained.

So I’ve written about Bionicle extensively here. In doing so, I’ve probably taken the toyline that has been discontinued for almost a full decade a little too seriously. As if a rambling thinkpiece about it wasn’t enough, I went on to use it as a topic for poetry, and then theology. And now I’m back at it again, because ever since this April, Christian Faber has been posting cryptic images hinting at a return of Bionicle.

For those of you who don’t know, Christian Faber is the artist who turned Bionicle from a one-off toyline with the ridiculous name “The Boneheads From Voodoo Island” into the layered, surreal work of science-fantasy that it became. He created the project when he was struggling with brain cancer, and had the idea for what Bionicle became when he imagined the pills he took contained little soldiers, battling the tumor so that one day he’d arise healthy again. As great as Bionicle was, bits of his original vision promised something much larger and stranger. For example, while Le-Koro ended up as a generic jungle, albiet with some fascinating settings, his first idea was a forest of bio-mechanical plants, with flowers blinking in binary code and trees fashioned after microscopic cells. So I’m understandably thrilled that he’s begun showing off concept art for some new Bionicle-themed project on his Instagram.

I should clarify that it’s been a strange and unclear road to this point, and it will continue to be one for a while longer. He has admitted that Lego has not signed on for a Bionicle reboot yet, and even if they had, it will be a long road to something real. Lego started development of Bionicle in 1995, before I’d even been born, and by the time it came out in 2001, I was old enough to understand the convoluted plot and not choke to death on the little pieces. If this is a real toy theme, it could take a full decade to get off the ground, if not longer.

But here’s my thinking: it doesn’t have to be a full toy theme. Faber doesn’t need Lego to produce millions of plastic pieces, which I doubt they’d fund give after the second generation of Bionicle flopped so hard. He just needs their permission to use the intellectual property. Because, as the son of a great European history teacher put it: “Just as Prussia was an army that happened to have a country attached, Bionicle was a story that happened to have action figures attached.” Granted, the Bionicle toys were great, but they were great for an entirely different reason than the story. The physical Bionicle toys looked like really cool robots that you could take apart and build in a new way. But the Bionicle story was all about setting and atmosphere. It featured massive landscapes and magic powers, which were great imaginative inspiration, but impossible to express in the toys themselves. Rather than robots, the Bionicle characters of the story were cyborgs, flesh and skin plated in metal, cool from afar but always unsettling up close, in a distinctly H. R. Giger type style.

So, instead of another round of toys, which I wouldn’t have money or room for anyway, I’m hoping that we get pure story this time around. A webcomic would be the perfect format for this new iteration of Bionicle, I think, or a point-and-click adventure game akin to the Mata Nui Online Game from Bionicle’s first year. That isn’t to say that I’d complain about a new line of toys. I’m sure I’d buy the first green one to come out and display it proudly on my shelf. But all I really need to get the nostalgic part of my brain lighting up is a return to the alien world of Mata Nui. Or, hell, even a couple more bits of concept art would be nice.

I realize now that nearly no one but me will get anything out of this post, but screw it. I wrote almost a hundred posts by now for the rest of you, it’s about time I wrote one for myself.