Aanchir

While we're on the subject of books, we now have cover art for Comet Crisis. Also, on the subject of the graphic novels, the editor's note in the back of the tenth graphic novel says they will be reprinting the ninth one with the current Ninja costumes, which is a nice treat that I was not expecting (the original edition used their 2013 costumes). I doubt we can expect the value of either edition to skyrocket, but it's still more than I would have expected for an already-released graphic novel. Oh, and Brickset has released their review of the Ninjago visual dictionary. Looks to be a good book overall.

Even besides as a minifigure part, I can imagine Infearno's flame head piece being useful for jet exhaust on vehicles.

As far as the sets are concerned, they're going to be in entirely new forms. But they might be meant as new depictions of previous forms, the same way the Stars version of Tahu was a new depiction of his Toa Mata form rather than a depiction of an entirely new form.

Don't forget Naya from the LEGO Friends Character Encyclopedia, who was entirely assembled from existing elements. I agree it's disappointing, though at least this gets me a fig I hadn't finished deciding on how to get (since I don't yet own the Destructoid and was contemplating getting either that or the activity book). I would have been a LOT more miffed if I had preordered this book only to wind up with a figure I already owned.

Well, that's another one of my pet peeves. Besides Gali and Pohatu, most of the Toa Mata were utterly convinced that they worked better alone, despite pretty much every single one of their experiences telling them that was not the case. It wouldn't bother me if they had clear personal reasons for getting into arguments. I get it, friends and teammates fight sometimes. I don't have a problem with that. But with the Toa Mata it seems like they were ALWAYS ready to split up at a moment's notice. And then they would have to learn the same lessons about teamwork over and over again. If BIONICLE came back, I'd hope for more complex and consistent character development than what a lot of the early years of BIONICLE offered. Avatar: The Last Airbender is a great example of how you can have a serious story but still teach lessons that aren't so simplistic or repetitive.

Personally, I prefer the idea of sticking with a single team for several years. I think sticking with a consistent team was one of the smartest decisions Hero Factory made, even though a team of nine turned out to be maybe a bit too large. But you DO make a good point of how changing characters' genders would not really affect the team dynamic unless you changed the characters' personalities as well. So if these are the same Toa Mata as in the previous BIONICLE storyline, changing their genders is probably not a good idea. On the other hand, if these are new characters who are just named after the Toa Mata, then it would not be nearly so problematic to change their personalities or their team dynamic up a bit. The original Toa Mata were not especially complex characters. None of them had very unique goals as individuals. I think some more recent LEGO themes have done a better job with that. In LEGO Ninjago, for instance, there was a whole subplot about Zane trying to discover where he came from. So starting fresh with a new team of Toa might help the theme get off to a better start, not just in terms of gender but also in terms of characterization in general.

It's an interesting idea, but as you say it would require a lot of new molds. And it's hard to say how much more expensive each mold might be than the current variety, since I don't know how complex the molds for Hero Factory beams are currently. Remember that the more steel sections have to come together to mold a piece, the more expensive the mold is to produce and maintain. So for example, a Hero Factory torso beam or Toa Nuva leg beam would be a fairly inexpensive mold, since it only needs to be molded in the front and the back. But a Toa Mata torso or Toa Metru torso would be a much more expensive mold, since it has to be molded from the front, back, top, and both sides. Personally, I would not be especially interested in a new shell design like this, since I'm never bothered by the smooth, clean aesthetic of Hero Factory pieces, and rarely bothered by exposed beams. It's not that I don't think it would have any use. I just don't perceive any pressing need for it.

All the details can be found here!

One new "variant fig" who would be cool to see is Robo-Wyldstyle! She MIGHT require a new mold, if they wanted to be totally accurate to her disguise and include the hard hat with her hair poking out. But it'd still be a cool fig to have, since they already did a Robo-Emmet. Also, it'd be great if we got some figs who were identical to the existing figs but with different expressions. The character who probably needs this the most is probably President Business. He smiles a lot in the movie, yet neither of the existing variants has a smiling expression of any kind — not even an evil grin. Wyldstyle could also benefit from some alternate expressions.

No, but for a creative toy like LEGO I think it'd still be a major improvement, ESPECIALLY if the characters weren't grouped by gender into specific elements and color schemes. Again I bring up My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, another series I love. It has exactly one male main character — Spike the Dragon. The rest of its main characters are female. This is not a bad thing, especially since well-written, female-dominated series are fairly rare in modern-day media. But I think it is an example of a series where equal gender ratios would be undesirable. A lot of the show's appeal comes from the distinctly feminine perspective it regularly draws from. It is unapologetically a girl-oriented series — and yet, it has become popular with boys as well, because the stories and lessons are just that enjoyable. I don't necessarily think BIONICLE should abandon its very gendered marketing strategy either. However, it also should take care not to alienate its periphery demographic. I feel like focusing primarily on male main characters is tolerable — not exceptional, not groundbreaking, not an improvement to the media landscape as a whole, but tolerable. However, setting up a 1:5 gender ratio throughout the whole Matoran race, and reserving just a small handful of elements and color schemes for all its female fans, is a huge creative limitation for fans, especially for whatever female fans might be drawn to the series in spite of its boy-focused marketing. Not only would a more realistic gender ratio and less rigid rules about gender permit more fan characters to exist without contradicting the official storyline, but it would also allow the story to feature a greater variety of female secondary characters. Personally, I think the theme should at least work towards a 1:2 ratio among its main characters: one female character to every two male characters. If the Hageman brothers are to be believed, around 30% of Ninjago's fanbase is female. I see no reason why BIONICLE can't at least meet that benchmark. And in that case, it would be ideal for the theme to try and reflect that audience by having at least one third of all characters be female. I see no reason why boys could not tolerate a second woman in a six-person team. It worked for Power Rangers, and that franchise is every bit as merchandise-driven as BIONICLE. Adding a second female character might even increase the size of the theme's female audience, which might allow the LEGO Group to push that boundary even further without a decrease in sales. But in the short term, having a team that's 30% female would be a good goal to start out with.

I've always liked female minifigures with hourglass figures, but I'm certainly a bit biased since I'm a guy and have never had to use female minifigure torsos to depict myself. Hourglass printing is definitely not necessary for every type of outfit, of course, and the LEGO Group doesn't use it for all figs — firefighters and some other figs with loose-fitting clothes often tend to have unisex torsos. But for certain outfits I think it's a good way to give a sense that clothing on a female minifigure is form-fitting, the same way that printed abs and pecs or a printed belly would show the same thing on a male figure. As for makeup, it can be a little bit frustrating sometimes, especially when it's bright red. I'm not so bothered by lips printed in Nougat or Medium Nougat like the cheekbones, abs, and other lines on many male figure. This adds definition to the lips and makes them look more feminine, but doesn't necessarily give the impression that they're wearing heavy makeup. This, this, and this are good examples of heads with lips printed in a lighter color. It's closer to the minifigure's native skin color so it's not so jarring. Overall, I don't think either of these things are all that sexist. They are just meant as visual shorthand for female minifigures, not as a template for what all real-life women should look like. However, it would be good if the LEGO Group could come up with some more female minifigure faces that didn't need any makeup to be recognizably feminine, for variety's sake.

It's a palm tree top (2566).

As far as I can see, this is too blurry to make out any useful details whatsoever. So I'm not going to bother speculating on what they might be or mean. I wouldn't assume that any of these are "humanoid titan sets" — all we can see are boxes, but no way to judge what size they are, and there are rumors that ALL the new BIONICLE sets might just use cardboard boxes for all the sets rather than pouches (which would make me sad ). EDIT: Something I just noticed on an archived BIONICLE press release (click "BIONICLE: The Heroes of Mata Nui"). Turaga Vakama is described as the "defender of fire" and Nuju as the "defender of ice".

I can't help but disagree wholeheartedly with this comment. I can tell you are a lot more skeptical about the maturity of the BIONICLE fan community than I am. Personally, I think any controversy over something as basic as gender is likely to blow over fairly quickly. You bring up the controversy about Hero Factory, but bear in mind that the Hero Factory theme has managed to last four and a half years in spite of any online bickering that may have ensued. And something as basic as creating new Toa with different genders but classic names is hardly going to be anywhere near as controversial as cancelling an entire theme. It also seems to me like you perhaps haven't searched Hero Factory on deviantART in a long time, because the amount of bickering about it there is much less than it was back in the day. Certainly fans aren't bitterly making immature image macros bashing it or any of the other idiotic stuff they used to do back in the day. Furthermore, the fact that there has been so much discussion of this possibility in the first place should tell you that a lot of older fans are open to this idea. They would have just as much opportunity to define the narrative as fans who are enraged by the change. It's true that moderated discussion on forums has been giving way to discussion on social media... but at the same time, from what I can tell, social media seems to be every bit as open to the possibility of improved gender ratios as the major forums are. It's no coincidence that every time this conversation comes up people compare it to discussions taking place on Tumblr. Avoiding controversy has its merits, but it just seems stupid to me to consider this a controversy worth avoiding. The reveal of Mata Nui's true form was controversial, but that didn't kill the theme. Neither did the enormous controversy that Hero Factory inherited the minute it was first revealed. I think if the LEGO Group keeps the existing genders, it will be for the same reason gender ratios have always been so pitiful: because they're afraid boys won't want to buy sets of female characters. NOT because they think changing things as basic as gender would be "too controversial"

Technically, their primary function wasn't as defensive weapons OR canes. They were the Turaga's "badges of office" — basically symbols of their leadership, almost like a scepter. See the old BIONICLE Lexicon. Sadly, I also think we are perhaps unlikely to see Turaga as sets. Frankly, regardless of whether you see them as village elders or merely village chiefs, they were never involved in a lot of fighting other than self-defense — defense of the villages generally fell to the Matoran villagers rather than their leaders. And I think that's part of the reason why the BIONICLE sets only focused on the Turaga for the first year, later shifting the focus of the small sets to the more battle-ready Matoran. I do hope that if we see Matoran OR Turaga, they will have somewhat cutesy, dwarfish proportions like the Matoran and Turaga sets did for BIONICLE's first seven years, rather than body proportions like the Av-Matoran and Agori.

Yes, but there's no reason to assume that the idea of Takua being older than than the Turaga was known at the time the movies were made. His personality in the movie was meant to be carefree and inexperienced, so he was given a youthful voice. The Turaga, on the other hand, were meant from the beginning to convey an air of wisdom and experience — and when using human voices, a low, elderly voice is the simplest shorthand for wisdom and experience. You can't fault the movie makers for making an informed decision based on the information that was available to them at the time.

I don't see why people think the movies messed up. The point of the Turaga was always to basically represent the village chiefs/elders. Even if they're not literally older than any of the other Matoran, they were always intended to be mysterious and wise, so I think it would have been unfaithful to that intent if they had been portrayed as young, nimble, and sprightly. Mata Nui Online Game even described Matau as "In lifedawn years past, was known Matau Kewa Champion!" The phrasing there suggests a sense of advanced age was meant to be understood even back then. Likewise, there's absolutely nothing wrong with how they portrayed the Rahaga and Raanu — what in the world makes you think they were ever meant to be portrayed any differently? The Rahaga in particular — their transformation was supposed to seem unnatural, and their physique in the sets was even more hunched over than their physique in the movies, so I don't see why aging their voices seems like such a problem.

Not necessarily. All three (well, arguably, four) of DC Comics' "Sandman" characters exist in the same continuity, and they even interact with one another. One is an ancient entity older than gods, one is a campy superhero in a brightly-colored suit, and one is a vigilante who goes out at night wearing a gas mask and fights crime using sleeping gas. Likewise, it is common for certain characters to "take up the mantle" of an existing hero or villain. Just look at the "Reign of the Supermen" arc... four characters were fighting for the title of "Superman" after Clark Kent's apparent death. It is not impossible for characters in fiction to share a name. Furthermore, how do you know this new BIONICLE isn't going to be the start of a brand-new continuity? We pretty much don't have any story details at all yet. All we have are the names of some of the characters. Whether or not it's the same continuity, there's no reason the new Lewa would have to be the same character as the old Lewa. Are we thinking of the same LEGO? The LEGO I know reuses names all the time. I already pointed out the multiple Karzahnis and Nektanns, but the LEGO Group also repurposes plenty of names between themes, hence the Space Police III character named Slizer, the Drome Racing team called Exo-Force, Hero Factory's elite team being called "Alpha Team", etcetera. Furthermore, there is a very obvious reason for characters within the same continuity to share the same name: later characters can bear their names in honor of earlier ones. This is why the princess in The Legend of Zelda is always named Zelda. For that matter, this is part of the reason for many real-world names. George Washington Carver was named in honor of George Washington. Martin Luther King, Jr. was named in honor of his father, who was named in honor of Martin Luther. Pretty much every single Roman Catholic pope ever has taken the name of a saint (or sometimes the names of MULTIPLE saints) when they assumed the papacy. You keep repeating that... you haven't exactly provided any evidence. If these are in fact new characters, then the original Toa might not even be appearing in the new storyline. It would just be a cool trivia point that the new characters are named after classic characters, whether in-universe or out-of-universe. The Legend of Korra is another example of a series where characters have shared the same name. There are two major characters named Iroh who appear within the same season of the series. One just happens to have been named after the other. It's not gender-bending if they're entirely new characters. It'd just be new characters who are based on the original characters, who share names that were never established to be gender-specific in the first place.

If the old BIONICLE could have an intelligent plant with the same name as an ancient chaos ruler AND the place he ruled (Karzahni), or a robot drone with the same name as a Skakdi warlord (Nektann), then why would it be too confusing for a new BIONICLE to have a character who shares a name but not a gender with a classic character? I also have my doubts that the LEGO Group would do this, and I don't necessarily want them to either. But I don't think it would be bad or wrong or confusing or controversial if they did so. It'd just be a new character with an old name, the same way DC Comics and Marvel Comics have had so many characters with the same superhero or supervillain name.

Pretty much all of the sets are based directly on scenes from the movie, though some of the designs are slightly altered to make them more feasible as toys. For instance, Metalbeard's Sea Cow in the movie is massive, but the set is scaled down to something that could be sold for $250. Emmet's Construct-o-Mech in the movie is likewise MASSIVE, easily two or three times the size of the set. The Melting Room in the movie is also much larger and more complex. But in answer to your question, rest assured that not a single one of the sets is based on an unused concept (though there might very well be concept models in the movie that were envisioned as sets but never ended up on store shelves, including a handful of wacky flying machines similar to the ones in the "2-in-1" sets).

This blog post says it will be available from LEGO stores and shop.LEGO.com on August 1. I imagine that will be the case worldwide, with the exception of a possible early release in the LEGO store in the UK where Peter Reid is going to be doing an event of some sort.

Personally, I find the opposite problem: the ankle on most BIONICLE feet like the Toa Metru foot is too far forward. On a real human foot, the heel just barely sticks back from the ankle, even when wearing a heavy-duty boot, whereas with most BIONICLE feet, the horizontal distance between the ankle and the back of the heel is as great as the vertical distance between the ankle and the ground, if not greater. I am grateful that Hero Factory has provided some good alternatives. The 2.0 foot is a bit large, but not to the point that it looks ridiculous on a 7-inch/18-centimeter figure. It's just slightly longer in the front than a Toa Mata foot. And in fact, I like that it's slightly oversized because this means it can also be used for larger figures like Furno XL. Earlier this year I discovered that you can achieve similar foot proportions with a slightly more feminine look by using a 1.0 hero foot, a 2M axle, and a Y-joint. Though that's unlikely to ever appear in sets because 1) it's not a very traditional connection and 2) we haven't seen the 1.0 hero foot since Breakout. My one biggest criticism of most BIONICLE and Hero Factory feet is that it is very difficult to use them with a friction joint — doing so raises the ankle joint up a full module, which looks slightly absurd (see: Furno XL). But other than introducing a foot piece where the ankle is one module lower by default, I don't know what other solutions might be feasible.

I wouldn't complain about new feet, but... we just got two new foot designs just this year. We're not in desperate need of new feet IMO. Though part of the reason I feel that way is that I don't really have a problem of the 2.0 foot design, and I'm generally not fond of replacing a good piece just because it's been out for a while.

We see a character who looks like original Tahu, but referencing the original character design does not make it the same character. Pretty much every Link in The Legend of Zelda wears a green hat and tunic, but that doesn't make them all the same Link. As I've pointed out before, if we had first caught a glimpse of Toa Lhikan without any name attached before we knew about the character, it'd be easy to think it was a new version of Tahu.

I've never heard black described as "color-scheme breaking", and honestly if these character ARE the Toa Mata, I think black torso beams would work just fine for them. After all, their hips and shoulders (the parts of the torso beam that are going to be most visible with proper torso armor) were black in the original Toa Mata and Toa Nuva to begin with. One of the biggest flaws of the Stars version of Tahu, in my opinion, was its LACK of black to balance out the bright red and bright orange that dominated his color scheme. You don't realize just how important that color was to the original set's color scheme until you see what it's like without it. Now, as for the limb beams? I suppose those could be more brightly-colored, though to be honest I rather like the layered look that neutral-colored beams and brightly-colored shells can afford.