BIONICLE was Awesome, but Overstuffed

 I’m reading Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton (because I wasn’t able to stealth grab Battle Ground from the library in time) and I’m like…. Whaaaaaaaat. It’s a Victorian-style drama about a well-to-do family navigating society, but they’re all dragons.

I don’t get it.

Anyhow I’m feeling a bit better than I have for most of the past week or so (no, it’s not corona, before you ask), so I’d like to think I’m on the mend. Still some random aches though.

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BIONICLE was Awesome, But Overstuffed

I struggled for a while trying to figure out what the fudge I was going to write about this week, and for some reason the topic of BIONICLE popped into my head. And I didn’t have much else to write about other than [checks notes] dysfunctional relationships in fiction and how different authors present Galahad. So BIONICLE it is.

So let’s start with this: BIONICLE was AWESOME.

[That music from 2004 still gets stuck in my head sometimes.]

For a lot of LEGO peeps growing up in the early 2000’s, BIONICLE was the first comic book series we followed. It was our first fandom. And through that it got a bunch of us into writing, and art, and building, and complex stories with nuanced characters. I got into comics because I’d receive a new BIONICLE issue every month. I got into online fandom through BZPower, a BIONICLE fansite. I really got into writing, encouraged by both the nonfiction and fiction I saw on BZPower, and the way that the story writer, Greg Farshtey, interacted with the fans and answered questions. Reddit’s Ask Me Anything sessions had nothing on the Ask Greg thread in the BZP forums.

In the later years of BIONICLE’s run--and for the purposes of this Note we’re talking the original run, which was 2001-2010, not any of the reboot--the series expanded considerably. See, part of the thing is that the main story had to focus on the characters they were making sets out of--this was, after all, a story based on a LEGO toy line. So a lot of times old characters weren’t part of the new story. But both the fans and Greg Farshtey cared about older characters, so he kept trying to find ways to slip them into the story. In about 2007 he got permission to start doing web serials, where the narration showed what different groups of characters were up to while the main story about finding the Mask of Life was going on. And there were some side books too--a BIONICLE Atlas, a book about Rahi beasts, and a book about the Dark Hunters (these last two heavily featured fan creations, because they were the results of contests). 

The supplementary content also got away with much darker material, because it wasn’t as widely read by children. So you had one web serial about Takanuva visiting an alternate dimension where Toa have taken over the world and made a dystopia, and by the end of it several alternate versions of characters have died horrible deaths (including Tuyet being bisected what the fudge Greg).

Except… as it went on, it got kind of weighty. A lot of fans did point this out at the time, and a lot of fans (myself included) ignored any of the criticisms. But it got to the point that there were dozens of characters, all running around with their own motivations and subplots, and because so much was going on, Greg would lose track of where things were going. One character was a double-agent spy with connections to a secret society...and then he gets killed before that goes anywhere at all. One character is a heroic doppelganger of the main villain brought in from an alternate dimension to help fight the villain and this also goes absolutely nowhere. Many times the Plots cancelled each other out--Ancient being a spy was cancelled out by the Shadowed One finding a Plot Device that would fix everything, so he killed Ancient to cover it up (and then his Plot went absolutely nowhere too).

And then BIONICLE ended, and we were promised that the story would continue with web serials. We all had our doubts, but at first it looked like they were continuing. But then they just kind of stopped, without resolving anything.

Now I’m not saying that these supplementary stories are what killed BIONICLE--they aren’t. Maybe it was sales, maybe it was just LEGO not wanting to shell out the expenses for it. In any case, it wasn’t a story issue. But there was a problem with the story and it’s kind of funny reflecting on it, because recently we’ve been seeing similar things happening with Star Wars and Marvel (though it’s been happening with comics for ages)--that there are a bajillion stories taking place in the same universe, and we’re promised that they’re all important, and yet for the most part, they go… nowhere.

This is what happens when a fictional universe gets overstuffed.

It’s cool to think of the idea of a bajillion different stories, and all of them being cool and relevant, and those characters having a huge effect on the universe. But for the most part they’re just… there. So often they’re left hanging, dangling Plot Threads that didn’t need to be there in the first place. There’s a book by Rebecca Roanhorse (who is great, don’t let this criticism prevent you from picking up her other non-SW books) that came out before Rise of Skywalker called Resistance Reborn, about the Resistance picking up as many allies as they can, and many of them are characters that have popped up in different books, comics, and games set in the era. Tor called it the Avengers: Endgame of Star Wars. And yet… it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s not like it’s even really referenced in the movies. It’s just… hey, look, these people still exist, we’re pretending we care.

Then you had Agents of SHIELD, which despite being created for the purpose of being a show in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was utterly ignored by the movies, to the point that they weren’t told anything about Endgame and so couldn’t tie into what happened in that film.

I’m not condemning any supplementary material, but the obsession with making more of it, the idea that we need it, and trying to make it seem like it’s necessary to understanding the main narrative, and that it’s going to be super relevant when it’s obviously not--I don’t like that! Especially because in some of these cases, the subplots are piling up so high that they end up cancelling each other out.

I get that in those cases, it was a series being written by a bunch of writers rather than just one, and it differs from BIONICLE in that way. But it still resulted in the same problem. BIONICLE was falling apart, narratively, because it didn’t know when to stop adding side stories. And if those side stories kept doing their own things, that’d be fine! But instead, they kept hinting that they’d be part of the main Plot, and then cancelling it. Maybe it’s meant to be dramatic, but it just reads as frustrating. Expanding the universe is all well and good--just don’t do it and make it collapse under its own weight. Don’t introduce elements just to cancel them. That’s not a good story; that’s just filler. It’ll bring the rest of the narrative down.

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