Gathered friends, listen again to our legend, of the Bionicle.
Hello all, Grumblebricks here.
With a delightfully retro banner, as well.
(that I made today)
My first Bionicle digital art had a lot of purple, and I only just remembered that. Anyway.
This is an unconventional way to talk about Bionicle, but many years ago, back in the days of mocpages, I was one of the first people to have a Bionicle blog there, so I’ve been doing this a while. I believe mine started around 2006, so by ‘one of the first’ I mean I was one of the few who included extensive lore with the mocs and who became known more for that, than for the mocs themselves.
Space Lewa was a favourite.
He was Lewa… but he went to space on a modified Axalara, in order to rescue Mata Nui (and on the way crashed into cosmic beings, as you do). His story started in 2007, splitting off the main Bionicle story just as Tren Krom became a character.
Fans of my science fiction books might see a pattern here.
On Mocpages, I would post 1000-word bits of fan-fiction, photos of my mocs, and the occassional personal insight. The fan-fiction included numerous stopmotion videos set during the apocalypse, when a cracked mask of Life (then the mask of Death) started leaking death-energy across the landscape.
The result? The only nearby immortals, Vezon and Kardas, rose to power in the wasteland, and a more regal version of Vezon stepped forth from a parallel reality to kill his zombified main-universe self and take power from him.
I built fortresses from my Bionicle boxes, now lost to damp, and filmed 8-minute stopmotion episodes within them. I staged elaborate battles and recreated my favourite Youtube memes, before subsequently abandoning the video making when I discovered partying and goth bars.
Not sure if I regret that or not.
The post title is ‘wearing the Vahi Nuva’ in reference to these older stories. Time travel has always been important to me, as has interdimensional travel. In fact the first poem I remember writing, when I was six years old, was about finding an alternate reality upstream in time, hidden in a portal behind my sofa.
I would later drunkenly read this to my poetry professor at uni, because time is a circle, or at least a very tight spiral.
I had a few self-made characters in my stories. One was a tan and brown dark hunter who had a gatling gun on his shoulders and wide hands with tan bohrok limb fingers. I think he wore the noble Komau.
Space Lewa had a dark counterpart, shadow Lewa, who he would have semi-regular katana battles with. Vezon found eldritch powers from a wizard up a mountain (whose ‘mask’ was the Spinax head rotated 90 degress).
I had another character, too. An inventor with four arms, whose entire torso would flip to swap the arms out. Eventually, his character grew so detailed and weird that he no longer made sense in the Bionicle universe in which he had been planted.
So, I made my own universe.
The results of that universe and its delirious worldbuilding, ten or so years later, turned up in this book. It has some Bionicle references too, across its multiverse.
My mission as a writer
When I started evolving more toward writing in my own universes, in around 2007/2008, I would share bits of these with my Lego audience. It was often little bits of science fiction and sci-fi poetry. My self-publishing journey started at this time. I was sixteen when I first rejected a vanity publisher on the telephone. They wanted £6000 to print a book. I managed with £40. Taught myself cover design, editing, everything.
I even put a handful of books out. One poetry. One sci-fi.
It was arguably a happier time, for it was a time before politics, before violence, before fear. It was a time when, as a kid, I could get along with almost anyone provided they shared my sense of humour and agreed that Lego was cool.
And I mention that because I want to cherish escapism.
In the current literary scene, and indeed the Arts as a whole, there’s a lot of drama. I’ve got two degrees in writing, so I can say with some confidence it’s people without an imagination that want every single story to be “rooted in reality”. I can understand this for literary fiction, and I can contort myself a little to tolerate it among the poets, but even there I think fiction is important. Poems can be made up. The subject of a scathing comedic bit could be someone you invented in your head.
Science Fiction does not have to be about today’s politics.
Stories can be about bigger, more impressive, more existential things.
People look down on escapism because they have downloaded this strange moral dilemma where they feel guilty if they aren’t holding a protest every five minutes. That’s their problem, and it shouldn’t be ours.
It’s okay to take time to yourself.
It’s okay to be human.
It’s okay to want to sit back and relax to weird stories about spiritual robots saving the universe.
So I want to bring that era back.
Bionicle was a success because its story was timeless, ageless, because its story was ultimately about good triumphing over evil, and not just that. It was about good understanding evil, learning how it developed, how it grows like a sickness in the hearts of the people we least expect. Bionicle was a story about discovery, both outer and inner. It was a story about six heroes who at times felt isolated, but who found more and more companions as time went on.
It was about the future unlocking the past.
And above all else, Bionicle was a story about exploration.
And I’ve been exploring all my life.
The past
Putting this newsletter together reminds me a lot of mocpages. I made my first fans there, all those years ago, and was active between 2005 and 2011 I think. It was a good era.
I want to use this as my own mocpages, talking about my projects in a way that just is not possible on instagram.
It was my 32nd birthday recently, the day before Bionicle day. It was Bionicle day when I was a kid, too, because all the summer sets would show up for my birthday.
When Bionicle was cancelled, I continued this tradition by asking for boxes of parts off eBay, or money for Bricklink orders.
So, I’m 32. When I started Mocpages I think I was 13 or 14.
It has been a long time.
Substack
Substack is inherently more trustworthy than instagram. You or I could be dropped from that platform at any moment, or the platform could collapse, but I have your email now, so I can mail you these articles directly, and you can actually read them.
As a writer, I always found textposts on instagram funny. It’s not designed for that, it’s designed for pictures of cocktails.
So, I am moving the writing to where the writing belongs. Here.
The future
As some of you know, in the years since 2008 I’ve put a lot of time into my writing. I want to create a space here that will hopefully be useful in showcasing good Bionicle stories, and not just mine. My ancient project, Planetary Overlap, never truly died. The idea of sharing other people’s Bionicle stories and mocs lives on here and on my instagram.
The Gali giveaway will happen when we reach 100 subscribers here. Right now we are at 9. So, if you want to email this to a friend, here’s a link.
Once we have 100 subscribers, I will get a robot to pick a random email address and that person will win Gali, provided they’ve subscribed and commented “Bionicle”.
It could be a while, but it will happen.
And if it’s a success, I’ll do more, with more valuable things, at other milestones (500, 1000, 5000)
EDIT: As people are commenting ‘Bionicle’ on random posts and notes across all my substacks, I’m going to struggle to keep track of them. For that reason I will just trust that you’ve commented it somewhere, and will only be checking your emails. So, sign up here to grumblebricks, and you’ll be on the list.
While you’re here, please consider supporting my LegoIdeas projects.
-Grumblebricks
