Lord-Vorahk

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why they didn't try ranked voting? At least for the final four. Maybe it's because of Recent Bonkle Fandom Drama (The Helryx contest, which I've done a writeup of on r/hobbydrama because it was that bad), but I kinda really love ranked voting for things like this. "First past the post" is basically just a "What's your favourite" vote, whereas ranking them all from 1 to 4 would give Lego a much more accurate picture of what's got the most demand for it. This is as much market research as it is a popularity contest, and while the outcome is not much of a surprise, "Big Shock, the three archetypal Lego themes and their biggest story theme got the most support and still have a strong market for them all", it's still valuable information for Lego. That information being the most accurate it can be would be helpful to have. I'm also not of the mind toward including G2, just because I don't think Lego really gave it a chance. It was cancelled after its first wave, and its launch was so mismanaged and poorly budgeted that at feels less like G2 failed and more like it was shot in the leg before it could even start, and that's a shame because some of those sets were darn good, even if the story... wasn't. As an aside, this is how I'd rank the current winner's circle: 1) Bionicle- Surprise, it's my favourite. Gimme a quasi-UCS Takanuva or something. 2) Castle- Has been dormant for the longest time of the others, and I'm big into medieval fantasy, even if there's not a Drow or a Tiefling in sight. 3) Space- Not really any strong feelings on this one, and it's had a lot of love lately, but apparently its big Lego Ideas shot didn't even reach review stage? I sympathise with Ideas disappointment (Even if the Sonic Mania set has my attention and probably my wallet), and I do like sci-fi. Especially pre "Human cops and evil aliens" Lego Sci-Fi. Screw the modern stuff tho. 4) Pirates- Come on guys it still has sets on shelves, the heck are they gonna do that's different from those?

I mean, I couldn't get back into the account I used to support Sokoda's Bionicle diorama back in 2019, so I just... made a new one.

Predictably I went for Bionicle. I have no doubt that Lego will keep doing Space, Castle, and Pirates sets ad infinitum. They're already doing that. Classic Space gets a throwback almost every other year, there are Pirates sets on store shelves right now, and Castle has two(?) coming in the summer. And I honestly think the "No-brainer" choices should've been left off, to give some of the smaller, more obscure themes an opportunity to return. Obviously that would need to be prefaced with a "We didn't forget the obvious choices, but we don't need to be told to keep making those. They're not going anywhere" statement, but between those three extremely obvious choices that keep getting made anyway, and Bionicle, who a lot of people are very passionate about but probably won't get the victory even if it gets the most votes, nothing else really stood a chance. I do find it hilarious that Castle got wild-carded in, though. Smacks of "We expected/wanted this to come down to Space, Pirates, and Castle, but those pesky 90s-2000s kids voted for the robots so, uh... We made a fourth slot! Castle gets to join in too!" I say that because I experienced something very similar in the Transformers fandom a few years ago, with the Power of the Primes vote. For those not up on their knowledge of this particular brand of plastic crack, from 2017-2018, Hasbro ran the toyline "Power of the Primes", which closed out the Prime Wars trilogy of sublines. Hasbro have been running fan-choice polls to decide on certain new figures for a while now, which resulted in new main character Windblade, the all-female Combiner team the Torchbearers, and a bunch of other stuff. But for PotP, they decided to have the fans choose who would be the next wielder of the Matrix of Leadership. This character would then get a Leader-class toy (At the time the largest/most expensive general retail figures) and a starring role in both the IDW comics and the infamously woeful Machinima animated series. Thing is, Hasbro had basically already picked who they wanted to win: Japanese G1 character Deathsaurus. The problem was that they made a complete hash of supporting him. Deathsaurus was instead billed as "Unknown Evil", ensuring that only people already familiar with his head silhouette would even know what he was, and put in a bracket with two huge fan-favourites: Marvel G1 antagonist Thunderwing, and Beast Wars main character Optimus Primal. Predictably, Deathsaurus lost badly. So Hasbro made a Surprise Fourth Slot so they could wild card him into the finals, where he predictably again lost to Optimus Primal. Because when you put three G1 dudes against one Beast Wars character, the absolutely massive Beast Wars fandom will all vote for that one guy and win. Then the toys actually came out, and the Leaders had an "Evolution gimmick", being composed of a small figure representing their pre-Matrix selves (So Orion Pax and Hot Rod for the two main Autobot leaders) that armoured up into their full-size leader forms (Optimus Prime and Rodimus Prime). As such, Primal's toy had the small figure be based on his iconic Season 1 design, while the main attraction was based on the gaudy and much-less-popular Optimal Optimus. Because of its small size, Primal's regular form couldn't transform into his usual gorilla mode, and he instead turned into... a surfboard for his armour's gorilla mode. The gimmick was almost certainly intended for Deathsaurus' rival, Autobot Leader Star Saber, who was another contender in the vote and actually made the final legitimately, but then PotP the toyline was cut in half and Star Saber never got made. Also the cartoon predictably blowed chunks and the comic role was cancelled due to IDW winding down its original universe, and Optimus Primal instead featured as a mostly-characterless evil minion of Onyx Prime. And then this year saw the release of the Generations Optimus Primal that all those Beast Wars fans actually wanted in 2017, putting a hilarious line under the entire tragicomic saga of PotP Optimal Optimus. I don't think Lego will necessarily make the same mistakes, but it is something I've seen before.

The crew are Bonkles.

"Hey, how many red pieces should the red guy have?" "Three?" "Works for me." That said, while a lot of us were okay with CCBS, myself included, there was a lot of pushback from other fans who expected Lego to (somehow) recast all of the old G1 parts and bring them back, and then pick up exactly where G1 left off. And they were militant. I, personally, would be fine with a CCBS Bonkle set. Others? Maybe not. Just like you've personally said you wouldn't take a mech with a minifig, I'd personally be happy to take a brick-and-minifig Bionicle G3 with something akin to the Marvel Mechs providing the "Constraction" angle. Everyone's got different requirements and wishes for it, and the hard part would be find the right balance.

I wager the new Marvel Mechs with Mixel parts are going to be the basis for any future Constraction theme, either as mechs themselves or just as the basis. So going fully into System basis while keeping the balljoints instead of trying to invent a "Brick" for constraction, which CCBS was. And given that those sets are £9 while the Toa in G2 were £20 (If I remember right), and that's with the licensed markup, I'm personally okay with that. I just want whatever the theme is, whether a third Bionicle, a second Hero Factory, or something else, for it to be good and take off.

Oh hey, you managed to get it small enough. I spent like 20 minutes trying to shrink it enough to fit without making the text illegible lol. I'm hoping the 100th anniversary will be better, provided that we're all still here in a decade.

I don't think for a second that Bionicle is going to win overall, despite supporting it and only it. If I'm being 100% honest with myself, it doesn't represent all of Lego, and Lego have demonstrated that no amount of noisy Bionicle fans is going to make them give it the nod. They poked fun at us in TLM1, made the second-chance at exactly the wrong time, when most of the fanbase were broke college kids rather than adults able to spend disposable income on toys, dropped us from TLM2 entirely, and rejected the fastest-ever Lego Ideas set to hit 10000 in favour of safe, easy licenses. But hey, they haven't C&D'd any fan projects, I guess. I also don't really understand why they're only doing one set, because honestly I don't think any singular theme could represent the entire 90-year history in a satisfactory manner. Of course it couldn't. And that's part of why I didn't think too hard about what should win. I just threw my vote to my favourite, the only one on the entire list that was a presence in my own childhood, and didn't bother writing in any of the others (Like Life on Mars) because if they didn't get given the not by Lego, then they had no chance. But the System fans panicking about the possibility that the anniversary is gonna be "Hijacked by Bonkles" should probably cool their jets. The chance of that happening is basically zero. Not only will all the System votes be compiled into just two options rather than 29, but the combined votes for all the Space themes puts Bionicle further behind. True, things could be being skewed by everyone getting three votes, and those Space themes may have been a lot of people's second or third pick, but given how many Bionicle fans voted for just Bionicle (Like I did), that wouldn't be much of a boost for Bonkle anyway. People whose favourites didn't make Round 2 are much more likely to go for one of those two System themes than Bionicle, so don't worry. And even if Bionicle did win, there's still little chance of Lego deciding to make it. The lack of public results for Round 2 and the statement that they're not necessarily going to make the Number 1 choice all but guarantees that they'll be making whatever they like out of the Top 3, which will probably be Space. So chill, people, we're not gonna ruin the anniversary for you. I'm just taking the opportunity to give Lego another reminder that we're still here. If it were up to me, there'd be an entire theme for the anniversary, I'd try to hit all the big ones, and Bionicle would be one of them. Of course it would. Supposedly it made up 40% of Lego's profits in 2003, and it ran for a decade in its original form, with a community that remains active and producing content to this day. And that's not a send-up of G2, most of it is focused around G1 still. Canonisation contests have returned, for better or worse, Christian Faber is trying to do... something, that's looking increasingly like a lot of pretty art and nothing else, but he's trying and if something comes of it, we'll be there, Ideas sets keep popping up and we keep supporting them, and there's a game/mod based on the earliest part of the story in the works too. It's a part of Lego's history, a huge part, and it deserves to be remembered. Just as most of these other sets do. Yeah, sure, some of 'em, like Town, Arctic, and Trains are now folded wholly into City and still get new sets because of that, and half the list is decompiled Castle and Space themes, who could probably have done with being less decompiled. Space absolutely needed to be split up a bit, but perhaps not in the way it was. I really wish the second and third options for the final weren't Classic Space and Pirates, though. I probably wouldn't have bought the others, but I would've at least thought it was cool. But to me, Classic Space and Pirates are things... Lego still does. In fact, they're pretty much Lego's go-to Nostalgia Button set options. Space got the mech, the battle pack, the minifig in that book, and of course Benny's Spaceship, and while most of those are currently out of circulation and have been for a while, it's pretty apparent that they're not about to stop making Classic Space throwbacks. They'll keep making those until long after everybody that remembers Classic Space has keeled over. Pirates... still has sets on store shelves. I honestly don't know why they included it, given that, but I guess it's a big enough deal to get the nod even when whatever's made would probably be functionally very similar to what's already available right at this second.

Not sure if it's an unpopular opinion in general, or just in this thread, but I really want more TCW stuff, of a specific angle. I want things that are more of a later-season bent. To give a similar amount of Clone army support for the Phase 2 Clones that the Phase 1 versions got in 2008. It's been 12 years since we got an ARC-170 and I want another of those more than I want anything else. Also I just... really don't care about the helmets and mosaics.

I bought myself the 501st set and got gifted the AAT for Christmas. Immediately halved the length of the gun on the latter, but on the whole they're both fantastic to have. Even if I mainly care about the minifigs.

Prior to HF, there was a pretty solid internal reason why characters tended to change appearance so drastically between designs: Their masks. Very often, a transformed character would be wearing a different mask or a different form of their old one. Since masks were not the character's faces, but rather something that many characters could wear and use, and mass-produced within the setting. While, from a character design standpoint, it makes the most sense to keep the character's face consistent, from an internal, story-focused perspective, it makes a lot less sense to have a set of different masks with different powers look so similar to each other. Would Jaller's Toa sets have been improved if their masks looked like a Hau? Probably. Would it have made sense for the Calix and Arthron to look like Haus? Nope. HF and later, G2, did away with the "mass-produced mask" concept, ironic, considering that the former were supposed to be mass-produced droids, and that allowed for more consistent "faces" between the characters' different forms. This, however, ended up making them less friendly to MOCing for me, personally. The standardized parts were great, even if I prefer the look I get out of G1 parts, but the masks and helmets being so tied to the character made things more difficult. I couldn't make a HF MOC without it looking like a new form of one of the existing characters, unless I wanted to slap a Glatorian helmet or finagle a G1 mask onto it, and my attempts at G2 MOCs often have the same result. That said, none of this excuses the Mistika's transgressions in this area, since they aren't supposed to be wearing new masks, and streamlined versions of their existing ones would've fit a lot better. Except Lewa. His Phantoka Mask is my favourite incarnation of the Miru.

They're good parts packs. I like the idea of a torso bone with space for four limbs. The claws are nice not counting the inability to hold stuff.

Huh, this topic is still a thing. I can corroborate the fragility of G2 pieces. I've got some friction extenders that no longer make any difference, just from being part of the set they came in, some bones are loose and floppy too, and some of both are actually broken. My G2 parts are mostly supplementary in G1-style builds now. The Bionicle MOCs I have on display still look good to me.

We didn't have any indication that Makuta had intentionally unleashed the monsters himself until late 2015, and even then, that was on Ekimu's say-so, whereas before, it seemed like the Skull Spiders were born from him but not explicitly carrying out his will, and Kulta was his own entity..

Probably because Dume being Makuta in disguise was a pretty big thing in 04. Also, the Ekimu theory spawned because Makuta's jealously was pretty well-justified. Ekimu got mountains of praise and adoration for, basically, using his magic mask to make the same identical villager mask over and over again, while Makuta used his actual skills to make different ones and got ignored. He then gets possessed and corrupted by the MoUP, but Ekimu spends all of 2015's latter half talking about how it's all definitely Makuta's fault and he is super-duper evil.