Females in Bionicle

[CabooseBM]

Besides, if it changes nothing about the characters, but gives more kids heroes to look up to, I can't say I see a single downside to this. And that goes for both boys and girls, boys could use more heroes to look up to who are woman too. It's only weird to people who see gender as a this big huge thing to change(despite arguing it isn't) and folks who hold on to G1 as if it were handed down on stone tablets from a burning bush named Greg Farshtree.

And don't get me wrong, I would absolutely love a team of new characters with a 1:1 ratio, but it seems we're dealing with the Toa Mata for 2015, so that's who we'd talk about right now.

If it IS a continuation, and I highly doubt it is, then yeah, I'd see the point, but only because treating a gender change so flippantly(In the absence of a good in-story explanation ie: NOT Arcee from IDW) is kinda disrespectful to transgender folks, (Well, kinda, maybe. Disclaimer here to say I'm not getting all truscum all up in this, if you don't know what that means then don't worry about it it's probably not for you.)

Edited July 21, 2014 by CabooseBM

[Still Raindrop]

If it is indeed a reboot, I could see it--gender swaps often seem kind of gimmicky to me, but far from the worst (I am really not a huge fan of alternate universes that have interactions with the main one, and Bionicle has already done that, so a reboot with an established character as a female would be fine by me.)

However, I think they'd have to carefully choose which one, if they're keeping the personalities similar. I think Kopaka and Lewa are the best candidates. Onua and Pohatu already share a lot of personality traits with Gali, and making Tahu a female seems too obvious--I think it's just as bad to make a female character the exact opposite of feminine stereotypes as it is to make her the embodiment of them--both rely almost solely on gender for characterization, either playing to it or subverting it. If I had to choose, I would want to see a female Kopaka.

Now, I do think there is another good idea. The testing that Lego did for Friends indicated that younger girls, in general, preferred to act out day-to-day situations, contrasting with the boys' general focus on action and such (I'm a man, but I have always liked both--I think the Mata Nui online games succeeded because they provided both action and a glimpse into how this world worked). If the "guardians" are Matoran, I think it would be smart to also sell packs with random Matoran-colored masks (and maybe shells?). This way, they could only produce six Matoran sets (maximizing shelf space), but could leave open the possibility of creating a village. I was always upset at the exclusivity of the McToran when I was a kid, because I wanted to build lots of Matoran to populate my world. If the monogender tribe thing was revoked (and I think it should be), this would open things up even more, of course. People who want day-to-day world-building could have that, as well.

Edited July 21, 2014 by Mariko

[arc]

Before I realized this had its own topic, I said in the 2015 topic that I'm all for breaking the tribes gender rules. The glatorian already did, so I would like to see more diversity from there. avatar the last airbender was very popular with males and had good female leads like katara and toph, plus others like the kioshi warriors and azula. I would love to see characters like them in bionicle. However I don't think gender bending existing characters is a good idea. But then again, I don't want a reboot in the first place.