#my current thought process | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bunnyhysteria · 13 days

Text

does anyone wanna talk about how the fandom has hyper projected onto shen yuan and went the mile with at least a leap of interruptation of one line yet turn a blind eye to the rest of canon?

specifically I'm talkin about the broke american college studentification of shen yuan coupled with the fanon that he's chronically ill. these are two beasts of their own and should be tackled differently so I will.

I personally and strongly disagree with how a lot of fanon portrays shen yuan with messy hair, a large hoodie, disgustin room, and general I guess losercore aesthetics lmao. and now I'm even wondering if he was explicitly a college student or if it was just fanon based on that he's at least 20 years old. I feel this is a mental image constructed not from canon, but the idea of what kind of person would be his age and show his behaviour online... from a western perspective.

I believe that he would be far more put together, especially as he is a rich pretty boy in modern china. the difference in acceptable levels of casual, especially for a son of a very wealthy family, are much different between america and china. honestly I do find it a bit sad I wear a slightly frilly button up shirt and a short skirt and suddenly I'm a model in my area but I digress. I definitely think that shen yuan would probably even be actively into street fashion, give how well he seems to take to shen qingqiu's own pretty boy life. I also have a hard time believin that such a low life style person would readily take to the upkeep and demands of life as an immortal master with specialty in the fine arts.

there's also something to say about his resemblance to shen qingqiu (re: mushroom body), as well as I've seen some people claim that shen yuan was tall due to his lack of reaction nor stumbling with his new towering height. while the two adaptions I know if depict him with short hair, I think he could have readily had longer hair as well, maybe shoulder or so length. if "not reacting" is grounds to stand on (which is also used for the chronically ill headcanon), one could reasonably point out he doesn't seem to have any trouble with his now waist length locks. even slowly growing out my hair I'm having shocks to what the life entails, so I can't imagine being fully chill with sudden long hair. however, with the it's modern china argument for fashion, it is most reasonable he'd have short hair.

and yet, despite all this evidence in favour of a distinguished shen yuan ignored, the fandom took his pretty boy waiting to die line and ran with it, hard. I have been told this was due to a fan translation note implying that it could have hinted to chronic illness, and it was instead warped as fact of what the line was trying to say. I've also seen the lack of reaction claim used on him supposedly adjusting very well to living with without a cure, often paralleled to some people's chronic illnesses. this is a fair headcanon and is not really a problem on it's own. I just want to speak my thoughts on it, especially in contrast to the other popular fanon arising from ignoring a fair bit of canon implications and then taking one that most likely was not even in that direction as gospel.

first and foremost, as a disabled person myself, I find a lot of fandom depiction of chronic illness to be very divorced from reality, used to play into the losercore vibe, often just thrown in there with feelin like the creator forgot they gave him a disability only to suddenly write a single sentence goin "look! he's disabled!", and worse of all as if it could be his only justification for wasting his life away on the internet.

I once read a fanfic that seemed to just list a bunch of things he had or did because of his disability in a very list-like way, but a believable combination enough to presume they at least knew someone disabled, only to leave his cane at home after establishing his unamed illness with 50 symptoms could suddenly k.o. him at any time. not only did nothing happen while he was out, I question why someone of his status yet so severely disabled would not have an ambulatory wheelchair.

I also question the lack of mental illness present in many fanfics. this is not only due to that chronic illness does not really exist independently of mental illness, but I feel that shen yuan is canonically very mentally ill. not only is he wasting his life away with no purpose, heavily implied to be neglected, but he immediately accepts and welcomes a foreign life with no consideration of going back. many people write fanfics of shen yuan pressed about his identity and wishing to be seen for him, but as I've noticed and have pointed out to me by others, that's just not the case. there is no canon reveal because there is no identity conflict. he may divorce himself from shen jiu adamantly, but he marries himself quite well to shen qingqiu, readily switchin how to refer to himself near instantly.

I also feel there's something to say about how he's not only welcoming a foreign world, but one with severe danger that he has to face. and what does he do? dissociates like hell. it takes him a couple books before he even sees those around him as people! I also feel that him not even recognizin that he was cryin from literally ripping a chunk of his own leg out until binghe pointed it out speaks volumes. he let binghe rawdog him in a craze with excruciatin pain that literally killed him and was like "yea this is fine ah what do you mean there's a chance binghe might be dead when I get back noo". could even make an argument that his ignorance to his harem is more than just comphet, but also believin that he wouldn't have value to others in that way. his value is his status: a status he didn't earn and has never earned.

I don't know. I feel there's a lot more to shen yuan than the fandom looks at or rather the fandom digs into things that aren't even there as if it's the penacle of his character. I wanna see more exploration of shen yuan as he is rather than what the fandom wants him to be. or at least to me, his pretty rich boy complex feels far more interestin than the hundredth "oh yea he's chronically ill" shoved in for little to no reason other than they can't comprehend his behaviour without it. as if to say "well if only he could physically do other things, he would. he's not like those losers who can't get a grip of themselves." completely ignorin the depths of mental illness they could explore. it feels both saneist and ableist, in different directions. he's only so pathetic because he's physically disabled. that he can't be any other way, otherwise he's just not likeable.

like give him a couple personality disorders to explore his behaviour with or something! show how he's actually so used to playing pretty composed rich boy in public and that's why he so easily slipped into his idea of shen qingqiu! something!! anything!!!

#svsss #shen yuan #text #mine #throwin this into the tags like a heathen #I feel like I'm gonna get myself into hot waters arguin a character shouldn't be depicted as chronically ill especially on the tumblrs #I mean not that he can't be but. at least do it right if yer gonna. don't just do it because you feel like you have to #or accidentally confuse it for canon or look down upon the alternative explainations for his actions #the broke college student chic thing I don't get at all though. that's just wild to me.#at first I accepted both of these things without thought in a consumption way but the moment I stepped into the idea of writing #along with plans to reread and dissect characters with notes #the less what I've already processed on the first run through made sense with fanon and so I dug into why a little bit #mayb I'll have more refined takes on my second read through but this is my current opinion

113 notes · View notes

horse-head-farms · 5 months

Text

au where hypno is a demon!

the human xb summons him not to sell his soul but with a business deal, see, demonic deals work that its a soul in exchange for whatever you want, not necessarily your own soul, but a soul. hypno cannot interact with people except his summoner, but xb can run a business where he asks for “harmless” IOUs from people, getting them to sign a piece of paper which is actually a contract for possession of your soul. since xb is a regular human, it would mean nothing, but with hypno’s help it’s magically binding and they enter a mutually beneficial deal where hypno gets a ridiculous amount of souls and xb is given what he wants by hypno.

their partnership starts off solely as a business one, but as time goes on, they grow closer and also begin to care about the business that was just supposed to be a front for them to gain souls, and once xb gets the power and wealth he originally wanted, they focus their efforts on growing Horsehead Farms as a company. they advertise themselves as a “safer” alternative than dealing directly with demons, giving people whatever they want in exchange for an IOU - not a real soul (it is their real soul, but they don’t tell them that). they manage to become a major competitor to all of hell. since it has a human head of the company, people assume it is more trustworthy. xb and hypno engage in all sorts of evil capitalistic ventures

eventually hypno gets kicked out of hell, a feat no-one thought possible, for ruining every other demons’ livelihood, and is reincarnated into a regular human. xb is investigated by officials due to the scammy and dangerous nature of Horsehead Farms, and in an epic car chase where xb tries to escape, he crashes and dies. for all the human lives he’s ruined by stealing souls, he is sent to hell and becomes a demon. they find eachother, and seeing how there’s still one human and one demon overall, they see no reason to not start their business again

#got the idea from that fanon swap thing going around. but demon hypno also kinda makes sense #feels weird drawing human xb… where your fins at bro #i imagine this is an urban fantasy setting. modern life but magic and deals are a well known phenomenon #keralis is xb’s sexy secretary i think #idk yet what the consequences are of stealing peoples souls but my current thought process is it either: drains their creativity and makes #them fatigued. or it means they don’t get an afterlife as their soul is already being used by the demon #hermitcraft #hhf #hermitcraft au #hermitblr #hypnotizd #xbcrafted #hermitcraft fanart

199 notes · View notes

jils-things · 5 days

Text

happy mothers day to my first and best momma concept ever designed 💚💚

#i love her so much. i am so proud of her ;;;; she's my biggest favorite right now because of how much ive made for her...#jaide stone was nothing but a huge catalyst for exploring new things ive never thought id find joy in 💖#and waah hehe yes big rubebe 💖 my son is so big now! so handsome 🥺🥺🥺💚💚#i feel compelled to expand on the adult ruby concept but that will be for another day :3 #anyways hello how is everyone? i know im a bit of a rollercoaster of activity right now on this blog specifically but yeah :]#ive been twirling around my alt blog so im doing okay #big irl news - ill be graduating from senior high very soon and we're currently in the process of rehearsing it heheh #so hopefully once that's over ill be here and bouncing again!#but yes - momma jaide 💖 the best in the world #~ art #jaide (mangaverse).insert #ruby.fam #stone family tag #pokespe parents #familial f/o #child f/o #selfshipping #selfship #safeship #© to cafekitsune for the dividers

56 notes · View notes

airenyah · 15 days

Text

watching sad boy tawan struggling to eat with his left hand post-injury is unintentionally hilarious when you remember that joong is in fact left-handed

#ploy's yearbook #joong archen #tawan phongtawan #pyb tawan #meine grafiken #pybgifmine #adrm #my thought process went roughly like:#''why is he eating so awkwardly? oh right his other hand is currently injured..... wAIT–''#peak acting tbh lmao #ALSO SORRY ABOUT THE QUALITY OF THE LAST GIF IT WAS A WIDE SHOT AND I DIDN'T MANAGE TO SHARPEN IT ANY BETTER #i was afraid of making it look weird if i went overboard

62 notes · View notes

ninyard · 1 month

Note

okayy jer sibling thoughts: for a minute i was toying with the idea that bryson isn't the brother cat was talking about when she says jeremy's older brother is an asshole, that there's another older brother maybe in prison? explaining the anxiety about being recognized by cops and his family's obsession with image (gotta crack down pretty hard when you already have a kid in prison). obviously jeremy doesn't get on with bryson, but he doesn't get on with annalise either (albeit not to the same extent as bryson) and cat doesn't say anything about her. granted, her wording of "/the/ older brother" implies bryson is the only one and therefore the asshole, but the other brother being in prison is still possible. if bryson *is* the bad one, i think he likely hurt jeremy at some point. i'm thinking about lucas and jeremy's phone convo where jeremy asks if lucas feels safe with grayson and lucas says "he's my brother" and jeremy says "that's not what i asked"... the exchange feels pointed imo

I didn’t even realise that interaction between Lucas and Jeremy was…significant but now that you point it out to me oh my GOD is it relevant it’s SO pointed.

This just gives me an opportunity to share my Jeremy’s Family Situation Theory okay so in this theory: (reposted it here)

- Jeremy has an estranged oldest brother

- This brother goes by their father’s surname and not Knox

- Jeremy’s brother was also on the Trojans (but this may or may not be dependent on them having different surnames)

- Jeremy’s brother was homophobic

So I have a few theories about the Banquet incident and one that’s a mess of a bunch of different theories and it’s this: picture Older Brother. Older brother is a 4th year Trojan, he’s well liked, but he’s kind of an asshole in private. His dad is Jeremy’s dad - but he grew up with a different surname, because their parents were still together/married by the time he was in school. Jeremy and his sister became Knox kids after their mother married into the Knox family. The older brother was old enough and refused to change from his father’s surname. He tried to fit in with the Knox family but he knows he’s kind of a black sheep for it. He’s the one that’s excluded from public facing recognition, because he’s not a Knox.

Jeremy gets scouted for the Trojans while his brother is still there, and to have his baby brother on the team was INFURIATING to him. He didn’t get along with Jeremy already, but to have him on this team. Oh, he hated Jeremy for that. But the key thing here is he never revealed that Jeremy was his younger brother. He threatened Jeremy as well, and told him to keep his mouth shut, and tell NO ONE that they were related.

Along comes the fall banquet. Jeremy is out as a gay man and has been for quite a while. It’s a bone of contention in his family but ultimately they accept it as long as he is quiet about it, and it doesn’t interfere with their political or public image. But Jeremy’s oldest brother never supported Jeremy and regularly insulted him or bullied him over it. So, Jeremy is out, and he decides to bring a man to the banquet. 1) his mother begged him not to. 2) his sister begged him not to. 3) everyone in his family begged him not to. But he refuses to hide who he is or pretend to be straight for the sake of their image. In the end there’s nothing they can do, and he goes with this man.

Jeremy, little freshman Jeremy, rolls up to the banquet with a man on his arm. It’s 2003, maybe 2004. It’s a huge deal. Jeremy’s older brother doesn’t know he is bringing said man to the banquet, and he fucking glares at him all night. He’s so angry. By the time the tables get moved, he plucks up the courage to cross the hall to Jeremy. Calls him a very unsavoury slur starting with an F and Jeremy hits his brother, he punches him square in the face. He would’ve hit him again, but they get pulled apart and he can’t. Theres witnesses. And still nobody knows they’re related. The brother leaves him alone, Jeremy promises to stay away from him, and the night continues.

Jeremy steps outside to get some air, and unbeknownst to him his brother follows him. An altercation ensues, and eventually they start PUMMELLING each other. His brother hits him first, Jeremy hits him back, there’s blood and bruises and now more witnesses as Jeremy’s brother beats him the fuck up. Somebody called the cops, and the cops have to separate them. They ask Jeremy if he wants to press charges; he says yes. He says he wants it to be reported as a hate crime. They ask his brother if he wants to press charges for assault, and he says yes. So they both get arrested.

Where I think Jeremy’s fear of cops comes from, or lack of trust, or hatred for them, is how he was treated that night. The cops tell him they need a reason to charge his brother with a hate crime, he tells them he’s gay, and he gets treated like SHIT. They search him for no reason, they’re looking for any reason they can to make him uncomfortable or drop the charges. They’re asking him did he do anything to deserve it? Did he antagonise his brother? Has he been drinking? They make him really fucking uncomfortable and upset. by the time his mom bails him out he’s ready to drop the charges, but decides not to. The brother goes to stay with his father, Jeremy goes home, and the Knox family pay A LOT of money to keep this quiet. They don’t charge Jeremy with assault, but maybe they tell his mom there’s nothing they can do about Jeremy’s charges against his older brother if he won’t drop them.

Proceed to the reaction from USC; they recognise it as a hate crime and Jeremy doesn’t get kicked out of school, but he does get a very stern warning and maybe gets benched for a while. His brother on the other hand loses everything: there’s an active hate crime charge against him, he brutally assaulted a freshman while representing the team, and he gets removed from the team and expelled from the university. The Knox family have no choice but to estrange him further than he already was - so he’s totally out of the picture.

Jeremy tore the family apart because of his refusal to drop the charges, then him dropping the charges and instead getting a no-contact/restraining order against his brother means that while he’s living there the brother cannot be in the picture. So brother who is already a black sheep for not being a Knox, is now no longer welcome in the family home (except for when Jeremy is not in the house - if he’s not estranged, possibly he visits on the weekends, or lives there during the summer? And that’s why Jeremy doesn’t live at home during those times?)

The scandal is that he caused a team member to be removed from the team as a freshman, his sister who doesn’t like him that much anyway can now no longer see her brother, and she stopped supporting Jeremy’s matches because of it. He tore the family apart because of his insistence on being “GAY HATE CRIME VICTIM”. They bullied him into not seeking justice - and his sibling hate him for this whole incident. They don’t agree with him being gay because of their political affiliations, his older brother lost HIS older brother because of him, his sister lost him too. Idk

Does this even make sense? Is it far fetched? I don’t know I don’t care I just had to get this off my chest. I could talk about my theories FOREVER. This is just. A quick short summary of the possibility of an oldest brother who’s no longer in the Knox Family Picture.

#I’m so sorry for this rant #but I had to talk about it #Jeremy Knox #tsc spoilers #tsc #the sunshine court #Jeremy’s family I will not rest until I figure you out!!!!!!!!#I’m gonna write this as a fic I think #I might change my mind on some specifics #and May disregard some points later #but this is my current thought process if there is a chance he has another brother

60 notes · View notes

scintillyyy · 5 months

Text

red robin #4

robin iii: cry of the huntress #4

same vibes. to me.

#dick and tim #arkham takes are dumb and tired #tim should instead angst about how ppl always want to send him to metropolis when he's riding the struggle bus #tim should tell dick that he's acting like jack & that should have the same energy of when my fil tells my mil she's acting like her sister #we all know what that really means when that is said #actually realistically i in no way think that dick was trying to shuttle tim off to another city because he couldn't deal with him #nor do i think that he was trying to institutionalize tim. clearly he was just trying to get him to talk to someone #but the 'in metropolis' bit always gets me a little bit because there's a perceived distance from gotham damian etc implied there #like why not a therapist in gotham? because dick wanted tim to have some distance from the cause of all his current pain #because maybe he thought that's what tim needed to heal. to process away from the epicenter of grief.#anyways that it's metropolis will never not be funny to me because i can make this joke

98 notes · View notes

randomwriteronline · 3 days

Text

Bionicle and Plato's Cave: Mata Nui help us Random has been thinking again

HI. MY BRAIN HAS ONCE AGAIN BEEN SCRAMBLED. WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING.

A thing about stories is that there aren't really fully, one-hundred percent original ones. This is not a bad thing, it just happens.

Stories keep repeating one another whether we like it or not, maintaining their own identities through a variety of changes, and Bionicle repeats many, many stories within itself: you've got Polynesian mythos, fantasy epics, dystopian fiction, cosmic horrors, torahic and/or biblical episodes, a subversion of Pinocchio, an Odissey cut short... The works. I'm half certain one would manage to fit some parts of the Divine Comedy in there, probably.

But speaking of deeply allegorical works, the Organic Annal is that too - specifically bearing a resemblance to one of Greek philosopher Plato's most famous allegorical myths, that of the cave.

For those who do not know it, please have a simplistic bastardized version of its first half, which is the most relevant in this case:

A group of men have been, since birth, shackled within the deepest recesses of a cave. They are sat facing a wall upon which a fire casts the shadows of figurines (a tree, a donkey, a vase, etc) placed before it: this is all they've ever known, what they perceive to be reality. Imagine, then, that one of these prisoners manages to free themself from their restraints, and for the first time looks back. Thus they discover the figurines, the fire, and the lie they thought was truth; and though it would be easy to consider these new idols the "true" reality, the prisoner looks past them and sees that the cave stretches forward. As such they crawl through it until they reach the outside world: the sunlight forces their eyes down as they are not used to it yet, and their first taste of this new environment is a reflection in a puddle, or maybe a lake, wobbly and not quite clear. Only when they've accustomed to the Sun they can raise their head and properly discover the real world.

The myth of the cave is an allegory for the philosopher's quest in search of true knowledge, which resides not in the imperfect physical world, but in the perfect metaphysical realm of ideas.

This is not, necessarily, the allegory I believe the Innard Scoresheet represents.

The Biological Chronicle is, to me, a story about stories. About making stories, about being swept in the flow of a story, about recreating ourselves in stories over and over and over again.

I promise it will probably make more sense later.

But back to the point: the myth and the Flesh Record follow a similar structure and have a similar message. That is the thesis of this post until I inevitably get derailed again. Let's look at that.

In applying the steps (shadow, copy, reflection, reality) of the philosopher's journey towards enlightenment to the Meat Diaries, I'll do what Plato would bludgeon my head with a stick for and take them much more literally: the places described are physical ones, and the characters actively move between them. This is not because of any personal wish to specifically spite some dead Athenian fuck, but because that is literally what happens in the Entrail Annotations, whether through actual movement or changes of perspective.

The island of Mata Nui is of course the first step: shadows cast upon a cave wall.

There is a certain irony in this. Mata Nui shares the same allegorical location as the cave, yet physically is its complete opposite - an open space signaling the end of an enormous interconnected system of caves. The journey starts from the end. Great job everybody, we've found reality! This philosophy shit is easy.

But the island is still very much the cave. It looks prettier and livelier than the cave, but it's still a prison in which the Matoran have been confined with no chance of escaping; it's still cut off from the world at large, be it beneath it ir around it; it's still a place where beings who do not know any better blindly believe what is told to them. Only seven people know the truth (or what they believe to be the truth) and spin it in tales of shadow puppets: simplistic retellings full of gaps to fill with magic and terror and prophecies. The Turaga mean no harm - they had no way to know when or if they would have ever returned to Metru Nui, and it made no sense reminding the Matoran of a place they may end up agonizing to see without being able to - but it remains that Mata Nui is a cave, a prison of ignorance.

Things change after Mask of Light: shackles broken and door opened, the silver sea stretches before the Matoran and offers them a sight familiar yet different, more defined.

Metru Nui is the figurine, the copy held in front of the fire. It's the first introduction to the Matoran Universe proper, the first step towards the cave's exit. Here we see how the Matoran are supposed to work, how this sort of society is meant to function, and it... well, it sort of sucks the joy out of it, doesn't it? The soft edges of the figurine's shadow have been replaced by hard protodermis sides that leave no room to the imagination, letting us see the craftmanship clearly. And it's... it's kind of unpleasant. Kind of dull and mean and so... unmagical. I'd like the shadows again please. Those were nicer.

(Plato describes this exact happenstance in the philosopher's journey - upon seeing something closer to the truth one might feel repelled and want to return to simpler times. But we persevere. We must.)

Or perhaps this step is not Metru Nui itself, but the Turaga's recollection of it. The city they knew is now gone, abandoned to itself and rotting miserably alone for a thousand years, and yet they still cling to that pristine image their minds have sculpted for it, forgetting details, crafting imperfect copies of its reality: their own stories place it in a time before time, turn it as they say in a "city of legends", of great minds and a great hero and a strange tension pervading it that they might not consciously recognize. This is their basis for the stories they told, and they believe it to be the truth. It is not. The truth is deeper behind them.

The Matoran Universe as a whole is a reflection in the water. We've gotten out of that cave, but it's still too bright and our eyes can't adapt quickly enough: this will have to do for now.

But what is it a reflection of? A body? That's a given, since the whole thing is housed inside one. Yet this body does not behave like a body, its organs don't act like organs. They are landmarks and settlements, and there are species and parties involved in their own more or less treacherous businesses, and death is everywhere and seldom spares anybody, and evil isn't a singular incomprehensible thing but many perfectly identical pieces, and everything is happening all the time and I would like a break. Please. I can't handle all of this. It's too close to how everything already is. Let's go back to the figurines. They were worse than the shadows, but not to this extent. Please. I just don't want to see the bad guys win. I just don't want to see my friends die.

(Upon seeing something closer to the truth one might feel repelled and want to return to simpler times. But we persevere. We must.)

The Matoran Universe is a terrible place, but it's still far away. The edges are wobbly when the surface shifts: the stakes are universal in size, the rivalries are exaggerated, the situations are fantastical, the evil so terrible and terribly simple. It does what it does because it simply does it, and after all why else should it do it? In its increasing complexity it's still simple and sometimes a bit silly. It's still dolls that you can hold in your hand to make fly around.

As @sepublic mentions briefly here, Bara Magna is by contrast just so human. Before the big bombastic Rock-Em-Sock-Em Jumbo Edition ending and peeling away the sci-fi elements, these are stories of people trying to live. This is reality.

People are sleazy. People have priorities that not always include the well-being of other being put first. People are evil for reasons beyond just "power" or "money" or "why not". Strakk is a massive selfish bastard and also he is the one motherfucker who gets me because to be very honest I too would not want to wade through a desert crawling with quicksand and huge bat winged serpents and raptor riding marauders and spartans so bloodthirsty they don't even name their children until they make a new body count record without being paid well enough. Mata Nui's idealized honor makes him a complete anomaly because nobody is a prince in shining armor here. They're all covered in bones and doing their best not to start a war again.

Even his quest, despite what it entails and how solemnly he presents it and the information we as readers have (his identity as a usurped god exiled from his own body), is surprisingly real - in fact, his struggle is actually the same as Kiina's: both of them are strangers to the region suddenly separated from their people during a time of great strife and desperately wanting to reunite with them. The difference being that while Kiina had no chance to do such a thing, Mata Nui was built to fix both of their problems.

This is what the Matoran Universe is made in the image of. And while it very much deviated across time, the core of it remained the same: elemental tribes and variegated species caught in a dance of death, biting each other's tails endlessly.

This is the world the MU beings find once fully free. It's rough, but they've been through something like this before.

They'll handle it.

They always have.

That is the will of the Non-Mineral Journal.

Of Bionicle, the story-that-ended.

BUT.

Not necessarily of Bionicle, the story-that-does-not-end.

Now we are getting into "Random Experiences Getting The Brain Scrubbed By The Hard Back Of A Sponge And Makes It The Problem Of Everybody Listening To The Inane Yelling" territory. I'm talking walking into headcanon if not straight up just fanfiction territory. Possibly also sensible speculation but I don't know how to tell. Please do come smack me if you feel it is needed.

It's wild that Bionicle has managed to endure for what now (2024) are 23 years. The endless rebuildable possibilities intrinsic to being a LEGO product have certainly helped, but at the same time I really do feel like it wouldn't have held this strongly without its story.

I will admit I'm not a building kind of person. I had some ancient LEGO bricks when I was little and what I usually did with them was stacking them in a really tall line and try to keep it upright until they fell and scattered like lemmings booking it for a cliff. Getting into Bionicle would have never been possible for me had my dear beautiful friend @cantankerouscanuck not innocently dropped me links to Legends of Metru Nui, Web of Shadows, and the Crosswired Geeks website asking if I could have please considered skimming through it. This was back in september 2023. These pieces of plastic have been irreversibly fucking up my brain for nine months, and it was only possible because the plot and characters were written in a way that actively sunk its teeth into my skull and did an alligator death spin so potent that I'm still reeling from it, thinking about it.

I do think that's one of the main reasons why it's still going, why people still talk about it. It lives on through fans who still look at all the enormous potential left by the gaps and holes in the story and work on them, analyze them, make their own versions of them. So this second section is about that part of Bionicle, the story that just does not end, carried on by others.

So back to the point, what actually kickstarted this entire line of thought (the Squishy Note and the allegory of the cave are sort of the same lol) was a headcanon I have about the characters that have been actually missing from this analysis: the Great Beings.

You Know.

The Guys Who Kickstarted Every Single Thing, And Notably Continuously Did All Of It Wrong.

From my own prior knowledge I had understood that they are all Glatorian, and I just learned that they also were, apparently, given their incredible weird fucked up mental powers that made them into godly creatures by a space octopus.

I am going to take both pieces of information and discard them.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with them, except maybe coming from the leftest field available like a sack of granite to the face, but I feel like this kind of explanation for who and what they are isn't really satisfactory to me specifically. It does fit with the allegory of the cave still, technically - they are part of the real world, the ones who created every layer of detachment from it on purpose (somebody must have shackled those prisoners at the bottom of the cave, after all) and have managed to get to a higher level of reality still, following the platonic quest for knowledge into something that resembles the iperuranium, the perfect metaphysical world in which ideas reside.

But also... I'd like for there to be a limit to how higher we can go, you know? Into the cosmic horror? Because everything is cosmic horror in the Doctor's Report already. We live on a god's face. We live in a god's body. We are a god's cells. Our universe is a tiny manmade action figure in a larger universe. Our god is just a synthetic soul. The real older gods made it and sent it around to do their bidding. Also they're all gonna kill us when we figure out our universe is fake. Cosmic horror. Cosmic horror for miles. These are fucking LEGOs. Why is there so much existentialism in them.

So yeah, at the cost of sounding boring the psychic octopus from outer space might be a little bit too far for my personal tastes.

This does not mean I am immune to adding onto the cosmic horror.

Because my personal interpretation of who/what they are still adds onto the cosmic horror.

It just doesn't also include "giant aquatic fauna with psychic powers" in the already very large salad of sentient sapient species who have stakes in this universe, because I think we have enough of those.

So what is my platonic ideal form for them?

The Great Beings are human beings. Straight up just people. They're the readers, the players, the writers, the designers, the creators and tellers of the chronicle itself - they have this immense dominion over everything around them because they are the origin of everything around them in a sense, but their constant failings make sense because for all the influence and power they are still human, and that makes them very, very fallible. I mean, mr Greg "I will rewire your brain chemistry forever with some of the best stuff you'll read as a kid, and also for undiscernible reasons doors aren't canon" Farshtey would be one of them. Things make a lot of sense.

(this is impossible in Stone Cold Canon by the way and I am aware, because if we got to properly see the Great Beings they would have needed to be products to sell, but this is not a matter of probability it's a matter of Vision. like can you imagine how fucking cool would have been a Bonkle movie where the characters finally meet the Great Beings face to face and when it happens the style just completely shifts from 3D animation to a stop-motion and live-action combo with the Great Beings played by people and the characters portrayed by their actual sets with all of the lack of expression and stiff hands and all. do you see it. im about to blow up)

And so, we return to the allegory.

What are the shadows on the wall? Are they still the Turaga's tales? Then shouldn't they be their memories, as well? Everything that comes out of their mouth is hazy either with nostalgia or simplification, and none of it can be real. Yet they present it as such, because to them it is. Their ignorance is the same as the Matoran's, but they do not grasp it because they can't. Mata Nui to them is not the cave, it's the reflection in a lake: an imperfect mirror of reality. They cannot see the fire nor the figurines.

They are the figurines. Man-made creations confined under artificial light in a vast underground system, as large as a whole galaxy and yet so small, so isolated, so far back into the cave they are never meant to know anything other than. The shadows were their own but they can't realize that, and they can't realize they themselves are copies. The Matoran Universe is a puppet show that Teridax shuts down as he takes its reigns: he banishes its fire, Mata Nui (who is a gnostic Demiurge, a god made by gods demanding worship despite its falsehood - another copy not fully aware of being a copy) and shuts the entrance, plunging it all into darkness. No more knowledge. It is not something dolls need, after all.

Bara Magna is not the last step. It is not yet reality, not yet the truth. It's closer, much closer, but it's not: it's the lake, the puddle, the reflection that distorts when something is thrown into it. The stakes are more realistic, the characters and motivations, but not yet real. There is still a layer of separation: the elemental powers, the alien setting, the strange beasts, the supernatural history, the secrets pointing to things much bigger and more fantastical than anything reality could be, the way it is cut short by no fault of its own. What does it reflect? It's not the Matoran Universe, since that is a model based on Bara/Spherus Magna. It's not Mata Nui, because that is an attempt at recreating what the Matoran Universe was, at least in part. So... Is it the real world? Our, world?

It must be.

The Great Beings (us, the players and readers and writers and artists) shaped all of this. This universe is their creation, their work, and it is based on what they know, on their reality, because all stories are.

Maybe it was a story as close to real as possible that turned fantastic and wild until it became mythical, or maybe it was a simple story that grew so complex and grounded that it became life-like. It doesn't matter. It's a long story, a really, really long one, and maybe they're tired of it, or maybe they don't know what to do with it, or maybe they just think it has run its course, or maybe... Maybe they don't know how to tell it again. Tell it like this again.

So... I guess the thing to do is clean up.

Full tabula rasa.

And once we're done we can take these figurines we still have left, the last proof of all this immense work, this spiraling dive into who and what we are, how we function, how we create, how we imitate and recreate ourselves in fictional worlds that are our own and yet completely alien over and over, and make new ones. Distorted reflections that become imperfect copies to place before a fire so that their shadows can play out a new story upon a cave wall, for those same dolls to believe they are real.

God I got sidetracked severely

#bionicle #random talks #HELLO this took me TWO DAYS to write and i somehow reached conclusions i hadnt thought of during the writing process. Help Me #it also brought me Thoughts about g2 that i need to write down in a fic Right Now. it is Fucking Late In The Night. Shit.#also i finished this while watching an in-depth analysis of Emesis Blue (tf2 psych-horror movie) thats TWO HOURS LONG and very interesting #just to give you an idea of my current state #anyways its a mess. enjoy.

20 notes · View notes