the appeal of opposites
If you want an explanation to as why I like the metal and the mechanical so much, the Bionicle franchise is the first thing I would hold responsible. While I wasn't around in time for the very start of the franchise-- I remember jumping onboard at the tail end of the Hordika line and being there for Inika-- I was no less a superfan. I had as many of the sets as my allowance would get me and burned my parents brains out watching the movies on loop. I threw a tantrum because I didn't get the Piraka McDonald's toy I wanted. It was legit, man. You can imagine how pleasantly surprised I was this past holiday season when I got gifted a Lego set of Tahu and Takua. From what I can tell, it had some kind of limited release status, so the gesture certainly meant a lot to me.
Even with all that sentimentality, I still struggled to find the time and energy to actually build the thing. For the better part of this year, Tahu and Takua fared the same fate as a decent chunk of the gunpla kits that I have around and languished in the backlog. Fortunately, I got a great kick in the ass this past weekend to finally scrounge up the time and actually build the thing; I recently build a hefty chunk of additional shelving in my apartment, and was in sore need of things to take up all that newspace. So, this past Monday, I spent an evening out on my back porch and headed back to the year 2002.
I really enjoyed playing and building the original Bionicles because of how different they were mentally and physically from standard Legos. The ball joints
and mechanical gimmicks like disc launching make building a Bionicle feel very tactile in a way I didn't find in a typical Lego set. There was a lot more
playability and they felt more like toys than display pieces when completed. Naturally, when I saw that this set was made of traditional lego pieces with their
2x4 bricks and flat printed-on face plates. When I was actually building the thing, though, I noticed how much attention to detail the set has to the
old style. Take for instance the head pieces. In the actual Bionicle line, every set would have the same generic gray head shape with a different translucent
"eye" slotting into it. This would give the face a kind of glowing effect that I thought added a lot.
They riff on this in a fun way in this new set. You still build out a shape reminiscent of the old head shape, and include the translucent eye piece with It was nice to see that they even go the step of matching the plastic sliver to the eye color printed on to the face plate.
I also enjoyed how these black frying pan shaped studs were meant to evoke the pipes and plumbing the traditional torso shape had. A lot of small touches like this went a long way for me.
I was surfing through random youtube videos as background noise when I was building it-- as no one can do anything in relative quiet anymore-- and came across a couple of impressive animations of giant robots. These videos combined with the satisfying feeling of building the Tahu set made me wonder why exactly I found all of this so pleasing, and for right now I've settled on the following answer: it is the contrast of the immense and the intimate. Seeing these absolutely huge masses of metal topple city blocks by simply stepping while also zooming into the smallest pistons raising and lowering the patella of a knee joint ten yards tall is awesome. It is a very satisfying feeling to not only see something so huge move, but know it does so as a sum of thousands of little efforts. It is that contrast that I enjoy the most out of all the various aspects of mecha that I've seen so far.
