Rock Raiders Bionicle.

One of the six "left over pieces" Matoran. Would have been kind of neat to see some recolors instead of just mini Toa Metru.

I kind of hate what Greg to this character. An oddball little guy who is an engineer and inventor in 2006? Fun. The twist reveal he was a god descendant to mortal form and started going on a murder streak in 2010? Felt less like an "oh my gosh!!" reveal and more like watching the character of an old friend changed to serve the plot. I hate that.

@MCLegoboy said:
"One of the six "left over pieces" Matoran. Would have been kind of neat to see some recolors instead of just mini Toa Metru."

Yeah, the 2004 Matoran all had recolored masks, would have been nice for the 2006 Matoran to follow suit. The only recolored Metru mask we got was a dark blue Great Ruru in 8940.

Honestly most/all Greg-lore post-2010 may as well be taken as semi-canon, it's honestly weird that the fandom treats Greg-canon as the highest authority when he was only a piece of the Bionicle storytelling and lore puzzle, especially the post-2010 supplemental material with minimal Lego oversight.

That said, the fact that this guy's a god-turned-mortal-turned-major-slasher-villain in Greg-lore is too ridiculous and iconic (especially since it effectively makes him the final G1 villain since the serials were cancelled in the middle of his murder mystery plot) that it's effectively welded directly to any image of the character. That guy, yes, that $4 guy using recycled parts, not even one of the three plot-important ones of Balta, Dalu, and Garan, got an *insane* post-mortem significance boost by being chosen to be the Great Being in disguise slaying demigods and framing 8939 Lesovikk for the death of 8940 Karzahni. It's such a buck-wild writing choice that can't really be undone.

The lore on this guy’s going to be insane

No lore tonight, maybe in the morning. This one is wild

@Alia_of_AGL said:
"Honestly most/all Greg-lore post-2010 may as well be taken as semi-canon, it's honestly weird that the fandom treats Greg-canon as the highest authority when he was only a piece of the Bionicle storytelling and lore puzzle, especially the post-2010 supplemental material with minimal Lego oversight.

That said, the fact that this guy's a god-turned-mortal-turned-major-slasher-villain in Greg-lore is too ridiculous and iconic (especially since it effectively makes him the final G1 villain since the serials were cancelled in the middle of his murder mystery plot) that it's effectively welded directly to any image of the character. That guy, yes, that $4 guy using recycled parts, not even one of the three plot-important ones of Balta, Dalu, and Garan, got an *insane* post-mortem significance boost by being chosen to be the Great Being in disguise slaying demigods and framing 8939 Lesovikk for the death of 8940 Karzahni. It's such a buck-wild writing choice that can't really be undone."

See here's the thing about Greg, he's a good writer but not a great one; and to much of his tropes are sourced in comic book and TTRPG lore. He lacks the sort of irreverent tongue-in-cheek tone of say Jim Butcher to be fun to read as an adult, and kind of reminds me of a watered down Brandon Sanderson (and I struggle to read Sanderson). He's certainly not Frank Herbert or J.R.R. Tolkien in terms of storytelling or world building either. At best Greg might pass as a Larry Niven, which worked in Bionicle's favor in awe over Big Dumb Objects, but at his worst Greg reads like a c-tier DC or Marvel author.

I think what worked for Greg is his audience was children, and he was one of the first authors to engage his audience in meaningful Q&A's. I always have some regret voicing my criticism of his writing because of his genuinely great fan interactions (and for all of my criticism on his writing, he was an editor on the Star Wars book that inspired Pulitzer Prize winning Andor's Ghorman Massacre, which is wild to me that Greg indirectly had some influence on that). But, the 2010 serials are all of Greg's worst writing traits boiled down to the core, especially lacking the Bionicle story team oversight that made his comics and early books fun. Velika might as well be the poster boy for that, throw in Vezon becoming "Deadpool, but LEGO" and Lariska the "cool O.C. don't steal" and everything cool in 2001 Bionicle was dead in late-2010 for the most generic comic book and dime novel sci-fi/fantasy tropes you can imagine.

Bionicle lore: This guy's a little bitch and we hate him

@xboxtravis7992 said:"See here's the thing about Greg, he's a good writer but not a great one; and to much of his tropes are sourced in comic book and TTRPG lore."

Well, he wrote for TTRPGs some time before he ever worked on Bionicle. I have a copy of the West End Games Star Wars RPG (Revised and Expanded) from the Nineties, and he's one of the writers.

As someone who never read any of the books, had only passing familiarity with the comics and whose main knowledge of the lore came filtered down through BZPower, was there any actual foreshadowing that this guy would turn out to be a Great Being? Like, I know roughly that he was a bit quirky even for the Voyatoran, basically the closest thing they had to a Turaga, but did anything ever leap out as “secretly a god”?

@Brickalili said:
"As someone who never read any of the books, had only passing familiarity with the comics and whose main knowledge of the lore came filtered down through BZPower, was there any actual foreshadowing that this guy would turn out to be a Great Being? Like, I know roughly that he was a bit quirky even for the Voyatoran, basically the closest thing they had to a Turaga, but did anything ever leap out as “secretly a god”?"

No. Absolutely not!

Speaking to the set, in a year awash with new parts and colors that would set the design language for BIONICLE until the end of its run, trying to muster any enthusiasm for Velika or any of the Voya Nui Matoran was a struggle. On the plus side, yay! No clone builds (this was a big deal after years with all the small boxed sets the same set, just recolored and given a different weapon or mask). But on the downside, you could tell that after all the budget at LEGO went to the new Piraka molds, the light-up eye parts, and the canister packaging, there was literally nothing but scraps left for the Matoran builds. They might as well have been alternate models from another set! I mean, Velika here has no eyes (the skull part is left hollow), but the rest of the Matoran are even worse. Kazi doesn't even have a proper head!

Story-wise, it was cooked up that these Matoran were misshapen refugees of Karzahni or something, but it was a piss-poor excuse in an otherwise extraordinary year for BIONICLE sets.

And coming full circle to Velika's role in the story, I hold up his "reveal" as a Great Being as a prime example of why I reject fandom's call for BIONICLE to be "finished". Those serials left hanging in 2011 were rife with unnecessary plotlines that, while entertaining, really didn't have any real bearing on the original plot, the original "Biological Chronicle". For me, BIONICLE ended with that lovely scene in the final comic of Mata Nui saying farewell to the assembled Toa, Turaga, Matoran, Glatorian, and Agori, leaving them a new paradise to live and build in peace.

A cousin give this one to me, but I was missing the weapons. The set is really drab without them. I eventually got them when I was able to use Bricklink, but you might remember what happened for me with most of my old bionicle collection from my other posts. I now have it again, and last christmas I actually even completed the set of 6 for the first time :D

Btw, the lore on this guy is nuts. And as someone who didn't have access to the comics or books but who did read the online serials, I fully agree with the above post of @xboxtravis7992. Greg has done wonderful things for the story for sure, but some of the serials were just baffling and in hindsight are probably the case of one man being left to his own devices with no other writers to work with.
I appreciate everything he made, but at the same time he opened far too many plotlines only to leave them hanging, which was inevitable with the rate he was writing different serials with many long plotlines each. Stuff like the Golden Skinned Being, Velika, the new toa of psionics and the red star were some of my least favourite plot threads, even if they had been finished.

When I first glanced at the small image I thought it was an early Mixel.
How I miss those.

Come to think of it, there has never been a Mixel as RSOTD yet, has there? Even though they have been eligible for over two years.

@Brickalili said:
"As someone who never read any of the books, had only passing familiarity with the comics and whose main knowledge of the lore came filtered down through BZPower, was there any actual foreshadowing that this guy would turn out to be a Great Being? Like, I know roughly that he was a bit quirky even for the Voyatoran, basically the closest thing they had to a Turaga, but did anything ever leap out as “secretly a god”?"

IIRC, Greg wrote the "someone is secretly a Great Being" twist without even knowing who it would be, and asked BZP for candidates, and this ended up making the most sense while not being obvious, but there was never a chapter after that, and he just kinda stated it's Velika in a post.

Velika means a big female in my langauge. Do with that info as you will.

I liked the 2006 Matoran line but it's missed opportunity not getting recolored Metru masks.

The Great Beings were once the scientist kings of Spherus Magna. As time went on they all debated on how much dominion they should have over the planet. Despite the complaints of a Great Being (who we'll call Velika for now) the other GBs decided to pawn off their leadership duties onto the Elemental Lords. This led to the Core War that would split the planet apart, which emboldened Velika and convinced him he was right that the general populous were too stupid for their own good.

When the Great Spirit Robot was built, Velika hatched a long-running secret plan. While the other GB's went to the safety in a stronghold in the far north, Velika transferred his consciousness into an unsuspecting Po-Matoran onboard the vessel. Right away, his obsession with riddles and philosophy felt off for the completely robotic drones. He was deemed broken and sent to the realm of Karzahni for repairs, only to wind up twisted and mutilated, and was then sent off to the Southern Continent.

But Velika did not want to rule simple robots, that would be to easy, so he began to modify the code of the MU's inhabitants. He gave them better sapience, prompting emotion, creativity, and self awareness. In this "The Awakening" the biomechanical experiments became truly alive, and Velika found it an interesting study on the development of culture.

When the Great Cataclysm occurred, Velika was stranded on the island of Voya Nui when it was shot to the surface. When the Piraka arrived on the island they enslaved and brainwashed most of the Matoran, with Velika being one of the six survivors to form the Voya Nui Resistance Team. This team helped the Toa Inika when they came to stop the Piraka and find the Mask of Life.

After Mata Nui completed his mission and reunited the planet, Velika put the final stage of his plan in motion. He began killing many of the old lords of the BIONICLE world, like Karzahni and Tren Krom, pinning the blame on the Toa in order to make the people of Spherus Magna distrust them. Around the same time, the Toa killer robot Marendar awoke, likely under his influence. Eventually, with all the great powers and heroes out of the way, the simple masses would be easy for him to take control of and rule the planet. The story ended on a cliffhanger before we learned both which body the Great Being was possessing (now we know it was this dude) or how his plan succeeded/failed

He also had a lot of secret agents and alliances still on Bara Magna, but aside from arming a tribe of intelligence Vorox and convincing them to hunt Toa for sport none of this really came up in the story.

As soon as I saw this guy's picture, I said "oh boy", knowing we were in for a ride with this one. Honestly, the comments have been a lot more restrained than I expected them to be so far, but I guess there's still time yet...

Like others have said, I also don't consider the late story serials to be part of my personal perception of canon. Mr. Farshtey was having fun with them, and I don't begrudge him that; but by that point I feel like they really should have been little non-canon 'what if'-style short stories, rather than appending all this lore to the end of the story that literally couldn't have any effect on the already-established events. That said, I also wasn't around for them, having mostly jumped ship once 2008 wrapped up and only checking back in intermittently in 2010 to find out how the story ended; so maybe these were better received at the time, and it's only with hindsight that they feel like weird additions?

Honestly, although I will happily pretend it never happened, the Velika thing isn't even the thing I liked least to come from them: that would be the way that 90% of everyone who died in the Bionicle story got revived on the Red Star, which is now a space station, and therefore death is meaningless in that universe unless you're called Matoro or Sidorak. It cheapens so much of what came before, and to me doesn't feel at all compatible technology-wise with the rest of what we know about the Bionicle world. I know certain characters have been revived in the story before - Jaller in Mask of Light being the primary (and never fully explained) example - but that was a one-off, and honestly easier to accept since the end of MoL didn't really seem to know what it was doing anyway so what was one more piece of weirdness? Doing that massive scale for everyone is a choice, though.

As to Velika... I have to say that he was perhaps my least-favourite of the Voyatoran, even from the start. I loved most of those little guys - they may have been made from leftover scraps, but there was a charm to that, in my view; their different builds gave them so much CHARACTER, they were a welcome point of familiarity in a year where so many of the main characters had rubber faces/masks that made them look otherworldly and different at first glance, and I've always had a soft spot for the Matoran characters in general - but Velika was just a straight recolour of Garan's build rather than being any kind of variation the way the others were, so he immediately became least interesting out of them all, for me. I didn't *dislike* him, but he also never really clicked for me.

(Perhaps Kazi being my favourite of them, and being the one who was eternally frustrated by Velika, may have had an effect on my perception of the guy too...!)

Still, even while unironically loving the others, I do agree that they would have benefitted from a) masks being switched up between them and recoloured, instead of being exact reuses from the Toa Metru and b) eyepieces in their heads. The latter, particularly, puzzles me: appropriate eyepieces were even used that same year, albeit only in two colours now, on Axonn and Brutaka, so they weren't out of production; and the lack of eyes wasn't something that was ever relevant or even referenced in the plot, so I really don't understand why they couldn't have given these guys (as well as Dekar and Defilak from the following year) the two extra pieces each required to prevent being able to look through their eye holes and straight out the back of their skulls...

(Note that Velika's artwork here does make it look like he has orange eyes, as is the case with a few of the other Matoran too. This is entirely artistic lisence.)