The most on brand name for a character in Bionicle. Brutaka, built like a brute? I mean, come on. And his buddy Axxon who wields a gigantic Ax. 2006 may have been the most edgy year, but those titans, as cool as they were, kinda silly names... and yet also perfect.

(hashtag)SavetheBand

@Zordboy said:
"Oh a hunch, Brutaka was one of the bad guys, right?"

Kind of. He was a dedicated member of a group called "The Order of Mata Nui" which was a quasi-religious-super spy-cult-hero-assassin organization that protected the Bionicle universe and revered the god-spirit Mata-Nui (who was actually a giant robot everyone lived in [which is a metaphor for the co-creator Christian Faber's pituitary gland tumor with the Bionicle characters representing cancer fighting medicine inside the giant body]... Bionicle lore is nuts).

Anyways Brutaka and Axxon were both assigned to protect a mythical artifact (the Mask of Life), but Brutaka slowly lost his faith during the mission; eventually being seduced to evil and joining the Piraka gang in attempting to thwart several teams of heroic Toaa attempting to find the Mask of Life to save the life of Mata-Nui. It culminated in a mano y mano duel between Brutaka and Axxon, where Axxon realized the dark force that had seduced Brutaka to evil was the gaseous form of the franchises staple villain, Makuta. Axxon smashed the vat holding the Makuta, which began to loosen the spell that had held Brutaka to evil.

After a swim in the polluted ocean that gave him some amphibious mutations, Brutaka eventually rejoined the Order of Mata Nui and attempted to atone for his betrayal. He was assigned to a Suicide-Squad knock off group including other former franchises villains such as the dark mistress Roodaka, and the team was assigned to do something that I think took them to meet knock-off Cthulhu (Tren Krom) if I remember right... Most of the stories after his duel with Axxon were told in secondary short stories and I have not read all of them and am just going off my memories of wiki-summaries, but at the end of the day Brutaka was back on the side of the heroes is the main thing to take away from it.

@xboxtravis7992 said:
"Kind of. He was a dedicated member of a group called "The Order of Mata Nui" which was a quasi-religious-super spy-cult-hero-assassin organization that protected the Bionicle universe and revered the god-spirit Mata-Nui (who was actually a giant robot everyone lived in [which is a metaphor for the co-creator Christian Faber's pituitary gland tumor with the Bionicle characters representing cancer fighting medicine inside the giant body]... Bionicle lore is nuts)."

... holy spit balls.

@Zordboy said:
" @xboxtravis7992 said:
"Kind of. He was a dedicated member of a group called "The Order of Mata Nui" which was a quasi-religious-super spy-cult-hero-assassin organization that protected the Bionicle universe and revered the god-spirit Mata-Nui (who was actually a giant robot everyone lived in [which is a metaphor for the co-creator Christian Faber's pituitary gland tumor with the Bionicle characters representing cancer fighting medicine inside the giant body]... Bionicle lore is nuts)."

... holy spit balls."

https://i.imgflip.com/11mtf7.jpg

Brutaka holds an ominous distinction within not just my BIONICLE fandom, but my overall LEGO collection. 2006 was my last full year of high school before graduating in the Spring of 2007 and going on to college after the summer. By the end of the year, it was not obvious what university I would be attending nor if my family could afford it. After throwing everything into obtaining the six Piraka and Toa Inika, along with Vezon and Fenrakk, my spending for LEGO was severely throttled. I need to save at last for college expenses!

Thankfully, as the early months of 2007 rolled, I got accepted in a few schools, including my second-favorite, and they gave me a very generous scholarship package. I knew all this by April 2007, so I could allow my personal wallet to breathe a little. With the Mahri and other BIONICLE "titan" sets for 2007 well on the way, I went about filling the gaps in 2006 collection. Brutaka was the most appealing of the larger sets, but I had been waiting for a sale. Alas, I grew impatient, and by May, I purchased him from Wal-Mart. And here is where the frightening distinction occurs: up to this point in my LEGO collection, I had opened and built every set I acquired. But I realized that when I bought Brutaka, I would only barely be able to build him before graduation, a family trip to Bolivia, and then preparing to be sent off to college out of state. I shuddered at the thought of him just collecting dust for the rest of the year, so I came up with an idea. I would leave the set sealed and stored in my closet until after I graduated college, whence (I assumed) would be the time that with a career and the need to settle down wherever work took me, I would finally have the time and space to build him and any other sets collected between late 2007 and early 2011.

Sadly, this was not (quite) to be. As my college years progressed, my LEGO collection indeed continued to grow at a faster pace, but with all boxed sets being merely admired before being stored in my closet back home. My naive hope for my post-college career backfired spectacularly when I landed a great job right out of graduation, but requiring me to essentially live on the road and in temporary housing wherever my worksites were. Even on my precious days and weeks at home, I was always too much a nervous wreck about being called out to work again to just settle down and enjoy a lot of LEGO building. I didn't want to leave a bunch of incomplete builds collecting dust either!

Many years passed. My LEGO collection grew very substantially thanks to my paychecks. After a particularly peak year for collecting (2016), I couldn't keep the charade up. At this point, I was living on my own in an apartment in the city where my corporate office was located. Business was slow, so I wasn't gone from the city as often, and I was taking more time off anyway to care for my cancer-stricken father. LEGO was a perfect escape during that time.

A little less than two years after that and more calamitous personal events, I finally broke away from my employer and found a much more stable, "typical" desk job that made me very happy. And with this stability, I finally set about finding that new home for all that LEGO. I did, and after moving in my house, I started making the LEGO room a reality. Now I could build and display sets that had long sat boxed in closets. I can't put into words how nice it felt to finally do that. I never wanted to hoard MISB LEGO for investment or bragging rights. I only wanted to build and play and create things. On that last item, I had been with a growing assortment of loose pieces, but the sets were kept apart. But not anymore!

{continued in post below. There needs to be a longer character limit to comments!}