@Miyakan said:
"Double Bionicle!!"

There's a fly in the ointment...

I like...to singa...?

Two Bionicle sets in two days that I actually own.

@Murdoch17 responding to your comment on the last RSotD.

Do you think GSR is the only user who can provide Bionicle or Lego lore? It’s not like there aren’t other people who are knowledgeable regarding the stories of various themes.

I think I got one of these in my megahaul of 100+ Bohrok Va (the vast majority of which were Nuhvok Va) that I got at 3/$5 during the Kay*Bee lawsuit sale. I was never really a fan of the lopsided hands on the regular Lehvak, and it's even less appealing as a skull plate.

Looks rather froggish to me.

@xccj:
The Bohrok Va had black 2L friction axle-pins and McToran feet, plus they were the exclusive source of brainpans that weren't light-grey (if you cared about that sort of thing). I actually liked Nuhvok Va quite a bit. Some of the others were okay. This was just bottom of the pile, though.

Hmm...wonder what'd happen if you said this ones name...to a Klingon...:)

Also: @Harmonious_Building, um no; it'd be:
"Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal..." ("froggish" enough for ya @MeisterDad:))

It’s ironic that the little guy has to slice things up with such tiny looking machetes when it’s head is a giant set of secateurs

@Brickalili , @AustinPowers it's not easy being green

I used to own two of these. For some reason I thought that these were the leaders of the Bohrok, hence the shields for head plates. Of course that wasn't the case. But I always actually liked the asymmetrical head on this. It's like a combed hairline. For whatever leader I also imagined Lehvak Va as a leader of this group. Maybe it was the red eyes. Maybe the katana. Who knows?

Anyway it wasn't canon at all. But that's the neat part. It didn't matter and the figures were obtainable enough for me to have some fun.

I just now realize this might come off as a comment about Bionicle lore. It's not. This was more about how I regarded the set before the lore. I love the lore stuff a lot and always really appreciate the lore writeups by those who provide them, being a fellow OG fan :)

I happened to help a friend rebuild his old Bionicle collection a week ago after finding the boxes containing them in his attic. Both the Lehvak-Va and yesterday’s RSotD Nuhrii were among them. He had a surprising number of the earlier sets that I still do not own, but I have a lot more of the later years because he got out of the hobby early on.

After that we watched Mask of Light in celebration of its 20th anniversary, though it did not hold up that well. He has never watched the films so I wonder what he thinks of the sequels.

Would you believe that, despite being a Bionicle fan from practically day one, I didn't even know that these guys existed at the time?

To be fair, in the UK we really got the short end of the Bionicle stick in 2002. While we got the first comic packaged free with Lego World Club magazine, just like we had with the two* the year before; but for the rest of the year we didn't get any more of them, just a three-or-four page excerpt from the comics printed in the main magazine instead - it wasn't until 2003 that we got full Bionicle comics again. As you can imagine, that cut out a LOT of content (including literally any appearances from the Bohrok Va, who had only minimal screen time at best anyway); and I didn't discover the Bohrok web animations until the following year so missed their appearances there too. By the time I learned these guys had been a thing, they were gone from the shelves...

I got my first two, both Pahrak Va and this guy, a couple years later when they randomly turned up in the bargain bin of a cheap toy shop. And of course, I leapt at the chance to get Bionicle sets that I'd missed!

*the second UK comic was, for whatever reason, an amalgamation of the second and third US comics; mainly the third, but with one scene cut to make room for a few extra pages from comic two at the beginning to provide context for the opening cliffhangers, with some dialogue edits to match.

It's Blinky! Bionicles of Doom is real!

@PurpleDave said:
" @xccj:
The Bohrok Va had black 2L friction axle-pins and McToran feet, plus they were the exclusive source of brainpans that weren't light-grey (if you cared about that sort of thing). I actually liked Nuhvok Va quite a bit. Some of the others were okay. This was just bottom of the pile, though."

While the green McToran feet aren't really useful for any canon Matoran character, I still think they looked kind of nice in that color. And at least there were some Matoran with green (28 Dark Green) feet shown in MNOLG I.

Although I agree these guys can't compete with purple/yellow Krana or a tan Onewa hammer...

Virginia is for lovers! Especially in Lehvak.

I had no idea they used system weapons in any Bionicle sets— so awesome.

Fun fact: Real ninja mostly didn’t use katanas, samurai (who they more frequently fought than allied with) did. As many were villagers or farmers, they used farming equipment to take the fight to the elites instead.

The fact that he wears Pac-Man’s skeleton on his head as a war trophy is pretty dark for a children’s toy.

@Trigger_:
Fun fact: Ninja couldn’t afford to buy katanas, because it can take up to a year to forge one, and the exact process is still a closely guarded secret. NOVA on PBS did an episode on it, and a trained smith has to be able to tell the temperature of metal being heated, or the grade of iron ore, entirely by sight. The smiths who made them all worked for the samurai caste, and selling even one katana to a commoner would have resulted in a death sentence. Katanas also tended to draw attention to whoever was wearing or wielding them, which is the last thing any spy or assassin would ever want.

Another Fun Fact:
Samurai controlled the money. Ninja worked for money. Guess who ninja would have usually been working for? Samurai! Samurai lived by a strict code of honor, but also kinda leaned into the “it’s only illegal if you get caught” philosophy. Since everyone noticed samurai wherever they went, and they couldn’t be seen doing dishonorable activities, they hired other people to do those things for them. There’s no way any large group of ninja would have been allowed to operate freely in feudal Japan if they weren’t subservient to that same feudal society.

@PurpleDave said:
" @Trigger_:
Fun fact: Ninja couldn’t afford to buy katanas, because it can take up to a year to forge one, and the exact process is still a closely guarded secret. NOVA on PBS did an episode on it, and a trained smith has to be able to tell the temperature of metal being heated, or the grade of iron ore, entirely by sight. The smiths who made them all worked for the samurai caste, and selling even one katana to a commoner would have resulted in a death sentence. Katanas also tended to draw attention to whoever was wearing or wielding them, which is the last thing any spy or assassin would ever want.

Another Fun Fact:
Samurai controlled the money. Ninja worked for money. Guess who ninja would have usually been working for? Samurai! Samurai lived by a strict code of honor, but also kinda leaned into the “it’s only illegal if you get caught” philosophy. Since everyone noticed samurai wherever they went, and they couldn’t be seen doing dishonorable activities, they hired other people to do those things for them. There’s no way any large group of ninja would have been allowed to operate freely in feudal Japan if they weren’t subservient to that same feudal society."

I'll take your word for it, my history knowledge is pretty dusty (especially when it comes to ninja).

@Trigger_:
I know a lot more about samurai than I ever did about ninja, so some of that is extrapolation. For much of my life, ninja were considered to be nothing more than folk tales, but there’s apparently just enough historical record now that they’re treated more seriously now.

BTW, one of the other issues with weapons in Japan is that only the samurai caste was really allowed to own them. This was most certainly true for katana and wakizashi (wearing either was basically claiming to be a samurai), but martial weapons in general were banned for the peasant caste. The problem is, there were these things called bandits, and they preyed on the weak. Many of the really weird Japanese weapons were farming implements, or had evolved from them. Stuff like nunchucks and kama were originally for harvesting rice. The bo staff? Oh, well, that’s clearly just a harmless hiking stick. We have a saying about turning swords into plowshares, but they were practically using plowshares as swords, because they had no other choice.

Where things get confusing is the weapons more commonly associated with ninja (whether or not any of these are real). A katana is not forged with a curved blade. It is fitted with a straight blade. Three grades of steel form the core, the sides, and the edge, and it’s the quenching process causing the body of the blade to shrink more than the edge that gives the blade its distinctive curve. There’s a sword that ninja supposedly used that’s straight, which would indicate firstly that it’s cheaply made. Legend also says the sheath used for this sword would be open at both ends, allowing it to be used as a blowpipe for poison darts, or as a breathing tube for stealthy travel in water. That all sounds like it could be legit. Then there’s the kusari-gama, which is basically a kama (small sickle) attached to the end of a weighted chain. This sounds fake, at least to me (which is why one of my Bionicle TMNT Foot Soldiers wields one). If you try swinging the kama on the end of the chain, it is definitely not going to cooperate and always have the blade pointing forward. Either the blade will act like a wind vane and train behind, or it’ll flop erratically. Either way, you’re most likely to konk the other guy with the not-sharp back end of the blade, or it’ll strike with the blade flat against the target and at best leave a bright red imprint of the kama on their skin.

nice little set

@PurpleDave isn’t there also some detail about the katana actually being a pretty antiquated sword design because it reached a certain point that one emperor or another thought was perfect, and he promptly banned anyone from ever changing it? Like, on pain of hand removal?

@SearchlightRG:
I've never heard anything like that, but one thing I do know (which seems to conflict with what you said) is that katana size changed between peacetime and wartime. In combat, having a longer weapon gives you a reach advantage over your opponent, or at least keeps you on par with him, so there would be a bit of an arms race during long periods of wartime. However, a katana is entirely unsuited to combat in an indoors setting. It's a slashing weapon, so you need room to swing it around, unlike a fencing weapon that's designed primarily for thrusting attacks. Strictly in terms of combat, this was solved by pairing the katana with a wakizashi. You'd use the katana outdoors, or maybe in large open rooms, but you'd use the wakizashi if you were fighting in a corridor so it wouldn't get fouled on the walls.

In peacetime, having a katana that's really long becomes a hindrance, since the saya tends to bang into things indoors. As a matter of convenience, they tended to be made shorter during lengthy peacetimes, just so you could walk to the fridge without busting up all your furniture.

This is in addition to various tweaks to the shape of the blade (like whether it has a chisel tip or curved tip), there were metallurgical advancements (and catastrophic losses of knowledge, due to the intense secrecy involved). And the katana mandated for all Japanese officers during WWII were straight garbage, being mass-produced out of an outdated necessity more than any real purpose in battle.