#But Mata Nui wasn't relying on them--the Red Star had him covered.

[ctrl-alt-tahu]

The Last Toa

I have a not-quite-100% finished thought rolling around my head about the legacy of the Toa Metru, and in attempt to get it complete, I'm trying to write it down.

So, the Toa Metru are the final stop in a line of Toa going back to the foundation of Metru Nui, right? They were made Toa by Lhikan, the last of the Toa Mangai, and as his heirs and mentees, they are the last Toa of Metru Nui.

Indeed, the GSR generally, they come awfully close to being the last Toa--period. Not the last Toa in existence, obviously, but the Mata/Nuva, Takanuva, and the Inika/Mahri are all Toa in some other special way: Artahka originals, the Mask of Light, and intervention by the Red Star. None of them represent the passage of energy from Toa to Stone to Matoran: that lineage, which I assume goes back all the way to the earliest days of the GSR.

I think Krakua is the only real monkey-wrench in the idea that the Metru were the last Toa made in the conventional way. I'm pretty sure he's the only non-Inika example we know of in canon definitely after the Cataclysm.

There's something wistfully sad about the Metru being the Last Toa Ever™ and yielding their own Toa power to revive the Matoran, with no new Toa to follow them. When the Toa Mata arrive on Mata Nui, it becomes something like an Arthurian return, but it's also a supplanting: "the line of Dume and Lhikan and those even before them has failed" and a better thing takes their place.

Some basic Googling/BioSector01ing seems to suggest that there's not a lot of canonical detail in HOW Krakua becomes a Toa--so even if we accept that he's a fairly recent Toa, we can allow ourselves some speculation that he ALSO might not have been an old-school Toa-Stone-made Toa.

Why does any of this matter--other than poignancy, which is a consideration of its own? Well, I was thinking about Matoro (as one does) and the unique way in which he could carry on the legacy of the Toa Metru: he's the one Matoran (and thus the one transformed Toa) who knows their tale before the reveal at the end of MoL. Alone of the amnesiac Matoran, he has knowledge--though not memory--of Metru Nui, and while he kept the Turagas' secrets, he can't have helped being shaped by them in the 1000 years of doing so.

Destiny is the will of Mata Nui (well, destiny is a thorny subject, but let's call it that here). The Toa Mata, Takanuva, Krakua--what if they were all attempts in some way or other to supply the "needed" Toa to save the Great Spirit? But, though he is dying, the Great Spirit doesn't want any of these: he doesn't want to saved by Artahka's demiurgic Toa, or the Avokhii-wearing saviour, or any of the washed-up leftovers (Lesovikk, "the forty living Toa," the Hagah): instead, when the Red Star intervenes--the Red Star that echoes his will in a way the Order of Mata Nui can never hope to--he chooses one of them, and he chooses the one of their number who is the truest heir of the Toa Metru--his Toa.

Destiny is a big theme of the Metru in a way that was never true of the Mata (unity is their theme), and this really comes to the fore with the dancing back and forth between who was destined: them or the Mask Matoran. Destiny also comes up big with Matoro--and perhaps their destinies are the same.