#The Komau is a great Kanohi (no pun intended)

[ctrl-alt-tahu]

December 2nd

I really enjoyed last year's Bionicle Advent Calendar, when I wrote at least a snippet of fanfic every day, but I just don't have the time this year. Most of last year's was written in the slow times at work, and this year there just aren't any slow times. But I wanted to do something again, so you're going to get pictures and probably some descriptive/explanatory text. (Talking endlessly isn't "work" like writing fiction can be. Though, if we're lucky, maybe we'll get SOME ficlets later on.)

Today we're going back to the beginning! Onewa was my first Bionicle, the one who started it all. He wasn't even mine--not fully. My brother and I split him.

We were LEGO fans, solidly entrenched in it ag that point, but we had minimal Technic or interest in it and had passed on Throwbots and Roboriders completely and though we would do the same with Bionicles. The comics were kind of cool, but we were System fans, minifig fans. It just wasn't for us.

But our Mom knew we loved all kinds of LEGO and that we weren't very discriminating about it, so when she was Christmas shopping (this was October 2001), she found a marked-down Onewa in the clearance section and figured two or three dollars was worth a flier.

Onewa had been marked down because he'd been opened and one of his 5-module axles was missing. We stole a 4-module axle somewhere in our System sets and he was good to go. Our entire perspective on Bionicle flipped with him in our hands. What had looked (in our narrow, childhood judgement) as "weird" in the magazines and catalogues now looked really cool and fun in person.

A couple weeks later, we were sold on Bionicle enough that I "bought out" my brother's half and he put the money into buying a Turaga Matau. We also split a mask pack: a brown Pakari (mine) and a medium blue Ruru (my brother's). We were hooked, and we'd remain that way until about 2004: the colour change and the shift to Metru Nui matched a belated growing up, but it would still be a long, slow slide to my true Dark Ages, starting around 2009ish.

Because Onewa was the first and because we didn't really absorb all the media pre-movies, and because the Turaga had less real development as characters before 2004, I never pictured Onewa as the abrasive a-hole we got in LoMN. He was more of a Gandalf mentor type, and he's still kind of there for me. Reconciling him to LoMN has been a fertile ground for fiction for me.

Another big thing that LoMN contrasted with in our games was that Onewa had been the leader of our Turaga! If it was supposed to be clear, before 2004, that Vakama was the team leader, it was lost on us. I don't think we thought the Turaga HAD a leader, and Onewa, wise and strong (and the first one we had), got to be the team leader.