#but. i wrote this. it'd be a shame to just memory-hole 500 words

[logicalabsurdity]

[rubs hands down face] You're still going on about this? (Context: here.)

Okay. Okay. Here's the thing. Here's my understanding of why using Maori words, specifically, was a dick move on Lego's part, and why it's cultural appropriation. (Disclaimer: I'm a white Canadian; I've done my reading, but that's not the same as being a New Zealander and certainly not the same as being any kind of indigenous person with cultural experience of the problem.)

The Maori are an indigenous culture whose language was suppressed by European colonials. Maori schoolchildren were, for a while during the middle of the 20th century, punished for speaking Maori, including with corporal punishment. (Read: being beaten with various implements.) For a European company to come in and go "oh, we like the sound of this language, let's borrow some words to name our exotic robots with only passing reference to the actual meaning of the words", when the Maori themselves were struggling to be allowed to use their language? That's cruel.

Because the problem with appropriation is, the marginalized group is punished, socially or legally, for doing the same things the appropriating group is doing. Another example of indigenous people having their culture stolen out from under them: white people getting to dress up as ""Indians"" for Halloween, while Native Americans have been struggling for centuries to be allowed to wear their traditional apparel instead of being culturally genocided into assimilation into the European hegemony.

Or! Or! Since we're talking about "woke" anyway: how about the use and misuse of African-American Vernacular English by non-Black people? AAVE is often called "bad English", when what it really is is a distinct dialect with its own grammatical rules and its own distinct slang and word choice. To be "woke", from AAVE, is to be awake and alert to (racial) prejudice and discrimination. What you are doing, in redefining woke in your post? Is mocking that original meaning of the word.

Is it possible to be over-alert? Sure. Usually it's due to having been burned so many times that the overly-jumpy person is on a hair trigger about the possibility of getting screwed over again, in which case I can't really blame them. Is the case of Lego using the Maori language and the Maori needing to sue about this cultural appropriation a case of being over-alert to racial prejudice and discrimination? Uh, NO.

Look. Bionicle in fact kept naming characters words in non-English languages. They just stopped using Maori. The problem is not mining languages; the problem is mining languages when the native speakers of those languages aren't permitted to speak it. Dead languages? That's fine, that's why Latin and Ancient Greek get used everywhere, for everything. Living languages that don't have a recent history of being suppressed? Also fine.

As for the meaning of "appropriation", and whether it's inherently negative, I'll just let Wiktionary speak for me on that:

Verb appropriate (third-person singular simple present appropriates, present participle appropriating, simple past and past participle appropriated) 1. (transitive) To take to oneself; to claim or use, especially as by an exclusive right. Let no man appropriate the use of a common benefit. 2. (transitive) To set apart for, or assign to, a particular person or use, especially in exclusion of all others; with to or for. A spot of ground is appropriated for a garden. to appropriate money for the increase of the navy

No, I think. I think the meaning of "appropriate" as in "take for oneself exclusively", in the context of cultural artifacts, is bad. It's not called cultural sharing! It's called cultural appropriation, and that's for a reason.

it’s sad knowing that the reason why Lego won’t be doing bionicle again is because their afraid of zoomers trying to cancel them for bionicle being “cultural appropriation” when all of the stuff that is currently in bionicle, they were allowed to keep after the lawsuit.

Those canceling maniacs will never see the true beauty of bionicle.

I don’t usually like using the word “woke” to describe people like this because people might think I’m some sort of bigot who doesn’t appreciate progressiveness, but the bigots usually describe the “woke” stuff as “thing that has progressive messaging in it” or “person who supports progressiveness”.

I categorize “woke” as “leftist who only relies on reactionary instincts and who doesn’t logically look at things or look into things more than the surface level “oh, this looks bad to the paranoid onlooker!””

trust me, I’m more of a “disband the team and never let them have a team again” than a “change the mascot” kind of girl, but when I look at 2001 bionicle, I don’t see anything that offensive. They just misused a couple words and when they were told by Māori individuals to fix their mistakes, they did. The mistakes were probably made in the first place because the Māori dictionary they used didn’t give them detailed enough information on the spiritual context of words and even misdefined the word “tohunga”.

I have an idea… find a dictionary that accidentally misdefines the word tohunga and send a photo of link to it to me, so we can see the dictionary they used for bionicle!

remember “appropriation” is not necessarily a negative word. In recent years it has taken on a negative meaning, but it really just means “taking inspiration from another culture or borrowing something from it”. The bathrobe could be considered appropriation because it was inspired by the kimono, but you don’t have any negative feelings towards the bathrobe, do you?

(Also, yes, I know that using words from a real language to name fictional characters is lazy.)