Hey Greg,
I hope you’re doing well. This may be a silly question, but are you permitted to canonize G1 content such as short stories and visual depictions of characters without the input of any of the other (former) members of the G1 story team? I definitely know that contests were held for official canonization purposes in the years after the line was initially canceled, and that the winners, such as this depiction of Tobduk, were accepted; however, I’m not sure if there is any potential for this to still occur.
Further, @Jon, would the cast be open to hosting an open canonization contest of some sort in the future, provided that Greg is interested?
Most of the rest of the story team from G1 are scattered to other projects, so I can pretty much do it on my own (since there are no plans to bring G1 back). At the same time, canonizing stuff seems to provoke a fury in some of the fanbase, who just feel the story should be dead and buried for all time. So while it is not something I am opposed to doing, it is also not something I plan to do a lot of.
There are a lot of things that were left unexplored and unanswered. Even just like culture and lifestyle pieces on later locations such as the Av-matoran villages in Karda Nui and islands like Voya Nui.
You’re always going to have overzealous fans spitting over the new strange things they don’t want for whatever reason, so I don’t see much of a point in trying to not anger them with such things.
This is just my perspective, but a lot of the things which irk fans seem to be the result of one individual, or a small group of individuals, proposing an idea without consulting with other fans to see how they felt. In many cases it’s something frivolous that would have been better left to fan-fiction anyway (like, do we really need to hammer down which Kanohi some nameless, now deceased Toa once wore?). Now that the G1 story has been concluded for 7 years and Bionicle has been cancelled for the second time, the community’s main struggle remains sheer population size and interest. This gives small groups of fans more opportunity to hijack the canonization process to get ideas into the G1 canon that never would have flown with the community 10 years ago.
I’m not against adding to the Bionicle canon in 2017 – I think that’s a beautiful thing – but only as long as it makes people happy, not frustrated. I definitely think there are methods that can mitigate that frustration. Something as simple as a quorum would probably work pretty well, which would give us a system similar to LEGO Ideas. If every contest required consensus of, say, at least 100 members, that would serve as a very good indication that an idea/short story/MOC appeases a wider audience of people. Any idea which receives less support than that should get canned. For example, a poll where the winning entry has only 12 votes obviously should not be canonized – there’s insufficient evidence that people want that idea canonized at all. The onus of advertising the poll and meeting the quorum should be on the people who are interested in getting the idea canonized.
Like @TheMightyObsidianDude suggested, there’s ample room to explore minor characters from the Bionicle universe without stepping on existing canon too much. For example, you can explore Tobduk’s homeland, his life before the Visorak invasion, the culture of his people, etc. without ruining other aspects of the Matoran universe for fans. Just don’t make it tie into the backstories of like 10 different characters in established canon.
