Tuesday, December 22, 2015

The Building Chronicle: A Critical Consideration of LEGO's "Bionicle" Series - An Exercise in Limitation 2

My previous limitation exercise drew from Japanese combiner model aesthetics that differed quite substantially from the more familiar North American models. This time around, I'm going to play with one of the more novel builds that I've come across as I build through the series.

Wairuha is a combiner model, a Toa Kaita in the parlance of the series, constructed from Gali, Lewa, and Kopaka. The original version from 2001 is fairly rudimentary, and shares a build with Akamai, the Kaita of the other three Toa. In 2002, however, with the release of the Toa Nuva, Wairuha's build alters fundamentally, and adds a very cool body model to the MOCer lexicon. I noted in the previous limitation post that I'd always had trouble making MOCs from the very early Bionicle, but with this build, potential has opened up.

Here's Wairuha Nuva:


The body build is one upside down torso attached to two backward facing torsos. As far as I know, this is a unique build to this character, though for the life of me I can't figure out why. It offers so much more poseability (and possibility) than the previous build, or the Akamai Nuva build. The arms are the shortfall of the model, as they're attached to gear systems, and are thus very difficult to pose. The feet, too, are a bit problematic, as they're single axles attached to balls, and tend to fall off. This is not an insurmountable problem though, as my next few builds will attest.

Setting myself up with the instruction manuals, I proceeded to make this model:


I call it Swashbuckler. It's built fairly faithfully to the same design as Wairuha, even down to the foot design that keeps falling off! I adapted the arms somewhat, though, to improve its poseability, adding Glatorian neck pieces to allow for a later wave arm construction. Aside from that, though, he's pretty close to the original instructions. What's cool about these builds is that they've added the poseable head, something which I find adds a lot of character to a model, and which finds its way into the series as a regular feature in the 2004 wave of Toa.

My next build takes a step back in time. I isolated all of the pieces of the original three Toa that make up Wairuha, and decided to see if I could adapt those pieces into a Nuva-style build. Here's the result:


I actually really love this model. There's some real attitude coming from it. I did have to improvise a bit to make up for pieces from the Nuva that were not present in the Mata, but it all came out alright in the end. I should also note that the "official" versions of Wairuha wear Lewa's mask, both Mata and Nuva, but I'm a big fan of the Gali masks, and thought they suited the models more.

Having gotten the hang of this build, I decided to let my imagination run rampant, and see what happened:


This is the Desert Mech. It follows the same body and leg build as Wairuha, but uses the adapted arm build from Swashbuckler. I used axles with stoppers and the ball joints that accompany them for the legs, to stop the feet from falling off. The way that the torsos point backwards allows for a lot of potential for accessorizing, as evidenced here by the cooling unit fans behind the head. What's harder to see in the picture is two Karda Nui-era wings on the back that function as solar panels, fueling the mech as it crosses the desert.

After these builds, I started to wonder what a Wairuha made from another wave might look like. Breaking somewhat from the limitation I had set myself, I sorted out a green, white, and blue Glatorian, and fused them into Wairuha Glatorian. I'm not super-happy with the results, but it had to be done:


And that's my limitation exercise for this time. There's been a few cool builds for bodies that I've come across so far, but this one has certainly made my use of Mata and Nuva era torsos more likely.

Not sure what next time will be. But I can't wait to get there!

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Collection: Religious Ephemera Part 2

 My first piece in today's post is something my son brought home for me from school, given to him by a friend for a laugh. I have a fair bit of respect for much of the ephemera that grows up around religions. I don't always necessarily agree with the tenets they proscribe, but I admire the dedication to one's faith that drives people to offer this kind of secondary writing. If more fundamentally religious people dedicated themselves to the pen, and not the sword, we'd have a far more interesting world.

That said, I think I fail (or pass, depending on your point of view) this test.









It's a well-recognized fact that many religious organizations find new converts amongst the lost and directionless of the university campus. I do truly believe that these groups, the ones that have a table in the student center, or who advertise on the bulletin boards, have altruistic origins, even if their practice is not quite the same as their praxis. I find numerous pieces of this ephemera tacked up to the boards I walk by on my way to and fro in the school. These three pamphlets were packaged together, and I've got a couple of other bundles too. Though of slightly higher quality than something like Bill Ashmore's exegesis from the previous post, they're still products of an independent press seeking to offer elucidation of Christian principles. What I think would be interesting about these sorts of works would be to compare their conclusions to the more rigorous and accepted interpretive texts.



My final piece for today is a bit of a joke, though one with some teeth. In my first year of the PhD program, I was given a research position (more a "catalogue this office" position, really) that involved going through a large collection of amateur science fiction fanzines from the mid-70s and "bibliographizing" them. A substantial portion of collection was a publication called Minneapa, and within one of the issues was this send-up of dogmatic religion. My own thinking on religion accords something like this just as much veracity as any other piece of ephemera, and it's kind of amusing in its own right. As you can see, it's credited to Al Kuhfeld, who was a regular contributor to the zine. Hopefully he doesn't mind my reproducing it here.




That's it for this installment. See you next time.

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Collection: Religious Ephemera Part 1

I make no secret of my fascination with the paratexts that grow up around religions, both factual and fictional (a distinction that I think needs troubling). I've just finished reading a piece by Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price about the various canonical, apocryphal, and pseudepigraphical pieces of sacred writing in the volumes of the Cthulhu Mythos, and it got me thinking of where such independently published, or small press published, texts fit into these distinctions.


























I discovered these lovely little cards in various books that came into my used book shop in 2001. A large proportion of my initial donations for the store came from a priest who was retiring from very active service and wanted to downsize his library, and I get the suspicion that these were bookmarks he'd used. The top one is the oldest piece in this collection, dating from 1903, with the subsequent two from a decade later. I think these are beautiful little bits of religious art, and I keep my eyes open for more. Two of them have the name "Agnes" written across the top, perhaps indicating that, regardless of the subject matter of collectible cards, those who possess them are adamant about their ownership!


A couple of years ago I was riding the train to school, and I caught sight of this little pamphlet sitting on a seat next to someone across from me. Immediately I realized I was looking at one of the great oddities of the comic book world, a Chick Tract. These evangelical little comics are famed for being both deeply disturbing and, unintentionally, hilariously bad. While I was growing up in the 80s, the "Dark Dungeons" issue, a paranoid denunciation of Dungeons & Dragons, was a well-known and well-mocked example of these pieces. Just before I got off the train, I actually ventured to ask the young man sitting next to it if it belonged to him, to which he replied in the negative. And so I acquired my first Chick Tract in a very cool way, as if it had been left, either as addition to my collection, or warning against my sins. (I haven't scanned the whole thing, just bits that I thought were interesting.)

 I'll just offer one more piece today, otherwise this post will run long. Where the Golden Text cards were in books, and the Chick Tract was on the train, I found this next piece sitting in an icy puddle while walking down Kensington Street in Calgary. I brought it home, dried it out, and gave it a read, and it immediately found a place in my heart. I don't want to imply that it converted me or anything, only that these sorts of independent writings, printed at home and posted or distributed with the fervent desire to spread helpful truth, are amongst the most earnest and valuable religious writings in some ways. Many creeds will propose that the truest way to salvation is to have a personal relationship with whatever deity presides over one's faith. Writing such as this are testaments to that personal relationship.



I'm afraid I can't comment on the strength of Ashmore's exegesis here, but that he was driven to produce such exegesis speaks volumes (and, should he ever see this, I hope he doesn't mind me posting it, and takes my thoughts on it in the spirit they're intended, as praise). This is the work of someone figuring for himself how to fit himself into the typological narrative of the Bible and the dogma that has grown up about it. There is something genuine about it, something lacking in much of the more polished and produced religious exegesis that is popularly available.

Going back to Price's look at the texts of the Lovecraft Mythos' fictional religion, he leaves out these kinds of works, though perhaps in the case of the first two examples, it's because the fictional religion is meant to be a secret. Ashmore's work on the Bible comes closer to the exegetic texts Price describes in another article on the various sorts of books that populate the Lovecraftian Mythos, a working out of meaning and connotation, and one's place within it.

As the title notes, this is part 1 of this collection. I'll come back with more in the near future.