#Think of it as a different Dekar/Hydraxon situation

[ctrl-alt-tahu]

He's Always Been Dead

So... I have a completely uncanonical idea for Bionicle I'm turning over in my head.

What if Mata Nui was a title more than a person? Like "the Great Spirit" sounds more like a title than a name, right? What if the use of the Ignika was less like an electric paddle--because the Great Spirit was always already dead?

Basically, in this alternate story, the original Mata Nui (the spirit controlling the GSR) died as the result of the Great Disruption. The sacrifice of Jovan's teammate wasn't to die but to become the next Great Spirit. This is why it's necessary for wearer of the Ignika to "die": they become the next Mata Nui.

The Great Spirit who falls asleep at in the Cataclysm isn't the first Great Spirit--and it might not have been the second. Perhaps, after Jovan's teammate also died, the Ignika was next worn by a Makuta, sacrificing himself as nobly as the Toa before him had, but this left enough clues that--for the first time--someone pieced together that it wasn't the same Great Spirit reawakened, but the Makuta in an elevated position.

Naturally, it's Teridax who figures this out, explaining both where his ambition to "become" the GSR comes from and why he calls the sleeping Mata Nui his brother. Sleep spares him the pain--of betrayal.

Teridax's plan is to be the one to wear the Ignika, but after that whole "Takutanuva" thing, he no longer has a body to wear it. His backup plan may originally have been to try wearing the Ignika while inhabiting the Maxilos robot, but either he realised that wouldn't work (maybe he tried, before the Mahri got there), or he found a backup plan.

The being subsumed by the Ignika to become the next GSR would lose a lot of their memory and self (it is, after all, a sacrifice--and the truth of what happens wasn't know until a Makuta--a being of greater innate power than a Toa--did it), which Teridax wasn't keen on, and after being subsumed, the Ignika still had to be taken to the Codrex to upload the new Mata Nui. Teridax saw his opportunity to avoid the obliteration of his self and in his disembodied state had the perfect opportunity to slip in ahead of the new Mata Nui when the Ignika arrived in the Codrex and started the upload process, taking control of the GSR as the new Mata Nui while circumventing the loss of self supposed to go with it.

What this means, of course, is that the "Mata Nui" of 2009-10 is actually Matoro. And perhaps, after having had a Makuta as the last Mata Nui, the Ignika didn't obliterate everything that had made Matoro himself, and when he incarnates on Bara Magna, he begins to remember who he was and what has happened to him.

This is, of course, a transparent alternate reality that allows Matoro to survive. But it also sheds a little light on Teridax and his "brother"--and maybe on Teridax's destiny: he was supposed to become Mata Nui, but he was supposed to yield to his destiny and surrender himself, rather than to grasp for it.