“We have entered a period within the Bionicle community that is unlike any we have seen before. All the weak fans have fallen by the wayside and only the strong remain. The content we produce is better than ever, and as we combine the talents we have honed into our adulthood, we can produce exactly what Bionicle fans want because we are the Bionicle fans.” - the Featured Image section of the Custom Bionicle Wiki front page as of the time of this writing
I don’t harbor any beef with “weak fans”, for the record, but this is an accurate assessment of the current state of the Bionicle fandom. What I want to focus on, however, is the first part of the third sentence.
The last fanfic I was writing before college consumed my life, time, and mental programming was Kanahka’s Chronicle, a first-person, journal-themed narrative of the origins of the characters on my side of the little universe within a universe I share with my friend ArghYeMatey (AYM). Honestly, it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever written, for a few reasons, but the most important one to this blog is the fact that it was the last thing I wrote. It was after I had gained plenty of practice conveying my thoughts through a lettered keyboard, years of fanfics under my belt.
That doesn’t sound like something I should be bragging about. Well, like it or not, I am unironically proud of the work AYM and I have done, and I don’t regret one iota of it.
All through college, it was clear to me that Kanahka’s Chronicle would be my vector to return to that fanfic universe, but it took me until this past Monday to finally get around to writing the next entry in my character’s journal. I sat down to write it, and, happily enough, the words flowed freely as they used to, and before I knew it, something odd was happening. I was building off the direction I had taken Kanahka’s character arc right before I stopped writing years ago, but I took it further than I ever would have in my teens.
It’s not even about would have, it’s about could have. Kanahka was feeling shame after a disaster he recorded in the last entry I wrote before college, and I was clearly trying to take him in a self-doubting direction, but since then I have been through some emotional journeys I won’t get into here. Suffice to say, I now much more completely understand what self-doubt and self-inflicted shame are, and I took that knowledge and applied it to Kanahka’s characterization before I really knew what I was doing.
I’m not bragging about it being effortless to lord my writing skill over all you plebs who need to git gud. I’m marveling at what happens when an actual adult (not just the teenager who thought he was an adult) applies their life experience to a character from the Bionicle universe. It’s amazing how well it applies to the context, even though I realize that, as long as I’m writing about people with emotions, emotional struggles should apply to the context well.
I have thankfully been able to realize over the past year that the five previous years were not wasted after all, but I somehow didn’t expect that the personal growth I’ve been blessed with over the last half-decade would be able apply to something I had stepped away from before then in such a satisfying way.
Why am I writing Bionicle fanfics again in the first place?
It’s better than binging YouTube videos all day, I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of course I have posted the new content to Wikitronia, accessible with the link above.
Thanks for reading, and have a lovely day!