Three years ago today, the Myths and Legacy site went live.

Today marks the third anniversary of the launch of the MnL website! It’s been an exciting, exhausting year, and we couldn’t be more thrilled at all we were able to accomplish! To celebrate this exciting milestone, we’ve added an entirely new story and other all-new story content to the site–but more on that below.

Although we ended our year-long streak of posting new content every week, we still added a host of content online, both on the site and on MaskOfDestiny. Join us as we reflect on this past year!

What Has Gone Before

Every year, we began by reviewing all our releases from the prior year. This year we continued much of the same content we produced in our first two years, completing several projects that we started in those years.

In total, we published,

• A fan archive for LostHead, right after the second anniversary celebration. Notable in this archive was the story Call to Arms, a story following Jaller as he assembled the Toa Inika
• A few entries in our new anthology set in The Bohrok Wars
• A game-changing new development in Vision of the Great Beings, the involvement of Greg Farshtey in unveiling unrevealed details and providing feedback on our story
• A full-length continuation of The Yesterday Quest
• A full-length continuation of The Powers That Be
• An audio drama for Lord of Elements, another entry in our Vision of the Great Beings series, as well as As Above, So Below as narrated by Greg Farshtey
• Two exciting interviews with Peter Mack and Cathy Hapka which revealed lost details of MNOG II and the BIONICLE Chronicles!
• Book vs Movie comparisons of Legends of Metru Nui and Web of Shadows
• Comic novelizations of the 2004 and 2005 Metru Nui Comic
• Enemies of Metru Nui, comic companions to the 2004 comics starring Nuju, Onewa, and Whenua as they languish in imprisonment. We also released an Adventures novel cutting this material, the comic material, and the middle portion of Legends of Metru Nui focusing specifically on the time spent by the Toa as refugees and prisoners, going from their failed exhibition in the Coliseum to their reunion
• Toa Hordika and Turaga Dume, also known as The Search for Turaga Dume, a completed version of the incomplete 2005 Web Comics
• Among the Ruins, a full Adventures novel featuring novelized versions of The Search for Turaga Dume and The Search for the Mask of Light, as novelized by LostHead
• Web of Shadows, an Adventures novel cutting the recap of Web of the Visorak and adding in the comics with connective tissue streamlining it into a single story

Do these last few sound unfamiliar? I thought they might…

New Anniversary Content

You may have noticed that since the start of 2024 we’ve launched a flurry of Metru Nui-themed content. Between book vs movie comparisons, comic novelizations, and other complementary content, we’ve gotten a lot out the pipeline. This anniversary will be the culmination of this series as we debut our continuation of the 2005 Web Comics!

For those unfamiliar with the Web Comics, these were story content from 2005 that was set to debut on Bionicle.com before being untimely cancelled. Of these comics, only the script for the first entry was ever revealed, following the Toa Hordika as they set out to recover Turaga Dume’s sphere. We know from later canon content that his sphere malfunctioned, letting him loose, but we never knew how the adventure ended… until now. Follow the Hordika as they contend with Visorak, Chute Lurkers, and the Turaga himself on this exciting new adventure. Check out our comic script here!

But that’s not all! Thanks to the tireless work of LostHead, we are also thrilled to debut a full novelization of this story, as well as a full novelization of the 2005 Online Animations! These animations followed the Toa Hordika as they sought out the Makoki Stones and the Avokhii, paving the way for the adventures on Mata Nui a millennium later. Now, brought together into a single cohesive story, these two adventures can be viewed here as Among the Ruins, together with a new Adventures-style epilogue and prologue, also written by LostHead.

But that’s not all! We’re also debuting a version of Web of Shadows with the material from Web of the Visorak and Origin of the Rahaga excised and our comic novelizations added in, together with more connective tissue and a chapter exploring where Dume, the Makoki Stones and Avokhii, the items obtained in Challenge of the Hordika were during Web of Shadows — a chapter that also sets up the comic narrative, tying it to the narrative of the rest of Web of Shadows. In other words, this novel is meant to completely replace the original BIONICLE Adventures 9, forming a more cohesive reading experience with the rest of the series. Interestingly, with everything added and everything taken away, the net wordcount is roughly on par with the average BIONICLE novel.

We hope you enjoy these as much as we’ve enjoyed putting them together! Thanks so much to LostHead for his work in making this happen!

What Is Still To Come

What is still to come? Where does M&L go now? Every comic has been novelized, every movie has been compared with its book. The continuations of The Yesterday Quest and The Powers That Be which we teased in prior years have been finished. What happens now?

Well, there are certainly stories we’ve teased in the past. Those who remember a couple BIONICLE Days ago will remember how we teased the first chapter in Legacy Weapons, a book centered on the efforts of the Toa Hagah to save the Toa Mahri. Now at last, the long-awaited complete rendering of that adventure is set to debut this year! We also have the more entries in the Bohrok Wars anthology prepared to be released.

I could also speak of comic/book comparisons which we teased in our Web of Shadows Book vs Movie comparison. Although these haven’t been prepared yet, we do hope to make these a priority in the coming year.

But no, even more exciting are the new additions to our Myths and Legacy writing team. To date, we have had five contributors to the Myths and Legacy Originals archive, and this year we will welcome two new members to the ranks—LostHead and Tahnok Trapper! Followers of Myths and Legacy will be well-acquainted with LostHead, who already has a personal archive on our site, but who also played a huge role in creating the story Among the Ruins. Not only are we moving his story Call to Arms over to our M&L Originals Archive, but he will also be one of our reoccurring writers moving forward. Tahnok Trapper, meanwhile, is new to the M&L audience, but he has already been active on the TTV Message Boards where he publishes slice-of-life stories centered on the Matoran.

We’re also woefully overdue in featuring new independent writers. The last time we opened a new section was a year ago when we first added LostHead to the site the week after our second anniversary. Now, after we explore Tahnok Trapper’s stories, we have quite a few independent writers that we are excited to share with you in the weeks to come.

Furthermore, we anticipate that this year will see more steps taken to debut a project we teased last year and in the months since. There’s nothing to share there today, but stay tuned.

We also have some entirely new community-oriented ideas that we’re excited to share. More on that to come!

Concluding Remarks:

Although we broke our weekly release streak from last year, we are thrilled with what we were able to accomplish.

We hope that you continue to enjoy the Myths and Legacy project, and as our community and our scope continues to grow and expand, we look forward to providing more quality BIONICLE content.

If you haven’t already joined our community on Discord, we encourage you to hang out with us there.

And for all the latest news on our project, follow us here on MaskOfDestiny or over on Twitter.

Thanks again for all your support. We couldn’t have made it this far without you.

–The Myths and Legacy team