MOC: Rinsan

 Sometimes an idea leads to a whole different destination than you were thinking - and the it can probably come back to the original concept. That sort of happened with this female Toa of Iron.

The original idea was to build a Toa Knight using dark red KK2 legs and feet as a boots. I built a quite nice looking upper legs to go with them so I chose to make it female. In Bionicle canon (which for I don't have much respect if it doesn't have MNOG in its name) dark red doesn't appear in any female Toa color (rather strong gender roles in that theme, I tell you) but there isn't lot of known Iron Toas (they also say that "Toa" can't be used is form "Toas" but I don't listen to their ridiculous cavil). Well, I took some liberties. Silver isn't very interesting colour, but I had lots of pieces to work with and it makes the dark red stand out pretty nicely.

But at some point it didn't look Toa, or probably I wasn't interested to build one any more. I started to look for a more mecha-like MOC, with head similar to Belsa's, without hair (hairy mechas, nooo) but with some kind of headphones. It stayed on a wip stage on my "Bionicle table" for a month or something, but the idea didn't fly. It just looked bad and I didn't have any ideas about the weapons or tools.

So I returned to work on the MOC and somehow returned back to the original idea. The red-silver Ruru had been used as a chest armour on the mecha version (and it looked terrible even though the marbled effect has good) but I switched it to the face and built a new chest (which came out well in my opinion) and gave her a sword and an odd shield tablescap that had been floating around in the WIP-shelf for some some time.

I don't think that the finalized MOC is perfect, as the legs are rather rigid. But I didn't want to change them as they were the main point of the project and making them more flexible would have demanded some big big tweaks.

-Pate-keetongu