Botar

 

Who will survive the coming of Botar? This was part of a collaboration work on re-imagining 2006 Bionicle sets and combiners, including 23 (!) people. Please find the complete list on Flickr.

 The edit was done by N (Brick Brickolson), Ari (Buttloafbuilds) and me.

I chose Borat because he's completely very absurd, tall, human-shaped fellow with very small head with huge teeth and big golden ears, actually quite good colour scheme and idiotic weapons; I ditched the wrist blades as half of fantasy characters in general have them, but I left the axe-blade thing. It was too silly to miss. Botar was also killed in the story just to be replaces with person named "Borat's replacament", to make him bit more weird.

 I first tried to imagine Botar as a big, semi-humanoid rabbit, but his creepy, prolonged look reminded more of a slim, short-hair cat on its hind legs, so I emphasized the cat-ness, still leaving the very long ears. The tail, absent from the original, stresses the cat aspect. It is definitely inspired by filmation of Cats (2019, or 2020 in Finland) - actually the latest film I've seen in theatres! It was in Kotka, a small theatre with weird, angled floor and the film was awesome and horrible and absurd and better than Rise of Skywalker -

I began with Borat's head, and for a short time the was version with eyes with two-studs gap between; but it looked bit too convincing, missing the odd look of having Metru head behind the teeth completely, so I returned to this look. I'm very happy with how the white T-bars light up the eyes. The head is mostly System, but I assure you, the rest is almost completely Bionicle and Technic, first time for many many years (membuja ei tässä lasketa)... Once a part of Bionicle collab, I really wanted to brush up my bonkle parts. It wasn't easy - there's still trickiness in getting the right pins in right places, and having only around five black 3-long ones didn't help! The chest is closest part to the original model, other areas are more freely interpeted. Eight-pack abs in gold fitted the upright cat idea, and naturally continued into chainmain loincloth. The skull spider mask knee pads emphasize the horror feel, and dished behind them mimic mechanical joints - Motif I enjoy in my Bionicles. What I'm not 100% happy with is Botar's colour balance. I would like have done the fingernails in pearl gold and lower legs in black, but didn't have the correct pieces available. I have them, just in some models somewhere else. But that's not too bad.

-Eero.