TTV Interviews BIONICLE G2 Author Ryder Windham (With Transcript)
Recently, TTV had the opportunity to sit down for a discussion with the author of BIONICLE G2′s chapter books and graphic novels, Ryder Windham. It was a very insightful discussion, and we learned a lot about what goes into the behind-the-scenes production of BIONICLE G2′s literary works. You can listen to the audio interview here, and a written transcript of the interview can be found after the jump.
Meso: Hello everybody, and welcome to TTV’s interview with the New York Times Best-selling author, author of more than 50 Star Wars books and the junior novelizations for the Indiana Jones films, as well as the current book author for the BIONICLE G2 reboot: Ryder Windham! How’s it going, Mr. Windham?
Ryder: Oh, hello!
Meso: You have a rather impressive list of credentials there.
Ryder: I was impressed, yes. Thank you, I’m happy to talk with you about BIONICLE.
Meso: Yes, today the subject of our talk is going to be your work on the BIONICLE “G2” series of books and graphic novels released in both 2015 and 2016. Without further ado, let’s go and kick this off! For our audience, just a quick introduction so you can know who’s on this episode today: I’m Mesonak!
Eljay: I’m Eljay!
Kahi: I’m Kahi!
Takuma: I’m Takuma Nuva!
Meso: And without further ado, let’s do this. So Ryder, I suppose a good way to start this would be asking how did you first get into writing BIONICLE? Were you approached by Lego, did you contact them, what’s the story behind that?
Ryder: I’ve been a freelance writer for about 20 years now; I used to be a comic book editor, a long time ago I worked on Star Wars and Indiana Jones comics for Lucasfilms. After I left Dark Horse, it was a friend at Lucasfilms who said “Hey, you know this material pretty well, would you be interested in working on books?” At the time, I had written scripts for a few comics… I never aspired to becoming a writer, it’s just something that happened because a friend started recommending me. It was a few years later that I realized “Oh, I guess I’m a freelance writer because that’s what I’m doing most of the time.” Anyway, one of my first assignments was a series of Star Wars role-playing game books for Scholastic. My memory’s a little vague on this one, but I think it was around 2000 or 2001 that an editor at Scholastic contacted me and asked if I would be interested in working on the Lego BIONICLE books. She sent me some comics and a few toys, and I got up to speed, I was reading about it, and I said “Sure, I’d be interested in working on it.” It totally fell through, I remember talking with the editor and she informed me that a fellow named Greg Farshtey would be writing pretty much all the books, and I said “Well…. okay!”
Everyone: *laughter*
Ryder: I had nothing to do with the decision, I just thought “Well, okay” and I just proceeded to do more Star Wars books. Last year… actually, no, it was late 2014 that an editor at Scholastic, a different editor, Rex Ogle, contacted me and asked if you’d be interested in working on BIONICLE. I was like “Well, yeah I would be, but what’s the situation?” He assured me that the folks at Lego were familiar with my work on Star Wars and they were hoping for me to do a reboot. Not to meander too much, but what happened next surprised me… Rex Ogle left Scholastic and went to Little Brown, and then I thought “Oh man, there goes this assignment too!” Fortunately, my new editor at Scholastic, Michael Petranek, came on and assured me that I was still on this and I would be doing Chapter Books. I was about to begin work on the first book and then Rex Ogel contacted me and said “Hey, I’m in charge of the BIONICLE graphic novels here, would be interested?” There was no conflict of interest, everything was friendly, so… I still think of my editors as my guardian angels. I never had an agent, I didn’t have a foot in the door already with Lego, so… that’s how the work game my way. I know mostly aspiring writers kind of casually hate my guts, cause it’s like “Well, how did you get this?!” It’s mostly because I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve made some good connections, so most of them remember me well. They’re just like “Well, Ryder can do this, I guess…” So that’s how I got into BIONICLE.
Eljay: What would you have done if you’d heard back from one of the editors and they’d been like “Greg Farshtey, he got it again!”
Ryder: If that had happened… well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Kahi: Because you’d be in jail, obviously, because you murdered Greg. “Take my assignment, will you?!”
Takuma: Whoa.
Ryder: Nah, there’s no… I’ve never met him, but I am familiar with his work, and I’m guessing one of your next questions might be “Did you read his work?”
Meso: How could you have guessed?
Takuma: There goes my question.
Ryder: Just a guess. After I got the assignment, I did go online and, I confess, I poked around some of the fan forums.
Meso: Oh boy!
Ryder: What I read, I mean, various BIONICLE fans were writing “There’s no way Windham can do anything! He’s not Greg Farshtey, he’ll never be Greg Farshtey!” Then there were others who were like “Oh wait, I read some of his Star Wars books and he’s pretty good, I think he’ll do good work!” Then some others would say “Oh really, you think so?” and then others would say “NAH, can’t possibly, I won’t even bother reading them!” Just so you know, I can’t take any of that personally! To me, it’s a matter of, well, I’ve been given a job, not just to write this book, but to do a good job that hopefully will lead to more work, because that’s what I do for a living. So when I got these assignments, I was told… this is a reboot where the Toa will be in a new environment, they’ll be dealing with new enemies and new landscapes. It was pretty clear that I wasn’t required to read anything except that Lego had a very detailed story bible which they had developed specifically for this. The focus was on the new location and the new characters, so I read and studied that and… to Lego, I asked… I had a LOT of questions for them. Now I can’t remember all of them, or any of them, but things where I just said “How does this work?” I actually do remember an example; I watched the cartoons on the Lego BIONICLE website, and one of the things I noticed was the aerial view of the island… you could see the island had six distinctive geographic regions, but over the course of the animation you find out there was a massive cataclysmic explosion that radically transforms the island into six different locations, and I thought… “Wait a moment…” If you look at the beginning of this cartoon and look at the end of it, it seems that, yeah, there’s a little crater that is formed, but how does that work? When I was reading the story bible, it strongly emphasized that the island was once a large, tropical island. It was the explosion that changed everything. So… the response I got from someone at Lego was… “Well, yeah…” I don’t want to get in trouble with Lego because I don’t remember how that response came back to me, but it was something along the lines of “Well, during the animation we wanted to emphasize the different environments and we thought it would be easier if we did it this way and just started out with these environments.” So I thought… well, does that make sense? I wasn’t chewing them out, I wasn’t angry, I was just trying ot make sense of all this.
Takuma: Yeah.
Ryder: What I came up with was the idea that over the course of history, even long before the destruction, these different regions were recognized almost on a mystical level. This tied in, also, that they had the… six elemental creatures, these ancient creatures that are almost like spirits of the island. So I thought “Wait, how can there be this Elemental Spirit of Ice in a tropical area?” It doesn’t make sense! So I thought that there were some things about the history of the island, perhaps in earlier times… I tried to work with what I had, and tried to make sense of it as I went along. Lego was really supportive, when I asked them questions, they seemed to trust that I was trying to figure this out. So anyway…
Eljay: I knew I wasn’t crazy.
Takuma: It was a good thing to do, because people in the BIONICLE community will rip it to shreds trying to figure out every single thing.
Eljay: I knew I wasn’t crazy, we had this discussion before about the Ice and the elemental regions. The bios for the Creatures state that when the island was created, they all popped up, but there wasn’t any ice before.
Meso: What’s the next question we have… do you want to ask the next one, Eljay?
Eljay: Yes, so writing the story and going off the story bible, from I understand you were given some creative liberties, naming certain characters, giving them names, identities, and genders. In the first book, it was revealed that… is it “Kor-go” or “Kor-got?”
Ryder: That is an excellent question! I just type it, but I always thought of it as “Kor-got.” As far as the liberties, specifically with the Protectors, that wasn’t… that was a retroactive liberty because Lego and the editors, they didn’t say “Okay, we want you to develop new names and indicate genders for these characters.” What happened with the Protectors was I looked at this list of names and pictures, and for example, the Protector of Earth… It was initially just “Protector of Earth.” I anticipated when I write these new stories, if I have the Toa of Earth saying “Protector of Earth, come help me!” For the graphic novels as well, it was just like… why don’t these characters have individual names? It just struck me as practical. I presented a list of suggested names after I had scoured through a ton of foreign language dictionaries, scavenging fragments of words and combining them… somewhere I have a notation as to where Korgot came from, whether it was something I made up or was derived from several different languages… I can’t remember. I do recall that when I presented the list, Lego came back with “Okay, can you give us three alternatives for each of the Protectors, three names so we can choose?” So I did that, I created a second list, they read through them, and they made the final decision to choose the names from the list I had come up with.
Kahi: Hm.
Ryder: How to put this… I’m the father of two daughters, and even know they are in their teens and they don’t play with toys anymore, I guess I’m thoughtful that girls play with BIONICLE too. I took it entirely on myself, I just thought that there was something strange to me about the idea that there was only one Toa who was female. I thought that AT LEAST one of the Protectors should be female too.
Eljay: I’ll say that was astounding for the community.
Ryder: What I also did was that I looked at what was online for the Protectors on the Lego BIONICLE website. I read about the Protectors of Earth, Ice, etc… the website indicated that a few of them were male because it said “He had this weapon” or “He could do this” but there were a few characters where gender was not indicated. The more I thought about the Protector of Earth, this bulky, broad-shouldered, and strong character, I thought… “Why not make Korgot a female?” Lego had no resistance either, they totally supported it. It wasn’t until the first book came out that I returned to scoping out the fan forums, because I was curious if they still hate me! Does anyone like what I do?! I was curious, and some of them thought it was a great idea but a few were quibbling and saying “WAIT A MOMENT, only the water characters could be female!” I was like… I don’t know! All I know is that this is what I proposed, and Lego approved it. I wasn’t trying to trample on things that had come before, I just read the material that was given to me and made a decision that I hoped would please some, if not all fans.
Eljay: I think the majority really enjoyed it because the prior precedent was that only the blue characters could be female up until 2009, so…. you picking not only a non-blue character, but a Protector at all…
Meso: I think it was a good decision.
Ryder: Something I emphasized when I wrote to the editors and the really nice folks at Lego was like… if I were to make the Protector of Water a female character, that would just be the obvious choice. Oh great, the two female characters get to go together… it seemed like it was putting them in a niche that it struck me as condescending, so I thought why not have a strong, female character that’s paired with a male character? It just made sense. So there you have it, I’m a feminist.
Meso: Well, hey!
Eljay: I think it worked out for the best. Do you have a favorite character in the books?
Ryder: That’s a good question… it’s a question my daughters would ask me. I find that more often than not, it’s not the individual character but rather the relationships that I find interesting. I’ll make an analogy with Star wars and say that R2-D2 is, in part, as interesting as he is because of C-3PO, and similarly, Han Solo is a cool character but with Chewbacca he’s a REALLY cool character. With BIONICLE, it’s funny because I’m struggling to think if there was any one particular character that I enjoyed more than others… Oh gosh, I don’t know. I like the Protectors. I felt that they, to me, were more interesting than the Toa. The reason for that is that the Protectors are familiar with their island and they are trying to protect THEIR island. The Toa as the heroes who show up, I mean, they have their powers, they’re certainly very strong, but I think that with the Protectors there’s more potential for an emotional capacity, I guess. The threat to their island was a threat to their legacy, or their families. With the Toa, they’re brave, helpful, and resourceful, but it’s not like they have family on that island. I did find the Protectors interesting, they’re lik the underdogs, I guess. They intrigued me.
Meso: I quite liked the second book that was all about the Protectors, I think that was a good decision to make them the protagonists of that book.
Ryder: Well, that was my decision. I can’t even remember the order that I worked on the books, because there were three chapter books and two graphic novels, and they all kind of staggered, they were overlapping when I worked on them. With the first chapter book, the primary goal was… I was told that Lego wants this book to strongly tie in with the animated cartoons, it’s to introduce these characters. Same thing with the first graphic novel. So I realized that there will be some redundancy, readers are going to get somewhat similar information. So now it became a challenge as to how I could do this differently… so instead of focusing on the animated cartoons, which focused a lot on Tahu, I thought I should shift to some of the other characters and see how they interact in their new environments. Man, am I on a ramble… So, uh… writing them, I can’t remember just what affected the decision, but I thought that in order to write… rather than just having the Toa going around, having adventures, and fighting skull spiders, a good way to make the reader care about all the characters more is to give them a better understanding of the island, its history, and how the Protectors had been protecting the island for generations. It was a good opportunity to tell an adventure story with a bit of history. Even though the history is fictional, it’s important to make the reader care about these robotic heroes.
Takuma: It shows that this world was important before the Toa showed up.
Ryder: Exactly!
Meso: Kahi, you going to ask the next question?
Kahi: I have some questions specifically concerning the book. One of the things we were wondering about because it was mentioned on the website but has yet to appear anywhere else is mask powers. The website mentioned that certain masks had powers attached to them. One was a mask of strength, for instance. This was in old BIONICLE where all the characters had masks which had an additional power, but in the reboot they mostly have elemental masks. Can you remember anything about the Protectors having masks with unique powers, or anything like that?
Ryder: Oh gosh… I remember having lots of questions about the masks specifically, wondering how many masks were on the island, or the whole idea regarding the Mask Makers. There were things which were baffling to me because I thought… I should stress that the story bible which I first read, Lego’s own story bible, was a constant work in progress. Every week or few weeks or so, I got these updates that they were adding, modifying, or expanding the story bible. There were things regarding the toys or animations to be released in 2015, but there were more secretive things related to 2016. For example, when I first began working on the first chapter book, I was completely unaware of the ancient elemental creatures which, initially, were referred to as elemental spirits but were later changed to creatures. I was like “Wait a minute! How far back does this go?” That’s when I started getting confused again. I got the impression that Lego was, sometimes… they were maintaining their secrecy for security purposes or to keep information close, but in some cases, they were finding new opportunities where they thought things would be interesting as part of a backstory. I didn’t really always understand how everything meshed, and from the correspondence that we had, I’m not always sure they knew how it meshed either. They thought that something would be a good idea for a toy, and I was like, “Yeah, but I’m the one who has to write about it!”
Everyone: *laughter*
Ryder: It’s one thing to put two short sentences on a toy package or on the website, something to describe a character, but I’m not Mr. Know-It-All, and I’m not a mind reader! I’m just trying to figure out how to make all these story aspects sound real and somewhat logical. So, again, I digressed, but from working on the story, I can’t remember all the details. Just know that it’s a work in progress, and I was getting new information as I was working on the book, so sometimes my issue was trying to tie up loose ends that didn’t manifest themselves until I was almost done working on the books. Did that make any sense at all? Did I even answer your question?
Kahi: Kind of, you answered enough of where the question would come from or how the question would get answered in the future.
Eljay: Takuma?
Takuma: The Skull Villains, thus far, haven’t got a whole lot of screen-time, and we don’t know too much about who they were before they were dead or where they came from. Is there much you can share about that?
Ryder: Not much, a lot of the information I just took at face value. One thing that came up, and… forgive me, I’m not even sure which books are out yet…
Takuma: Two.
Ryder: There were some… it was one of the villains who was introduced, because… if you watch the initial run of episodes from the animated cartoon, it leads up to Ekimu being revived, and it’s just… the pace of the story that you get these various enemies… There’s the Lord of Skull Spiders, the Skull Crusher, the Skull Grinder, and the thing that surprised and concerned me was that it seemed like most of these characters were rather quickly dealt with. It was sort of like, okay, this one’s down, and now this one, and then that one! It occurred to me that Lego likes to keep characters alive. At first, I’m reading this script, and it seems clear to me that the Lord of Skull Spiders has been sent plummeting into this chasm, but not necessarily! Lego tells me it still could be alive! The same is true with these other villains. At first I thought that perhaps these Skull Creatures, in regards to where they came from, I don’t know! Perhaps they have the power to simply revive bones, so you have these deceased BIONICLE characters and it’s kind of a zombie-like thing. I had a lot of questions, because if you look at the toy package art, it doesn’t seem clear. I couldn’t understand if the Skull Spiders steal the masks of the islanders and then jump over the character’s bare head, or do they jump over the entire masked head to control the characters, and Lego sort of goes back and says “Oh, well it could work this way, or it could work that way!”
Kahi: Right.
Ryder: It’s sort of a flexible answer because they’re concerned with kids playing with toys and being imaginative, and I’m thinking… I don’t mean to sound so rigid, but for a narrative story, it needs some kind of rules. Anyway, I don’t recall some super specific thing about where the Skull Creatures came from, but there is a villain… I don’t mean to give anything away, because I think it’s in the third chapter book, but it sort of hints, I think, at the origins of how the Skull-oriented enemies arrived on the island.
Meso: Interesting!
Ryder: If I’m wrong about that, you’ll just have to see me in court!
Meso: Fair enough! The main reason the Skull Villain history is even a question is because there were a few lines in the first book regarding the last two Skull Villains introduced. Ekimu was like “THEY call him Skull Basher or Grinder, etc.” and the question was raised by the community… who is “they?”
Ryder: I actually asked that question too, I did! I do remember asking that, how does he know that? He’s been asleep for however many years and generations… I did question how does Ekimu know these things, who is he talking about right here?
Meso: Well, the next question I have, switching gears from the Skull Villains and moving into the second chapter book, there was this period at the end of the book where Ekimu meets up with the Protectors after he had been awoken and he calls them by different names. In the book, I’ll say that was an excellent extra bit of world-building, knowing those ancient names. The problem is that in the book it’s not made apparent which name is which for each Ancient Protector, so I was curious if that was something you knew?
Ryder: I’m sure I gave it some thought in that… as far as trying to keep the dialogue flowing and conversational, my best guess it that if you were to read the lines as Ekimu is greeting the characters by name in a certain order. So, hello… Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, etc. So just before or after that statement, he looks up and he sees them, I’m pretty sure I arranged them in close proximity so you’ll see that he’s looking at the Protectors… I’m pretty sure I put them in the same order. If you want me to type something up, I’ll certainly take a look at that. I’m pretty sure… actually, the second graphic novel, SPOILERS, features the ancient protectors.
Meso: Makes sense, considering it’s a flashback novel.
Ryder: I’m pretty sure I identified them by their ancient names, I also was thinking, especially for very young readers, I didn’t want it to be baffling. I wanted them to be entertained. While I was working on the books and the comics, I was able to distinguish the ancient protectors from the contemporary protectors by name. At the time, I remembered all of them, but it’s been months. I don’t get paid to remember all that, I get paid to write all that!
Everyone: *laughter*
Ryder: So no, the names were not arbitrary, each ancient protector does have a specific name.
Kahi: One of the most important things going forward with G2 is the culture and the villagers, as well as how they live their lives. Did you have any cool concepts for the world they lived in that was just never able to find its way into a book?
Ryder: I don’t recall having… the only thing I remember was from watching the cartoon, the opening one that introduces the new island. You see some islanders, the little robotic creatures, and some of them are fishing. I think some were sitting on pylons and they had rods with string that extends to the water, and I remember asking… do they eat food? If they catch fish, what do they do with the fish? Do they… eat them? Do they use the bones for food? What’s going on with that? I don’t remember the answer exactly except that it seemed as if the emphasis was that these are living, organic BIONICLE creatures, so they could certainly eat and consume food. It struck me as something I was just going to let go, as opposed to the characters going hunting for food tonight. It seemed that I was more comfortable with the idea that they just got their energy as they needed it.
Meso: Oh we are… there was a recent debate about how Matoran eat in regards to the original BIONICLE, where the characters ate through their hands as opposed to the their mouths.
Ryder: I was thinking, especially relating to their masks, do they have to remove their masks to eat. It struck me as kind of odd.
Kahi: I know that Harvali made note in the second book that there were edible plants, and I remember thinking “Do they eat with their mouths now?”
Ryder: I’m guessing they do. The cartoons along with the story bible, along with the BIONICLE website, was my source material. There were scenes with the masks removed and you can see that the characters do have mouths, they can talk so it seems to work. I just remember something that did baffle me! I can’t remember who asked about additional masks, but I do know that masks, from what I remember of the story bible, the Mask Makers produced many masks. It wasn’t just masks for the Protectors but for other characters as well. As for giving specific powers, I do think that the Mask Makers could produce masks that weren’t merely ornamental, they were celebrated and recognized for the mystical powers that came with them. I remember being baffled because, here’s one thing to consider: the cartoons establish that when the Toa arrive on the island, they have to go on these quests for golden masks. It made me think “Wait a minute… the masks, they seemed, were specifically made for them. ” There’s this whole prophecy of the Toa, if you watch the cartoons, the prophecy is first mentioned by Ekimu’s spirit. After the cataclysm, the Protectors gather around his lifeless form and they hear this prophecy that the Toa will come. So, okay… now we have to backtrack because prior to the cataclysm, that’s when Ekimu made the masks. How did he know something bad was going to happen? So, even before the Protectors knew about the prophecy, Ekimu knew something bad was going to happen, so he constructed masks that would eventually help save the island. The problem being, the way I just explained it was never indicated in the story bible. I was trying to piece together the story of the whole thing, typing things up in chronological order… It was an interesting experience, I enjoyed working on the project. It was sometimes baffling to me, but I liked the challenge of it, how it was a very collaborative thing between Lego and my editors. The one thing I felt may have been interesting, and it did get shot down immediately, was the idea of a… not exactly time travel, but suggesting the possibility of a “Temporal Loop” of sorts.
Eljay: Oooh…
Ryder: The island was anticipating the coming of the Toa, so I thought, perhaps to bridge the gap with the previous BIONICLE series, what if the Toa… they’re not just on an ongoing series of adventures, but what if they’re on an odd loop, where they might be stuck and they’ve gone from one place to another. What if the reason this prophecy exists is that the ancient islanders… what if the Toa had been there before, but that information was lost to time? I wrote up a short synopsis about how it could work, and the initial response from Lego was “No, that’s too complicated.” I was never hell-bent on seeing it happen, I just thought it might make it more interesting, but they thought it was too complicated, and I said “Okay! Sorry for wasting your time!”
Eljay: Wow!
Meso: Well, I suppose we should probably wrap up there. The final thing I will ask to close this interview is that… we currently have release dates for Chapter Book 3 as well as Graphic Novels 2 and 3. My question is, can we expect anything more after that, or has your work on the BIONICLE theme wrapped? Or can you even say?
Ryder: To be honest, if there is a third graphic novel, that’s news to me, because I didn’t write it.
Meso: Oh.
Ryder: I don’t know what’s beyond that, if there are more opportunities to write for Lego and specifically for BIONICLE, they know I’d be honored and delighted to do more, but for now, I don’t know of anything beyond the work that I did.
Meso: Oh… okay then.
Ryder: One more thing, I know this is mentioned in the chapter books, and I know it comes up in the graphic novels… Ekimu has an airship. This came about because I remember wanting to get the characters around the island faster. I pitched the idea that maybe there’s an ancient airship or something, and they were like “Yeah, that can work.” I just mentioned that as an example that Lego and the editors, they were just receptive to things and ideas, which was part of the fun of the project. I feel that I had to work within various constraints, but they still encouraged my imagination as well and it was fun. It was a pleasure to work on.
Meso: Well, excellent. I certainly hope that you will be asked to create more in the future.
Ryder: Thank you.
Meso: The books, so far… the online animations were excellent and we’ve had the privilege to talk with the screenwriter for those animations in the past, but they were short and did not have the necessary time to convey adequate world-building. The books and the graphic novel have fulfilled that role pretty wonderfully, and we’ve learned a lot through your intervention with the theme, the questions you’ve asked, and the things you took it upon yourself to create that we may not have learned otherwise.
Ryder: I got a message from someone saying that the Protector of Jungle has a tail. On the toy the tails are on his feet, and you’ve got it going off the spine of the character. It wasn’t until I read that message… I found out about the tail through the website, but they just have a picture of the tail and it’s not even attached to the character. If you watch the cartoon, I said “Look, he has no tail! Not on that character!” So I didn’t mean to screw up, I wrote it that way at the time because that was my understanding. It was A tail, a singular tail that came off his spine.
Meso: LISTEN… normal tails do come off the spine. It’s not exactly a grievous mistake to make.
Kahi: Can confirm, the tail is off his spine.
Ryder: That’s how I wrote it, yeah.
Meso: Then that’s how it will be.
Ryder: Well, thank you very much!
Meso: Thank you, it was a pleasure. Maybe we can do this again sometime.
Ryder: That’d be fun.
Meso: Alright, well, thank you all very much for listening to TTV’s interview with the BIONICLE 2015 and 2016 book and graphic novel author, Ryder Windham! Be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments section below, and uh… yeah. I’m Mesonak!
Eljay: I’m Eljay!
Kahi: I’m Kahi!
Takuma: I’m Takuma!
Meso: And goodbye everyone.