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Hey deviantArt, it's been a while. Like, a long long while. I've been building more recently, and I wanted to share some of that with you. Today it's Toa Helryx, an official Bionicle character we never saw as a set.

The leader of the secretive Order of Mata Nui, Toa Helryx was the first Toa ever created, making her somewhere over 100,000 years old. Although she's a Toa of Water, I've tried to capture her age by making her largely silver instead of blue, as if whatever paint she had has mostly eroded to reveal bare metal. I've also used CCBS parts much more than standard Bionicle parts, again to make her stand out and seem strange design-wise compared to later generations of Toa. Her mask is Hero Factory, Breez's from 2013, which was my only real choice for a vaguely feminine mask without 3D printing.

In terms of design, I was experimenting with a sort of samurai aesthetic, with the overlapping plates and wide hips. When I turned to Knight's Kingdom II plates to complete her armour it picked up a bit more of a Western knight vibe, but I'm okay with that. She doesn't correspond neatly to any one Earthly culture anyway. Canonically she wields a shield and a mace; both appear here, in gunmetal to make them stand out more against her silver armour.

Bionicle tends to be... not great about portraying female characters. There's very few of them, and those that do appear tend to be either indistinguishable from male characters (most Matoran) or absurdly over-feminised. I wanted to find a middle ground, to make a female character who is recognisably female but still practical and sensible. Helryx is buff as all hell, so I hope I've succeeded.

Description
Hey deviantArt, it's been a while. Like, a long long while. I've been building more recently, and I wanted to share some of that with you. Today it's Toa Helryx, an official Bionicle character we never saw as a set.

The leader of the secretive Order of Mata Nui, Toa Helryx was the first Toa ever created, making her somewhere over 100,000 years old. Although she's a Toa of Water, I've tried to capture her age by making her largely silver instead of blue, as if whatever paint she had has mostly eroded to reveal bare metal. I've also used CCBS parts much more than standard Bionicle parts, again to make her stand out and seem strange design-wise compared to later generations of Toa. Her mask is Hero Factory, Breez's from 2013, which was my only real choice for a vaguely feminine mask without 3D printing.

In terms of design, I was experimenting with a sort of samurai aesthetic, with the overlapping plates and wide hips. When I turned to Knight's Kingdom II plates to complete her armour it picked up a bit more of a Western knight vibe, but I'm okay with that. She doesn't correspond neatly to any one Earthly culture anyway. Canonically she wields a shield and a mace; both appear here, in gunmetal to make them stand out more against her silver armour.

Bionicle tends to be... not great about portraying female characters. There's very few of them, and those that do appear tend to be either indistinguishable from male characters (most Matoran) or absurdly over-feminised. I wanted to find a middle ground, to make a female character who is recognisably female but still practical and sensible. Helryx is buff as all hell, so I hope I've succeeded.