Vex should've been in Crystalized... With Tommy revealing that the Never-Realm's time flow isn't out of sync with Ninjago's and Aspheera just sent Zane back in time, there's no reason to believe Vex or Akita or anyone else from there rapidly aged to dust by the events of Crystalized. All of them should've been able to come back, considering they were part of the Wildbrain era.

Not only would a crystalized Vex be so easy to pull off (just recolor his pieces so the 'ice' crystals are Overlord crystals), but also I wanna see him torment Zane. I want to see him interact with Aspheera because her beef with Wu inadvertently led to everything for him. It was her power that gave Vex the Ice Emperor.

Vex's philosophy seems to be hiding behind the biggest, baddest monster to be safe. What if he basically replaces Char as Aspheera's lieutenant, they're intertwined, hand in hand, as the antagonist of the Fire and Ice chapters, representing either element which they never had true claim to and have lost by Crystalized. Imagine the drama. Imagine Vex explaining what Zane did because of her, and Aspheera taunting Zane with his guilt.

Imagine her taunting Wu; Once again, a loved one of yours has taken the bullet that should've been for you, and was doomed to become a villain because of it. And even after returning to their senses, they are forever haunted by their actions; First Lord Garmadon, now Zane the Ice Emperor. Garmadon being bitten by the Great Devourer was one of the most traumatic things that ever happened to Wu, so Aspheera basically replicated that in the present; And suddenly her revenge does not feel like it failed. It still isn't enough but she derives cruel satisfaction behind it, as Vex once again hides behind someone who wielded the Forbidden Scroll of Spinjitzu.

Their main conflict might come from Aspheera not caring as much for conquest anymore than she had when she was younger, whereas Vex wants to rule. But then again he is also someone who thrives off of irrational spite and self-perceived victimization. So they'd feed into one another horribly. Plus they're both still subservient to the Overlord, so they're both going to help him rule Ninjago either way.

I saw an explanation I really liked about why Aspheera sent Zane sixty years to the past! The idea is that she wanted Zane (or Wu, as was originally intended) to wait sixty years minimum by himself for the ninja to come rescue him, because if he’s sent back in time, then the moment the ninja move to rescue him, it’s already been sixty years from his perspective. This is because Aspheera herself had to wait decades in isolation for someone, the ninja, to free her, so she wanted Wu to suffer the same way.

...idk, this doesn't track. Why 60 years? Aspheera was trapped for thousands of years. why not thousands of years for Wu? Seems a little out of character for the punishment to be lesser than the crime. Pretty sure she just wants wu to suffer. I mean, her whole thing is revenge. I'm fine with the concept, but the time span is just so arbitrary.

What if Zane did remember during his stint as Ice Emperor. The Forbidden Scroll already drives you mad, plus Vex is there to voice the worst. What if he waited years for the ninja to come to him, wondering what was taking them so long. What if he found the Traveler’s Tree and made it back to Ninjago, only to realize he had been sent back in time by Aspheera. What if the realization drove him mad that his friends weren’t even born yet, he’d have to wait forever for them to be alive, much less be the people who knew and loved him.

So he returned to a place he at least had power, a place where he was feared and respected. Him and Vex get horrendously codependent. He’ll sometimes ask Vex if he’d ever leave him like the ninja did, and Vex unfailingly says never. He has not a real love for Zane, but he’s nothing without the Ice Emperor and needs him, like a leech or parasite latching on. And at this point the Ice Emperor does not bother to make the distinction. Vex brings out the worst but the Ice Emperor will often leverage and threaten the power he has over Vex, and become angered should Vex talk to anyone else.

Imagine the Ice Emperor's robotic nature, but from the perspective of the people of the Never-Realm, who have zero context for a being like him. They don't have robotics or particularly advanced technology, though they at least have magic to expand their imagination with, and are aware that (some of) the Blizzard Samurai are made of ice.

But still, machinery on the level of Zane must be totally foreign to them. Alien, even, and it technically is if we go by the strict definition of the term. People rightfully assume the Ice Emperor is made of, well, ice; But they aren't aware that he's metal. He has metal organs and bones unlike any creature they have ever seen before. He doesn't breathe; He doesn't eat, doesn't drink, doesn't even bleed. When he is 'asleep' it is like being in the presence of a lifeless statue, that is to say there is no presence, just impersonal cold; One looking for the Ice Emperor might even assume they've only found a statue in his likeness.

Imagine if during those sixty years, someone came close, really close, to defeating the Ice Emperor before the ninja arrived; But they failed and died because they could not have anticipated his nature as a machine. They tear apart the Ice Emperor, his head is rolling at their feet... And his eyes blink anyway. He's still alive. He bleeds not blood but sparks of lightning.

He puts himself back together like a puppet. He creaks and groans and emits strange noises. He does not 'live' in the sense that the Never-Realm understands; He is an uncanny mimicry, not quite moving the same, even more unimaginable beneath the already terrifying exterior. The Ice Emperor doesn't heal naturally, he must weld and fuse his body back into place. Imagine if the evil sorcerer plaguing your lands was finally taken down, only for him to have a second phase where it's revealed he's a Terminator. And when you consider that he's from the future, the comparison to the Terminator is even more apt.

His former Titanium Ninja moniker suggests he's made of the stuff. Had the Ice Emperor not awoken, had Akita gone through with stabbing him with her knife... Would it have just broken against the 'skin' beneath the armor? Would she have not found skin underneath the armor, not realizing the Ice Emperor is armor all the way through? If Akita had made a cut, would it have been enough to actually affect the Ice Emperor in a meaningful way, for a slashed neck is not as much to a machine as it is to one of flesh and blood?

There's just a lot of potential when it comes to exploring the Ice Emperor from an eldritch horror angle, an alien that even Vex is lowkey afraid of, because obviously he came from somewhere, someone made him; What is that world like? It'd be like meeting the Iron Giant and realizing he was built originally as a weapon. What if the rest of that world comes for us, wondering where their scout went?

Blursed thought but Ninjago’s latest line of elemental mechs are lowkey a Galidor reboot; They’re buildable lego figures whose limbs you’re supposed to swap. Sora gave us glinching. Ninjago is the return of Galidor, as was foretold with the name Skalidor referencing it, and Mother Doomsday wearing a Galidor shirt!!!

“I don’t care about dumb weed jokes,” I said naively, before I saw this

Rewatching Episode 1 of Rise of the Snakes and apparently Lloyd has escaped Darkley’s before?

Cole said and I quote ‘It’s his son, he must’ve escaped the school for bad boys again. And to think we could’ve been doing Spinjitsu by now!’

Again???

You telling me Lloyd has ESCAPED Darkley’s before getting kicked out?!

I love Kai’s climbing mech. Some Ninjago sets have endeared themselves to me because of the way they were implemented in the show, but the climber mech is one of the select few that I genuinely want just for the build alone.

And you know what? It genuinely resembles Nocturn to me. With Lego’s recent obsession with mechs and statues, plus Bionicle fans trying to cope about a potential G3 by considering Brickonicle, the climber mech feels like a genuine look into what a brick-based Bionicle might actually look like!

Four arms, plus the legs with the splayed toes and that particular piston piece for support… The lower arms wield blades, and one of the upper arms has a longer tendril to grab with! I even heard the designer for this set used Matoro’s claw piece as a placeholder for the climber mech’s golden claws!

I could see an extensive mod that turns this set into a Brickonicle Nocturn; The head would probably be brick-built and/or use the new dragon head mold pieces that Ninjago has introduced. Tbh, it doesn’t even have to be Bionicle G3 specifically; I’d just really like to see a theme where the sets ARE the characters, rather than the characters being within the sets.

The brick-built scale allows for so much more customizability for characters, and if Lego really wanted minifigures, maybe they could function as the smaller ‘Matoran’ analogue, who knows? There’s just so much character to convey with different builds. And Kai’s other mech this wave, which is the ‘base’ form of the climber mech in canon, is paired with a wolf mech whose hands and feet always remind me of the finned Piraka feet piece;

Look at that hand; That’s a Piraka foot. Lego seems really into mech builds lately in Ninjago and Star Wars, not to mention their attempts at superhero action figures. I want to see how Lego would do an original line of fully-sized characters on their own terms.

They need more esims!

A part of me wishes they saved Euphrasia’s fight with Cinder for like… the end of the season or something so she could just utterly curb-stomp Cinder by using her wind powers to disperse his smoke form. And then everyone is shocked, Euphrasia included, when Cinder is spread thin to the point of non-existence from one gust. He doesn’t reform. Someone asks if Euphrasia just killed him. “That’s what it looks like, I guess.” She replies sheepishly.

Geo could use his powers to climb walls. Just fuse his hands and feet to surfaces and then undo it when he needs to move a limb. Based on the range of his powers demonstrated in S2, what’s stopping him from fusing your feet to the ground? And a huge portion of the ground, not just a little bit of it. He blocks a punch and boom your fingers are fused together. You blink and uh oh you can’t open your eyes for a while. He could even fuse the walls of your heart with the surrounding tissue, preventing it from contracting and thus killing you. He can make solid rocks out of sand, turn a sandcastle into a stable and durable structure. Geo has the capacity to be soooooo OP I wanna see him fight more.

Reminder that Suko is 1.5x the size Kong was in Skull Island.

You know those jokes about kids that look like miniature adults? I guess that’s Kong.

You can already guess that Jurassic World’s Giganotosaurus is an inaccurate movie monster, even before you check what the actual Giga would’ve looked like (speaking from personal experience). But I think it bears a pretty decent resemblance to Gorosaurus!

The triangular skulls and ridged spines that curve back… In toys, Giganotosaurus even shares an olive green complexion. So unless we get a Monsterverse Gorosaurus, JW’s Giganotosaurus, which looks nothing like its real life counterpart anyhow, is my go-to HC for how Goro would look on the big screen.

Sora: So Arin and I were watching this movie about time travel-

Kai: Time travel? Oh yeah I’ve done that before.

Nya: Same here.

Kai: Yeah but I’m the only one who’s done it twice.

Nya: Doesn’t Zane also count?

Zane: I try not to think about the second incident.

Lloyd: I didn’t even get to time travel at all…

Sora:

Sora: Arin did you know about this????

Arin: I only know about one of those times and I’m not sure if it’s the one Nya’s talking about.

I just realized the perfect nickname for Trexdis: T-Rex.

Did anyone else have multi-purpose OCs, who you’d use for different stories at once? Sometimes original, sometimes as part of some pre-existing media, with minor differences between incarnations. I recall Midas and Lynkos doubling as both Ninjago and Ghostbusters OCs.