Subversive Toyetics

How Polly Pocket and Transformers will help us Question Authority and Smash Hegemony

The Eighties and Nineties saw an age of unrestricted toy and merchandise marketing children. In a weird turn of events, this age may have ushered in a subversive, revolutionary new form of narrative that’s more important now than ever before.

Making for Selling (And Selling it Any Way We Can)

In the late Sixties, a Mattel toy developer and marketer named Bernard Loomis pushed across the idea of a Hot Wheels cartoon show. Think about it! Multi-channel marketing through different media! The show eventually became a reality, but was cancelled in its second season by a court ruling — pointing out that it was thinly-veiled 30 minute commercial targeted at children.

Meanwhile, Loomis had left Mattel, and was sowing his nefarious seeds at General Mills. In a discussion with Spielberg regarding his new film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he broached the issue that the film wasn’t easily merchandisable. There weren’t any specific characters or creatures or spaceships that were “toyetic” enough turn into marketable toys. Thus, the word that shaped the way stories were to be told (and sold) slithered into the world of advertising. The story may well be somewhat apocryphal, but if it says anything, Loomis went on to bag the toy making rights of some weird new film called Star Wars.

From then on the aaesthetics and narrative of core media became aware of, if not influenced by, its potential merchandisability — at least like never before. Let’s call this merchandising philosophy toyeticism. It sounds a bit religious, I guess, but with good reason. In the early-Eighties dawn of unfettered market Neoliberalism, it was made legal for children’s entertainment to heavily feature marketed characters without it counting as advertising.

This sea change led of course to the consumerist fever of the Eighties and Nineties that we all know and love. Super toyetic franchises from Japan were imported, dubbed over, funded, and bet upon like horses at the races. Polly Pocket, G.I. Joe and Barbie suddenly became not just toy lines, and not just movies or TV shows, but fully blown multimedia empires.

Fanning the flames, video games were beginning to domesticate, moving from the arcade into the home. This would have meant little if there weren’t a proliferation of corporate hydras looking for any opportunity to grow more heads. Cartoons got video games, video games got cartoons, and where there were both you’d find dolls, toothbrushes, and lunchboxes.

There’s no question that we’re still in that Black Sun Neoliberal Church of Toyeticism (my new sludgecore band for anyone asking). But I think the age of its creative realization has passed — this is gonna sound totally “only 90’s kids remember” of me but hear me out.

After Gamefreak developed the shockingly popular Pokemon games for Game Boy, they licensed the merchandising rights to anyone who’d ask, hoping to ride the waves of what they honestly thought would be a flash in the pan. Accidentally, they achieved world domination and set the merchandising bar higher than anyone had thought possible.

Post-Pokemania, toyetic success became redefined. Unless a franchise empire was going to compete with Pokemon, who may as well own the fucking moon, it wasn’t worth the investment. Since then, only the most established franchises colonize the toy aisle, without too many fresh and wily underdogs shaking things up.

In most thinkpieces, this would be the point in the article where I decry the evils of neon materialism, and urge you to burn everything you have, live in a trendy white hole of Ikea-brand minimalism, and travel to Kolkata to learn something about yourself. And y’know, if you’d like, go do that. Please stop reading.

But if you’re the type of person who has a plastic shrine to Sailor Jupiter, who’s spent more than they’d like to admit on imported action figures, and who feels like the stories they love are more than advertisements (i.e., my people) please read on.

Proliferating Perspectives™: Collect Them All!

As is pretty universally agreed upon, intent isn’t the be-all and end-all of art and action. There have been some pretty neat side effects to this neoliberal toyeticism, and I’m pretty sure some weird beardy guy once mentioned something about capitalism sowing the seeds of it’s own something-or-other.

Let’s talk about Postmoderni- Hey hang on please don’t go.

I’m not going to bother too much with the history of Postmodernism here, but there’s a general consensus in academia that it’s probably a step in the right direction. That’s gonna sound super controversial to any academic but please, please. Let me have this. Just one.

Roughly, Postmodernism is the rejection of a homogenous, authoritative, and “objective” account of something. Usually that authoritative voice is framed as normative — male, white, hetero, wealthy, etc.

This rejection takes the form of including multiple perspectives, voices, and experiences. In many ways postmodernism still aims for a kind of soft-objective account, but only betwixt complex similarities and discrepancies. Where Modernism is the obelisk, Postmodernism is the city. Where modernism is the expert, postmodernism is the support group.

So how on earth do toys fit into this? Multimedia, my dudes.

When you have a story told by a comic, a movie, a tv show and a book, those media will obscure and highlight very different parts of a story. Even when narrative singularity is aimed for, there’s an unavoidable multiplicity in the way the story turns out. The container will always shape the contents, and this says nothing of the diverse authorships of each separate medium.

But beyond traditional storytelling, toys and video games are particularly effective at smashing a narrative into a kaleidoscope.

What’s fundamentally different about toys and video games is their interactivity, that allow for unique individual interpretation, play, and experience. For a kid playing with her Star Wars figures, Darth Vader can be the protagonist, saving the universe from the nefarious R2-D2. She decides on an alternative interpretation of the subject matter, in an experience that’s as equally valid as the canonical film. Video games, too, leave a great amount up to a designed emergent narrative, but some of that narrative might get skipped over, misconstrued, or recontextualized on the fly.

The interpretations, headcanons and fanfiction that result from the creative consumption of media creates a discourse of accounts that are all valid in various ways. Sure, canonization of events sometimes “rules out” certain aspects, but people might not have read that page in the comic book, or missed an episode. At the end of the day, as long as you’ve spent money, Mattel, Hasbro and their kin won’t go out of their way to correct you.

In essence, kids were being sold the idea that there’s always limitlessly diverse ways to consume something. To read something. To interpret something. And they should do their darndest to collect them all.

I love this sweet irony. It totally subverts the remaining dregs of Cold-War era propaganda. It’s a pretty radical line of thought: your experience doesn’t always line up with a canonical one. Seek out various interpretations of a story, and make up your own mind. Let’s call this accidental postmodern narrative Toyetic Storytelling.

Putting It All Together (Into an Elemental Robot Maori)

I might be a little bit optimistic and overzealous when I talk about the equality of interpretation here. Toyetic Storytelling was interpreted by kids, not scholars, and it’s all too easy to go reframing history going on conjecture and theory. But when the serpent split its head in seven and became the hydra, the marketing strategies ended up producing this new kind of narrative that hadn’t really seen popularity before. To really paint my picture, I want to focus on a uniquely narrative-intense franchise by The Lego Company that was engineered to compete with the popularity of Pokemon.

Bionicle was a bizarre, risky venture by Lego that ended up saving a company at the edge of bankruptcy. At face value, it was a construction system for buildable action figures. Lego had tried this approach a couple times to middling reception, but Bionicle’s marketing had a really fascinating spin that was the epitome of the multimedia blitzkrieg that the toyetic era had been perfecting.

The goal to sell narrative-driven toys that don’t even have a compulsory build led to a multifaceted, multi-level approach to get kids hooked into the story in any way they could.

To say nothing of the very postmodern aesthetics of villager robots on a jungle island, Bionicle serves as a brilliant case study because it showcases Toyetic Storytelling in a clearly premeditated orchestration; accessible through multiple media and perspectives. Spoilers: Bionicle is a portmanteau of (bio)logical chro(nicle).

Let’s start with the toy:

You got capsule-like canister — the lid of which had various system-compatible details and notches. Inside were pieces for a named, buildable action-hero figure with instructions. The end result was a brightly coloured robotic figure with a traditional weapon (no guns) and a mask, featuring a cog-powered arm-swinging mechanic. Also included was a small comic book showing the character in action, a website url, and a mini-CD.

You were encouraged to investigate. If you bothered, the mini-CD would give you the lowdown of the overarching backstory through narration and tasty animatics by Blur studio. You’d find out your character’s elemental powers, mask-power, and the prophecy for your “Toa” hero (collect magic masks, beat the big bad Makuta, save the island of Mata Nui),

The website hosted character bios and backdrop, and featured a really polished Myst-like flash game called the Mata Nui Online Game (MNOG) developed by Templar Studios. In it, you played the role of a villager, exploring the island and chronicling the story of the Toa heroes. Hell, if you were signed up for the free montly Lego Magazine, you’d also be following the trials of the Toa through a full-sized DC printed comic.

Interestingly enough, The MNOG, the comics, the movie and the books all told intentionally different stories. Where the comics focused on the Toa’s journey, the MNOG focused on the comparatively powerless villagers, the island, and the stakes. When the Toa did appear in the animatics, they were regarded as incarnated spirits, the elements incarnate, whereas the comics made note of their occasional naivety and quibbling.

This all served to create an immediately rich and populated world of deep lore (the holes in one telling filled in by another narration), and helped to illustrate a diversity of power dynamics. While this didn’t successfully translate to any decent form of race or gender representation — I like to believe it had the potential framework for it.

Fundamentally, this was a new form of multi-voiced storytelling that had no one true authoritative, narrative core. While there was a general story bible that was powered by a massive mystery plot twist that kept the franchise going for almost a decade, the story was characteristically told in a puzzling array of perspectives.

Whereas other franchises snowballed their multimedia approach over time, for Bionicle, everything was planned from the get-go. Instead of building up different ways of telling stories when the opportunities arose, splintering off and accidentally fracturing a singular narrative, Bionicle crashed through the gates with a rich plethora of situated narrations.

In other words, Toyetic postmodernism was the goal, not the consequence. The form of the story was specifically chosen by the creative team, not just the advertisers.

Okay — so I’m going to stop gushing about my very particular interests. There’s a reason I picked this franchise as a case study for Toyetic Storytelling.

Narrative Archeology and Actor-Network-Theory in Toyetic Storytelling

What really, REALLY, captivated me about the early years of Bionicle was the equal relevance of every scrap of information found. Part of the big mystery of the franchise was the scope. The events of the story were very local to the island, but the prophecy and mythos seemed far more epic than the island’s constraints. The island held ancient secrets, indicating a long stretch of time that dwarfed the events of the first years. The fans were always hungry, pouring over every piece of narrative artifact in attempts to find a common link.

It took me until now to understand that I wasn’t just consuming a new form of narrative, but I was participating in a new form of reading that this postmodernist form necessitates.

Perhaps reading might be a poor term for it — I’d liken this narrative consumption to archaeology.

Let’s say you start with some skull fragments and tibia. Every fossilized bone you find changes the entire creature you’re trying to understand. You might find a pelvis that indicates a relativity to avians, only to find something 20 feet off the digsite that might actually prove that the creature’s more of an amphibian.

In fact, the pelvis you found might actually belong to a separate specimen entirely. Jesus. And then after you’re done, how do you piece it together? Traditionally? Experimentally? Are you sure you want to even remove it from the site in case you sabotage future research? Basically, each element you find is going to drastically alter the entirety of the whole in that suddenly, every old element has a new element to relate to.

Analysing something as a network of relationships is pretty wacky, but most academics in the social sciences and humanities refer to it as Actor Network Theory (largely attributed to philosopher-anthropologist Bruno Latour). It’s portrayed really well in a tactile, real-world setting in an article by two folks named de Laet and Mol published in 2000. Don’t worry, I’ll keep this second gauntlet of academia short and sweet.

Basically, when studying bush pump installation in Zimbabwe, de Laet & Mol began thinking of literally every facet of the process as actors or participants, from the experts, the elements of the community, the replacement bits, the pump, and even the water. Crucially, each node in this network was acting upon and being acted upon. Therefore, there’s an equivalence of importance to human and non-human actors — not just the people who designed, implemented and use the pump. After all, if the pump decides to stop working, it’s affecting the network just as much a human could.

The boundaries of the network are important here — it’s easy to end up connecting every quark of fractal consequence, and wind up paralyzed in deterministic apathy. Alternatively, when you draw the line and establish the container, you kinda have to bullshit where something stops and ends. The focus on the network and relationships, and not on hierarchies of value, is what’s truly unique about this perspective.

While this framework was intended for use in showing how technology affects us as much as we affect technology, it translates really well trying to understand these new forms of geeky-ass stories.

Legacies of Toyetic Narratives: Dark Souls and Beyond

I chose Bionicle as a case study because it’s the first memory I have of involvement with this new kind of narrative form. I’m certain that it wasn’t the first IP to deliberately use this postmodern form, but the fact that the franchise was built to be multi-faceted from the get-go is a really good affirmation of the rich narrative worlds that were a consequence of that 80’s and 90’s toyetic frenzy. Sometimes you get the opportunity to see a forest through the trees, and taking in the majesty of a forest is a pretty mind-bending experience.

So where are we? Nowadays, I think we can see this toyetic form still exists, but it isn’t necessarily tied to toy lines anymore. Most of all, we get to see it develop and mature in gaming and interactive media.

The medium of video games really gels with this kind of narrative, and I don’t think it was coincidence that the complexity of game narratives went hand in hand with the Toyetic age. Just like certain songs are easier to play on certain instruments, this style of storytelling works really well either between mediums or in the simulated space of programmed interactivity. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is pretty close to a postmodern narrative contained in a book, but it’s a goddamn mess and ends up being an illegible choose-your-own-adventure tome that begins to melt the brain. By necessity, it can’t keep traditional form.

Video games, on the other hand, commonly inherit the fluid consistency in disparate elements that toyetic franchises folded together into fictional universes. The functional scope of video games as a container for disparate, archaeological narrative is far more flexible. Both inferred and explicit information and story elements can occupy the medium comfortably together, whereas traditional media has trouble. A movie must conclude, a book must be legible — perhaps the trick to games proficiency here is that it’s so ridiculously leaky and multifaceted that it suits postmodernism wonderfully.

In a way, Toyetic Storytelling and the gaming medium are twin sisters, having shared the same childhood — it wouldn’t surprise me if toyetic-style franchise narratives are so popular in games because it was simply the narrative style of the era.

Listen, the Dark Souls series has had more than enough praise as a medium-defining text, but it’s so successful with the kind of multi-faceted postmodern storytelling that Bionicle was gunning for. At face value, it’s another violent fantasy game. Like, it could have had a saturday morning kid’s tv show like Dungeons and Dragons, a card game, and a line of action figures.

While it may owe a great deal to those foundations, the way FromSoft built upon the worlds of early toyeticism truly marks it as a uniquely important work. In-game, every item has a description, and each description feels like an individual narrator of varying trustworthiness. There are some accounts that directly contradict others, and while it could be argued that the “right answer” is up to interpretation, there are subterranean clues that could firmly address certain mysteries. You can only find out by collecting your toys.

And just like Bionicle — there’s that driving mystery of a container with uncertain borders. The scope of Dark Souls is vague, perhaps either local to a fantasy island, a hub of disparate universes, or possibly taking place in an alternate earth. It could take place over the course of generations, or lifespans of realities. And the plot — the reason for the alleged degradation of the world, involves very mortal gods whose nature is entirely debatable.

In place of the unknown scope of the context, every node in the network — every boss fight, every behaviour and piece of dialogue, every item drop has equal import and relevance in relation to literally everything else. Furthermore, the very order and chronology is convoluted (canonically and by consequence of the open world). The narrative archaeology that people like Vaati Vidya, EpicNameBro and others do with the Souls series quite literally provides us with potential reconstructions of the plot, understood in perhaps more familiar, digestible forms. They put the dinosaur together.

What’s lost in Toyetic Storytelling is, of course, the certainty that was present in traditional narratives, where we had someone give us definitive closure. We find ourselves craving the objective truth, to find there might not be one “right” answer. But here’s the beauty of this new narrative — has the right answer we’re served always been factual?

I think at this point we can generally interpret the ideological morality that traditional narratives try to burn into us at the end of the day. Red Dawn’s about American superiority. H.P. Lovecraft’s work is about being afraid of non-whites. After passively absorbing it, we can choose to take or leave that thesis, or maybe interpret the text against itself. And that’s dependent on you having any training in media literacy at all.

With this new form of narrative, reading things complexly, uncertainly, and with a grain of salt is the undertaking. Asking who’s talking — who’s the authority in a situation and what gave them that authority, that becomes the norm. Any understanding at all depends entirely on you actively participating and flexing your critical thinking muscles.

And it’s been a roundabout way of saying this, but power structures hate critical thinkers. In this political climate, where histories are being erased and written over — where reality itself is being bent to suit white, male, interests; we need to cultivate critical and complex ways of understanding.

And weirdly, there’s already a wellspring — tapped by coincidence by the greedy bastards who won the rights to relentlessly coerce money from children in the Eighties.

No, the stories we love aren’t a distraction from the revolution. They are revolutionary.