Bonkles

About

"Bonkles" is a corruption of the name of the BIONICLE franchise of The LEGO Group. While it was originally created as a way of mocking those who take the fandom or story too seriously, it's use has become more widespread and less spiteful.

Origin

The term has been claimed to have been created by BZPower user Dokuma ^[1] at some point on the site. However, due to the complete loss of all acrchived threads on BZPower from 2001 to 2013,^[4] no documented record of this exists.

Spread of the term "bonkles" is often credited to the Tumblr Blog "Lunacyoflegomansvalues". This single topic blog focuses on showing the more questionable side of LEGO and BIONICLE communities. The oldest usage of the term on the blog was a tumblr tag added to a LEGO CUUSOO comment chain screen cap^[3] about users wanting BIONICLE to come back. The tag "BRING BACK BONKLES" was mocking those who acted immaturely in wanting the theme to come back into production.

Spread

The term, as well as the BIONICLE fandom itself, became more widespread due to the return of the Bionicle theme in 2015. The bonkles tag is popularly used on Tumblr ^[2] being used with posts about all aspects of the BIONICLE fandom.

Various Examples

External References