(Femme-Bot Friday #84)
I've affirmed many times that I am very much against TransFormers merchandise - and particularly in the form of action figures - that does not transform, but model kits are something of a grey area. I went through a phase, some years back, of collecting Gundam and Macross model kits, because I found building them to be quite therapeutic. Some Macross models can even have the bonus of being transformable, since the variable fighters have been part of the anime from the very beginning.
My exposure to Armor Girls Project, Frame Arm Girls, Variable Fighter Girls and Eastern Model ATKGirl brought an interesting new angle to both action figures and model kits, blurring the line between them at least to the same degree as the Gundam kits I've built, and with just enough 'mecha' vibe to pique my interest.
All that said, when Flame Toys started producing licensed TransFormers model kits, I wasn't overly impressed by their exaggerated take on G1 and Beast Wars. They were all weirdly-proportioned and unpleasantly angular - different from the source material, yet cartoonish enough to put me off. IDW-based designs, such as stealth bomber Megatron and Hot Rod, looked better but I didn't feel compelled to buy into the line because, ultimately, they were non-transforming TransFormers, and that didn't sit right with me.
That was, until they showed early photos of their proposed Windblade kit. Windblade has, so far, got the short end of the stick. Created during the 30th Anniversary, her first toy was flimsy, unstable and showed signs of features having been trimmed to fit a budget. Remixes for RID2015, Titans Return and Cyberverse just seemed to get progressively worse, and improvements in Takara Tomy's versions were largely limited to additional paintwork. The problem was that Windblade was seemingly conceived as a robot, first and foremost, meaning her jet modes were invariably tacked-on rather than designed around her. This alone made her ideal for the model kit treatment, and Flame Toys took a markedly different tack in her design, versus the more established characters.
The bottom line seems to be that Hasbro and Takara Tomy are still having trouble creating feminine robot forms out of jet aircraft without dumping most of the nose on the back and leaving the lower legs rather hollow. Thus, a model kit for a non-transforming figure of Windblade's robot mode seems to be about the only way to present her as a solid-looking character, at least somewhat based on the interpretations of her from the comics... So, let's take a look...
Packaging:
Unsurprisingly, this model kit comes in a box very much like your average model kit - two halves made of (alarmingly) light card, printed in colour with a matte finish on the front half and a gloss finish on the back. The image on the front struck me as somewhat muddy, lacking contrast, but otherwise nicely done, particularly its representation of the model. The back of the box shows a few product shots and a boxout depicting the 14 sprues that make up the kit.
Surprisingly, the instructions are printed in full colour, on a leaflet of just six pages. The illustrations are CGI rather than photographic, and some are a little tricky to follow due to their small size and the complexity of the parts depicted, but the overall quality is good.
Build:
While it's been a few years since I last put together a Gundam model kit, I'd consider myself fairly experienced, overall. Before those, I used to build model cars and planes as a kid, though I didn't tend to paint them, and built models of a Xenomorph from Aliens, the Yautja from Predator 2, and even put together an Alien Queen kit for a friend. I didn't record how long Windblade took to build, and ended up spreading the work over a few days, largely because my eyesight isn't up to sustained, close-up work these days. Even with a bright LED lamp nearby, there were some points where I struggled to see what I was supposed to be doing. Nevertheless, I'd estimate this kit took somewhere in the region of 4 hours to complete, based on the playlist of podcasts I had running in the background.
Most of it was pretty easy, but a few steps required me to break out the pliers to squeeze tight-fitting pieces together. Some parts are difficult to fit together purely because they're so awkwardly shaped, and some pieces don't like to stay together once fitted. Some parts are tricky because the're so small and flimsy - the two gold kanzashi, in particular, feel so delicate that even getting them off the sprue is terrifying, and the fact that they can rotate around the peg to which they attach makes them all the more precarious - while others, like the 'grip' hands, are tricky because all three parts are small and irregular, offering little surface to grip while pushing together. Making this all the more fun, the swords cannot be inserted into the hands once assembled, so they have to be prised apart, then reassembled around the hilts. The feet are also a little troublesome. They fit together well enough, but the toe articulation and the armour plate attached to it tend to compete for movement such that the toe sections tend to curl upward, meaning the feet no longer offer a flat surface for the figure to stand on. Remove the armour, and the feet are fine, and it's not simply that I'd attached them to the wrong feet because the parts are symmetrical and interchangeable.
The only part I outright flubbed - and I'd tend to blame the instructions for being a touch vague on this point - was the fitting of the grey wingtips. The instructions appear to show the wingtips being assembled separately from the red frame and turbine sections, before depicting the fully assembled wing, so I assumed the grey section would be able to slot in the the completed red, but that is absolutely not the case. The grey wingtip has to be connected to the grey ring of the turbine first, and the red panels assembled around them.
Leading on from this are the stickers... because the guide for applying them shows the completed model, but some - such as the gold rings for the turbines - can only be attached before assembly. Bad enough that, most of the time, the backing would come apart before releasing the sticker, initially leaving me worried that I'd wrecked the stickers and wouldn't be able to apply any of them. Having discovered that I hadn't messed up, I realised I'd have to disassemble both wings (again) to fit four stickers to the turbines... and it's quite hard to attach a ring sticker at the best of times. Thankfully, only one of them ended up with a crease, but pretty much all of them have a habit of peeling. One of the tiny detail stickers - one of the gold/copper details from her pelvis - tore away from its laminate, such that the foil and glue remained on the sticker sheet for half it minute length, and the red V-shaped sticker in the middle of her torso, below the chest section, didn't quite attach properly and started creasing while posing the completed figure. The most difficult one to apply was probably the recessed 'jewel' in her brow piece, which alone probably took me about 20 minutes to get right.
It was somewhat surprising to find that the instructions recommend gluing just two pieces - the belly plate and the robotic equivalent of the latissimus dorsi - since they are prone to popping off through simple articulation of the torso. That said, the other parts that are prone to coming off are on joints that are intended to move, so glue would be impractical, not to say outright detrimental.
Figure:
The finished figure is absolutely stellar: it's articulated well beyond anything a transforming toy can achieve and, since the wings, nosecone and cockpit are purely for show, they fit the figure without becoming an unwieldy backpack. Of course, the obvious downside to this is that she ends up looking like a cross between Major Kusanagi and one of the robo-geishas from Ghost in the Shell, with the wings nicked from some sort of aerial drone. I'm a little puzzled by the way her decoration is split between paintwork and stickers, though. The white on her cuff wings and the smaller wings on her back is paint, but the white blocks on her larger wings - just below the turbines - is all stickers over the dark grey plastic. The lower 'ribcage' area features both red and sky blue paint, but then stickers are required to complete the 'panty armour' of her pelvis... and, since the stickers are metallic foil, it doesn't match the flat red of the plastic anyway.
Considering there's often some kind of controversy over Femme-Bots, and the sexualisation thereof, it's interesting to note that FuRaiModel Windblade has a comparatively slight and restrained figure. In part, this supports the idea of her transforming into an aircraft - the smaller and lighter she is versus her wingspan, the less power is needed to keep her in the air - but it's commonly noted that Femme-Bot designers, even those at Hasbro and Takara Tomy, though most frequently with Third Parties, often favour massive robo-boobs, while Windblade's are surprisingly modest. Sure, they're still separated into individual breast-analogues, when a single, smooth chest piece would be vastly more sensible, and certainly more accurate to her first toy. Then again, even her earliest comic book depictions, by Sarah Stone, took the artistic liberty of presenting her with cleavage. Her arms and legs are slender, but functional, though it's certainly not clear how they might transform into parts of a jet's fuselage since their shape seems dedicated to the form of feminine robotic armour.
That said, the figure is not without its potentially contentious features. Most notably, the backside has two clearly-defined buttocks formed of a central section, two independently-mobile curved butt-panels, and the smoothly-curved crests of the hips. While I still wouldn't label this as 'sexualising' the figure, it's clearly unnecessary in a robot... but, again, it's not without its precedents in Hasbro's back catalogue. While official Windblade toys have tended to have minimal detailing of the posterior, several iterations of Arcee have had sculpted robo-glutes, even though that's not strictly accurate to her original animation model. The only criticism of any genuine value, therefore, is how intricate the construction of FuRaiModel Windblade's derrière is... but that is a manifestation of the engineering required to make a humanoid robot to a certain level of detail and complexity. While this level might be excessive on a transforming toy, I find it perfectly acceptable in a robot-only model kit.
And the level of detail is excellent - nothing overtly unnecessary but, equally, it does a great job of representing the multiple layers that make up Windblade's body, through sculpting on individual pieces and through the overlapping of connected parts. That layering is particularly effective where different colours of plastic are laid on top of each other, such as around the gold used for most of the limb joints, or the exposed areas of blue-paint behind the shins. She also feels quite substantial and stable, particularly compared to the Armor Girls Project and ATKGirl kits I've built, where even the larger ones feel flimsy - as if the plastic used isn't quite dense enough to support the weight of the completed figure - and can be tricky to balance on their feet. Even with such small, high-heeled feet, FuRaiModel Windblade stands quite easily, but for the aforementioned awkward toe-curl.
The kit comes with two copies of her traditional Stormfall Sword - each made out of a translucent pink blade and two halves of the hilt - but, sadly, no scabbard, nor any way of mounting even a single sword on the figure. What's strange about that is that the guard has a ring section that would be ideal for attaching to a peg of some kind. There are no pegs on the figure, though, so the swords just have to be set aside if she's not holding one or both. The hilt is nicely detailed, but its design means that it cannot be inserted into the hand - the hand has to be assembled around it. Even when held, it tends to be quite loose unless the thumb is nestled into a cutout in the bottom of the guard.
The head sculpt is easily the best version of Windblade I've seen so far. It seems a little big for the body but, to be honest, I suspect that's more because most TransFormers toy heads are undersized, so I'm used to those proportions. As one would expect, the head is styled very much after the Kabuki/Geisha look, but is crowned with an elaborate comb-like tiara rather than the tessen given to some Windblade toys. The 'hair' is far more helmet-like in its design, without becoming overly angular, while the brow piece is wider and more pronounced than on some of her toys. The face is fairly simplistic and generic apart from its distinctive Kabuki-style paintwork, but the eyes are large and quite nicely detailed, with their translucent blue plastic backed by metallic paint to give them a sense of depth. The back of the head features a red multi-layered shell that looks equal part robot armour and remnant of her alternate mode, with small tags hanging off, like earrings or the ends of hair pins.
Obviously, there's no transformation to write about, but there's plenty of articulation. The head itself is mounted on a ball joint offering unrestricted rotation and decent forward/sideways tilt, but the backward tilt is severely limited by an armour panel protruding from the base of her head at the rear. The separately-jointed neck is able to supplement the head's movement to a degree, but nowhere near enough for her to be able to look upward. The shoulders can rotate a full 360°, backpack permitting, and can raise to about 90° out to the sides, with the pauldrons shifting slightly to accommodate. She also has butterfly joints that allow the shoulders to swing about 30° forward. Bicep swivel is unrestricted, and elbows are only single-jointed, but the slender arms means they can bend through about 130°. Wrists can rotate at the forearm and at the back of the hand, as well as tilt on two separate joints - one in the forearm, at the base of the winglet, and at the gold joint where the hand connects. The torso contains several joints - a ball joint embedded in the upper torso allows rotation and a small amount of tilt, a double-hinge inside the waist allows decent ab crunch (though it's a touch too high to be very effective) and arching of her back, and then a joint in the pelvis allows the upper body to tilt slightly from side to side. The downside to this is that that's the sum total of the waist articulation. The wings can swing backward and tilt upward, though this joint has a nasty habit of slowly separating. There are also smaller wings below the main ones which can tilt slightly around their pegs. My only gripe about these wings is that they're a little too tight to her back, so they can interfere with her shoulders due to the bulky pauldrons. Her legs have a good range of forward motion supplemented by a small additional joint in the pelvis, that allows the hip joint to swing further forward, past the jointed armour panels over the hips. Backward swing is limited, even with the separately-articulated butt-panel, and outward swing doesn't get very far without first either rotating the hip or swinging it slightly forward. There's a decent thigh swivel, and double-jointed knees offering excellent range. I'm particularly impressed that the kneecap is actually attached to the knee joint, rather than the base of the thigh or the top of the shin, as this allows the knee bend to look much more natural. Ankles can rotate slightly on their mounting peg, have an excellent range of tilt, reaching almost 90° both forward/backward and from side to side, and then the toe section can tilt about 45°, with the armour moving slightly to accommodate. All of this allows her to be displayed in almost any kind of pose one can imagine, from dynamic battle poses to cute or sexy, and it's such an elegant figure, it's difficult to find a pose it doesn't look good in.
I was a little trepidatious about this kit due to my experience of other anime-style 'action figure' kits, but Flame Toys first Femme-Bot figure is of a far higher quality. I might be tempted to glue a few more pieces together but, for the most part, she holds together very well for a push-fit model kit. Not long after I acquired this kit, I learned of a knockoff presented similarly to the YoloPark 'kits' for Rise of the Beasts, where it's just a case of connecting the limbs to the body rather than full assembly from individual parts on sprues. Initially, I thought it looked better due to the metallic paint used... but, having now seen it in more detail, I'm glad I chose to buy this kit rather than the knockoff. Joint tolerances seem better, the sculpt is more refined, and the chest piece of the KO is an incongruous blob of unpainted matte red rubber... Plus I got the relaxing and therapeutic experience of slowly assembling the figure from all its constituent parts. Granted, the stickers aren't great, and I ended up adding a few touches of gold paint to my completed figure, but I'm generally very pleased with it.
That the first Femme-Bot entry in the FuRaiModel series was Windblade was... an interesting choice. Windblade has been a divisive character, due to having been created - broadly speaking - by fan poll, then shoehorned into the associated media as a key player and subsequently appearing in almost every new toyline and TV show, taking the limelight away from much-loved legacy characters like Arcee and Elita-1. Her first toy, in the Generations/Thrilling 30 and TransFormers Legends lines, and wasn't especially well-received, mostly because the engineering had clearly been compromised to fit within the Deluxe class pricepoint, but also because the design of the feet - or, more specifically, the heels - was not conducive to getting the figure to stand unaided. Later iterations, such as those in RID2015, Titans Return and Cyberverse improved on stability, but the former lost out in terms of elegance and the latter featured even more simplistic engineering.
I've already bought - and assembled - Flame Toys' interpretation of Arcee, and am awaiting further news of their proposed Blackarachnia with bated breath. This kit has also made me a little more interested in acquiring some of their older kits, particularly the IDW Hot Rod/Rodimus figure. Furthermore, while the Yolopark PlaMo 'kits' thusfar revealed have been of no interest to me, I'll certainly be on the look-out for their version of Rise of the Beasts Arcee, considering all the available toys are pretty dire.
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