(Femme-Bot Friday #86)
It's a curious thing that, as a long-time arachnophobe, I've enjoyed the character of Beast Wars' Blackarachnia and, more recently, Airachnid from TransFormers Prime. The obvious answer is that both characters are very much in the tradition of the Femme Fatale, whose allure would tend to outweigh any sense of danger or unease that might come from the 'spider' aspect.
And, of course, they're not crawling about on my bathroom ceiling... but that's neither here nor there, right?
BingoToys weren't particularly on my radar until BT-06. Their previous output - including a Bumblebee movie Shockwave with an alternate mode every bit as dubious as his robot mode, and a Windblade analogue that didn't tick enough of the right boxes for me - hadn't inspired me, both because the aesthetics were unappealing and the transformations were lacklustre. That all changed with Spider Lady, who is a stylised take on Blackarachnia in much the same way as Big Firebird's Nicee was to have been a stylised take on Arcee.
Is this going to be a case where the temptation of a Femme-Bot Fatale outweighs my typical preference for a halfway decent transformation and a suitably robotic robot mode? Saddle up, folks, 'cos there's only one way to find out!
Without any prior experience of BingoToys products, I wasn't sure what to expect, but it's certainly a good, sturdy box. The front and back feature striking representations of the figure in robot and beast modes in a high-contrast, 'glitched' format over a plain white background, while all the other faces are purple. Measuring approx 20 x 24 x 10.5cm (7.75 x 9.5 x 4"), it was a lot larger than I'd expected.
Inside the box, Spider Lady is contained in a plastic clamshell tray with the spider abdomen, her alternate hands, and the first set of alternate faces (the pale skintone versions) off to one side. Below the tray sits the display stand components, the gold-painted set of alternate faces, and her weapon accessories. It's very no-frills, with no Collectors' card, and QR codes for video transformation are printed on either side of the box in lieu of paper instructions. She can stand perfectly well on her feet, and the display stand, frankly, feels a bit rickety, so I only used it for a few photos before putting it back in the box.
When the package arrived - containing this and Red Fantasy - it had been somewhat battered in transit, though the only actual damage was to Spider Lady's box: a small puncture to the outer layer of the box's upper flap. I'm not overly bothered by this as the box is ultimately there to protect the figure within.
Beast Mode:
There's no point suggesting that there has ever been a truly good arachnid or insect beast mode in the TransFormers franchise. The first Blackarachnia/Tarantulas figure was awful, the TransMetals and Beast Machines versions were OK, but had the characteristically weird 'robot' modes of their respective lines, the Animated version left the robot's forearms and hands visible on one pair of legs, and even the recent War For Cybertron: Kingdom Blackarachnia and Legacy Tarantulas left something to be desired in service of their more screen-accurate robot modes... So the fact that this monstrosity doesn't look particularly authentic is neither a surprise, nor even something that should, in all fairness, count against it.
Taken at face value, it's certainly an interesting beast mode... It's very much more on the TransMetals side of things, but without the appearance of mutation. It's even quite pretty, in its own way, being mostly bare matte black plastic - often a winner in my books - with silver, gold, metallic red and metallic purple highlights. The sculpt work is curious, in that the abdomen is segmented, with sculpted armour plates, something I'd tend to associate more with insects than arachnids. The ends of the legs have the appearance of segmented armour, while the black sections appear, if not truly organic, then at least biomechanical, thanks to a sort of pipe-like detail running along the top, which then reappears below the 'knee'.
The front and sides of beast mode show off a lot of the gold paint at first glance, but there are smaller designs in purple paint on either side of each 'shin', at the back of the 'knee', and on the upper face of the upper leg. The larger forelegs feature black- and silver-painted designs in a similar style. The abdomen features simple wavy strokes in silver paint, with little bobs of metallic red between each pair, and on raised 'spikes' running down the centre. The paintwork is crisp and clean, and does its best to make the figure striking, even if it can't appear remotely authentic.
And, to be fair, I don't think it's really trying to be an authentic, terrestrial arachnid. Sure, it's got eight legs, a cephalothorax and a bulging abdomen, but even the TransMetals Blackarachnia is more anatomically accurate than this. Because of the way it transforms, her front legs are the largest pair. Longest wouldn't necessarily be unusual, but the remaining six legs are tiny by comparison, both in length and bulk. Meanwhile, the robot's kneecaps stick out at the back, above the storage point for her handgun, as passable spinnerets, while the robot's feet poke out of the front of the abdomen but I couldn't get them to sit anywhere near flush with the cephalothorax when I took my photos. I've subsequently realised that several of the joints - like those on the robot's ankles and the daggers - are asymmetrical in their range, so it looks as though I had the joints round the wrong way. Oriented correctly, the heels pop back inside the abdomen, reducing the incongruity of the purple toes. The same is true of the daggers, which can also be mounted on the sides of the abdomen.
Where the whole 'spider' thing really falls apart is right at the front of the cephalothorax, which is neither sculpted nor painted like an arachnid. The sculpt is, essentially, the robot mode's chest - honking great armoured robot-boobs and all - clipped over its head. Rather than pedipalps, fangs and chelicerae, this thing has a couple of 'horns' on the top, four poseable 'pincers'... and an opening 'mouth' that appears to have either teeth or gears running down each side, and a single row in place of a 'tongue'. The closest it has to an arachnid's traditional eight eyes is a set of three silver dots on either side of the 'mouth' in the exposed part of the robot's head.
All that said, compared to Wind Girl's transformation, where her backpack does the bulk of the work, but she still ends up as a nonsense jet with a robot - boobs and all - hanging off the bottom, this at least has a reasonable beast mode, even with the egregious use of robo-boobs as the 'head'.
Robot Mode:
There's certainly no mistaking who this is supposed to be, though the overall feel of her appearance is halfway between the Beast Wars TV show's depiction of Blackarachnia and a stylised, more heavily-armoured take on the TF Animated version. Straight off the bat, I'd say this is a better interpretation of Blackarachnia than BingoToys Wind Girl is of Windblade... yet some of the elements of Wind Girl's design that I found offputting are still present here, albeit substantially less encumbered by her alternate mode kibble.
At first glance - and particularly with the default face attached - this does look rather more like an armoured humanoid than a humanoid robot. Even the waist area looks as if it has an organic musculature, and there's a small but defined belly button. The backside is largely concealed by the spider abdomen (the sides of which, unfortunately, cannot swing far enough forward to be over her thighs) but, yes, her derrière looks pretty organic as well. Her proportions - especially in the size of the head versus the body - are far better than Wind Girl, and less cartoonish... with the possible exception of those robo-boobs...
The golden armoured breastplate makes a lot more sense in robot mode, and fits perfectly alongside the small, horned pauldrons and bulky vambraces. The way it's sculpted suggests there may have been some discussion of whether to leave the upper panels of her robo-boobs unpainted, to give the impression of a superhero/supervillain-style armoured bustier with the underlying black armour peeking out over the top. Based on the fandom's response to the suggestive paint jobs on FansProjects Comera and Echara, it's probably a good thing they chose to paint the whole thing gold. The collar piece sweeping in from the shoulders and sitting over the top of the bust rises to a point in front of her neck, with a metallic purple panel on the front. Her pelvis seems to be making reference to Beast Wars Blackarachnia, in that it features a pattern of eye-like silver dots around armour panelling resembling a robotic insectoid or arachnid head... Although the gold and red paint on the central section have the unfortunate side effect of making it look like a bird's beak from certain angles. Her pauldrons are relatively small, and feature matching strokes of metallic purple on each side. While the upper arms aren't especially detailed, the vambraces appear to be made up of several layers of overlapping armour, with the tips of the spider forelegs folded back on the underside, and strokes of black paint on either side. The black portions of the forearm have applications of metallic red on the upper face of two of the sculpted ridges, and each set of the interchangeable hands has a block of silver paint just in front of the wrist joint.
While I'd have much preferred articulated hands, I conceded that they would have to be fairly small - and thereby fragile - to fit this figure. Spider Lady instead includes four alternate pairs of ready-posed hands, similar to Nicee/Mocha. The default pair are closed fists, then there's the weapon grip hands, the splayed-finger hands, and then a pair that form the 'heart hands' emoji. One frustrating thing is that she can only transform with the clenched fists in place - even the weapon grip hands are too large to fit in the forearm cavities, which is strange considering how small the pegs are, and how little difference there is in size between the 'closed fist' hands and the 'grip' hands.
Her legs are perhaps more intricately sculpted and feature a greater variety of paint applications, with small blocks of the metallic red on the uppermost points of the thigh armour, metallic purple panels curving toward the inner thigh, strokes of silver on the outer thigh, and a segmented panel of metallic purple running up the back of the thigh. The prodigious kneecaps are painted gold and metallic purple, and connected via hinges to the upper panel of her shin armour, which slides upward as the knee is bent on its lower joint. Gold panels are attached to either side of the calves, each one just above another set of three silver 'eye' blobs, while metallic red paint has been applied to small recesses just below each knee, and the top of the ankle area his rimmed with gold. The feet are sculpted as if made up of several segmented armour parts, but the front and rear are each solid parts, connected by a transformation hinge at the heel, with the front of the foot painted metallic purple and the heel seemingly unpainted, die-cast metal.
The smaller spider legs can remain in place, plugged into her shoulder blades, but they can also be plugged together in sets of three and mounted on the black spikes of her pauldrons. In either position, they remain every bit as poseable as in beast mode, though they're rather too short for anything but close-in hand-to-hand combat support, and there's no indication that, as with BW Blackarachnia, they also function as guns. In theory, the spider legs could also be attached to the abdomen, plugged in just above her backside, but the pegs seem a touch too short for a secure connection.
Overall the vibe is equal parts Super Sentai villainess and elaborate android... which is not a bad place to be, per se, but it's and aesthetic that distances Spider Lady - and, by extension, BingoToys - from the Third Party TransFormers figure market.
Comparatively speaking, Spider Lady is somewhat light on weapons. She's packaged with two daggers and a single handgun, which is strangely reminiscent of the gun wielded by G1 Shrapnel. The pegs on all the weapons are the same as those for her spider legs and her ankles, 2.5mm/0.1", confirming that the daggers' similarity to her feet - both in style and colour - is no coincidence. This is almost certainly why their grips are articulated as well, though the display stand is required to pose her with the blades in place of her feet. The handgun is quite stylish, but mostly unpainted - with only a small application of metallic purple toward the back and a flat red symbol stamped near the front, which looks something akin to a simplified Predacon symbol from Beast Wars, the Timelines Predacon symbol, a stylised bird head... or a weird take on Spider-man's mask. The meagre paint job is disappointing, given that Blackarachnia's gun has traditionally been gold/copper in colour and, while the sculpt isn't especially intricate, more paintwork would have made it a better fit to the rest of the figure. The daggers, meanwhile, have a coating of the metallic purple paint all over the blade, so they look fantastic. While the ball-jointed wrists don't have the greatest range, the articulated hilts allow for a better selection of 'stabby' poses with the daggers. Alternatively, her arms can be transformed back into their beast mode configuration, to make use of the integrated claws/blades already on her forearms.
The head sculpt is essentially a lightly embellished version of Beast Wars Blackarachnia's CGI animation model, with the addition of the four poseable pincers. There are slots in the helmet to allow them to close in toward the exposed part of her face, which made me think of Megatron's redesign for The Last Knight. Alternatively, they can be arranged like a crown, more akin to the Marvel Comics interpretation of Hela. Along with the default face (skintone, with red lipstick), Spider Lady comes with three alternate expressions in the same style, as well as all four expressions with the entire face painted gold. Aside from the neutral expression, the options range from a shouty/angry face, to a shouty/happy face and a similar thing, but with the tongue sticking out. These last two are the kind that normally draw the ire of the fandom, since they're usually considered to be typical hentai expressions. While I strongly disagreed with this assessment with regards to Nicee, the sculpts here are rather more explicitly in the hentai vein. As well as the faces, her helmet's brow piece can also be substituted for a version that features a domino mask, as a further nod to the Beast Wars and TransMetals versions of Blackarachnia. This is my preferred brow piece, but then she pretty much requires the contrast of the skintone faces, as the gold faces are of almost exactly the same tone as the brow piece.
I've seen Spider Lady described as being "based on Wind Girl"... but I can't see anything truly common to them in terms of their transformation engineering. The way the legs simply fold back on themselves is similar, but the way they interact with her abdomen is cleaner and far more satisfying than the way Wind Girl's shins break so the feet can awkwardly fold into the wings, and the usage of the robot's arms as the beast mode's forelegs is far more sensible that simply leaving them hanging on the underside of a jet that already looks dubious. There are, admittedly, a few aspects of Spider Lady's transformation that aren't exactly straightforward: arranging her robot mode legs for beast mode, particularly the part where you have to finagle the feet around the abdomen shell, is quite frustrating and, while the shell can be removed entirely for transformation, that seems like a bit of a cop-out... and doesn't even avoid the difficulty of fitting it around her legs. Some of her joints are excessively tight, and getting a firm grip on some of the smaller parts can be tricky - especially the gold-painted shoulder blades - but, overall, this feels more like a proper transformation than what I've seen of Wind Girl.
Since this figure is essentially an action figure that has been designed to transform into (most of) a spider, robot mode articulation is excellent. The neck has a ball joint at both ends, giving her a reasonably range of tilt in all directions, and full 360° rotation. The shoulders can rotate a full 360°, swing out a little over 90° to the sides, with the pauldrons hinged separately for clearance, and there's a very slight butterfly left over from transformation. She has bicep rotation, double-jointed elbows allowing a little over 135° bend up toward the bicep (but the upper hinge has a full range of 180°), and the wrists are ball joints, allowing for quick and easy switching between he fixed hand options, though their range of movement seems to be less than 45° at best. Waist swivel and ab crunch are involved in transformation, though the former is somewhat restricted by the fact that the belly section of the body sits down inside the pelvis. Surprisingly, and unusually, the hips aren't limited by the spider abdomen as much as they are by the sculpt of the whole pelvic chunk and the outer armour of the thigh. They can swing backward and forward, but don't get very far without either rotating the thigh or angling it out as well. Outward swing has no such restrictions, and the small gold armour shards on the hips are ball-jointed, allowing them to get out of the way, both by rotating and by swinging up. The knees are double-jointed allowing the calves to swing right up to the back of the thigh, and the ankles have asymmetrical joints that allow full 360° rotation at either end and about 45° tilt forwards/backwards or close to 90° if rotated sideways. These joints peg into the front of the foot at an angle, which also allows for sideways ankle tilt, albeit rotating while doing so, while the heel is articulated mainly for transformation. Given how small her footprint is, I've been impressed at how stable she is, even in dynamic stances and, for the most part, she doesn't really need the stand.
In beast mode, the front legs have an excellent range via all the robot's arm joints, plus additional 'butterfly' range, while the others can rotate around their mounting pegs, bend through about 135° at the hinge, and then rotate and bend via ball-jointed 'knees'. Whether it's entirely intentional or not, the beast head has a small amount of wiggle, and the abdomen can move slightly even when fully pegged together. Additionally the little pincers on the head are ball-jointed, and the mouth can open quite a way. What's rather impressive is that, unlike some official figures over the years, the spider legs are well able to support the weight of the body - which includes some die cast parts. I would expect the ball joints in particular to weaken over time, particularly if they're used often enough but, for the time being, they're strong enough that they don't all have to be in contact with the ground to keep her raised... and that's quite an achievement, given how small the points of contact are.
I've no doubt that this figure is going to upset some people - if it hasn't already - due to its perceived "sexualised" nature, possibly even moreso than Nicee/Mocha. Certainly more than BingoToys previous Femme-Bot, who seemed to receive an uncharacteristically tame and civil reception from the fan community (at least, I'm not currently aware of any forums banning photographs of Wind Girl). As a representation of Blackarachnia, it's stylised to the point where she's distinct enough from any existing official figure - surely a good thing for BingoToys, legally speaking - and her spider mode, while less dubious that BT-01 Silencer's 'gun' mode, is both technically flawed and awkwardly encumbered with a large pair of gold robo-tits masquerading as a head.
Make no mistake, though, I like this figure. It's well-built, the transformation is mostly straightforward, and the sheer adaptability of her accessories and sockets for display purposes is impressive. However, much like Unique Toys' Dragoon, I like it more as a figure in its own right than as anything directly connected to the TransFormers franchise. By most measures, there's more to identify the appearance of this figure as a traditional Blackarachnia than there is to identify Dragoon as a traditional Megatron, but that's mainly because the Bayverse had such bizarre and inconsistent artistic direction, and strayed so far from traditional character depictions.
Speaking of straying from tradition, since I picked this up, Big Firebird have released images of their upcoming arachnid Femme-Bot... and, much as I like the design in and of itself, I'd have to concede that she's barely a Femme-Bot to start with, and that the quasi-Egyptian presentation would be better suited to a scarab beetle beast mode than a spider. Iron Factory appear to be headed down a similar path, with their Iron Samurai Series TransFormers analogues, though most of them so far have more in common with the TransFormers characters who inspired them, in terms of both overall appearance and colourscheme. In particular, their take on Blackarachnia seems fascinating, as do many of their other Beast Wars samurai.
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