I think my Transformers One collection can be best summed up as “the characters from a hypothetical sequel that isn’t happening,” since it consists of everyone who was still alive at the end, in the final forms they were in. Because of this, I was already going to go in on Airachnid, but it also helped that this was another release that the community had really bigged up for me as an exceptional figure, in the vein of Studio Series Age of Extinction Optimus, only this one’s from an actual good movie.
Her incredibly strange, awkward laugh here is better than 80 percent of Age of Extinction.
I think the other big thing about getting a new Airachnid figure is that she’s just never been a full-sized Transformer of hers that was actually good. Apparently some of her minifigures were well-made, but the only other time she got a proper Deluxe was way back in the Transformers Prime toyline, and I hear that figure was hot garbage.
It doesn’t even look nice!
So, in my mind, Airachnid here is doing double-duty as both the villainess of Transformers One, and the renegade trophy-hunter of Prime. Either way, let’s see how she stacks up.
Robot Mode
She cuts quite the silhouette.
There’s something about Airachnid’s design when it’s translated into 3D space that I didn’t really get when it was onscreen in the movie: It doesn’t scan as a Transformers design. Something about her aesthetic feels like something out of a different mecha franchise. I want to say Ghost in the Shell, or Battle Angel Alita, or something. Some non-Transformers Japanese production that’s a bit less colorful, and a little more “real robot” in its sensibilities. She almost has the same kind of vibes that Bumblebee Movie Arcee did.
They’re the main mechs from an obscure 90s Anime OVA you sometimes see GIFs from. It’s got one of the greatest theme songs you’ve ever heard, and lots of lovingly-animated closeups of gears and pistons moving on the mechs.
I think it’s the way the design’s got so many narrow struts, and the specific way all the boxier bits of her design are made out of these sharp angles. I like it, it’s unique. I think another reason she scans as “different” to my eyes is that she feels a bit smaller in scale than the rest of the Transformers One toyline, which just adds to the “this is from a different mecha franchise” vibes of it.
“So YOU’RE the one who’s been stealing all of my roles!” “It’s because kids can actually spell my name, hon.”
That said, she’s got an extra four insectoid limbs that extend out of her backpack on struts, so once you’ve unfolded them from the packaging, her silhouette is actually much larger than her fellow Deluxes.
Bee’s arachnophobic.
By the way, the instructions don’t tell you how to properly assemble her backpack out of the box, but luckily, I have photos.
It’s like this. There’s a little peghole there for the rotors.
She is also fairly animation-accurate, with her main design differences being that she’s a bit bulkier than her onscreen appearance (pretty typical when it comes to making these bots transformable), and her feet have been redesigned to have struts that allow her to actually stand up in robot mode.
“They say we’re supposed to have a token Girl Fight. I say we take the fight to them.”
One kind of funny thing about her headsculpt is that while it’s technically way different from her Transformers Prime iteration, with a long Xenomorph-like cranium instead of a horned crown, she feels a lot like her Prime self, thanks to having the same kind of noseless, smooth facial sculpt (well, okay, there’s a nose there, but it vanishes into the crest of her helmet).
A distant relative?
Basically, she can do double-duty as both versions of the character.
Gina Torres voice: “Arr-ceeee!”
I love the tiny sculpted eyeballs going up the sides of her skull, too. She sees everything.
Including what you did there.
I think her colorscheme adds to her “real robot, not a Transformer” look, given how much of it’s an industrial-looking solid dark gray, without much other color. It works for the sculpt, and it looks good, so I’m not complaining about the choice. In fact, I think the only bits of color on her are some red stripes on her shoulders, some dark silver on her face and forearm-guns, and a little bit of purple for her eyes.
The fact that she can stand at all, much less when she’s doing this, is really impressive.
Her build quality’s impressive, considering how complicated she is, but it’s not without a couple of stumbles. The good part is that she manages to not feel fragile, despite being made of so many thin parts. The other, more miraculous thing about her is that she can stand up. They may have added struts to her feet, but they’re still these tiny, thin little rails supporting a full-sized robot. And yet, they actually work decently! Well, okay, she’s taken a couple tumbles here and there, but far less than you’d think, considering her design. I could always have her rest on her lower insect legs as extra support, but I’ve never really had to.
Unless you want to do a fancy pose, and need extra support.
As for where she stumbles, it really comes down to three things: Firstly, her left knee’s a bit loose on my copy. It’s not the worst, but it makes standing a bit trickier.
She’s been told to keep off her knee.
Secondly, she’s got some fairly conspicuous production mold flash right on her forearms (it couldn’t have been on the back of them?) and thirdly, she’s got a tab that’s worryingly close to breaking, but I’ll save talking about that for the transformation section.
Those legs are good at letting her do Matrix dodges.
For articulation, she’s got an unusual suite of joints, thanks to her odd shape. Let’s try to go bottom-to-top: Her bent-back legs have mid-shin swivels, on top of universal knees. She’s got ball-jointed hips, and the cowling on her thighs are on struts, so you can move them out of the way to help her articulate. She’s got no waist joint at all, due to the transformation. Her shoulders are on ball joints, albeit slightly restricted by the sculpting on her arms, and her elbows are the same, minus the restrictions. She’s got no wrist swivels, but a nice expressive ball-joint for her neck. Behind her, each of her spider-limbs are also impressively jointed. All four are attached to her body on ball joints, and each lower limb’s got two additional swivels, with the upper ones having four more (!) each. They’re mostly meant for decoration, but it turns out you can do a lot with each limb. So, she’s missing a few staple joints, but the bonuses more than make up for it.
Those spider legs just allow for so much expression.
For accessories, there’s really only two of them: A pair of little laser pistols, which fit into 5-millimeter ports on her forearms most of the time, but can also be handheld, if you like, or given to other bots.
When she needs to blast the intelligence out of some skulls.
These pistols are puny enough to work well with Cyber Changers.
Those forearm ports are the only weaponizable places on her, though. And while it’s not an intended gimmick, her transformation swaps her fists out for additional gunbarrels, so you can say that she’s hiding an extra set of weapons.
It’s another bit of her that’s very 90s mecha-coded.
Transformation
Hoo, boy. This is, in a good way, another Studio Series Age of Extinction Optimus situation, in that part of the draw is how they made something ludicrously complex for the size of the figure, but hopefully understandable. And to their credit, there’s a lot of neat stuff happening here. In particular, the way her upper spider limbs connect into a perfectly circular ligature for her copter mode is really cool.
Making this happen is really neat.
As to how intuitive it is, well, the back section is easy enough to figure out, but the front of the chopper requires such a complicated twisting and pirouetting of her robot limbs, that I’ve needed a guide every time thusfar. Another thing that initially baffled me was how to properly fold back her shoulders, as there’s a bracket they need to squeeze past and pop into.
Her shoulders need to get in here, like this.
But the big build quality concern is a hooked tab that goes into the back of her head, securing the rotor assembly. It was hard to get in there to begin with, and upon taking it out, I discovered it had gone white with stress marks.
You can see behind her head, that tab’s got some real stress on it.
I’m not sure if it’s a load-bearing tab or not, but after a couple careful transformations, I was able to figure out a good way not to put stress on it: Make popping it in, or pulling it out, the last step you do in either direction. That way, you can make sure there’s no other stress being put on it.
Going the other way, if you detach it last, it gives her a Beast Machines Megatron mode.
On an otherwise very well-engineered figure, it’s a dissapointing problem to have to run into.
Copter Mode
This thing really feels like an enemy in a cyberpunk video game. Possibly Cyberpunk.
Remember what I said about the robot mode reminding me more of something from Ghost in the Shell, or Alita, or a Cyberpunk-themed story instead of Transformers? That goes double for this futuristic drone-copter altmode, which literally looks like a piece of set dressing from, like, Deus Ex or something.
Or that 90s OVA I already described.
You’ve got the big, circular rotor in the back, two smaller ones up front, about six sculpted-in laser pistols upfront…it’s a spikey, mean military-looking hover machine. Funny story: My wife looked at it and suggested that if I held it vertically, it looked like it could be an Angel from Evangelion.
DANANANANAAAAAA….NA NA NA
Okay, I do think the front section of the main body’s a bit weak, largely due to it being a combination of robot limbs just kind of jammed together.
It’s a little indistinct.
But it feels like an equivalent exchange for how the spider limbs vanish into the rotor-and-landing-gear assembly at the back.
The better to menace Arcee with.
For colors, we’re even more plain in this mode. Just that dark industrial gray, a little bit of red on the underside, some silver on two of the pistols, and that’s it.
Pastel versus Goth.
It’s so plain, that the silver screwheads on the front rotors feel like deco. Again, I don’t mind it, because it adds to the whole industrial science fiction look of the thing.
Transformers is a land of contrasts.
For build quality, it’s another case of the macro feeling good, but the micro being a little bit dodgy, where I often find myself squeezing and adjusting some of the connections when picking the copter up. That said, it’s way less of a problem than this usually is, and it’s mostly me making sure her little side-rotors, or the collapsed limbs up front, are properly in place.
A narrow profile.
For features, the biggest one is the rear rotor spinning inside of the big wheel that surrounds it. Just flick it, and spin it.
The lone action feature.
That said, it very frequently knocks against the landing gear when it does so. I’ve tried making micro-adjustments to it, but it seems doomed to rattle against the copter’s body whenever I spin it. Then again, maybe the rattling sound’s the point, it makes it sound like a chopper.
She may not be colorful, but her firepower is.
For another feature, her six front-facing guns are the perfect size to accept blast effects, and you can always pop the two 5-millimeter ones off.
Overall
This is a very ambitious Transformer, before anything else needs saying.
My post-movie headcanon is that she bought her way into the Decepticons by giving them state secrets.
Airachnid’s a complicate, unorthodox design in both modes, with an equally complicated, unorthodox transformation. It feels like the desitners were trying to challenge themselves. And, you know what? They mostly pulled it off.
An important part of this Transformers One Collection.
She’s not quite Studio AoE Optimus good, but she’s really impressive. She feels un-Transformer-like in an interesting way, and makes a good stand-in for her Transformers Prime iteration, too.
She’s thinking about starting another blood feud.
She’s just full of wall-to-wall daring engineering, from the spindly feet onwards. And really, all my complaints are minor things. A tab I have to be careful with. A loose knee. A slight wobbliness. It all vanishes behind the novelty. In fact, she’s worth getting for that novelty alone, beyond the character reasons, and beyond just being, like, good. I still like Megatron more out of the Transformers One figures that I have, but she’s up there, proably at second place, another that’s worth getting even if you’re not collecting the movie’s cast.
An altmode shot, for the road.
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