Last year Hasbro asked the Transformers fan collective to help create a “Fan Built Bot” by voting on a vehicle mode, color scheme, faction, personality and signature weapon. The end result is Windblade, a female Autobot jet plane samurai. She’s so much fan fiction come-to-life.
Hasbro has been slowly revealing Windblade since voting ended last year, teasing fans with line art and vehicle mode silhouettes before finally debuting the character’s art at San Diego Comic-Con 2013.
Here is our first look at the completed Windblade figure, a deluxe-sized entry in the Transformers Generations toy line.
Windblade is a rare female Transformer, along the same lines as classic character Arcee or Beast Wars/Machines Blackarachnia. Some people are vexxed by the idea of female Transformers — why would a race that doesn’t reproduce sexually need separate genders?
It’s a question that isn’t answered in the 80’s cartoon, though we do get an episode where most of the old-timey female robots are destroyed for being female, which doesn’t seem nice. In the IDW Comics continuity, Arcee is the result of a failed experiment to introduce gender to Transformers. That doesn’t seem nice either. Hopefully IDW will do better this April, when the four-issue Transformers: Windblade series is released.
Windblade the toy will be on stores later this year, released as the final numbered figure in the increasingly innacurately-named “Thrilling 30” program, celebrating 30 years of Transformers.
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