Last year, we got three female Autobot toys in rapid succession: Windblade, Arcee, and Chromia.  And it was great!  But it'd be even cooler if we got female Decepticons, too.  As short supply as female Autobots are, female Decepticons are in even more dire straits!

And suddenly, TakaraTomy over in Japan, they saw this deficit, did some retooling, and BAM, gauntlet cast.  And one of these three new bad guy ladies is Blackarachnia.  She's technically a Predacon, not a Decepticon, but she was a Decepticon once, and she's often a bad guy, and so I'm fine including her in that group.  She's also different in that she wasn't retooled from Arcee or Windblade or any other recent mold, naw, Takara went back and grabbed Animated Blackarachnia from 2007 and used her as a retooling base.  I mean, Blackarachnia's a spider, and there aren't really a lot of spider toys to make stuff outta, so.  

Animated Blackarachnia is a pretty great toy to start off from!   It's actually a fairly inventive transformation, especially with how the arms and legs from from the spider limbs and how the torso is created.  The spider head folds down to form the chest and the pedipalps (which are balljointed) rotate and form the contours of the waist.  Seriously, it's pretty great.  

so what takara did was remove the pedipalps and replace them with new pedipalps that instead fold up and become boobs

I mean, I sort of get it.  If you're going to make a Beast Wars style Blackarachnia, her, um, chesty parts are an important part of the visual package.  Kind of, you know, in the same way you'd want your Jazz toy to have a chest made out of a car hood.  That's just what Jazz looks like!  And Beast Wars Blackarachnia puts the "rack" in "arachnid."  And, so, yeah, on that level, I understand.

But, damn, this does not leave her with much of a torso.  In fact, it merely leaves her with the original toy's spine.  She's got these two globes, a skinny stick to connect those to... well, the middle part of her pelvis that wasn't previously created out of pedipalps, and then legs.  She looks like something from the cover of Youngblood.  

That aside, she does make a pretty good Beast Wars Blackarachnia.  The new headsculpt is absolutely perfect, if set a little high on the neck, the paintjob is a good attempt at hiding the fact that she has hands and not claws (and you're supposed to leave her forearms half-transformed to achieve the look), and she's just generally painted meticulously all over.  You don't notice she no longer has a torso if your room's lighting ain't so great.

But it's just, like, what.