I've been quieter on the toy front these past few weeks not 'cuz I ain't gotten anything new, but because I've got some new stuff that's LEGO and that's different to talk about than Transformers stuff.  I've got a nice rhythm and/or rut with talking about Transformers stuff since I talk about it so often -- but LEGO's this entire different animal and so it's more intimidating.  (Also I'm not sure the big Batcave set I got will fit in my lighting studio, plus lifting it from the coffee table and putting it in the lighting studio is a Thing.)  I will have to get to it later.

MEANWHILE HERE'S A SIMPLE SWORD I GOT

It's not an official sword.  When we got Metalhawk last year at BotCon and he showed up in the comic, he was drawn with his original toy's sword because Metalhawks have swordses, but the toy didn't come with one.  It was just Thunderwing with a new head, after all, and so there was no sword in the tooling.  (And making a new sword means someone else doesn't get a new head, the way things are budgeted.)  But man, it'd be nice if he had a sword anyway, right?

Well, Venksta aka Renderform, the guy who made the Bumper head I talked about a while back, made one!  And so I bought it.  And now Metalhawk has a sword.

If it has a flaw, it's that it's a little heavy.  It's a solid chunk of plastic, seemingly without the gaps Hasbro puts in their stuff to save on plastic and shipping weights, so it's got some weight to it.  The only reason this would be a flaw is that it kind of upsets Metalhawk's balancing a bit and suddenly he's really topheavy on one side.  Otherwise, no probs.  It's a sharp sculpt.  There's even a second peg on the underside so you can store it in jet mode.

It completes him.   I got mine at Big Bad Toy Store!  You can buy it alone or with some original-toy-accurate rifles for BotCon Overlord.

And back to our regularly-scheduled BotCon stuff.

One of my most anticipated toys in the set this year was Metalhawk.  Now, I don't know Metalhawk from a hole in the ground.  He was a Japanese-only Pretender in a show I've barely watched.   But goddamn do I love myself some Pretender references.  Sure, we've gotten a handful recently, between Skullgrin and Thunderwing and Bludgeon, but those were remakes of the monster-type Pretenders.  Half the Pretenders were human!  I crave a new human Pretender toy.

And so Metalhawk was my ticket to happytown.  Human face!  For reals!  None of that post-modern "let's redesign the fleshy Pretender shells to look more like robots" crap.  He's just straight-up a dude in armor, as things should be.  The natural order.

Plus Metalhawk was the only human Pretender that wasn't a white dude, so that's neat.  Finally my Pretender collection has a little racial diversity!

And now that Metalhawk is a transforming Pretender shell, that means he's a Mega Pretender rather than the usual kind.  That puts him in the ranks of Vroom, Crossblades, and, yeah, Thunderwing.  Him being a transforming human guy is even more geeky.

Metalhawk is a retool of Thunderwing.  He has a new head, obviously.  The mold works pretty well as Metalhawk's Pretender shell body!  The red, white, and blues make him look heroic enough, despite his claws and pointy toes.  I do wish they'd painted the mohawk on his helmet red, though.

I suppose I should talk about those last two BotCon 2012 exclusive reveals.

One of them was Shattered Glass Ultra Magnus.  He doesn't excite me too much.  I do like that he has a translucent skull for a face, but the Diaclone Magnus colors don't look very striking to me.  He may be my least favorite of the six.  It is nice that we get to own the yet-to-be-used-in-retail alternate head for the toy.

The second was Metalhawk.  He was a Japan-only Pretender dude, and so under most circumstances he wouldn't be very high on my AW YEAH list.  However, BotCon knew exactly how to draw me in.  They not only did a toy of his Pretender shell mode instead of his robot, but they actually gave him a human face.  That's something Transformers proper hasn't seen since the late 80s.  It's also something you'd never see at retail these days, so it makes a perfect BotCon exclusive idea.  It's definitely a "you are a hardcore Transformers fan" thing.  It in particular calls back to the Mega Pretenders, who had shells that transformed into vehicles.  Some were random monsters, like Thunderwing, but some were humans!  Seems like Metalhawk gets to join their ranks.