Just in time for Wednesday's strip about How Strika Should Be, Like, More Wankable Or Something, I have received Ripclaw (and Smokescreen from BigBadToyStore.  They're Wave 2 Beast Hunters Deluxes.  They'll be in stores soon, probably?)  You see, the connection is Ripclaw is a lady!  She is a Transformer who ostensibly has girl parts.  She shares a body design with Ser-Ket, who at the time had begun to appear in the "Rage of the Dinobots" comic book miniseries, but we had no idea she was female until samples of Ripclaw's toy showed up with pronouns and everything and we realized, oh, hey.  They're both probably ladies.  And sure enough, Ser-Ket got some gendered pronouns in her subsequent appearance.  They are shes.

So she's not Thunderblast is what I'm saying.

What I am saying is that this toy is great.  I knew I was going to like it just from the stock photography, and the stock photography didn't lie.  Just like Lazerback, Ripclaw's card bubble is relatively deep.  She's a hunk of toy.  Unlike Lazerback, she has wings and a neck and a jointed tail.  Now, here's the super awesome did-not-see-this-coming thing about Ripclaw's tail.  It's not just simply segmented.  There's a rubber tube running through the middle.  The tail can hang lax, or you can tighten the whole contraption by hooking it up more securely onto the back of the torso.  It is an amazing tail.  The grabby-claw tip can be removed, leaving a simple nub at the end of the tail, while the grabby-claw  can be held by one of the robot arms.  (The claw attaches deeply enough through the hand-hole that it appears that the claw is an extension of the arm itself.)

Ripclaw's dragon jaw opens, and the top of her head is rubber plastic like the center of her tail.  Like many beastformers, she transforms roughly by standing up, though the limbs each go through a step or two so they don't look identical in both modes.  The robot head looks kind of cowl-y, like an eyed hat sitting on a neck, but she does have a jaw down there.  It's just mostly obscured by her collar.  I guess the artist who was drawing Ser-Ket in the comic was going off of stock photography or something, since Ser-Ket was pretty jawless in that.

Ripclaw is a super-great toy that looks dynamic by default.  It's hard for her to look bad.  She's a dragon, she has an involved but non-frustrating transformation, and a sweet rubber-enabled segmented tail.  Also, happens to be a chick.  She was the favorite of the Predacons I'd seen so far, judging only by photography, and the toy lived up to my expectations.