Our long-time friend Moldie is back with a review of the 3AA membership exclusive figure, the Lasstranaut. Check out his previous reviews here, here, here, here, here, and here. Thanks Moldie!
Ahhhh, the ThreeA Toys 2014 membership package… bought and paid for in mid-January, and put on weird indefinite and uncommunicated hold for what seemed like ages and told only that the “seamless lower body was tougher to do than we anticipated,” but that we’d, of course, be very happy with the end results. Promise.
Well, the set’s finally here, and while I have to fully disclose that I wasn’t overly excited about buying it in the first place (a year-long 15% discount does stupid things to a collectors brain), the figure doesn’t disappoint in disappointing.
We’ll work our way up from nagging issues to significant idiocies –
The general design of Lasstranaut is alright. It’s certainly solid aesthetically for a space-chick without any pants. The upper body is clad in several layers of space-suit-ness, from the bulky outer-tech-shell, to the sub-tech bulk layer which covers the skin-tight and stylish zippered space-jacket. The zipper on mine had burst right below the breasts, but I managed to get the zipper fully undone and re-zipped without the popped gap. Peeling off the layers was relatively easy. I did it with the intention of finding out whether or not the clothes COULD come off to potentially use on a different, jointed body with leg-clothes on. Good news on that front- they can. The overall result of all this oversized upper mass is that Lasstranaut is WAY top-heavy and is completely unable to stand on her own.
This leads to the fact that you have to assemble the stand she’s provided with. This would normally not be much of an issue for anyone with a set of small screwdrivers, except that the screw-hole in the upper portion of the stand on mine was not only not threaded, but was far too tight to drive the screw in without stripping the head of the tiny phillips-head screw provided. After drilling out the hole to a slightly larger diameter, I managed to make it work, but it’s not something I’d expect many people to do, or want to if they had to.
If you weren’t keen going through the hassle of assembling the stand, you’d probably put a little effort into trying to get Lass into some OTHER pose not requiring standing. More bad news – the slightest bend from her waist creates an ungodly fold, so trying to get her into a “sitting” pose won’t work. Maybe kneeling? Pfsht, no way. Bending her knees even a little bit makes the under-the-“seamless lower body”-frame easily seen and just as ugly, if not moreso, as if they’d just let the legs have visible double knee joints in the first place, like all the rest of ThreeA’s female figures (of which there are a ridiculous quantity, but I won’t even get started on that…). Bending Lasstranaut’s ankles is just as ugly, and has resulted in at least one photographed “skin” tear from another ThreeA member.
Lasstranaut also comes with a bendy hose that plugs into her “sub-tech bulk layer” and also to the “outter-tech” backpack, but not particularly well. Easily fixed with glue, probably, but who wants to do that to a figure you’re thinking you’re likely to sell?
Also included is a little whistling Star thing wrapped in a twist tie. It doesn’t plug into anything that I’m aware of, but I believe it’s supposed to have a look of having been lassooed or leashed by Lasstranaut. I really don’t know.
The rest of the Membership Package includes a couple prints of Lasstranaut and a book of Ashley Wood Lasstranaut “art” (not photographed). It’s a damn lot of dripping vaginas, nearly one on every page; too many for my taste. You also get a white t-shirt with some Lasstranaut graphic on it. I haven’t unpacked mine, so I don’t have a photograph of it. I don’t expect to ever wear it. Also included for “returning members” are what were referred to at the time of the pre-order as “an additional piece of clothing”. I made the mistake of believing it was going to be an article of clothing that I could use to cover the nether-region of Lass, like 1/6th scale leggings or pants or something, but alas, they’re white panties with Lass’s Star friend on them. Human-sized, I assume, but I didn’t have interest enough to unroll them and check what size human might squeeze into them. I’m not much of an undergarment collector when it comes to buying toys, frankly. (My wife just had a look at the underwear and laughed, “I don’t think these would fit anyone bigger than a twelve year-old. These are creepy.” So there you have it.)
We also got some random iron-on space patch to salve the wounds of severely tardy shipping…
All in all, from my pre-underwhelmed point of view, this whole set was just not worth waiting for. It’s always KINDA fun to dig into a new shipment of toys, but this just leaves everything to be desired in my opinion. I MIGHT be able to make Lasstranaut work, but only if I can find a replacement body with white leggings or tights that I can weather to match the rest of the figure. As the figure comes, with the whole “seamless” lower body and such, it’s just not practical. They may as well have just sculpted her from the waist down and called that “seamless”; she can do nothing. The rest of the package, well, none of it is a toy – it’s all marketing additive, and fully uninteresting to me. If Lasstranaut can’t be salvaged, the only good thing about this package will have been the Membership 15% discount, and thankfully, I didn’t have to wait eleven months for that to show up.