Laqua's Thoughts / Fuck You Dept.

Anubis, Jehuty, and now Vic Viper; I've finally finished making all the (good) designs from Zone of the Enders. Something about their only vaguely humanoid characteristics really appeals to me; they don't generally walk under their own gravity, so why bother having feet? (Don't ask why they have legs in the first place.)

I'm a little tired of giant mecha that are basically just giant people in terms of their proportions and designs. There's nothing really wrong with that, but I always gravitate toward the designs that embrace their own weirdness.

For instance, Viper's fingers can retract into the arm and turn it into a blade. Why? Why not!

Viper is definitely the weirdest of the ZoE kits. Jehuty and Anubis are two variations on the same design, so it makes sense for them to be similar, but Viper is completely different, with all its oddly placed barcode decals and knife-arms and flight mode.

I also have a spot for transforming mecha that aren't obviously just a person lying down with the legs dangling out the back. Viper is more like a collection of loosely connected shapes around a couple central pieces. The "shoulders" are just a pair of big triangles on their own little arms, separate from the arms proper, so once they fold back, there's no reason to see them as shoulders anymore.

Unfortunately, this is an absolutely wretched flight form to actually put together. Have fun putting dozens of joints at the exact right angles with no indication of when you've got it right other than a somewhat confusing set of instructions. Half of the joints are also fixed in weird angles to begin with, meaning nothing articulates as freely as it seems like it should.

Fun fact, according to the designer, the number 74 is there because he put together "nana" (seven) and "shi" (four) to make "nashi" (nothing). As in, there is nothing significant about the number.

The only personalized spin I put on this kit, other than a more metallic white for the primary color, was changing the lilac accents to metallic orange. Lilac just didn't jive with the rest of the color scheme IMO.

Overall though, this was just kind of a miserable build all along, and I scratched the hell out of everything while transforming it for the photos. This one ain't winning any awards.