When we first meet Mae, she is serving as a meknek on the Neimodian starship Fallon together with her crewmates Aprel and Joon.  Jewl-I and Awgust were on leave at the time.  Are these months of the year jokes doing anything for you? If you are reading this from the future, first, congratulations for surviving the corn syrup drought and bandwidth riots of the mid twenty-twenties.  That must have been harrowing.  Second, if that opening is confusing you, it’s because it’s a callback to the joke I made in the Osha review published the previous day.  Obviously in reality when we first meet Mae, she’s tracking her quarry as a Sith apprentice assassin.  But enough about this preamble.  Let’s get to business about this figure.

HECK.  YEAH.  DOGGIE.

There has been a little bit of an unintentional progression with the reviews this week.  I reviewed Sol first because it was the Acolyte figure I was most excited about.  I then decided to review Osha and Mae in numerical VC order. This manifested the following ladder:

• Sol:  Compelling release, but a disappointing figure
• Osha:  Boring release, but an excellent figure
• Mae:  Compelling release, and an excellent figure

We bring it all home, and on a Friday to boot.  Huzah!  Maybe I learned something along the way too, like an episode of Fat Albert.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s review, Mae was the action star of the early series among the twins, and Osha was mostly a passenger.  That makes Mae the infinitely more interesting figure in my collecting world view.  That’s not to say I need every figure to be “action based” to find it compelling or exciting.  Far from it.  If a figure helps flesh out a key diorama, it gets my juices flowing even if all they do is stand there (I’m looking at you, most Cantina aliens).  I just need a figure to serve one of those two purposes for it to be a welcome addition to my collection.  The Osha we got offers neither.  While there is no diorama featuring Mae that I am inspired to create, the character is central to a few action pieces. 

One key aspect of Mae’s action scenes is that part of her Sith apprenticeship is to kill a Jedi without using a weapon.  For better or worse, ths translated to some “wire-fu” combat.  Regardless of whether or not you found this jarringly un-Star Warsy, it was important that the figure be able to engage in some martial arts stances, and Hasbro didn’t disappoint.  Despite the plastic molded lower skirt, acrobatic kicks, leg sweeps, and dueling crouches are all unleashed.  This is due to the extreme pliability of the material combined with a couple of gaps afforded by the design.  This allows virtually every pose I was envisioning.  In fact, the most difficult set up for this entire gallery was trying to get Sol to hold both of Mae’s daggers in his not-so-grippy grip.  Hopefully that statement is particularly impactful in light of all the one-legged poses in the images.

As with Sol, the soft goods are executed extremely well.  In the “hood up” position, the material hugs the head as neatly as it does on the VC175 - Luke Skywalker (Jedi Knight) figure.  Out of the package, the “hood down” display is also very clean, but unfortunately I did not snap a picture of this before trying out the “hood up” option.  I couldn’t get the material to tuck back together as cleanly afterward.  It’s sort of like not being able to repack a piece of electronics in its orginal packaging.  Bantha Skull history note:  that was actually a sniglet created by one of our early members that he called “nonrepackulation”.  I really like how Hasbro gave us distinct accessories to display the scarf down around Mae’s neck or covering her face.  It’s a little reminiscent of the VC30 - Zem Wessel figure in that regard.

So, once again, I’m doing a lot of gushing about a figure that loses a point on the final grade.  I think the accessory load out is a little light.  I wish there was a sculpted set of fanned out blades so Mae could present them the way she does before combat.  I also wish there was somewhere to holster her blades (admitting that my worsening farsightedness might have precluded me from finding the sheaths if they are there).  I would have easily overlooked those two issues on the way to a perfect score if they were the only negatives, but I can’t overlook the big one:  the hair.  As with Osha, Mae’s sculpted hair desperately needs a wash to break up the uniformity.  As it is, it looks like LEGO hair.  This compels me to ding this release one point for aa 9 out of 10.

Were it not for this site, and the fact that I managed to find the figure early at brick and mortar, I never would have bought it.  Now that I’ve gotten to interact with it for this review, I want to track down a carded sample for my collection.  I like really well done figures.  You have no idea the sacrifices I would make to get a Darth Maul figure that can do what this Mae does.  I’m to go as far as Bart would to get into the Krusty Anniversary Special.