KR|Origin Review #23: Nar-Apsya

I love getting marginal characters in the KR|Origin line. So, November is actually a kinda exciting month for me - not only I was able to review a heroic cyclops that makes two or three brief appearances in the comics, but I also got a pretty obscure villain with Nar-Apsya^TM!

Aside from liking the idea behind the nature of the character, I’m a fan of how this 19^th action figure prototype in the line looks. It (she... he...?) has got this fantastically odd style to its body that makes you take notice. With its mix of biological and stony elements, when you first see it, you can’t help but wonder what it is exactly.

Details

Name: Nar-Apsya

Subtitle: life-giving snake

Classification: lepidosauromorph reptile

Sex: female (although the sculptural warrior that she animates has masculine features)

Home: Tahron

Era: 520 years before Masq-Lor's time (now renamed Foundation)

Affiliation: Reptonoid

Rank: ensign.

Background

First appearance: KR|Origin #3 - Battle for Tahron: Part II – Bi-Harr’s retribution

Brief bio: as a core member of Sphenorat's serpentine horde, which was made up of the most threatening snakes from across Tahron, Nar-Apsya was endowed with the ability to tap into her master's evil magical powers. Entrusted by Bi-Harr to guard his throne hall in Rokang Tar, she merged with a marmoreal statue during a memorable battle against the Therioms, to generate a diabolical warrior who could challenge the mammalian enemies. By doing so, she was also stripped of her reptilian nature, condemned to never leave the warrior's body and forced to fight using physical strength instead of serpent-like skills. Eventually, Nar-Apsya asked the sorcerer-engineer Loghar to use his magic and technology to clone her, hoping to live again in the form of a snake. However, he could only isolate a few of her mutated cells, which in the future would generate new gruesome reptilian creatures, including the snake warrior Volcrotran^TM.

Articulation

Standard, except that waist, wrists and calves are ball jointed, and the neck is double ball jointed.

Description

Head: resembling a mamba, whose jaws are wide open and reveal the head of a statue inside the mouth. The snake's head is characterised by a coffin-like shape, purplish scaly skin (except on the lower jaw, where the skin is yellowish), solid blue-green eyes with somewhat pronounced brow ridges and four sharp fangs, while the inner marmoreal head has no recognisable facial feature apart from a pair of evil deep-set black eyes

Body: the sculpture is made of a white marble with subtle coloured swirls and veins, and has kind of cube-like, unfinished features. The mamba (which is coiled three times around the statue's trunk, from the hips up to the armpits, with her tail wrapped around the left thigh and her head emerging from the back onto the neck) displays purplish scaly skin on the upper side and yellowish skin on the underside. The figure's torso suffers a bit from looking puffed up, which is not too troublesome to me, because I knew that such an overlay could hardly be executed without this side effect

Wearables: two dark-blue gloves, two dark-blue boots with knee guards, a belt made of dark-blue plates laced together and a black crotch piece.

Action feature

In the comics, by wrapping her fairly large body around the trunk of a headless marble statue that decorates Bi-Harr's throne hall, Nar-Apsya can bring the sculpture to life, transforming it into a fearsome warrior. By default, the figure comes in the snake-plus-statue configuration, but the transformation from combined to separate form is pretty simple, although it takes a little work. First, it's necessary to detach the head, or I should say heads, since there are two of them - the marble one placed inside the gaping mouth of the snake one; the mamba's slightly bendable neck makes this operation easy, while the removable double ball joint allows the sculpture not to show the peg coming out from its neck when headless. Then, the snake's tail, which is also bendable, must be unwrapped from around the statue's thigh. Afterwards, the sculpture's lower body, from the waist down, has to be detached, allowing the snake's rubbery (but not really flexible) coil to slip off its torso. The gloves and the boots must be replaced with marble forearms+hands and lower legs+feet, which match the overall body sculpt and paintjob. Finally, a marble-like skirt piece (which is composed of a flashy belt and a series of bendy flaps decorated with fang-shaped patterns, and is designed to conceal the coloured belt and crotch piece) must be slid around the statue's hips before reconnecting the lower and upper body halves.

Additionally, the snake's head(s) can also be detached and replaced with an alternative mamba head that has a closed mouth and a protruding forked tongue. This is the second version of Nar-Apsya's snake form in the line, after the stand-up variant that came with Origin Sphenorat.

Weapons and accessories

Apart from the limb attachments, skirt and alternative snake head, Nar-Apsya comes with an amazing weapon, which is a black cat-o'-nine-tails. This multi-tailed whip is made up of nine knotted thongs of leather, each resembling a snake and helping give the weapon an overall resemblance to a Hydra (indeed, in the comics, when the warrior drops its whip, this splits into nine living snakes).

Overall, I really dig this figure, I think it came out with a nice design that truly wows me. The snake "armour" works pretty well as a translation of the comic book design into the KR figures style. Yes, perhaps the folks at PoliganToys could have tried harder to adapt the inner shape of the coil to the statue's torso, in order to make it look less puffy, but, honestly, I thought it was going to be worse based on what I had seen in the comics, and in hand it is not really that bad.