You know what? I’ll just proclaim the Fortnite stuff from Jazwares one of the coolest new lines from 2019. With most toylines I collect, I usually know what I’m getting, thematically speaking. But I never know what Fortnite is going to pump out. Bananas and aliens and cyborgs and hot dogs. It is random and insane and has neither rhyme nor reason and it entertains me on a fundamental level.
Raven is a shadowy wraith-like gothic executioner/reaper/spooky kind of character, all black clothes and mystery and footsteps in the fog. It takes inspiration from a lot of different things and congeals them into one nifty little figure. There’s a bit of futuristic desperado or nomadic avenging spirit or…well, you get the point. Raven could be a good guy or a bad guy or neither. He could be misunderstood and really just want to make papier-mache flower baskets.
Raven is sharply sculpted, with a lot of great detail, from his belts to his buckles and straps and so forth. There’s some stitching here and there to amplify a certain tossed-togetherness of the design. Paint is well done if a bit minimal in some areas. Some extra paintwork on some of the details like the stitching and so forth would really bring out a lot of the detail that remains hidden in the molded plastic, but I can’t complain too much seeing as these figures are 19.99 at most and often far cheaper, making them some of the greatest 6-inch(ish) value you’re going to find.
The Fortnite articulation scheme is mostly standardized across the line, with a nice range in his elbows and knees, a ball jointed torso, ML-style hips and rocker ankles. The spread of his legs is a little impeded with the draping skirt section here, but the plastic is pliable enough so you can still get a decent range, but the splits are out of the question. His shoulders have a plastic overlay that gets in the way of his spreading his arms, but they still go up and down and all the way around fine. As with any Fortnite figure, the one bummer is the articulated fingers. I don’t want to become a broken record, but they do a lousy job at holding most things well. I don’t know if they have any plans to migrate to static fingers, but it’s the one little niggle that gets in the way of holding their weapons without angst.
Raven comes with a decent array of accessories. He comes with a pistol (he can actually hold that quite well) and a sniper rifle that he can only hold with great difficulty. I know, I know, that sounds complainy, but if I make curse words trying to get a figure to hold his weapon, then something is amiss and awry. And even askew.
I know the backpacks are called “back-bling” or whatever, and he does come with that, although I don’t know what it’s supposed to be. It looks like a cage. I could do research and find out, but I’m going to pretend it’s a cage that he carries his soul in until he finds a way to…reinsert it. Sure!
He also comes with a cube with some random glyphs on it. For this I actually did some research, and apparently it’s a smaller version of something called Kevin the cube.
I am super-glad I did the research, because that cleared everything up.
I’m just going to pretend it calls in Cenobites. If you just said “there are no Cenobites in Fortnite” then I have to retort with “Cenobites are everywhere. They’re even in Pac-Man.”
So yeah.
The scythe is the best and most apropos accessory. It has a great design and he can hold it better than he can his rifle, which is the case with most melee weapons in the line. He looks more intimidating and “natural” with it anyway, so it’ll be his default weapon for me.
Finally, he comes with three face-plates that swap on and off easily. One is a little neutral, one has a squinty eye that reminds me of Deadpool, and one is full on angry. I think the angry eye one is gong to be my default eye-expression. I like that his face isn’t really a “face” but just a shadowed blob. In a way he kind of looks like a Scooby Doo villain, and now I just realized I want Jazwares to do a super-articulated Scooby Doo line.
In conclusion, I dig this figure a lot, because it’s kinetically spooky and is an all-around fun action figure that does action figuring very well.
