Go! Go! issue 39
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| Publisher | Kodansha | ||||||||||||
| Published in | TV Magazine | ||||||||||||
| First published | June 15, 2024 | ||||||||||||
| Manga | Haruka Oda | ||||||||||||
| Editor | Minoko | ||||||||||||
Let's pray for sunny weather with Windblade!
Synopsis
[edit]The rainy weather has Bumblebee dejected, as it means he can't go outside for a picnic. Though the other Autobots suggest indoors activities such as studying, singing, exercising, and games to keep him occupied, they're just not enough to alleviate Bumblebee's boredom. That's when Windblade steps up, offering to pray the rain away and restore the sunny skies Bumblebee wants. Somehow causing Blaster to play traditional music he has no recollection of ever hearing, Windblade performs a beautiful dance ritual to banish the rain... which has no effect on the weather whatsoever, much to her shock and the Autobots' disappointment. As the rain worsens, Windblade pledges to do whatever it takes to bring back the sun.
Windblade transforms into jet mode and flies into the clouds, then transforms back and uses her powerful turbines to blow all the rain clouds (and Autobots) away. Descending back to the ground with the sky as clear as can be, Windblade lets everyone know they can have their picnic now... but nobody's there! As it turns out, Windblade's turbines blew all the Autobots straight into orbit, where they decided to make the most of the experience and have their picnic where the weather can't bother them!
Featured characters
[edit](Numbers indicate order of appearance.)
Notes
[edit]- This story was published as the June 2024 issue of the web comic and advertised Legacy Cyberverse Universe Windblade and the first collected edition of Go! Go!.
Transformers references
[edit]- Windblade makes her Go! Go! debut with a character model derived from the Legacy toy being advertised as is Oda's usual bent. This can be discerned from that mold's characteristic horizontal split of the fuselage during transformation all the way down to the greebling on her forearms.
- The one exception to this toy accuracy is Windblade's Stormfall Sword, which is here rendered with the sharp-edged purple gradient design from her original Thrilling 30 toy and reflected in its appearances in the intervening decade of fiction rather than the idiosyncratic "blast effect blade" sported by the Legacy toy.
- As the Legacy figure is pointedly marketed as Windblade's Cyberverse iteration, this constitutes Go! Go!'s first instance of repurposing a toy from one character into another.
Real-world references
[edit]- Oda remixes Windblade's nonspecific melange of visual cues towards traditional Japanese dress and usual cityspeaker backstory to create a new characterization as a cheerfully kooky miko (巫女) or "shrine maiden," a young woman who assists in the ceremonies of a local shrine in the Shinto tradition.
- The dance that Windblade does could be a reference to kagura (神楽), a ceremonial ritual dance performed by miko.
- The little ghost guy Windblade tries (and fails) to use to banish the rain is a teru teru bōzu (てるてる坊主), a traditional charm used to summon good weather probably best known to western readers as the inspiration for the Pokémon Castform.
