Monthly.. ish... roundup

I dunno, I lost track.

I haven't been buying as much recently partly because we just don't have much money and I feel guilty about it and partially because i've been saving for bigger things rather than splurging on like 20 playline dolls at a time.
And also because playline is boring the snot out of me, i'm fed up and just kinda... not feeling the dolly vibe so much these days.

I mean don't get me wrong, I still love toys.
I still love dolls. but nothing new is really exciting me.
It's all so... cutesy or so overpriced and inferior in quality that I just can't justify it.
Mattel's churning out crap. Hasbro's churning out the same thing ad nauseum, MGA are just big on this blind bag fad and i'm just not interested in paying £10 for something I can't even see, and the others are just.. gone.
UK toy aisles have shrunk, I mean it's getting hard to even find BARBIE here.
Supermarkets have given up on stocking anything except pocket money junk, even stores like Argos have a really small doll section of their catalogue for the second season running.
It's disappointing and it's uninspiring and it's just hard to get excited when there's nothing to get excited about.

But there is some older stuff.

and Toys R Us had BOGOF on Monster High so I went to see what they had.

it's a really long bus trip, takes about an hour to get there and then another hour back so yeah, it's a trek.

and of course i'm still saving money aside for bigger purchases like bjds and pullips and stuff like that.

but I dunno. I'm in a funk and part of that may be related to the fact that coming home from toys r us I was struck down with a massive headache that lasted SIX DAYS and wouldn't shift.
I can't help but think it's karma for buying Monster High when I said I wouldn't.
*sigh*

Anyway, here's what I bought.

First thing I caved and bought was Emoji Clawdeen.
She came from Debenhams who had free shipping. She was £8.
I wanted her because she has pinky peach streaks in her hair and we've never had that before, and her outfit is kinda cute.
She IS a static body doll though, so I didn't want to pay full price (which is like £10) because i didn't think it was worth it for something i'd need to rebody to really enjoy but I decided i'd sooner have static bodies than gappy fragile crap joints anyway.

this is the box she came in.
She had no packaging material, she was just thrown in a giant box.

Wiiiierd.

Like seriously guys? was a box this big neccisary?

Back of the box shows the other dolls, none of whom are as interesting. I mean they're pretty enough but we've had similar dolls to them on actual proper jointed bodies so pass.

Interesting thing to note about this box, it's very much like the old old style budget boxes. It's not a blister pack style, it's actually a proper box with a card tab holding it shut.

Opening it was a nostelgic experience. I was transported back to Gloom Beach *sighs wistfully* I miss those days, where toy hunting was thrilling rather than a frustrating excercise in futility and the products you were buying were exciting and novel and fresh and actually felt worth the price tag.

I'm yet to be able to rekindle those feelings of excitement. Now I find when I open a doll it's just "mm, that's nice." *puts it to the side*
things just aren't the same.

Anyway her backing card is cool. It just slides out the box with no fuss. No tape, no glue, just a card backing and some plastic ties.

She's a very simple doll but she's pretty.

now, i didn't realise this but her body isn't just static, oh no... it's static and POSED.
Like those Model Muse barbies or something.
I don't like it.
One leg is bent while the other is straight so one leg is shorter than the other and she can't bloody stand up. I had to lean her against things.
and her arm is in this really weird position. It's not resting on her hip, it's just sorta... raised slightly.

it looks awkward.

This is everything she comes with. a dress, a hat, some shoes.

The dress is cute, with zippers and paws and moons and bones and random green emoji faces which.. i dunno.. I guess because it's "emoji"? and Emojis are like the "in" thing with "the kids" right now?
Whatever.

It has a mesh section in the middle and the top which makes it a bit more interesting than a standard shift dress.

it IS half print though.
But I dunno, I don't mind half print as much as some people. i think it's okay on simple dresses like this.

Her shoes are new. They have little emoji wolf faces that look like mlp heads to me. Seriously, they look like ponies.
maybe a little wolf nose would have helped? or a mouth?

the molded fur is nice and there's like moons or something around the bottom. the details get a bit fuzzy at the edges. I think the toe is furry.

Her hat has pawprints and bones and pony... i mean wolf heads too.
Seriously, they're fricken ponies.

Clawdeen has bright pinky lips that match the peachy pink streaks in her hair.
Her hair is nice and soft and while it's prone to poofing up a bit into a wild mane, it texturally feels decent and the colours are really nice.
It's decent hair, and thickly rooted too.

Her eyes are amber as usual and she has more attitude brows than the earliest reboot Clawdeens so she doesn't look as scared. She looks more like herself.

She has no earrings and her body has molded fur detail and a really awkward posture.

Seriously what is UP with that bent arm? I'd understand if it was bent so it rested on her hip like the Fashionistas but it doesn't, and raised it's like swooning hand.
It's wiiiierd

I was going to keep her on the static body but due to the strange awkward shape it actually is, I knew I couldn't live with it. The bent leg makes her impossible to stand up and looks weird and her hand being in that odd not quite on the hip just randomly extended pose looks really unnatural. I find it was more limiting than just a standard straight leg pose would have been.

Unfortunately I had no spare Clawdeens to behead.

That's where tru's BOGOF comes in.

I'd wanted the Nefera from the Scream and Sugar pack for AGES but I really really hate Amanita. Like.. I seriously loathe her. I hate her character, I hate her face sculpt, I just can't warm to her at all.
So £20 for just one doll seemed a bit excessive.

I also kinda wanted the Clawd from the Winning Werewolves set because he has a new body sculpt and I wanted to see it. But the set is £30 which is way too much when one of the dolls is one who'd go straight in my reject pile and i'd have to find new clothes.

BOGOF made both sets effectively just over half price.
Averaged about £15 for Nef and £15 for Clawd. Plus articulated Clawdeen without gappy limbs for Emoji! score.

 TRU's website stock checker claimed they didn't have this set in the store I went into, they were wrong. they had ONE, just one, so I snapped it up.

I searched the shelves but really there was nothing else I much wanted so i'm glad they had this set. Otherwise i'd have probably come home with a random extra doll I didn't really want just because it was "get one free."

Anyway,

I find it random and kinda hilarious Clawd is packaged holding the pompom and Clawdeen has the ball. She's all "hey bro, hold this, i'm gonna throw."

Annoyingly because of Clawd's helmet you can't actually see if his facial screening is okay. I hate when they do this. Like come ON guys, dont' cover the doll's faces!

I hate both their outfits. Sports dolls have just never done it for me. I always loathed sport despite being on the track team and sports themes just... eugh.. no. They're up there with princess themes, I can't be bothered.

Back of the box has some nice characterful artwork.
They had the venus in tru but her body is so gappy you can see it from across the fricken store.

I don't think we've gotten the frankie at all though. We've missed a lot of the reboot lines, stores just aren't ordering them in.

 The front of the box has the same artwork just slightly tweaked to put them together.

I'm not totally sure why Clawdeen only has one pompom. Don't cheerleaders usually have two? What happened to the other one?

I think I prefer this style of fearleader outfit though, it seems more well... sensible for training but she's still wearing platformed sneakers.
Monster High cheerleaders must have ankles of steel man.

Backing card has a random crowd. I can pick out Howleen, Lagoona maybe? Manny, Neighthan? Draculaura and uh... Clawd?
Wha? Not a clue who the werewolf is tbh. I assume it's a werewolf, I mean, he has ears. Might be a random cat boy? Any ideas?

Swapping their accessories around and taking off Clawd's helmet reveals Clawd has hair! but he's lost his sideburns.

Both dolls have stupid lines under their eyes that sports people do... I dunno, I don't DO sport so I don't really get this practice but loads of sport dolls get these stupid lines and they're so limiting because then you can't redress the doll, they look dumb because they have fricken lines drawn on their faces like a twit. -_-

Clawdeen is on a nice decent reboot body, as in, it's not gappy as shit and actually poses properly and the legs are super rigid and stiff and feel like they'll snap if you try to sit her down.
Bitter? me? Naaah.

Her pompom is made of fabric but it's sewn so it can't actually puff out like a pompom, it remains flat... flacid... useless.

it has a loop of elastic so she can hold it.

In the box she looked like she had kinda fuzzy painted eyes but as I wasn't buying this doll to keep I didn't really look that hard. Her pupils are a bit fuzzy i think but it's not as bad out of the box so hmm, go figure.

She has arched brows making her look sassy rather than frightened like early reboot, bright red lips (ooo interesting) and pink eyeshadow (ooo clashy).
Her hair is thick purple streaks and is auburn coloured instead of brown, a lot redder than most of her other reboot dolls I believe.
It's sooo soft and silky and nice.
*sigh* Oh MH reboot.. you started with such promise... decent hair... decent bodies... then you shat on it all.

Anyway she has no earrings which actually makes sense for a sport doll and this GIANT plastic bow.
Like holy cow that's a big bow.
Apparently they're trendy atm.
It's massive.

The paintwork on it is a bit sloppy in parts but it's okay.

It's elastic banded into her hair and i'm not trying to get it out.

and yeah, stupid black and pink stripes on her face.

The streaks are pretty much only at the top and front of her hair.
Her hair is pretty dang long, it's butt length.

the back section was curled into a sort of strange coil that brushed out all kinked and sticks out wierd as you can see from that purple chunk.

This is all her stuff.

She has the standard FIRST reboot body with the non gappy joints (YAY) and molded fur detail.
Her shoes are a recolour of shoes we've seen soooo many times already in g1, Ghoulia had a few pairs, pretty sure Frankie got a pair at some point, probably Toralei.. like everyone got a pair of these damn high heeled sneakers.
these ones are purple.

She has some knit athletic pants with white stretch cuffs and waistband and a shirt with pink mesh and weird asymetric sleeves.

This top is weird. Like, it has a sort of short cap sleeve on one side but it's sleeveless on the other? Is it meant to look like that?
It's bizarre.

whatever, that's her top.

The pompom is made of stiff nylon feeling fabric.

The body swap was pretty easy actually.

turns out the static bodies have a long sort of blobby peg holding their heads on rather than the standard T shaped prong so her head came off super easily once it got heated up with a hair dryer.
the other body had the standard t prong but also popped off super fast.
I mean I barely had to warm them up.

Both heads went onto their new bodies no problem, sturdy, stable, no flopping.

I think the wierd awkward static arm works better with the pompom covering it, it looks intentional now. Like she's doing something rather than just raising an arm randomly.

Heck, even the posed leg looks better imo because it looks like she's mid routine.

strangely, the athletic doll looks better to my eye on a totally static body. Huh.
go figure.

Now Clawd has some cool football gear but under that he's wearing a really basic sports outfit made from cheap thin feeling fabric.

His shoes don't match anything, they're pretty random.

He has a new body and is quite light despite being so bulky.

Mine is also knock kneed. His hips don't sit in the hip sockets correctly, they sort of tilt inwards so his kness point IN meaning his legs have trouble bending as the joint is misaligned.
It's hard to explain but basically, this is as straight as I could actually get his legs. they overlap one another because they're twisted INWARD rather than being straight.
His knees should point outward, they point in toward the middle.
I can't fix this, it seems to be how the actual upper legs were molded.

Wtf Mattel?

Alongside an older Clawd you can see how much beefier he now is.

His torso reminds me of the "original" body kens you get now. Very triangular.

it's a nice body, very buff, suits Clawd who was always drawn as being quite bulky in the shoulders.

His legs are beefier oo, as are his arms.
It's the same head though.

New Clawd's lost his earring, but there's still an indent for it, and his sideburns.

His hair is a bit flat from being rammed into a helmet but it's curly fiber and quite thickly in there.

Sadly because of his bulk, new Clawd can't wear old Clawd's clothing.

the Jeans ALMOST fit but are quite tight around the calves and butt, but shirts just flat out will not go on. The arms are too narrow and the whole garment is too short across the shoulders as well.

This was as much of his signature outfit as I could fit on him.

The stupid stripes annoyed me so I took some nail polish remover and a magic eraser to them.
It took quite a bit of careful scrubbing to get them off without damaging his eye paint but I got there in the end.

I also found some clothing for him.

Turns out modern Ken shirts fit really well (furthering my thought it might be a modified ken torso) but his hips are too narrow for Ken pants. Barbie pants can fit, but are often quite uh... feminine styles with tight legs that didn't look great so these are a pair of Liv pants which fit perfectly around his waist and are the right length too
SCORE.

And I even found a Ken shirt with teal sleeves to tie into his shoes.

Without the stupid stripes, he's a pretty handsome doll.

He has a bit of a wierd wonky eyebrow but I think it gives him character. It's weird because his eyes are fairly even, but his eyebrows are wonked... wth?

He looks younger without the sideburns, but i really do like him.
The new body is hot.
Ahem.

Such a shame we'll probably never see it again.
What a waste.

I mean Dance the Fright away Deuce used this body too but we didn't get that line over here and it sounds like the US distribution was pretty borked too.

Why do Mattel bother making new sculpts and then just waste them?
Seems like such a money sink.

And the other set was the Scream and Sugar set, which incidentally says nothing about scream or sugar on the box so I dunno.

Tru didn't have the cleo that goes with this set.

Front has the artwork of these two nasty ladies

So does the back.

If Amanita looked more like her art I think i'd like her more.

They had a LOT of these sets in tru, like so many scattered in different locations around the store.
I'd heard Nef could have eye issues so I searched for a good one and by some fluke got a decent Amanita too. Not that I cared.

A lot of the Nefera's had loose cut hair all over their faces and styling product residue which made them look gloopy and gross.

Why the heck are they still putting dolls into boxes without brushing the loose hair off them and cleaning the crap off their faces?
So little shits given in the factory huh?

Backdrop is some cafe. It's pretty boring actually.

Both this and the Winning Werewolves set were those blister style boxes that involve tearing stuff.
I hate them, the glue is so hard to peel.
I did eventually work out that if you open the bottom of the box it actually lets the whole thing slide out but it's not very clear that's how you're meant to open em.
and then you still have to try to fight with all the plastic crap holding the dolls in place.
I just cut everything because splitting the backing card in half is hard with the amount of glue they seem intent on using.

Anyway here's the girls and their uh.. food.

The cake is adorable and has eyes, I feel like we've seen it before though.

I don't know what is up with teh worms and rat drinks, is it a pun i'm not getting?

and I haven't a clue what the other plate is meant to be. It has like a spike on the bottom and then worms out the side and.. I don't know. Is it a pie? is it a plate? No idea.

Aminita has cool eye makeup again and green lips. I don't like it, but then, I really don't like her face sculpt so I don't think anything would make me not just recoil and want to hurl her in the "gtfo my house" box.

I mean I love her skin tone and her hair is as always gorgeous but her face just makes me go "bleugh."

She has a spoon and a fork as earrings but i couldn't get a good pic of them.

On her head she has an evil cabbage.

Okay it's a corpse flower... I think...

with a devil face on it.

Her hair is two or maybe three toned? There's a bluish purple, a more pinky purple and maybe even streaks of black?
it's cool.

it's nice and thick and vivid and soft.

Her dress is full print, a sort of striped effect in dark purple and fushia pink with big leaves printed over the top in black. What got me about this is the hem and collar are real lace. usually dolls use scratchy sort of net or mesh stuff but this is real, soft, cottony lace. It feels really deluxe. I like it.

She also has a bright green bracelet with what look like egyptian inspired leaf patterns.

Her gloves are molded on with uh.. spiderwebs and leaves and stuff?

her shoes are like her gloves, black with spiderwebs and stuff?

the bottom of them looks like a cupcake casing.

they have no heel and look super awkward to stand in.

I stripped Amanita and threw her in the sell box.

Nefera has amazing teal and purple hair with bangs. It's quite thinly rooted but mine has no bald patches.

Her eyes have loads of teal around them and purple lips, tying in beautifully with her hair.
She's a little paler than the original Nefera and her skin is a bit shimmery, like BYBY Nefera. Did they just reuse spare BYBY bodies?

her outfit comprises a really chunky plastic collar, a belt with winged scarab detail, a gold scratchy fabric overshirt and a sort of boob tube and leggings in hieroglyph and er... camoish/bandage strip fabric.

She has a simple gold bracelet and I was delighted to see they remembered her birthmark (three scratch marks on her shoulder)

Her shoes are awesome.

and sparkly.

Her hair is uneven and choppy at the bottom and there's not that much of it. It means it sits a little flat on her head and can look a little limp.

but gosh it's a pretty colour.

So out of 5 dolls, this is what I ended up with.

Clawd, Gloom beach Clawdeen stole Amanita's lovely dress (the purple matches her hair and the fushia matches her makeup perfectly), Emoji Clawdeen got a jointed body and Nefera.

Thin hair aside, nefera is beautiful.
I'm pleased to finally have her.

While I was in tru I also found this girl, hiding in the Action Figure aisle.

they had 5 Reys, just Rey, nobody else. and every single one of them had wonky eyes.

As they were all errored in the same way to the same degree I grabbed one anyway because you know, curious.

They're £19:99 which is pretty steep for a mostly molded figure, but it's Star Wars so I guess it's premium pricing. And the black label action figures which are all molded and half the size are about £25 so it's not too bad compared to other star wars merch.

It's ALL overpriced.

The back of the box doesn't tell much. Just some crappy blurb about Rey being "true to her friends!" *gag* and that she has a "swinging staff action" when you squeeze her legs.
Uh.. okay?

the other two dolls pictured aren't available in the UK yet.

She comes with a load of stuff but much of it's molded to her or sewn on.

She's about the same size as the DC superhero girls and about as chunky feeling.

She has a doll-like head with rooted hair in her weird top bun thing. It's not very thick hair but it's servicable.
the two tendrils of hair are held to her clothing with elastic.

The fabric wrapped around her is stitched in several places and there's a clear plastic sort of belt holding it together under her actual belts.

the belts would come off, but they're attached to the clear plastic belt thing too and we weren't sure how much was packaging and how much was actual structural clear plastic.

Her hands are molded into a grabbing pose so she can hold her staff but unlike the DC dolls, there's a softness to her gripping hand that makes them look less crass and er.. gesticulating.

Her shoes ARE removable, she has actual feet under there.
So that's nice.

Her staff has a plastic belt thing that lets her wear it slung over her back. I think a fabric strap would have sat more naturally but oh well.

She can wear her packpack too, and sling the staff over it which is nice.

her backpack opens but it's not very interesting inside.

All the little bottles etc are molded in place.
it's a nicely sculpted piece though, look at those wrinkles!

She's jointed at the knee, ankle, hip, waist, shoulder, elbow, wrist and of course the head so she has the same amount of joints as most articulated dolls.
Most of her clothing is molded on though, she's basically a giant action figure and I think i'm okay with that. If you don't think of these as "dolls" but rather deluxe action figures, the molded clothing is less offensive.
and given they're being sold in the action figure aisle alongside power rangers and ninja turtles, I don't think Hasbro's really trying to invade the doll aisle with these.

I found it interesting they weren't placed with the dolls like the DC Superhero girls because while the marketing has been very careful to avoid gendering, the media have been calling these "star wars for girls" (because apparently it wasn't for us previously?) and there have been people losing their shit over icky cootie girls liking starwars and having toys aimed at them.

but if they ARE aimed at girls, why are toy stores putting them with the other action figures? in a part of the store traditionally cordoned off as a "girl free zone"?
Will it encourage girls into the action figure section? that'd be nice.

And I actually like how Disney and Lucasarts have been marketing these. If you watch their videos they don't ever talk about  it "for girls",that's not the direction they're talking and I appreciate that.
Promo material looks like we'll be seeing Luke and Chewie and a bunch of the guys too anyway.
and besides, we've seen very few female character representation for years. It's about TIME the girls got deluxe figures.

You can buy so many sets that feature minor male characters but don't have say, Leia, or Rey, or Sabine, main female fricken characters, MAIN CHARACTERS. There's a set I saw recently where they'd excluded the two female Rebels characters and shoved into the box two fucking storm troopers instead.
STORM TROOPERS? Instead of two MAIN important to the bloody story, active role in the plot characters!???
WTF?

So yeah, sorry guys, you can weep all you want, i'm lapping up the star wars gals. About bloody time they got some figures and people could play the "but... but where's Poe?" game instead of "Where's Rey" huh?
HAH. Now you know how we feel.

Anyway, I bought this doll for my husband who collects Star Wars girl figures (specifically the girl figures. He likes the female characters because they kick ass but he also prefers to buy the girls to encourage Hasbro to make MORE of them)
So he didn't let me play with her much.

Her swinging mechanism doesn't work very well. don't know if that's just our figure or if they're all a bit weak but the swinging thing is more a gentle sway. Maybe it was a safety thing? didn't want kids like, slamming a stick into their eye or something? Either way, it took a few attempts to get anything even resembling a swing out of her and it was kinda languid and weak.

A bit of a pointless gimmick if you ask me.

Maybe the others will have more effective motion.

And then the last thing I bought was this girl.

She's a Bobobie Ariel.

I have wanted an Ariel head for ages, those ears man, those ears but Bobobie have the worst customer service i've ever seen. I mean, they just flat out ignore emails. You message them all "i want to give you money" and they just don't reply.
it's insane.
They're also painfully slow to actually produce things, don't communicate like at all and are generally not a company I much want the stress of dealing with so i'd given up on ever getting an Ariel... till this girl popped up on Ebay.

Now, several weeks previously i'd splurged on another "only if I see it cheap" doll. A giant Resinsoul Long from the same seller.

This was his sale photo.

The wig is terrible right?

poor boy.

he was about half his retail price so I bought him and then had a bit of a panic about how i'd handle a doll SO big.
at 70cm he's twice the size of any other doll I own and I was a bit intimidated.

but he turned up and I got those awful lashes and the wig that was way too big off and oh gosh.. that face..

how could anyone resist that sweet little face?

he needed restringing, cleaning, a new face, the works... so I took him apart all brave like.

and you know what? it wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be.
he was very obliging to me putting him back together, unlike many of my smaller dolls who kick and struggle and generally make the whole process really painful.

He came with boots and clothing which he's not going to stay in. I've commissioned him a lovely fantasy outfit which i'm waiting on.

but here he is alongside a barbie to give an idea of scale.

And with my other bjds. 

the small one is 1/6 scale, she's about 10 inches tall so slightly shorter than a Barbie doll. 

the orange haired one is 1/4, he's about 45cm tall. 

the big boy is 70cm, which makes him officially the largest doll I own. 

He's HUGE.

but he scrubbed up beautifully. His name is Selador, because I like joke names.

I was so pleased with how well he'd scrubbed up that when Ariel showed up from the same seller I thought I knew kinda what to expect.

I figured she'd be grubby, she'd be old, she might have some little chips or cracks, but ultimately she'd be okay.

I put a max bid in and toward the end was convinced I wasn't going to win but then I did, by £2...just £2 and half her retail price. 

it was close, but I was delighted!

When she arrived it became clear she had a few more problems than i'd anticipated.

Now, the seller had mentioned she had "glue residue" on her head (you can see a shiny patch on her forehead there) and had pictures showing huge globs of it on both sides of her head. 

What wasn't clear is that by "glue" they didn't mean wood or craft glue like I thought, but something that feels more like SUPERGLUE.

See I thought "oh glue, that'll be pva, it'll just come off with a bit of water and a scrub"

HAH.

nope

I tried solvents of various types. Alchohol, meths, acetone, nothing shifted it. 

I tried picking it, I tried scraping it, it would NOT come off.

So I had no other choice, I had to sand it off.

I got an emory board and carefully filed the globs till they became flat and matte. 

Her lashes I also knew were coming out, but I didn't anticipate the residue in her eye wells. it was thick, extremely sticky and everywhere.

It took a while of carefully scraping at it with a toothpick to get it to come out. 

Her body however was fine. The Bobobie body I always dismissed thinking it was a bit crap and looked ugly and yes, it's blocky as all hell and not overly attractive naked, but wow does it pose pretty dang well. 

This girl is a light tan doll, she's a sort of pale latte coffee kind of colour, a bit yellowy but quite attractive I think. 

Bobobie and Resinsoul are sister companies, i'm not sure of their full history but i'm pretty sure they share or shared a sculptor at some point because Ariel looks SO MUCH like the Resinsoul sculpts.

She's adorable.

I'm waiting on a better wig. And still figuring out eyes. 

She's 1/4 scale like most of my other dolls and fits in well with them. 

She's even stolen one of the spears I made for another doll temporarily. 

She has narrow hands, quite a lot smaller than the resinsoul hands. 

I think she's quite a genderless looking face and her body is, without the boobs, quite androgynous as well so I plan to sand her big boobs down to make her more androgynous. 

I've named her Sage. 

Still some work to do on her. Restringing her (her elastic had perished) really helped her pose great, sanding got the worst of the gloop off and I need to sand down her chest. She needs new eyes and new wig and shoes... yeah.. 

getting there.

So that's my monthly roundup. Hope you enjoyed it.