Rambled Opinions and General Snarkiness: Forty Years of American Girl And The Stuff of the Ruby Anniversary I Care To Talk About

Read. It's still good for you--better than short form clips.

Hello, beloved readers, doll fans, toy collectors, unregistered randoms, and freaks of the industry.

I bet you'd thought you'd seen the last of me on here, after a single post in May 2025 was followed by radio silence on damn near all fronts. I'd thought I'd seen the last of me on here. Blogging is a lot of work--writing, reading, editing, linking, notes, researching so I have backing behind my opinions, and no video¹--with not always the same level of payoff, especially in this short-form scroll fast gotta get em in the first four seconds of the video internet style. And that's just the internet--my life has been even more up and down.

I've said "thank you for loving me, see you on the other side of the haze" to multiple relatives, crying my eyes out at not seeing them here anymore even knowing they had long lives and died in peace and are still there for me, and also been shocked by losing those in my family who didn't get them as long as I'd hoped. Maybe I'll memorialize them here like I did my dad over a decade ago. Maybe I'll keep my feelings in private circles.

I've had my heart ripped out, my back stabbed, my tears flow, my anger rise up alongside my bile, lost and gained, been pushed to my absolute fucking limit of what I'll tolerate and then some, and had my dreams deferred both temporarily and permanently and my wishes sometimes only half-granted. I've fallen apart, ripped my seams, crawled through multiple medical issues, feared for my friends and family, grieved and smiled and cried and gained, and rubbed the already thin spots of my soul raw--and had to get my own damn sewing needles out to stitch myself back together, pop up the loom to weave my own patches to cover the holes, and darn my own socks I knit in the first place. I've had more than two emotions in the past several years and having two whole emotions means the day is cancelled, it's bedtime, my Libra scales are outta wonk and I need to go rest my nerves.

I have been in the Swamps of Sadness trying so hard to stop Artax from drowning--and if you get that reference, it's time for your colonoscopy. Colon health is no joke. Eat fiber and get checked out.

Maybe I'll eventually talk about some of it. Or maybe y'all have to grind outside Cascarrafa for six hours to earn enough levels of Neth Friendship to unlock Deeper Lore. I've gotten shy and reclusive in my middle age--I'm officially there--and it's helped that I've weaned myself off most social media for a myriad of reasons. Outside of Tumblr, and that's cause it's Tumblr, the last bastion online of a decent feed for fans and curating my own experience without having to speak around the algorithm. We say fuck here, sir--and cocksucker, motherfucker, sexual assault, murder, and tits. The only grapes I talk about are fruit and a PDF is a digital file. People die when they are killed, and if you need me to be less direct they pass away when they are killed. Fuck me, I don't even have a public Instagram account for people to check up on me from--and if it was public, you'd have shit all to see on it because of my aforementioned lack of social media posting. Want to see a single picture of a birthday cake to prove I'm still here? You're getting a picture of a birthday cake. I've been crafting, connecting, and collapsing instead of scrolling.

I've lost my self in playing Pokemon and Pokopia and caught a lot of Shiny Pokes in ZA--thirty years this year--and reading Baby-Sitters Club in book and comic form--forty years this year--and staring at Zelda--also forty years. Damn, I'm celebrating a lot of fandom anniversaries in 2026. I've been writing without official Nano because it's dead, but November is still Writing Month and I count my work in hours instead of words. I've been taking pictures of flowers and dolls and books and random thingabobs. I've been gardening in the summer and tending my roses, which is a form of touching grass. I had friends immigrant away from where I live and others immigrate near where I live. I've read both books by a close friend and am anticipating the third, and that's only one of my writing friends that's published.² I've questioned my gender, reaffirmed my sexuality, and ultimately come out cis enough to still select female but with a propensity to say "no more gender today, I'm tired of it" and "my gender is 'come back with a warrant' and 'do you have at least 15 minutes to discuss race relations and white supremacy worldwide.'" I've logged into Infinity Nikki almost every single day since it launched, never mind the 1.5 update that made so many people upset, and let the magic of Whim and magic through outfits take over. I've drank water, minded my business, voted from the comfort of my home, and got to see Blue Texas again. I've been writing newsletters and reviewing images, reading and writing tropes, and winning ribbons.

Even in all the quiet and silence here, I've kept up with American Girl--and the AG Wiki, and I've had non-public thoughts on everything that's come out. Yes, even if it's been five years since AG Seattle closed down and I've not been inside a store since then; my last trip anywhere near an AG Store was to bury yet another relative because I'm at the age where you might go to just as many funerals as weddings, if not more. I haven't stopped caring or loving American Girl and finding critiques than aren't just "but it's not like it was when I was a kid!" and "everything I don't like is woke a cash grab" even if they're hard because so many people lean on that old chestnut. I still, forty years and a month after seeing a two-page ad spread in a now-defunct doll collector magazine as a curious kindergartner, keep up with the releases and characters of American Girl. More on that in a tick.

I've opened and closed my blog so many times I feel like that kid that keeps looking in the fridge trying to find what they want to eat, seeing my fruit and eggs, knowing I really like fruit and eggs, saying I'm going to finally eat my fruit and cook my eggs--and then the ADHD and depression and all the rest of it hits and I only grab a string cheese stick before I mindlessly scroll my Tumblr For You Page on my phone for a smackerel of dopamine via Polytrix fanart, and four weeks later the other quarter of my pre-cut fruit bowl has started an ecosystem and the eggs are now only good for the compost. The very rich compost that gets lots of nourishment from my forgetting to eat things.

I've been trying to pull it together and then had to set that plate down after everything just kept happening. Because it just kept happening. And blogging had to go to the wayside.

Let's be real, peeps. Blogging just ain't what's done for the fans of things nowadays. You don't get engagement from writing 5K+ words about dolls with interspersed close ups for the review. We can't even get some people in this fandom to read the books they claim matter about the characters. People get attention and eyes on them from short quippy graphics with various levels of jokes, IG playing on character names that I'm not interested in, short clips saying "did you know??" before they state the most basic data and might not even get it right, and hour long YouTube videos with thumbnails that have someone staring at the camera with a confused, shocked, or annoyed look and bold clickbait text asking "IS AMERICAN GIRL DYING (i haven't looked at the brand since 2007)" or "IS AG SISTERS REPLACING EVERYTHING MODDIE?" (answer:no but I wanted your eyeballs for this ad for Raycons) and "THEY PAID ADDY IN WOIMS?!"

Yet I remain stubborn and silly. I have never been the kind of person vying to show up on your FYP or your Shorts or your Stories. I won't be posting about AG on TikTok, YouTube, Reddit--of all the things I will likely never be doing, Reddit is just one of them--Facebook, or Twitter. I don't even interact with AGIG all that much now and AG Tumblr? Oof. Less on that forever. I'm too old for all the shit a lot of folk be doing too much of now, and at solidly middle-aged I been saying I'm tired of it.

I'm getting back on my original bullshit.

Plus? I liked blogging. I like writing. I'm a wordsmith and a literature witch. It's a slow meal to digest instead of fast food doordashed to the house, and I can sit and think and make sure everything's how I like it and actually link to things instead of having to say "link in bio" and don't have to crop and clip and fit into an arbitrary time cap before I hit post. And you can sit and read at your leisure without having to worry that hitting refresh means you'll never see a post again because you forgot to follow. I don't have to talk, face the camera, have a video camera, or have any background other than the green cloth I snap review pics in front of. I can blog with my bonnet over my braids and my bra off in my shit ripped inside leggings and no one has to perceive me. I am not a content creator to passively consume and beg the algo to put me in front of eyes. I've always been an outsider and outlier.

So I'm going back to Cali blogging in this year of Twenty-Twenty-Styx. Like the river.

Lemme get a damp rag and wipe the dust off--when it's this thick you gotta wipe, blowing doesn't move a damn thing--and spend this post talking about the things that came out from American Girl specifically for the 40th Anniversary that are about or involve the Historical Characters. Other things? More on that in another post.

But first before that, lemme introduce y'all to one of the many members of Neth's AG Gang that have shown up in the interim.

Cool kids and kittens remember going under the cut.

*~*~*

Let's Try This Again.

It's not been a great time for Neth.
Kirsten's mood here is a great summary of why.

20-Twenty-Twee was fucking hard for me after that Hoffman Twins post.

20-Twenty-Whore was even worse.

Posts on the most recent things coming May 10th. Hopefully. Stuff before that to follow after.

I'll at least try. I miss doll blogging. fuck.

Enter 20-Twenty-Hives: Stop Critting Yourself

--Neth¹

¹Obligatory footnote. Along with obligatory "rent-lowering, youth-scattering two fucks a post."

Rambled Opinions and General Snarkiness: The Why of Two-Kay: Nicki and Isabel Hoffman of the Turn of the Millennium

Stay on your side of the room!

For once I'm gonna be on time with something! A week and change later is on time, right? It counts. Get in where you fit in. Return of the Mack Neth.

So there I was, hot off the press of finishing Kavi's collection post within a reasonable time of her release, and preparing my checklist of "Things That Came Out In 2023/Late 2022 (So I Might Maybe Eventually Catch Up To Go Back)" when historical leaks hit hard. And by hit hard, I mean AG put stuff up several days early on the website and they were available for people to order, which counts as a release. So I set aside my checklist and decided I'd try to do a post on something fresh off the press on semi-time, even if colored. The time that is. It's a Colored People Time Joke. Then my attempts to post before February ended got delayed. But not by much! It's just the second of March. I'm fine, I'm a'ight. We're major. Happy Texas Independence Day.

Anyways, back to the matter at hand. On 2/22, only a month and a half after Kavi's release,¹ AG released their newest historicals: Nicki and Isabel Hoffman² of Seattle, Washington. They hail from the far flung, distant era of last century, the most ancient and noble year--

--of 1999. Hey, I graduated from high school that year!

Did you hear crying middle millennials after reading that year? I heard crying middle millennials. Yes, now it's the mid-to-late millennials' turn to feel fucking old about being represented by a "historical" era by the same doll company that started with the 1850s, 1900s, and 1940s. The early Gen Xers got whapped by the Historical Era Stick with Julie and mini vinyl records in 2007, the cuspier X-llennials like me did it with Courtney and mini cassette tapes in 2020, and now it's the middle to late Millennials turn with the Twinsies and mini CDs--and sooner than you expected it to be. Now it's y'all's turn to see the children ask you what a CD is³ and wince when a teenager who didn't even exist as a fetus during the 2006 midterms is on the Metronome App trying to tell you nothing happened at all during Y2K when you lived through that night and remember your desktop potentially glitching and the fears of the end of the world. Gen Z doesn't know how to sort through the file system or research without Google. You're older now. Your music's now part of the Classic music station--the hits of the 80s, 90s, and beyond! Stop lamenting that your age is closer to thirty than twenty, eat more greens, take your multivitamins, be glad you made it this far--not everyone has been so lucky--and for the love of gods, wear sunscreen. History doesn't just stop existing once color TV is invented. Just ask Julie. Hell, ask Melody.

We're going to start with my feelings on the Twinsies, and then follow up with the collection--which isn't that big to start, but then again neither has Claudie's been. Technically Claudie has more outfits. Technically.

Under the cut to where I'll fuss, cuss, and discuss. No Scrubs allowed. A scrub gets no love from me.⁴

Rambled Opinions and General Snarkiness: Broadway, Brown Skin, and Bollywood Beauty: Kavi Sharma of 2023

On the corner of Broadway and Representation.

Happy Valentine's Day! Or Palentine's Day. Or Fuck James Cook Day. Or Discount Candy Eve. Or Halfway through February Day. or It's Still Black History Month, Run Me My Money. For me, it's the last day of the Chocolate Gauntlet, with tomorrow freeing me from the loosely defined fears of cocoa products lurking in the seasonal aisles until September rolls around. I made it, people!

It's also a month and a half--give or take a New Year's--since the newest Girl of the Year launched. Though I have a backlog of AG posts spanning to before the entire damn still ongoing pandemic and a whole word doc to organize the items in, it won't get any shorter if I don't try--key word, try--to stay on top of newer things. Like news of outgoing girls who have worbs.

Speaking of outgoing things, and I don't mean the character I'm about to discuss. Remember in 2021 when AG Seattle closed, and I told AG Houston to sleep with one eye open?

Yeah, about that.

Spotify, play Chopin's Death March.

In a move surprising both no one and some one, AG Houston got murked like Flash Player at the end of 2020. Not only did it close--yesterday, in fact! body's still cooling!--but so did AF San Francisco Bay Area, which I had never been to. AG Miami is also done; it closed back in Sept 2022. This leaves only five non-flagship stores now, one--still!--in Dallas. AG Houston's demise is because, along with "the stores are not moving product like they used to", the entire Memorial City Mall is getting refreshed into a new look. Since the buildings are going down, AG was like "oh look, a reason to exit strategy the store!" Retail stores: they ain't what they used to be. There's a reason I toy shop at Target. That reason is because it's the only place with a decent toy department that isn't Wally World.

RIP AG Houston, we hardly knew ye.

I also know about the something new coming on 2/22 that involves Historical Jewish Twins and skipping the actual good part of the '90s, but I'll get to that when it launches. Or five months later, who knows, I keep my own fucked up schedule around here. On the real, I'll try to get on top of it before the month ends, hopefully no more than two weeks after they launch. Key word hopefully. For now, we're giving Kavi her diamonds, before people get distracted. I have quite a bit to say about Claudie once I get into that post and how she got undercut by releases and still is being so.

Go to the woods!¹

My girl pinched my hips to see if I still exist.

Belated Holidays and what not.

I think not, I'll send a letter to my friends. A born again hooligan only to be king again.
~ Fugees, "Ready or Not"

*~*~

I've been sick and sleeping poorly.

Don't worry, it's not Covid. I stay masked. But it's been exhausting.

I'll cover Kavi in a few days and then go back to 2022. And 2021. And 2020 and 2019.

It's whatever at this point.

But I did get my Addys in holiday dresses, so I'm still hanging on.

Be here in a bit.

--Neth

this is just to say

Dolls in snow is kinda my thing every single time it snows.

 

(with apologies to William Carlos Williams) 

 

i have been unable to blog
the posts
that were in
the planning

and which
you were probably
hoping to have
for reading
 

forgive me
i had an injury, nano, 

and two power outages
the latter of which was so unexpected
and so cold

    

Nano '22 is in the books and my knee is better and Kelvin remains an absolute unit.

New post in about a week, barring any other issues.

 

--Neth

Rambled Opinions and General Snarkiness: Ski Free in Aspen: Corinne Tan of 2022 and Her Entire Collection (With Bonus Kira B. For Some Reason)

The mountains are calling, and Corinne must attack them.

In 2015 I opened the year of AG blogging not with talking about Grace Thomas, then-current Girl of the Year, and her then-the-most-expensive item ever bakery. (That was about four days later.) I started a fresh new year of doll blogging by pointing out that, in fourteen years of having a Girl of the Year, the characters had been overwhelmingly white. At the time, there had not been a Latina character since Marisol twelve years ago, an East Asian character that wasn't half white, a South Asian character that wasn't a sidekick without her own book, or a Black character at all. Nor had there been many characters of color. Lindsey was and has been the only Jewish doll in the line and most of them were long spans of whiteness--four characters in a row, generally, and often with brown hair or eyes but not both at once--that really didn't have to be so. Frustrating. There was nothing in Lanie's story that had to make her be white other than she was from Massachusetts. Hence me promoting--off and on, but still--the hashtag and campaign #AGDoCGotY: asking AG to give us Dolls of Color for the Girl of the Year.

Now it's been seven years and one president (with a four-year gap of fuckery) later¹ and AG has done some major improvements on the Girl of the Year diversity.  Lea was a lot of choices that I didn't care for one bit, but the doll at least wasn't light skinned. Hazel eyes, yes, lightish haired, yes--but she wasn't pale, and a lot of people got her and ditched the very off kilter story to give her more representation than her story gave her. This was followed by: Gabby my Babby--last minute and overshadowed by someone with a guitar but still there; Luciana the STEM Space Ace Latina we all adored; Blaire who...was Blaire but at least wasn't fully boring even if her focus wasn't exactly a focus at all; Joss who was the first disabled doll in being deaf² and the first white one to have both brown hair and brown eyes; and Kira, who gave us gay aunt representation in a land down under.

Yes, three and seven-eighths of them are white, but each of them had something more appealing to them other than being white and fantasy wish fulfillment. Even if I owe myself a read through of many of their books to learn more details. Look, I haven't sat down and read as many books as I'd like--not just AG, but across the board--thanks to my brain wonk. At least I'm not saying with my whole IG account that Samantha was a full fledged suffragette, Saige wasn't radical enough by discussing school art programs, and Felicity never liked a nice dress. The push for more representation from AG has been not perfection, but progress. 

Then at the end of 2021--because that's when they've been formally releasing the new girls now--we got the first Girl of the Year East Asian character: Corinne Tan of Aspen, Colorado. Corinne³ is Chinese-American--which means for the first time in the line, a character offers East Asian rep without a side dish of whiteness to help the ethnicity go down!

...Mostly.

Her parents have, at the start of her story, divorced due to stressed exacerbated by the pandemic, and her mother Judy is preparing to marry her new boyfriend: a well-off Swedish man, Arne Karlsson.⁴ So not only is Corinne dealing with personal worries about what being in a blended family means and moving to a new place, but what it means that her white stepfather got that money money to the level of "has a personal decorator," "her little sister wanted to start ice skating so he just paid for it," and "No, Corinne, put anything you want on your pass at the ski lounge, I'll pay it." She's big into being outside and exploring the woods and mountains around her home, feeling like the outside and nature with it has a lot to give, and she loves to ski. She also gets a new puppy who she wants to train to be a rescue dog, helping find people lost in the woods. Put a sticky note on that, we'll get back to it.

Is this like Nicki from 2005, also from Colorado with a dog being trained? Yes, but Nicki didn't have anything in her book about skiing while Corinne is very much about it left and right. Also Nicki didn't have any underwear. Plus it's been long enough we can return to Colorado skiing. If we can have dancing based collections three times we can go skiing twice. The target age of AG, even at twelve, wouldn't have existed when Nicki had her year.

But it's not all ski slopes and more money woes for Corinne. There's also realistic occurrences of anti-Asian sentiment in book one and some rescuing involved in book two. I think. I need to finish a lot of reading and document a lot of things. I have a lot to do before November.

She's also due a movie on Cartoon Network followed by HBOMax and I'll get to it when I get to it.⁵ In the movie she's been bumped up to thirteen, in part because of the actress. I'm very curious for how the adaptation will go--we haven't had an AG Moddie movie since 2016, and that was a mess.

All these pics will be, of course, promo images and catalog shots, a first for me. Until Corinne's release, I was able to see every GotY since Mia face to face at least once during their active year--the ones until Kanani down at AG Dallas, and all the rest at AG Seattle until it closed. But given that it's October and I'm not planning any impromptu trips down to the LA store, I'm unlikely to see Corinne in the store before 2022 is up and maybe not even after. It's above me now. Other people will have to take pictures in stores of things. Hopefully they won't suck. Also her giveaway item was a poster, which she can't even wear. So I missed out on nothing that I'd later trade money for goods in a Safeway parking lot.

Ski jump under the cut for Corinne's entire collection so far--and a bonus that sets a very strange precedent.

Dat's my sister~ And my puppy~

The Return of An Outsider and Regaining My Voice in the Fandom

Claudie Wells and one of my many sunflowers.
Finding peace where it can be found, some days.

Let's start my return with a confession. 

Sometime early last winter--December or so--I considered quitting this whole blog. Shutting it down and leaving. Writing a "goodbye" post, then packing up shop. Not taking down any of my posts, mind, like I did when I was removed from AG Playthings and felt that my reviews shouldn't remain on a site I wasn't welcome on. Right call, that. But I was ready to call it quits, and leave AG fandom to the next generation: AGIG meme accounts, TikTok videos, and whatever the fuck is going on on AG Tumblr involving book piracy. I'd go dark and just stay in my own little corners where maybe people would leave me alone and stop hurting me. Because people were hurting me.

I almost gave up my voice.

And to start to bring it back, I need to say that and several other things.

I'm being vulnerable in this post, but not too vulnerable. Some of what I went through mentally and emotionally is for the select circles who know the best ways to reach me and treat me the way I ought to be treated--gently, and with love and care. There's some things about me that aren't worth the energy I'd spend trying to talk about it on a public blog about dolls and shit, where any yahoo serious with too much free time on their hands tries to scan every paragraph I write and twist my words for their agendas and vendettas. 

But the truth is I almost quit, and I want to be direct about it. 

That's the tone we're starting with. And this post is not so much about AG or even dolls or toys as it is about me, the Gen X black demifemme human behind this blog, and what I've done to even get back to where I can write this. So if that bothers you or you don't want to hear that shit because it's not the tone you enjoy, then go ahead and back out now because actual feelings on "new" things this past year to catch up and "old" things to look back on in Retrospecticus Posts won't happen until later this week or so when I have the energy to do research for the posts I want.

I'm a person behind this, same as anyone else, and I ought to be allowed to be myself.

The rest of how I feel and where I'm going--as much as I'm willing to share--is below the cut, along with some random pictures of dolls that I've taken pics of.

Refreshing My Broken Soul.

 

sometimes what you need is plants, yarn, dolls, and an entire year and more off.

Sometimes real life writes the posts. Sometimes real life gets in the way for a year. 

Even the woke gotta rest up. 

American Girl Outsider returns October 3rd.

If you know, you know. And if you don't, you won't.

--Neth

It's a Cruel, Cruel Summer

 

it's been one of those days since may.

Me: *makes plans for anything even with Covid*

Plans: *severely fucked* 

Let's see where I am in October. 

--Neth