AG Outsider Retrospecticus: Blaire Wilson, The Girl of 2019 and Character Neth Completely Forgot (To Blog About) and Introducing Fifi Martin-Russell

Blaire Wilson.
Or more accurately, Fifi Martin-Russell.

Beware the ides of March--oh. Right, that was a couple days ago, wasn't it? As well as Pi Day (the only made-up holiday where you can use math to compel people to bake you some key lime pie) and St. Patrick's day, the day all the Irish people and part Irish people get to heritage it up. Hope you maybe wore something green, drank a beer, and I guess posted Nellie on the timeline in the new Irish set. I'll do it tomorrow, to quote Goof-off Goose. Now let's talk dolls. The benefit with my blogging so frequently is that I have little to go on about myself and what I've been up to before getting into the meat of what you come here for: yammer about dolls, reviews, and integrated snark. Day to day nonsense and randomized art goes on the Instagram account.

2019 was a strange year for me. Not as strange as 2020--the high of winning Joss followed by the free fall of literally everything after the start of March, can't wait for the anniversary of face cloth in two weeks--but strange all the same, what with starting the year in an apartment I'd lived in for over a decade with some really awful neighbors yet again and and wanting to move, and ending it in a house with stairs and a lot more doll storage. And yes, I am protected. I also turned 2000 weeks old that year, which was neat. I'll let you know when I hit 2200 weeks old, I already passed 2100. 

Though I barely think about the old place now, the in-person pictures I have of "Blaire Wilson" that aren't inside the late AG Seattle back in the days when people still breathed community air are instead at the previous residence. So I'm going to have shots taken in the past. Flashback. At least these were before the complex painted the place from the various rich jewel tones I liked to I Can't Twerk To This Beige, insisted everything had to be stripped off our porches for two months with no end date, and killed one of my tomato plants in the process. Joke's on you, complex, now I have a front porch, a cherry tree, and digging dirt now and I can cover them both in all the plants I fucking want!

...and paint the banister myself--or more accurately, hire people to do it. Ahem. At least I'll make sure it's nowhere near my plants.

Between 2018's "Go To Space Today" Space Ace Luciana Vega¹ and 2020's Cool Deaf Surfer Girl Joss Kendrick, American Girl released for the 2019 Girl of the Year a little character that could named Blaire Wilson. Blaire--with an E, we had to add that version to my spelling dictionary--started leaking around the end of 2018, revealing herself as a return to white girls after two years of PoC. But she did have some semi-unique factors, being the first and so far only super pale Josefina mold--she was as pale as the very recently released #78--with green eyes and very red curly hair. Basically she's like if Felicity was paler and had Dear Elizabeth's face for more than regular kissy kissy. 

However, other than the new looks, Blaire didn't have a lot going for her as a character. Hence recent reports from Mattel's that Joss outsold her by 20% across the board even in a pandemic and the stores being closed for several months. The theme of her collection--and books, they're not just packing ballast for your dolls--was a little all over the place, and even some angles of it I haven't quite figured out even two years later. That's why I personally feel like AG whiffed it with Blaire. Not that her message wasn't necessary--look, the person with a chocolate allergy isn't going to knock talking about food allergies and intolerance--but in her collection this wasn't given a lot of focus. Furthermore, there was a big issue in that she had the "bad" eyes at the start, and and since I have a lot of old news to go over, we'll be covering the issues with AG's "bad" eyes in depth here.

Step behind the cut to read about Blaire Wilson, her collection, the books I still need to read, and learn about Fifi Martin-Russell--as well as my experience with the 2019 eye-swap and the short lived "bad eyes" that American Girl may have replaced at no cost to the consumer, but definitely at cost to the company, so quit bitching stores are closing. You wanted the older eyes, and the monkey's paw made it cost AG Atlanta.

The American Girl Create Your Own Line, Meeting Sonja Busse, and Clothes and Accessories Reviews: The Let's Smile Outfit and Accessories (2017)

Four Pretty Maidens, all in a row.

Did I say Tuesday? I meant not Tuesday. I forgot Tuesday that I was going to pick up my new glasses and I spent the rest of the day adjusting to my new lenses. I can read better again! I now have fancy new progressive lenses to read more clearly in that massively nearsighted left eye of mine, because in a battle between "seamless trifocals" and "having to remember to carry reading glasses everywhere and swap them in and out" I went with "seamless trifocals." No shame in the game. Also this post took a few days to write anyways because it's long and I'm excited. Let's talk moddies. 

American Girl Moddies--as I call them--have had a shitty assumption hanging over them their whole time they've existed, going all the way back to launch when they were called American Girl of Today in 1995. This became even more of a problem when the line was called Just Like You from 2006 to 2010,¹ but to be fair it has really been an assumed perception for the past twenty-five years. That assumption being? That the dolls were designed, customized, or intended at purchase to try to look like the recipient getting the doll.

Mind, American Girl has never pushed the idea that any modern doll should specifically or exactly resemble the intended consumer. They've tweeted that the dolls aren't customizable, corrected purchasers in stores and over the phone, and even stated in so many ways that the first moddie line is not and never has been available as customized dolls. The first name--American Girl of Today--initially was selected to reflect how history was happening in Manhattan (or wherever) and that a child of "today" was as tied to current historical events going on as a child of the 1940s was to the event of her era which was as far back as they went back then. The first ones even came with a set of six blank books and writer's guides to encourage writing a story about a character of today. While I generally don't give a shit what Pleasant Rowland intended for anything, the initial intent of the line was, to quote from a line in my 1996 Doll Reader magazine, "for [children] curious about their place in today's world" and to "link past to present and empower [children] to take pride in this, their moment in history."² 

Yes, moddie dolls can, as the statement goes, have their skin tone, eye color, and hair color chosen. From what initially was a pool of just twenty dolls, fourteen of which were light skinned with the Classic Mold face.

Having 70% of the available dolls as "white" is not, in fact, widespread customization.

If you were a child--or, like me, a teen--in 1995 looking over the selection of American Girl Today dolls and you were not white or light enough to be assumed as white? Your options were #1 and #18 for black; #2, #11, and #15 for All Other Brown, including lighter toned black people and anyone else; and if you were East Asian you only had #4 until 2006 when Jess came out. Every other option was was light and assumed to be white. There were more options for blondes than there were East Asian people. Even as more dolls became available--we're up to over ninety total that have ever been released--the majority of available dolls have had light skin and resemble young white girls. The first main 18" modern line wasn't customized or designed to look like kids, the deal was that that white girls had many more options than anyone else. And that's a form of privilege in society.

But AG saying what isn't, wasn't and never has been done with the now-titled Truly Me line doesn't mean that people don't assume stupid shit about AG dolls. (Just wait til I have the energy and focus to write about how your Molly from 1998 is not, in fact, going to sell on eBay for thousands of dollars, regardless of what some article on USA Today tells you.) This has led to thousands of parents over the past two and a half decades who have either bought dolls that they got to look like their kids and thought they did themselves a custom, insisted that the lack of diversity in the line is accurate to the population, or complaints up and down the board that there's no doll that looks exactly like their child and why isn't there one, because my white child has straight blond hair in a bob with no bangs and hazel eyes, and there isn't a doll just like that right now and these dolls are supposed to be like them. Boy howdy when white privilege occurs, hmm?

There is a much more customizable--to be little more accurate, designable--line now, though, and has been for about three and a half years. Back after it launched I only mentioned it slightly back then in my post about Z, but I'll go in because it's been four decades since 2017 and three of those happened in 2020. 

The American Girl Create Your Own Line--which the fandom tends to abbreviate as CYO--launched in August 2017 and is the most customizable American Girl product outside of doing the thing your damn self. For Two Hundred Dollary-Dos--plus tax--you can design a doll's entire look, select her meet outfit from the options, add in matching--or not, it's up to you--accessories, and get the whole kiddy caboodles in a fancy box along with a code to make a Design Your Own T-Shirt for free shipping--and that was free shipping available before AG offered that up for the low cost of buying $135 worth of stuff. (The offer used to include a six-month/three issue subscription to American Girl Magazine as well, but the magazine stopped publishing in 2019 so that's no longer a perk.) And while it does pull from a pool of their available options to mix around, it's a wide pool of options. American Girl boasts that there's--via every possible combination of hair, eyes, face, and extras--more than 2.4 million possible combinations of dolls available.

All those options, mind, and some people's creativity is limited to either whitewashing the Addy and Sonali Molds with no sense of irony (y'all probably didn't care black people came in albino until you decided you wanted a white version of molds that have never been used by the main line in white) or spending almost twice as many monies as a regular off the line moddie to remake another version of #27. Oh, but the collector said on her Instagram account, you don't understand, this one is a blonde and blue eyed classic mold but this one is a blonde blue eyed, classic mold who has slightly different and longer hair! Miss Ann, you might as well be telling me this mayo is slightly more creamy than the other. Bitch, if I'm going to blow $200 to get an AG doll I design, I'm not going to get one that looks like one I can get at the store, but with slightly longer hair and a hazy shade of winter. I wish her--and 99% of everyone who has ever designed a white Addy or Sonali mold for no good damn reason because they have European Beauty Standards Poisoning--a very unhappy evening. 

That being said, after you place the order they put the dolls together in Mexico--each doll has a foot mark stating they're One of a Kind unlike the common ribble rabble--and then ship them up to Laredo, Texas; from there they go out and arrive at your house in fancy packaging. When orders are low, a design can take up to three weeks or so to arrive; early in the pandemic, people were looking at ten weeks, and creation and shipping time can take even longer when items are backordered and/or it's closer to the Winter Holiday season. I had never gotten a CYO of my own that I'd designed. I'd gotten four of them secondhand, yes, and they're all super adorable. But I'd never gotten one that I designed myself, start to finish.

Until Monday. 

This is a multipart post. Bring snacks.

Rambled Opinions and General Snarkiness: Dat Street Chic Urban, Flying the AG Skies, and Sweets, Treats, and Other Neats: The 2021 Early Quarter Releases

We run these exceptionally clean and well-maintained streets.

I got two retrospecticuses--retrospectici? retrobungalows? we'll take that to the workshop--in and started sorting images for the third when a local snowstorm came in and delayed me and my buddies going to AG Seattle together, even though it was good for Maryellen in the snow for pics. Followed by sad over my last day in AG Seattle. Followed by concern over my family and friends in Texas because of their own freak snowstorms. Followed by March yet again I'm just saying, February was wilding and my brain decided every trip up meant focus was bullshit. I didn't even get my Valentine's day takeout dinner until last weekend.¹ Yes, I'm a bougie bitch. Get you a partner that looks at you like a warm cheddar bay biscuit and then gets them for you to eat at home.

Anyways it's now March and as of today, it has literally been an entire year that my life has been affected by this pandemic. "I'll be working from home for at least two weeks" followed by "actually, roomie, don't go on your usual walking trip out to the store this weekend, it's not fun out there" followed by "...all my thingies are getting super cancelled and the Costco is out of  paper towels, bleach, disinfecting wipes, hand soap, baby wipes, hand sanitizer, and rice. And toilet paper, wtf, why is everyone buying all the toilet paper, good thing we restocked last week."² Things are better but we're not out of the woods yet. Wear your masks, stay home, and stay distant. I don't care what your stupid state governor says about opening the entire state up to full capacity right now because their dumb ass wants to force things "back to normal." Fuck a normal. This is the equivalent of going "the flames are only on half the house now, everyone back into the living room to play on the XBox!" That bastard ain't gonna pay your medical bills and you can't contribute to the economy when you're dead. Freedom is not freedom to be a dick to everyone around you because you're weaker than a fursuiter and mewl at the mild inconvenience of some cloth on your face. And if you're like "lol that's what Texas/Mississippi get, backwards states voted backwards and everyone there deserves it" I want you to snort capsaicin up your nose like it's the 1970s and sauce is the new snow. There's millions in the south, many of which are BiPoC, that are being voter suppressed and trying to be heard, and they're not less worthy. Fuck your northern moral superiority, you fucking weeb. Don't make me overlay the Republican dominated states over the diagram of the Confederacy again. 

Ahem.

While I was working on old stuff and also being sad at times, new stuff came out with AG. I already covered Courtney's new stuff--all of it, really--in her own post, but she wasn't the only one getting the goods. The only Historical, true--but not the only line. Lo, have the moddie things been thinging. Due to the local store closure, I knew I wasn't going to see any of it in person and would just have to use website images and details as it came out, with the oldest new stuff coming out with Courtney and the newest new stuff having come out yesterday. 

So to keep on top of that, I'm still gonna blog about it. And Blaire's gonna have to wait another week for me to take my meds, get my new glasses to read better, and slam some black tea with milk and sugar so I can go over the deep interest of her not being able to eat dairy. I could try to do her stuff first, but then I'm delaying more and then more stuff comes out and then we're talking about 2021 releases in 2022 and I've got enough of a 2019/2020 backlog. Also I've got something neat coming soon and y'all might get the first new review of something in forever.

That and those three new girls are stupid cute and I'm trying to decide when I'll get them.

Pop under the cut and run these streets, site-used images and all.