Makeover: Meet Gwenni Damico

Meet Gwenivere Ruth Damico.

So in my last post I mentioned that I was doing a makeover. Well, she's all cleaned up and ready to debut. Meet Gwenivere Ruth Damico. Not bad, huh?

Picture heavy under the cut. Hold on to your hats.

AG Complaint Department: Some Children Are Too Young for AG Dolls

The American Girl company was initially created--so the story goes--to fill that empty niche at the time between the baby doll and the fashion doll. A companion that wasn't either focused on mommying or on dressing up. And with some history in the process, to get your learn on. Sure, we had Skipper among the fashion dolls, but she was a teen (and also small of waist). There was no doll the same age, generally, of that 8-12 year age range with an 8-12 year old body shape. I have to admit that Pleasant Company was hella successful in that task, seeing as now there's tons of 18" Companion girl dolls all over the market and new markets tend to pop up all over the place to try and challenge AG. (Some have even folded; Life of Faith is one of the bigger companies to fall.)

However, when American Girl was created, there's no getting around that they were intended for the 8+ crowd. Hence the whole books and encouragement of studying history and craftwork and stuff, and the focus around a girl of the era turning ten at some point in their series. They still stick to that, even. And society does, in many ways, encourage kids to skip past childhood--or, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis¹, try to rush girls to get to a certain age and then expect them to dawdle there as long as possible. The fact that someone tried to come up with the term "pretween" says some shit right there. Don't get me started on a store called "Forever 21" or I'll get completely off topic. So with this age skewing, the span for dolls seems to be from age 1 to age 8, and after about third grade you're just too old for dolls. Which is another rant altogether.

So yes, the age for doll play seems squashed in our society. Still. There should be a lower limit for getting a doll for a child--especially an expensive, high cost doll like AG--and that's because they don't treat things right.

"Gently played with" my black ass.

Braid Spray and the Ingratitude of the AG Fandom

Tara and Abbi know damn straight how braid spray can make a girl look good.

As a woman with 25 AG gang members--and many other dolls and ponies and other things with silky hair that can go rogue--I tend to invest time into their hair care regiment. And one of the centerpieces of my hair care is a big old bottle of braid spray. Not that the AG community at large really appreciates that I introduced this into the fandom. So this post is part basic care, part backstory, and part bitchiness.