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

 

Rambled Opinions and General Snarkiness: The 35th Anniversary Party, Flashback Fri-Year, Stuff Down Under, and Whatever Else Has Came Out Recently

Party down if you ain't no clown. Also don't invite clowns.

Go, AG
It's your birthday
We gon' party like it's your birthday
We gon' sip Bacardi like it's your birthday
And you know we don't give a fuck it's not your birthday--

But it is their birthday! At least, it was. Is? How does a year long celebration work vis a vis a birthday? I merely give myself a month, and that's more to allow gifts to arrive anytime in the span around with the actual celebration generally a few days before or after the moment of Actual Birthday. I even redid the layout of the AG Wiki to celebrate--and because hey, it should have a nicer background after this long. Fresh coat of digital paint and what not.

Congrats, American Girl. You were born in a warehouse north of Madison, Wisconsin--one of the two places in the state that has any concentration of black people, go argue with your unseasoned cast iron pan, I was born there--as the brainchild of a former teacher who gets over-revered. You started with just three modified Gotz dolls with the Romina Mold, covering three overly romanticized historical time periods and accompanying books, and outfits and accessories that fit a single two-page spread in the Doll Reader magazines that my mom's crafty and very wonderful friend used to let me flip through because I was a quiet well-behaved kid who didn't tear things up and I loved the blue trunk with the flowers on it and the doll that had the collection for it.

And now, past the invention of the CD, DVD, Internet, streaming and me being Entirely Grown, you as a company are still kicking it. In part because the last twenty-plus of your life have been Mattel run. No one tell the PC Purists, you'll break their hearts and send them into apoplexy when you remind them that Kit never was a PC doll no matter what the back of her head mold might say. Go argue with Samantha's shitty plastic shoes.

This is an achievement, and that's me being sincere. Not every line of toys makes it this long, or every line of dolls. Yes, Barbie's the same decade as my parents, and I'm older than Ponies--another line that still lasts--and I am Classically Trained in that an NES was my first system. There's things that last. But not every brand of toy thing lasts so long. Just a few doll and toy lines born the same year as AG that didn't make it out of the 1980s, courtesy of Ghost of the Doll:

• Jem, truly outrageous and over by 1988¹
• Fluppy Dogs, which didn't make it to 1987
• Shimmers, also didn't make it to 1987 
• Sweetie Pops, weird little dolls that only did a year
• Fairy Tails, birds with happy endings by 1988
• and MoonDreamers, which had images in 1988 Hasbro catalogs but never went into production.
  

Every few years toys and brands are born, live a little and die, burst onto the scene in a surge of popularity and fizzle out a few short years later to scatter thrift stores and wistfully look forward to the day they show up on Buzzfeed lists of Only Decade Kids Remember. Even the Baby Face dolls I like only made it two years, and I didn't know about Year Two until I was older. So congrats, AG, for making it three and a half decades, and thanks for making my life a lot more brilliant. Can't wait to see you make it to four decades and beyond.

Now let's talk goodies before the next set comes out. I am trying to maintain this 2021 energy of staying semi-on top of new things. Let's talk party booths and doll cupcakes.²  

Honestly, I meant to do this earlier this month--and the Wellies Retrospecticus last month before I did this. All these delays from me are for many reasons--including realizing damn near all my Wellie pictures for the past two years are of such poor quality that using catalog pics is just better for the whole damn thing--but the major one is that getting my anti-Covid shots³ whooped my ass. Like whooped it. I still have a cough since the last one at the start of May, WTF. My immune system went into major overdrive, which is good, but meant having hot eyeballs and swollen lymph nodes and a lack of focus to do anything but play New Pokemon Snap which is bad. The swollen knots in my neck, not New Pokemon Snap. That game is my friend. I'm chucking fluff-fruit at everything. But yay, I'm immunized. And still wearing masks in public because even though I'm fortunate enough to be stuck and the CDC claims we can just walk around with our faces out, not everyone is safely immunized, some fools who can be are refusing out of sheer selfishness, and the pandemic is still raging worldwide and other countries can't get all the vaccines they need for their people for who knows how long. Also I invested a lot in cute face-covering wear and I'm continuing to wear it and that way I can cough when my issues act up and know my mouth is covered. We'll decide how I feel about sipping Starbucks in the store later. 

I digress. It's a three day weekend, May is almost over, and I have my attention together long enough to blog about things even if I smell of Halls cough drops. So Wellies later--well, Old Wellie Stuff later, because I'm covering the New Party Stuff today--and New Stuff Now. Including New Stuff that's Old Stuff! But not Bitty stuff. LOL Bitty shit. Go argue with a Safeway doughnut.

Party under the cut!

Get Vaxxed, Puppies

Filler Kendal, since the next post is wellies.

Me: I'll blog after my covid shot! 
Miss Moderna: go take naps all week
Me: oh okay

See y'all next Monday when hopefully my brain is not all the sleep. 

Get vaxxed. 

 ETA, May 9th: that next monday was foggy and unable to focus, though i got things sorted. by the time i wasn't fogged, i was getting shot two, and it knocked me on my ass. lmao, i forgot that any immunization fucks me up.

 let's see where I am Tuesday. 

--Neth