Harping On (and On) About Centaurs: Monster High Avea Trotter by Mattel

Essentially since I heard of her, there was one Monster High doll I just couldn't decide on. Did I love her, or did I think she was a mess?

Avea Trotter was one of the four debuting doll characters in the Freaky Fusion line. In the movie, harpy/centaur Avea, along with skeleton/moth Bonita Femur, ghost/mermaid Sirena von Boo, and zombie/unicorn Neighthan Rot, is a new student at Monster High who is unusual for having very stark hybrid monster scaritage. The four new kids tap into their experience as hybrids to help out the eight fused ghouls (Dracubecca, Cleolei, Lagoonafire, and Clawvenus) in dealing with their artificially hybridized bodies, since they need to learn how to use them while dealing with shared consciousnesses. Avea herself is a little standoffish after a life of being ogled as a novelty, and has low hopes about feeling normal at school, but she is overjoyed to tears at being accepted into Monster High. I think the hybrid theme might have been a grasp at commentary on mixed ancestry, but I don't think it looks too great when read that way due to the way the characters are very much marketed out-of-universe as novelties for it and in-universe are called upon to use their experiences to teach people who are only temporarily in their shoes. I think the hybrid monster theme is stronger as fantasy worldbuilding and less as a social metaphor.

Avea was probably the most notable doll to me among the four hybrids, simply for the fact that she's a centaur doll and had pretty good leg articulation. The other three hybrids didn't seem nearly as out-there despite their fun designs and cool body details. Sirena had a weird lower body like Avea, but her fish tail disappointed in comparison to the articulation of MH merfolk starting with Finnegan Wake after her, and it certainly wasn't much next to Avea's leg joints.

However, I've also long had issues with Avea's color scheme and distribution of her mixed monster features, with her overall look frustrating me, so that held me up from getting her. 

But, c'mon. Centaur doll. You gotta take that, no matter what she looks like. So I ordered her and kept her boxed to save for my birthday. The offerings for Avea were surprisingly reasonable...by aftermarket standards, at least. I chose an incomplete copy of her that looked good and was missing her wings and her rear shin guards, and simply ordered a set of wings and a set of all four shin guards separately so I could complete the copy of the main doll. I'm pleasantly surprised by this, but almost a little disappointed on Avea's behalf. You'd think a doll as awesome as her would be much harder to obtain, even loose and incomplete.

Avea remained boxed up for about a month, with me packaging the replacement parts with her in the box she came in. On my birthday, I opened her up for real. Here's the three packages my Avea consisted of...

...and here they are unpacked...

...and all assembled (spare shin wraps set aside):

With her four legs, Avea has and had no doll stand, but this was a theme for her friend group. The hybrid students had a fairly feeble unifying gimmick of having body parts that allowed them to stand unaided...and I say this was a feeble gimmick because one of the hybrids, Neighthan, outright didn't fall in line. He had a humanoid body with no added body parts that functioned as standing aids, and thus he included a doll stand. I enjoyed Neighthan as a doll, but he was a bit of a weak link, having an equine monster overlap with Avea (which she obviously outdid him on) and not having a strikingly dramatic freestanding body.

Listen, I would not have been mad if Mattel made two centaurs in the line and gave Neighthan a horse lower body. Redundant? Sure. But it'd have made him a much more worthy doll in the line. Still, his body, with the exposed muscle sculpting, could be really fun to turn into a unique pure-zombie character, so that's one point toward the way they actually made him--customization potential!

A good indicator of how strong or exciting a toy is to me is how badly it breaks my doll-reviewing order of operations, and Avea pretty much shattered the proceedings, since the whole TT&T crew immediately wanted to start playing with her. By "whole crew", of course, I mean me and Maudie. While I wanted Maudie on deck early to provide a comparison shot at the beginning, she derailed things very quickly (and quite badly) in her exuberance. 

Maudie was basically bursting onto the desk to meet Avea for this comparison shot, which was understandable but not good. Maudie was absolutely enthralled with Avea, but that's precisely why they did not get on famously.

"Ooo, pretty bird-pony girl!"
"Dmitry, who is this?!?!"

Avea, with her front legs fully bent straight, pretty much matches the height of a standard teenage MH ghoul. Her head and eyes are on the smaller end for MH dolls, though, making her look smaller than Maudie.

Avea refuses passengers, as do all centaurs according to Avea, as they see being rides as incredibly demeaning, but Avea relented very reluctantly for Maudie, who wouldn't let the review proceed otherwise. 

"Just this once."

It was a humiliating disaster for all parties involved.

"Oh, isn't this a dream-!"
"Hrrrngh..."

"This is how the ladies ride..."
"groan..."

"And now, the great Maudie Sixtenstein enters the ring!"
"nnnnnnNGHHH!"

"Okay, GET OFF!"
"AAH!"

*oof*

"Ugh...grab my hand."
"No, that's okay, I'm so sorry, you can just leave me here-"

"Yeah. I will. But there you go."

"See you around, dots...I guess."

Maybe they can have a friendship, but today is not the day.

I apologized for Maudie, and Avea brushed herself off. She was relieved for the start of the real review. 

The first thing I want to address is that I really don't love Avea's color scheme. I feel like the purple and blue come out of pretty much nowhere and don't work. Perhaps it's an attempt to create another case of internal monster visual rules--"MH harpies are purple since we already did that with the CAM character" (never mind Quill Talyntino, then)--and an attempt to blend the harpy side more aggressively into the very heavily horsey doll. Painting the physical horse half purple might have been an attempt to bring the harpy out more. But the result to me is that I just see an unrealistically purple horse and I don't love that. Think how gorgeous this doll would have looked with more natural tones. Make her top half birdy yellow and her horse body brown. That way, her teal tones would mix well with the red and yellow to create a primary-themed color palette. Or go more high-drama--make her top half grey or white, (or maybe brown, grey, and teal to reflect the muted plumage of many female birds!) and make her horse body black! But this color palette, to me, fails to patch up the design imbalance of horse and harpy and instead accentuates the discord by giving us a fantasy pony with a weird color combo. 

As mentioned, Avea is a blend of two monster types--a harpy and a centaur. She's also the only mainline doll of either. A Harpy was featured as a Create-a-Monster add-on pack, but not as a whole doll with a complete torso. 

Mattel stock photo of parts of the Harpy pack. I think this design
is only okay, and I'm more interested in it for maybe 
making another avian monster.
(Despite the stock photo, the pack only had the one
pair of hands.)

Mattel also had plans to make a doll of popular harpy "backgrounder" character Quill Talyntino, who filled out scenery in the webisodes, but there's no evidence the doll plan for her even entered the prototyping stage.

Screenshot of Quill from the webisodes.
She would have broken the purple
trend, though, like Avea, her wings
aren't part of her arms.

While part of me likes how the hybrids introduced and held exclusivity on some monster types, I'm also disappointed by it, since it might have made more sense for the hybrids to be combinations only of monster types we'd already gotten dolls of. Perhaps Mattel thought the fusion ghouls did that enough already through combining characters we knew and their monster types with them, so they felt free to use unique monster types for the hybrids, but I just think of the dolls we could have gotten of those hybrid-exclusive types. Over time, some mainline dolls did get made of the hybrid monster types alone. Here's how it all breaks down.

• Avea Trotter (centaur/harpy) debuted one monster type-- a harpy preceded her in the CAM line. No centaur-alone dolls were made after Avea, but the Fright-Mares spinoff line of miniature dolls are each their own type of hybrid centaurs, being dream spirits with unique monster concepts on top of centaur bodies. This makes centaurs a uniquely prolific hybrid-exclusive monster type in the brand. 
• Sirena von Boo (ghost/mermaid) kinda technically debuted no monster types--a fish-tailed ghoul featured in the CAM line before her, but was labeled as a siren. She still counts as a mermaid to me, but Sirena was the first doll to be called one in the brand, so maybe she debuts a type, maybe she doesn't. Ghosts had been made before in the form of Spectra Vondergeist and the CAM ghost. After Sirena, many merfolk followed, with classic merman Finnegan Wake and the various other unusual spins on fish ghouls in the Great Scarrier Reef line--both natural and temporarily transformed. Several ghosts also followed Sirena in the Haunted line, also both natural and temporarily transformed, as well as ghost character Ari Hauntington in G2, and a few licensed characters who are ghosts within the Skullector line.
• Bonita Femur (moth/skeleton) technically debuted one monster type with moths-- a skeleton preceded her with Skelita Calaveras, whose forearm and hand sculpts Bonita reused. One standalone moth monster would follow Bonita in the Boo York, Boo York line with Luna Mothews...though more broadly, bug monsters preceded Bonita with the Insect CAM and Wydowna Spider, and would follow her with the Winged Critter mini dolls in G2's Garden line.
• Neighthan Rot (zombie/unicorn) debuted one monster type with unicorns--zombies featured with Ghoulia Yelps and "Slo Mo" Mortavitch. No full standalone unicorn dolls would be released after Neighthan. The closest that was made was a blank print-on doll pack for the Monster Maker CAM spinoff, which didn't even provide a complete doll body. The only zombie character so far to debut after Neighthan was Moanica D'Kay in G2.

I know we've already done everything but review the darn doll, but that last of my tangents leads into the point that I have to review Avea as two monsters represented by one doll, and to me, being two monsters is one of her biggest weaknesses. I feel like MH never delivered a great harpy doll, and that means Avea is included. 

It doesn't mean they didn't try, though. Let's start from the top (hat). 

Avea's costume theme is pretty much pure genius-- she wears equestrian fashion while being the equine herself, and as such, her accessories blend jockey's clothing with riding tack to beautifully emphasize the paradoxical visual of the centaur as both horse and rider! This starts with her hat, which is attached to a bridle-like strap that encircles her horse ears and attaches under her chin. It's a brilliant way to keep it on her head and add more centaur theming. To add some harpy in, the hat has red feathers attached to it. I know the hat is backward in these first few photos, but I left it as such since that's how it came and I thought I might as well demonstrate the fact that the hat has a "wrong" way to be worn.

Here's the strap under the chin, which closes with a peg and hole like most MH belts. 

And here's the hat flipped around with the feathers correctly pointing backward.

Avea's hair and tail are the same color and fiber, and are a rich mix of blue and teal streaks. The tail emerges from a black plastic cylindrical wrap piece which is a nonremovable part of Avea's body. Avea's hair color blend would later feature for Garrott du Roque, Ghouls' Getaway Jane Boolittle, and both Serpentine twins, which means it lost quite a bit of novelty, though not prettiness. I don't think this color makes much sense on Avea (really the only monsters it made perfect sense on were aquatic hydras Peri and Pearl), but it is objectively gorgeous. Her hair's definitely in pretty messy condition, though, and needs a good boil and conditioning. There were also a few sections at the back of her head where longer streaks had evidently been chopped short, which looks a little messy.

As with fellow horsey hybrid Neighthan, Mattel made a fun visual pun here--Avea's hair is very fittingly styled as a ponytail! Her original hair elastic was evidently lost or aged and broken at some point, as she came to me with this thin rubber band tying her hair slightly loosely.

Avea's head is made to look very equine, with horse ears on top of her head and a facial sculpt that successfully pushes a human shape into tones of horseyness, with the shape of her mouth, cheeks, and chin evoking the animal well. 

MH dolls are pretty skilled at subtly animalistic human faces, but I think the application for Avea was one of the biggest mistakes in her doll design, next to the color palette...actually, it's probably the only mistake, since I think every problem I have with Avea would vanish if she didn't have a horse head!

My first issue with the head sculpt is purely pedantic--the classical mythical centaur is known for not looking horsey at all on the top half--the whole visual of the monster is the contrast between the human torso and the horse lower body, so on those grounds alone, Avea just shouldn't have a horse head. But the other issue here is that the horse theme of her head significantly deprives her harpy half of visual representation. I would immediately fix the hybrid design of this character by making her head sculpt birdlike to make her a proper top-half-bottom-half divided centaur where her entire top half is birdy and her entire lower half is horsey. That'd make the monster traits much more fairly distributed--all you need for a centaur is a horse bottom, and that frees up the top to be all harpy so the theme of this hybrid monster reads much clearer! It also fixes the color issue, since, with a bird head within the same palette, I'd no longer view Avea as a really bizarrely-colored horse! As-is, Mattel not only inaccurately overplayed the centaur aspect of the monster, but they did it to the direct detriment of the harpy aspect. I think this could be fixable, but I don't know if I dare yet to try it, at least not on this head. Cutting off Avea's ears and recombing her hair to cover those spots, and painting a beak shape over her sculpted nose like some Enchantimals bird characters do-

Stock photo of Enchantimals' Dinah Duck by Mattel.

- could make Avea's head read more birdlike. I'm unsure if I want to do this or not, but if it fails, Avea's proven relatively easy to obtain so I could get another copy or head if I regret it.

The third issue with her horse head is that it creates a stylistic overlap between Avea and Neighthan, and with Avea being the more equine doll, it feels like Neighthan takes the hit in terms of novelty. If Avea had a harpy head and a horse lower body, then Neighthan would feel more unique and worthwhile with his horsey head!

However, there's one huge credit I have to give to her hybrid design: for all that I found the avian elements of the look to be weak, Avea's design still never once made me think of Pegasus. For a winged horse composed of two Greek beasts to not remind me of that third, more iconic Greek beast is actually a pretty big achievement. Good on ya, Avea. 

And I do like Avea's face paint for what it is. Her dark lips are nice and match her lower body, though her eyebrows ought to be blue. This Avea's eyes are slightly wonky, in a subtle way that makes her feel starey to me, so maybe I should try de-horsing her head because it's not a perfect faceup. I do like her eyelash feathers, though, which are shown to be real feathers in the Freaky Fusion special, not just paint.

Avea's purple humanoid skin tone is pretty much identical to Twyla's (and by extension, Whisp's), by the way.  No MH doll has skin matching Avea's horse half, though.

Avea's equestrian outfit continues in a multi-layered ensemble with belts over it. I appreciate this costume, since Mattel found a way to make it elaborate on a doll who they could only clothe half of!

Since the belts are getting in the way, we'll look at her wings and arms first, then the belts, then the fabric clothes.

Avea's wings are a unique rounded feathered sculpt that feel like they hug her back a little. They're small and not too dramatic, which is the norm for solid wing sculpts. If the wings are large like Ghouls Rule Draculaura's, Bonita's or Batsy's, then they're full of totally implausible cutout holes to save on plastic. Avea's wings are black with sprayed-on greenish teal at the feather tips. The teal color is present in Avea's hair, but I think her hair would have looked way better if the blue was the minority and her hair was more visibly greenish to match her wings and the accents in her eye feathers. The wings are two pieces and work like others in the same style, slotting into two holes in the back. Since Avea's wearing a jacket, there's a hole cut out in the back for the wings, and I feel like this hole is needlessly generous in size.

Avea's arms have a bracelet on each, and her hands are cast in black with a sculpt to look like formal riding gloves. A stripe of blue paint colors the ruffles that hang down on each hand sculpt toward the fingers. It's a little weird that out of three G1 dolls with this purple skintone (Twyla, Whisp, and Avea), only one of the characters ever got hands in this color--Twyla's got shadow-grey hands and Avea has black gloves!

The undersides of Avea's arms are sculpted with a feather texture, which is unpainted. I think paint should have been added here. 

Honestly, I might have preferred a repeat of the Harpy CAM's winged
arms. Those are awkward, but way more impressive and dramatic to me than Avea's
back-wings and arm feathers.

Now let's look at the belts. They're straps with dangling horseshoes, and they come in two pieces, with the humanoid rider's belt segueing into riding tack on her horse body while being a detachable separate piece for ease of redressing. Here's the belts connected and on Avea.

And here's how the top belt comes off. A peg and hole on each side of her body attach the upper and lower pieces together, and a peg and hole close the top belt at the back of Avea's waist. 

The top belt detached from her waist, but attached to the bottom belt.

The top belt detached, with the peg loops now easier to see on the bottom
belt.

The bottom belt wraps around her horse body and attaches under her horse...belly? Whoa, wait. Do centaurs have two stomachs? Two ribcages, spines, sets of lungs, hearts???? What is the internal anatomy of these creatures? I never had the cause to ponder that before!

Here's both belt pieces removed.

I think the separate parts make sense. I found it easy to attach the belts back on separately before putting them back together. 

Under the belts, Avea's got her fabric clothing, starting with her plaid jacket. Like her hat feathers, the piece is pinkish-red, and it has puffed sleeves, a collar that likes to stand up, and some tailoring around the bust. We've already seen the large wing hole in the back, and the piece closes in front with a small velcro attachment.

I don't think the jacket looks very attractive, but it definitely works and completes the doll's ensemble. I'd find it hideous anywhere else and it's on thin ice on Avea, but I definitely appreciate it in this context.

Under the jacket, she has a lovely airy halter top in blue that matches her hair. The piece fastens around the neck and lower back and has some great drape across her horse back, as well as covering the line between her human torso and horse body. I like the way it matches her eyes, too!

Her purple colors work much better when there's less red in the look, but it's really the horse thing that bugs me, so I think if she had a birdy head, the colors wouldn't matter.

Avea's last pieces of gear are her four leg guards. They're asymmetrical, with silver buckles on one side of each, and there are two guards of each type so all four legs can have the buckles facing inward or outward depending on what you choose.

Here, I have the front legs buckles-out and the rear legs buckles-in by accident.

These pieces clip onto the legs and have open backs. They're easy to accidentally spin around the shins, as several preceding photos show, and one of the guards has warped prongs at the back that have to be pulled open to get them around the leg. They're not wonderful pieces, but they look good.

Now, let's look at Avea's body. Maudie was too ashamed to volunteer for a body comparison by this point, and I didn't want to aggravate Avea any further besides, so I let Maudie calm down and think about her choices and subbed in my blank white Monster Maker doll for the shot. 

Avea's human torso shape is already different because it has the bust joint, but it's also notably skinnier all around. I suspect this is entirely in service of her upper belt piece, since getting the belt looking tight and sleek while there are two layers of clothing under it probably required the slimming of the torso. It might have also been done to make the belt easier to attach around her waist, but in practice, I don't really think that's the case. It's not the worst belt application experience I've had with MH (that will always be Kala Mer'ri's horrible combo of a slightly too-short belt and a very sheer coat underneath it), but it could have been a bit easier. Since Avea outright can't use a stand, her thinner torso isn't functionally problematic. A later doll with a thinned torso, Elle Eedee, did have issues with being too lose in her stand clip.

Avea's arm articulation is all the same, but she was the first MH doll to feature a torso joint, which has become less of a novelty in the brand since her release, even becoming standard-issue for the deluxe femme dolls in G3. Hers works pretty much the same as all of them, with maybe a little less range of motion than some later dolls?

Most critically, the joint allows her torso to rotate, which is great for getting side views of her full horsey body while she faces you. 

I would have been really annoyed if I couldn't pose her like this.

The joint also tips side-to-side a little, as well as forward and back a little, which I find less vital, but not unwelcome. 

Avea's lower body is a keen compact stylization of a horse that closely translates the analogous MH humanoid proportions onto the animal frame while keeping the body a plausible size for Avea that isn't excessively large and demanding of physical material. Her horse body struck me as smaller in person than I had initially expected, but it doesn't feel too small for her humanoid half, and having it in person really illustrates how MH the horse part feels due to its super long skinny legs! The body has good muscular detail as well, as well as asymmetrical Skullette dapples in a lighter color matching the skin of her humanoid half. These can be found on the outer edge of her right foreleg, and the outer edge of her left rear hip.

There's additional texture detail on her horse half, with some texture around her midsection blending the two halves of her body...

...and texture around each of her hooves.

I don't find either element of texture to be sharply-defined enough to be easily readable. I assume the hoof texture at least is meant to represent more feathers, but it doesn't look very clean or recognizable as such. I think I would have welcomed paint applications to separate her hooves. That'd be more worthwhile to me detail-wise...though I don't know what color they'd choose. Personally, I'd go for dark grey, but that's nowhere else in Avea's design. If I painted a beak over her nose, though, then that'd be a great second place for the color to appear...

Besides the equine sculpting and satisfying proportions, Avea's horse body is great because the legs have a pretty respectable amount of articulation that allows for some good motion poses and pretty versatile free-standing balance. 

Avea's rear legs are solid single pieces with limited rotation forward and back at the hips. 

This is as far as they rotate in either direction.

Her front legs are three pieces with forward and/or rear hinges and no rotation points. I think this articulation scheme with more flexible front legs is an acceptable compromise to give her high articulation without making her too complex and frustrating (or potentially unsturdy), but rear leg articulation might have opened up some more great poses and even aided in balance in many ways. For example, Avea cannot come down to ground level to lie down and get off her hooves. 

The upper legs can hinge quite far both forward and backward. 

The lower legs hinge to a straight pose aligned with the upper legs and in keeping with horse anatomy, bend no further forward than that, but they can bend backward to 90 degrees.

The hooves are authentically level on the ground when Avea's fetlocks are bent a bit forward past a straight pose, and the fetlocks can go backward to about 90 degrees.

With these complex front leg joints and simple back ones, Avea can achieve multiple dynamic poses.

I am very far from a horse enthusiast, but I'm aware this isn't a natural gait.

I like the energy in this pose.

And this was the hardest balancing feat, but yes, Avea can technically be posed unaided on just her rear legs! It's not the most effective rearing-up pose because she had to throw so much behind her to stay up, but I'm still impressed. 

No strings, no props. Just balance!

And of course, Avea can take a horse's bow after the show.

I know she's supposed to be read as a jockey, but I feel like she'd have a great run
as a ringmaster for the Freak du Chic!

Then I decided to check out Avea's messy hair. And boy...I shouldn't be at all surprised, but she's got quite the mane!

Her head of hair is thick and long and voluminous, and while I like her in the ponytail for the look and the joke, I can't deny she looks nice with her hair loose.

I took her hair to be boil-washed. Avea's four legs made it super easy to do, since she stood up in the sink perfectly while I poured! After washing, her hair tidied up, but lost its wave. I don't mind that; I don't think it was one of her essential traits. I think the straightening might have made the tail look even better!

De-waved, the amount of hair she has is a lot more apparent!

To try out my idea of making Avea's head birdlike rather than equine, I decided not to alter the doll head I had. That was too risky and too mean. So all I needed, I reasoned, was just another Avea head. I didn't need two full dolls, since I knew I could swap the heads out and decide which I liked better (original or alteration) at the end of the day. I chose an Avea head on eBay that looked appealingly wonky in the photographs, as her eyes had a mischievous side-glancing quality in the way they were applied that nonetheless didn't make her look spacey or misprinted like the Avea face you've seen here. I like doll faces with screening that gives them standout character, and this looked like a good case of unique screening that didn't harm the look of the face.

Here's the new head.

I love it already.

The hair on this Avea is markedly tidier and glossier--much like it would have been out-of-box, indicating this head wasn't played with much. She had two black elastic bands securing her ponytail, though I think she was only packaged with one.

The heads just can't compare. The new head feels so much more personable and alive. She's haughty, friendly, and cheeky all in one. 

I also feel like the teal in her hair is a little more prominent, which is extremely welcome given that I wanted her hair greener! This is ideal.

The two heads have so many subtle differences, like the expression, hairline, hair blend (and maybe even some mold variance--her jawlines look different to me) that I wonder if Avea was perhaps manufactured at multiple manufacturing sites with some marked head variance between the two. It happens pretty often--Spectra had two notably different head molds based on site, one with softer cheekbones, and even some current dolls have faceups that can be subtly told apart based on where they were produced. If that's the case, then maybe the doll with the first head was from a site that did a worse version of the head. The second head is what I thought her face would look like, and it's very nice.

I took the second head down to the workshop and sliced off her ears. Her hair is dense enough to cover the holes it left, even when it's not entirely swept backward. I then painted a grey beak over her nose.

Slightly reminiscent of Skelita, who I really hope won't have a human
nose in G3.

I had to take her hair to be very lightly boiled to unkink it from the elastic bands. Then I needed to figure out a hairstyle.

At first, I wanted to put it in a bun to match the general look of the original style, but she had too much hair for it. Then I thought of a drawn-back style with the hair puffed out around the bottom, but had no idea how to do that. I eventually resolved to have it loose and cut into a very short wavy bob, trimming out some of her central and lower hair to reduce the volume at the back. I think this gives her an old-fashioned but tough look that suits her costume and personality. I feel like the hair is very harpyish with its volume and wave and short length.

It reminds me just a little of Katharine Hepburn, a classic actress who was famous for playing no-nonsense...but was great when she played nonsense, too.

Avea's bridle hat still works on her. The nice thing is that now it can just slide forward onto her face without unfastening it. The not-so-nice thing is that now it can fall forward off her face. Oh, well.

I did not even notice the crazy shin guard in this photo!

Avea was so happy with her makeover that she decided to strut some laps.

She needed to be looking more carefully.

"AAAAAHHHH!!!!!"
"You have a new face?"

"Oh my gods, you're okay???"
"I'm a cartoon...so, yes."

"I guess we're even, huh."
[...]
"We're a recipe for disaster, aren't we-"
"Yes, we are."

Well, that worked out nicely.

I'm delighted with my head restyle for Avea. Not only did the new head have a more appealing face and better hair, but the small changes I made transformed her properly into a compelling and cohesive harpy/centaur hybrid. Once I put her back together with the new head, I was engaged on a new level. I wasn't just having fun with Avea as a novelty toy review, I was having fun with her as her own character. It's fantastic that all of my huge design issues with the doll vanished with such small changes, and if Avea's balance bugs you, then hey, take my steps as an option to reconcile her design that I think works really well!

 But I also need to review her as-sold.

At the end of the day, I have to say factory Avea Trotter is perhaps the ultimate Monster High doll. Maybe not my favorite, but definitely the ultimate. Avea encapsulates everything you need to know about the brand. She's wildly unusual in terms of her anatomy and she has a wonderful high standard of articulation within that anatomy as well as a pretty perfect execution of the sculpt, showing off Monster High's freaky monster extremes and its fantastic doll engineering. Avea also shows off some of the more unusual body details offered by the brand, having wings and textured limbs on her humanoid half, showing off how the body details became a signature highlight of the dolls. Monster High offered the freakiest and most divergent humanoid dolls on the mass market, and a winged centaur horse-harpy girl couldn't encapsulate that better. Avea's costume shows off the brand's strength for detail and visual invention with its genius equestrian-paradox "horse or rider?" theme. Her face paint showcases the brand's unique dramatic faceups and her face sculpt shows MH's skill for subtle humanoid shaping that can evoke a nonhuman or animal basis.

Avea is also representative of the brand's bigger creative failings for me. Her color scheme feels distractingly unnatural and random to me, mostly as a result of her bizarre monster-feature distribution. If she read more birdlike on top, her colors would be just fine, but instead, I'm left with the visual of a horse who's just jarringly purple. The weakest MH color palettes I've encountered have been unreally colorful and felt very poorly matched with their subject matter. I also think Avea's hybrid monster design is unfocused and the harpy elements feel shafted for the horse aspects. Mattel lost focus on the hybrid nature and went overboard by putting horse in her upper half when that was not only breaking with the classic centaur, but also wasted the opportunity to fully sell the harpy side with a birdlike head and fully-harpy upper torso. Sure, it's not implausible that Avea's genetics would present this way, but for a hybrid gimmick doll, I want to see more monster juxtaposition and more prominence from the harpy side, particularly since harpies never really got their due in the brand--elsewhere, it's just a simple CAM doll pack that never got an official body, and a webisode character who was planned for release in the mainline but never got made. So there really isn't any better doll in my eyes that fully represents the output of Monster High in its ups and downs. Avea's an incredibly engineered and brilliantly costumed doll of a weird and inhuman concept, but she's also visually disjointed and her color palette looks bad and distractingly toylike as a consequence. 

She's flawed, for sure, but at the end of the day, there's absolutely no way to get past the brilliance of an articulated equestrian monster centaur doll. This doll would be a must-have no matter how wacky or hideous her design was, just for the body design alone. In any MH collection,  I think Avea is an essential member, a "required text", perhaps (to stretch a phrase to its breaking point). In many ways, she's absolutely the most doll MH has ever made. 

And that's a pretty great reason to have her.

Don't take this photo as an insult to OG Avea. Just having a bit of dynamic posing fun to close this journey out!