Hopelessly Immersed in Shadow High (Part 3- Finale)

Here's part 3 of my Shadow High deep-dive. Read part 1 and part 2 for the complete picture, if you haven't already!

At this point, Heather was damaged and I was defiant at the prospect of ending my Shadow High exploration with the bitter event of a doll literally breaking. No. One more shot, one more go! I had enough gift credit to get one more doll.

While I considered Monique again, I felt like she'd be a great doll with no surprises. Rationally, that's ideal and you are entirely right to be screaming at me for not just going with her (she is still on my list!)...but I just can't make things simply by having my consolation doll be a guaranteed win. I wanted to be risky and get a doll I was curious and optimistic about--someone who'd lingered in my mind--to see if I would ultimately fall in love with her and hopefully have a good experience to end this more happily. I'm willing to accept a second disappointment and a final bad ending here, but I think the outlook is positive for this girl. And who is that?

Karla Choupette.  

Karla's entire look just grabbed me, with her crisp menswear influence combined with high-styled extravagant femininity. There's something so chic and bold yet unusual and controlled about her look that feels iconic and queer to me--and I mean that as a total compliment. Even if she's not meant to be a queer character, her style just gives me that energy of empowered beautiful social strangeness (I mean, the hand fan. Come on.) which feels differently-toned from characters like Shan and Heather. Sure, she's supposed to be firmly Euro-couture, and she's a broad whole-character tribute to 1800s-loving Karl Lagerfeld's designs and image, with the fan being one of his signatures and Choupette being the name of his cat...but I also feel like her look is exaggerated and plays with gender in a way that resonates as quite subversive and fun! And Lagerfeld himself did not appear to be straight, regardless of whatever he identified as himself.

Here's Karla in her box. I don't find her presentation here especially appealing. She feels kind of squeezed in without a whole lot of poise or visual grace and her hair needs some fussing.

Karla's box has the last unique wave 2 back artwork, with Monique sharing her illustration.

You are not in this review, Monique, but I promise you, you'll be on my shelf someday!

Like the other wave 2 dolls, Karla's seal just says "fashion design focus". I think that's fine for her, actually, but if they wanted to be more specific, they could have said "haberdashery focus" given her heavy menswear theme. However, if she's only feminizing menswear for her own clothing or other women's, then she's not actually designing anything for men. For Karla, I can accept regular "fashion design" being her focus on the box.

Here's all of Karla's stuff out of the box. I was already having fun with her fan!

Like Zooey, Karla's hangers are matched to her dominant color, while her stand and comb are matched to a less prominent, darker shade of the same. 

Karla has quite a bundle of accessories-- her phone and case, her folding paper hand fan, and her makeup palette, brushes, and lipstick!

Karla's phone displays a feed of Rainbow High YouTube video clips on its screen, and the back of the case is the SH initials very cleverly designed to create a black-and-white houndstooth pattern!

Like Zooey, Karla also has some messages and calls to check up on!

Karla's hand fan comes rubber-banded to her hand twice, but I cut one band and struggled to stretch the other out to put around her hand again, so I eventually cut that one off too. She uses it pretty well without them. The fan is a shiny dark ribbon-like fabric and features the word "Shadow" printed in metallic silver lowercase gothic text on the front. It's the text on the fan that makes it feel more like outlandish queer fashion to me--I've seen multiple queer entertainers dramatically flip open fans with text on them to deliver a message in an ostentatious silent manner. Karla's fan actually folds closed and is a fairly sturdy fabric material, and the piece is held together with a plastic rod that ends on a key-like loop on the back. The back is not shiny.  A long black tassel is tied to the "key" piece and hangs down to give it even more drama.

The fan is a little awkward to display with Karla at first since there's no handles or brackets and the shape of Karla's hands doesn't really interact neatly with the "key" on the back-- it can't be a loop over her fingers. Her fan is also too thick when folded to reliably be placed in her hand.

However, the fan can be balanced fairly easily against her head or body when her palm is up...

...and the fan can slide in sideways between her finger and palm pretty well as long as her forearm is tilted upward enough, since the "key" braces against the tips of her fingers.

This fan piece really is the hinge upon which the entire doll swings. I don't think I'd have been nearly as interested in Karla if she lacked it. It adds a ton of display value and personality.

Karla's last accessories are her makeup--an eyeshadow palette with a mirror in the lid, three platic brushes, and a pink lipstick. All of the makeup colors Karla is wearing are included within her cosmetics, which I appreciate. 

While the brushes looked like useless pieces the doll couldn't interact with, I actually found easy success in posing Karla doing her makeup! 

The secret? You can tuck the brushes inside the palms of her fingerless gloves to keep them in her hands! Monique also has makeup brushes, and also has fingerless gloves, so she'll be able to use her brushes too. I can't be certain this is a deliberate design choice, though, since MGA has left some dolls out to dry by giving them bare hands and makeup brushes they therefore cannot hold--Dia Mante is one such case. 

This is maybe my favorite photo with Karla, showcasing her mirror and makeup while also showing how her costuming allows her to use her brushes.

Karla's lipstick isn't really able to fit into her hands, but I appreciate how the cap comes off!

And I was still able to pose Karla using it by balancing it very carefully against her lip and her palm.

Karla's accessories have been my favorites of the wave 2 dolls so far, since I found them dynamic and largely more useful than I'd expected. The fan is a piece that feels more unique, too--more exciting than water bottles and computers. It's a shame that some dolls like Dia are not able to use their brushes because they don't have gloves like Karla or Monique.

Now let's look at the doll herself.

Karla's hair is a very pale pink tone, and is pretty glittery in-person. It doesn't have obvious tinsel through it like Zooey does, but there's something subtle about it that makes some strands of her hair really sparkly.

This is the best photo I could get illustrating the glittery look of her hair.

It's quite pretty and doesn't have the issues of tinsel in hair. The hair is as long as the majority of the girls' and is softly wavy. The front of the hair is pulled into a top ponytail with hair wrapped around the base, but a lock of hair pokes out of the half-ponytail to sweep across her face. 

The hair has gel keeping this lock spread out and in place, but some also got into the bottom edge of her hair where it has no business. Combed out, the hair is really nice. 

When the front lock is combed out, it has trouble staying spread across her forehead since the hair is coming from a thin strip on her right side, not hair that crosses the forehead, but this doesn't bother me too much. I added a second elastic band to the base of her top ponytail, however, to keep it standing up and more defined in her silhouette.

Karla's skin tone is a very pale greyish or slightly purplish tone, and is just slightly darker in value than her hair. 

Her eyebrows match the hair and eyes and her huge eyelashes are white, which makes her look even more ethereal. Her makeup is dark grey eyeshadow with glittery white lines and pink at the edges that appears in her lavender eyes and her lipstick color. Her pink, white, and purple make me think of pearls. It's possible (though not confirmed) that Karla could be an albino character, which would make her Shadow High's first depiction of albinism following Delilah Fields' more realistic take in Rainbow High. However, for Karla, I think it's just as likely she's just styled herself in an avant-garde eerie-pretty manner. The pink eyes, white eyelashes, and super pale hair call albinism to mind, but it's Shadow High. Anybody there could have those. Still, I do love the effect of her colors. She looks like the strongest level of goth that Barbie would be able to muster. She looks like a supermodel vampire heiress. She's a fabulous ghost. She's a high point in creepy beauty and style. 

Karla has "S" and "H" silver earrings with hooks upon which small pieces dangle loosely with gravity. Her right earring has two simulated chains, and her left has just one that ends on a pearly piece.

Karla's outfit is a feminine and avant-garde twist on menswear traditions, and consists of a body-hugging dress over a puff-sleeved tuxedo shirt with an attached simulated black necktie. The necktie has a plastic SH pin on it, and the sleeves are made to look like they have cufflinks at the ends, with the cuffs being pinched and featuring silver studs in them. I love that touch!

Karla's dress is really interesting and unusual. It's very much like a trench coat that was re-cut into a strapless dress, as it hugs her bust with simulated lapels creating a V shape, has a row of fake buttons down the middle, and features pockets with top flaps on the hips plus belt loops and a belt. The dress is pale pink like her hair and shot through with vertical lines of iridescent silver thread in a subtle striping effect I didn't see in the photos online. The pockets on her hips are both open, and looked to me like they were fully lined. In truth, these pockets are just holes in the top layer that are exposing a loose inner underskirt layer of the dress, so they're not true enclosed pockets. That doesn't mean that they don't beautifully hold Karla's makeup brushes while she's wearing the dress, though. 

All three can slip into one of her pockets, or you can spread them across both, and they're secure since her legs brace against the underskirt and hold the brushes between both layers of fabric. I found the lipstick too chunky to put into the fake pockets, though. 

This is what the layers of the dress look like when it's removed.

And this is what the brushes are really doing when you put them in her pockets.

While I should probably be disappointed that Karla doesn't have fully real pockets on her dress, the fact that they'll hold her brushes anyway delights me, and her outfit still feels more deluxe and functional than most doll clothes I've come across before. 

The belt on Karla's dress is just like Shanelle's, being a completely separate ribbon piece with its own velcro closure. I just didn't remove it from the dress because I didn't want to deal with the belt loops.

Karla's fingerless gloves have already been mentioned, but they're quite nice. They're pale pink imitation leather with an elaborate SH embroidered on each in silver. 

As with other dolls, these gloves have a thumb hole and a wide hole for the rest of the hand, but Karla's look more tightly-fit and convincing than other fabric fingerless doll gloves I've seen, and given the functionality they provide to her makeup brushes, I'm glad these aren't just done with a new hand mold and paint. I particularly like how tight they are around the wrist. I chose not to pull either glove off because I figured it'd be a nightmare to pull back on a doll that didn't have talons like SH does, so it'd be even worse for her! The hands can be removed and replaced pretty easily while still gloved, though. And Karla's hands were entirely funtional! Hooray!

The construction of Karla's costume means the optional layer of clothing on this doll is the under layer, since Karla can wear the dress piece without the shirt. 

Karla, pretending her hands are attached, with just the dress on.

I won't be displaying her this way, but I appreciate the permutation.

I'm struck by the realization that Monique seems to be the only wave 2 SH doll without a large optional clothing piece. She just has a one-piece dress, which is gorgeous, but it seems unfair that the other dolls got optional layers to give permutation while Monique just gets one outfit that can only be worn one way. Did all the budget on that doll go into manufacturing her microbraided hair, or was her dress made of fabric diamond or something?

Karla wears boots with long thigh-high sleeves that feature buckles and fake zippers. The boots have a thin vinyl fabric that attaches to the solid heel. I found it difficult to get the boots back on as these assemblies, so I took scissors and snipped the thread and a small scrap of vinyl on each so the sleeves and shoes could separate for ease of redressing. 

The vinyl got a little ragged from cutting it away from the sleeves, so the boots don't look great without them, but that's fine since I like Karla best fully-dressed and I improved her functionality.

So that's Karla!

I think the first thing that has to be mentioned is that I found my copy of Karla Choupette to be utterly without issues. Her body wasn't broken, her hair was nice, her faceup was perfect, and her clothing was all up to par. I put unfair pressure on this girl when I tasked her with being my redemption doll after the Heather fiasco, but she passed with flying colors.

The second thing that has to be mentioned is that I had an absolutely lovely time with Karla. I love her aesthetic so much. It's campy, it's feminine, it's chic, it's subversive, it's creepy, it's ethereal, and it's powerful. She's iconic. I found her accessories to be delightful and more worth playing and displaying with than Rexx or Zooey's. Her makeup palette isn't suited to her hand, nor is her fan really, but both can be balanced on her for attractive and dynamic static displays. Her fan is a super fun and super impressive little piece of construction, and Karla's cosmetics are also nice and much more useable than I expected. Her fingerless gloves turned out to be great for slipping the handles of brushes into so she can hold them, and her lipstick has a great separating cap despite its less useable nature. Her boots ought to have been separate pieces from her leg sleeves just to make them easier to put back on, but separating them isn't difficult, so I won't complain about that.

And ugh, I do apologize, but I still can't let you go. I was still curious about Natasha Zima after all and saw promising photos where her head didn't seem at odds with her body color, and plus I had Rexx to pair with her and still more gift credit left over that could foot most of her cost, leaving me now paying only about $17 of my money for six dolls and that's really cool and six is the size of a full series and offers an even fairer sample size for quality than five...

And so what if she ends up bad after I went through a redemption arc? If she spoils this journey after all, so be it. Call it a Greek tragedy. I'll have earned it for pushing it past Karla to a sixth doll!

Part of why I warmed to miss Winter here is that photos of her from people who owned her were looking more appealing to me, and I was liking her striking white aesthetic. I also admit I feel a little kinship to a character with such a Slavic background, being an American adoptee from Russia myself and having grown up with many Polish family friends.

Natasha. Box. Here she is.

I didn't look up Natasha's character before getting her in-box, so her seal gave me new information--her specialty is cosmetic chemistry! 

Her written bio clarifies that Natasha works with formulating makeup and also, apparently, fragrances, since she's said to value her perfumery and always wants to smell good. Diverse fashion focuses like SFX makeup and cosmetic chemistry make me wish the Wave 1 kids had gotten accessories to highlight their specialties. Imagine Shanelle with a measuring tape and scissors, Heather with a case of monster claws or silicone skin applications that could be draped on her face, or Natasha with perfume bottles and laboratory vials! I feel like handheld accessories and a jacket for each would been all I needed, since the second-outfit base pieces don't excite me. 

Here's Natasha unboxed. Her stand and comb colors are identical to Heather's.

The first thing I have to mention is Natasha's boots. I was excited about them because they're fabric attached to a plastic sole, and the way they were packaged was interesting, with plastic shells folded in two in the shape of legs to fill them out.

The boots are deliberately crinkled with ruching at the back--they don't stretch out to be smooth.

Unfortunately, Natasha's boots are glittery by way of being encrusted with ultra-fine holographic glitter particles, so they shed tiny glitter all across the desk in the process of removing them from the packaging. I despise encrusted glitter as a texture, don't see any merit to it as a visual, hate the messes it makes, and the choice of holographic glitter for Natasha feels poor (silver would have suited the SH look better). I wanted to love these boots, but I got a nasty first impression of them. I took these for a bath to scrub as much of the loose particles off them as I could after the initial photo session. 

Now the doll herself.

Natasha has white hair with a much tighter wave than Karla, bordering on curly. Hers is done in a top half-ponytail like Karla's, but with no lock of hair poking through it to sweep across her face. The hair appears to have grey highlights (or lowlights, as it were) to give it more visual interest and dimension.

This was how her hair looked out-of box at the back.

This combed out very easily and beautifully, though--I couldn't detect a drop of styling product in her hair, which is just as it should be. 

I can understand why Zooey got some gel at the ends of the hair coming out of her buns, but some of her gel was totally needless, and Shanelle had no reason to be gelled at all. I'm pleased that Natasha both had no need for gel, and actually had no gel to boot.

Natasha's face was one of the big reasons I came around to her doll. Her expression looks unique and pretty, and she often strikes me as having a look of delighted surprise!

Her wide eyes, upturned lips, and raised eyebrows make her look pretty friendly and open, and even though I think the elements of her face are a little weird, they work together pretty well. Natasha's skin is a pale white color, and most of her makeup is a very soft grey, including her lips, which almost seem like they're nude with gloss on, rather than lipsticked--maybe they are. Natasha has bright blue eyes and pink blush. 

Natasha's earrings are a good ol' S and H again. They're each solid pieces with no loose dangly bits.

Natasha's first outfit is a sleeveless dress with feather trim on the top and bottom and a bow on the front and back each. It's grandiose to the point of ridiculous, but not in a way that I find unflattering or silly.

The feathers are more yellowish than the body, but Tasha has enough varied white tones in her design for this not to be an issue. 

I took photos of the dress off on the table since it's hard to make out details against her hair,

Front.

Back.

Natasha also wears a silver clip-on bracelet shaped like round beads.

Her shoes in this outfit are slide heels, which fall off of her feet far too easily. 

Uh-oh, am I gonna have to face those boots?

Natasha's second outfit is very similar to that of her color opposite, Shanelle. It's a strapped sweetheart tank and miniskirt which feature a lot of beaded detail. 

This outfit looks okay to me, but her skirt is missing several beads on the pattern. Most of them look like they never got placed, but one of them (marked yellow on the second photo) was applied and fell off while I was unboxing the skirt.

It's not a huge problem to me because I don't like the second outfits as much on wave 1 SH, but if I really wanted Natasha to wear this, I'd be peeved.

Natasha's miniskirt does not have a strap inside to keep it aligned and prevent it from riding up. I had expected one after Shanelle and Zooey's, but it's not really a problem.

The last piece Natasha has is her faux-fur coat. 

The coat is thick, lined with white satin, and features embroidered lines with a studded effect across the body and sleeves. The coat and boots and dress look great for a fully ostentatious wintry Slavic fashion look, but the coat's sleeves feel just a little too thick for me and from many angles, it swallows her neck up in a way I don't love. I think the coat completes Natasha, but it doesn't flatter her automatically.

Natasha and Shanelle are the only Shadow High dolls I've gotten in this group of six who don't have usable pockets anywhere in their wardrobes.

While my Natasha's head matches her body just fine, there are color-matching issues, with her hands and kneecap joints looking different from her body.

These aren't glaring enough to ruin her for me personally, and knowing this is an issue across Natashas where more significant mismatches like her head can occur leads me to be happier it's just her hands and knees on mine.

Here's how I choose to have her--fully fluffy, fancy, and bundled-up. The boots are better after scrubbing and soaking them out of a lot of their glitter, but I still wish they had none of it, and the ruching effect makes it hard to tell when they're fully pulled on.

Natasha didn't have any flaws or issues that turned me off to her or demanded replacement--just a couple of things that irked me. Her issues don't prevent her from being a gorgeous or functional doll, so I think she lands about the same to me as her total color opposite, Rexx. It just happens that Rexx's flaws unfortunately bother me more as a consumer than Tasha's do.

Her outfit isn't my favorite to work with, but see? She can look absolutely stunning in it. 

Natasha also looks great with her fellow greyscale dolls. With Rexx, she's a perfect counterpoint.

And her wave 1 opposite, Shanelle, looks good with her too.

I like how the eyes are the darkest part of Natasha's face, and the lightest part
of Shanelle's, almost like a yin-yang!

And the four desaturated dolls look amazing lined up. It's an insidious and effective collecting motivator-- the dolls make you want to complete the color spectrum, and now I find myself tempted by Ash and Luna to expand the greyscale...and I don't even like Luna's styling!

Shut it down, Dmitry. Don't succumb to marketing...

I'm glad I got Natasha. She's a pretty doll despite her glittery boots and cumbersome coat and color issues. 

Conclusion time (at last!)

I really like the way this worked out so I was reviewing a wave 1 doll and wave 2 doll in each post and that the group is split even between the two sets. 

First, I want to think about ranking. I can't really choose a favorite doll here, because I love different things about each and some dolls that I might have been able to put above the rest were brought down by flaws. Despite the wave 1 half of this group having second outfits, the wave 2 dolls remain competitive with their wider visual range and the craft of their first outfits. Rexx has a great outfit and feels so well put-together on display. Shanelle is polished, dramatic, beautiful, and flawless but not the doll who ultimately engages me the most. Zooey has a great design and legendary coat, but her faceup blows her potential. Heather was a lot of fun, but she broke and I'm awaiting a replacement. Karla was a dream with really fun accessories and a style I enjoy a lot. Natasha is gorgeous but has issues and her coat completes her but needs careful display to really flatter her. I guess I have to say my best experience was with Karla, since she cheered me up after the Heather fiasco and turned out to be a dynamic, issue-free doll, but I still wouldn't place her apart from the rest because, again, all of them have their own qualities I love.

So. After all that, what do I think of Shadow High as a brand?

I'm very mixed, though where I'm positive, I'm extremely positive. 

I still don't feel totally resolved to the general aesthetic of the dolls, since I find the heads to feel too childlike at their current scale on the bodies they have. The boy dolls like Rexx suffer this worse, in my mind, despite the comparatively smaller heads, since they don't wear makeup that can serve to age their 
faces. The heavy use of SH branding within the fashion design also quickly grew tiresome to me, reminding me of the most warped consumerist aspects of modern fashion, and I wished for those instances to have been replaced with something more imagery-based or character specific.

I also think that the brand can sometimes feel premium to a fault, since there are issues like fully-constructed clothing pieces outright not working with other layers of their designated outfit, purely decorative tiny bow knots and laces that are very frustratingly not glued, meaning they can come untied, and some extraneous items wasting space in the box--Dolls like Rexx and Monique include combs they cannot use, and the clothing hangers included in the wave 2 dolls feel like a bit of a mockery, since they're the first SH dolls without second outfits to use on them! The hangers can pass usefully back to the wave 1 characters who ironically lack them, but a backwardly functional system is just that--backward. Hangers would not be missed if they get cut in wave 3. Shave a buck off the price if they did that, too. The doll stands are also disappointing. The dolls often fall forward out of the clips and the poles often rock out of the bases. The stands work, but not as tightly as they should. The best part of them is that the bases are always flat and level. There seems to be some trigger-happiness at the factory regarding styling gel applied to dolls who don't need it, and in bizarre spots. The hair ties also feel too loose in general, resulting in structured styles with ponytails often having deflated silhouettes on the dolls when they're unboxed. The accessories in the wave 2 dolls are also mixed. Many don't seem designed to work with the dolls' hands very well at all, and when they are useable, like Karla's brushes, I'm half-convinced it was unintentional--shoving Karla's brushes into her gloves so she looks like she's holding them feels a little like the wrong way to do it. 

On the other hand, the craft of these dolls is ambitious and largely stunning. These feel like deluxe luxury collector dolls, each one, and it's hard to believe these are the mass-market standard of the franchise(s). The dolls are large, substantial, and intricate, with a satisfying heft, silky hair, inset eyes and applied lashes, nicely-articulated bodies with great double knees, and marvelously-sewn clothing with a level of detail, realism, and even functionality that puts other play dolls I've seen to shame. Rexx and Zooey have incredible jackets, with Zooey's having four real pockets. Heather has a a wild intricate goth pigtail style with braids and intertwined rings, plus a great jacket that can be worn as a cape, Shanelle's ombre skirt is a showstopper, and Karla's jacket-dress has false pockets that nonetheless hold her brushes well. When Shadow High is on point, it's unstoppable. These are the most gorgeous, dark, impressive spooky dolls on the market right now. The dark designs, fantasy twists, and even deluxe releasing with doll stands are a welcome return to the buying experience many treasure from Monster High's glory days, and I think MGA is genuinely doing right by giving Mattel a kick in the pants and showing them their old gig never actually went out of style. That doesn't mean I'm mad at Mattel or anything. I'm on board for all they're doing with MH now. But I think Shadow High is perfect to have around, since it'll scratch the itch I had for the old MH. It's the best of both worlds--I can buy my home brand from Mattel and I can go to MGA and buy the darkness it used to have!

Unfortunately, when the craft, production and functionality slip even a little, it creates some pretty bitter cracks. From a sample size of six, the equivalent of a full wave of dolls, only half (three) were without issues I considered truly detrimental, and even of those three, only Karla was a truly flawless and fully pleasant toy experience. Natasha had a poorly-beaded miniskirt, her body parts had color-matching inconsistencies, and her boots were lousy with shedding, gritty, tiny glitter, and the bottom of Shanelle's ponytail was gross with gel and looked fried, so I had to trim it. 

Of the half of this group with more disappointing issues, it scaled up in severity. Rexx McQueen was the least troubled. He came to me packaged with only one of two earbuds, and I had no choice but to cut off his hoodie's sleeves if I ever wanted him to put his puffy coat back on properly--there was just no reason to expect anyone could get his sleeves back through that coat. I was also disappointed with how poorly his wrists hinged compared to the girls. Zooey Electra was not mechanically flawed or missing pieces, but I rank her botched faceup above Rexx's issues for damaging her appearance on display, particularly since I know Zooey dolls can look lightyears better. Heather Grayson had the worst problem. Her lips were imperfect, but that was nothing next to her left hand peg being stuck immobile in her arm and snapping like a blade of grass when I attempted to pull her hand out. I know now that I should have tried to heat her hand up to loosen the peg, but I proved to myself that that was not the first course of action to come into anyone's head, so the fault lies with the manufacturing for allowing a copy of a doll to be produced that will break when you try to make it move as designed. There ought to be some kind of checks for that kind of thing, and Heather was very disheartening. Both Zooey and Heather had issues that warranted replacing them. (An epilogue post will discuss how that--thankfully very successfully--turned out.)

There was an incredibly fine line separating Rexx and Tasha from being placed in each other's halves of this quality divide, since both are dolls who display beautifully and work well despite multiple concerning aspects. Natasha is technically made more poorly due to the color matching issue on some body parts and the poor beading on her second outfit, but the second outfit doesn't appeal to me as much anyway and her body color matching could have been worse. In addition, the issue of her boots' glitter was pretty resolvable after the initial mess. For Rexx, his issues weren't things I felt capable of addressing with the copy I had, or called for steps I felt were extreme. I cannot conjure a second earbud to cover for his lacking one when packaged, and his wrist-hinge range being restricted is an issue that would be best solved by minutely trimming the ends of his arms, which is both risky and should never be required. I also think having to cut the sleeves off a top under a jacket should never be required, but MGA designed him with a hoodie that simply cannot feasibly be pushed through his coat sleeves once the coat comes off the first time. Because Natasha had issues I could fix without buying more things, or issues that didn't affect how I played with or displayed her, she narrowly passes the check, while Rexx narrowly fails it because he has issues another copy or aftermarket shopping would be needed to remedy, or issues that require modifications which could qualify as damaging the doll. 

Ultimately, my experience was a rollercoaster. With coats(!!!) (!!!!!!!!) and faces and colors like these, I can't say I'm done with Shadow High--even after half of both its waves so far. These dolls are pretty awesome experiences...but I have become a lot warier, and I'm not confident about branching out to using my own money on them...and I may also suck it up and start buying in-person. I just can't trust in the brand's quality control when ordering these dolls blindly. From the first six doll copies I received, I found there was a 50/50 chance a random doll would have a seriously disappointing issue, and even if it passed muster for me, it might still have irksome flaws. Those aren't nice odds. When Shadow High is on point, the dolls are a beautiful treat. When it slips, it can feel like your ice cream scoop has dropped on the floor. Right now, I think these dolls are just too high-risk to buy from online retail or with one's own spending money. If you can see the face and clothes of the doll copy you're buying, and you're not spending your regular cash on them, though, your risk factor and disappointment are likely to be drastically reduced. 

My opinion of these toys waxed and waned back and forth. I thought these were incredible achievements in craft, then I thought they were sloppy, then disapppointing, then lovely, then iffy. Ultimately, I concluded the obvious: these are mass-produced toys from a corporation. Regardless of the art design and craft planned for each doll, execution is going to be variable and messy and serious problems or oversights will occur. These aren't artisan pieces at the end of the day--they're just extremely ambitious mass-market factory products. 

At MGA's worst, I find their dolls vapid, grotesque and concerning. At their best, they're deluxe, trendy, and creative. Shadow High falls pretty firmly in the latter end for me. I'm hugely excited for whatever SH offers next, and I'll be shocked if I don't end up wanting at least three dolls of whatever wave 3 turns out to be. There's still other already-released dolls I may go for, too. 

But cave, dear emptor. 

Cave.