Give Her Her Flowers: Monster High G3 Signature Venus McFlytrap by Mattel

I've never seen such consistent praise and excitement for a G3 doll Monster High doll design before...and I cannot remotely dissent. She was a must-have the second I saw her first photos. Usually, character redesigns are contentious, but I've seen so much love for this one and I completely agree.

Venus McFlytrap is a mainstay secondary character in MH, having appeared in all three generations of the brand. 

Mattel stock photo of signature G1 Venus.

I think of her as sharing a kind of space with Abbey Bominable, as they're in comparable places of prominence, and both have been in all three generations. She's an eco-punk plant monster based on the classic pseudo-flytrap Audrey II mold, and her style signature had always been half-shaved hair.

Plant monsters like Venus have been iconic probably since Roger Corman's B-movie The Little Shop of Horrors, which was the basis for the more well-known musical stage show Little Shop of Horrors and the show's film adaptation by Frank Oz. Monster carnivorous plants have appeared a lot in spooky cartoon imagery as well. Carnivorous plants which inspired the monsters have always carried morbid fascination as well, framed as weird and frightening because they're so unusual in appearance and feel paradoxical in function. Plants are typically considered the bottom of the food chain, so a plant that eats something else feels bizarre and can spark ludicrous fears of being the prey yourself.

I struggled to connect with Venus dolls previously. For one, I was continually disappointed with her fashion. Her dolls tended to strike me as having uncohesive, samey, or unexciting clothing, and sometimes her clothing designs seemed misguided, like invoking greenhouse ironwork patterns which then gave her clothes a poorly-suited antique vibe as a result. I'd still be interested in a RESTYLE ICONS project with G1 Venus, but as-sold, she didn't ever fully click for me. 

The other things that bugged me were her hair and level of detail. Most editions of G1 Venus had hair made from a fiber called kanekalon (which doesn't see use anymore), and that fiber was super glossy and sleek, but also had zero cling to itself, leaving it feeling very thin, and could get staticky. They actually leveraged this for the Reanimation Chamber Frankie playset in  Freaky Fusion, featuring a machine that generated static electricity to levitate Frankie's kanekalon hair and simulate the energy entering her body and bringing her back to life! I think boiling also did something funny to kanekalon hair and made it even more airy and voluminous in a way it wasn't meant to be. Mattel now seems to be using polypropylene where they used kanekalon before, as seen with accounts from people who have already gotten their hands on Creeproduction Spectra. Certainly not a beautiful tradeoff, but I guess you have to use something problematic to replicate something problematic, and poly does take to the same kind of colors and can closely mimic the glossy straight texture. Venus also had very minimal monster detail. Her ears were leafy, her hands had an unreadable texture on the backs, and nothing else. They compensated for this with vinyl vine wraps for her limbs, but like G1 Cleo, it was the costume acting as monster detail when it should have been on the body. 

My ideal G1 Venus for restyling would probably be her Fangtastic Fitness doll, as it visibly has wavy saran hair, as well as a successful, Venus-appropriate invocation of greenhouse patterns with the lattice top that doesn't feel too old-timey. The only Venus I owned in my original collection was her Music Festival doll, who was one of my earliest acquisitions. She was alright.

At the end of her G1/G2 career, my absolute favorite thing about Venus was her name--it's an obvious pun, but I just really like the name Venus on its own merits.

G3 Venus immediately struck me...and a large chunk of the doll community, with an adoration rarely seen.  I was in love with her visual texture and deeply saturated colors, and immediately, consensus was that she was incredible. She's strikingly different from G1 Venus without her color palette or fashion aesthetic really being all that altered, and in many ways, she's a much more engaging and rich visual design.

Official artwork of G3 Venus.

G3 Venus's most significant design difference is that she has shifted to being portrayed as a Black character. I think this is welcome, and it's done very well. You could say that G1 MH had minimal Black representation in terms of the proportion of the overall cast--it was just the recurring Wolf family and Honey Swamp who were clearly Black or Black-coded, though the Wolfs had plenty of dolls. Making Venus a Black character might help change the balance for G3 so individual Black characters have a greater presence, and the translations are graceful and beautiful. 

I haven't been this excited to grab a G3 release. I was delighted to find her in Target and bought the best copy I saw. 

Already completely in love.

Venus was always known for her distinctive half-shaved head, which is cleverly translated to this hair type as a microbraided style with sculpted cornrows on the right half to keep the effect of the hair volume all on her left. 

The head sculpt is similar to the side-shave sculpt some G3 Frankies have on their left.

The hair is gorgeous, the cornrow head sculpt meshes seamlessly with it, and the texture and style are nice representation on a doll. Since they've understandably become a pretty regular presence in doll lines, I was wondering when microbraids would debut in MH-- G3 sig Venus is the very first doll in all of the brand to have them. I really love that the braids are wavy, too, giving her hair more volume, drama, and impact. Something about it feels more attractively plantlike, too, with hair that comes closer to beautiful plant fibers and vines in appearance than G1/G2 Venus's loose straight hair. I've seen the braids boiled to lose their wave and mimic the G1 hair silhouette, and that looks great, too. That's not happening on this copy, but even the change from loose hair to braids sells the botanical hair concept better under the same silhouette. 

The hair itself feels very lightweight and the braids don't appear to be sealed at the ends, but I'm not super worried they'll fray. Fingers crossed. While some of her braids are green, all of her cornrows are painted pink. 

Maybe it's a little callous to say, but Venus's hair promises to be welcomely easy. It's basically no-maintenance since it's not going to mat in storage and require care when she comes back out, and you only need to (and are only able to) comb her braids loosely with your fingers to sort it out. This hairstyle isn't made for precision, but volume and drama, and it shouldn't ever change from this state. Doll microbraids are more similar to rag doll yarn hair in that regard, and it's nice to have dolls from time to time that have hair that doesn't need much fussing or regular salon sessions to look their best. I can understand why this kind of braiding is done for hair types like this--it's pretty, but it's also very orderly!

Venus also has painted pink baby hairs all around her forehead.

In her hair, Venus has a bright lime piece shaped like flytraps and flowers. It's just clipped onto a small section in front. Her hair can tangle in it, but it's less aggravating to work out the braids and tidy them than it would be for loose fibers. 

This reminds me of some Gloom and Bloom pieces--naturally, G1 Venus was in that line.

Venus's skin is appropriately a deeper green color to go with her change in racial coding, and is a body color we haven't seen from Monster High before. It's definitely the most saturated green skintone in the brand, fitting with the fact that none of the previous green colors (G1-G2 Frankie/Scarah/G3 Ghoulia, G1-G2 Venus, CAM Gorgon, CAM Witch/Casta, Iris, Amanita, G3 Deuce, Frankenstein's Monster) were implicitly coded as dark-skinned. 

Her face has also shifted, with a broader nose and less dramatic eyes, but her painted-on two-directional flytrap fangs are the same. Her eyes are a great hazel brown, which works perfectly and makes more sense than G1/G2's blue, and have reflections shaped like branches and what might be leaves or seeds. Venus has two lower lashes in black, but the rest of the lash pattern is done in solid pink makeup evocative of the view inside a flytrap's "mouth". 

An open Venus flytrap (photo taken from the Wikipedia page).

I was delighted to see the yellow in the corners of her eye makeup. G2 Electrified Venus was really cooking something by debuting a prominent yellow focus for her, and I hope it doesn't remain a one-off, especially since it goes great with the G3 palette.

I'm in love with how saturated G3 Venus's colors are. All of the greens and pinks, with purple, red and yellow, are just a feast for the eyes. She feels rich and lush and just like the more unconventionally stunning flora that carnivorous plants are.  The green in her hair is also more vivid with its dark lime color--G1 Venus favored an olive tone, with Fangtastic Fitness having pale green, and G2 Venus used a darker medium green. It seems like the green braids deliberately match her skin to make her hair and skin blend a little and evoke her plant basis more. Fangtastic Fitness in G1 previously did that with her hair's green matching her skin's green for the first and only time in her G1/G2 dolls. 

I think Venus's only doll with all-pink hair was my least favorite design of her releases--her G1 Fierce Rockers edition, which was saran-rooted and had two different shades of pink from her typical G1 color--the accent color was a pale lighter tone.

Venus retains her classic leafy ears, though the G3 caricaturing makes them more prominent and visible. 

Her earrings are symmetrical silver hoops that look like flowers. The earring pin goes in the front and the ring slots around the back of the ear to create the illusion of a whole hoop.

Around her neck, Venus has a silver floral choker that matches her earrings.

Venus's outfit fits her eco-punk theme and feels like a great translation for G3 despite only the boots containing a direct parallel to G1 sig. Her outfit is a black graphic tank over a long-sleeved lime shirt printed with purple and magenta vines, and a pair of faux-denim shorts with a vine and peace-sign pattern. 

"NATURE" is a little on-the-nose for a graphic on the tank, but Venus's whole eco-theme is generally reflective of a bygone push of that kind of messaging in kids' media from the nineties and aughts, and the ecological reform we so desperately need is also pretty directly against Mattel's self-interests, so it's not gonna be that deep. 

I'm fascinated by her shirt. It's also super saturated and pleasing to my eye, and while the material is a jersey-esque mesh, I feel like it can also be read as a woolen knit, and that tracks really well for me with this outfit somehow. 

Here's the outfit without the tank. 

And here's the outfit without the shirt.

Both of these work, but I prefer the whole thing. 

Venus has a silver belt in line with her jewelry, and her shorts have real pockets!

Venus's legs feature asymmetrical punk socks--one mesh, one with stacked hole cuts in it, and tallish boots. The boots directly reference the G1 sig boots with the toothy mouths sculpted in the toes, and the viny wraps around them allude to the G1 limb wraps. Venus previously wore fabric with hole cuts in it on her Coffin Bean G1 doll. Venus's shredded clothing has always fit her punk theme, but also matches her status as a toothy monster, as if her jaws tear things apart. Real Venus flytraps operate more on snapping shut to hold their prey and digest them, but they look so much like toothy mouths that the cartoon plant monsters often play into the threat of teeth.

The boots are sculpted to look like fabric with spiraling lace gaps, but they fade from magenta to a concrete-grey color and angular toes with speckles and cracks as if her shoes are planters she's rooted into! Absolutely brilliant. This is why Monster High rocks.

Do you think there's soil in her shoes?

Ombre'd tall boots have emerged as a G3 design cliche for some reason and it's usually pretty ugly, but I think the effect is fine on Venus. There's maybe a bit of a graffiti connotation from the design, and the colors work out well. 

The vine wraps can come off the boots, but they're flexible enough that it's not necessary for taking them off and putting them on. The flowers have small pins that can push into the shoe holes to secure them a little better, but it's not a super tight connection and they pop out easily. The wraps aren't gonna fall off (because they're...wrapped), but they can get misaligned and scrunched down easily.

The socks are also just leg-warmers, not full pieces. Booo. 

I did appreciate that there was elastic in the cut sock to keep it better in place on her leg.

Leaked prototype images of Venus indicated she was planned to come with a jacket, which would have been good in theory, but I'm glad the jacket shown was scrapped because it felt wrong for me. It was a solid pink vinyl fabric piece with a bit of edgy shaping, and not only did I find it plain and too much pink (and a bit cliché for G3 dolls), I also firmly don't want Venus to be dressed in plasticky fabrics since that strikes me as antithetical to her character. If she has future dolls with vinyl fabric pieces, I'll almost certainly seek to trade them out. Given the choice between "the prototype jacket which felt too pink and artificial for an edgy eco-punk", or "no jacket at all", I'll take "adding my own jacket options" instead. 

Actually, the whole prototype photo design feels a little less punchy and more executive-mandated than the final product. It seems like maybe the designers took a second pass at Venus to make her more true to her original spirit and that of the MH brand itself--they made changes to make her less softened and "rebooted"! That's so so heartening to me. Maybe MH is shifting back even more toward its old tone because Mattel is seeing people embracing that so fiercely, or even because MGA has decided to enter a guaranteed flop era by taking up the role of the soft, sweet company now! When MGA goes soft, Mattel is primed to pick up an easy win by going hard...and that's all entirely to my benefit as a Monster High fanatic! Venus might well have been rescued by a shift in brand approach...and could be the bellwether for future edgy characters to come back right!

Venus's body adds some of the vine sculpting that debuted on her G2 dolls, with vines appearing on her legs. G1 Honey Swamp, a gator-like swamp monster, absolutely put G1 Venus to shame with her curling body vines and made Venus look even more unjustly vanilla than she already did. G2 Venus added body vines which were not nearly as extensive as Honey's. G3 Venus's detail is on par with the style of Honey's vine sculpting, but it's exclusively relegated to her legs. It's almost a shame her awesome outfit is designed to cover most of it!

Her feet also have a cabbagey texture.

I almost wonder if Honey stands a chance of a G3 revival, because now, Venus is the monster with body vines and Black hair, and kind of co-opts Honey's niche. I've already felt like Jackson Jekyll/Holt Hyde's traits have been cannibalized for other characters in G3, so maybe Venus might edge Honey out of business. I hope not, though. Why not have both around and make Honey more distinct...and anything other than a Southern belle, because seriously? That was an outdated and dodgy archetype that didn't make much sense to use, and it was really weird (at the least) to make that the concept for a Black character in particular.

We don't need to render older characters ineligible for revival or cut them from the cast when shuffling traits around. Omitting characters was a major factor that turned people off from G2!

Venus's hands are just the standard claw shape and lack the indistinct texture they had before. I don't miss it because I could never tell what it was depicting. Was it meant to be leafy? Bark-like? There were so many clearer ways they could have added texture to her hands, and while I think Venus should have had vines here this time, it's okay.

While Mattel definitely seems spooked about going all-out and giving G3 dolls extensive body texture, and has provided little reason for me to hope for characters with entirely bespoke texture sculpts, I think there's a good rationale for Venus having only leg texture--she's a plant, and the texture being only on her legs likens to the proportion of stems and leaves on the lower parts of the plant while the taller parts are flowers and fewer leaves. It also suggests roots into the ground, like Venus could plant herself in the dirt at any time, and works perfectly with her garden-planter boot design. 

What surprised me from first owner reports was that Venus has a taller sculpt, matching the height of G3 Frankie and adding a second femme character to that height point. It works well for a plant monster!

...okay, what the hell is going on with Chewlian?

Is this the tradeoff? A flawless, gorgeous G3 transformation has to get a visually nonsensical pet update? Venus and her pet look like they're from two different toy brands! What's even the visual here? It's like a mammalian animal (cat or fox maybe?) inside the mouth of  a typical plant monster? Really? Is that how you cutesify a man-eating plant? This is more disturbing than a plant with pearly white chompers and a mohawk!

Also, this could be considered a retcon within G3 continuity! G1 Chewlian clearly appeared in the artwork on Skulltimate Secrets Series 1 Clawdeen's locker door.

I swear the Clawdeen project is coming soon.

Well, nonsensical and overly-cutesy look aside, Chewlian is actually one of the better G3 pets. For one, he's a complete "animal" that can come out of the pot!

He just pops onto that pin in the middle. It's a great feature, on par with Sir Hoots a Lot having removable glasses. Chewlian's also sculpted really well, with leafy texture and a flytrap on his tail!

I don't have doll-scale G1 Chewlian, but I do have his larger Secret Creepers Critters toy, and I think he pairs much better with Venus. 

It was so hard to get her to hold him!

The Secret Creepers toys all depicted MH pets and had ways of hiding messages between the owner and friends. The Critters subline of the Secret Creepers were all purely mechanical, not electronic. And Chewlian was the only Secret Creeper whose function was to destroy messages--feeding a note slip into his mouth and turning a leaf on the side makes his mouth chomp as the paper is shredded into three parts and dumped into the chamber inside his pot! A plant-monster paper shredder remains one of the most brilliant novelty concepts I've seen.

Turning the leaf jumps his mouth up and down and shreds a paper. 

Hey, Mattel. Remember that this rad-ass scary plant creature was a girls' toy. You can do this kind of thing today!

Venus's first accessory is her water bottle. 

Her phone is medium green and has some awesome vine and tooth detail. 

It's subtle and hard to read, but Venus's personal Skullette seen in her app icon has been edited for the G3 character to match her new hair type, now being depicted in braids. This was the G1 version of the graphic, with hair styled as a loose mohawk.

The Skullette is also patterned like the globe.

I'm glad they made the tweak to suit the new depiction. It's such a tiny touch on this doll, but it's valuable.

Look at the back of that phone!

Is MH getting back to hardcore in places?

Venus has a punk-decorated "BOOTANY" planner.

For Venus, hair care is plant care, so she has a hair product in a garden spray bottle to hydrate her locks! Venus herself appears in the graphic. 

Such a fun piece. 

To eat, Venus has a little snack bar. I find this a little inauthentic, because surely a ghoul like her would eschew plastic-packaged foods? A paper bag of sunflower seeds would have been perfect, but this snack bar allowed Mattel to reuse a sculpt...which is ironically less wasteful!

Venus has a pair of viny pink half-moon sunglasses. They really bring out the neon pink in her eyeshadow!

The arms here have very deep hooks to secure themselves around her large ears.

Venus has an unusual backpack, which is translucent blue and shaped like a basket or tray that goes on her back. It definitely works for her, though, and you can actually neatly pack every one of her handheld accessories into it!

Hard to tell, but her phone's in here too!

Chewlian can also fit well as the only cargo.

Alright, time for some first portraits! 

Venus looked really good under a green filter.

Pink created a very different effect. 

She also looked good under yellow lighting.

And my room lighting and some slight edits allowed me to get an incredibly clean, poppy portrait of her against the neon yellow paper backdrop I bought for Neonlicious. This portrait looks so cheery and tidy!

To further explore yellow, I tried popping her in a Rainbow High Sunny Madison jacket, left over from her Fantastic Fashion doll. It's not totally Venus's style, but the color is phenomenal on her.

More pink is not the answer for this ghoul!

I ordered out for a couple of other jacket options I thought I could give her because I wasn't done with her wardrobe. It's very typical of me--holding up a project's publication speed because I get new ideas!

Meanwhile...

I don't know why G3 Chewlian is two colors and two parts, but that gave me hope I could fix him, and that was what I did next. I wiggled a potter's needle around his seams to break the glue and pulled him apart. This is how he's assembled.

This structure basically handed me my vision of taking the face out. I used an X-Acto blade and cut around to keep the outer teeth of the pod and remove the rest, and the cute animal face was gone. I glued him back together.

Immediately, it's much more hardcore and cute in the weird atypical way G1 pets were. I then painted the mouth in black and added a pair of eyes, as if they're dangling on stalks in the throat. I was on board with the "face inside the mouth" idea, just not at all how it was done. I also painted the teeth on the tail-flytrap white. I feel like that's a reasonable paint application to expect for this sculpt.

I thought this was fun, but I wondered if the eyes were still too cutesy and taking away from the adorably horrid image of the giant mouth for a head on a kitty body. I decided "yes" and chose to paint over them and have his head just be a gaping black mouth. That's more Monster High to me personally, and much more Venus. 

I made this decision to go eyeless fairly late, so I did edit some of the following art photos I took to black them out, because they were taken with the first phase of his makeover and it wouldn't have been worth it at all to re-stage the pictures.

I think it also makes for a great horror gag--he looks like an ordinary (well, "ordinary") monster flytrap at first...and then he startles the everloving hell out of you by jumping out of his pot and scampering away like a cat! I like that you wouldn't expect this plant to be built like an animal now, and this ghoulish mouth-head on top of the kitty body makes the removable-pot aspect even better--Chewlian disguises as something less mobile!

I've disdained the G3 pet aesthetic, but Chewlian was the only one so...well, chewed up by it that I decided to modify. Then again, he's also the only one whose construction offered a good opportunity for modification to remove him from the G3 pet art style, so I took it. Venus is too good to have a pet done like that, and Chewlian was too cool in all other aspects to suffer that sweetie animal face. Now I wish the other G3 pets could be more significantly transformed by DIY. Maybe I need to look again at Dustin.

While at the craft store, I saw a big leafy bud decor item that instantly gave me visions of Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus! 

Well, this is also a Venus! I had to get the fake flower and then figure out how to make the concept happen! Here's a quick test just to see if she could pose right. 

I then set up a photo. I have a mudroom bench with coat hooks and a rack, and the back of the bench is a black iron lattice that was perfect for a garden backdrop. (It also meant I had something easy to lean Venus up against so she'd stand. Absolutely no chance she'd manage barefoot in this plant piece.) I magneted my fancy green paper backdrop behind the lattice and added fake flowers, a wreath with branches to fill the upper right, pipe cleaner vines, and used a platform with checkered placemats over it for a floor. Venus is posing nude like the goddess, and I brought original TT&T character Dendrea Barker in as her attendant with some fabric to robe her in. She was my only other 11-inch plant ghoul, and her costume fits a classical vibe. I didn't have another appropriate character to place the upper right corner, nor did I even want to think about rigging a doll in midair, so I just used the fake flowers to fill that space. I considered doing something with Treesa, but she'd be very hard to compose in the frame in a way that worked into the original painting's composition, and I had just recently put her into storage, so I wasn't keen to haul her back out and stage her hair and such.

Here's the photo. The green plant already looks like it's been painted!

And edited  with a filter to look more paintlike. This is not an ideal result, since none of the image editing effects I found on my phone or graphics program were quite getting me where I wanted it, so I'm sharing the raw photo too because both have their merits. This was the best painting effect I could manage with what I had. 

Plantro Botanelli, The Birth of Venus McFlytrap.

I kept some of the setup for a few more photos--here's a horror photo with Venus in a pot holding Chewlian in a pot (yes, the big pot was also bought in the craft store for this doll)! I added the lattice shadows in post to make it seem like another part of the implied greenhouse is casting shadows over the picture.

Unfortunately, the pot isn't tall or wide enough to pose her relaxing with her elbows on the rim. Venus being a tall ghoul has its limitations.

I also tried another red portrait.

And I took the cover photo in the pot with one of the flowers. I liked the red/green contrast here, and I thought the imagery made for a good review title.

I criticized G1 Venus for ornate/antique aspects which I found poorly-matched to her look, but maybe I was wrong there. G3 Venus can absolutely crush both a classical and a pop aesthetic in these photos, easily. But also, G3 Venus is incredible.

Since it's entirely the wrong season to take natural botanical photos with Venus in them, I'm glad I had enough fake floral pieces to get great photos of her regardless.

While I liked the yellow jacket I already tried on Venus, and will probably keep it in her repertoire, I needed a proper coat for her. There were two things I wanted to try. One of the people I follow on Instagram had put Venus in Rainbow High Carmen Major's purple and magenta jacket, which looked so perfect on Venus with its colors and size that I knew I had to try that myself. I couldn't track down the original photo I saw in order to make a proper attribution, so if you read this and are that person who dressed Venus in that piece, let me know and I will thank you for your style insight! I also thought Vanessa Tempo's jacket from the same Rainbow High line was objectively a great thematic and visual option for Venus, but I declined to get it because the rebellious logos it's covered with are all Rainbow High-themed.

Carmen's jacket has some Rainbow High text and imagery that needs to be edited out--there's a black RH logo on the right of the jacket, and the back has fabric pieces that aren't right for a Venus jacket.

The face here isn't in the Rainbow High art style. 

I unstitched and removed all of the fabric patches from the back of the coat and painted black over the "RAINBOW" on the ribbon dangle on the front, as well as the RH logo to make the piece unbranded. Here's Venus wearing it!

Purple hasn't been a Venus staple color either, but I'm convinced by this jacket that it very well could be. I still prefer the idea of Venus using yellow because that's less conventionally femme than purple, but this looks great. I also think the fit of the coat is pretty good. It's large, but it's the kind of material and cut that feel like they're meant to be baggy. 

I also decided to get another Sunny coat--her hooded jacket from the Rainbow High Madison sisters two-pack. There really aren't any thin baggy punk-friendly doll jackets in yellow (or white that could be dyed yellow), so I crossed my fingers I could make the Sunny piece work. Ideally, the Vanessa piece in yellow with MH graphics would be my perfect coat for her, but that's not possible. 

Here's the Sunny coat. It's denim or denim-like with inner cuffs like sweater arms and a white fleecy hood. The front has ruffles I knew couldn't stay, and the back has an applique graphic that had to be dealt with.

First, I cut the ruffles down with scissors. I messed up a bit on one side and cut too much, but a hole in the coat is perfectly acceptable for Venus. 

Then, I took the piece down for work. I prepared a pot of water to boil, and first soaked the coat in the hot water with no dye so I could heat it up and rub off the applique on the back. After that was done, I added yellow dye to make the coat more saturated. The hood is synthetic fibers that didn't dye with the rest (I got an all-purpose yellow dye, not a synthetic one) but I hoped it would still work. 

Here's the coat after that.

Then, the fun part. I painted the coat thoroughly with tiny little graphics to turn it into a more punk illustrated jacket. I had so much fun coming up with designs, and I think I came up with something that felt more homemade, individual, personable, and authentic than the Vanessa Tempo coat because all of the designs look like they were added by Venus by hand, rather than being corporate logos she ironed on. I think it really fits the spirit of a conscious rebel who would use thrifted clothing to customize and be fully individual rather than decorating with someone else's icons. Here's the first look. 

And here she is wearing it. The fit is not as nice as the Carmen piece because the fabric is thicker and looks wider and bulkier on the MH frame, but it still works and I love the work that went in. 

On the front right, she has the word "GREEN" and the phrase "CHEW U UP".

On the front right, there's a pink drip effect, a purple vine, and a scene of a fly and two flytrap monsters above the word "FLYTRAP". I am astonished that Venus hasn't done fly iconography. 

She and DiDi probably wouldn't be friends. Maybe that's why they never did a fly monster officially!

The right arm has the word "ECO" and a green vine, a peace sign, and a heart.

The left arm has "PUNK" on the front to complete the message started on the other arm, and uses the pocket assemblies to play into how important her hair is to her, with the plant-hair phrase "GREAT ROOTS" and a drawing of Venus's locks.

The back features a polluted Earth and the phrase "DON'T FEED THE PLANTS (SO MUCH!)", riffing on a lyric from Little Shop of Horrors to play into a greenhouse-gases warning. Venus is calling for less C02. 

Mattel would never indict themselves with a message like this, but I can do it!

I'm just so delighted with how this piece turned out. It's rebellious but also feels cheerful, artistic, and homemade in an earnest, inspiring way. It's exactly the style of jacket she deserves. 

The coat can cinch under her belt if I want it looking a little tighter.

I just couldn't stop taking pictures of this ghoul! (In my defense, she couldn't stop looking great.)

Wow.

I've got a really exceptional amount of passion for this doll. She was so good, I worked extra hard on giving her more! Thing is, though, she was absolutely good enough not to touch at all.

G3 sig Venus is basically without flaw. There's no motivation to compare her to the original because this doll is thematically on par with G1, and yet also visually even better to me. I think Venus rode out the changes to G3 extremely gracefully, and her color palette is remarkably untouched. I think she's right in that sweet spot of being blessed with conceptually immutable colors (a Venus flytrap cannot be depicted with any other two shades; green is locked in, suck it Mattel execs) and having a precursor palette that's just pink and girly-friendly enough to be unaltered in G3. At the same time, there's totally things they could have done to soften Venus, and it really doesn't feel like they did, at all. She's vibrant, punk, and one of the most visually bold dolls G3 has put out. Her monster detail also feels pretty serious for G3's standard, and its limited placement at least feels logical and thematic enough for me to accept that she doesn't have more. This really feels like Monster High's glory days--not too soft and sweet and girly, just individual, confident, and amazing at what she's meant to be. Venus isn't pulling punches. She doesn't reek of market pressure, and there's reason to believe that was a deliberate choice after her first draft leaked!

Chewlian on the other hand...

...but hey, he's fixable. 

I wouldn't say no to trying out an Old-Skull nostalgia restyle once Venus has a couple of dolls under her belt that might expand her stock with more G1 clothing references--I definitely expect a later G3 Venus will be given a G1-style denim vest, for example, so I'll wait for that to happen. And if another Venus doesn't mimic the G1 hair silhouette, I'd definitely seek another copy of this one to try straightening the braids. But G3 signature Venus by herself is just a fantastic, fantastic character design...who happens to be even more excellent with the right coats. I can't wait to see where she goes next, but she could honestly have just this one doll for good and still end up with an outstanding G3 track record. She's got to be my number-one favorite signature doll from G3 so far. Nothing of Venus is meaningfully lost here, and quite a lot is gained. 

I pray we can get more characters with attitude retained like this. Venus gives me actual hope that a G3 Operetta would still be badass like her preceding G1 version! Tatted, scarred, red-and-black Operetta was essentially antithetical to G2's vibe, so she was probably an easy character to dismiss from the G2 roster. With that, we were spared the sight of her being mangled out of recognition into the G2 mold. I was still nervous she'd be unable to remain intact in G3, but the brand does seem to be scraping back its toughness and drama, and Venus is an excellent sign that less gentle characters might have gotten the space back to be resurrected as themselves. If Mattel can revise a softer prototype to make the final product more tough and G1-like, then more great things are possible. G3 sig Venus feels like a potential turning point, and I hope in hindsight that we'll have lots of credit to give her for evolving the G3 brand into its glory days. Please go out and get this doll if you're interested! Mattel needs to see that we want this kind of material!

I just had a wonderful time here. My only big complaint might be that I wish she released sooner because I would have had an even better dreary COVID Christmas with her in the gift-to-self pile!

I've been effusive, and that matches my overwhelmingly positive feelings about this doll about as well as I can express, but let me try to make it simpler.

In one sentence?

If Venus is the flytrap, I'm 100% the fly.