Queens of Hearts: Looking Into Ever After High

Not long ago, a reader asked for more of my thoughts on Ever After High, which I thought was a great idea. I did take a different direction than I had planned, though, owing to the urge to be seasonal this first half of February.

I had replied to the comment saying there were some characters I could work with. Maddie Hatter was my favorite character in the story, Alistair Wonderland felt like a great candidate for restyling, and I really liked Apple White's aesthetic. However, someone else popped up in my mind as an ultimate priority, not only because it's Valentine time, but because she's the doll I coveted most in the brand: signature Lizzie Hearts, the daughter of Wonderland's tyrannical playing-card queen. And then I looked at EAH C.A. Cupids since we're on this theme and decided to commit to her Thronecoming doll, too. I thought it was only right to have an EAH edition of her after getting my first big grail, her Monster High debut, and I thought Thronecoming looked spectacular and capable of dark Valentine drama with a lip repaint.

Maddie and Apple might be here another time, and Alistair requires a bit more frivolous spending money for a future date if I want to work with him, but Lizzie and Cupid felt worth the splurge for now since I decided to make this a timely seasonal post. I got a new-in-box version of each because it was crucial to me that I get them complete with their factory hairstyles. The stands are a strong bonus, too.

So, a bit of history. 

Just after halfway into Monster High G1, Mattel decided to cast its net wider by dropping a sister series, Ever After High, paired with a TV series on Netflix (a narrative model that would be echoed by G3 MH's Nickelodeon cartoon). EAH followed the same high-school-alternate-universe narrative concept as Monster High, but focused on the children of famous fantasy/fairy-tale characters rather than horror archetypes. As such, EAH was also obviously the sweeter, "safer" brand on the shelves, though it was certainly pretty spectacular. While the dolls had soft and perhaps bland identical face sculpts (later dolls finally diversified that) and very very rarely had sculpted fantasy features on their bodies, the costumes were elaborate, emphasizing an ornate and antique flourish with ruffles, layered fabric assemblies, and aged color-wash paint jobs to make everything feel old-fashioned and fairly baroque to suit the classical fairy-tale theme. It was "princess", but clearly not Disney, and felt like a lavishly-illustrated fairy-tale picture book and rightfully felt based on the original stories first and foremost. EAH, in its very best dolls, also occupied a niche familiar to (OG) Rainbow High collectors of feeling like collector-edition dolls released at an ordinary retail price point, because the dolls felt refined, extravagant, and classy in ways Mattel fare, let's be honest, pretty rarely does. The production level of EAH felt pretty outstanding for Mattel standards. This did not last very long, with dolls getting lower-detail rereleases and the overall brand aesthetic dropping most, if not all of its antique splendor. 

Also, small note--the EAH webisodes and Netflix series were both the same 2D animated style. No 3D-animated CGI movies for this brand, which was probably correct because that really saved the dignity of the story and the 2D animation was very appealing. That G1 MH CGI was janky. 

The tone of EAH was just as goofy and full of Flintstones-esque slang as MH, but the story had significantly greater depth and was serialized with strong narrative continuity through its main story tension--Ever After High as a school is designed to see the new generation of fairy tales follow in their parents' footsteps and agree to uphold their legacy, with the implication that the parents aren't even the originals...and about half of the student body doesn't want to do this, despite the widespread belief that not adhering to the stories creates an existential supernatural threat (EAH was way ahead of the incredible Spider-Verse saga!) 

The main split is between Apple White, daughter of Snow White, who wants to fulfill her fairy tale, and the daughter of the Evil Queen, Raven Queen, who doesn't want to be a villain and doesn't really have it out for Apple at all. (Centering on Snow White is one of the touches that does feel Disney-influenced, since that was their first big movie.) Raven thus sparks a "Rebel" faction of students who agree they should write their own stories, while Apple is the face of the "Royals" who want to follow tradition or believe they should. The story seems to be grasping at the conflicts teens will face regarding their upbringing and whether they want to follow their parents' values or whether they're breaking away, and the Royal/Rebel conflict is essentially a conservative/progressive struggle. 

The series never really got a proper narrative conclusion (and the worldbuilding logic of the whole narrative was flimsy), but the story had a strong concept and also did a good job of showing that nobody was wrong for choosing tradition or independence in a vacuum, and the mess primarily came from a lack of cooperation between two parties originally designated for one story. While that sounds really "both-sides" or wishy-washy, the story makes it clear it's wrong for the Royals to step over the Rebels' wishes and goals in life, and there were clear signs that the whole "existentially, deviations cannot be allowed" thing is misinformed and that the futures of the new generation of fairy tales are meant to diverge. The most dramatic part of the original run was probably in the Dragon Games special, where Apple finally falls under a Snow White sleeping enchantment. Her designated Prince, Daring Charming, kisses her...and it doesn't work. What does work to wake her? A kiss from Daring's Rebel sister Darling, a princess who decided to be the knight in shining armor instead of the damsel in distress. Not only did it throw its hand to the Rebel side of the story by showing Apple's story played out in a different way than was ordained, but people jumped onto the queer implications immediately. It's easy to see that moment as Mattel trying to include a sapphic relationship in the most explicit way they could...but the soft reboot basically left that all unresolved.  We did still see more hints that the new generation of students wasn't meant to follow their parents when Daring Charming turns out to be the next Beast (of "Beauty and the" fame). 

It was confirmed in Monster High's Boo York, Boo York that the two franchises shared a universe in an ending scene where alien Astranova contacts Raven and Apple on her phone (they appear in the EAH 2D animation style on her screen for that scene), but a proper crossover special and/or doll line never came to fruition due to the reboots of each. Only a novel based on the rebooted franchises, The Legend of Shadow High, came out. It had nothing to do with the MGA brand that started years later, though it's been floated that MGA choosing that brand name later was them being perpetually petty in response to that book.

Unlike Monster High, EAH didn't have a totally blatant full-reboot overhaul, but it had a big shift nonetheless. Around the same time as MH G2, EAH outfits got made simpler and started including molded-on clothing, faces got cheery grinning smiles, the lowered paint detail from the doll rereleases became the standard for all of them, and the narrative kind of dropped off, with one last special during this era, Epic Winter, not developing much on Dragon Games and not delivering the franchise crossover. I don't know why "safe" EAH was chosen for a rebrand beyond Mattel just generally getting cheaper, but the rebrand wasn't super popular. As fashion dolls generally collapsed between 2016 and 2018 to be overtaken by blind-bag toys, there probably wasn't much that could have saved them, anyway.

Disney also released the extremely similar Descendants media franchise which included a fashion doll line while EAH was running. Descendants features the high-school kids of the Disney characters and stars the daughter of an evil sorceress who wants to not be seen as evil hMmmMMmmmMMMMMNOTSUSPICIOUSATALL--

There is a level of credence that can be lent to Descendants not being a ripoff, and notions that EAH was made because Mattel lost the Disney license, or that Disney made Descendants because they saw EAH and were offended that their monopoly on fairy tales was being threatened, or offended that Mattel dared to make fairy-tale dolls after losing Disney, are all unprovable. It's genuinely possible the two concepts were developed independently...but it's hard for me to buy that there was nothing catty going on in the execution of Descendants. At the least, I think the brand was very consciously competing with EAH at the start, though the stories did diverge. 

I collected few EAH dolls back in the day. I've already showcased my passion for the Lewis Carroll Alice books, a core treasured work in my heart, so it should be no surprise that my EAH collecting focused on the Wonderlandians, getting a rerelease of Kitty Cheshire, joker card Courtly Jester (a wholly original character placed in the Wonderland sphere), and the Carnival Date pack of Alistair Wonderland and white rabbit Bunny Blanc. Alistair's hair wasn't good, but I still wish I had kept him since the signature version is not an easy acquisition.

My old Kitty (second edition) and Courtly, with an Alice book and LEGO minifigure. 
I still have the minifigure.

I never had her, but I always liked signature Lizzie best of the entire doll line, and she was my ultimate EAH grail...okay, she was my only one. I admit it, I coveted far more Monster High dolls.

I could see myself getting Courtly back. I'm surprised at myself for never seeking Maddie and Lizzie before, though. 

Since EAH was suggested as a topic and it was Valentine season, I allowed myself to go in for Lizzie, who had abruptly turned into a priority. It wasn't like there was much self-coercion required, though. 

I made sure to get the original release of Lizzie, not the cheaper reissue. I'm not having that. Here she is.

I don't know what is going on with the leg pose.

Lizzie is one of the Royals, which means she does want to be the Queen of Hearts, but she's a bit of a reformist Royal because she wants to take the role and transform it into something kinder and more just, using wiggle room in her mother's directives to reinterpret what the position means. She can still be a bit abrasive and tends to chop the tops off things per her mother's famous cry, but she's not really villainous...kind of like the original Queen, who's a cruel blowhard whose threats are always pardoned by her King. While she commits my biggest Wonderland pet peeve of blending together the tyrant antagonist playing-card Queen of Hearts from the first book and the stern teacher/governess chess-piece Red Queen from the second book, she looks darn good for it. No EAH character design surpassed her in my mind. 

The EAH boxes were themed like storybooks, with the sides looking like book spines and the windows showing the doll over a text backdrop with a bookmark (a removable document serving as the doll diary). The character names were printed on the backdrops, and the bookmarks displayed their allegiance. 

Here's the side, with a portrait of Lizzie, and her parentage written out. The EAH 2D art style was very pretty, and the cartoon matched the box art very closely. A woman's face half-covered in hair appears--this is the Ever After High logo, akin to Monster High's Skullette. It's pretty generic and doesn't have a clear significance. Unlike the Skullette in MH, this face never appeared in the EAH dolls' costumes. 

The back of the box has a lot of text outlining Lizzie and the Royal/Rebel conflict. There's a keyhole cutout in the back to alert buyers to the corner compartment in the unfolding box which hides the doll stand. This was a system used by Monster High boxes of the time until Great Scarrier Reef, which had no stands. EAH debuted after MH phased out the cardboard boxes with front windows and removable backdrop inserts, so the EAH boxes never had a comparable style to early MH.

Monster High boxes had a text graphic saying "Doll stand included" on the top of the corner compartment.

The phrase "Are you a Royal or a Rebel?" incites the audience to identify with a faction, a very common and often-successful tactic for building fandom engagement--provide multiple groups of personality or ideology that have different virtues and divide the audience and get them to talk about their choices. You see this with things like the Harry Potter school house gimmick, the Hunger Games Districts, the Divergent factions, etc. This kind of engagement division also sees itself happen a lot with love triangles-- are you Team Edward or Team Jacob? Team Gale or Team Peeta? EAH doesn't play with that angle too much, but any time you can split an audience on an issue with an appeal either way, you'll get people talking. Smart move. 

The rest of Lizzie's box has a full-body artwork and a paragraph about her as well as a profile, and illustrations of other characters to collect. I would soon discover that the profile can only be read on the box--it's not replicated in her bookmark, unlike how Monster High diaries have the profile printed in the back. 

Lizzie's box works by prying off the bubble window and unfolding the cardboard to reach the stand and the backs of the tie tags. 

Here's the front without the window.

The EAH stands are shaped like heart padlocks and have clear poles and frosted clear clips. These stands stick out further in front of the dolls than the MH stands, and have taller bases. With both, I think it would have been wiser to have some of the platform extending behind the pole to keep the stands from toppling backward.

The most common stand base/brush color seems to be gold, but these stands have also appeared in black, and I believe, silver. 

I got an off-brand ripoff of the EAH stand previously. This one replaces the logo with "Fairy Tales" and its pole and clip are the same color as the base. The knockoff pole is also a bit shorter and it wobbles noticeably in its socket.

The EAH brush is shaped like a key to pair with the lock base visually. The woman's head that is the symbol logo appears here.

Here's the bookmark out. It's tucked into the box with tabs you're instructed to cut off, and unfolds accordion-style. 

The "diary" story is printed on both sides, with the opposite side being printed in the opposite direction, making you invert the piece when you turn it. I like the design of the bookmarks a lot, visually and mechanically. There's something very Wonderlandish about reading a book's worth of story in a little bookmark, but this is the system for all of the EAH cast.

Lizzie's story features conversations in "Riddlish", which encodes conversation behind bizarre phrases, and discusses how the Wonderlandians are essentially refugees after the Evil Queen has sunk her hooks into the country and corrupted her mother's mind even further than usual. Of the students from Wonderland, Lizzie is the most homesick. She is counseled by the White Queen, who works at Ever After High, and Lizzie meets with her friends and devises the solution of creating a Wonderland garden around the magic well that links Wonderland to Ever After so she can enjoy a piece of home. 

The story for Lizzie doesn't overall feel much in-spirit with Carroll's Wonderland, and the EAH interpretation does fall a bit into the modern "it's all nonsense" and "conflations of the two books" problems I have with a lot of Alice interpretations. It also just plainly changes things--"Off with your head" was absolutely not being misinterpreted in the original books. It was a literal threat of execution meant sincerely by the Queen, and darker takes on Alice that show her threats carried out are at least honoring the genuine sentiment! In short, I firmly believe the Alice books satirize unfair standards for Victorian children as a way to give put-upon kids some sympathy, so the stories don't moralize to kids but do have allegory for adult behavior. Lewis Carroll's passion for children has come under scrutiny, but the "let kids be kids" undertones I see in the Alice books are a good argument for him being innocent. The nonsense of his books is also less esoteric or arcane and far more witty and based on subversion, wordplay, and dreamlike logic--nonsense is comedy most of the time in Alice, which requires some understanding from the audience. Never in the books is there any implication that the characters Alice meets are speaking in code or a fully different lexicon in the way EAH frames the nonsense speech. The one note Lizzie's bookmak featured which felt really authentic to me was the mention that because the Queen of Hearts is expected to be furious, the measured Lizzie has to take "non-anger management" classes to deal with her calmness! That's a perfectly Carrollian joke for the modern day. 

Here's the bare backdrop. The book-page text is just for the visual and isn't coherent, dipping in and out of English phrases related to the story and possible lorem-ipsum faux-Latin placeholder text, and had to have been randomly generated.

A rosebush being painted red, an iconic image from the book, is visible. I did enjoy the idea in the bookmark story of "paint the white roses red" being an established "Riddlish" proverb meaning "make what you want out of life". In the book, it's framed as a ridiculous task when the Queen's soldiers have gotten the wrong color of flower and are trying to fix it, but I can see it as an inspiring call to act for the change you want, too.

Here's Lizzie unboxed after ten years of waiting behind plastic.

The main thing that makes this doll absolutely stunning to me is her red, black, and gold color palette which is pristine in most of her dolls. While prints of the iconic classic playing cards often feature blue as well, there are prints that are just these three colors, and it certainly suits the antagonistic Queen as written by Carroll. Disney did similar with their design of the Queen of Hearts in the 1951 animated Alice in Wonderland. 

Official Disney art of the animated Queen of Hearts.

The incarnation Lizzie might be most similar to, though, is Iracebeth of Crims, the Red Queen of the very lamentable Tim Burton Alice duology. Those films are a huge insult to Alice in every aspect except the brilliant character designs, and like Lizzie, the Red Queen has red, black, and gold, with just a splash of blue around her eyes. Lizzie has blue irises, and Iracebeth has blue eyeshadow.

Portrait of Helena Bonham Carter as Iracebeth.

I love how the Burton Red Queen has a giant head to nod to the John Tenniel illustrations that are inseparable from Carroll's text (Tenniel was a political cartoonist first and foremost, and dipped into that for the adult characters in Alice), and I owned her Jakks Pacific Alice Through the Looking-Glass doll because that had a larger head and the design looked so nice. The films do give her the wrong name, and they spoil the fun visual of her head size by explaining it as lore in the second film, but the character looks great.

In addition to the color palette, both Iracebeth and Lizzie are influenced by Queen Elizabeth I--Iracebeth has her famous hair and half of her name, and Lizzie's name is almost certainly derived from the English Queen.

I've been featuring a lot of red dolls recently, and maybe I'm trying to work through something! I think I might be subconsciously trying to achieve catharsis against the current plague of pinkening that Mattel has enacted, including changing red colors to pink. I love red color palettes and I want to see them today, not just in the past! Have faith, Mattel!

Lizzie's hair is long and center-parted, and the colors are black with red streaks in the front. The texture looks quite curled at the bottom, and I will have to comb it wet to not create a horrible cloud of hair. 

On top, inside her crown, Lizzie has two sections of hair pulled up and rolled under in gelled tubes to create a heart-bun visual. This hair is not tied off on either section, and the factory result is less than impressive.

This hair shape might also contribute to Lizzie's influence from the Looking-Glass Red Queen, as the bun inside the crown, the ring of her collar, and the relatively vertical nature of the rest of her silhouette all make her resemble a chess piece. 

(Random theorizing here--perhaps the Red Queen is so often frustratingly conflated with the Queen of Hearts because there aren't any red queens in modern chess sets? Today's chess sets are black and white, so the phrase "Red Queen" doesn't register as a chess piece for modern readers, and it just recalls the Queen of Hearts instead.)

Readers of this blog should know I don't hold with gel, so I will endeavor to recreate the heart-bumps in a dry hairstyle. I'm sure I can do better than these clunky rolls. Having the hair correctly sectioned out by the factory was invaluable to me, though, so I needed her untouched.

Lizzie's crown clips around her hair buns and thus, her hairstyle is essentially mandated to fall in this kind of shape if you want the crown to stay on with the tags removed. It has a really beautiful aged antique gold paint wash, and I like that it feels like a serious proportional crown and not a dainty tiara.

The piece is a flexible vinyl, so it's easy to bend it open to fit around the hairstyle without disrupting it.

The Ever After High face sculpt used by the majority of characters (remember, the budget was not directed to the doll bodies) is very round, like, circular, and not like other brands. No Monster High face is this round. I went on record referring to the standard EAH sculpt previously as a "pancake face". I might not fully stand by that sentiment anymore (especially not next to L.O.L. O.M.G.!), but I do maintain the sentiment that the faces were samey to a detrimental degree as a result of the character design focus being so opposed to individual doll sculpts, and the reused face being so odd didn't help the problem. 

The face paint is similar to Monster High, though not going for modern edge. Ever After High dolls have a signature of little reflection dots painted on the lower lip, though later dolls seemed to drop this step in the faceup process. Late in the brand, the face sculpts shifted to be more smiley, using a  toothy grinning sculpt. Two characters grinned before (Kitty Cheshire, for whom it was essential, and Courtly Jester, who wore it well), but the late brand made everything cheerier. I thought the faces fit goofy Madeline Hatter and friendly Apple White, but it was probably overdone and I see the value in the more serious look, which was one of the things making the dolls feel more mature and luxurious. Lizzie's not one of the characters who feels too serious, though. This face suits a reserved and sometimes irritable royal heir perfectly.

Lizzie also has a huge red heart painted over her eye, marking her with her playing-card suit. It's really eye-catching and it feels like a clever way to anthropomorphize a playing card. Apparently, this is makeup and not natural coloring for her. Both eyes have red eyeshadow, but the eye in the heart shape doesn't have the taupe shadowing above it. Lizzie's eyes are bright blue and have heart-shaped reflections. Red or gold eyes would have been really fun, but EAH tried its darnedest to avoid or downplay inhuman design features wherever it could. Kitty and Bunny had human ears!!!

While I think Lizzie's color palette is stunning, it does feel like they pulled the slightest of punches in her face, as her lips and heart symbol aren't as bold and saturated as the rest of her reds. It hardly ruins her, but she might have had just a bit more punch. The face heart not being bolder does make it read more like a birthmark and Lizzie's actual pigmentation, though, and I think I prefer to view her that way.

Lizzie had a bit of metallic gold paint on her forehead, which wiped off with nail polish remover. 

The earrings are symmetrical, being pearl gold pieces with two heart pendants.

Lizzie has a clip-on vinyl collar, depicting a queenly ruff in an antique-washed burgundy. I love the impact this has on the outfit, contributing to the chess theme as well, and the ends of the ruffle folds are heart-shaped!

Lizzie's dress is a body-hugging sleeveless strapped piece with ruffles that start at the hips and go behind her back. The body of the dress is printed with hearts and crowns, and the top waist accents have a chessboard design that looks perfect.

Lizzie has the typical EAH hand sculpt cast in black, with separate wrist cuffs to resemble black heart lace, all to give her the visual of dainty hand gloves. On her right hand, over her third and fourth fingers, Lizzie also has a ring shaped like playing cards. This stays on really well, and never fell of while I was manipulating the doll during her later hair work.

Lizzie has sheer black tights printed with red hearts. These do not feel very tight around her knees, which is pretty unflattering.

Lizzie's shoes are wedges with cutout platforms and gold playing cards stacked up the front.

Her purse is an antique-washed 3D heart. This is a solid lump of vinyl with no opening. 

The EAH girl body sculpt is different from G1 Monster High's, but not necessarily more realistic. 

The EAH torso is thicker and more pear-shaped, with smaller, rounder breasts. The hands have a very gestural shape and a flow and sharpness to them that makes them feel more creepy to me than the default MH hand shape. The hands can be swapped between girls from the two brands' contemporaneous dolls for the most part. 

EAH is not on the whole shorter than MH--Lizzie is not the best representative for comparison because she is on a less common shorter body, which is shared with the other Wonderland girls. This choice for the native Wonderlandians was possibly done to bring their proportions closer to the big-headed political-cartoon art style of the defining John Tenniel illustrations of the Alice books, or else to suggest the constant size-shifting that takes place in Wonderland. Unlike G1 Monster High's shorter ghouls, though, this is not a separate body sculpt from the EAH standard--only the legs are changed in sculpt to lower the height. The same occurred for taller characters like Duchess Swan, who swaps the legs for a taller version. While MH's little-sister and big-sister body sculpts had the advantages of reflecting different stages of maturity, that could also be a limitation and it essentially tied height to age as a result.

The EAH heads can tip quite far to the side, and the EAH hip pieces are attached with simple ball-and-socket joints on static pegs, unlike the more complex (and more mobile) rotating hinge assemblies of the G1 MH hip joints. 

Later on, G2 Monster High's new body sculpts would reuse the Ever After High leg sculpts, and thus also had this simple ball joint in their hips. I'm willing to bet they used these legs for G2 because it would allow them to save money on shorter characters (Twyla. It was...only Twyla.) since EAH decided to make shorter characters by swapping the legs and not making a new torso sculpt. The EAH system allowed Mattel to only devise one G2 ghoul torso and just use two interchangeable leg sculpts they'd already designed for EAH. No taller EAH legs were used in Monster High G2, as none of the taller G1 characters appeared in the G2 style. This leg system is somewhat similar to how they did G3 Twyla as well, since her legs are shorter, but her torso is the same as the median size. The G3 dolls do have rotating hip hinges, though, and their bodies have more variation overall, so Twyla's shared torso sculpt doesn't feel quite as cost-motivated there. 

Clothes swapping is more possible between sister brands than you'd think, though it's easier to give EAH clothes to MH rather than vice-versa, since it's EAH that has the wider torsos. EAH clothes work pretty well on the median G3 Monster High torsos, too, as I confirmed with Bramble Berryblood!

G1 Monster High and Ever After High can share shoes--another design advantage for the G2 team, who could continue sculpting shoes off the G1 Monster High base despite the switch to EAH leg sculpts. It's possible that was even a motivating factor to making EAH feet the same shape to begin with.

Alright, now to fix Lizzie's hair. I boiled it down to reduce the curl and volume so her silhouette wouldn't be too triangular, and I took the hair rolls and washed them out. I then split each into three and twisted them as tight as possible with clips to keep them in shape, and boiled them. That would turn them really Elizabeth-frizzy when brushed out.

The twists after boiling.

Combing out the twists, I then took each half of the hair split and tied it to hair underneath, allowing me to push it forward and create two bouffants. This actually created the effect of each half being a heart shape tilted to the side--even better!

The way I tied the hair and the way Lizzie was rooted created a gap between her right long red streak and the black behind it, so I pulled a bit of black back out of her bun and added some paint to her scalp where flesh was showing through to disguise it. The right combing puts her hair together properly, too. 

I then put the crown on and boiled the long part of the hair and the tails of the hair bumps so they'd be less frizzy, and her hair felt nicely controlled and had a good shape without gel. I'm not concerned with the top hair looking super heart-like when the crown is on, so long as it looks pretty.

I hate that these hair elastics are so impermanent and age and fall apart, because hair work like this ought to have ties that last forever. There's just nothing that's so small and so reliably tight that I've found as an alternative.

I got some good portraits with her.

I recently got a wingless copy of the Gargoyle Boy Create-a-Monster, a huge get for me because I've wanted him for ages, and while I'm not working on my plans for him yet, he posed well as a statue for a decapitation-happy sovereign!

And I had to use some real cards, too. I got a pack that had no blue printing just for this purpose!

There's actually a surprising amount of similarities between my sister grail dolls.

Both have heart motifs, including in eye reflections and the shape of their hair and purse, and both had really bad factory hair-hearts that required a lot of hair modification. Both dolls also feature paint washes to age pieces, and have limited color palettes. 

We're not quite done with Lizzie yet, but before the rest, I got my Thronecoming Cupid in.

The Thronecoming line was one of the "giant-dress deluxe" EAH releases, following the Legacy Day line (the students dressing up for the ceremony where they're meant to sign themselves over to their fairy tale legacies) and preceding a few one-off releases for single characters. Cupid herself was one of those later one-offs, with a solo deluxe release called Heartstruck, essentially a more springtime-colored take on what Thronecoming did, with bigger wings and a smaller costume.

Mattel stock photo of Heartstruck Cupid. 

Thronecoming is a dance line featuring tinsel hair and masquerade masks on sticks as the main design traits that set the dolls apart from Legacy Day. I previously owned Thronecoming Blondie Lockes (daughter of Goldilocks) in my old collection since she was on sale at the time, and I let her hair down and regretted it because it didn't look as good anymore.

While still in the same design template as the signature dolls, the Thronecoming boxes are wider to let the huge costume silhouettes shine. 

Here's the spine. 

And the back. This time, a photograph of the doll is used for the large portrait, though the other characters in the line are illustrated in the bottom left. Cupid has found herself nominated on the Thronecoming court, and she's dressing for the occasion with Greek mythological influences--chiefly, Pegasus, who inspires her mask. 

While C.A. Cupid is neither a monster nor a fairy tale, she had a longer tenure at Ever After High, and found herself aligning with the Rebels. It suits her particularly well, since their icon is a winged heart, and the daughter of love aligning with freedom and progressivism is a very good choice. Cupid being a Royal about her job could have quite hateful connotations. All the same, though, Cupid is also kind of a Rebel by default as she has no story to follow as a non-fairy-tale.

The Thronecoming dolls use a saddle stand design so the skirts can flow free, and Cupid's stand base and brush are black.

The EAH saddle stand has a new base sculpt and a new pole with a large cradle. Unlike the Monster High saddle stand, which gripped the doll lightly, this stand clips hard onto the doll's undercarriage. The dolls aren't able to tip out of the stand at all, and it doesn't matter if the shoes are tall enough to brace against the base or not. It kind of forces the doll's angle and it feels like Cupid is a little tipped backward the way the stand clips on. Because the pole was a brittle formula of clear plastic, my Blondie's stand broke. I don't remember now if it was the cradle or the pole that broke, but I think it was from the stand and/or doll falling over, not the doll being pushed into the cradle. Whatever the case, I will endeavor to be careful so Cupid's stand won't break. The toy industry at large seems to have shifted to slightly cloudier but more sturdy clear plastics in recent years, likely out of recognition for the brittleness of the old formula.

A Monster High saddle stand. This one broke too, and has been glued back together.

Cupid's bookmark is significantly more brief in storytelling, as a whole side is taken by a photo of the four dolls with a checklist for the owner. That's okay, though, since Cupid had her debut EAH doll to give her a longer diary.

Here's Cupid unboxed. While Lizzie looked pretty pristine, Cupid has clear signs of aging, with all of the elastic bands decayed and her head and hair looking yellowed. For her particular dusty pink-and-bronze aesthetic, however, I don't find the aged coloring at all detrimental. 

Cupid's hairstyle is pretty simple, being a high ponytail with two loose tendrils in front beside a row of straight bangs across her forehead. The colors are pink and pale pink, with magenta tinsel mixed in. From afar, this can make it look like she has lavender streaks.

The circular EAH face is a far cry from the sharp Ghoulia face mold the character used in Monster High. Her eyes are basically the same, though, with blue irises and heart eye reflections (actually, a lot like Lizzie's!) and her lips still have a heart in the middle, though the rest of EAH Cupid's lips are painted in a lighter pink to make the style less harsh and doll-like. 

Monster High Cupid.

EAH Cupid's eyes read a touch greener than in MH, but the colors are all the same. Thronecoming Cupid also has sparkle and heart designs painted around her face to look more fancy...but it's a kinda childish type of fancy makeup. While MH Cupid's brows matched her hair, this one's are brown. 

Cupid's earrings are bronze ear cuffs shaped like feathered wings, which her bookmark story states are a gift from the god Hermes. They mimic his famous winged shoes. All of her costume pieces are drawn from her mythological relatives. 

These earrings feature something I've never seen on a doll before--to attach them securely, they have two pins and two holes that enter Cupid's head. 

I've seen two-hole earrings before with G3 Abbey Bominable, but her upper piercing only went through her ear, not inside her head.

These earrings are a bit tricky to push in with two pins.

Cupid's head is predisposed to tip backward, which, in addition to her stand tilting her back a bit, makes it hard for her to look forward or down. I don't plan to give her neck surgery at the moment, but if I really feel like it, I might sometime in the future. 

It's my personal theory that, being an adopted daughter of Eros and not from either world she lives in, C.A. Cupid's wings are just costume pieces, and Ever After High lends credence to that theory by featuring multiple Cupid designs, through which her wing shape blatantly changes on multiple occasions. While her debut EAH wings mirrored the silhouette of her bony MH ones, the Thronecoming wings are much larger and pointier, shaped like upturned wings with a heart cutout and laurel branches at the bottom. They still have a brown aging wash, but the paint and pearly plastic lend the wings the appearance of white marble or ivory!

These must be absolutely killing her back.

All of Cupid's wings have attached with a neck collar, but this is not actually definite evidence toward them being fake. In MH, Cupid debuted before the first dolls with wings that plugged into the back and her CGI model didn't have the collar element. In EAH, every winged character has the wings attached to a collar because Mattel almost never modified or debuted doll sculpts in the line. 

Cupid's dress is a fancy piece.

The bodice has black straps and a black section with upward ruffles, above a pink-and-gold section that goes to her waist. Around her waist are two ruffles above a huge parted skirt, which is two layers of glittery fabric. The dress actually has a leotard bottom sewn in that covers her up.

The piece is voluminous and grand, but the glitter, even after a rinse, shed everywhere. It's awful. Thronecoming Blondie was metallic and opulent with zero glitter whatsoever. I'm disappointed by the manufacturing here. 

Cupid wears two arm bracers of different sculpts. On her left, there are pink blooms, and the right lacks them.

Cupid's mask is bronze with some antique-washing and features Pegasus motifs. The piece is angled backward and measured well so it can be held to fall precisely over the doll's face. I always liked that the masks could be properly held regardless of position, and the engineering was good. The mask and handle are separate parts, but that didn't mean the handle was reused across the dolls--Cupid's has character-specific sculpting.

Cupid's shoes are tall sandals in bronze and pink, connected to the goddess Athena. They're a pretty rigid plastic that made it very difficult to pull them on and off. 

Cupid's purse is shaped like a pouch with a laurel strap inspired by Apollo. The purse is solid vinyl with no opening, like Lizzie's. I think that's more common in EAH than in MH. 

To modify the doll, I washed her hair first. I decided not to reshape it because there's nothing really wrong with the style she has. I then wiped her lip paint and redid her lips in black. I didn't think the puckered-heart look suited this design so I went for more of a classical Cupid's bow (yes that's a joke) that I thought worked better with the look, while having some of that friendly/harsh ambiguity. Love can be cruel, tragic and dangerous as much as uplifting and happy, and I enjoy stories that don't play Cupid as entirely nice. I also like playing EAH Cupid further into her MH black color. I used some black paint to lower her lids and made her pink eyeshadow more opaque.

I then went back and added two black dots under her eyes to make the makeup feel a touch more operatic and inscrutable, and took some portraits. I found one floral printed paper that so precisely matches her aesthetic, she blends into it, and another one of pink marble with gold veins that she fits really well.

She really does have such a stunning antique appearance, and is a perfect vintage-Valentine decoration. 

Last year, I got an antique doll head and repainted it to a creepy-cute Valentine style. I thought it made a good surreal, weird seat. 

But honestly, I like it even more for Thronecoming Cupid. Doll parts suit her antique slightly-ominous look really well. I also liked the subtlety of the doll head underneath her huge skirt.

The two Cupids really look different, even after my gloomier modifications to Thronecoming.

I like to think I found a comparable tone for Thronecoming under the new design lens, though. It'll forever be MH Cupid that's more precious to me, but Thronecoming is a nice showcase of how grand EAH could be, and she wears an air of menace really well.

Alright, back to Lizzie. I did that dangerous thing when I jump into a toy brand by perusing the product history, and I reminded myself of the Spring Unsprung playset book, Lizzie's second release, which was essentially a glorified carrying case for a unique budget Lizzie doll. This Lizzie looked like she had potential, and the case was so pretty that I thought it'd be the perfect storage to honor sig Lizzie in when not on display. This is not a mint complete set, but I didn't need it to be. 

The case is shaped like a book with a cutout window showing the doll on the front cover. 

The spine is nicely detailed. 

And the back is another printed cardboard panel, depicting the Wonderland well on the EAH grounds.

Here's the box open. The inner door pins the cardboard insert in, and features two of the card suits as dimensional pegs, but I don't think anything was designed to hang from them. Lizzie is on the opposite side, in a compartment with shelves to set up a dressing room. 

What I really love about this box is that Lizzie is held securely by a doll clip in the wall. 

I think something like this should have been done for the Skulltimate Secrets dolls, though the varying waist heights of G3 dolls would be tricky there, and indeed, a taller EAH doll wouldn't work in this box.

The left of the compartment has a small surface under a mirror, representing a vanity, and a red basket drawer underneath. 

In the upper left is a rotating panel, which flips inside the compartment to reveal a playing-card portrait of Spring Unsprung Lizzie. 

The shelves below show her signature purse and collar in illustrations, and the lowest shelf has plastic "cushions" to slide a child-size ring into. 

Here's the basket taken out and dumped, showing some of the accessories in the set--not all. 

When inverted, the basket is cut to serve as a chair for Lizzie to sit in at her vanity.

The accessories consist of a solid unopening purse, a playing-card stack with a handle, a child-size rose ring, a padlock EAH charm to hook on the outside of the door, and a foreign hand mirror which is not from this doll brand, let alone this set. This assortment is missing a piece that looked like a tissue box, and Lizzie herself is missing a gold arm bracer.

Here's the doll herself. Like all G1 MH/EAH playset dolls, she has the misfortune of being budget-tier alongside spectacular dolls in her line who released deluxe, but I still like her. 

Lizzie wears a gold headband with roses on it. The Spring Unsprung line is extravagantly floral, and there was no other flower to give to the Princess of Hearts but roses. 

Lizzie's hair is mostly black with red streaks at the temples that include some pinker streaks as well, possibly to bring in the rose theme further. The top front is tied off, and the hair is also held down by an elastic band over the head.

This head of hair is quite messy and tacky, and looks little like the artwork. That indicates that the front of Lizzie's hair should be puffed in a bouffant, and that half of the red streaks should be split into the puff.

Lizzie's face is similar to signature, but her eyeshadow is gold, her lips are dark red with no painted reflections, and her heart marking is noticeably but very subtly smaller.

While I like sig's hairstyle much more, I think Spring Unsprung has the better faceup. I like the dark lips, and the gold eyeshadow is a good choice for standing out against the heart marking. 

Spring Unsprung Lizzie's collar is the same dark red color as sig, though not antique-washed, and features rose shapes at the ends of the ruffle and shoulder beads going to the sides.

The dress has a pencil shape with gold and red roses printed over black, and a sweetheart neckline. The waist has a pinkish-red ruffle over it in a satiny fabric.

The dress had clear elastic straps that had decayed so much they pulled off easily. 

Lizzie's shoes match her collar and are rose-themed.

While she's a simple doll, I do really like her all accessorized.

The cards are great with sig Lizzie too--and much easier for her to hold than the human cards!

I then went to fix Unsprung's hair. I gave her a good goo treatment, and then retied her hair into the bouffant she's illustrated with, carefully splitting the red streaks to match the art as well. Her headband does not fit very securely behind the bouffant this way, but for static display, it still works. This is an improvement. 

Her overall look here reminds me more of the Tim Burton Knave of Hearts! 

And the two Lizzies now fixed up.

And here's sig Lizzie trying out the box. I was delighted to find I could pack her doll stand in by putting the base under her legs and the pole to her side while the clip rested on a shelf.

While I love the portrait cutout on the door, I wanted the doll to be protected from dust while in storage here, so I took a sheet of Dura-Lar plastic and cut a rectangle to glue over the gap on the inside of the door, giving it a more proper window.

I found myself surprisingly charmed by this playset, even incomplete. The box is one of the best modern storage cases Mattel has ever designed for a doll, and even though Unsprung Lizzie isn't going to live there, the set feels cohesive and perfect for her. I also found the Lizzie doll to be surprisingly appealing. I have no desire to restyle her or give her away. Despite being obviously less than she could have been, I really like her design. She's a good casual take on the doll.

But we're still not done. I wanted to investigate some fabulous pieces from her Way Too Wonderland doll. That doll line was the last big release fully untouched by the soft reboot, and like Monster High's Great Scarrier Reef, broadcasts the imminent kiddification with its very bright colors. I mean, look at this. What reason does Lizzie have to wear aqua and violet???

But I just couldn't ignore the playing-card fan collar and the crown holding a croquet flamingo! I also liked the black mesh tights and the black glove hands with the white ruff cuffs. There was definitely potential here.

I had bought this doll to test her crown and collar on sig Lizzie after repainting them--here's that part done. I added black to the flamingo to paint its beak and eyes, and dabbed black over the collar and crown before adding metallic gold. The pieces look immeasurably better with this antiqued paint!!!

At this stage of the project, I had decided sig Lizzie was too precious not to be displayed as she was, and I already shifted to thinking about the pieces for Spring Unsprung Lizzie instead, so I also dyed the skirt red to get rid of the magenta and thought about layering it over her dress. I also decided to antique the neckpiece the collar attaches with. 

After trying out some looks to build this on Unsprung Lizzie, I wasn't sold. I thought an Avea jacket copy I had would work if it was dyed black to finish the outfit, but I needed to wait for dye to arrive. And then I had I retied Unsprung Lizzie's hair and wondered if I was too attached to her, so I circled back to building the look on the WTW doll. I also dyed the top with red for this purpose too.

Then I dyed the Avea jacket black. My tests building the outfit made it clear that the jacket over the skirt was too much unbroken, similar red--plus, the jacket leaned too pink for Lizzie. Since the jacket's original plaid felt so right for this idea and Lizzie needed more going on with the jacket, I used metallic gold paint to create a grid pattern over the torso of the jacket, and painted a small red heart on the left breast. That made it feel like a wealthy designer piece and would hopefully provide a good color balance. 

However, the attempt to work with WTW Lizzie was abandoned after she took far too much time and acquired too many stains in the process of dyeing her purple hair red and also during the post-dye phase in soaking out excess dye and removing dye...the absolute final straw was when my Remove-Zit application seemed to have dissolved and smeared some of her faceup. I decided to put that Lizzie to rest because she was really careening off the cliff and I couldn't have that base doll finished before Valentine's Day at the rate things were going. Maybe I'll do something else with the doll, but not what I had intended, that's for sure. 

(I'll elaborate soonish on learning about how synthetics dye is a liar and doesn't hold up on soft vinyl for very long at all, but it appears to remain stable and viable for hair and clothing. I just wasn't as careful as I should have been for WTW Lizzie to work out and the time pressure for this seasonal post didn't help.)

So I circled back again to building the deluxe Lizzie on Spring Unsprung. I thought that would work, and she could just be a doll with two alternate wardrobes. 

Here's me trying the dyed dress on her. It's annoying that both the top and the skirt have to slide all the way up her body, necessitating that the top goes on first. 

I couldn't totally red-out the violet parts of her dress print, so this doll base is actually perfect. Her rose-tinged streaks of hair balance the subtle pink in her dress nicely to resolve things. 

And here's the doll entirely complete. This is the deluxe fancy edition Lizzie always deserved. Her Legacy Day look, or a standalone portrait of her future, whichever release format you want to fit this into. She needed this. This is her stepping into Queenhood.

The crown does fit on her, but it will very easily fall backward due to the shape of the hairdo not being ideal for a headband. 

I'm still mesmerized by the repaint!

I pierced one of her ears to give her the second Skullector Sally earring I had floating around. A cat's head works perfectly for the Queen of Hearts, given the Queen's incensed reaction to the Cheshire Cat appearing head-only at her court, and the way the Cat being only a head stymied the Queen's usual threat of decapitation. 

I didn't have a good second earring for her, and figured a mad queen didn't need symmetry. It actually offsets her facial marking this way!

Lizzie's collar can encircle the jacket collar decently well with a lot of fiddling, and I was able to pull all of her long hair to the front to really let the card fan shine. 

The jacket is long, but it folds down over the waist accent on the top pretty well. 

Because I had cut the modesty-skirt portion of the WTW skirt off, I had to replace it with another cover, and went with the red CAM boy shorts from the same Gargoyle doll. I think they make her look more sporting and correspond with her jacket to lend her a bit of an outdoorsy look for a game of twisted croquet. 

I don't recognize the shoes; they came with a copy of Cerise I ordered for parts but weren't hers. I couldn't see them in any listings I skimmed for "Monster High gold shoes" and "Ever After High gold shoes", so they might be foreign to either brand. They fit well, though. 

[UPDATE: A reader identified these as shoes from the Descendants line, whereupon I could track them down--they're from the Royal Wedding Evie doll from the Descendants 3 line.]

I'm really happy with this doll. I think the color palette works out well, and I like my choices with the way I customized and selected her clothing. I wish WTW Lizzie hadn't crumbled, but Unsprung feels like she was made for this restyle. I had to set up a properly Wonderlandiful tableau for her. I used several Alice-related props our family already accumulated and fashioned to throw an Alice tea party a couple of years ago, and I used the two copies of Alice I have now--my childhood edition on top, and The Annotated Alice between it and the Lizzie book box. 

The door and soldier were painted by me.

You would not believe how frustrated I got posing Lizzie to be stepping down like that. I had to give up and use the china flower ornament behind her as a prop. 

And then I put together something to serve as a royal portrait that would be painted upon her ascension to the throne. 

And here's my two Lizzies together with the LEGO Disney Queen of Hearts. The red heart is actually a treat stand that unfolds on both sides, and the middle spins up to be a third surface!

And lastly, something to mimic a playing card and a book page with Tenniel's illustrations. Exporting a filter in Inkscape that matches the screen view is a nightmare and a half, but I got something!

Unsprung Lizzie's hands and costume easily store away in the book box while she's in her full Queen mode...and who knows if she'll ever wear them again!

Lizzie was a character choice to celebrate Valentine's, but the Valentine season conversely made it very easy to celebrate Lizzie. Getting the heart props for photos with her would have been harder at another time of the year!

Well. That was a long post, and a needlessly long creative process, but we're here! I'm very happy with the selections I made. Signature Lizzie is a treasure in my collection, and the Spring Unsprung doll was surprisingly appealing, has a wonderful box, and made for a phenomenal deluxe fancy restyle for the character. Cupid probably won't stick out in my mind as something fantastic, but she does what she does pretty well and captures a strong aesthetic. I'd definitely keep her around for at least another year. 

I don't know if my opinion or wishlist toward Ever After High has really expanded significantly. I still admire its ornate aesthetic and visual impact, but my heart still belongs foremost to the Wonderlandian characters. I'm definitely not negative toward the brand, but fortunately for me, I haven't ignited a spark to get lots more EAH than I had wanted previously. I definitely need to bring Al and Maddie on at a sooner-or-later date, but only when that feels right. 

Happy Valentine season! Next up...things are getting pretty fiendish and scary. Be warned, but I'm incredibly excited.