Anniversary Reunion, Part 1: Revisiting My Roots with Amanita

 This is it. My first doll. Different copy, but she's back! 

This April, I am reobtaining and reviewing the first three dolls I got in my first doll hobby--three rather than the first only, because I got the three dolls as a batch, starting my collection with three on one day. Fittingly enough, the reobtained dolls were ordered on one day, and, most poetically (and out of my control) also arrived on one day!

This small series of posts is being conducted on approximately the anniversary of when I got these dolls the first time--in early April of 2016, confirmed for me by the timestamps on my first photos of  the original dolls. I have to imagine some birthday money from March back then might have facilitated me being able to get three dolls on one day, or else I had saved a little prior. While I didn't get these guys last year, I felt like the second year of this blog and resumed hobby was the second-best time (after the first year) to reobtain my inaugural triad of dolls, and marking the anniversary felt correct.

I've already detailed my story with dolls and Monster High way back in my first blog review discussing Creeproduction Frankie Stein. I recommend you read that first if you haven't already, but I noticed a fairly glaring omission from the time of writing (now briefly corrected there) in that I had totally neglected to talk about which dolls were the first collected--Gloom and Bloom Amanita Nightshade, Frights, Camera Action! Operetta, and Kala Mer'ri from Great Scarrier Reef. 

The new old trio.

When I had first learned about Monster High through the Bogleech post discussing the Feisty/Love Inner Monster, I then dove into researching the brand at large. I looked at what characters were on offer, and found myself in love with Elle Eedee the blue futuristic robot, and characters like the new Great Scarrier Reef gang were enticing. I had also begun diving into the webisodes and learning about the characters. However, when I first found myself taking those brave, unconfident steps as a teen boy, going into the Toys "R" Us with the express purpose of seeking out and buying a Monster High doll for real, I was completely blindsided by this gorgeous box display.

I had to have Amanita Nightshade, the self-obsessed, horrible offspring of the Corpse Flower.

And, yes. For an occasion as important as this, I felt it was only right to go all-in. To reacquire my first inaugural doll, I needed to acquire her just the way I did with the original copy--new in box. (The other two were just fine coming loose and cheap. I had LDD purchases to prioritize this month!) I think this was the right way to get her back...and it illustrates why this foul valley ghoul, headline character of the Gloom and Bloom doll line, hijacked my plans. Because this packaging was a major factor in my choice. 

Gloom and Bloom was in late-ish G1, where the packaging style had found its second real consistent phase. The boxes were no longer cardboard Trapper-Keepers with windows and backdrops that slid out, but were now unfolding backdrops under window bubbles that slotted into the back with tabs and kept the box together for sale. Triangular compartments were constructed to hide the doll stands, and large artwork of the character's face dominated the back of the box. Much of the box construction was shared by sister brand Ever After High. However, despite the packaging being simpler and apt to look cheaper, G1 MH did not skimp on the design. They used cardboard inserts with gorgeous graphics to maintain a strong impactful aesthetic, and Amanita's box proves it. Her striking purple and green tones and big presence are well complemented by the overwhelming, lush, dark design of her box, depicting a spooky plant-filled greenhouse filled with narcissistic selfies. It's a super dramatic and pretty display and it hooked me immediately. 

I hadn't looked twice at Amanita based on her stock photo, but in person with this box, she was absolutely gorgeous. G1 MH really knew how to feel extravagant and exciting when it needed to be! I understand G2 and G3 packaging is likely motivated by a desire for lower production costs and I admire efforts to reduce material waste, but their boxes are just so so dull. 

The side of the box features the character art, and the back of the boxes in this era of MH featured huge close-ups of the faces. 

The concept of Gloom and Bloom is actually a storyline that runs parallel to the first-wave Monster Exchange doll line. The Gloom and Bloom thread of the overlapping plot sees the school throwing a dance to celebrate the imminent blooming of the ancient Corpse Flower, which only blooms once per 1,300 years (unlucky 13!) Unfortunately, the Corpse Flower contains a ghoul, its "bad seed" Amanita Nightshade, who is entirely vapid, catty, and self-obsessed, and who Cleo de Nile has a bad past with, as the de Nile royal family previously owned the flower and had Amanita living with them until she abandoned them in their tomb. Amanita's doll diary reveals that she then met up with Medusa traveling in a caravan and drank all of the travelers' water before she sealed herself in her flower to rest until the Gloom and Bloom dance. So she's made enemies with both Cleo and Deuce's families! Amanita proves to remain entirely dimensionless and horrible and her story gets no resolution--she just vanishes from the fiction after a couple of webisodes. She doesn't have the cool, crafty bad-girl appeal that made G1 Nefera de Nile a love-to hate iconic villain, but I find a comedic charm in her ridiculous narcissism--if only it was fully played as a comedy bit.

The character-building of Amanita is a little all over the place (a gothic fantasy valley girl whose last waking moments were from a time well before either subculture?), but she is based on a real plant--the titan arum, or the corpse flower!

Photo of a corpse flower on display at the New York Botanical Garden.

The corpse flower, or amorphophallus titanum (get your minds out of the gutter, scientists) is a Sumatra-native Indonesian plant known for its unpleasant death-like stench and its slow blooming cycle, which have been adapted to fantasy with Amanita being a thoroughly repugnant person who blooms from her flower once in over a thousand years. It's immediately obvious that Amanita's colors are derived from the real plant, and in the cartoon and box design, when she blooms from it, her standing figure replaces the tall spadix in the middle of the large petal shape. Corpse flowers are large enough for that to work as a visual! 

Amanita's name, however, has nothing to do with the plant...and doesn't fully commit to the floral idea either. Amanita is actually a genus of mushroom, with the most famous being amanita muscaria, the red white-spotted mushrooms iconic to woodland fantasy and surrealist imagery...and which are actually quite toxic!

Photo of amanita muscaria.

The name of this ghoul may have been intended to convey the sense of "beautiful but toxic" because that's miss Nightshade in three simple words, but using a fungus instead of a plant or the corpse flower's names feels way off-base. For one, the character could have easily been named "Titania", to suggest both the fairy queen of Shakespeare and the name of her flower. "Nightshade" is still acceptable as a surname because I don't think mining a name from the amorphophallus aspect of the flower's scientific name would be appropriate! But even if they didn't use the corpse flower name, why not continue on the "nightshade" theme and name her Belladonna or even Donnabelle? It confuses me. Titania would have been the best name for her, but she is Amanita and I won't change her name. 

I refuse to acknowledge that eight years have passed since I got Amanita the first time because that's completely horrifying. Nope. Not thinking about it. Not acknowledging the horrible time-warp to be opening her as an old doll now when she was brand-new the first time.

The box opens by pulling the bubble off with tabs that slot into the cardboard backing. The top of the box notes that the corner stores her stand and brush, and this section unfolds, just like a classic EAH box.

Here's the bubble window removed.

Back in the day, I believe in imitation of someone else I heard did it, I would take the character art out of the front window and trim it down to save, stacked inside a drawer. I don't really know what for, as I never did anything at all with it, but what the heck. For old times' sake:

Here's the back of the box unfolded.

The only tags you really need to cut from the back are the ones in her head. The others are easier and safer to get from the front. 

Amanita's diary has a personalized cover design and is framed as a volume in a lengthy autobiography. Amanita writes in the third person, though this does absolutely nothing to add any objectivity. Her diary consists mostly of insufferable praise heaped upon herself and a total lack of perspective and empathy. It's pretty entertaining.

This diary is more fun than her webisode characterization, because it pushes the idea of completely delusional self-obsession to a comical, engagingly frustrating level. She's not just a petty mean girl; the ghoul legitimately has a god complex!

Here she is unboxed. How did I ever let this ghoul go???

"Yeah, that's why you paid that tithe for the fancy box and all. It's like, your darling little atonement for foolishly losing moi."
(She's not wrong.)

Amanita's hair is long, tightly waved, if not curled, and I know it gets extremely voluminous when brushed. It's parted to her right and is a gorgeous blend of dark purple with red-violet and royal blue highlights. 

While the stock photo for Amanita depicts her with orderly princess curls, I always liked her with her hair big and wild. It works with her gothic plant theme to look disorderly and beautiful. However, this time, I'm very happy with the hair just out of box, and I won't try to comb or boil it because the shape is really good as it is. Some light combing with the fingers should suffice.

The hair combed to her right is lightly gelled to keep it in place. I remember when her hair had been washed and combed, it was the same texture and volume as Peri and Pearl's and Freak du Chic Toralei's.

In her hair, on her right, Amanita has her floral hair accessory. Everybody in Gloom and Bloom had something like this. Hers is a black flower with vines, and while it comes rubber-banded on, it has a clip on the back to go around a section of hair that's been tied off.

This hair flower is clearly not a titan arum, but it might loosely resemble another infamously death-smelly plant, the rafflesia arnoldii, or stinking corpse lily. The flower might not be trying to invoke this plant, but it'd make sense with her broad concept.

 The amount of hair tied off doesn't create a super thick band for the clip to hold onto, so it's not super steady, but it'll stay on for idle display. The hair accessory also reminds me of the piece used with G3 signature Venus.

Amanita's face reportedly recycles the sculpt (but not the mold) of the Create-a-Monster Vampire girl. I think she does far better with it. The CAM Vampire's face was not interesting or appealing to me, but Amanita is flat-out stunning.

She has purple eyes and leaves at the corners and below her eyes, giving her an extravagant elegant gothic look for a plant ghoul. It's similar to the eye feathers of Avea Trotter. (That poor doll has been out of commission after falling victim to too many failed design revisions, so I don't know what the path for her going forward is at this moment. I want to fix her up properly, finally and do an update post, but she's a bit lost right now.)

Inherited from the CAM Vampire sculpt, Amanita has pointy ears, which do a good enough job of being plantlike without botanical texture. Amanita feels more like some kind of dark fairy, anyway.

Amanita's face feels like it illustrates her character perfectly. She's the kind of ghoul who knows she's gorgeous and has let that completely rot her personality. And even though the vintage-gothic and petty-teen sides of her feel at odds sometimes, her face really works for both. I've always felt that Amanita was one of those rare dolls who looks incredible in any look, and I think her face sculpt and painting do a lot of the lifting.

Amanita is a unique green skintone within the brand, being a pretty vivid take on mint green compared to dolls like G1 Frankie/Scarah/G3 Ghoulia . Here's some other green MH dolls to compare.

G3 Deuce, Bramble (built on a G3 Ghoulia), Amanita, G1 Frankie, G3 Venus, Skullector Monster.

Amanita's earrings are small black pieces that have an abstract shape.

Around her neck, Amanita has a black thorny necklace. This piece was reused, down to the same color, for Skullector Nightmare Before Christmas Sally. Having known Amanita so well, I immediately recognized it there. 

I lost this piece on my original Amanita somewhere, so in that regard, this new copy is an upgrade because if I still had the original she wouldn't be complete. But also, I probably would have been able to replace the necklace alone through eBay.

Amanita's dress is two layers and two pieces. Over top, she has a fancy sheer wrapped dress in lavender with black trim. The edges of the bodice have black mesh ruffles, and the shoulders are triangular. The skirt trails into a raggedy, petal-like hem and has an ombre to green, and a print of black plant stalks and leaf skeletons. Also on the hem are some strands of purple ruffles, evoking flowers like hyacinths or other vertical, long blooms growing on the side of her dress.

It's such a dramatic, pretty piece. 

Underneath this dress, for modesty and alternate display, Amanita has a one-piece dress reflecting a tube-top/miniskirt combo, with the top portion being lime with a black print matching the bottom of the outer dress, and the skirt being faux leather. She looks just as incredible in this look, even though it's not nearly as antique.

On her right wrist, Amanita has a black spiked bracelet.

In her left hand, Amanita has her iCoffin phone (lord knows where she got it). Because the G1 iCoffin was a flat piece of plastic with no handle, the doll cannot hold it without an elastic band, so I left it in place from the packaging for this first part of the review. I want to recreate that old first photo of the original doll, so she needs the phone in hand. I just popped out her forearms while looking at her outfit. (Gosh, it's nice to be able to do that with a G1 doll!)

Amanita being selfie-obsessed does feel like a slightly too-late-to-be-topical jab at the youth of the era (2013-14 were the right years to make those jokes, and she's a late-2014 doll), but it makes sense that it'd be the first thing she'd figure out upon discovering smartphones.

Around her ankles, Amanita has two floral accents that clip around her legs--this is another trait all of the Gloom and Bloom dolls exhibited. Amanita's are purple blooms with trailing green foliage.

These aren't super tight, so with the old doll, I shoved the clips further up the legs to keep them static...but that just ended up widening the clips and making them fall right off if they fell lower down the leg, so this time, I'm leaving them at their recommended height.

Amanita's shoes are black heeled sandals with leaf straps and heel sections that look like flower bulbs.

Amanita has a small purse with a curved strap, and it looks like a satiny floral cushion the way it's sculpted. It opens, but I don't know what I'd put in it. The phone won't fit.

Amanita's last piece is an album sculpted with a corpse flower on the front.

If you don't already know what's inside the album, you haven't been paying any attention.

Time for photos. This was the first picture I could find of my old Amanita.

Here's my re-creation--same table, new basement. I tried to get the pose and placement and overexposed flash as close as I could, though there are naturally differences in setting, doll, and the photo tech on my newer phone.

And I had to take some backdrop portraits. I played with lighting and color to work with her gorgeous palette.

Then I took her outside with the other dolls I felt would fit a dark garden fairy-tale theme: Bramble and Dendrea (both consciously designed in the same tones), and remade Treesa.

Bramble's sitting on a depiction of a true Amanita.

Maybe some of the unrevealed Garden Ghosts designer series MH dolls will join this group one day. Lenore Loomington just isn't that botanical or woodsy.

And Amanita had to bask in the early-spring flowers that naturally grew entirely in service of complementing her beautiful hair.

"The flowers love me, the camera loves, me, the monsters--well, I know they all love me deep down, and who can help being jealous, really?"

And I re-staged the greenhouse backdrop I set up for G3 Venus, since it would work just as well for this plant. I wanted a creepy picture of her dormant in the flower pot.

And here she is voguing in her minidress. This ended up being my very favorite picture of Amanita. She didn't look better in any of the other pictures I took.

Signature Amanita Nightshade is a gorgeous, gorgeous doll and it was a sentimental and aesthetic crime for me to have let my original doll leave my hands. Her colors perfectly embody the spooky duo of purple and green, but leveraged to a lush, wicked vintage-gothic garden-fantasy aesthetic that I absolutely adore. Gloom and Bloom is a very pretty doll line, but I do think Amanita provides strong competition within the group and might be the best embodiment of the line's aesthetic. And she should be, as the character it's anchored upon. Amanita is one of those dolls blessed with perfect color, contrast, and detail, such that she always looks great. 

Note how I said "signature"? Well, Amanita got one subsequent doll, an obvious delayed G1 release pushed into the G2 timeframe, in a "Scream and Sugar" bakery-outing two-pack with her former caretaker and fellow irredeemable narcissist Nefera de Nile. I owned that doll previously and she was also unassailably gorgeous. I have not reobtained her, but I think I fully intend to at some point because that doll just proved Amanita was visual perfection.

I didn't get every wonderful photo I could think of with Amanita this time, simply because not enough plants have come in and some aren't in season right now, so I'll definitely be watching the garden as the spring and summer progress so I can find new photo-ops for her. Watch my Instagram (linked on the sidebar) to catch any such pictures.

That's a huge goal checked off my list now--my first doll has been regained and welcomed back into the collection. This time, she will not leave! Stay tuned for the next two dolls very soon.