Living Dead Dolls Roundup 5

LDD Roundup 3 was unthemed but had the commonality factor of all of its dolls being boys. Here, LDD Roundup 5 has the commonality factor of everybody being a fair-haired scare! All three of these dolls have a blonde or light hair color!

Consider this my July LDD roundup, since this was mostly done and all purchased during July. August should have its own dedicated roundup as well.

BOO: Revenant

For a while, it looked like Series 6 had begun to get less accessible on the aftermarket, as I was noticing Revenants and Jinxes were ending up in the $60 range after seeing all of S6 in the $40 range when I started, but fortunately, I found a Revenant back in the low range who looked opened and tissue-mangled, but complete, and possibly still tied into the box. 

Within Series 6's Halloween imagery, Revenant is a ghost, and she's the first ghost in LDD as well as the first LDD to glow in the dark. Revenant achieves this by being cast in luminous translucent yellow plastic, which several other dolls would follow with, including Walpurgis as the Wicked Witch of the West. Revenant is not the last, and arguably not the most traditional, Halloween ghost in the line (Eleanor followed her in Series 16--she's waiting here for her time in October), but she does feel very classic and appealing. 

Her box was pretty beat-up, which might explain her low price. 

The clear window lid is a bit bent, the box is scuffed, and the chipboard is veined. Not a huge deal.

Revenant's chipboard has her eyes, but LDD cleverly chose to depict her while glowing in the dark to make her glow factor clearer--as such, her face is phosphorescent green. 

Revenant is the only S6 doll made to look eyeless, so this image is harder to recognize as a fragment of a face than the other dolls'. 

Her chipboard poem mentions her pet, as per the series formula:

One hell of a ghost

And Carrion her pet

Are two of the creepiest ghouls
You wish you never met

And a rewrite

A hell of a ghost

And a flesh-eating pet:

The creepiest creatures

You shouldn't have met

While Series 6 has six dolls and six pets to reference the Number of the Beast, Revenant is the only doll in the series whose death date actually makes a 666 reference. She died on June 6, 1960, or 6/6/60. 

Her certificate poem says:

An image from the past, she roams eternally

Reliving the horrid night of a twisted tragedy

To gaze upon this ghost, you'll witness her demise

For she is a harbinger of death as you will surely realize

Very clumsy. 

A wisp of the past, eternally roaming

Reliving her downfall, shrieking and moaning

A glance at the ghost, a nasty surprise

To see her will bring forth your early demise

Here she is unboxed. She had already been removed previously.

Revenant's hair is long, white, and center-parted out of her face. I'm sure it would have been perfect new, but like so many (too many) Living Dead Dolls, age and/or heat damage has caused her ends to be fried and tangled. There's no real way to fix this or make her hair comb fully smooth, but for a tattered ghost, it's acceptable. Just disappointing.

The rest of the hair feels pretty nice.

Revenant's face is done entirely in black paint. Her eye sockets are blacked out to look empty, have some black airbrushing to shade them, and her face and neck have a veining effect similar to S6 fellow doll Hush. It also looks a bit like later doll Agatha's cracks and blacked-out eyelessness. Revenant has no eyebrows at all, not even hidden within her vein detailing, and her lips are subtly smiling. I think she's capable of looking both sweet and sinister. 

This isn't the most novel horror face design, but Revenant executes it perfectly. 

Revenant's body is cast in a translucent yellow phosphorescent plastic that glows in the dark. She looks less opaque, and more yellow, than Oz Walpurgis. I'm willing to bet the translucency is fully part of her ghost theme, though.

Walpurgis looks yellow in certain lighting, but is more green. Revenant is unambiguously yellow-toned. While it doesn't objectively look good, I love it as a hallmark of old toy kitsch. Glow plastic in an ugly conspicuous color is very nostalgic and charming to me, and Revenant is of that childhood era where I remember those things--I just wasn't aware of her at the time. It's possible Revenant looked less yellow when new, going by her official photo, but most copies today look about the same, so maybe the official photo is a prototype. 

The remarkable thing about LDD is that I haven't observed any clear age yellowing in any of the old dolls' vinyl, only in the white hair of Hollywood. I wonder if that has anything to do with the thickness/rigidity of the doll vinyl compared to a Mattel fashion doll head, but whatever it is, I love it. And if the dolls do yellow, it's extremely even in effect because there aren't any patches of discoloration evident. I appreciate it, because LDD has too many other issues and too many pale dolls for yellowing to be an issue! Now if only there was a way to undo the stains in these dolls, because nothing I've tried was successful. 

And of course, I say this with the caveat that my LDD collection may well be stricken by yellowing in the future. Here's hoping not. I do keep them out of direct light, though, which probably helps.

The translucency of Revenant's head also shows some internal molding flaws. There's some veined lines on the inside of her right temple, and an air bubble that formed on her left.

I had to pop out Rev's head anyway to free some stuck strands of hair in her joints, so I was able to poke a tool into her head and feel the flaws with the tool. They're not fully encased inside the plastic--they're dimensional on the inside of her head, but the outside is smooth. I should probably be more bothered by these, but they're kind of fascinating.

Revenant's hair looks cool with light passing through her from the front.

Revenant's dress is two layers of fabric-- a black piece attached under a white piece with deliberate tattering and holes. These holes are the same pattern on all copies.

The sleeves and hem have jagged-cut edges and the sleeves are flared with a slit up the side and are long enough to completely hide her hands, giving her costume a lot of drama. 

The layered effect has quite striking contrast and feels very classic and party-store scary in a charming way. There's nothing some ratty-looking fabric can't make a little scarier. 

The dress velcros down the back and comes off in one piece. While the piece has a lot of unfinished edges, particularly around the holes, gentle handling will prevent unmanufactured damage. The white fabric isn't super thin or liable to fray on its own. I like its texture. The white part has some yellow stains, but I don't know how possible it is to clean them. Trying to soak in bleach could result in the black layer of the dress seeping into the white. I chose to dab in some white paint over the stains instead.

Revenant's body is predictably quite stained by the black in her dress. Her legs are the least opaque parts of her body.

Here's how she glows.

While Calico still has the coolest pet with her Frankenstein animal Muzzy, Revenant gives her fierce competition with her pet Carrion, who's a full vulture. While vultures are a Halloween presence, I feel like they're a kind of under-recognized or underutilized spooky icon, and I always welcome them in the horror space. 

The actual first thing I saw when I unboxed the doll was that Carrion's right foot had fallen off. Fortunately, it was a peg attachment that I could pop back in, but I'll wager this was once glued when it was new. I decided to re-glue it.

Revenant had a Resurrection release, which was fairly different. Both gave her the batlike wings several LDDs have had, which are plastic-ribbed fabric with a hinge at the top point that lets them close and open. The wings make her look like a "lost soul" archetype, and both dolls are black-haired. The main is stark white save for her hair and wings and has a really piercing creepy effect with her white staring eyeballs and high-contrast veins. She looks more like a creepy baby in a compelling way. The S6 doll looks older.

Revenant's Res variant is more faithful to the doll facially; having a different but tonally identical face to her original S6 doll. She also is cast in glowing plastic like the original. She still has inset eyes, but they look more like the dark voids on S6 Revenant. The two Res dolls swap color balances between wings and outfit, so the variant has the dark robe and light wings. She also has a hood that can be worn up. Neither Revenant reissued Carrion or bore any reference to the animal, unlike the later Series 6 Resurrections both seen in Res XI. Dottie Rose and Hush's Resurrection variants both referenced their pets in their costume designs.

Back to Series 6 Revenant. She can carry Carrion perched on her arm, but for this posture to work out, Carrion actually serves as a counterbalance. If I take the bird off, the doll falls backward, and if Revenant leans forward, the bird will tip her forward!

And another portrait.

I tried using a Pepper's Ghost effect by manipulating a pane of glass to cast her reflection over a scene to create a "ghost" version of the doll in-camera, but that requires a bigger, more rectangular glass pane than the artist's palette I was trying to use, and I needed more black fabric to cover the scenery under the glass. Other parts of the scene got reflected too.

Still, you can see what I was going for.

I love Revenant because, and I say this with pure affection, she looks like a cheap hokey Halloween toy. Her tattered clothes and ugly yellow glow plastic look humble and like much of the Halloween paraphernalia of my childhood which wasn't that finely made, but had all the earnest spooky charm in the world. (And she is actually from that time period of Halloween toys--I'm just getting her well after the fact!) 

The doll is simple and basic. She's very familiarly spooky and doesn't look super special to me...and that's what makes her super special. She perfectly captures that niche of generic Halloween junk that always made me smile and get in the Halloween spirit. She's not the most classic or retro Halloween ghost design (that would be Eleanor), but she still feels very classical Halloween, quite timeless, and not overly edgy or scary. It's a fierce competition as to who is the Halloweeniest S6 doll, but Revenant might feel the most evocative of my personal Halloween memories and I love her for it.

A Trip Through the Woods: Daisy Slae

Daisy Slae is a doll from Series 14, which I could maybe see myself getting all of the dolls in (I have no special affection for Dee K., the ugly zombie with braces, but she does have a unique head sculpt). One of the primary reasons Daisy Slae has always stood out to me is her very uncommon color palette--she's one of the only Living Dead Dolls to feel aligned with the color yellow! Granted, the doll is only yellow in the way a can of La Croix seltzer is a fruit juice, but she still intrigued me. The only doll who feels fully legit yellow-themed is S34's Canary, and I'd like her too, but she hasn't been on my mind as frequently. 

I was shocked by how unavailable this doll is on the aftermarket. Few are selling her, and nobody's cheap about it either. I previously had no reason to believe Daisy Slae was especially popular or valuable in the community. She had no Resurrections or subsequent releases, and I'd thought she was just a blip in the fandom. I wouldn't have classed her as a big-ticket item before looking her up, and that bumped her down the list until now. But I had to get her in July if I wanted to take her on vacation. Our yearly lake destination is surrounded by forest with scenery and specific spots I knew would be perfect settings for this doll to photograph in, and we were leaving at the very end of the month. Daisy had a deadline!

I've actually wanted Daisy Slae for a few months now--since April at the earliest. Given her surprisingly high aftermarket value, I suppose I consider her a major acquisition in the brand like S1 Sadie or S12 Chloe, despite me not previously thinking of her as a Very Important Doll in the community.

Daisy Slae is Living Dead Dolls' resident hippie. She's not a psychedelic sixties flower child with a headband and flowy dress, though. Her drab brown/beige/yellow color palette, graphic tee, and center-parted hair strike me as pretty firmly 1970s, while her nose piercing and hair texture feel more like a 1990s college hippie. Daisy Slae's death date puts her in the latter category, and this era of the hippie archetype is a little more alternative and in line with LDD's aesthetic. 

I'm left-aligned and pacifist and I like nature and am deeply worried about the future of our planet under unchecked corporations, but I'm not a spiritual or new-agey person, so I probably wouldn't vibe with Daisy Slae on a personal level. 

Daisy Slae's name is an edgy take on the Southern-style compound name Daisy Mae, though I don't know if there's anything specific about the choice. While Daisy Mae sounds like a famous name, like a well-known artist or the fictional subject of a famous song or something, this doesn't seem to be the case. The only recognizable Daisy Mae in media that I could find is the young boar turnip-seller NPC in the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, who fills the role previously held by her grandmother Sow Joan...and her game came out several years after this doll. (The turnips in the games form an analog to a stock market, so Joan's name references the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Daisy Mae's name references the Federal National Mortgage Association, nicknamed Fannie Mae after its initials FNMA.) Maybe the LDD name is a personal reference to somebody the LDD guys know or knew. Daisy Slae's name trades out the "Mae" for the sound of the word "slay"--in the "evil kill kill murder" sense, not the "work it, queen" sense. It's not a knock against her to say so, but this doll is not a camp icon. Maybe a camping icon, though.

I don't think I'd expect a hippie type to have such a Southern-sounding name. Just not a lot of demographic confluence there, in my mind. The daisy part of her name makes total sense, but it could have been left at that, particularly because the name Daisy Mae doesn't have any apparent significance. I still like the name, though. She goes alongside Dottie Rose for two-part first names in my book, though Dottie Rose's name isn't absolutely confirmed to be one name rather than two.

My Daisy Slae came sealed. The S14 shrink-wrap is stiff and rattly.

The Series 14 dolls have slightly greenish-blue tissue, which make Daisy Slae in particular pop out against her box. The S14 tissue color might be my favorite of any LDD series. I just think it's so pretty, and Daisy Slae works the best with it in the whole series. She might be my favorite LDD doll-in-box display just because of the colors. She's also fortuitous for this roundup because her tissue color is a new one--good for the roundup cover photo since the other two dolls represent series and box colors I've already shown. 

I liked the tissue color paired with Daisy Slae so much that I invoked blue tones for several of her art photos despite the tissue color not being part of the actual doll design!

The chipboards have a photo-negative theme with inverted color portraits of the dolls on them, and a background of very shattered glass veins. The text and background actually make me think of Spider-Man with the colors and the glass being web-like.

Her poem here says:

She thought that nature was so pretty

Even gentle and pure

But the deep dark depths of the wilderness 

Proved more than she could endure

The opening reminds me a lot of Hush's certificate poem--"Shy little Hush thought rats were so pretty"...

Here's a rewrite.

Daisy Slae felt that nature was gentle

Since flowers were pretty and pure

But once she went into the wilderness depths

She found things she couldn't endure.

I also noticed the black coffins seem to have a subtle grain print design with vertical lines and a few spots of prominent green tone. It almost looks like this isn't a deliberate effect, it's so faint, but this is definitely a print. 

Daisy Slae died on May 31, 1996. I don't believe this date is a reference to anything particular in public knowlege.

Her certificate poem reads:

The elements claimed her slowly

And she ceased to sing and play

But to spite natural law

And the powers that be

She arose from the dead, Daisy Slae

And a rewrite.

The earth reclaimed her slowly

She had ceased to sing and play

In revenge against nature

And all laws that be

She rose as Daisy Slae

Here's the doll unboxed. I never anticipated this would be such a huge moment in my collection, but she is objectively momentous based on her aftermarket value!

Daisy Slae's hair is thick pale tan yarn with a very slight pink tone, and it's dabbed with green paint to make it look mossy or moldy. It's long and center-parted. 

LDD has put paint in hair for bloody effect on a few dolls before, but Daisy Slae is the only yarn-haired LDD with a paint effect and the only doll with hair paint that isn't done to depict blood. I feel like the yarn could stand to be a little yellower for better cohesion, and it's not very thick, meaning a lot of arranging will be needed to disguise bald spots. The hair is also only rooted in a small patch on the top of Daisy Slae's head. 

On LDDs with doll hair fiber, this is a technique that pops up occasionally, always done to make the hair deliberately sparse and thin, but here, with the yarn, it might just be a way to control the volume of the silhouette. I like this better than Calico's hair application, with her hair being glued down on the middle of her scalp, and not even done very tidily. Daisy Slae's hair works out more gracefully.

It's possible the intent of using yarn hair here was to depict white-person hippie dreadlocks. It's a contentious issue whether such hair is negative appropriation or not, and if there was a verdict, I wouldn't be able to deliver it. While there's certainly an unfair racial element to the stigma behind dreadlocks as a Black-associated style, I don't think white people adopting them have generally had an unjustly easy time with them, either, since dreads have generally been stigmatized regardless of wearer. Whether they're dreads just wild center-parted hair tangles, Daisy Slae's hair certainly fits in with the hippie stereotype. 

Daisy Slae's yarn strands are thicker than (upcoming review subject) Macumba's and slightly thinner than Calico's. Here's a lineup of LDD yarns that I have now.

Left to right--Hush, Macumba, Captain Bonney, Daisy Slae, Calico.

With Daisy Slae, Captain Bonney, and Macumba all purchased in July, I rapidly ended up pushing into having more of the yarn-haired LDDs in my collection. It's just Lucy the Geek (someday for a Series 30 project), Rotten Sam and Sandy (probably someday) and Misery and Agrat-Bat-Mahlat (no interest) who I don't have now! I think Lucy's yarn is exactly as thin as Hush's strands, while Misery's looks like it'd be the same size as Macumba's or Daisy Slae's. Agrat-Bat-Mahlat might have yarn as thick as Calico's.

Daisy Slae is a white-colored doll, and her face paint is pretty classic and cartoony LDD. Her eyes are oval-shaped and ringed by heavy yellow shading, while her eyebrows are thin low curves in dark brown. Daisy's eyes are complex. They have white sclerae mostly filled by red blood, while the irises are outlined in blue and feature a small black pupil surrounded by a yellow ring, with spokes of lime green radiating from the pupil over the rest of the iris. The eyes themselves are outlined in brown, but next to the blue iris outlines, they can look purple and I thought the lines were purple before seeing her in-person.

It looks like a separate gloss layer was applied over her eyes. They're very shiny in a way the typical factory eye paint isn't. 

LDD can talk all they want about Daisy Slae being killed by the elements or the poetic force of Nature, but I'm not inclined to believe it. I look at this hippie with glassy bloodshot neon eyes and I know a substance contributed to her end.

Daisy Slae's lips are also dark brown, and her nostrils have brown shading in them. Daisy Slae also has a small metal nose ring! This is not designed to come out, but it's an actual metal loop going through the vinyl nose. The previous LDDs with a facial piercing were Series 3's Sheena and Series 9's Blue, who each had a lower lip ring in the same kind of execution. Along with the dreadlock hair, this piercing brings the 1990s hippie archetype into her design, which is otherwise very 1970s. I don't believe any other LDD had a facial piercing as such, but Series 28's Ruby does have a small white gemstone "beauty mark" glued to her face that might be intended as a stud piercing. 

I really like Daisy Slae's face. The yellow, brown, and white are so quintessentially 70s in a way I love, and the wild eyes are a fun bit of psychedelic detail. The piercing is also really fun.

Daisy Slae is wearing a simple outfit. On top, she has a short brown cropped tee with a tight neck and appliqué graphic on the chest depicting a yellow and white daisy with a skull-and-crossbones in the middle. You could consider the graphic to be a pictorial rendition of her name!

In the same way Dottie Rose was pink-haired and polka-dotted, this compound-named doll is also dressed like a literal depiction of her name itself!

The doll hasn't been touched, but the appliqué has aged a bit with time. Not to detrimental effect, though.

For bottoms, Daisy Slae is wearing a darker beige corduroy maxi skirt. 

I like the trouser seams and stitches, and the fabric is soft and flexible. Daisy Slae can sit in this skirt pretty well, but her hips are stopped from turning forward at a point some other dolls can go past. Daisy Slae might not get as upright when seated. The pockets are semi-real--while the gaps are open and objects can be slid into them, the pockets are not enclosed pouches and just lead to the inside of the skirt.

With pockets like these, you'd put in a handful of coins and they'd fall right down to your feet. I previously encountered pseudo-pockets in this style with Shadow High's Karla Choupette.

Daisy Slae has a classic LDD white sock with Mary Jane shoes, and hers are brown to suit the palette. Like other dolls, the shoes are not super tight even when socked, so the doll wobbles back and forth inside them.

These aren't daisies, but I got this paper as a backdrop for her ages ago because I thought it would be a good match when I finally had her.

Here's some photos in natural scenery. Fortunately, we have daisies she could pose with!

And these leaves had yellow spots that worked perfectly with her eyes.

I also planted her in a pot. I heated and popped apart the doll to do this, using the head and an arm disembodied. Reduces cleanup and allows for a fun surreal effect with the pot I have available, since she couldn't possibly fit as a full doll. I wanted her in a classic terra-cotta pot and this was my only option.

Because she's a hippie and she's vaguely said to have been killed by nature, I wanted to add an accessory to define her death according to the story her eyes are telling. What if Daisy Slae was killed by a toxic mushroom she foraged, mistaking it for a safe drug or a harmless snack? I decided to sculpt a mushroom out of Sculpey, and had the idea from the start to gracefully shape it to be compatible with an LDD flat hand--I made it a two-stemmed design where the hand slides between the stems so the mushroom stays on the hand--the underside of the big cap keeping it from falling downward. I added amanita-style bumpy spots to the caps, and scored gill lines underneath. The smaller cap is flatter.

Here's the mushroom after baking. 

And here's how it fits on a hand.

I actually somehow got it so weirdly perfect in shape that once it's slid onto the hand properly, it won't fall off when the doll is tipped forward or turned upside down. The topology is just right to make it snug and sturdy in position. I still don't trust the piece to stay attached or assembled were the doll holding it to fall or topple, but the doll can easily be carried safely while holding the mushroom.

During painting, the mushroom fell and the second stem snapped, but it was a clean break and I was able to superglue it back together and sand the seam to make it disappear. It might be stronger now than it was. Fingers crossed. I painted the stems and dots yellowish off-white and made the caps purple with neon green fading from the top to match her eyes. 

Because I did this before the doll arrived and I had misjudged her colors, the mushroom did not feel matched to the doll. I was wrong in assuming she had any purple, and the stem was not a shade that matched any part of Daisy Slae.

I thought, for the flat seventies-retro look, it would be more clean and fun if the mushroom shared her colors more closely. I repainted the caps yellow with green at the top, and made the spots dark brown while making the hue of the stem match her hair better. This made the mushroom look equally cartoony to Daisy Slae, and perhaps even more dangerously-colored. I think this truly completes her and looks fantastic.

I also tried adapting her into art styles of the 1970s. I spent a very long time digitally tracing her to compose a psychedelic 2D poster, and I'm happy with the result. The colors and background were very tricky to get just right, and I experimented a lot, making an earthier version before shifting more to greens and yellows and hints of the Series 14 blue tissue color.

I then tried a simpler flat graphic look akin to her T-shirt, but featuring Daisy Slae herself and a slogan.

And last might be my favorite--I went for the super loose 1970s hand-drawn animation style with shaky-lined white figures over watercolor backdrops. It was really fun abandoning form and relaxing the details to create the fully-expressive look of this style, especially after emulating more precise aesthetics of the time.

I could have kept going and playing even more with 1970s 2D-art digital pieces for her, but I think this is already great.

I've always been fascinated by the breadth of cultural aesthetics during the 1970s, but I couldn't forget the similar eclectic vibes of the 1990s, and because Daisy Slae is textually a nineties girl, I had to honor that side of her aesthetic as well. I think this invocation is a little more parodic and inaccurate through combining more disparate nineties cliches, but I liked it.

And we're still not done!

Daisy Slae was acquired early in July, but I had to take her traveling and hold off this review because I knew the perfect locations to shoot more Daisy photos with--and they were at the lake preserve my family visits every year in early August. Daisy Slae is the nature girl, and the lake is nothing but nature, uninterrupted and very easy to frame, so Daisy Slae came along for the trip. I also decided to bring Faith, Menard, Macumba, and Captain Bonney along too, since they were dolls that could benefit from water and beach photos, but Daisy Slae was the first doll I knew I needed to travel with, so blame her for the delay.

I had the advantage of knowing exactly where I wanted to take Daisy Slae because I know the lake so well. There's one patch of ferns in a small clearing that's very sunny, and I thought it would work for her. Throughout these nature shoots, I did two pictures--one with more natural tones and one edited more seventies-brown. I also wanted to work with the idea of her being entangled and swallowed and minimized in the environment. Daisy Slae's small size as a doll contributed to perspective and size illusions that made the plants and paths in the forest look much larger, grander, and altogether different from the same scene viewed from human scale.

I like the hallucinogenic glow this ended up with!

I then put her mushroom by a tree to create her fatal foraging.

I took a couple more pictures on the path to another photo location for other dolls. I thought her hair worked well with this straw-like section.

No shoes were lost in this photo session. Hers just fell off before this one and I decided it worked.

And Daisy Slae found a real yellow mushroom, which was just what I was hoping for. I knew they were around. I would have accepted a larger or taller mushroom that was easier to stage her with, but I digress.

I really liked these pictures, putting her walking across a log like a lost voyager on a magical wandering path through the woods. Maybe Daisy Slae was just a stupid hippie, but there's a poetry to the destruction by nature and disappearance in the wilderness.

I liked her against the sky to capture some of the contrast she has with the Series 14 packaging.

Makes me think just a little of the sunny, trippy, deeply harrowing film Midsommar.

Here's some pictures in a tree.

Then I took her hiking on another trail. I found some branches to lose her in...

...and took other photos of her wandering through the woods.

I found a cozy stump with mushrooms growing on it that suited her quite well. 

These aren't the proper pale flat kind that grow like shelves. All of those tree mushrooms tend to be picked clean by hikers who like them for decoration and artistic canvases. These black knobby ones tend to be pretty solid and hard and what little flat surface they have grows facing downward.

These tiny conifers felt like trippy pinwheels for her to lie down in. In brown, the visual is even more psychedelic.

And I took some more tree photos to show her as a literal tree-hugger and sitting on a branch.

I liked this patch of red growth on the ground--the only scenery that worked with the pinkish cast of her hair!

And this one was taken vertically among plants on the side of a boulder--I just flipped it upside-down in post for a more interesting image.

Here, I saw a wonderful gap between boulders that would make the perfect frame for her as an aimless specter of the forest. I had to climb over the rocks to reach the other side and place the doll, then climb back over to photograph her. While I had to fudge the lighting hard in post, this setup was perfect for a horror story about somebody destroyed in the wilderness.

And I was delighted to find just the right kind of shelf mushroom on a tree down another trail! I wanted to find one Daisy Slae could sit on, and there it was!

I wanted some real dark photos, but I waited long enough for it to be too dark. I still got a cool indistinct dark portrait and two versions of a photo in "night mode" that have kind of a VHS or camcorder "cryptid" image quality.

And my last attempt to photograph her in a darker hour.

So rests Daisy Slae.

Clearly, I adore this doll. And with all this creative work, I think she actually gave me my money's worth!

Daisy Slae's concept feels very cohesive. Her characteristic earthy 1970s color palette is actually derived from a movement in design influenced by environmentalism during that era, suiting her perfectly. The colors also work to evoke a floral theme with the daisy flower that also serves to give her her nature-girl name. The flat coloring mixes with the hippie archetype and actual natural imagery perfectly in visual and historical context. Daisy Slae also incorporates 1990s hippie traits in a way that feels graceful. Her design is also instantly recognizable--I got evidence of this when my mom walked into the room and saw her for the first time, and she got it immediately. I quote: "That flower-power one is...eugh..."!

While the echelon of the aftermarket Daisy Slae falls into feels wildly unlikely given how niche her appeal would be in the goth market, her design certainly nails it, and I was not only willing to pay up, but felt richly rewarded by doing so. Daisy Slae looks really nice and has some unique features with her green-dabbed yarn and nose ring, and her aesthetic is on point. Her hair is thinly rooted, its tone is subtly too pink for her palette, and adding her mushroom made her much better than she was, but I click with her. I love how her whole aesthetic feels seventies on a meta level with her coloring and graphic style, and her theme invites nature photos and psychedelic art concepts, both of which I found really fun. I understood this doll's vibe completely and clearly got a lot of physical and digital art inspiration from her, and she gave familiarly magic woods a new magic to me when looking at them for her sake. She's an outsized success in the photo department, and it was more than worth it to take her on vacation.

Aria Pianissimo: Siren

Siren is my fourth Series 5 doll, but the third to be published on the blog. (The other two, of which I've worked with one already, are going in a separate project.) Siren's grown on me for having a dramatic spooky charm. She was a famous singer whose voice was muted by her lips being stitched shut, and her celebrity status visually appears to be that of an opera diva, given her luxurious hooded cape. While her death date references a popular rock musician, she's giving more Phantom of the Opera in her appearance, so I think that would have been her entertainment sphere.

Siren is a simple doll and I wasn't in love with her to start with, but her purple/yellow/black/white color palette struck me more over time and I wanted to see if her simplicity was an asset. I always knew I was getting her full-color main doll for my mixed set of S5 dolls. Of the Series 5 variants, Siren's is the doll I never looked twice at because her greyscale rendition is fairly low-contrast (less dramatic than the original, even) and the colors of the main doll formed a lot of appeal.

I got my Siren opened but complete. There was a cheaper option for her, but I caught that her box didn't have the clear lid, so I moved up a bit in price to secure that.

Here's her chipboard.

The poem reads:

Siren was an untimely singer

Whose voice it was said sure could linger

Until the night she was sewn into silence

Her song abruptly ended with a fierce act of violence.

The second line is clumsy grammar, and the first couplet makes the mistake of forcing a rhyme based on spelling when the words do not rhyme audibly. "Singer" and "linger" have a different cadence on the "ng" sound that prevents the two from rhyming. Here's an alternate poem, since I don't think the bones of the original suit a rewrite.

She lost her song, she had no coda

Her voice was frozen in the air

Her lips were sewn, her throat was choked

Her last note rang in deep despair

Siren's name is, of course, a reference to the Greek mythological Sirens, who were either supernatural women or bird/woman hybrid monsters whose voices had an enchanting compelling quality that drove men sailing past their island mad with a desire to reach them. Because their island was in dangerous seas and the Sirens were predators, the men would drown or get eaten by the beings. The Sirens feature in a part of the Odyssey, where clever hero Odysseus survives the Sirens by having his men tie him tight to the mast of the ship so he can't leave and makes the crew plug their ears with wax so none of them will hear the song he can. As such, "Siren song" has become an idiom to refer to an alluring dangerous prospect, and the Greek Sirens have been often conflated with mermaids as sea-ladies who sing. It's not uncommon to see fish-tailed women called sirens, but as a mythology nerd, I don't participate. Siren seems like she was a perfectly harmless person who was totally victimized, so it's likely her name alludes to her killer being driven mad with some obsession over her and her voice.

I also wonder, though, if Siren's name is meant to be a partial pun on "silent" or "silence". 

Siren's coroner's report sheds a little more light on her death, but not a lot.

She died on October 4, 1970 at 10:05 PM. This day was the day rock singer Janis Joplin died at a young age. Siren has nothing in common with Joplin otherwise. I think this death reference is one of the reminders of the Gen X background of the LDD creators. While Joplin's death remains sad and impactful, I don't think she'd have been the first musical-tragedy reference coming to mind for later generations. For millennials or older Gen Z, I think the reference would be to Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse, later famous untimely musical deaths.  

Siren's time of death creates an interesting 10/04 10:05 pattern numerically. She's identified just as a vocalist, and her frightened look is attributed to her lips likely being stitched while she was alive. The biggest detail dropped by the certificate (which I referenced in my poem rewrite) is that her actual cause of death was strangulation, meaning she was tortured and then murdered, with both attacks clearly being symbolic assaults on her ability to sing--shut the mouth and disable the throat. I wonder why someone did this to her. Obviously, it was unjustified no matter the reason. Her crime scene photo has blood below her, which doesn't make a ton of sense because this isn't a bloody doll.

Here she is out of the box.

Siren's hair is a pale unrealistic yellow that leans greenish. It's evidently not supposed to look natural, but I wish its hue were yellower. It's less saturated than I expected (or wanted) it to be, but it contrasts well against her purple tones and mixes with the black and white to give her a very classically spooky palette. 

The hair is long and wavy and parted toward her right, and feels like the most classic retro-starlet hairstyle of the four S5 ladies. It suits her, though I think I'd expect a famous opera singer to have a more formal look with a bun or updo myself.

Siren is a stark-white doll with a simple faceup. Her eyes are black with small yellow irises and black pupils, and have upper and lower lashes and purple rings and slight grey shading around them. The irises have subtle purple outlines. Her eyebrows match her hair and are turned far upward to make her look miserable or frightened. This feels like one of the more tragic LDD fates given her evident reaction, but an unhappy toy can be very endearing from time to time. 

Siren was the first doll to use this stitched-mouth face sculpt, and Isaac in the very next series was the second and last. Clearly, the sculpt wasn't adapted and modified to live on after the ball joint body was introduced. Another stitched-mouth sculpt was debuted late in the ball-joint era with Ella von Terra, but her crossed stitches looked too thick and the bloody mouth paint didn't let the sculpt shine. If a loose Ella ever showed up, I'd be down to try remaking her base to see what the sculpt could do with another look. I prefer Siren's sculpt, though. Her lip laces are painted in a pale off-white color and have less contrast against her skin than Isaac's black stitching, and her lips underneath are painted black, though the effect can make the lips look like an open mouth instead. Maybe purple would have been the better color. It is impressive to have painted the stitches and lips each in their own color.

Here's the two (and only) LDD faces with this sculpt. 

Siren's signature costume piece is her opera cape, which is black crushed velvet lined with purple cotton(?) fabric. The cape has a pointed hood that falls down Siren's back, but she can wear it up.

One side of the cape had a stitch holding the front to the back, which would have been for packaging, so I took it out to let it spread. I assume the other side had such a stitch too,  but the other undone and this one somehow never was. It's possible the cape only ever had one stitch, though.

The cape ties around Siren's neck with a ribbon, which is not my preference. I'd have loved if this closed with a hook or snap instead.

Here's Siren trying the hood on. She's a very spooky doll.

Under the cape, Siren is wearing a very simple dress, with a ribbon-strapped plain black top and a skirt with some pleated panels that have purple sections between them. This detail wraps around the whole skirt.

I've mentioned before how some early LDD costumes, after felt fabric was phased out, shifted the "crutch" material to satiny fabric which created an effect I found really cheap. Siren is one of those dolls. The material isn't bad, but it's not all that special and, applied this way, it looks like a party-store costume rather than something truly elegant or quality. It feels like her cape took all the budget out of the rest of the clothes. I can't tell you which fabrics would suit this costume better, but there had to be something. I'm not impressed, but it looks alright.

Siren's nails are painted, like the other ladies in the series, and hers are purple. She wears the sandal sculpt in black, just like Hollywood and Jezebel.

I made an error discussing Hollywood when I said Series 5 introduced the sandal sculpt. The shoe actually debuted on Ms. Eerie in Series 4, who was the only doll in the series to wear it, but Series 5 went ham on the new sculpt by putting all of its ladies in the sandal right afterward. I've corrected the information in Hollywood's review. 

Siren's right sandal has a particularly loose peg-and-loop connection on the ankle strap. As mentioned previously, I didn't notice this issue with later sandals, with them evidently improving as early as Series 6 with Calico. Calico and Betsy's shoe straps close more securely.

Even though Siren's dress looks like one piece, for some reason, it isn't--the top is a velcro piece, while the skirt is separate and uses only waist elastic to secure it. The top is cut to securely cover the waist so it doesn't ever look like a separate piece or create a gap.

Siren's stains weren't what I expected. I thought I'd see a lot of black on her, but as if in mockery, it's the purple lining of her cape that got her the worst. Her hand has some stains, as does her jaw and neck. 

I then took her down for a good hair wash and comb, and a rinse to clear up any manageable spots on her. Her hair isn't super silky, but while there are some frazzled ends, it didn't feel super catchy on a comb either.

While her dress is simple, her cape does afford her a lot of drama and presence...

...or it can be used to minimize her presence, wrapping around her more meekly.

The cut and drape and hood are all wonderful...the ribbon tie was untenable, though. I'm very bad at tying bows, particularly tiny ones, and getting the ribbon tight around her neck without tying a double knot that would be hell to undo was proving frustrating for me, so I decided to replace the closure for my own ease of use and enjoyment. I tried out a hook-and-eye closure, but while I could successfully attach one with glue, the length of the clasp messed up the look of the cape and didn't let the top close together properly around the neck. I also found it too fiddly and tricky to maneuver. I then tried a plastic snap, but that looked too obtrusive and it showed too clearly in the fold of the collar, so I then switched to black velcro harvested from a doll top. That allowed the cape to close at the right spot without the closure being too jarring--and that's actually the system in use in the very previous photo. This tight velcro closure does preclude the hood being worn up at the same time, so I would probably have to add the hook closure back as a second way for the cape to close that would allow her hood to be worn up...but I can also just put the cape on her head and drape it over her for display, and I don't favor the hood-up look for her. It's fine not being prioritized.

I had a cruelly funny idea for an accessory for her, and I decided to pursue it--a microphone. I had the L.O.L. O.M.G. Spirit Queen boom mic that I thought could be converted to an LDD accessory. Cutting the handle let it slide over the LDD fingers (though no LDD's arms are suited to hold it well), and using a Shadow High mic stand with the socket bored out wider let the boom mic fit in so Siren can be paired with it hands-free. 

The boom mic shape isn't quite right, but I think it passes for a metal grille microphone stand from the older days pretty well.

For Siren's news media piece, I made a very simple magazine cover patterned on a 1970s edition of Life magazine. This is the same fictional magazine issue that my interpretation of Tinselton Stitches is also featured in, as I chose for him to die just before Siren so both of their stories would be printed in the same edition. Siren, in my lore, was Tinselton's first high-profile autopsy after he became undead himself (if we're not counting his autopsy on himself!)

I didn't intend for this meta aspect, but the fact that I only made the cover and not the article accidentally aligns well with Siren being forced into silence. Her story can't get out!

And to put them together, here's Tinselton's story inside the issue, which I've previously shown. I wrote it as if it were finished prior to Siren's death becoming breaking news, so there's an editorial note at the end adding that update.

And here's Siren at her autopsy. Everything looked normal to Dr. Stitches until he fully uncovered her face...

Then I set up a theater for her, with my chest of drawers being pulled open to put a couple of dolls in a coffin-lid "box seat". I'm not totally happy with this setup as far as looking like a believable theater, but what am I gonna do? That'd be very difficult to achieve.

Siren didn't know why she was onstage after she came back from the dead. She couldn't speak or sing, and this new world of ghouls and monsters was frightening to her. Still, she had been pushed into the theater, mobbed by fans desperate to see her next show.

She felt like a joke as the audience silently watched in anticipation, and her head began to swim in anxiety. It was bad enough that she expected, and even hoped, to hear a cricket chirp.

Siren stood in internal anguish, and would be sweating were she still alive, but the audience was rapt at her every motion.  People were responding with awe and emotion despite the lack of any sound in her performance. Was...was she somehow singing?

She began to work it. It was impossible, but it appeared she was performing in dead quiet. Perhaps if she just acted like she used to when she sang--and that's when the crowd truly became affected. She was stunning the crowd with an aria that didn't exist. She could feel it. All her pain and her fear and a newfound elation swelled in the air, but you could still hear a pin drop.

Without even trying, she had created a masterwork of a show.

Siren's Grauman's Theater slab was made for her well in advance once I got Isaac, because he, having the same face sculpt, was able to create the impression of her lips in the clay. I put her name on a musical staff, and her footprints will have her standing on the right side of the full S5 lineup.

And here's an autograph piece. I like making these, and it's a fun way to strengthen my take on the Series 5 worldbuilding by using the signatures I established for the characters in the slabs. Siren's is the first color signed portrait in this group.

Siren isn't the most spectacular doll, and of Series 5, I understand why she's a bit lower-end. Her charm is her spooky colors and high contrast, and I love the volume of her hair and the drama of her cape, but the cape itself isn't very easy to use as-produced due to the ribbon tie around the neck, and the costume and colors can end up making her look a little cheap as well. I think there's real appeal in her aesthetic and tragic design, and the cape really does a lot of lifting for the doll. She has real presence and drama, and that might be worth more than her deficits. I had fun with her, but she's not objectively super special.

May her song find its way somewhere in the shadows.

So that's another three down!

It's kind of funny that I have two white dolls with yellow hair and one yellow doll with white hair in this group. They work together!

Close reading should not be required to discern my favorite of these three. It's the oddly wonderful Daisy Slae. I didn't expect to like her quite as much as I did (and I expected to like her!), but her cartoony retro look, unusual modern hippie theming, and yellow/brown color palette really charmed me and gave me a lot of successful artistic inspiration. I absolutely understand her appeal. Siren is really dramatic and spooky, but not overall something I can write home about. I still got some great inspiration from her. Revenant is the simplest and gave me the least material within my current photography means, but she's a very effective piece of classic spooky imagery.