An Uncomfortable Living Dead Dolls Discussion, Part 2

The time has come to take out the red flags again.

Last August, I assembled a group of four Living Dead Dolls to explore the matter of the brand's optics not being very clean, looking at four dolls I found problematic while engaging in as fair of a critique as I could, acknowledging points of appeal to the dolls while also frankly discussing why they present issues. It gets a bit dark and serious at points, but the first post is here (relevant content warnings are at the start). Unfortunately for LDD, but fortunately for my topics and writing prospects, those four dolls were not the only ones to be iffy in terms of content, and so I was able to relatively easily assemble a second group to discuss. (I could also do at least a third after this.) We're sticking with totals of four. My previous uncomfortable-roundup plans could have ballooned and I pared it down to the four of the first post, so there was always going to be follow-up. 

Sip your cup of tea every time I bring up the LDD Fashion Victims doll line in this post. I'll get to them eventually, I swear, but the amount of times I found them relevant to this roundup even got me exhausted!

Let's begin. This is a long one.

Warning for discussions of ethnic stereotyping/slurs, mental-based ableism, underweight eating disorders, and sexual themes.

Unhappy Medium: Gypsy

You're absolutely right: this doll's name is offensive language. I dislike it, but I am a descriptivist here on this blog and I will sparingly but accurately use the name the doll was given because I don't want to pretend it's better than it is or dress it up nicer than it deserves and make it more comfortable. (If the word stings to read, perhaps it should, but please know I do not invoke it as my own vernacular or use it in malice.) Censoring the name also feels a tad performative under the context of analysis, and I trust an audience to understand a word is ill-advised and taboo while still seeing it quoted. I also want to account for the fact that this doll's name has a complex legacy and that it is not universally condemned by the people it applies to, in which case there could be people who would find total avoidance and censorship unnecessary--and I cannot invalidate that. If you can't continue with my approach here, I do understand, and I encourage you to opt out of this post if you need to, but just know I will not enthusiastically use this language through my discussion. I am not in the position to condone or condemn this doll's name, but I do acknowledge it is broadly ill-advised and treacherous for outsiders and I would never choose such language for the character myself. I just want this discussion of LDD's choices to be direct while also weighting toward sensitivity.

Here, the issue at hand slaps you right in the face: this Series 15 doll is a broad stereotype of the Romani mystic, and it's an archetype that doesn't hold up well today.

The Roma, or Romani people (grammatical usage of the two terms varies depending on who you ask, but I'm erring on "Romani" as the adjectival form) are an ethnic group originating from the Indian subcontinent, associated with a nomadic itinerant history and a lifestyle of traveling entertainment. Different sources provide different pronunciations for "Romani", with "Roh-mah-nee", "Roh-manee", and "Romm-anee" all being cited without apparent consensus. If there is consensus, I'd love to know, but it won't affect written text here.

Historically, the Roma have consistently been oppressed and discriminated against for entirely racist and xenophobic reasons, and the term most outsiders have historically referred to them by, "gypsy", is often seen as an ethnic slur, something outsiders have begun to be more conscious of, but not on a mass scale. Originally (and completely inaccurately) derived from "Egyptian", the term has also given rise to the insulting noun/verb, "gyp", meaning "to swindle" (verb) or "a swindler, or a product or service considered a rip-off" (noun). This word has now been more recognized for the bigoted language it contains and can be read as an anti-Roma microaggression, intentional or not. It's unsurprising the word "gypsy" has become a slur to many. 

For some groups or establishments of Roma, the term is embraced, but I think it might be comparable to American Native groups calling themselves Indians--they're well within their right to do so, but such terminology should not be used as an assumed label by outsiders. I can't blanket-condemn the word, because I've read the Roma diaspora has differing opinions about it (as is their right), I've seen someone claiming to be from the diaspora who offered "the pass" to use the word, and certain Roma organizations title themselves with the term, but even though quoting it as a sensitivity-focused outsider is a controversial decision in its own right, quoting is as far as I go. I'm certainly in no position to advocate its use. Any Roma may call themselves Gypsies, but for respectful reference and professional purposes, that should be avoided by outsiders. I avoid the word entirely in normal vernacular because it's simply not for me to say. Even if I got "the pass" from someone Romani, that person's permission wouldn't be universal and speak for all Romani people. I use the word for the purpose of quotation here, because LDD, in the making of Series 15, were like many people of the time and had no qualms about it. I would be shocked if one of this doll's designers had Roma heritage and substantial cultural connection that would give the name a pass. I'd back off a bit if I believed that was the case, but I truly don't. 

But oh my god, seriously? Even operating under the incorrect framework that "Gypsy" was a harmless uncontroversial demonym...there was still no better name for this character that...named her like a character with a theme? LDD got Macumba's name wrong for his Haitian Vodou theme, but they didn't name him "Haitian". None of the Dia de Muertos LDDs are just named a form of "Mexican", even if Santeria's name is off-base in the same way as Macumba's. But here, they couldn't pull out a well-worn "Madame Fortuna"? No "Esmeralda" if we wanted to get literary? (Then again, Victor Hugo's originating Esmeralda was a white woman kidnapped as a child by the Roma, a very damaging narrative stereotype.) Even just "Emerald" would be a beautiful name that suited the doll's costume and loosely invokes the literary character. Or maybe, you know, another option that a Romani woman would be realistically named. 

I don't know. It's very telling to me, the way this doll was named. It's as if the inaccurate and often insulting outsider name for her ethnic group was her theme in the eyes of the designers, when something related to magic or fortunes would be more appropriate and less painful. She'd still not be a great idea for a Romani character, but holy geez.

In some way, LDD Gypsy could be explained by widespread cultural ignorance in her time, before the narrative shifted (and it still hasn't on a mass scale, so there are many even today who would see no issue with this doll). Romani history and discrimination also aren't prominent talking points in the U.S., where the Roma population is less recognized as an actual separate ethnic group subject to persecution because it's not so close to home...and the chances of that discussion seem to be getting even further away than they've ever been under the ideal of "education" the government wants to enforce. In Europe today, I've heard the anti-Roma bigotry is still both active and passively endemic at the same time. But the doll being from an American brand or being of its time doesn't purify its depiction.

Romani people are very commonly associated with psychics and fortune-telling, possibly out of a mix of Romani performers genuinely having a past of making a living with psychic reading performances (predominantly, palmistry, a trade they could perform anywhere with just themselves and another person being required), and the power in using the "other" as a more mystical figure, which you see all over the place. Stories by and for a White audience love to explain spiritual supernatural stuff through foreigners or underrepresented outsiders because magic isn't part of typical culture for that demographic, so the story must explain magic to come from somewhere else. It comes from China. From Russia. From India. From Black people and their "voodoo" (or Hoodoo if the story is a little more researched; see The Skeleton Key). Magic also comes from Native American spirituality (maybe they'll be specific about which culture, maybe not). Or from the Roma. There are so many examples of this foreign-magic-for-white-people narrative trend. 

See also: The Great Zombini, LDD's magician, who reflects the performing trend of wearing a turban for exotic mystical theming rather than cultural authenticity. 

The archetypal fortune teller is classically a Roma character or someone co-opting a Romani style, with beads, head scarves, curly hair, gold coins, and flowy outfits being visual traits that recur. We also get the narrative stereotype of the "gypsy curse", where a legit Romani mystic has the power to magically curse somebody who offends her (she's pretty much always a woman). Depending on the narrative purpose of the curse, this can create the unfortunate reads that either Romani people are scary and dangerous to White majority outsiders, or else, if they curse to teach the protagonist a lesson, that they only have a purpose in fiction to be the "other" supporting character whose actions solely influence the personal growth of a protagonist who is not Romani. This magical-Roma archetype is everywhere in fiction, and it's othering because there's never any other Roma who have grounded non-mystical portrayals around them. Anybody could fill the role of a psychic character. White people were all over the stuff during the spiritualism craze of the Victorian era, but that's apparently not exotic or "authentic" enough for a story. 

So LDD Gypsy is a straightforward cultural stereotype named for a word that today, best practice is to treat as unacceptable. I can't be as lenient with her as I can with Macumba, because Macumba's name is factually off-base, but it doesn't hit as a slur. While it's arguable Haitians are primarily depicted as and othered as voodoo practitioners in outsider media in the same way Romani people are primarily depicted as fortune-tellers, I doubt there was much research or authenticity put into this Series 15 doll. Macumba's design can easily be identified in Vodou tradition with his concrete recognizable basis in the iconography of Vodou deity Baron Samedi. This doll just feels like a costume of a mystic with no specificity to historical Romani practices. 

Some fans have reportedly taken to calling the doll Fortune instead to avoid using a slur, and that's a definite aesthetic improvement...but I'm not fully sure that makes a difference. As with censoring, changing the name doesn't fix her concept, and even with the best intentions, using a different name could feel dishonest. I completely understand the impulse to avoid using a word that perpetuates harm. The G-word isn't nice to use. Choosing another address for the doll is also a valuable signal of dissent toward an offensive choice, and believe me, I'm fully on team "dislike the official name" here...but is choosing a different name not also in some way a form of making it easier for you to experience the doll when she doesn't deserve that? At worst, swapping out the official name could be a balm to let you uncritically enjoy the rest of the doll and feel better about doing so, even though her problems aren't just in the name. The name is her worst problem, but it's not the end of it. 

Maybe there are Romani LDD fans out there who like the doll as a portrait of them except for her name, and I think that's within their rights, but I haven't heard proof of that particular perspective if it's out there. I'm not sure non-Roma fans are quite the right people to say the doll is all fine except for the name, though.

Look, I am not qualified to tell anybody to use the name this doll was given. If a universally-accepted arbiter on the matter could exist, it would not be me. But in discussing this toy and her context, I'd personally rather use the bad name when necessary, in the spirit of accurate quotation, because it deserves to be acknowledged openly that this doll is iffy at the least, and that the offensive name is honestly what was used. You do not need to agree with this approach; just take me at my word that I personally find this the most honest way to discuss the topic and that I am doing my best to be sensitive while weighing that in. Again: every time the word is being typed here, it is a reflection and transcription of concerning terminology used by others which I do not support.

You can tell I'm nervous about a topic when I write so much on it. I hope my intentions are clear. Now onto the doll herself. 

Series 15 is themed on a séance ritual, with each doll having a piece of a human-size spirit board you can assemble to play with. The cast is still pretty eclectic despite the theme gimmick--there's mystic Gypsy, vaguely retro girl Flamingo, altar boy Judas, Countess Bathory (based on the historical alleged aristocratic serial killer), and Death him/itself, in the form of a classic skeletal grim reaper. The four human dolls each have a rolled-up quadrant of the full board, depicting themselves drawn in the corner, while Death has a plastic planchette pointer which the spirits (or ideomotor effect) are supposed to move over the letters to spell messages. Death makes sense as the face of the series, and Gypsy fits stereotypically but thematically as well due to the idea of contacting spirits through a medium (the board). The other three dolls don't have anything particular to do with the gimmick. I guess Bathory as the Blood Countess of legend contributed to a lot of death and she would be a spirit to contact from the other side, Judas as an evil church boy would be attracted to a sinful spirit game, and Flamingo...honestly, I don't even know what her deal is. She's so close to great, but her hair color and style just don't complete her right for me. That doll feels unfocused. She's one of several LDDs who would have benefited from blonde hair, or else maybe she'd have done better with a short wavy bob in any color. 

I'd consider Series 15 a "variety" series in terms of its disparate cast, but its overarching collection gimmick and chipboard branding still makes it part of the "themed" side of LDD series. Series 15 is also just one of two where none of the characters have any specialty sculpts, unless you count Death's gripping hand. All of the dolls have the standard LDD face sculpt without gory detail or screaming or body gore sculpts, something only repeated afterward by Series 20. Every other series has screams or bumpy faces or horns or torn cheeks or body gore or some other unique what-have-you for at least one of the dolls' sculpts. (Series 35 counts because horned Sin is in the pool of Resurrection-style mystery dolls that occupy the "fifth doll" slot in the series.) 

Series 15 had a variant set where the colors of outfits changed around. Death, Flamingo, and Gypsy all got color changes which pushed their outfits more into tones on the red spectrum, while Bathory, in one of the coolest uses of a variant, is identical to her main but missing the blood coating, and Judas is instead a little more black-toned with the red and black color balance of the main swapping toward the black. Variant Gypsy has popped up cheaper than the main at times, but I vastly prefer the teal costume of the main, which is much more distinct in the LDD cast. At the time I got my copy, the main was cheaper on the low end, so I'd advise that her price range for either version falls in the $40-50 range and that higher offerings, unless they become the new baseline, are too much.

The Series 15 chipboards have a flat-edged cut and are fittingly decorated to look like spirit boards. Ouija is a trademark owned by Hasbro despite being the most famous name for the game, so "spirit board" is an appropriate term for the piece depicted outside of Hasbro's hands. ("Ouija" is reportedly a result of a medium asking the board to name itself during a session, with those letters being spelled out. I don't believe in this phenomenon myself, but the medium probably did, and it's a fun story that makes for great marketing.)

The series 15 boards don't name their series, making this a rare themed series not to identify itself by a number or title on the packaging. Other cases I've encountered include Series 6 (6 dolls, six pets, also a Halloween aesthetic) and Series 32 (vintage Halloween). 

The poem says:

Gypsy comes with misfortune

And some deadly spells

Purchase of this doll

Will surely bring you to hell

...well, LDD said it, not me. But my vibe of "I'm going to hell for buying this doll" comes from a very different place than they were suggesting. I don't feel magically doomed. I just feel morally weird about her subject matter!

Here's an alternative.

The outcast of her family

Who darkness seemed to hound

She'd gone too deep to flee the spell

That put her in the ground

The character died on December 3, 1949.

This death date is the same as (apparently non-Romani) Russian actress Maria Ouspenskaya, who played Maleva, a Romani woman with supernatural werewolf knowledge in the classic Universal horror films The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. The depiction of the Roma is rough and dated as would be expected, but they get an atypical amount of respect and defense within the script. I can't confirm if their presence had anything to do with the intentional Holocaust subtext of the werewolf curse and the supernatural marking of victims, which appeared to be the product of a Jewish lens only. Romani people were among the groups explicitly targeted and murdered by the Nazis, and this being invoked by The Wolf Man's lens could be poignant if intentional. I think it still could be poignant even if it's purely by accident. In the film, Maleva's son was the originating werewolf in the plot who turns the main character Larry Talbot at the will of his curse, and from then, Maleva tries to help him, so...maybe? 

Maria Ouspenskaya as Maleva in The Wolf Man (1941).

I suppose this doll's reference to Ouspenskaya can also be extrapolated to get a better picture of LDD Gypsy's background, and she could be interpreted as a Slavic Roma woman as a result. I'll admit that gives me the slightest amount of superficial kinship with her if I take that to be the case, despite me not being very culturally Russian at all, and zero-percent culturally Romani.

And while it doesn't make it correct, this character's placement in 1949 and reference to a film character of the time is slightly better framing for why LDD Gypsy is named as such, because that was absolutely the practice for Romani characters in fiction and art at the time--they were typically just credited as nameless "gypsies". LDD often imitates retro dolls on a literal sense, and were the LDD actually made during her time of death, that's what she'd have been called then. Again, an actual name would give her more dignity, and historical authenticity by way of ethnic ignorance doesn't hold water for a collectible doll character in an unserious horror universe, but putting her into her context...at the time she was made and at the time the doll is deliberately invoking, "Roma" never entered the outsider language describing her culture in mainstream media. You can't change history.

Here's her certificate poem:

Moving around the fire

Tambourine in hand

Dancing to the rhythm

Her feet upon the sand

Gypsy did not feel this spell

As it stopped the dance

Her heart exploded in her chest

She never had a chance.

Neither of these poems explicitly say the character was a fortune-teller, but they do describe her dealing in spells and magic. She is described as having a tambourine the doll does not. Tambourines are often associated with Romani performers, who did historically perform with them, and also used them as collection dishes for tips from the audience. LDD Gypsy being killed by magic is mysterious and welcomely unusual. We don't know what was coming for her or why, but it almost feels like an inversion of the "gypsy curse" trope because she's not said to have hexed anyone and instead something found her instead. As such, her story is unclear, but it almost seems to step away from and flip a tired offensive narrative device. I'm not giving Mezco plaudits for that, but it could have been worse.

She moved around the fire

With her tambourine in hand

She struck a frenzied rhythm 

While her feet stirred up the sand

She knew not what magic moved her

She fought against the trance

But her heart gave out and failed her

She never had a chance

This doll's portion of the spirit board is rolled up and is loose behind her doll tray inside the coffin. Making a usable "build-a-board" for humans kind of necessitated it being a rolled piece like this.

I had assumed this piece was rolled glossy poster paper, which I thought was really cheap and poorly-designed because it would have to be manually flattened by the users and would be too flimsy. But I was wrong. This is actually a non-adhesive plastic cling decal rolled around a stiffer rolled piece, and it peels off and can spread flat onto a surface for easy use! 

If you have a bare table or a board, you can lay all four pieces in alignment and they'll be totally flat, while being able to roll them back onto their tubes and repack them into their owners' coffins. It's kind of like a friends' party gathering where everybody brings a piece of the board and then takes it back home at the end of the night!

I'm in trouble. Flamingo and Judas, remind me that I don't adore you!

I thought LDD had done something really cheap and stupid for their spirit board gimmick, but they actually did something really brilliant. I underestimated it. Reusable cling decals that spread flat and assemble is the perfect way to have done this, short of rigid board pieces which wouldn't fit in the coffin. If I collected all of Series 15, I'd be unsure whether to permanently adhere the pieces assembled onto a board or not. I wouldn't need to, but it'd be an option.

As mentioned, each doll with a piece of the board has a character portrait in their corner. This is a very different art style from the Series 1-4 or Series 8 illustrations which depict the characters as childlike dolls. Here, they have more grown proportions, and actually, the art style is pretty similar to the Wave 1 Fashion Victims...just without blow-up boobies.

Fashion Victims Sadie's face: the most family-friendly part of her doll.

There are multiple characters who never got subjected to the Fashion Victims line who I'm very happy for, but honestly, LDD Gypsy may be the biggest relief for never appearing there. That would be intensely grotesque and offensively fetishistic for such an ethnicized character, and whatever taste or dignity the S15 doll may have would be utterly nullified by a porn-adjacent doll.

(I really want to make the Fashion Victims the next uncomfortable blog topic from LDD, but they are expensive and one I want is hard to find!)

Here's the doll unboxed. She seemed a little grimy and had black curly fibers clinging on the side of her face from some unknown origin. I'd also encountered them on my variant Dahlia. They later wiped and washed off easily.

While Gypsy is a Roma stereotype, her costume doesn't seem to make any blatant, offensive errors in its depiction..at least, not from what I read and saw in my efforts to inform myself. All of the traits of her costume seem derived from real or historically documented examples of traditional Romani clothing, so from what information I found, I'm not in the position to criticize her outfit as incorrect. Sure, it's a narrow depiction of Roma culture, but the doll is also aiming for a traditional/historical lens and with that lens, it seems okay. Like with Macumba, I'm out of my depth, and I'm equally in no position to praise it as correct, but there wasn't apparent evidence of the clothing being very wrong on either doll. If anything, LDD Gypsy's costume is simplified, with fewer colors, textures and fabrics than one might expect, but this is likely in service of a darker design and moody tone, and that might be passable as stylized adaptation and a production-budget measure.

The costume starts up top with a head scarf tied around the scalp in what could be compared to a bandanna style. Scarves worn like this are common in traditional Roma outfits and depictions, so it seems to check out. The piece on the doll is a stretchy sheer black material with a silver sparkly chain embroidery pattern in alternating lines of different "link" sizes all throughout, and it looks like a legitimate scarf knot has shaped it so it's tied like the real thing.

Captain Bonney's bandanna piece, made before Gypsy, faked the similar shaping by being sewn on a seam with a tie only on the corner, but her scarf was also a much thicker denim fabric.

The scarf came held onto the head with an elastic band that went over the head, behind the knot, and under the doll's chin, but this is just for packaging and it was already disintegrated.

The scarf just lifts off the top of the head, and it can be placed back on easily, fitting pretty snug. While it seems possible to untie the scarf, you'd never need to, nor do I imagine one wanting to when that would make things harder.

The doll's hair is black, which is typical for depictions of Romani people and phenotypically common in the diaspora, and her style has thin flat bangs on the forehead with a slightly choppy cut that feels pretty realistic. The bangs are a little messy, but they lay flat and have good coverage, and are pretty impressive for this moment in LDD, which was a fair bit before straight bangs were being produced consistently like this. A lot of later LDD bangs were consistently thick and flat, but that took time to achieve.

You can't see from the front, but the rest of the hair hangs down to her waist and is woven into a thin braid behind her back.

Gypsy was not the first LDD with braided hair, but she was my personal first braided LDD (I got her before Hazel and Hattie) and was the first of two in the line with a single braid behind the back--all others have had twin braids on the sides. The Hopping Vampire in Series 27 after had similar hair, emulating Chinese Qing Dynasty hairstyling, sans bangs and with a significantly higher hairline. I believe those are the only two LDDs with a single braid.

The braid elastic was clearly on its last breath, and it fell apart on its own without touching it after a day or so. I replaced the tie with black cord that blends in perfectly.

One thing slightly unusual about this doll is how youthful her design is. Typically, the Romani fortune-teller archetype is elderly or middle-aged. Possibly another unusual thing is how pale she is, though Romani people do not have a universal skintone and are not all visually in the "brown" range. I think LDD Gypsy's stark white is acceptable pallor and stylization...but it can still feel telling of LDD just not being interested in depicting darker skintones whatsoever. Only Macumba and LDD Presents' animated Gomez Addams are both explicitly non-White and also have darker human flesh tones. Demonique is an optical mess to parse out who I'd like to tackle next time. None of the Mexican dolls from Series 20 or Calavera are darker than White tones, Wurm in Series 30 was inspired by a darker-skinned Guyanese man but is given a fantasy green color, and even all of the dolls who are Asian or are possibly Asian-coded are all stylized fantasy skintones rather than flesh colors. At a certain point, it becomes a choice to not depict Black, Brown, or Asian people, or to not ever depict them with human colors. That really sucks and it's a horrible pattern, regardless of awareness or intent on the part of the designers.

This doll's face paint is pretty characterful. Her eyebrows are unevenly quirked in the smirking "DreamWorks" style, but this doll is neither the first nor last to have this brow graphic style. The first in the brand would have been Hattie of the conjoined twins, while Ezekiel in Series 12 and Beltane in Series 26 have a mirrored quirked brow setup and Andras in Series 24 matches Gypsy and Hattie's brows. None of these dolls' brows seem like direct graphic copies, so stencils maybe wouldn't have been used, but they're all doing the very same thing. LDD directly reusing certain graphic elements in the faceups has happened elsewhere with dolls like Died and Penny, who share a blood-trail paint shape cascading down their faces. There's another design-graphic reuse I spotted which is more atypical because a 2D paint job was adapted to a unique 3D sculpt in the same pattern--Scary Tales Beast's unique scarred, stapled face sculpt visibly adapts the outlines of his scar pattern from all-painted Calico's patchwork face. 

Not an exact match, but a clear lift.

Gypsy's eyes are very slightly almond-shaped at the corners and are heterochromic, with her right eye being yellow outlined by red, and her left eye being pale blue with a darker outline. It's an interesting touch, perhaps intended to signify she is magical and in touch with the supernatural. Her eyes have lashes on the upper edge, and her eyes and mouth alike are smudged with periwinkle shading. Her eyes have a darker maroon layer of shading within that, which matches her lip color. The smudging around the mouth makes her look dead...or like she's eaten some blueberry pie.

In her ears, the doll has two large golden metal hoop earrings pierced through the vinyl of her head.

The earrings are matched, but the piercing on her right side seems a little off, with the earring feeling like it hangs less "straight down" against her head. LDDs with earrings are uncommon, and Gypsy's are the largest among the characters who have had them. Like other LDDs with earrings, these are not designed to come out.

Her dress is four pieces, though it's made to look like two.

Her costume is the most gorgeous jewel-toned greenish teal with a bit of black, and it stands out massively as a beautiful color seen basically nowhere else in LDD. The upper half with the velvet fabric inaccurately photographs much bluer than the dress, so I had to edit the pictures to better reflect their appearance to the eye.

The top half of the costume is velvet pieces imitating an off-the-shoulder cropped blouse with puffy sleeves. I don't think this is the fabric I'd associate with this clothing style, nor the color (white and cotton are more typical), but the visual is pretty and it feels luxurious and warm. The sleeves are evidently meant to look like the same article as the top, going off the fabric and the illustrated portrait on the spirit board, but they are fully detached pieces.

The sleeves are gathered at multiple points with elastic to puff them, and the cuff is wide around the hand and covers part of it. This may be a consequence of aging elastic loosening, because it looks like these sleeves were supposed to be tighter around the wrist. While the detached sleeves don't totally sell the shoulderless-blouse look, they do likely offer the doll more arm mobility than pieces sewn to the side of the top would. Fully-detached sleeves also aren't completely unheard of for Romani dress, though I'll grant these festival dancers' costumes are a different aesthetic altogether and seem like an outlier:

The actual bodice of the doll costume is functionally a tube top-- no straps. It's two segments of different velvets with the top having a slight sweetheart neckline, and it velcros in the back. It's a pretty tight fit and wants to spring open.

It's cropped above the navel, and the skirt can sit low to expose her midriff, though I prefer it pulled up to meet the top. 

The skirt is the prettiest piece of the costume, looking splendid just with a lace fabric dyed in an emerald tone.

I think the lace is a fair shorthand for the more layered and textured skirts one thinks of for Romani clothing, and the volume and length of the skirt seems appropriate.

Around the waist, there's a belt sash sewn to the skirt, made of the same material as the scarf. It's tied in a knot in back, and the skirt can slide off without untying it...

...but because the velcro closure is under the belt, it's best to untie the sash first at the back. The belt is attached all around the front and sides, and the loose portion of the belt is just at the back.

Because the lace is not opaque, there's a simple black cotton petticoat layered under it to complete the skirt and define the pattern more. It's sewn together at the back like most layered doll skirts.

Gypsy is a barefoot doll, which I suppose is justified by her poem discussing her dying during a dance in the sand around a fire, presumably at a traveling camp, but this is not necessarily typical for Romani dress, where shoes and slippers do exist and are worn. I think she could have used the sandal sculpt, even in a special color of the green of her outfit, or else she could have worn a unique fabric slipper. At least on this copy, though, her bare feet offer better standing stability than fabric shoes would. 

Her body has some stains.

Her hips were not moving when I tried them, so I quickly let go. I took her downstairs to wash her vinyl and then heated up her hips to make them mobile, which was successful. She's of the era where the hip pegs are likely to snap rather than twisting out of the body if you keep trying to move a stuck leg, so I had to make sure that wouldn't happen.

Here she is with Macumba featured in part 1.

There are close parallels, with both being named poorly in non-representative ways, and both being lone depictions of an ethnic or racial or cultural demographic that has been pigeonholed into mysticism and spooky otherness in outsider fiction. Each has mitigating factors. Macumba is visibly based on Haitian Vodou and iconography of the spirit deity Baron Samedi, while Gypsy's costume seems like a fair enough historical representation and she loosely cites a real depiction of Romani in horror via The Wolf Man, which was itself a fairly positive portrayal. But both are let down by their inaccuracies and stereotyping, and Gypsy lands a bit worse in respects, particularly because her concept and visual design are less specific and her ill-advised name counts as an ethnic slur and carries painful tones while Macumba's is just factually off-base.

To photograph the doll, I started with a bluish wood-design paper backdrop.

Then I hung a red curtain and some gold cord, all staged on a patterned rug to depict a fortune-teller's den and made a small table. I had a desktop crystal ball toy with a light and a touch sensor (it plays "Magic 8 Ball"-style fortunes as audio at the same time) and I wanted to stage the doll with it. The crystal ball does have a history in Romani fortune-telling as well as palmistry, so, while understanding this is still a very narrow fantasy narrative, it's not a BS association. The red dot on the base in some of these pictures is the touch sensor.

 

Then I brought Agatha in for a palm reading. Agatha was my choice specifically because I had used my second copy of her as a dummy body to test if I could sever a Living Dead Dolls hand and reaffix it seamlessly with rotation to face upward.

Peggy Goo was the doll who got the surgery I was testing here. I was doing this back in January before I thought I'd be getting Peggy! The test worked pretty well, and as a bonus, I now had an upward-facing palm that could be read by the fortune-teller. I just swapped it onto my original Agatha to wear for these photos because I knew she matched it.

I think an upward-facing hand with a painted palmistry diagram could have been an awesome feature for Gypsy to have had, or even just a diagram hidden on the underside of a normal hand. Or the pentagram that appears on the palms of werewolf targets in The Wolf Man if you want to root her further in a specific existing work, though I know the optics of a Romani doll with a pentagram on her hand would be bad without knowing the context of that film. (The symbol's use there was subtextually a comparison to the Star of David labeling Jewish people imprisoned by Nazis.)

She was having trouble providing a palm reading for Agatha, though.

"I'm sorry, my friend, but...I see so many cracks spread across your porcelain skin, intertwined with the lines. I cannot read this hand.
But you are the tea woman, are you not? How soon can you make a cup?"

"There you are, right away."
"It looks divine."
"It ought to be."

"Exquisite, indeed...the malice courses through each sip, and the eyeballs truly add a special something. You make it hard to save enough to swirl the leaves."
"Why, thank you."

"Ah. The dregs...are unusually precise. It must be your affinity for the tea. They've formed the definite shape of a dead flamingo...and they must not be referring to my séance-group acquaintance of that name, unless you know her?"
"No, madam. I know what's meant by that. A pink-feathered beast-- it's my mistress of the house! Her, coming to ill...well, that cheers me more than anything in the world."

I only brought Agatha in to wear the upward-facing hand, but then the obvious tea-reading twist landed in my mind and it worked perfectly. I was halfway through packing up the shoot before I realized and had to restage it and grab the tea things!

Then I restaged the ball scene once I found a plastic capsule to replace the ball with. I wanted a ball containing an image in-camera--the visage of Death, played by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come's LDD Minis head! Once I had the idea of using the Mini head, I couldn't resist, and the visual effect was exciting. The crystal ball base is the same electronic sensor toy, just with the capsule replacing the frosted crystal sphere over the light. The ball also has some cotton inside to stuff it and keep the head positioned as well as catching the lighting and diffusing it inside the ball.

This visual looks so so good, and digital edits of the skull in the ball wouldn't have nearly the amount of wonder and charm as doing it in-camera like this. There's more of a "how did this get taken?" awe at a photo like this, knowing it's all in-camera. I was deeply reminded of the Madame Leota visual effect in the Haunted Mansion rides at Disney parks, where the prop is a mannequin head in a ball with video footage projected on it, but lighting and a good wig make her a magical talking woman in the crystal's ethereal mist. The best fake crystal balls are actual props inside a clear shell with great lighting. Frosted balls with internal projections or illumination are cute, but this is what a magic crystal ball should look like. A dimensional figure inside makes all the difference.

There's also a fun resonance here, because Death is the "master" of Series 15's morbid séance, so it makes sense for Gypsy to have brought him forth in visions during her own practice.

You already know this crystal is a small doll head in a capsule with cotton...but the biggest trick here is that the perfect capsule I was able to find...is an egg!

Not by necessity; I'd have used a sphere if I could find one, but the capsule I found on hand already was an Easter egg, and I figured rightly that I could just turn it on its side and shoot it so it looked like a sphere. Most spherical capsules I've seen are cloudier and have injection molding marks on their top and bottom, and this egg had a clean bottom edge, so I went with it rather that trying to find and buy something else. The seam on the capsules would have restricted my viable camera angles regardless.

I actually used to be innocently enamored with the mystic-Roma archetype before I realized its issues. I loved the Folkmanis fortune-teller puppet I got as a kid, and sought out the LEGO Minifigures Fortune Teller character, who almost certainly wouldn't be made now.

The puppet's crystal ball was a removable velcro piece. She had a male counterpart who was a fiddler. I had both, but he left before she did. I no longer have either, and haven't for years.

I still have this minifigure, but was too lazy to dig her out of my collection.

I'm not admitting this as some kind of pretentious flagellating atonement ritual where I perform growth and reject the Living Dead Doll today and impress you with my wondrous enlightenment. I'm just relating that the media I grew up with and the perspective I had as a kid made me see no problem with this representation in the past, and I found positive angles to it then. I loved female characters who were magical, wise, and powerful when I was a kid, and Roma fortune-teller roles filled that niche for me. I innocently enjoyed the archetype and saw the beauty in the traditional(ish) costume depicted while having awe and respect for magical authority figures. And to that effect, I do in some way see LDD Gypsy as a very pretty doll with personality and a beautiful costume that doesn't (to my knowledge) seem horribly inaccurate. But it's awkward, because to enjoy the role of the mystic Roma or to appreciate LDD Gypsy is also to embrace a distorted narrative packaged by outsiders and to pigeonhole a real ethnic group who are limited by such depictions. It's a different scenario for me than my love of witches. Catching on to the Halloween witch's historical influence from antisemitism has made me more cautious about the archetype, but there's also been a drastic shift from historical hate to modern innocence, where the witch archetype has become fully fantastical and witches in fiction today don't come across as hate symbols and are often celebrated and explored as complex figures (even as victims of unjust discrimination) or are just lighthearted spooks. The witch is too big and broad and changed in culture today to be inherently uncomfortable or unsupportable to me, but the Roma mystic is still inextricable from...well, the Roma. And LDD Gypsy makes no pretense she's anything but a narrow depiction of them. 

Her name slaps you right in the face with it.

Dollhouse Madhouse: Sybil

Such a cool doll production-wise, but such an iffy subject. Sybil is from Series 4 and depicts a stereotypically insane asylum prisoner in a straitjacket. The visual and engineering of the doll is excellent for reasons I'll get into...but the concept just feels so off. People with mental or neurological disorders have long been stereotyped as frightening and dangerous and bizarre, and while neurotypical people can be unsettled by witnessing behavior that's detached and unfamiliar, realistically, Sybil would have been a victim of the system, where her mental illness wouldn't be properly understood or sufficiently treated. Asylums, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals had historically been a way for people to offload difficult relatives or unhoused people and forget about them, while the people in question would suffer greatly where they were placed. Then asylums became attractions for people to gawk at the mentally ill and assert a sense of superiority. I feel like there's a way to use the asylum patient sympathetically and frame the horror as the conditions they're living in, but it almost always winds up being the patient/inmate treated as a freak with a deficit of self-awareness on the part of the work.

I understand that the insane patient in the straitjacket was a pretty common edgy and sometimes countercultural icon at the time, with it often being a way for a singer or artist to portray themselves as misunderstood and unpredictable and oppositional to society...so basically before we saw just how embarrassing that framing could get in the wave of "the Joker is just like me" edgelords. But that countercultural madman image, while coming so close to demonstrating productive empathy for outcasts by using the image as a metaphor for being misunderstood, still ends up firing strays at mentally ill people all for a self-serving presentation making it all about whoever is using the metaphor. Still, Sybil is a fascinating doll just on a production level, and out of this batch of uncomfortable dolls, she's the one with the most collectible novelty merit in the entire group of this roundup, doing something no other LDD ever did. The previous group I selected had more collectible novelty across the board. I also confess to really liking her character design on an aesthetic level despite its optical/moral problems. 

My copy of Sybil was unsealed but otherwise untouched, wired inside her coffin.

Sybil's chipboard art matches the doll closely. While other doll art in Series 1-4 looks more freehand due to the arm posing the real dolls can't match, you could tell me this one was a tracing because the arms are bound just like the doll's.

The poem says:

Strapped in a straight jacket [sic]

With a collar and chain

Pray that this is enough

to keep Sybil restrained.

And a rewrite.

A straitjacket, collar and long metal chain

And treatments as far as removing her brain

Curing her, killing her, keeping restrained?

All of these efforts have ended in vain

Sybil died on December 21, 1978 at 7:41 AM.

The only possible thematic connection I could find for the date was that this was when serial killer John Wayne Gacy (previously referenced by LDD in Series 3's Schitzo the clown, another uncomfortable contender,) was arrested. Maybe Sybil was a serial killer?

The poem says:

Locked away forever insane

The doctors came and removed her brain

She died on the table by morning light

Now in search of a mind she wanders the night

"Removing her brain" sounds like an exaggerated equivalent to lobotomy, a terrible neuro"surgical" procedure which severed people's brain tissue connections in the attempt to make psychological/neurological disorders cease to manifest. Victims of the procedure were typically irreversibly altered, with major loss of cognitive function or personality. Regardless of whether Sybil suffered lobotomy or if her full brain was cartoonishly plucked out, her mental state should trend toward vacancy rather than erratic behavior or consciousness, making the use of the straitjacket seem at odds with her story. Straitjackets are implemented to prevent the wearer from harming themselves or others while still theoretically being more humane by letting the wearer walk freely. Someone with a massive loss of brain function might not require one. That could lend some agency back to the character, as if supernatural means have restored Sybil's consciousness and rendered her operation null after she came back to life, making her a vengeful menace upon those who wronged her, and a powerful force who the jacket would be useful to restrain. I like to think Sybil's somehow "back" in undeath, if not more ordered than she was before the procedure. She may be "mad" by outside standards, but she has a purpose.

Nobody living could see through her pain

The doctors declared her forever insane

They thought then to end it and took out her brain

But somehow her mind and her life were regained

Arms in a jacket but feet walking free

Sybil now seeks that which only she sees

Living was madness, but death is reprieve

Driven and keen, she has nothing to grieve

Sybil's name to me originally read as some distortion of "Sibyl", the term for a classical oracle, under the idea that perhaps Sybil has gone so mad she's turned prophetic and wiser than the average person if she can be deciphered--itself a problematic idea, let's be clear. Oracle characters have been named Sybil before for the same connotation. 

Turns out, the real answer is more depressing and tasteless. Sybil was the title of a book and adapted film written about Shirley Ardell Mason, a woman purported to have had sixteen alternate personalities and given the pseudonym of Sybil Dorsett in the account of her life. The book did become well-enough known to enter the lexicon for a period, with the name being brought up as a reference to having multiple personalities or being "insane". While the truth of Mason's case as reported in Sybil has been disputed to various degrees due to much unverifiable information, the LDD being named for her in any way feels exploitative. 

I suppose this could be interpreted as the LDD character's backstory--she had very complex dissociative identity disorder which resulted in her institutional commitment and lobotomy. Because why deal with sixteen personalities when you could potentially have zero instead? Not for nothing is the lobotomy considered one of the most horrific and unethical procedures to have ever been practiced and discredited. There's also a misogynist component to the disproportionate amount of female patients committed for undesirable behaviors or symptoms, and the higher proportion of female victims of the procedure, which Sybil ends up invoking. If Sybil's backstory is to be taken as a large DID system and this doll did or does represent a case of plurality, we know nothing about the details therein and only have the one name to refer to and Sybil may as well be a psychologically singular entity now. It's not stated she had DID or alters to refer to. I guess it's up to the owner.

Here's the doll unboxed.

Sybil's hair is effed, and it's meant to be. It's short and wild and would be about shoulder-length if combed and tidy and obeying gravity. I think the wilder, the better on this character. I've seen Sybils more tidied and combed and it just doesn't work for the caricature. 

Nah.

As it is, the rooting is really thin with wide-spaced rows, but it only shows from above or behind, and it's honestly acceptable for the aesthetic. The hair is dynamic and able to be reshaped to a degree.

It's a lot like Bloody Mary's hair later in Series 17. 

I'm not doing a thing to tidy Sybil's hair. It's just how it should be, and I like to think she embraced the madwoman aesthetic after resurrection and finds it rebellious.

Sybil's skintone is a pale flesh color, and her face looks good. 

Sybil is the the first of the three LDD characters with spiraling eyes, with The Great Zombini and Quack following. 

I'd previously thought Sybil and Quack were the only two, having not seen Zombini's face in high resolution until recently. Sybil's eyes feel the most present. Zombini is in a trance and Quack is in a haze, but Sybil? She sees something. Sybil's eye swirls are a little smaller than Quack's, while Zombini is the only one with separate irises and sclerae. Quack's spirals fill the most space. Both Zombini and Quack have red spirals, but Sybil and Quack both share white sclerae with no iris. Quack's spirals have the same center shape as Sybil's, but they terminate on the other side of the swirl so the tails point up. Zombini's spirals are mirrored from left to right, but both he and Sybil's spirals have the tails pointing down. Sybil and Quack's similar smudge eye shading increases the likeness between the two's eyes.

Sybil's eyes are surrounded by black rings and black smudging, and she has quirked harsh thin eyebrows. She's indicated to have vomited by some lime green dribble in the corner of her mouth, which does suggest a lack of consciousness or control, but the rest of her face has enough focus to it that it doesn't feel as dehumanizing as it could. Her eyes may be swirled, but they're also piercing and direct, aided by her eyebrows. 

For a gross aside (and I do apologize), here's Sybil's dribble compared to Jubilee's wheeze.

Sybil's is a flat color and the effect is more runny and liquid. Jubilee's looks a bit more chunky. Ick!

Sybil also has grey smearing dirtying her face, and I don't like how mine has some up to the base of the nose. I wiped part of it off.

Before.

After.

The only aspect of this doll's design that visually genders her is the lips, which are tidily painted dark grey in the effect of lipstick. I think it's the right touch to make her more stylized, and it makes her look more present.

I like Sybil's face a lot for the goth aesthetic. The messy hair and swirly eyes are good, and I think the lime green dribble is the perfect dash of color. The whole doll's coloring is really nice, with the tan jacket, pale flesh, black, white, and green coming together in a grimy but boldly stylized palette. 

Around her neck, Sybil has a studded dog-like collar with a metal chain hanging from it.

The chain hangs to her knees and ends in a ring that could be pulled by an asylum handler or used to secure her to a wall, or even to hang the doll. 

This ring would work much better with a gripping hand, but the LDD hospital staff came before those.

Hanging.

The chain is pristine and is not oxidized unlike the jewelry chains from Rose and Violet or the metal jewelry affixed to Captain Bonney. I wouldn't have expected Sybil's chain to be a metal capable of oxidizing, but LDD had such issues on other dolls and it's been worth reporting on as a result. 

The dog collar is both very alt punk/goth and camp and cartoonishly dehumanizing in the context of asylums, so it's honestly a welcome unreal ridiculous touch to separate Sybil from true tragedy. It also completes the costume well by giving it a tight neck, and balances the black and metal elements.

The collar is made of faux-leather with metal studs and closes around the back of her neck with a quality metal snap of the kind full-size human clothes use. This is a really nice piece!

The collar did stain her neck, but the doll is really completed by it and will always wear it, so I'm not bothered by that.

Sybil's straitjacket is the source of her greatest novelty. The piece looks and works like the real deal. The fabric is a thick canvas-like material stained with reddish patches, and features two buckles with sliding bars--one on the front for the tail of the crotch strap that starts on the back of the jacket, and one on the left enclosed sleeve binding the sleeves together behind her back using the strap on the right sleeve. (The arm buckle ends up on the right side when viewed from the back, but it's from the left sleeve wrapping around.) The straps are faux-leather and the buckles are metal that match her collar.

Okay, but how does this work on this doll? LDD arms aren't typically shaped like this and could never be bound this way.

Standard swivel-era LDD arms modeled by Faith.

Well, it's clear once you spring the arm binding.

Sybil's arms are uniquely made, being cast in a softer vinyl so they can be bent across her torso and held in place by the buckled straps. Undoing the crotch strap in front and pulling it out lets the whole jacket come off so we can get a better look. Because of the crotch strap, the jacket does not open all the way down the back and must slide down Sybil's body to come off. Here's her without the jacket.

Sybil's arms are still crossing over each other because they've been held that way, but even without that, they seem posed a bit differently by the arm mold. The material is not a shiny sticky dust-cling rubber or anything, but it feels less soft and squishy than I expected. The arms are hollow like normal, but the material has a slightly silky, gummy feel to it and the arms aren't so flimsy that trying to turn the shoulder joints just bends the arms instead. I like the feeling of the arms, and the arms have no issues sliding back up the sleeves, unlike some other bendy doll limb plastics which don't easily pull through tight-fitting clothes.

Actually, I think the arms might be silicone instead of vinyl. They're just like the texture of some silicone kitchen tools I have. Maybe they are vinyl, but they match better to silicone in texture and behavior.

It seems like the arms aren't being bent all that much by the jacket thanks to their inherent pose. I wondered if maybe a wire could be threaded through her hollow arms and torso to give them an armature and bend them into poses a stiffer plastic couldn't, but these arms are fairly firm as they are and the way they're molded isn't conducive to folding in a jointed fashion. It would take a pretty strong armature, and I don't think the results would look great. The palms are pierced for accessory pegs per the standard in this time of LDD, even though the arms are nonstandard and the whole point is that Sybil's never going to be holding anything.

I let Sybil's arms hang bare overnight to see what shape they would relax into, and this is where they were the next morning. I didn't expect them to relax much further, and these do seem to be a different arm mold from a typical swivel LDD, with the forearms turned inward more and the palms more parallel to the front of the body and resting over the thigh. The fingers also seem curved in a bit more toward the thumbs.

I could tell these arms weren't going to twist into the shape of a typical LDD arm. 

Because they're softer, the arms pop in and out very easily. Here's the shape alone and demonstrating the flexibility.

So I think I can conclude that Sybil's arms are both cast and molded uniquely for her--they're not just normal arms cast in a softer plastic. That's a double novelty!

In theory, a Return edition of Sybil would have enough arm articulation to have a bound jacket, but I'm not actually sure it would work as well as or better than the S4 doll. The arms wouldn't be able to be pulled tighter when threading the strap through the buckle, so the strap would have to be a little longer and able to thread through the buckle without putting the arms in tension. A Return Sybil might have to do what other later Sybils did and just have loose arms with extra-extra long trailing sleeves.

Re-binding the jacket isn't too tricky. The hardest part is sliding the bars of the buckles so the straps can wrap around them, but the sliding bars overall make the threading through the buckle much easier. Sybil's arms can be bound with either one on top. She comes with her left arm crossed over her right, but the other way works too. 

I think if they had ever dared Resurrect Vincent Vaude (who is one of the least beloved LDDs), they could have put him in a straitjacket and repeated this manufacturing trick somehow on the ball-joint body. The straitjacket is an escape-act staple, after all. So I did it myself on my own Vincent by putting Sybil's arms and jacket on him. This was a big pain! I think his costuming made the arm binding much harder to close with him wearing the arms and jacket.

Sybil's pants are black faux-leather like the rest of her accents and they're fairly baggy and close with velcro in the front.

I was actually faintly dreading handling Sybil in 2025 because I've been trained to expect doll leather to peel and flake into a sticky, nasty mess of microplastics all over my fingertips. Captain Bonney is shedding from her belt and pants. Vinyl-coated shiny fabric is also generally doomed. Lust in this very post was a doll I knew would cease to hold her value once unboxed, thanks to her vinyl fabric, and I was sure Sybil was just the same with her faux-leather.

Sybil is absolutely, entirely spotless after 23 years. 

Her faux-leather, and I do believe it's faux, is completely pristine without the slightest indication of rubbing, wear, peeling, or flaking, not even on her straps or collar. And she wasn't even sealed, while the Cap'n was! There's no telling what may yet happen to her, but I feel like her material is much higher quality for what it is. It doesn't feel nearly as thin as Bonney's faux-leather coating. This material feels solid and sturdy and though it cannot be guaranteed, I am not scared for its future right now. Sybil's costume is in perfect condition and by now, after this long, that's very encouraging. I feel like Sybil has given me a great gift by being so pristine, and that admittedly will be biasing me toward her as a doll. This costume would have been very well-made in 2002, but that description only becomes cemented when it remains so. This has remained a good costume, with flying colors. I'm open to revising my opinion if the outfit does start to break down in my possession, as maybe the care for the doll was immaculate before and protected her. I'm not taking this perfection for granted lest it fall away, but I'm very impressed with the doll right now. 

Sybil is a barefoot doll. Her last detail is gross smeary reddish paint on her feet to make them look dirty and/or injured.

Sybil was Resurrected right out of the gate in Resurrection I, with her two designs being mostly just palette swaps. The main edition had basically the same colors as S4 Sybil, but her head is bald and painted to look shaved with a brain surgery scar, one of her eyes is black with a white pupil, her spiraling eye has inverted colors from S4, she's wearing a Hannibal-esque bite mask, and her uniform is a footie jumpsuit with a ribbed texture and extremely long straitjacket arms which are unbound and do not fasten.

Reminds me of Renfield's restraints in the film Bram Stoker's Dracula.

I'm not sure if the mask is the same mold used for Little Bo Creep.

There is no shocker under her mask--her mouth is painted similarly to S4.

Photo credit to Valley of the Living Dead Dolls on Facebook.

This doll is pretty interesting and fits well with Series 4 as a more haunting, artsy take on the character, though you could argue she looks even more victimized, less present, and less stylistic. Only her wacky bodysuit is exceptionally weird and fantastical. There's a lot of fun things you could do with those long sleeves for display. If she was ever sold for less than $400, I'd consider getting her, but that's a total pipe dream for anybody in Res I.

The variant doll has grimier colors, a bigger scar, and eyebrows. I'm not sure how different the Res Sybil skintones are in person; the archive portrait of the variant may have distorted lighting on her. I haven't seen a photo of her unmasked, but I don't expect a lot different. From pictures of her mask slipping in the coffin, she looks to have similar paint.

Sybil also appeared as a Mini recreating the S4 doll, and I was curious just how she managed to replicate the outfit so precisely. While the Minis matching the bigs is to be expected, Sybil is an atypical big! I found a complete copy with her collar to investigate, so here's a small diversion.

Minis Sybil

This is one of the harder Minis to find, though Series 5 (replicating big LDD Series 4) is overall less common on the aftermarket. The only copy of Sybil on eBay is without her collar, and I wanted the whole thing, finding it through Mercari instead. Still, the doll being able to lose her collar suggested it was a removable piece, which intrigued me.

I felt a little guilty when I got it, because I hadn't seen that this was a signed copy, and I have to open her. I don't know whose signature it is, and the seller didn't identify it, and none of it is legible enough to identify it being from either Ed, Damien, or Mez without already knowing how they signed LDD items.

Maybe this signature makes her priceless to somebody, but to me, it's an obstacle. The cling wrap has to come off. Sorry, collectors. 

It's to be expected that LDD Minis are produced as one-to-one with their larger counterparts as is possible. But I truly believe none did it any better than Minis Sybil. There's a shocking amount of parity with these two.

Minis Sybil's hair has less messy verticality, with its part more visible and its silhouette obeying gravity more. I prefer the S4 nest.

I was later able to tease out her hair with some hot water and combing, which improves her silhouette, but exposes her thin rooting. 

The face paint is applied nearly identically. Only the smudging around the eyes feels like a different technique, and the Mini has no other smearing on her face, unlike the big.

The Mini's eye spirals are not vertically aligned, but it doesn't ruin the doll (and I had no other pickings for getting her). 

Minis Sybil's collar is made of black ribbon rather than a thicker leather construct, but it still has some studs and the loop with the chain. The loop hanging off the collar is proportionally longer on the Mini, and the collar actually thins her neck visually rather than bulking it out if it gets twisted before fastening. The piece attaches with a tiny square of velcro on each end rather than a snap. The chain hangs proportionally longer on the Mini than S4's does on S4 Sybil. The Mini chain reaches the floor and trails some.

The chain is all unoxidized silver in color--the lighting just added gold tones.

It's almost surprising Sybil's Minis keychain clasp wasn't just put on the end of her chain rather than the usual separate noose, but the attachment of the collar isn't secure enough the way they made it. The actual doll would be lost as a bag charm pretty easily if the velcro collar was her keychain anchor. If the collar was sewn closed, I think the chain could have been Sybil's bag charm, but I'm so awed by the tiny piece coming off that I prefer the system we got. I also like optional keychains, so the clasp being on her chain would be intrusive to me.

Mini Sybil's jacket isn't artistically dirtied like the big doll's, but it actually works the same and is made of the same materials. This jacket is bound just like the big doll's, but the straps are a lot smaller and the buckles don't have sliding bars.

And when unbound, Minis Sybil has arms of the exact same shape and softer material as the big doll, making her the only LDD Mini I know of with specialty arm pieces!

And the Mini doll has a bit more potential with her arms thanks to her rotating shoulder hinges!

They're bendier at this scale, though, so moving the shoulders is less smooth. These arms are more apt to bend before the shoulder joint moves.

The pants are just like the larger pair and are just as pristine. The toes are painted the same way.

Getting the doll back in her jacket was harder. On the Mini, right arm over left looks better, but left over right is still possible:

Pushing the straps through the buckles required some poking and pulling because the pieces are tiny and the bars don't slide on the buckles, and this resulted in the fabric getting stressed and scuffed at points, which might need some fabric glue sealant to address. I might also try putting in some kind of small rigid point on the straps which can guide them through the buckles and provide something to grab and pull them with so I'm not poking and stuffing the material through and damaging the fabric further. It's harder to use this doll's straitjacket...but that it works the same way at all is a marvel. 

This is one of the only LDD Minis where the small doll truly offers an equivalent experience to the larger doll with all of the same bells and whistles--so many LDD Minis omit accessories or other elements from the larger doll, or structurally change things due to fewer molds. Sybil is built almost exactly like the big doll, and while she differs in spots for being a Mini, she still functions the same way. Other Minis have basically the same experience as the big doll--Nurse Necro, lacking accessories on either edition, is basically the same in big and Mini. Eggzorcist, when given the noose keychain, is basically the same between big and Mini. Series 16's Mini equivalents replicate their Halloween disguises, though not their treat buckets. Inferno alongside Minis Sybil miniaturizes the folding bat wings, and she does seem to have her horns after all--most pictures just don't show them. (I only just learned S4 Inferno's dress is faux-leather rather than satin, which makes her design more interesting to me...but also makes her a worse buy, going by photos of it aging badly, unlike Sybil's clothes.) But Sybil's Mini feels like the most elaborate recreation of an out-of-the-box novelty, with her build being functionally the same in nearly every way. Inferno and Sybil are likely the two most faithful Minis on account of their designs missing nothing at all from the original dolls, but Sybil feels more extravagant in the steps Mezco had to take to make her work so 1:1. I honestly didn't expect Minis Sybil to be that close in production to the main doll, and it's arguable she's a better doll thanks to the Minis articulation...though it comes at the cost of being more fiddly than the big, and I prefer the larger doll visually. Still, Minis Sybil is a treasure and a triumph.

Back to the overview of the character's history.

***

Sybil was in the classier second wave of Fashion Victims once the dolls found a more confident art style and rolled back the sleaze a bit. She's wearing a straitjacket like S4 Sybil, but it has a prison/goth stripe pattern and extra-long unbound sleeves like Resurrection. A wave 1 Fashion Victim has rubber arms with a wire armature that might allow a straitjacket to bind them, but the wave 2 dolls have stiff limbs with rotating hinges only at the shoulder and hip.

Her eyes are swirled; the photo doesn't show it great.

Of course, the Fashion Victims couldn't totally clean up their act, so Sybil is bottomless and using the crotch strap of the straitjacket as a G-string...charming.

Her sexier second outfit has bottoms that could maybe be paired with the jacket for improved modesty, though, and it explains her eye makeup because costume 2 is a tribute to A Clockwork Orange.

These boots would be needed to let Sybil stand because the barefoot first costume wouldn't cut it.

Conflating Sybil with Alex DeLarge is another association between her and brutality, so maybe she really wasn't a good person. 

I do wonder how the sleeves of the jacket pull back onto her arms once you take it off the first time. It looks like her fingers would poke through the knit before it slid over them. Maybe her hands have to pop out, the sleeves have to pull way up over the wrists, and then then they pull back down to cover the hands. That only works if the ends of the sleeves are open, though.

I'd like to get Sybil whenever I get around to discussing the Fashion Victims, with Sybil as my spotlight for Series 2. I might invest in hunting down a pair of pants for her, though. If nothing else fits well on the doll market, it could have to come to finding Fashion Victim Lulu's trousers.

Sybil appeared in the Living Dead Dollies baby-doll spinoff with another apparently functional straitjacket. Credit where due: this is the most absurd depiction of Sybil.

The outfit looks basically identical to S4, adjusting for proportions. I'm not a fan of baby dolls, but if I discuss the Dollies someday, it's likely to be either Hush or Posey. The Dollies are deliberately grotesque and not totally my vibe, but Hush looks interesting and Posey is genuinely haunting.

Sybil also appeared as a pencil topper (read: a spare Minis head without a body) and a blind-box vinyl figure. 

Sybil's last appearance was in "Living Dead Dolls in Wonderland" where she was naturally cast as the (Mad) Hatter, and her two variants are frankly pretty spectacular alt-goth adaptations of the Carroll character, complete with spiral monocles, high-platform boots, and towering felt hats. I like that these also continue the kind of non-gendered aesthetic she had in Series 4, though being cast as a character who was male in the source material probably contributed.

The variant is so stylized it's less of Sybil, but look how pretty!

Her Wonderland eyes have an angular spiral on the right and a normal white sclera, grey iris, and black pupil under her monocle/eyepatch.

Particularly on the standard edition, it's impressive how Sybil's traits were repurposed, with the messy shirt and striped pants and waist chain all reinterpreting asylum motifs. Her green lips also throw back to the S4 faceup and the spiral monocle is a striking touch. Both Sybils have a unique pink hair color for the character, which is fun.

I'm as shocked as you are that I still have none of the Alice LDDs...or, at least, shocked until I see the prices again. Someday!

Here's a simple photo of the brain operation.

I set up a padded cell for Sybil by wrapping a quilted blanket around some foam-board walls.

I edited a slotted bar door over the scene and painted the walls with gore digitally for this one. Her arms are bound...so how did she do this?

I got some papers with a distorted checkerboard pattern that suited her and taped them together to create an expanse in the darkness. I'd need more sheets to have the same effect with her standing. This paper flooring will stick around for whenever I do anything with LDD in Wonderland.

Then I put her on crumpled scraps of striped paper. I thought it would be fun to put her chain ring on her eye like a monocle, but she had to lay down for it to work and it was very difficult to position it and get it to stay even then.

Here's another angle.

Then I put her under a wire rolling rack's base to put her behind bars.

Here she is taking revenge on the staff--choking Dr. Dedwin with her sleeves and hanging Nurse Necro with her collar.

Here's more photos in the basement to have fun with the unique physicality of her arms and sleeves.

"Cuckoo...cuckoo..."--the Longlegs vibes are strong here.

And against a canvas background that matches her jacket.

Here she is backlit like a gritty seventies horror film, inspired by fellow spiral-eye Quack getting a photo this way before.

The two Sybils also photograph well together, given that Sybil must have a heavy level of distortion with the way she perceives things, allowing the Mini and the big to share space in more surreal and even abstracted compositions.

The Mini also works just fine interacting with larger dolls and scenery by herself in a kind of Alice in Wonderland distortion as Sybil perceives herself out of proportion. Sybil is the Hatter, after all, and Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is a real disorder where perceptions of scale are distorted.

Of the uncomfortable, questionable-to-own dolls I've selected in these two pools, I might come the closest to proudly saying I love (the two) Sybil(s) in a toy sense, and that means there's a lot they're doing to overcome their issues.

By any objective toy-collecting measures, the Sybils are fantastic. The character's visual design is spot-on and flawless for her aesthetic. She's one of the gothest goths to goth the floorboards at LDD and she's a solidly realized caricatured horror archetype. Her straitjacket gimmick is perfectly executed and engineered and gives her a sense of showmanship and novelty in the production, succeeding at two doll scales, and her outfit quality is strong, particularly on the big doll whose faux-leather has all aged to this point without issue, which completely astounds me. I was certain she'd be a wreck and not the same doll she was in 2002, but she's in perfect condition. She feels like one of the best productions of any classic LDD, and she's astonishing for an entry as early as S4. Minis Sybil is astonishing for a LDD Mini. The only critique I could leverage was that S4's paint smears were a bit badly placed on my copy and that her hair is thin, while Minis' leather straps are fiddly and less durable...but the dolls are still very strong. Either Sybil ought to be an automatic recommend...and yet.

What are we doing this top-notch design for? A tacky pop-culture approach to a subject that serves as a portrait of real systemic societal failings in empathy and infrastructure. A patient like this would have been a mistreated victim, and there's so much real systemic abuse and human suffering behind this cartoon archetype of the restrained mad person. To Sybil's credit, it's obvious she's going for cartoonish unreal aesthetics. Her messy hair and swirly eyes are goth stylization as well as caricature, and her studded dog collar and leather also put an alt spin on the mental-patient look to show that Sybil is based upon a countercultural aesthetic rather than direct medical history. I do also credit the face design with lending her far more consciousness than it could have conveyed. Maybe she's clouded, but I completely believe Sybil is perceptive and active and that her restraints are necessary because she has capacity. It's not really the best that sympathy for asylum prisoners distorted into the insensitive "they're a symbol for how edgy and misunderstood I am!", but even when objectified, these caricatures do acknowledge a mistreatment. And Sybil is a symptom, not the problem. LDD participated in a glibly ableist visual caricature; they didn't invent it. If Sybil is separated as a work of edgy 2000s goth fiction, treated as an the unreal distortion she is, she's right on the mark and is one of the best LDDs in the brand who earned her status and strong merchandising run as a classic. I could see myself concluding she's the best of Series 4 if I got and ranked them all. But examining the greater context brings her into darker territory. If you can be conscious of the context and media impact of depictions like Sybil's and still find her impressive as a doll...I think that's okay. Sometimes, trash is fun, just so long as you know what's wrong with it.

She Rode a Black Horse: Famine

I'm going to be honest and tell you that this doll probably has the weakest case against it, and if you conclude her inclusion in this topic was a reach, I won't blame you. But if we're talking dolls that make me uncomfortable, she gave me a reason to feel that way. I also thought her inclusion through this avenue would form a nice rhyme with the first roundup.

Famine is the latest/most recent LDD release in this entire uncomfortable project thus far. As Famine's name implies, she's part of a series depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. 

The Four Horsemen are iconic figures mentioned during the end-times prophecy that forms the final book of the Bible, Revelation. While Revelation itself only identifies the final rider, naming them as Death, the others have since been popularly codified as the avatars of Pestilence, War, and Famine. Pestilence is actually the most ambiguous Horseman, with prior interpretations naming them as Conquest, separate from War. I can see why Pestilence won out, though. Disease is very much a prominent threat to humanity, and conquest is so related to war that making each their own Horseman feels like splitting hairs. These archetypes have become very common as a collective to be reinterpreted, in a very similar way to the Seven Deadly Sins, another Christian construct of evils tackled by LDD previously. Good Omens, aa mixed parody of Revelation and The Omen (1976), changed Pestilence to Pollution as a newcomer Horseman replacing the former, since, at the time, manmade damage to the environment was seen as a bigger threat than disease, but oh how humanity errs and rejects science and makes conditions for pestilence to very much resurge as a threat. I think a more accurate interpretation written today would be to have a Fifth Horseman for manmade destruction of nature and bring Pestilence back because clearly they're still at work and getting stronger. Also, the obligatory disclaimer: for all the brilliance of Good Omens, Neil Gaiman is a predator who I strongly disavow and he has demonstrated no meaningful remorse or reparations toward his victims. Sir Terry Pratchett, the other author, died with a clean legacy.

Living Dead Dolls has a fun interpretation of the Horsemen. War is a Knight Templar Crusader wearing a more modern gas mask and camo pants, mixing eras of warfare (though he was originally intended to also have a 20th-century German soldier helmet too). He also has tribal war paint under his gas mask, which is like, I get it, but he's also a White doll and I don't know if that invocation is appropriate on him. Pestilence is a pretty classic plague doctor with a beaked mask (though not a unique, more accurate sculpt--it's just S18 Jingles' masquerade jester mask recolored), and Death is a classic cloaked reaper (not to be confused with the different design of Death used in Series 15, the Kiss of Death doll, or the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come LDD Mini). The most brilliant idea of the set is the horses themselves. Because LDDs are often very literal toy doll characters and because it saves a hell of a lot of space and budget as opposed to making a full horse for each character, the Four Horsemen are all carrying hobby horse toys on sticks!

But then you look at Famine. Over time, I realized I wanted her in this project because as the opposite extreme of a Christian theological hunger archetype, she's a functional perfect match and perfect inversion of the problem with Gluttony. For Famine is depicted, reasonably, as a starving ghoul...but something just doesn't sit right with me when her aesthetic point of reference is a modern Hot Topic emo.

I've touched on the idea of dolls and alarming skinny imagery before with Skelita Calaveras, but Skelita was pretty clearly a case of bad optics and poor engineering creating the wrong impression. I'm not entirely sure what's going on with Famine, though. Because yes, just as it's ostensibly logical to make Gluttony fat, Famine should be starved, but it feels like it crosses over into something slightly off when her costume and hair make her look like a young woman from the modern world. She could have been a starved character in any visual styling, so why this specifically?

There was a cheap Famine on offer which I just missed out on getting, and then I found an auction for her and Horseman Death together. I was the only bidder, for a minimal amount, during most of the auction and I wasn't holding my breath on winning. I decided if anybody did outbid me, I'd let it go and just get Famine separate later, but it didn't look like it would happen. Then again, I sold my first copy of Bloody Mary on auction, sure nobody was bidding on it for the entire run until I checked back after and found an acceptable take at the very end of the auction which sold her. I was happy to get two dolls in one lower auction than getting Famine alone for the same, but the copy of Horseman Death looked less promising and less necessary to me in the moment, so if I was outbid, I wouldn't feel crushed not getting it.

I was ultimately the sole bidder and won the auction! I'd probably have been happier to have Pestilence bundled in with Famine, but Death as a throwaway is about ideal since I was interested but not sure I'd pay for him directly. Getting them in person confirmed Horseman Death was a cool doll, and Death will be in the next standard roundup.

Famine is the only female doll in the Horsemen set. This is atypical for LDD. where girls are the majority in almost all of the collections released in the brand--only Series 27 also applies, with three boys to two girls. Pestilence and War here are both masculine, and Death is gendered male in the text of Revelation.

The coffin tissue is red, which is boring but fine. The chipboard features a portrait of the four and their horses in a fire-and-lightning sky above a ruined landscape, with their group name as the collection name and the Horseman's name in front. Because only Death is named in the Bible, only he uses a direct quote on his chipboard. The other three Horsemen fudge it a little to identify the rider while still looking like text pulls from Revelation.

This collection's chipboards consistently mis-apostrophize the possessive "its", which deeply bothers me.

Like other themed series of LDD exclusives, the dolls do not come with death certificates, and it makes sense that they wouldn't have deathdates as abstract Biblical nonhuman entities.

Here's the doll unboxed.

Both Famine and Death came to me unsealed and unboxed but complete, so I didn't have to undo the doll's packaging myself. I could tell the horses were originally held in the front of the coffin next to the doll on their left though, judging by the twist-tie holes on the side. Odd, given how they hold the horses on the other side, and Jubilee had her hat packaged in the front on her right side.

Famine's hair was tied back in a ponytail for packaging, but her hair is meant to be loose like this.

Her hair is parted to her right and hangs about to her butt, and she has some serious emo bangs on one side of her part. These bangs are too long, going by the copy photographed by LDD themselves. I later trimmed them to uncover both eyes and fix the slope of the bangs like so:

The hair is cut choppy in layers on the back and feels a little dry and snarled at the ends, not combing smoothly.

I'm not happy to think this can happen to newer dolls, too. 

Famine, as expected, looks starved, and is all ghoulish, no glam. She isn't made to look like she has any makeup on and she uses the screaming face, as if gasping for food. She has no eyebrows and her eyes are black with white irises and she has dark airbrushing around her eye sockets and as contour on her cheeks to make them look sunken around a skull. She also looks a little grimy around the face and teeth, and her mouth is black inside except for the teeth, which are white like her eyes and bone designs.

While this visual is deliberately unappealing and potentially distressing, I think the open mouth might be the saving grace because it lands on Famine being hungry and truly wanting to eat--after all, she's the embodiment of a want for food, not a compulsive disordered rejection of it. The fact that she has upper teeth instead of leaving them out also makes her look more hungry. Leaving out the upper teeth could make her mouth look more slack and sad, and the teeth give her more of a will to bite on something. It's a good reminder that the want to eat and the disordered want not to eat are opposed, and uncomfortable visual associations aren't coming from the root concept. Had Famine not been given the open-mouthed sculpt, I think associations could be off-target and more offensive. I'm not fully sold on the skull contouring on the cheeks. It can look a little bit like grime or even like a beard. I've seen more convincing airbrush illusion contour from LDD before, and I even found Violet to have more effective hollowed rotted cheeks, through a much more stylized paint aesthetic.

I think harsher angles like Violet's contour might have helped here.

Famine is cast in greenish-yellow vinyl, though some spots seem to have gone a little orange with age. She fluoresces nicely under blacklight, and this actually makes the face contour illusion work better.

...but no part of this doll glows in the dark. I don't even know how that's possible. You're telling me LDD designed a doll with skeleton print and cast her in a color so very close to greenish glow vinyl, but didn't make a single part of this doll glow in the dark? Sure, she'd have been the only Horseman to do it, and sure, maybe glowing wouldn't make so much sense...but this doll was designed visually with "THIS DOLL GLOWS IN THE DARK!!!" written all over her! I'm shocked they didn't do that.

Considering this doll's green isn't because she glows, the color is kind of a strange choice, and I might have expected white, maybe with orange eyes?

I might honestly prefer that because the green overall gives her a repulsive look when paired with her face paint. I guess that's not inappropriate to stylize her as starving, unearthly, and ill, and it works with her Halloweeny tones. She's just one of the more off-putting LDDs.

Famine's costume is fitting for her alt theme, with a skeleton-printed laceless corset over a skirt, and arms painted to depict elbow gloves with matching print.

It's a little "Hot Topic", bit it's also a bit "hot-girl Halloween", with notes of a cheap party-store costume. I'm not complaining because that's a fun aesthetic niche to capture, but again, it feels odd on a starving ghoul. 

The corset piece fits over the skirt and hangs down over her hips with a point, fitting because the skeleton print on the front depicts the ribs and pelvis. The piece isn't tailored very well around the waist, and the top of the bodice is uneven with one sharp corner and the whole line not being quite centered. The piece is strapless and velcros all the way down the back, easily lifting off the doll. 

While this wasn't very well sewn, at least on my copy, it doesn't quite activate the feeling of "this doll is too skinny for her clothes" in the way Skelita's dolls could. It helps massively that Famine has no nonstandard sculpts to make her look skinnier, so the outfit is easier to appraise as just a mechanically messy job and not necessarily an optically messy job.

The corset's velcro is very weak and opens too easily. It's a very sloppy piece.

Famine's arms are the most elaborate part of the doll, being painted back past the elbow to create the image of gloves, and then having elaborate bone paint on both sides of the arms, even within the palms of the gripping hand on her right. Similar skeleton paint has been done for Death dolls before this series and Halloween exclusive Jack O Lantern after, though Horseman Death has only the paint on his head.

I'm impressed by the detail here. Famine needed this touch to feel more polished within this simpler aesthetic. Especially after the corset.

The skirt under the corset...well, when I clocked this doll's vibe as "hot-girl Halloween", I wasn't prepared for how right I was, because the skirt is literally paper-thin plastic-tablecloth fabric right out of a party store. That's authenticity!

There is an element of camp here, isn't there? Memorializing this genre of party-store costuming is very funny. As a genuinely scary ghoul in a sexy-ghoul costume, I think she's a really funny doll who would be amusing for Halloween, but considering the idea of starvation at her root, that makes the juxtaposition weird again. The costuming doesn't feel inappropriate or lewd for the doll design, but the aesthetic still feels off for a depiction of Famine.

I can see where this idea comes around innocently. Famine means starvation, and the most iconographic, practical way to depict that on a doll with normal sculpts is a skeleton pattern, and that skews the design modern. I can see how trying to only paint the doll starved could be ineffective, and portraying her as an old-timey person in need could maybe come across as exploitative? LDD is also goth, so this works fine. I can see how this is the "better" way to depict Famine, but she may not escape the awkwardness.

I feel like Famine would work really well with the same base colors and face, but a costume depicting her more like an older farm woman with a bonnet, long dress, shawl, and apron. The apron can still be skeleton-print to make her more edgy and weird. If the LDD Horsemen had individual attributes as accessories, I'd give her the pitchfork and bent arm from the American Gothic sets, too.

This starving older homesteader idea has a lot more personal appeal to me than an emo ghoul in a Halloween costume and feels more specific to the concept of a famine while still being unreal and inhuman as the force of Famine. I think it's actually something that could be executed as a custom with the right clothing and a haircut or bun and a paint wipe on the arms, but I don't feel passionate enough to invest everything into that, nor do I have the sewing skills to make the clothes (or the money to frivolously source existing LDD pieces that would work).

The skirt has a mesh layer sewn underneath, though I'm not sure how much it's really shaping things.

Famine wears an atypical knee-high boot sculpt with a vaguely cowboy aesthetic, or at least an equestrian one. I couldn't tell you exactly the style, nor do I think another LDD has worn these sculpts. I couldn't match these to any other doll.

Unique boots for Famine is an odd touch, especially because she could have gotten by with the classic LDD pointy boot, but new and exclusive footwear also brings her production up a notch. These boots could pop off with heat, but they don't have slits in the back that make them intended for removal.

Now, the horse.

The stick is a different plastic from the head, with the head being two halves of glossy hollow hard plastic and the stick being dense with less shine. The horses feel pretty large and substantial. The sticks end on a disc and are molded with a woodgrain texture.

The head on Famine's horse is printed with horse bones on both sides. The horse overall is black, per the Bible. Pestilence has a white horse, War has red, and Death has a "pale" horse per quotation, interpreted by LDD as a light grey. Each horse also fits their doll, with Pestilence's having sores, War's being angry, and Death's sharing the bone print with Famine's.

The horses all have strips of felt inserted to form manes, and the manes are cut with different shapes. Famine's horse mane is a row of rounded square forms that resembles a spine poking out of a horse's back. Three of the horse manes are black, while Pestilence's is white. The Famine mane could have made sense white and would play the spine gag more clearly, but this is supposed to be the black horse in the group, so the mane helps throw the color in that direction.

The Four Horsemen all have the gripping hand arm on the right to hold their horses, making this collection one of three where every doll has a gripping arm, alongside Series 16 and Series 18, where the dolls had it for the pumpkin buckets each came with (though S16 Isabel had a different, rarer gripping arm used for her stick mask instead). 

Famine's grip on her horse isn't a super firm clip on, so it threatens to tip sideways out of her grip--at least, it felt less firm and sturdy than Death's grip on his.

It seems like the Horsemen's gripping arms might actually be a subtly different mold with a wider curve to clip onto the horses. Their hands didn't relax to a tighter grip when empty. Here's another gripping hand for comparison, modeled by Betsy.

While there could be some LDD pieces that might benefit from a wider gripping hand, and a wider hand grip might have been wisely applied to those dolls, this wasn't the place to use it (if this is a separate mold). Betsy holds the horse much more firmly with her narrower grip.

The wider grip on Famine was able to grip the original LDD slingshot that came with Damien's dolls. I heard Series 35 Damien has a difficult grip on the piece.

I could force it into Betsy's hand, too, though, so perhaps Famine was just poorly molded with her hand too loose. Death's grip is firmer, if not as tight as Betsy's, and his hand looks closer to Betsy's. My Horsemen sample size might need to increase with Pestilence after all, but it looks like my copy of Famine might just be a minor dud, and that there wasn't a deliberate mold difference.

I tried to bend the vinyl of the hand tighter by dunking it in hot water, pushing it closed and then setting it in cold water, and it looked promising...

...but putting the horse back in widened it out to the same shape again, flopping around about to leave the grip. I think it's some minute molding thing on Famine, plus the weight of the horse, that makes my copy of her specifically struggle with holding it firmly.

Because classic LDDs don't have mid-arm joints, the Horsemen cannot fully straddle their hobby-horses to ride, but they still do a surprisingly good job brandishing them as intimidating staves. You can get the stick between the dolls' legs to a decent enough degree, though. This only works for Famine and War, though, since Pestilence and Death are wearing robes over their legs.

LDD did make a full-size horse for a doll once, as a plush included with the variant edition of the Headless Horseman:

I do like that, regardless of execution, the LDD horses are obviously in a toylike aesthetic.

I took Famine for a hair wash and comb, and clipped the sharp corner on the top of her bodice. It doesn't fully even things, but it's less distracting. 

Famine and Gluttony are a match made in Hell, with both being inspired by Christian archetypes centered on humanity's relationship to food.

I worry, though, about leaving Gluttony alone with Famine.

Gluttony may be Gluttony but hunger is hunger. She's eating him the first chance she gets.

If Famine eats Gluttony, do their caricature extremes cancel out to make Famine into a mid-weight person?

I didn't select the whole character pool in this post to rhyme with the characters from uncomfortable roundup 1, but I was conscious of thematic matches in terms of ethnicity and weight issues. Had I selected for character parallels on the topics of suicide and true crime (matching to Jezebel and Dahlia), my choices would have been Series 9 Blue and UK-exclusive Jack the Ripper or deeply brutalized Res IX Fairy Fay, but these dolls didn't sting as much to me at this moment. They're still on the table for later, though.

Here are some portraits.

I drew lines in some dirt while the bushes were still mostly bare and put some sticks in the ground to create a dead field that Famine has struck, spoiling the agriculture.

And think how much better the "farm lady" concept would suit this imagery!

Here's an edit of the field scene to open the background and play with high contrast and orange for a more stylized image.

Then I wanted to stage her in a still life gone to waste, playing on classic paintings of laden tables by showing a scene where there's nothing to nourish with. I did that craft of shrinking apples into carved ghoulish heads--done by peeling them, soaking them in salt and lemon juice, carving them, re-soaking them, and drying them out with very low oven heat and time. I did two face apples and used this technique to dry and preserve a simple apple core to make the gag read clearer.

I also shriveled and carbonized some grapes and stripped some grape stems, and used cracker crumbs, bread crusts, and a banana peel as more of the meager offerings. I did two shots, including one with Famine holding a knife and fork in an "I want food" pose, and I'm pleased it wasn't difficult to get the right lighting and filters for the painted look I wanted!

These are the pictures that make the doll all worth it.

I don't dislike LDD Famine, but she's not totally my vibe and she could be made a little more solidly. I'm not happy with the sewing or weak velcro of her corset, and her gripping hand should have been tighter. Her visual design is okay, just not what I would do with the concept. The starvation and modern hot-girl alt aesthetic make for a weird combination, but at the end of the day, her root idea of Famine as the want for food when there is none saves her. This is a doll who represents a lack of access, not a lack of hunger. The Horsemen set is a cool idea, but this doll isn't a huge treasure to me.

O Father, She's Been Sinful: Lust

To make this clear from the get-go: this doll is not in the roundup because sexuality and kink make me uncomfortable. The subject matter on its face doesn't bother me. But how it was done...?

Living Dead Dolls have always been portrayed as versatile age-wise, with some dolls coded as children and others as adults, much in the way many classic dolls have been childlike but often styled in adult roles. But never this adult. 

Living Dead Dolls' Series 7 doll exemplifying Lust is a vinyl-clad dommy kink devil named Mistress Demonika. And on the one hand, cool, get your freak on. I'm not remotely a kinkster but I also don't remotely judge. On the other hand, this doll might eke past, if not way past, the limits of the LDD doll design as far as working for adult characters. This seems to be a relatively hot take; most fans see no issue in her and she's a sought-after item on the aftermarket. I myself only paused and said "hey, wait, should LDD have done this design?" more recently. In my original era discovering and obsessing over the dolls as a teenager, I didn't bat an eye at the combination of doll sculpts and character design here.

The sin of Lust is ostensibly that of desiring without sentimentality or meaningful connection, making it similar to the hedonistic tones you can find in the sins of Gluttony and even Sloth. However, socially, Lust is chiefly connoted with sexual desire that's only surface-level. Lust in the Christian conceptual framework has some relatively prudish connotations, or at least has been adopted into some prudish perfunctory mindsets that would have sexuality only applied to the purposes of starting a family. Still, there are very obvious and valid reasons to fear and warn against lust, as shallow and unchecked sexual urges have led to predation and infidelity and damaged countless lives. Lust as a corruption of the sinner's soul is less of a concern to me than lust as a potential harm to others, but yes, it can be a dangerous thing. 

BDSM, however? Sure, it's great character-design iconography to convey sexuality and pleasure-seeking without getting nude or outright pornographic...but I think it's become increasingly known that the BDSM community strongly preaches "safe, sane, and consensual" and that kink is play to be practiced ethically and with care for one's partner, no matter how wild or distressing it could look to outsiders. The only way I think LDD Lust could be justifiably condemned for a kink lifestyle is if she obeyed no safewords, respected no boundaries, abused her partners, or involved people in her play without consent (i.e., unregulated public appearances in kink mode). But that's not the fault of BDSM as a concept. That'd just be her fault for doing it wrong. 

However, even if kink isn't actually inherently dangerous, it does fit the bill of the traditional Christian deadly sins for this assumption to be made, and I don't think any buyers of the doll were thinking "eww, BDSM!" I think the reaction was that she was fun and over-the-top. I don't think LDD were sincerely saying kink is evil when designing this character, either. They've demonstrated they're not prudish with the Fashion Victims, whose shadow is so heavy over this post by now it's suffocating. But let's not talk of suffocation while Mistress is on the table. She'll get ideas.

I don't know how to feel about the common association of Lust and femininity, or the "temptress" archetype. While men can be weak-willed and think with the wrong parts, there's often the use of an "evil woman" figure actively tempting and corrupting him...and why are we giving her all the blame? I think the men can take responsibility for their own decisions to harm or be unfaithful, thank you very much. And I know the "feminine allure" has been reclaimed under feminist mindsets, like it's the woman's special power and social asset in society, but I think that idea reads very regressive and gender-essentialist. I couldn't stand the retro-style horror film The Love Witch for this "seduction empowerment" reason, among other talking points about gender roles I found surprisingly backward. Beautiful retro authentic production design and schlocky throwback mimicry, but not great messaging. Though I suppose its viewpoints inadvertently suited the sixties era the film was mimicking.

I guess I can appreciate that the LDD Lust character is not a classical pretty-lady femme-fatale archetype in the sense of the beautiful dangerous homewrecker. She's clearly part of a niche community and likely offers services and play to people who seek her out, so I'm getting a little less of the "it's all her fault" with Lust. She could very well be a a lady who was so selfishly and unsafely driven by her own sadistic (blood)lust that she turned kink into genuine torture for everybody who went to her.

My big concern with getting Lust as a collectible was just her vinyl fabric costume standing to make her an absolute nightmare for preservation. The material always degrades, and a domme is not there to suffer degradation, honey. That's for her to impose. As such, my hopes were low for the doll presenting perfectly in her costume. This is another one where, knowing LDD sewed with durable all-plastic sheeting on occasion, I desperately wish they had just used that. I wanted to see if there was a way to rehabilitate the fabric, because I've heard of glossy fabric paint that could restore an element of sheen if the material has lost (or is doomed to lose) its coating.

Lust is actually the first and only retired LDD item I've seen "in the wild", and very recently, too! She showed up person at a local comics shop I just discovered, and sealed, so she could have been my first old LDD bought and carried home from a physical store...but the Mistress in the cabinet had badly faded tissue that had gone fully grey and I liked the pop of red on rich blue with her coffin enough to seek a sealed copy whose tissue still had its color. I'd love to discover and purchase a Living Dead Doll physically sometime, but it wasn't to be on this occasion.

I'm glad I made my choice: Lust's doll/tissue visual display combo is one of LDD's all-time most striking.

While red is the classic color of passion, including sex and romance, and may be applied to lust, another traditional color of the deadly sin of lust is a rich blue, hence Mistress's tissue. I love that they chose this over red. I can't confidently state another LDD coffin with this tissue color, so it might be a one-off just for this doll. That's kind of a shame. It's a pretty color and more LDD releases with it could have lessened the overpowering use of red all the time.

I did take a moment to pause and wonder about LDD's current age rating at the time, as pertains to this character. She'd have been beyond the pale during the ill-advised short era where LDD thought its minimum age for its target audience should be eight-year-olds, but I still feel weird about her falling into the brand when the minimum age they ask is fifteen years. Teenagers aren't as innocent as adults want them to be, of course, and I don't think that will ever change, but had LDD's lower bound been 18 years like it is today, then this doll would be a tidy adult collectible. Regardless of how much a fifteen-year-old may already know, it's not a great look to sell a doll like this to that age minimum.

All of Series 7 quotes from the same series of medieval artwork for its chipboards, with each doll's chipboard background being the depiction of their sin's punishment in Hell. Lust's depicts a scene of demons burning people in cauldrons.

The original art.

Series 7 has a weird thing going on where two pairs of characters have shared calendar death dates (but not year) because each is referencing a separate thing. Lust is in one of those pairs, as both she and Envy died on an April 22. Envy's deathdate is the birthday of model Bettie Page (both Page and Envy are known for jungle-girl garments of leopard fur, though I still don't know why Envy is a jungle girl), while Lust's deathdate is April 22, 2002-- the day adult film actress Linda Lovelace, made (in)famous through the mainstreaming of pornographic film Deep Throat, died. Bettie Page honestly could have been the referent for both dolls, though, as she was a pioneer in BDSM modeling and filmed softcore kink material. 

Linda Lovelace (real surname: Boreman) has a sad story, with her coming to reject the film that made her famous and joining the crusade against pornography at large because she consistently maintained she had been coerced and assaulted in the production of Deep Throat, as well as some other films, by her husband at the time. I believe her, and experiences like hers are a serious and horrific issue in the sex industry, but I think there is an ideal that can be achieved where the industry is consenting and fair work for those who are willing. I understand entirely why Boreman wrote the business off and turned so completely against her past, but I don't necessarily agree with the movement against the sex industry itself. Both Bettie Page and Linda Boreman experienced sexual assault, and both turned to faith later in life and discarded their pasts, though it seems like Page was less vocal against her past work than Boreman was, and Page never alleged assault or mistreatment on sets of her photoshoots or filming. It's all very complicated. Sex work is a fraught industry.

LDD's reference to Boreman with this doll is hard to gauge. I can't confidently say it's an insult to the person in, say, the way Greed's celebrity reference clearly is (if only LDD had known just how abhorrent that real estate man would become), but it would be hard to say it's a cheeky compliment or shout-out either, since, you know, this is the sin of Lust we're talking about here. In some way, Linda Boreman could have co-signed this doll's caricature given her negative experiences with the sex industry, seeing it as a fitting condemnation, but having the doll referencing her...it sounds like she would have been offended to be involved in this character in any way, had she known about it. It makes me wonder how much the LDD guys understood about her painful story when making this doll, or if they empathized. Worst-case scenario, they maybe could have ended up sued, if not deemed liable, had Boreman been alive when this doll was released.

Lust's certificate poem says:

Because of her desires in pleasures of the flesh

The fires of Hell were the fate dealt our Mistress

Smothered by brimstone and consumed by flames

She writhes in the underworld eternally in pain

Lust overall is the most classically hellish, then--she's a red devil and her punishment is the classic fires of Hell that dominate the imagination of Hell at large. Does that mean most of Hell's sinners are there for being horny?

It's hard to imagine any torture working on her, though. Then again, she is a domme, not a sub, so maybe it does torture her to feel out of control.

Here's a loose rewrite:

The fire licks this dominatrix

And sears her sinful flesh

Tortured to no longer be in control

And branded with brimstone when fresh

Lust's theme isn't the kind of thing that would work on me, but I can appreciate that she rocks her costume all the same. I know a bad bitch when I see one!

Like Gluttony this same series, Lust came packaged with an accessory in hand rather than it being stuffed in the packet with her death certificate like LDD normally does. Gluttony had his serrated knife rubber-banded to his left arm, raised up, while Lust has her whip, which has a built-in fiber elastic loop, wrapped around her right hand, posed down by her hip. This made me wonder if Wrath had her lollipop in-hand in the coffin too, but it seems not, from photos I found. It wasn't a whole thing where all of the Series 7 dolls with something to hold did so in their factory packaging, but that honestly would have made more sense than two of the dolls holding their accessories in front when LDD pretty much never does that.

Mistress's costume is kind of interesting, because it's all joined together as one piece--it's a form-fitting hood connected by straps to the dress. Most of the costume is the same black vinyl-coated fabric. A dire portent for aging and upkeep.

The hood has a widow's peak devil point at the forehead and covers her ears and neck, leaving only her frontal face out. It also has holes on top for her horns to poke out of, as well as a hole for a very thin black high ponytail, which is only rooted at that spot it emerges from, and not across the head.

The hood is sewn with zigzag stitches that seem deliberately textural as well as functional, and the panels meet in the back like this:

The edge of the hood framing the face doesn't seem backed by fabric and isn't folded under and stitched, which puts terror in my heart.

The bottom of the hood has a strap across Mistress's throat which velcros under the left side of her jaw. Undoing it reveals the strip of fabric the three vertical straps which meet the bodice are connected to.

Opening the hood lets it slide over the horns and ponytail and hang off her head, still connected to the dress by the three strips above the bodice. I never felt like I was stressing the fabric getting it off her head, but that didn't mean it held up from doing this--more on that soon.

This is the hair rooting underneath. Extremely minimal, but unlike most LDDs with this little hair, it's not meant to be visible as such. Mistress's costume was only engineered that way so the doll could be put into it, not really for her to come out of it, so seeing the dearth of hair rooting was never intended for the consumer. I might have closed her hood permanently with an adhesive instead of velcro, to be honest, though I appreciate that it was made this way so I can show how the doll was built.

This is my first LDD with the devil-horns sculpt. The horns have no special shaping and they're built into the mold rather than being add-ons plugged into the head. The shape is a little taller and more exaggerated on a bare head, but most LDDs with them are rooted with hair the horns can sink into, whereupon the horns read a touch cuter and more subtle.

Mistress's hood and hair are very similar to Vanity in this very same series, who's also got a head mostly wrapped up with a ponytail coming out the back. Vanity (Madame Dysmorphic) has a head wrap of plastic-surgery bandaging.

Vanity's bandages aren't sewn with an opening/closure like Lust's hood, though it seems the fabric is softer rather than being hardened gauze stuck to the doll head, and I've seen Vanity copies with loosened or fully removed bandages. This doll is still my least favorite of Series 7, but I'll never say never, I guess. She could be a contender for the next batch of uncomfortable dolls. Series 7 is great for this theme!

The hood of Mistress's costume connecting to the dress makes her head rotation prospects a little limited, because trying to turn her head too far could stress and possibly break the straps attached to the bodice.

Lust being a demonic character makes some things unclear. Was she ever a living human? Her Resurrection main edition interprets her like she could have been, but here, it seems like she might have always been a demon, or perhaps just became one after death? She does have a death date. Part of the ambiguity's effect is that it creates a bit of a question on whether this character can accurately be described as a sex worker. If she was a human dominatrix in life, then the answer would be yes. If she's a devil in Hell who is just like this, then I don't know if that standard would apply.

Lust's skintone is a very classic cherry red perfect for a devil, and it's not a super common color for LDD, only being shared (more or less, maybe the shades are different) by Resurrection-variant Inferno, Nicholas (whose frontal face is painted yellow) and variant Mephistopheles. I think Lust, despite her sex theme, ends up as maybe the most classic cartoon devil doll in LDD to me, beating out Nicholas and Res-variant Inferno due to her precise mix of red skin, black widow's peak hood, and horns. 

I really like her face paint, too. Her makeup is entirely black, giving her a bold cartoony look with a hint of retro caricature like some of my favorite LDDs. She has two swooped eyebrows with a slightly uneven quirked pose as if daring her slaves to challenge her. Her eyes are painted with angled lowered lids and upper eyelid creases as well as plenty of lashes and some slight bags under the eye in the same flat black. Her sclerae are white and her irises are small in two-toned gold coloring with no reflections, raised up so the lid covers part of the iris. Her lips are black and full, making her look mature and possibly smirking, possibly displeased. The face paint has some flaws, especially in the eyes, but it reads well and I like the design a lot.

Back to the dress, the bodice of the dress has almost a halter effect, just with the three straps connected to the hood rather than a ring collar. The bodice is sewn to evoke a corset, with an outlined pointed edge at the bottom and red thread lacing through the middle with four stacked X shapes. I think LDD could have made a little joke if they cut that down by one row so her torso literally spelled XXX (the literal sex symbol) in the stitching. The skirt is long and nearly covers Mistress's toes, but it has a super high slit by the left leg leaving no doubt that this is a sexy costume (if the color, fabric, and lacing didn't already tell you). The slit is shaped by the skirt wrapping around and crossing over, with the upper side of the wrap being the portion that falls behind the left leg.

Lust's arms also contribute to the costuming with fine painting of ribbon or straps accenting around her arms and fingers adding more kinky texture to her look. Greed also has arm paint forming part of her costume, but Lust's straps here are a unique effect.

The arm paint is not symmetrical on the two arms, with each having its own layout of painted straps. The paint wraps around the arms smoothly, but the application is not flawless, with some smearing and blurring at points. Lust's palms are both pierced for accessories, and the straps that go across her palms also cross the piercing holes. Her hands and feet also have black nail polish. Lust's doll is almost entirely red and black save for the white, yellow, and orange which are all just in her eyes. It's a really striking use of the red and black pairing that feels very appealing and standout in a sea of LDD red and black palettes. I think the bright red skin gives her a lot of distinction since it's so uncommon in LDD and dolls in general.

Mistress has the LDD devil tail in back, and is also my first doll with this feature. It's a pretty rigid piece plugged into the doll and emerging just at the end of where the dress velcros, and the shape of the piece is pretty subdued, such that you can't see it from the front. It suits a classic demon, but there are also sex jokes to make about "tail" just as much as "horns" if you were so inclined.

I can appreciate that the tail has such a low profile because it's not going to get in the way of any other dolls standing beside Lust on the shelf, and it wouldn't be possible to have Lust toppling neighboring dolls with her tail when trying to take her off a shelf and move her somewhere. The plastic of the tail is slightly springy, but it's not as light as I thought it would be. The material is fairly dense and firm. The tail doesn't rotate or pose in any way.

Rather than a hellish pitchfork, Lust's torture tool is a cat-o'-nine-tails whip, which suits a classic demon torturer, but it's also clearly kinky. This piece actually has nine tails exactly, which I appreciate, and is held to her hand with an elastic loop...at the very bottom, meaning she can't really easily hold it upright. Everything except the elastic is constructed of vinyl fabric strips that match her costume and aesthetic, so this may well be an accessory that simply disintegrates. The vinyl is backed, but who knows how well it'll hold, especially since the fabric backing doesn't look so sturdy itself.

This kinda works to hold it up, but not very well.

I'd have much preferred a piece with a plastic handle, a palm peg, and thin cord for the tails. In the event I need to replace Lust's whip, which is a distinct possibility, I might try sculpting a handle with a peg and then gluing in a cord bundle. The elastic loop should have been on the side like this:

Demonika's shoes are the sexiest option available to LDD at the time: black sandals.

Here she is undressed. Her dress and hood really didn't stain her, which shocked me. What's Calico's excuse? Her dress's fabric backing was white, and she still got lots of red stains!

Demonika is painted with black underwear. This is a doll where I might have expected that detail left off, but I'm certainly fine with this.

Here's a better look at the tail connection.

Technically, it's coming out from between the cheeks, and to harmonize with the sculpt, should have been placed higher, but that's where the stamp is and maybe this worked best for the dolls with their costumes to take into consideration. I don't know if the torso for the devil tail is a modified mold for the socket the tail goes into, or if they had a process to add the socket to a normal molded torso.

This tail does not allow Lust to sit down, and it pins the back of her dress down between the tail outside and her legs inside it. She can use her tail as kind of a chair, though:

More LDDs have horns than devil tails. No LDD who has the devil tail lacks horns, though. Lou Sapphire in Series 2 introduced flocking fuzz texture for the horns and tail which have been used for Resurrection Lou and Res Sin as well. Most LDDs with the horns or tail have them un-flocked. Most horned LDDs have paint defining them, with Demonique's striped horns being the most intricate.

And we come back to the body sculpt. 

It's just flatly not a mature female figure, and it's not a great effect, but at the same time, when all done up, she doesn't feel as repellent to me as, say, several MGA toys depicting unambiguous toddlers in nets and leather, or grown women with extremely infantilized faces.

Ultimately, I think the LDD design is just tall and applicable enough to not make this immediately gross. The doll also emphasizes height and maturity with her sleek look, tall shoes, horns, long ponytail, vertical straps and laces, and long skirt, as well as her face paint and costuming all aging her with zero attempt to make her look childish or creepily highlight an immature quality. Removed from context, had I never seen LDD before, I would probably just read Demonika as a stylized retro cartoon rendition of a domme devil, not a bizarre and questionable child in horrifically unsuited clothing. LDD doesn't have chibi faces with giant heads and giant eyes that push an infantile element in ways entirely unsuited to mature fashion designs, and when it makes older characters on these doll bases, it's clear--unlike, say, Madame Alexander, where all of the dolls have childlike faces regardless of what they're styled as, making for a consistent blend of child face and grown costume. Mme. A never goes this adult in terms of subject matter, but they also would never pull it off on their dolls as well as LDD did with theirs here. LDD knows how to separate out their kid and adult character designs even as the base is the same, and their base face sculpt is restrained and versatile enough, and the body proportions are long enough, to tale on many roles. You can tell from the paint whether LDD wants a doll to read young or mature, even when lipstick is involved, and Lust just isn't made up like a little girl in LDD's style.

Here's Lust next to Sadie, a childlike swivel doll from the same era of LDD.

They almost feel like they shouldn't be sharing a scene; Sadie's just a child! But see how Sadie's eyes are painted to look larger and her lips are smaller? Demonika has heavier makeup on her eyes as well, and fuller lips. The outfits couldn't be more different, either. Sadie has a shapeless oversized kiddie cut to her costume which covers most of her, while Lust's outfit is form-fitting and covers far less while also making her look tall and mature. The sandals also give her crucial height. These two dolls have the same face and body sculpts (though different head molds, of course), but it's obvious we're looking at a child in Sadie, and that she should have nothing to do with Lust, who is an adult in a kink space.

I think I still prefer LDD to remain chaste due to the fact that the sculpting is still inescapably not adult at the end of the day, but I think Lust can be assessed as more off and ill-suited than nefarious, revolting, or suspect. I side-eye LDD severely when it goes into sexualized women, but I'll give them this: kinky Lust and the porny balloon-breasted Series 1 Fashion Victims are so blatantly so adult-coded that never do I get the implication that LDD or its designers have a concerning attraction to actual youth. The Fashion Victims are as problematic as any pornographic portrayal of women, and yeah, they do include fetishized schoolgirl and cheerleader imagery, but they're indisputably women acting out those bog-standard icky porno fantasies.

I don't question for a moment that Lust is meant to depict an adult demon woman, and her styling doesn't at all present her as a child or childlike. There are worse body sculpts you could build this character on, for sure, even within this brand. Lust would be revolting and completely unacceptable if adapted to the LDD Minis line (unambiguously toddler-shaped) or the Living Dead Dollies (infants). But there are definitely also better body designs she could have had.

LDD Presents Elvira was later released with a unique one-off boobed LDD body sculpt, which was pretty much mandated by the character's naughty schtick. Through Elvira, Cassandra Peterson basically turned her breasts into their own characters!

It was really surprising that the Monster High Skullector Elvira was released on the standard teenage body sculpt as a result, but Elvira's getting a take-two Skullector revisit loosely honoring Pride this year with a release that seems to be rightly taking advantage of the return of the adult G1 body sculpt.

I think something like this sculpt would have suited Lust well to very clearly push her body into a caricatured cartoon adult feminine shape and remove dissonance. She could even take the heels, too. Perhaps Lust would have been afforded breasts if the production of Gluttony didn't call for eight new molds this series. Maybe LDD didn't do breasts because they didn't want to open that door for lots of custom torsos and thought only Gluttony was impossible to execute with the standard body. I can understand the impulse to rein back the production and keep as much as possible anchored on the classic dolly form. I also just think this doll would be easier to accept if she had an adult woman's torso. 

There's likely no chance of modifying Lust with a dyed Elvira since the Lust outfit wouldn't be cut for the Elvira body and the heads are incompatible with the opposite bodies (Elvira is a ball-jointed LDD). I don't know if the neck socket of a ball-joint torso could be hollowed out to accept a swivel head, but for sure I'd want to test that with dummy parts first. You'd also lose Mistress's arm paint by popping her onto another body. Also of concern--LDD Elvira's legs appear cast in a darker color to mimic sheer nets darkening her legs, which would make a body dye more difficult. In this hypothetical project, this body might have to be repainted after getting a sealant layer for best color results to match Lust. You could argue Elvira's body clashes between the breasts on the torso and the rest, but there's also an argument for it demonstrating the versatility of LDD's sculpting, as, with breasts added on, the doll sculpt and paint can work for the purposes of depicting a cartoon woman. 

...and then the argument comes in that grown women don't always have big ol' bazongas and suddenly I'm the jerk and the creep and the weirdo. It's hard to argue against: just because the LDD sculpt was based on a childlike form, the absence of breasts does not invalidate the depiction of Lust as a grown woman because sometimes women's chest silhouettes are not pronounced. While breasts are stereotypically sexy and would aid a caricature of Lust on that tack, who am I to say the doll cannot portray a woman because she's flat-chested? Am I saying LDD would have that defense or justification in mind when they made the doll? Almost certainly not; look at the Fashion Victims. But while the doll factually isn't built on a woman's body shape, and that has its issues, an interpretation that she's a cartoon of a woman with a slim profile is pretty solid, and again, I don't get the feeling LDD is being gross and playing with the collision of elements. They're doing all they can to make this a purely mature design, and they did not adapt this character to their far more childlike spinoff doll types. Had they done, calling the police on them would have been one's civic responsibility and moral duty.

I noticed Lust's skintone ends up darker than White dolls when converted to greyscale, so she could be read as a non-White character if you so wished.

I wouldn't call this intent, and there's an argument that reading Lust as non-White is its own can of worms, but it doesn't have to be if you don't make it so.

Lust was the only Series 7 character to be Resurrected, and it seems deliberate for her theming that the series number remained a seven--Lust was in Resurrection VII. Only one of seven dolls Resurrected makes Series 7 the set with the proportionally smallest Resurrection representation (for series that spawned more than zero Resurrections, at least). There are other series (5, 10, 14, 15, 16, 18) with one Res each, but their series size is smaller so the ratio of un-Resurrected to Resurrected (4:1) is less stark than S7 (6:1).

 Resurrection Lust indulges in some provocative blasphemy by being styled as a fully-covered nun in sexy vinyl fabric, and wears the LDD gas mask. 

I feel like the right's outrage machine just never found out about these dolls, because material like this could have gone nuclear if certain talking heads found out about it. The dolls had been banned in Greece, maybe over beliefs they were being sold to young children, and surely that accusation would be made by the grifters over here in the US, but nope. LDD hasn't hit the mainstream yet...and I want it to stay that way. (Again, though: Talking heads would be within their rights to excoriate LDD over its first target age range, which was a foolish idea.)

I feel like a nun in vinyl and a gas mask (suggesting kinky suffocation) is a rather over-the-top and on-the-nose illustration of sinful sexual repression and rebellion and it's a little silly, but Lust's main Res is intriguing for portraying her as a human woman with pale flesh and blonde hair. She's a bit like Lady Gaga in the music video for "Alejandro", actually. Lust's Resurrection variant is more true to the S7 original, having red skin and the horned sculpt as well as a black costume. Variant Res has black hair in the same style and still has the same gas-mask nun look. These outfits look hard to take apart and put back on! And don't get me started on their aging/upkeep prospects.

Here's the Res Lusts unmasked. They seem to have the same inset eyes. Sometimes two Res editions have different inset eyes per variant, while sometimes both dolls share an eye design.

Photo credit to Lilith in tenebris on Flickr. I don't know if the markings under their eyes mean anything. Main Lust's dashes almost look like Morse code, but they're not uniform enough to be, and that would be an extremely strange way of hiding something in a doll faceup.

See what I mean about the Gaga? Red latex robe, pale skin, platinum hair, beauty mark, blasphemy...have I cracked something here? I don't really expect the LDD guys to be listening to Gaga, but the similarities are so close, and the video was out a good time before the doll.

I think the elements making this inconclusive are that Gaga's beauty mark is below her eye, not on her lip, and much of the Lust faceup is dissimilar. And again, I don't really expect the punk-goth-fan Gen X LDD designers to have been Lady Gaga listeners. She was more shocking during this formative era, though.

EDIT: The owner who photographed the Resurrection Lusts unmasked did some custom work which misled me. While the hair makes perfect sense, both dolls are officially bald, which makes sense because they need to fit in their cowls. Of course the hair wasn't official-- though it looks good on them. Previous LDD nun character Bad Habit was bald for the same purpose.

I still appreciate red-robed Lust unmasked, though an invocation of Lady Gaga is less likely, knowing she doesn't have hair.

End of edit.

The Res VII set labeled as variants on the LDD archive is apparently the easier set to get, so I wonder if the website made a mistake? The red-robed Lust is the bigger get and has to be chased on the aftermarket if her total absence on it at time of writing is any indication. I have a Resurrection Revenant from the ostensible main set on the way!

Res Lust is obviously White, while the variant is the same red as S7, so concerns about Res whitewashing S7, if the S7 doll is taken as non-White, can be countered by the original skintone being represented in the Res pair. Maybe having the flesh-toned doll be paler is still concerning, but the Res release does not fully replace the original doll's skintone with lighter options, unlike, say, Demonique's Resurrections which are both paler. I'm not able to form an opinion either way on what S7 Lust depicts, and Res Lust's coloring doesn't bother me.

I took Lust to wash her hair, undressed. I retied her ponytail with fiber elastic because, while her elastic band looked to be in great condition, it wouldn't be forever. When I put her back in her costume, her hood was in a very bad way compared to before I took it off. It was a stark transformation. The material under her horns was splitting and honeycombing to the point of near disintegration and I knew the hood wouldn't be long for the world without immediate intervention.

This evidently isn't a unique problem, though, because I've seen secondhand Mistresses for sale with this spot already disintegrated and her horns no longer enclosed. While the fabric was never going to be pristine forever, it's possible Mistress's costume would be safer to take off if it was broken into two pieces, starting at the bottom of the corset. If the corset velcro'd off as a top, doing that would then allow you to open the chinstrap of the hood and lift the hood right off the head with the bodice already loose. Then you could put the hood on first and then secure the bodice second to redress her so there would be no pulling the hood up while it's anchored down to the bodice. I can see how a separate piece for the corset and skirt could look too bulky and make the tail harder to negotiate, though.

I'd already wanted to do something to protect the shine of her costume before it could all flake off, but the hood here especially would leave nothing if it flaked, so I had to act. I used some fabric glue to smear over and work into the gaps to try to stop further disintegration, and used dimensional fabric paint in black gloss applied by brush. I'd heard of the paint as a promising substitute or repair for vinyl fabric and bought it in advance. With Lust's costume being shiny and smooth already, it served as a new layer of coating over the top to seal the fabric while matching the finish so it wasn't very easy to spot. Brushing a matte surface with the paint wouldn't be as easy and would more likely soak into and stiffen the material before you could get it over the surface as a gloss, but covering over the existing material with the paint seemed to be a helpful strategy. If I had a do-over, I'd take these measures before ever removing her hood the first time, because clearly it's one of those actions that compromises the doll so the costume will never look as good as it did before you took it off. Had I been bold enough to assume the worst and add the paint over her hood when she was untouched, then it might have come off undamaged. If I got a copy of Lust with the hood already wrecked and wanted to save her somehow, then I'd probably cut the hood and straps off the dress bodice and do a reroot for her head to give her a full head of hair and widow's peak. This all would have to be for a doll whose dress wasn't also badly wrecked by peeling.

I've handled Series 13 Iris for a regular roundup that's all ready to publish, and found her coat vinyl disintegrating rapidly after opening her. For her, I gave up on the coat and let the vinyl all scrub off in water to leave her costume matte, but if I got a second chance with her, which I might seriously do, I could try coating her coat with this paint before the peeling damage got too dire so I could save the original visual. Still, Iris could afford to wear a matte coat. There was no answer for Lust beyond trying this new coating out to keep her from crumbling.

Since the doll was already scuffed and modified, I added that elastic loop I was talking about to the side of her whip to make her hold it better.

As with Gluttony, Lust called for a fancy environment setting--the dungeon in Hell which she rules over. I didn't want to get any more inappropriate than the doll as designed, but I thought it would be possible to emphasize an element of horror torture to show how badly Demonika handles her trade.

To continue on the blend between actual torture and kink, I made Lust a pillory. I cut oven-bake clay and used paint caps to cut out the holes and then cut the piece in two. Because I could only test the fit of the holes on a doll's head and raised arms after baking the pieces rigid, it took two sculpts and bakes to get the fit right.

I painted the pieces glossy black and glued a LEGO hinge plate on to let the pieces open and close. 

I put them on a dowel and foam board square to form the pole and platform, and painted them black after this.

I then drilled in holes to add eyehole screws a lock could thread through, making this piece fully functional.

Sybil already has the perfect leash and collar for Lust to walk someone else around in.

Choosing the participants in Mistress's club was a little difficult because the dolls all needed to fall into the adult-coded sphere of characters, and I have few male LDDs who suit that role. Not to say Lust only caters to men, nor that sapphic women wouldn't be attracted to her, but she's pretty much a caricature of the male gaze, so her victims made sense being mostly men. I decided on Dr. Dedwin as her puppy slave, then put Maitre des Morts on a meat hook and put Carotte Morts in the pillory. Jezebel can be a stage entertainer in the back, and Madame la Mort works as another patron. Series 33 is very useful for this doll's theme, given its cabaret subject matter. I also threw Viv in hanging (top half only) from a rope binding her. I did my quickest prop build ever to throw Madame into a guillotine when I realized I could repurpose the first pillory bracket I sculpted. Madame La Mort in a guillotine is partly a joke on her French nationality and vaguely Marie Antoinette look, but it also suits her cut neck well, and the idea of an outright execution device in Hell's kink club is also pretty funny to me and directs the theme toward horror torture nicely. The piece is very simple, but it gets the visual across. No functionality, and I built Madame into the neck bracket by gluing the ends closed around her. I broke it open to free her later. 

Here's some pictures in the club setup. I emptied my closet again and covered the floor in trash bags, and used red and blue and blacklit lighting for the right atmosphere while playing with the Deadly Sin color of the hour. Blue light actually suits an adult club setting really well.

And with flame added digitally. Didn't work as well as I had hoped.

Maybe this?

Here's some basic portraits on blue.

When thinking of dolls and spankings, I was reminded of the notorious children's book The Lonely Doll by Dare Wright. The story is told through writing and photography of an articulated doll and two teddy bears, discussing Edith and her bear friends' adventures in a human-scale home, though no human characters appear. The most infamous scene of the book is a moment where Edith and Little Bear write a mocking note on the mirror about Mr. Bear, for which Mr. Bear decides to spank the two. This is one of the illustrated sequences, and the resulting photograph is...uncomfortable.

While the books have no ill intent, people feel weird about this moment, and I understand why. Even if it is just a parent's discipline being depicted, corporal punishment isn't good. Demonika made me think of this scene, but with the doll/bear roles reversed.

I made an illustration for Gluttony with the medievalish style before, so I did one for Lust too.

Lust also photographed great against a blue flame background, and editing a second layer to engulf her in post also looked good.

While blue is the symbolic theme color that helps mark her as the icon of Lust rather than any old demon, that's not to say she doesn't shine on red as well. This also provided a cleaner scene to showcase the pillory in. That's Dedwin again as the body, though this could be any of her tortured slaves. The gag ball was unbaked grey clay that I recolored in post.

It's strange for me to say this, because I've disparaged the spinoff multiple times, and multiple times in this very post, but Lust should have been a Fashion Victim. She's the character that justifies the existence of a sexy adult spinoff of LDD; heck, she even justifies the dumb extra-booby first wave! While the Fashion Victims are embarrassing and tasteless and hard not to call sexist, Lust is a character who vastly better suits the doll medium of an adult-bodied toy whose sexuality is the whole gag. Lust shared a time period with the wave-2 Fashion Victims, but LDD must have known there was no Series 3 by the time she was released, because it's unthinkable that she wouldn't have gotten in while the line was running. While LDD Lust is built on a doll design that just ekes into the versatility required so the character does not feel like a sexualized child, and she does kind of work it when viewed as a cartoon woman, she'd be much more baggage-free as a Fashion Victim truly built as a woman's figure. 

Honestly, main Resurrection Lust might be more classy and safe with the doll design. The symbolism of a suffocating human nun in a vinyl habit is implicitly erotic and sinful, and is extremely blasphemous if that's a concern of yours, but it visually feels more chaste and less at odds with the doll design by showing less skin. There's a really compelling element of conflict and juxtaposition in the Res design while the doll ends up more naughty in context than in objective visual. I think I've come around more to her despite her ridiculous tones because I can appreciate her being more symbolic and less jarring on the doll build. For sure, her fabric would be destroyed too by time, but if it was colored underneath to match the vinyl, then it would probably look okay after peeling.

As it is, the Series 7 doll is in a fraught place. On the one hand, she's a serve. She rocks her costume and her colors and face paint are fantastic. On the other hand, her costume isn't durable at all and she's one of the worst LDDs to collect today because of how poorly her material ages. I'm not even sure how well my interventions with fabric glue and glossy paint coating are going to hold up. I'll need to keep an eye on her for sure, and will definitely move her to a cooler storage when summer fully sets in. This doll flatly should have been sewn with an all-plastic sheeting material, which LDD demonstrated they could use for things like Nurse Necro's smock, Gabriella's costume, and the LDD gas mask, all of which were separate durable materials. Gabi's costume sleeves and "shorts" are an outright ideal material for what Lust needed to do. 

Even just because of her costume material, Lust is not an eminently recommendable doll, and is one of those few I completely understand keeping sealed, because taking her out sets her on a course of destruction. Within an hour of opening the doll, her hood was badly damaged from gentle handling and needed quick action to halt its deterioration.

And even if you accept Lust as a cartoon woman who works okay with the body sculpt, there's still the discomfort behind her deathdate reference and the thing about her concept being potentially too mature for the age range of the brand at the time. LDD had adjusted upward after it was clear the brand wasn't suited for its age range at the start, but then throwing in more mature concepts like Lust made the age rating seem inadequate a second time. I hope the Fashion Victims were rated older.

To enjoy the LDD Lust doll, one must view her as adult as possible, but at least it's clear LDD was doing the same designing her and I have no grounds to accuse them of any intent to do otherwise. When she works, she works, but there's always going to be something awkward about her. This just isn't the ideal medium for this character design.

Finale

Out of this group, I'm pretty attached to (the) Sybil(s) and Lust when I'm able to view them as cartoons with heavy stylization. Both dolls have a strong look and understand their conceptual niche. Of the two, Sybil is undoubtedly the better buy, though. Her costume has aged flawlessly and her design is 100% functional and display-friendly, while Lust's costume is pretty much doomed to rot when handled and left to its own devices, and her accessory really doesn't interact with her hands well. (Minis Sybil is also just a damn achievement of a tiny doll.) While Sybil's concept is horrible in its own way, it makes me feel less bad to say I like her conceptually, and her quality being better makes her the top pick of the group. Lust was precarious and I only got as far as I did with her due to intervention for her costume's future.

Of the four, Gypsy and Famine land in the most and least problematic categories, respectively. There's nothing that can break through the stereotyping and offensive name given to Gypsy, and papering over Mezco's poor choices with a better name doesn't feel right to me because the doll doesn't fully deserve it. Even if the character beyond the name may not be badly inaccurate or offensive in her portrayal of Romani history, it's still a very limited range of portrayal afforded to the Roma and the doll, our only Romani LDD, wouldn't exist without the ethnic stock stereotype. Famine, on the other hand, is a mostly fair design that I got some hangups about but ultimately feels the least egregious of the group I selected here. She's my least favorite doll of the group because her visual design isn't fully my thing, her costume is cheap even within the design prompt of "cheap hot-girl Halloween dress", and her horse and gripping hand aren't as tight together as I'd want. Sybil is the most functional and best-aged of the four dolls, and if you're willing to enter a stereotyped irresponsible fantasy for a moment, she can be entertaining and appealing. None of these dolls are innocent, though. 

Compared to the last batch?

It's interesting reading back my previous post, where the intro states the project was predicated on sorting through the issues of dolls which I found to be standout productions but couldn't be talked about like any other LDDs because they had big conceptual challenges. With those dolls, there was at least part of a sentiment of "I'd love to just highlight these as interesting dolls for what they do, but there's something wrong with them that needs deeper exploration." I do think I picked Jezebel more for being uncomfortable than for being a standout I couldn't discuss lightly, but she does still have multiple surprise details, for better and definite worse. 

Here, however, I constructed this post with the sole intent of seeking out issues in LDD and tackling them. Only Sybil in this batch is a standout novelty with her straitjacket arms, as opposed to last round where every doll had production novelties or surprises. Candidates I'm thinking of for a third batch have even less novelty factors. This group here was based more on troubling content than the sentiment of "that's so cool, but...", and Famine, Gypsy, and Lust strike me as less collectible or recommendable. Gypsy is the best quality of those three but I felt she had the biggest issues conceptually, while Famine isn't the most appealing doll nor the best-made, and Lust is a time bomb for vinyl fabric decay. There's less reason, I think, to get this batch of dolls as a toy collector, while the last batch all had collectible factors that set the dolls apart.

I think there are some definite similarities in topical range and my final reactions, though.

Macumba and Gypsy are both ethnically iffy dolls who have some merit and some reflection of cultural history, but are marred by their tokenism and inaccuracies making them feel like poor representations, and I'm ultimately not as attached to either as a result. I don't dislike the dolls, but they're not treasures. I actually found Macumba to be the least uncomfortable of the first roundup, because despite his starkly lonely depiction of a Black person and his conceptual inaccuracies, he could be taken as a good-faith if flawed depiction of Haitian Vodou culture and the founding of zombie mythology. At the time he was made, he wasn't as bad, and he only aged worse by LDD consistently demonstrating an obvious lack of interest in darker human skintones for their dolls in the long time since his release. I think Macumba could have represented a better trajectory for the brand if he wasn't ultimately left so so alone. Gypsy, however, stands out to me as the most shameful of this roundup because that name is so ill-chosen and she has less specific substance to her design that could reduce accusations of her being a pure stereotype. 

Dahlia and Sybil are the two dolls I like quite a bit but don't feel proud to, with both being well-made novelty dolls with concepts that aren't great. I think Dahlia's concept is a little more painful through its specificity and insensitivity to a real criminal case, but the reaction is about the same. They're both worth collecting for production novelty and are well-done pieces with personality. It's just hard to say they're great due to their root ideas. Dahlia was another of the worst in the first batch in terms of problematic material, and her specificity to a real individual's murder makes her land more offensive to me than Sybil, who is a generic archetype. 

Gluttony and Famine as Christian weight icons are the easy comparison to make, but there's no contest in my personal opinion--Gluttony is a doll I like much more. He's gross and offensive, but the doll has some design appeal and novelty with his special body sculpts and three accessories he can juggle around, and he's a compelling doll. Famine just isn't clicking with me despite being less repugnant in her ways. I do think both are the least painful of their roundups, though, with both designs being justifiable as caricatured archetypes of a concept even if they're still uncomfortable for it. It's possible those with a more significant relationship to weight will disagree and find them worse than I did, which is fair.

Jezebel and Lust have comparison as sexy dolls, though their root issues that got them featured are different factors. I suppose I land about the same on each, though--they're ready to walk the runway and I like them as iconic ladies with fierce looks, but the sticking points for each doll really stick and it's hard to look past them. I can compartmentalize Dahlia and Sybil okay under the lens of exaggerated fantasy, Sybil moreso, but Jezebel and Lust's issues (insensitive portrayal of suicide and sexual design on an unsuited doll base) can't really be put aside in the same way. Jezebel's always going to have her paint details and covering them up is still a reminder. Lust is built on the body she has. I'd like to like them more, but those things are just still there. Time will tell, but I do think Jezebel could turn out as the easier one to embrace--I've already used her in photoshoots for crowd scenery just fine, while Lust's theme might make her more specific and limited. 

With the aspect of LDD Minis brought in, it coincidentally ends up that only one doll in each batch of uncomfortables I picked even had a Minis representation to speak of--that would be Macumba for batch 1, and I may well go ahead and get Minis Macumba just to have him. 

Thus concludes another analysis of dolls that give me pause. I hope I've been as even-handed and honest as I can in discussing these dolls. As before, my intent is neither to absolve nor condemn them--just to discuss where I feel they're harmful or misguided and where they may be enjoyable. I reiterate my belief that exploring icky media can be valuable and that it's possible to be aware of social issues and fight for the right side while also consuming morally impure media. You do have to understand it's wrong, and why, so you don't replicate its harmful aspects or get swayed into being positive toward the wrong elements, but media consumption is not always complicity. 

I do expect to have a third roundup of four in the future, as mentioned, though the exact lineup isn't set entirely in stone and one doll I'm thinking of may be very hard to find and quite expensive. I'm certainly not fast-tracking that potential project, though, and it could very well end up being a next-year thing. This roundup here felt a little bothersome because I got Gypsy so much earlier than the others, and while it was my choice, having a project started but unfinished for so long wasn't the best feeling, so I probably won't get any dolls for the third round until I'm basically ready to have all of them, give or take a month.