Big Emotions: The Monster High "Fearfully Feisty/Fangtastic Love" Inner Monster by Mattel

This toy changed my life forever, and it's possibly the most overdue topic on this blog by now.

Warning for some more intense language in this post. I have some spirited reactions to this doll in certain ways that are most authentically expressed in emphatics I normally don't use here. 

During high school, I discovered the Bogleech website, run by a passionate monster fan and creative discussing many monster-media topics which clued me in to a lot of horror tropes and character designs and taught me how into horror I really was. I read all the articles, but one entry spotlighted complex customizable dolls with a freaky, gnarly side that was hard to believe was seriously marketed to young girls. They had brains under wigs. They had three eye options that cycled through with a button. They had bizarre anatomical extras to fit them with. The dress-up play included undressing them down to the skeleton so you could style their internal organs. The doll being highlighted on Bogleech was the Fearfully Feisty/Fangtastic Love Inner Monster from Monster High, and this was the very catalyst of my entire doll hobby. The Inner Monster led to me discovering Emily the Toy Box Philosopher through her review of the same doll, and to me amassing a collection starting with Amanita Nightshade. The doll also became my first study when trying to improve on drawing human characters, which opened up a whole artistic practice for me. I felt like my drawing skills were well behind my age when I drew the doll first at the age of 16, but as I kept retrying and refining portraits of Monster High dolls, my instincts improved and developed.

My 2016 drawing, emphasizing the most normal and freaky displays for the doll--it was bad. Really bad.

I'd drawn other iterations of the doll and many others over time, but this was my revisit in 2023. Still not perfect, but absolutely on a different level.

So much of my personality and skillset has sprung from discovering this doll. It can't be understated.

As I've mentioned, the Inner Monster dolls, and Feisty/Love in particular, were not my collection entry point, and when I got my Feisty/Love doll back then, she ended up pretty much in the middle of my original doll collection, perhaps even within the latter half. She wasn't on store shelves at the point I got her, so I ordered a complete boxed copy from Amazon. The doll did enjoy the honor of being the only doll in my original collection which I kept...but she had an issue, and this, in addition to competing priorities, is why I've taken so so long to finally put her on the blog. When I got her new, she already had signs of yellowing plastic, including her hard-plastic head, which gradually displayed bands of yellowing color far darker and less uniform than I'd experienced on most other yellowing toys before, leading me to wonder if this was normal. I certainly hadn't seen other eBay copies of the doll displaying the same yellowing pattern or intensity. The problem got worse over time up to the current era-- like, much worse.

Taken last year.

While hydrogen peroxide soaking did seem to help reverse the yellowing, it also seemed to be damaging her faceup, with the (to be fair, subtle) lip paint fading badly and almost vanishing. Her black paint and the eye option in front during the soak looked unaffected. I'd also repainted her faceplate and one of her emotion charms was broken since the early days owning her, so I decided I could only review the doll in good conscience if I got her some replacement parts or swapped out the base doll altogether to a more pristine copy. While this technically dethrones her and technically leaves me now with no surviving fashion dolls from my original collection, she's still here in Ship-of-Theseus spirit and wouldn't be a full doll without the pieces retained from copy 1. I want to show you this doll at her best, but I'm coming in knowing how she gets at her worst.

Inner Monster was a spinoff from the Create-A-Monster line which I’ve discussed previously. My most comprehensive discussion of the CAM format is found in this post here. Inner Monster serves a slightly different purpose from CAM. Instead of giving pieces of distinctive monsters, IM provided more neutral monstrous humanoid characters as a base and different accessories and clip-on faceplates to transform that base into something more defined and extravagant, all themed on the way different emotions have changed them. There were four doll sets and three Mood Packs as supplemental releases to the dolls. The four base dolls were monsters depicting:

• botanical Shockingly Shy and octopoid Scared Silly
• peacock Frightfully Fierce and dragon Spooky Sweet
• flaming Fearfully Feisty and creepy Fangtastic Love 
• and a deluxe doll depicting three emotions--tornado Eek Excited, butterfly Hauntingly Happy and gloomy Shivering Sad

The Mood Packs were designed to supplement one of the base emotions from each of the three standard dolls, providing vinyl wigs, faceplates and costumes to make those select emotions more defined than the base pack's parts did. Scared Silly got a pack giving the emotion a clown theme, Spooky Sweet got a pack giving the emotion a candy theme, and Fearfully Feisty got a pack expanding on the flame theme. The Happy/Excited/Sad pack came with a larger assortment including three faceplates, a vinyl wig and fiber wig, a pair of wings, a tornado tail to replace the legs, two sets of torso shells, and multiple costume parts. I previously owned Sweet/Fierce just to build the candy-monster look with her Mood Pack, but was a little unsatisfied by it, while I always wanted Shy/Silly to build the clown-monster look with her Mood Pack...and probably still do.

Unlike Create-a-Monster, which existed mostly tangential to the G1 narrative material (save for being the place a few webisode background monsters were released), Inner Monster was given a spotlight in the G1 webisodes...and I honestly despise how that was done. It's a two-webisode run and it's awful. 

Ghoulia has just coded an artificial intelligence app she's intending to be a logical knowledge base for things like helping find optimal routes to the next class on your schedule. She named the app Inner Monster, and the IM dolls are portrayed as the avatars of the app, with their visual appearance changing for the monster using it. A programming error gets the app set to "100% emotional" instead, and Ghoulia discovers monsters are connecting to the app as a companion AI to talk to and sort out their feelings. Way to go on predicting our modern dystopia, Mattel. I also feel disappointed in Ghoulia. I think we know pretty well now just how disturbing the idea of a companion AI truly is and how psychologically unhealthy that can be for the human brain, and it's impossible to watch the episode not feeling horrified. Also...Ghoulia. Why did you call this app "Inner Monster" if there was no intent for it to be about feelings?

Things get worse in the second episode, where Iris is struggling to communicate with Manny, and uses the app to translate his awkward terse remarks as romantic declarations, then Cleo does so with Deuce. It's a really sexist gag painting the picture that boys are universally unromantic or lacking in emotional intelligence or expression, and it's a reminder of how, despite the male characters' unusually prominent and interesting representation in G1, they ultimately had much of their identity built from their romantic relationships and no boy doll character except Kieran (who was always intended to be gay, and is, in legacy content) ended up not in a couple or a clear romantic potential pairing with a girl. (In G3, Deuce is implicitly aromantic, which is nice to see.) I know boys and men aren't often taught to be sensitive or forthcoming with affection, so there's a root in reality, but reflecting that root in a way that upholds a stereotype doesn't do any good when Mattel could have instead presented a scenario where boys were honest and sensitive in a positive way. Also, I feel like there would have been a way to make this genuinely poignant, like depicting the app as an aid device for monsters who struggle to communicate or express themselves and want to, rather than the "dumb lovable boy translator". Or even have the boys use the app of their own volition out of an introspective desire to explore their emotions and communicate them better. Boy Inner Monster dolls would also have been wicked, but there was never a chance of that.

As it stands, in the G1 canon, the Inner Monsters are chatbot avatars of a dystopian AI companion app that tricks your brain into thinking you're interacting with an actual person and is just the best for getting those stupid ol' boys to say they love you. Fuck that. This doll is just an actual monster character to me, thanks.

The three base dolls’ packaging was a trapezoid with a plastic window forming the front and sloping sides, and a flat cardboard back. Each side featured large artwork of half a graphically bold colorful face representing one of the doll's two emotion personas. The art was arranged such that Inner Monster boxes standing side-by-side formed complete faces between them. I always love when packaging is designed to align in groups like that. 

While I can't concretely say it's so, the over-the top visuals of these dolls and their box art made me wonder if there was an anime influence behind the art direction here.

Neither of the separate hair colors on the two face images are representative of the singular wig provided by the doll, but the fake bob hairdo over the doll herself does match the wig's color. The Inner Monster artwork has some similarity to the hyperactive and arresting Sweet Screams doll boxes…though the Sweet Screams dolls were just as wild as the art! The doll was displayed with a bare head, which is what the paper hair prop is covering up, leaving the brain button exposed with a hole in the top of the box so you could test out the eye-change feature. Nice touch. The background art in the box is a ribcage, which alludes to one of the doll’s key gimmicks. I did always wonder if the issues with my doll's plastic had anything to do with the box design exposing the doll to the air around it, and if maybe my doll was around something weird before she came to me, but I can't be sure. All that yellowing could suggest she was from a smoker's environment, but the fact that the yellowing was progressive even after her relocation and seemed to resurge after attempts to use peroxide would say otherwise. There was also no odor to the doll when I got her.

My replacement lot of parts came with the body mostly complete sans a left hand, the wig, a dress not from Monster High but which fit the body okay, the flame wings and boots from the base set, one red shoe from the base set, the faceplate, an incomplete piece of the spider wings, and the best surprise of all--the charms inside her torso included the one I broke on my original copy! 

The left thigh of this doll did display some yellowing, but the rest didn't. 

I examined the parts of both bodies and cobbled together the doll with the better version of whatever pieces I had two of. This here is essentially the assortment you get from unboxing the doll new.

My doll is very nearly complete and these are all of the base doll's major parts. There are just some of the doll's original emotion charms I no longer have, but I have plenty to spare from other Inner Monster products that ended up my way. I got the Shy/Silly monster and the Spooky Sweet Mood Pack for a failed custom project I'd need to restart with my better methods today, with new base parts, but I held onto some of the elements of those packs, including the emotions. 

Due to the Inner Monsters using harness-style back accessories, the standard waist-grip stand wouldn’t really work with them, so they have saddle stands instead. This exact stand design actually debuted in the 13 Wishes doll line for the Haunt the Casbah dolls with big skirts.

The pole is clear plastic centered on a base shaped like a Skullette. I recently used mine to stamp dalgona candies for Monster High's Skullector Squid Game doll, where I had to break the stand and glue it together so I could remove the bottom of the pole socket from the inside of the base and make cleaner stamps of just the edge outline. When it was in factory condition, the pole was removable and could snap in facing either direction. The standard MH stands have a sloped juncture between the pole and base, plus a tab and slot, each making the connection one-direction only. Not that it would make sense any other way--the regular stands' poles are at the edge of the base due to the waist-grip system needing to center the doll on the base from behind.

Sometimes saddle stands work fine, but I found these saddle stands weren’t as good as the waist-grip. Because they’re one fixed height, there's no guarantee every doll will fit well. Sometimes, it seems like the doll swims in the air, and she can tip out of the cradle if she's not firmly braced against the base with her feet. Valentina's red shoes in particular don't brace her well on the stand, though I did find the big-sister-bodied doll Casta Fierce to fit this stand perfectly when I had her. My Casta's typical MH stand had a base that was warped and she fell over backward constantly, so I had her in this stand for a time. A shoe change is liable to alter the doll’s balance on the stand thanks to changing the height a little. Some kind of telescoping pole should have been engineered, seriously.

There's an even bigger problem with the stands, though. The clear plastic of the pole/cradle piece is meant to be inconspicuous and keep from looking awkward, but in practice, the material is unwelcome as it fundamentally makes the piece more brittle and prone to breaking--translucent plastic like this, on a chemical level, isn't as hardy as opaque plastic. Saddle stands with clear poles have featured in the Ever After High line as well, and my Thronecoming Blondie Lockes, who had such a saddle stand, had hers break, with one of the cradle prongs snapping. After five good years, the same thing happened with this Inner Monster as well. It survived my first doll era, but didn't last far at all into the second! I eventually superglued the clip back together. Ugh. I don’t like how the design fix offered by the saddle stand (hold a doll wearing a waist-covering harness) truly just created more design problems. This stand should have been opaque and with a telescoping pole to be sturdy and functional enough. Also, with this doll’s hip-hugging pencil dress, the saddle stand was inconvenient since I had to take care to pull the dress down around it so the stand clip wouldn’t be overlapping the doll. The ruffle dresses of the Shy/Silly doll are less tricky with the clip. On the other hand, putting the cradle through a skirt that hugs it tighter makes the doll a bit more secure in the clip.

A later saddle stand design, used with Howliday 2023 Skelita Calaveras, paired a stand base originally designed for a waist-grip with a saddle pole, which was an unwise design because the doll wanted to tip backward in the absence of surface on the base to throw behind the pole and the doll. The clear plastic appears to be a different formula that's less brittle.

There needed to be a measure of platform projected behind the pole as well as in front for this to work right.

I was more satisfied with the next two saddle stands MH trotted out.

The stands with the Off-White dolls (I got Symphanee Midnight) have what looks like the same pole as 2023 Skelita's, and the connection is at the back of the platform again, but the Off-White stands are heavily weighted blocks, like paperweights, that are in zero danger of being tipped over by the doll. The only hindrance to the stand function was Symphanee's shoes having no traction and a small footprint.

The stand design I encountered first with Skullector Young-hee is sized for the doll's curvier body sculpt, but provides a compelling alternate solution--the pole has switched to opaque plastic and it uses a normal stand base, but corrects the balance issue by sloping forward to center the doll's gravity in the same spot as a waist-grip.

The Ever After High rendition of saddle stands as seen in the Thronecoming line was different in that the cradles were actually firm clips holding tight onto the dolls' undercarriages, which had a sturdy factor and made whether the doll's feet braced against the base irrelevant, but also kind of fixed their torso posture in a way that could be a little ungraceful. The clear plastic of the EAH saddle poles was also brittle.

Inner Monster dolls have uniquely customizable diaries. The covers have a blank name line for you to fill in, and all of the pages consist of the standard G1 diary profile categories repeated and blank so you can define your monster multiple times with different profiles depending on how you configure her.

I wrote the name in way back when.

The pages also have a "current mood:" row of icons where you can circle one or more to make a statement. The icons are derived from the emotion charms featured in the dolls, but not all of them are 1:1 depictions of charms on the dolls.

None of the classic CAM dolls had diaries, not even blank ones. The multiple profile pages here are nice, but some blank lined pages for diary story entries to compose could have been nice, too. I still like this touch, though. As for my story for the doll? I find the fire and heart iconography works pretty well together to characterize this Inner Monster as a love demon, so I’ve called her Valentina Lovett ever since getting her. This is a good name that's served her well, but it doesn't actually do anything to encompass her fiery, passionate side, so I'm giving her a late, slight rename to balance that out a bit better. 

Valentina Ardor

Monster Parent: A love demon
Freaky Flaw: I can make anyone fall in love with me with a simple glance. I've learned, though, that it's not as nourishing as relationships forged from scratch.
Killer Style: Anything heart-themed or flame-patterned. Love is love, and sometimes, it burns!
Favorite Activity: Studying relationships and how they develop. I've learned a lot about my own powers and how to approach these things without them.
Pet Peeve: Monsters who fall in love but refuse to give it a chance. If you feel it, feel it! Romance can be a worthwhile experience, no matter how it ends.
Favorite Food: Artichoke hearts.
Pet: I have no pet, for I still need to learn to bond with animals while not using enchantment.
Friends: C.A. Cupid, Heath Burns

The dolls came with instructions I can't share because I don't have them anymore. They had diagrams for each of the special features of these dolls. The back encouraged you to come up with your own combinations of pieces and showed some potential ones labeled as “Hauntingly Happy” “Shivering Sad”, and “Eek Excited”. This was odd, since these names are the ones used for the three emotional personae represented by the deluxe Inner Monster set. I would have left the "make your own emotions" images unlabeled or used names that another doll didn't already have. And to be honest, the suggestions didn't work really well because the dolls are really just designed for two or three defined aesthetics. It would have been more effective, if also more insidious, to depict the "make your own emotions!" demos by showing the doll's parts mixed with other dolls from the Inner Monster line to demonstrate the cross-compatibility and "collect them all" appeal. Maybe I'm misremembering and the demo images did mix parts between dolls, but I can't be sure.

Let’s look at vanilla Valentina first. This is the doll at her most basic complete assembly.

Valentina’s wig is a watermelon pink with black streaks underneath and in the left half of her bangs. The shape of the hair is fairly long with a mini-ponytail on her top left and straight-cut bangs across her forehead. 

The straight bangs are ideal for disguising the wig cap, and not all CAM and IM wigs feature styles that adequately do so, making Valentina a bit more favorable of the three smaller IM sets. Mattel's doll wigs to this day could afford to be made with much more grace to keep the caps hidden. I took out Valentina's top ponytail at first, thinking it looked stupid, but then came around to putting it back in. It adds something. 

The pink fiber appears to be the exact same color and kanekalon fiber as used on most G1 Venus McFlytrap dolls, which means when wet, it feels fairly coarse and when dry, it’s super smooth and shiny and also extremely floaty and has no cling to itself. When boiled, the hair strands hug around the contours of the wig cap edge, making the shape a little distorted. I’ve seen pictures of this Inner Monster wig with very unattractively short bangs, including in Toy Box Philosopher Emily's review, but I was lucky enough to get a wig cut properly with longer bangs. The bangs and style do make this wig fairly well-disguised, but when placed next to a rooted doll the wig looks pretty ungainly and unconvincing…or maybe it’s the fiber’s airiness making it look off. I'd probably like this wig a lot more in saran.

Because Inner Monster dolls have a mechanical button on the top of their head, their wigs attach in a different manner from the Create-A-Monster dolls. The two wig types are not mutually compatible. While the CAMs had inserts forming solid plastic disks in the top of their heads that featured a slot in the middle for a rubber prong in the center of their wigs to push into, the Inner Monsters instead have two very short rubber prongs on the rear of the wig cap’s inner ring that fit into two slots on the back of the head just under the point where the top is “sliced off”. 

A CAM head's wig slot.

A CAM wig's peg.

Inner Monster wig holes on the back.

Tabs on the inner back side of the wig cap that fit into the head.

This attachment was necessitated by the eye mechanism, but makes the wigs much easier to pull off due to not being attached in the center (the wigs can flap a bit like a hinge or lid) and having a shallower peg attachment. Simply combing the hair is enough to scalp these ghouls if you're not careful and pinning the wigs down with a finger or two. The silicone (I'm assuming) wig cap material doesn't grip the plastic head as much as one would hope. It might have worked if the doll heads had a slight groove in the top and the wig caps had a ridge that would grip into that groove so the wigs weren't looser everywhere but the back, but the dolls' display value without hair could have been lessened. And I do like that these dolls can display with naked brains.

Create-a-Monsters can wear the Inner Monster wigs alright because the prongs are short and flexible and the caps will squeeze around the edge of a CAM head, but Inner Monsters cannot wear CAM wigs thanks to the wig spike in the middle of the cap.

None are included in the three standard base Inner Monster sets, but the Inner Monster line also features sculpted vinyl wigs in the supplemental packs and deluxe set. Those are pieces that simply hug the doll's head like the sculpted CAM wigs did. The IM wigs are compressible to access the eye-change button while they’re on, and they're a little wider so they can fit on the doll's head while the faceplate is being worn. The sculpted IM wigs are thus a bit too loose on CAM heads, and the sculpted CAM wigs don't work on the IM heads when the faceplates are in use because they're too tight.

The Inner Monster head depicts a fairly nonspecific “blank slate” face with delicate features and minimal makeup. 

Each Inner Monster has the same head sculpt/mold, though not the exact same faceup. They're still all pretty close in tone and not very bold or specific. This part recycling works because the Inner Monsters are customizing dolls meant to be generic enough to take on the owner’s desired personality, and since their heads are complex mechanical pieces and the faceplate mechanic was best done with universal compatibility, it made more sense to design just one head that could be used for multiple Inner Monsters. Valentina comes closest to looking human of the Inner Monsters with her pale pink color, which seems close to Draculaura's. The other three Inner Monsters are blue, orange, and pale purple.

The mechanics of those fancy heads come into play when their wigs are snatched (sorry) because they’ve got those delightful sliced-off craniums and exposed brains. 

Like her skin, Valentina’s brain is a nearly plausible pink tone. Orange Shy/Silly has a bright green brain, Blue Sweet/Fierce has a purple brain, and purple Happy/Excited/Sad has an orange brain. Paired with Valentina’s near-human pink skin tone, her brain color makes her look more gory than the other ghouls whose brains and skin colors pair to make them more fantastical. 

This was my first doll with a sliced dome and exposed brains, but she wouldn't be my last.

Living Dead Dolls Purdy as the Scarecrow from the "Lost in Oz" line.

The middle of the Inner Monster brain is a large rectangular button, that, when pushed down, cycles the eyes through one of three options, rolling the eyes downward as the next design pops in. It's a very quick and smooth action. I'd have enjoyed if the eyes rolled upward instead like so many demon-possession images, but if engineering demanded this precisely, I understand.

Mid-press, the eyes rolling down as the piece inside the head rotates to the next pair.

Inset eye-change mechanisms (let alone inset eyes outside of MGA brands) are extremely uncommon in small modern fashion dolls; they’re really more of a collector/art-doll thing pioneered by Japanese brands (maybe there is a Japanese influence to this line?), and the Inner Monster head may be the most miniaturized eye-changing doll mechanism I’ve seen, all done in a delightfully gory user-friendly way. The mechanism can be pressed through the wigs, but doesn’t work as flawlessly when the wig is on, as the eyes can get stuck when the button catches in the cap. You may have to gently roll the eyes into full position with your fingertip while the doll has the hair on, but the mechanism never gets jammed and is easily coaxed to competing the eye switch. I like this function a lot. The only way I think it could have been better is if the eyes had independent mechanisms and buttons that let them be cycled asymmetrically- you could even have the brain buttons divided so the two hemispheres were each a button for full anatomical creepiness! I can understand how that would have been infeasible for this scale, but they really ought to have done it for the giant Beast Freaky Friend dolls who had an eye-change mechanic. Those dolls would have been big enough to have independent eye cycling. They had a button on the back of the head, though--not exposed brains.

Let’s look at those eyes, shall we? The three eyes are what support my perception that the doll has three forms--neutral, Love, and Feisty, thanks to the way the eyes read.

The most basic eye option features light blue irises and vertically narrowed black pupils as the only unusual touch.

There's nothing either feline or reptilian about the doll otherwise, so this is a pretty ambiguous, but successfully spooky, element to include.

The next eye option in the cycle is for the Fangtastic Love emotion, featuring irises of concentric pink and blue hearts without pupils. 

These feel very retro and work great with the freaky graphic-pop spin of the line. I always saw a hypnotic tone as well, like these eyes can entrance you with their optical pattern while Valentina works her persuasive love powers.

Both of the first eye pairs have a subtle band of translucent grey painted on the top section to add some shadow and depth to them.

The final eye option is for Fearfully Feisty, and is probably the single wickedest eye design ever featured in MH-- dark indigo sclerae surrounding flaming irises with catlike pupils again.

These eyes are downright demonic and hellish, and super scary and fun. No other Monster High doll has sclerae as dark as this, making it extra unique and freaky.

Here's the other eyes with the wig on.

While the Inner Monster eyes are necessarily inset, it’s pretty much just for the mechanical aspect, and unlike other doll brands with inset eyes, this is not being done for realism or artistic effect. The Inner Monster dolls’ eyes are designed to blend well with the majority of Monster High dolls who have painted eyes, with a similar flat and sharp look and a pretty close fitting in the sockets to make the inset nature less obtrusive.

The Inner Monster head is not designed to be disassembled, which is reasonable for a play doll, and wouldn't be necessary because they seem darn perfectly engineered. I wasn't willing to crack a doll head open, though...but I was already putting Valentina 1 out of service...

I did have an even better candidate, though. The Shy/Silly monster head from my failed custom. Because I knew this wasn't the run for my old idea, and because de-making her back to base didn't work since it destroyed her original face paint, she became our guinea pig. I squeezed the head seam with a wrench until the back popped off. Here's what's inside.

It's all very compact. The brain is a spring-loaded button that activates a plunger that spins the eye piece held in the head with grooves and brackets. Here's the pieces removed.

The eyes are basically half-domes on a spindle, precisely painted so they spin to a different pair at each stage of rotation.

Huge props to the engineer who made this work so seamlessly and reliably on a small doll head. I can't imagine the amount of time this took to engineer.

The balance of eye designs on these dolls varied for me. Feisty/Love has the best trio of designs in my opinion, while Happy/Excited/Sad had the worst. All of her eyes were normal humanoid designs, just with different coloring effects. The other Inner Monsters all had at least one wacky fantasy eye design.

The final play feature on the Inner Monster heads is the additional faceplates that give them a more detailed and emotionally-charged new faceup that can be further customized with their eye options. This doll's faceplate is designated for the Fangtastic Love emotion, and it's a lot.

At some intersection of "avant-garde", "drag", and "circus clown", we get this face with massive blue hearts framing the eyes with a high arc and dripping down symmetrically, hot pink lips with a blue heart pucker in the middle, and blue and fainter pink hearts dotting the left side of the face. Its (ironically) unemotive clownishness makes this feel less like love is happening to Valentina and a lot more like she’s trying to will love upon you, which is a big reason I’ve characterized her as a love demon. The hypnotic eyes and harsh heart-marked face looks like love energy bursting out of her while trying to cast an enchantment on you, so it really doesn’t match the other emotions in the line that seem like the doll’s genuine emotions emerging to be worn on her sleeve.

This is a lot to swallow, but it's fun and it's very harsh and creepy...it just does not suit the wig a single bit.

The face is just so campy and extreme and it needs a hairstyle and color that suit this tone. The wig provided simply doesn't. It makes her look gloomy with this mask on when she ought to look vibrant and even sweet. I'd assign the wig purely to "basic" Valentina because it doesn't do wonders for either of her emotions and Feisty has a designated vinyl wig in the Mood Pack.

These faceplates are a rigid plastic that fits smoothly over the face and gently clicks on with two tabs into the small slots on the sides of the face. 

The faceplate looks pretty respectably seamless on the doll, but may highlight or exaggerate the oversized head further by jutting the face forward a bit because it is layered on as a mask rather than a piece that swaps out with the neutral face.

The faceplate sits just below the line of the wig cap, meaning it doesn’t interfere with the doll’s wig at all and the plate can be slid on and off the head while the doll is wigged without any disturbance. This only applies to the fiber wigs--the sculpted Inner Monster wigs fit around the faceplates and are best removed to swap them in and out. 

The next Monster High doll with a removable faceplate would be Skullector M3GAN, who I reviewed in the same post as the Squid Game doll. M3GAN's faceplate comes off to reveal a robotic internal face  and meshes much tighter with the head by virtue of completing the head rather than stacking over it. The M3GAN face also has her ears.

M3GAN's eyes are technically inset when her external face is on, but they're part of the base head mold and have no mechanical features.

Unlike the Inner Monster base heads, the dolls' emotion faceplates are not all the same sculpt as each other, as they are meant to represent a more emotive and expressive transformation of the base doll. Some of the faceplates, due to their optional nature and theme, have more animated expressions than any standard pre-2016 Monster High doll, including a smirk, a frown, and a silly stuck-out tongue! A few of the faceplates, however, appear to be sculpted as neutral faces that match the base head and only change the mood with their painted designs. There isn't a dichotomy between the base dolls and the Mood Packs/deluxe set where the base dolls’ faceplates are neutral sculpts and the Mood Packs’/deluxe set’s are more expressive--the Shy/Silly base doll’s faceplate has an emotive smile sculpted in. Valentina’s Love plate is one of the neutrally sculpted ones.

You’ll notice that the faceplate on this doll favors only one of the two marketed emotions, leaving Fearfully Feisty with only flaming eyes to represent her facially. That’s where the marketers get ya with those Mood Packs. Feisty is built up more with the supplemental set for this Inner Monster. The Mood Pack system still doesn’t quite even the balance since the base Inner Monster dresses are pretty evenly split to suit both emotions (meaning now there's a dress for one emotion, and a dress for both, but not a dress just for the other emotion) and the dolls should probably have gotten two additional wigs and costumes as well, so there would be three distinct sets of pieces for the three sets of eyes. The dolls also end up with two pairs of shoes designed for one emotion since the base doll has shoes for each and the Mood Packs have alternate shoes for one of the emotions. Here’s how I think it could have been, ideally as one larger doll release:

• A neutral look using the fiber wig, the base head and most neutral eyes, and a neutral or in-between costume and shoes designed to suit the first eye option. All of these pieces would form a cohesive basic look while working as parts to swap into the more distinct emotional personas as well. No dramatic body accessory.
• The first emotion with its own wig (vinyl), faceplate, dramatic body accessory, and specific costume and shoes matching its distinct eye option
• The second emotion with its own wig (vinyl), faceplate, dramatic body accessory, and costume and shoes matching its distinct eye option

Alternatively, make a Mood Pack for each emotion but give the base doll the two emotion masks and leave the shoes and masks out of the Mood Packs so the Mood Packs are just dresses, charms, and wigs and the doll only has two pairs of assigned shoes. Three pairs of shoes would be best, though, so maybe the base doll has only a neutral shoe option and the divergent emotion shoes would go in the Mood Packs?

Now that we’re through all that, let’s look at the costume we got on base Valentina. 

She's wearing a blue halter dress with the halter collar attached to a mesh section above (fittingly) a sweetheart bodice. The collar is watermelon pink translucent plastic with a small velcro closure at the back. The body fabric of the dress is a blue color with lighter and richer shades that pop brilliantly against both the love-pink and feisty-flame tones and is detailed with flames in blue as well as images of ghoulish dripping pink hearts and flaming heart heads. The waist section of the dress has two layers of plastic ruffles in watermelon pink and yellow to incorporate flames. The piece’s colors are really attractive and suit the character of someone confident, fierce, and perhaps romantically persuasive. This is a cohesive dress to me. Valentina gives me trendy mean-girl vibes aesthetically, but that can be fun.

Valentina's has special details featured on her limbs. The Inner Monsters are pretty blank-slate dolls but have subtle differentiating touches besides their skin color. Fierce/Sweet appeared to have a sheen to her skin, and her hands, while not monstrous, were a nice cupped shape the other Inner Monsters didn't have. Shy/Silly had the standard claws----the Clawdeen/Rochelle/Jane shape, and a gradient effect on her limbs fading to a darker tone at the ends. Feisty/Love has creepy pink bleeding hearts painted down her forearms, hands, and lower legs, and her hands are the standard clawed hand on her left and a special right hand in the same style, but posed to form the compound ASL sign indicating the letters "I-L-Y", making it the shorthand sign for "I love you!"! 

This hand sculpt is not exclusive to Valentina. It's appeared on a CAM Monster Maker add-on pack, and the Create-a-Monster Cat, though I don't know if it had a mainline appearance. Clawd Wolf has had a hand in this pose as well, with his left hand in the Pack of Trouble four-siblings set being shaped in this sign.

It's cool that sign language is being represented even in such a tiny way, and I wonder if it was included as a note of recognition to the Deaf community. It could just be a cute detail seeing as the sign has become fairly well known to hearing folk, but it leaves things open so Valentina could be interpreted as a Deaf character or someone otherwise allied with the Deaf community, which is really neat.

Monster High has occasionally done other hands with unique poses like this and I love it every time. The other cases I know of are Lagoona's School's Out and Roller Maze dolls having her right hand molded in a "hang ten" sign, Wydowna having one of her six hands in Spider-Man's famous web-slinging pose, and the Create-a-Monster Witch Girl having a hand posed in a finger snap as if casting a quick spell.

Valentina has one pair of all-Love shoes, which are red no-heel platform sandals with black heart links wrapping around the toes and ankles. The sculpt is a close visual imitation and simplification of C.A. Cupid's heels, but the links are thinner.

The other shoes are for Fearfully Feisty, being neon orange translucent sandal heels with feather texture. While the shoes have full platforms, it almost looks like they imply stiletto heels whose negative space just got filled in.

These feel phoenix-like in this color and are a direct recast of the Create-a-Monster Harpy shoes. This shoe mold featured on no mainline Monster High dolls as a result, being exclusive to the CAM sphere like a few other shoes, but these probably could have been used for "backgrounder" harpy character Quill Talyntino if her planned doll release had occurred. These shoes are pretty tight around the foot and it’s basically required that you hold onto the lower leg while removing them lest you pull the (detachable) lower leg out of the upper leg instead. I don’t like these shoes as much because they're harder to use, though they do seem to be a slightly better height for Valentina to stand more securely on her base.

Valentina has one accessory- a pair of sunglasses. These are a translucent pale pink with lenses shaped like flaming hearts to bridge the two emotions. 

As such, they kinda work for both emotions but also kind of don't work for either. I'd assign the shades to her "neutral" or "in-between" getup, honestly. The glasses fit over her face whether she's wearing the faceplate or not and magnify her eyes a bit. 

I've seen that copies of these shades can be frosted to opacity, but mine are translucent and fish-eyed in a way I don't like. This piece doesn't look great on her face(s) but perched on her forehead, the shades look pretty chic.

You know, considering that I've seen this doll with shorter bangs and frosted lenses when my copy had longer bangs and clear lenses, perhaps this doll has manufacturing variants from being produced at two facilities, and I got one variant while Emily at TBP got the other. I think the long bangs are a positive on mine, but I'd prefer the frosted lenses...and maybe even the plastic of the doll got so badly yellowed on account of where she was produced? Heck, I'd be glad to know my new pieces were from the other variant where that maybe wouldn't happen, if that's the case, though the wig I got in my rebuild pack was also long of bang.

Lastly, the doll comes with two elaborate harness pieces to add a dramatic feature to her back--these are the pieces that necessitated saddle stands for this doll line. These torso accents and the shoes are the only cases where the base Inner Monster doll provides a separate major piece for each of the two advertised emotions. None of the Mood Packs thus come with torso accents, which makes sense--so why do they have shoes?

Fearfully Feisty comes with a pair of flaming wings, which are dramatic but not really very appealing to me. 

They’re only slightly translucent, if at all, and they feel pretty flat and fake and chunky despite their effortful gradient paint effects. The black core and straps don't really feel very visually polished, either. They really look like a backpack or harness costume piece. More shaping to curve the flames inward or out and making the attachment harness look like flames too might have improved them. Maybe the black harness is meant to look like burnt matter, but it's not working for me. The piece goes on by hooking the shoulder straps over and then getting the waist strap around the waist.

The second back accessory, for Fangtastic Love, is one of the freakiest things Monster High has ever made and heavily contributes to Valentina's title for Most Hardcore Fashion Doll. This accessory is an arthropod creature in two shades of pink that latches onto her back and provides a set of six spindly spidery winglike legs that are each jointed at the very end with a clip joint to make them more skittery and alive. 

The piece is very grotesque and looks like an alien parasite or like the horrific transformation of a monster like John Carpenter's The Thing. The pink color of the spider legs makes it plausible that they erupted from Valentina's flesh, and I can see them bursting out of her back as she unveils a darker side. The legs are molded with some spirals and Skullettes for texture and they integrate well with her body, avoiding the backpack look of the flame wings. When this arthropod harness is put onto the doll nude and sans wig, she's an absolutely sickening body-horror doll for girl's toy standards. This kind of twisted stuff is what I really miss from G1, when it pushed the envelope on just how freaky they could make a fashion doll. The firmer plastic of the core makes this one clip easily around Valentina's waist. The flame harness is softer and the waist grip has to be pried open around her waist since pushing her torso into it just flattens the waist straps against the back. The shoulder straps of this one also fit better.

I know the three standard Inner Monsters had one articulated back accessory each. Feisty/Love's spider legs have joints, Shy/Silly's octopus arms have rotation joints on some of the ends, and Fierce/Sweet's peacock tail fans open and closed with two jointed pieces. 

Here's Fearfully Feisty all done up as the base doll allows, avoiding all heart imagery that was optional.

Blah. I can see why people bought the Mood Packs!

And here's Fangastic Love done up as the base set allows, avoiding all optional flame imagery. It's almost somewhere, but the hair is all wrong.

Now, the torso, and the true innards of the Inner Monster.

The torsos of the Inner Monster dolls are a pair of interlocking translucent plates that directly replicate the contours of the standard G1 mid-teen Monster High body, and a skeleton is visible inside.

Each standard Inner Monster's torso plates are a translucent version of their skin tone, though not exactly the same shades. The Happy/Sad/Excited Inner Monster had two pairs of torso plates--some marbled translucent plates blending pink and blue colors and an opaque set of torso plates for her body which matched the rest of her pale purple skin. The opaque plates lend much more of a sense of creepy visceral dissection to the doll, while the translucent torsos look more like a stylized anatomy model! The skeleton piece inside the torso is the core that all of the doll's body parts attach to, and the doll can be assembled without using the torso plates. The plates pop off by squeezing the seam at the waist, or by popping off a limb (these are built on take-apart Create-a-Monster joints) to pry the plates apart around the hollow socket. They're not so tightly locked that they feel at risk for breaking. Here's the plates removed and the skeleton bare.

Like Monster High's other two skeleton torso sculpts so far (G1 Skelita Calaveras and Jack Skellington), the bare Inner Monster skeleton offers the hip joints greater forward mobility and allows for more sitting poses than the standard body or the Inner Monster torso plates.

The inner skeleton is reminiscent of the G1 Skelita Calaveras body, but Skelita's matches the standard shape contour more while the Inner Monster's is compressed and simplified to fit inside the standard shape.

Skelita's ribs double as her breasts to fill out her clothing, but the Inner Monsters' bones get to just be bones because they've got torso flesh, albeit translucent, to shape them. I can't tell yet if G3 Skelita has rib-boobs or not, but I'd welcome a change to let her bones be more realistic. 

Previously, the River Styxx doll featured a depiction of bones within a translucent standard (little-sister) MH body, but her bones were in the lower parts of her limbs and those were solid pieces, while the Inner Monsters' translucent parts are removable shells over the skeleton. Later on, Symphanee Midnight would depict a skull inside a translucent head. 

That's heads, torsos, and lower arms and legs now done with bones inside a translucent body part (River's hand bones were just painted onto the translucent vinyl). I'd love to see a doll with all of those bone-in gimmicks combined!

Owing to the unique construction of the Inner Monster torsos, there are no slots for wings or tails like the original Create-a-Monster dolls had (there's no way to make a secure socket and there's not even enough depth to push things through the back plate because they'd hit the skeleton). This is why the wings and back accessories in this line are achieved with harnesses and waist grips…and also why the dolls need saddle stands. On the bright side, it freed up the options a bit in creative terms--if these dolls could have wings in their back or tails, then they'd all have wings in their back or tails. Because they can't, their dramatic accessories vary more in the way they attach. Frightfully Fierce's peacock tail clips around her lower waist rather than hooking on with harnesses, and Shockingly Shy's dramatic plant accent is a collar that also wraps around her arms. 

As already mentioned, the shell over the skeleton isn't just a cool visual effect, and the removable plates have a purpose. It's part of the core play feature. Why would you want to open their bodies? Well, to customize their organs!

The titular "Inner Monster" gimmick finally arrives--those holes on the skeleton are for placing the charms of your choosing on the doll's skeleton to act as visible internal organs through the doll's skin, with those organs being a visual representation of the doll's deepest emotions.

Those emotions themselves are small hard plastic charms with pins that fit into the skeleton with various shapes you can interpret as different moods. I don't have every charm that originally came with Valentina, but all of these in this picture below are hers.

Now, these charms can't go exactly anywhere, and that was the one thing I found the instructions missed out on explaining. The charms have two pin shapes--some diagonally angled, while some are perpendicular. Those with perpendicular pins are meant only to go in the belly spot above the pelvis, while the charms with angled pins fit only into the ribs.

Trying to swap them around can make the torso not close up and potentially break the pins on the charms and render them unusable. This is not made as clear as it should be by the instructions and is extra confusing because Valentina has emotions with heart imagery, but they're both belly charms. Surely it'd have made more sense to give her a heart charm that could go on her ribs. I myself broke one of her charms back then by not realizing it was a pelvis piece and trying to close her torso plates while the charm was in the wrong spot. I'm just glad I got it back by chance in the rebuild lot of parts.

Valentina is not the only Inner Monster with belly charms that look more aesthetically suited to the ribs, and that bothers me.

The emotions included with the base doll are as follows-- I'll give objective descriptions and my interpretations:

Ribs

• A red Skullette with angry eyebrows (more for Feisty, but could represent passion)-don't have this one anymore
• A pale pink Skullette with heart eyes (Love, innocent love, having a crush)
• A chili with a ghoulish face--a literal ghost pepper! (Also pretty Feisty)
• A black Skullette with a bomb fuse (Feisty, volatile anger, about to lose her temper)-don't have this one anymore
• A flower with a monstrous face in the middle (malintent guised as friendliness, romantic manipulation or lurking anxieties of romantic torment and doom?)

The chili pepper's shape only really works on the lower right rib slot to prevent it from blocking the upper slot, but even then, needs some turning so a charm above will push in right.

Belly

• A lacy Valentine heart with an arrow through it (smitten, true love, love anxiety, perhaps, given it's near the stomach on the human body)
• A trio of ghastly hearts as seen on her dress (romantic torment, an unwanted, incompatible, or inconvenient attraction taunting her...or perhaps Valentina feigning attraction?)
• A snake coiled as (and located as) intestines (nerves, a bad feeling in the gut)

I've pretty much exclusively used the snake intestines in the belly slot because it's such a wicked creepy image. To supplement the doll, I completed her skeleton with charms from other dolls, using a purple Skullette heart loosely where a heart goes, plus an orange "blowing a raspberry" Skullette, both from the Shy/Silly assortment.

Now. I fear I've been drastically understating the appeal of this toy throughout this review, so allow me, now that everything has been illuminated, to get sufficiently colorful. Pardon my French.

THERE IS A DOLL. WITH AN EXPOSED BRAIN UNDER HER WIG. A BRAIN THAT CHANGES HER EYES TO DEMON FLAMES. A DOLL WITH PARASITIC BODY-HORROR POSEABLE SPIDER LEG WINGS AND CREEPY MASK FACES. AND A TRANSLUCENT TORSO. THAT COMES OFF. TO ACCESS HER SKELETON. AND CUSTOMIZE WHICH

! ! ! O R G A N S ! ! !

YOU CAN SEE THROUGH HER SKIN. 

THIS IS THE GNARLIEST SHIT OF ALL TIME AND IT'S A NON-PARODIC EARNEST GIRL'S TOY.

Ahem. 

Part of this is because of the specific model. Feisty/Love is, again, the most disturbing Inner Monster because her colors feel so fleshy and she's got this organic leg-wing attachment and flame eye design making her more horrific. The other Inner Monsters are firmly fantasy characters with a goofy or pretty spooky edge, but man, some Mattel designer said "hey, you know what'd be really messed up?" I love this doll.

And naturally, whichever emotion charms you're not using need a place to go. That brings us to the piece we overlooked beforehand--the purse.

All of the Inner Monsters come with the same basic purse, which is shaped like a Skullette with a chain handle and the classic Skullette bow. The purse bow is a different color for each Inner Monster, with Valentina's naturally being pink. Hers most closely resembles the typical MH logo Skullette as a result. The purse is pretty solid thin plastic with one static strap, and the front half opens on a proper hinge as a separate piece-no folded plastic hinges. The bow is cleverly included as a grip to get leverage to flip the purse open. It's honestly incredible to me that this purse was only just created for the Inner Monster line, since a classic Skullette feels like a no-brainer shape for a bag in the brand…but perhaps it's so on-the-nose and generic that all of the other characters' highly specified themes and outfits precluded it from being designed for them. Blank-slate characters make it more fitting. The purse is pretty roomy inside and can easily hold all of the charms from a base doll and her mood pack, and even a few more than that. I love how roomy the bag is, and using the purse for these pieces is an extremely elegant, practical storage solution.

This thing holds a lot!

It's pretty great, but I really wish there was some kind of latch/clasp system or a firmer grip between the closed halves because this purse instantly spills open and scatters charms when it falls or gets dropped, without fail. I've had that mishap several times. That's not good for something intended as secure storage.

Man, life would be so much easier if you could just stuff unwanted emotions in your bag!

The Inner Monster articulation only has one minor difference from any standard Monster High doll or CAM--the head. Inner Monster heads are solid plastic and mount on a simple static neck knob which is a feature of the solid skeleton core of the doll. As such, the head merely rotates, with the angle of the head changing due to the shape of the attachment. This limitation bothers me more when the dolls are built so their heads are supposed to be able to tilt and they're not being manufactured right!

There is no way to tip the Inner Monster head side-to-side like a standard MH or CAM doll will allow, or to adjust the forward/back angle (like standard dolls are supposed to do well, so the doll, particularly when wearing a faceplate, can look a bit slouched.

The Inner Monster bodies are fully deconstructable in the exact same vein as the Create-a-Monster dolls and use the same attachments for everything but the head, so their pieces can be swapped with each other pretty well. CAM limbs and IM limbs swap easily and CAM heads can go on the IM body, but not vice-versa.

The blank Monster Maker dolls paired with the printing machine playset are a bit like Inner Monster because they have hard-plastic heads and swivel-only neck posts, but the Inner Monster and Monster Maker heads cannot be placed on each other's bodies or on original CAM. Limbs pieces are compatible on all three CAM body systems, but classic CAM (vinyl heads) is the only head type that can swap CAM body types. Vinyl CAM heads fit on all three bodies, though the static neck pegs of the Inner Monster and Monster Maker bodies restrict the articulation for vinyl heads too.

This compatibility is really welcome and these dolls really didn't need that extra potential. The Inner Monster dolls would have worked just fine if their only removable parts were their wigs, masks, and torso plates. To have so much more to work with is a treat. I also just love the convenience afforded in redressing CAM dolls since you can take off their lower legs and heads/hair to make dresses smoother to put on.

While I don't expect this was universal, my Valentina's 1's knee hinges started out pretty stuck, and I put a lot of undue stress on them trying to bend the leg down. I took the legs out and loosened the hinges by pushing the peg instead and that worked, but it was concerning to me that I needed to. Just glad that I popped the leg out before I bent it the wrong way too much and broke the joint. My rebuilt Valentina is using 1's lower legs because they were still good and 2's legs had some blemishes. 

Now let’s talk about Valentina's Mood Pack. I never owned it previously! I've only gotten the Fierce/Sweet doll and her Mood Pack before.

The Mood Pack boxes were styled like the main boxes got sliced vertically in half, with the addition of a hanging hook on top.

The Fearfully Feisty and Scared Silly Mood Packs work best, since their matching dolls' boxes put the matching emotions on the right side, making it look more like the original box simply cut in half. Spooky Sweet, however, was put on the left side (front view) of that Inner Monster base doll's box, meaning the Mood Pack puts the design on the opposite side. Of the three base dolls, only Shy/Silly's box follows the same left-to-right order as the name of the doll. Feisty/Love would actually be called Love/Feisty if scanning her box left to right, and Fierce/Sweet would actually be called Sweet/Fierce.

My Mood Pack was unopened, but the plastic bubble got a little crushed and the elastics holding the leg wrap pieces had broken apart, leaving them loose inside the box.

Interestingly, the words "Mood Pack" appear nowhere on the packaging, and instead, the set is just called an "Add-on Pack". 

Here's the back, showcasing the parts of the doll. The doll's blue eyes have been used rather than her flame ones. Maybe the demon eyes were pushing it in the marketing department.

The background of the back side and the interior of the box is a ribcage, like with the main sets of this doll line.

Here's the figural cutout without the pieces displayed on it.

The Feisty Mood Pack includes four charms--three for the ribs, and one for the belly.

The charms all land on the "Feisty" side of things, of course, and include:

• An angry heart on fire (anger, possibly romantic frustration?)
• A grenade? A jungle canteen flask? A perfume spritzer? I don't know about this one, actually.
• Campfire weenies on a stick (not sure what this would symbolize--hunger? Gusto for life?)
• A lit stick of dynamite (about to lose it)

The charm designated for the belly is the second one, the one I couldn't confidently identify.

Since Feisty/Love has an actual heart where her heart goes now, I put that in, but left the purple one in next to it. Who's to say a love demon doesn't have two hearts, one wicked and one sweet?

The Mood Pack wig is a vinyl piece made to look like translucent flames, in the third flaming hairstyle in the brand and the only one worn by a ghoul. The others were boys. Holt Hyde and Heath Burns precede this wig, while G3 Heath follows it. Holt and G3 Heath have translucent flames, while G1 Heath's two dolls had flat red hair in a flame shape, depicting the hair non-ignited. The Inner Monster wig has more yellow tones and depicts a short choppy silhouette with a side part and curling layered locks that spike out at the bottom, all imitating tongues of fire. It...might be kind of a "mom" hairdo, perhaps, but she makes it work. Like other vinyl wigs in the CAM range, there are no pegs--it just squeezes on around the head. The brain is slightly visible through the plastic, but that's hardly a negative.

All of the flame hair designs in MH's oeuvre are plastic elements, which is the right call. Rooted fiber hair in warm tones isn't quite up to the task of conveying fire.

The faceplate for Feisty is one of the more animated sculpts, depicting a broad, full-lipped lopsided smirk in bright red, while her eyes are surrounded by flames and a judicious band of teal eyeshadow. The eyebrows are brown here. The faceplate is a little shinier than I expected, and I might spray a matte coating on it. There's also a scratch through multiple paint colors on the inner edge of her left eye's makeup.

This faceplate seems to give her a squarer jaw, as well.

Feisty's dress has a ribbon tie at the neck (ugh) and a sweetheart neckline, while the skirt is wide and has a tattered-cut hem. This dress covers less of the translucent torso than the main dress, which is a downside. The base blue color is close to the main dress, but this dress is more fully flame-themed with reduced heart iconography--what hearts are there are also on fire. The dress also features orange flames, marshmallows, and sticks of dynamite.

I do love the use of blue as contrast to the warm fire tones, and it's not even unwarranted because the hottest part of the flame is blue. While I've gotten better with ribbon ties, the ones on Monster High dresses are still too small for me to easily work with, so, because this doll's head pops off, I double-tied the neck ribbons to create a closed loop. I can undo the dress and slide it up the torso to slide the loop over the neck while the head is off to remove the dress. This tie eventually came undone, though.

The Mood Packs come with arm and leg wrap pieces in vinyl, a flavor of accessory introduced to Monster High with G1 Venus McFlytrap's vines. The Mood Pack pieces are chunkier, with Feisty's being flame eruptions on her forearms and lower legs. On her arms, lighter paint is applied for a flaming gradient, but the leg wraps are a solid color in the darker neon reddish-orange tone.

The leg wraps are a bit tricky to squeeze the feet through. 

The Fearfully Feisty Mood Pack shoes, in theory, would work better as the shoes for the "neutral" form of the doll, as they depict chunky high heels with hearts and flames combined. The base shoe is neon orange while the heel is painted blue.

The base doll's shoes are purely heart-themed and purely fire-themed, so I think the feather shoes should be the Feisty pair, the heart links should be the Love pair, and the Mood Pack shoes should be the in-between. But...the color of the Mood Pack heels doesn't fully suit "neutral" Valentina. The neon orange isn't matched to anything else on her.

I think she makes it work okay, but the shoes should have been redder, I think, so both forms could use them well.

The feather boots can be used in conjunction with the leg wraps despite being so tall. The tops of the boots can actually seamlessly layer over the wraps. Here's full Feisty!

Here's some mix-and-match with the Mood Pack.

I did go ahead with matte-sealing the mask to make it more photogenic. 

I wanted to see how I might evenly create three separate doll looks, with the neutral or blended look, and a fully done-up look for both Fearfully Feisty and Fangtastic Love. For me, this meant the neutral form and the two emotions would each have their own wigs, dresses, shoes, and face/back setup, with the neutral form having no wings or faceplate and the two emotions having separate ones. This, here, meant primarily fleshing out Fangtastic Love.

To give her a wig, I didn't have to go shopping. I just yoinked the vinyl Color Me Creepy Werewolf wig I'd previously gotten to for the re-work of my custom Tinny Tinkerpins doll. The retro silhouette and the two colors of the wig perfectly suited the emotion and brought the faceplate to life in a way the fiber wig never could. She actually looks gentle and friendly despite her extreme faceup! It takes adjusting, but the wig can come right to the top edge of the faceplate to hide the seam from a head-on view.

To fill the holes in the wig, initially designed for fish fins or wolf ears, I found some LEGO horns I liked for the idea. She is a demon, after all.

I then tried to dye them red because the red shoes needed balancing out on this character form, but the dye wasn't successful. The material didn't take color like vinyl does. I had to order a dragon minifigure who's built with the same horn sculpt cast in red. 

For a dress, I figured my best bet was a G2 Draculaura piece, because G2 Drac used pink, hearts, and blue together a lot and several G2 dolls had more graphical cartoony prints on their clothes that suited the Inner Monster fashion schema. I'd previously sourced one of the "Pop art" dolls' dresses for Maudie, partially because my first outfit for her was the Fierce/Sweet dress. There was a budget line of "emoji" dolls, and that version of Draculaura was my pick for Love Valentina's dress. (I got the dress loose, not on a doll.) Like many G2 dresses, it's only half-printed.

For shoes, she kept the red platforms from the base set. I also added a red dice belt from Operetta to help balance the red out along with the horns. Here's my completed version of Fangtastic Love.

And here she is next to Cupid.

Here's the iterations side-by side now that I've fully built all three forms.

While I can't use Valentina 1's head bare due to the damage it suffered, it still works to build masks and wigs on, and using both heads allowed me to fully build the heads of Feisty and Love to simply swap them out fully-built for quicker emotion swapping during the photoshoot.

Here's pictures with Feisty against flames on my computer screen.

For better face lighting, here she is against a flame-patterned cloth and lit by a candle.

And some pictures with Love, including her baring her heart.

And because I had Valentina 1's Love faceplate to spare, I decided to fully wipe it and sand it and give it a fully new design to lean into a fourth "body horror" or "anatomy model" form. Here's the base plate.

During my travails trying to customize a Fibre Craft angel doll, I was defeated, but finally found myself seeing the light and following the gospel of repainters--sealant and watercolor pencils. Watercolor pencils are vital because the markings easily erase with water so you can "undo" back to the last "checkpoint" you locked in with sealant. Using acrylic paint wasn't right because undoing the acrylic, either through sanding or acetone, also undid the sealant and all prior work. Watercolor is also inherently easier to get thin and flat paint with once built up, and the pencil form is incredibly easy to work with for precision and blending. A tiny paintbrush dipped in water also makes for very easy cleanup of lines and edges so your work looks more tidy. Acrylic can be flat and cartoony, but there's no way to make it permanent or to easily backtrack during a faceup. Watercolor sealed in layers each time you get something just right lets you wipe it off quickly and cleanly to start over without losing the good parts. It's deeply humbling and annoying to be faced with the fact that I got here too late in my custom experimentation, and that the sworn-by method really is the Way, but it is. 

My concept for this faceup was to continue the "anatomy-model" theme and have half the face look like glam exposed muscle and make the other half look more haggard to suit the monstrous concept. This was my first pass that got sealed. The color isn't solid, but it was as thorough as I could get in one layer, and I went over again after sealing. 

I went over more times, folding and resorting to acrylic for some tones that needed to be more solid toward the end. It's not mistakable for factory work, but it's a fun enough design. I didn't attempt to put any flame iconography in this one, so I guess it's technically an extra Love mask, but I see it more as purely monstrous.

Here's some photos of the doll in full freaky horror mode, as if she's shed her human disguise and escaped into some horrible facility. I put her legs on backward to aid the effect, but left my repaint mask off because this look is scarier with her normal face.

A fashion doll for children, everyone!

Here's some pictures of neutral Valentina.

And some mix-and-match.

I cut together two pictures of the doll with her assigned pieces in Feisty and Love modes to create the cover.

So that's the Feisty/Love Inner Monster. You can understand why she's so cool, right?

There are negatives.

I'm not that happy with the hair fiber. I think it's a bad choice for a wig. The shape of the hairstyle also doesn't work for all of her looks and certainly doesn't flatter the Love mask, which has no assigned wig to pair with it other than the fiber one. The first doll's plastic yellowed badly over time and trying to fade it with hydrogen peroxide also attacked her face paint. Her saddle stand is an inadequate solution to the inability to use the classic waist-grip stand, one that has limitations and is too fragile by virtue of its material. The set's lack of balanced representation for the two suggested emotions is a manipulative ploy to make you buy supplemental products, and even the Mood Pack for the doll doesn't fully correct the balance of pieces in an optimal tidy way. The unused costume and body add-on pieces of the doll will have to find a place of your choosing in your own storage, making them feel a bit like clutter, though storage/display for them could also feel excessive and bump up the price too much. My solution right now is to have three smaller bags for the parts of the three separate looks I made, which will fit into one larger bag as my kit, plus a bag of spare Inner Monster Parts kept separate. The doll can disassemble and fit into the "neutral" bag for storage.

Back to critiques: my doll's knees were also way too stiff at the start. The instructions ought to have clarified that some charms were only meant to be placed in the belly, and having this doll's heart-themed charms only fit on the lower skeleton is visually unsatisfying for the concept of invoking internal organs, particularly given the snake-intestine charm that invites the visual accurately by its placement and cannot be used in conjunction with the heart charms. The doll's purse immediately pops open if it ever falls which can lead to charms spilling or being lost, which is a problem because losing charms is exactly the predicament the purse is designed to prevent. The limited head articulation and the added size with the faceplate can make the character's head look too jutted down and large.

But the positives?

The Inner Monster concept is an incredibly cool doll idea that introduces really neat physical engineering to reveal gory details and provide cool visual variety that gives the dolls freaky display options unique to them. The eye change feature, faceplate system, exposed brains, and translucent body with customizable innards on the skeleton are all incredibly cool features that could each be the sole awesome gimmick of a doll--but all of this wonderful, imaginative, tactile crazy shit shares the space on one rad-ass toy. Despite all of the engineering departures and unique features, the Monster High doll standard has been minimally compromised. Only the head articulation is reduced from a standard doll, and the doll's pieces are mostly interchangeable with CAM ones to make them even more customizable and creepy. The purse, when handled gently, is a nice piece that also serves as discreet and useful storage for the smallest pieces of the doll that would otherwise be too easy to lose. These were Monster High's most experimental dolls in terms of play mechanics and body horror, and I think the experiments were successful. This is a gimmick doll done absolutely right in my book, where every gimmick is cool enough to outweigh the minor losses in adapting the standard G1 doll mechanics.

The Feisty/Love Inner Monster specifically has a lot of great-- a solid visual design with a really nice color palette and costume, a fun humanlike skin tone with creepy markings, a wonderfully gruesome spider leg accessory, and a rounded variety of eye options. Some of the other dolls' eyes feel less exciting and more consistent with each other. I can still see myself pursuing Shy/Silly, because I liked the base doll before trying to customize her and still like her Mood Pack design. I could also try a second attempt at customization with my better methods now.

Valentina was and remains an incredibly fun doll to fiddle and play with, and is inviting and variable enough that I simply can't put her down for too long without switching it up to showcase that other cool display option she has--and then the next one! That's exactly what you want in a play doll--play. With gooey guts and bones!

Valentina was the doll that put Monster High on my radar and it was well worth the wait for her to finally join my collection. While I now heavily regret my brutality in culling so much of my collection, I haven't for a second regretted that she was the sole doll I chose to keep.