Evil's Evil Twin: Living Dead Dolls Sin, Refired

Time again for a Return LDD review...though I definitely thought this would be sooner after Damien's.

Read my previous Return of the Living Dead Dolls reviews in these links here: Sadie, Eggzorcist, Damien.

This project one started with the panic I associate with having a homework assignment due the next day--I realized when I got Return Damien in April that Return Sin's projected shipping window ended in April and that I needed to make my order stat! I had dawdled on Damien, to be sure, so I forgot to adjust my time scale and I thought I had more time for Sin. I was glad to have the ability to make that purchase on a snap! I needn't have panicked, though--it was over a month after making that order that I finally got my Return Sin. I was honestly wondering if I'd need to put in a complaint, but with no fanfare or notice she was arriving, there she was on my doorstep in July.  I'd tried to get Series 1 Sin in order and would have by this point if the copy I'd gotten was the one I needed, but she wasn't--she was incomplete and a little rough, so I ended up needing to get the S1 after the original, and only did so once I had the Return in-hand and no longer had to worry about her not arriving.

Update on Return LDD

Good news and bad news. The bad news: Return is the future of the brand and the classic dolls seem pretty definitively over now, because it's clear that the Series 1 remakes were not the entirety of the Return idea. The good news? Holy crap, they made me like Lou Sapphire! These are all photos from SDCC, and they're not my photography.

Lou is a pretty darn basic gentlemanly devil no matter how you slice it, but changing him to having a red suit and red skin instantly did so much to make him more appealing than this in Series 2.

Giving him goat hooves is also a great touch. To solve the depiction of his widow's peak hairline, his scalp cap and his face plate both have black flocking that aligns when the pieces are together to create a buzzed version of a widow's peak hairstyle. Works for me, I guess. I worry the scalp will be hard to remove, though, especially without damaging the flocking. It's not ideal, but I couldn't see a much better way to achieve that hairline with this head assembly system. I'm fully guessing, but perhaps Lou's extras will include a full goat face, possibly human feet and shoes, new versions of his Series 2 cane and contract (maybe the cane could even hide a sword or his poem!), and maybe a cape or coat. 

I guess I'm still waiting for the Return LDD to break my streak, because I can very much see myself getting Return Lou. I just wonder if this means all of Series 2 is getting remade and Mezco is going to try a very linear repeat of the classic line's arc, or if we're going to shift into Return dolls just being "greatest hits" characters picked from anywhere. Lou Sapphire was enough of a staple in LDD for either to be possible. I don't think I need to collect original dolls alongside Return going forward, but Lou is generally affordable so maybe I'll keep it up with him. If they make a Schooltime Sadie, that could also be worth getting, because we could get a Sadie with the updated head build system and maybe a center-parted wig to let there be an even more S1-accurate rendition of the Return character. Dang it, Mezco. Stop making Return good. 

Who is Sin?

Well, first we have to talk about original Sin.

Sin was a Series 1 character, of course, being a little devil girl in a red dress, and for whatever reason, she was visually twinning with Series 1 co-star Sadie, having a very similar hairstyle and the same costume, just with the dress color changed to red. Sadie's become one of my LDD favorites on this blog and a collection in her own right, but this is my first time working with Sin!

Series 1 Sadie.

This matching motif has continued through all of Sin's dolls. She's had a smaller run than Sadie, and several Sadies have no corresponding Sins, but every Sin has been matched with a Sadie wherever she released. Her Resurrection III doll was based on Res II Sadie:

Res Sadie.

Res Sin. Same white skin and dress, just with a change of color and loss of buttons.

I personally prefer Res-variant Sin, who's not quite so matched to the Res Sadie variant, but they still go together.

Res-variant Sadie.

Res-variant Sin. Love the hair color. This one does have the buttons. If this doll wasn't an absolute pipe dream...

Sin's next unique character design was her birthday-themed Celebrating doll released to pair with Celebrating Sadie for the brand's 13th anniversary. Sadie was distributed to contest winners, while Sin was distributed at an in-person party whose date her hat commemorates.

I like Sin most of the time, but Celebrating doesn't do much for me. Sadie is the clear winner of the duo for me in this instance.

Sin's last design prior to Return was her Series 35 doll, one of the randomly-distributed Resurrection-style dolls included in the "mystery" slot that formed doll 5 of a Series 35 set purchased as a lot. These mystery dolls were all of the Series 1 cast reimagined plus a Res-style doll of Candy Rotten who debuted officially within Series 35's standard four dolls. Candy Rotten was an old character who never got produced, so she got the bonus treatment as a piece of LDD heritage. Series 35 Sin is closely similar to Sadie as ever, but she has a totally different hair silhouette for the first time. S35 is the only case where I can confidently posit that I like the Sin more than her matching Sadie, though I'd need to own the dolls to be more authoritative on that claim.

As Series 35 Sadie is a loose remake of Celebrating Sadie, so too can Series 35 Sin be considered an echo of Celebrating Sin, though the similarities are less overt on the Sins than the Sadies because the Sadies have the extra commonality of a blue-toned eye on the left making their lineage more obvious.

Sin had her appearance in LDD Minis too, but the brand was foolish enough not to mold the Minis head with horns until after they released Sin without them. What's even the point of the Mini, then? I'd love a Minis Sin, but I'd have to glue in some small LEGO horns to complete her. Sin didn't have a tail either, though, and I don't know how I'd fix that in a way that looked good. Maybe a Playmobil piece? The tail isn't pointed at the end, though, and is molded for a tiger costume originally. I don't know. I'm mad that the Sin Mini was such a flop because I'd love her in Minis form done properly.

The anniversary remakes of the Series 1 dolls were subtly different from the originals, but I didn't like what they did to Sin's face. The appeal of the original was the flat cartoony faceup that suited the 1960s-doll look of Series 1.

They did give her a gripping hand so she could use her pitchfork...but they took it away for the more faithful variant doll reproducing the original S1 faceup because the S1 doll didn't have the gripping hand. I don't really care for scrupulous faithfulness when it extends to replicating a detriment of the original product. I might end up getting this doll anyway for parts if she looks like a good color match for Sybil as the Mad Hatter. Giving the Hatter a gripping hand would let her pose with the Series 23 tea accessories, and the Sin base could be used for a custom idea.

The Sadie editions that had no Sin counterparts were Schooltime Sadie, Bedtime Sadie, the pencil sharpener head, the Fashion Victim, Wonderland Alice (all three editions), and Sweet 16 Sadie.

Return Sin

My enthusiasm for Return LDD had been disrupted by my last go-around. While I was thoroughly impressed by Sadie and liked Eggzorcist more than I ever expected to, I was kind of forcing myself to be excited with Damien, who never grabbed me on a conceptual level...and what's worse was that I was pretty disappointed in the manufacturing quality of my copy. I saw several signs of slipping, with the "blank" eyes just being sprayed over with paint and thus including the iris chips disrupting the sculpt with iris texture, the wig scalps both having issues (one scalp was too loose in the head until I bent the tabs; the other scalp separated from the wig piece of the assembly when pulled), the body having a chemical smell, and the poem slip being suddenly a different paper type that wasn't glossy. So my expectations were tempered for Sin, with the understanding that Damien still represented something pretty outstanding, if a little less so, and my expectation that I would click with Sin's character and design a lot more on an artistic level.

Return Sin's coffin follows formula with the same lid design. The photo on the back shows her skipping through what looks like a forest plank path, but lava and fire have destroyed the scene.

I'd expect more cavernous rocky scenery for Hell, so I like the idea of a twisted landscape instead. 

Sin is assembled with the same face and eyes shown on the back of the box in the first tray layer of the coffin. Sadie remains the only Return doll thus far with an accessory packed in this layer of the box, having her bouquet taped to the clear shell holding the doll to the red tray as if the flowers were laid upon her for burial. Perhaps Posey's flower will repeat that? Sin has nothing but her person here, and her horns threaten to be too large for the coffin!

Sin's hair is held down with the typical plastic band snug around her head, but because she has those horns, I chose to cut the band off with scissors rather than try sliding it up off the head with those horns. I could have also slid it down the face, perhaps, if I popped the head out.

Here she is right out of the box.

Return Sin is more differentiated from her matched Sadie than her editions typically are, though her dolls have always had some breaks in the mirroring between the two characters. Here, though, her hair shape and costume cut and even shoe mold all have enough differences to make the mirroring less repetitive.

The first big change to Sin is that her horns are now mounted on her forehead rather than her cranium, allowing that feature to change between her faceplates, and the horns have been increased in size and sharpness, curving forward to a wicked point with gradient paint fading from black to red. Previous Sins' horns used the stubbier, cuter classic LDD mold with horns on top and were solid red.

Sin's hair is parted in the middle of her forehead like her original doll, and unlike her matching Sadie who wears bangs that break from the Series 1 look...but because Sin's horns are on her forehead now, her hair has been swept around them to make the horns look like they're poking out of her hair. It's a cool idea, but I worried immediately that it wasn't going to work right. I figured the front locks were gelled, and that this would get wrecked by taking the wig off and playing with faceplates, and that the hair wouldn't fill in the space around the horns correctly. Out of the box, it wasn't promising.

I noticed that her ears were poking out, which could only mean they're pointy! Turns out, this is not just aesthetic, but it's actually key to how the hairstyle works. The front locks are not gelled; they're merely combed out and pulled back, using the ears as something of a hook to tuck the hair behind and keep them in place. This is pretty clever for making the hair easier to reset when tidying the doll after changing parts out. 

Once the locks are tucked away, hair from on top can be combed forward in front of the shoulders to fall over the gaps. 

It's not a perfect cover for the gaps in the hair, but it works pretty well and the dark spots can be easily patched over in photo editing. I appreciate the way this hair can be fairly quickly arranged, and I'll take that over a perfect cover that's really fiddly to work with while putting the scalp back on. The hair does have to fall forward over the torso to hide the gaps the best. 

You could band the front locks of hair to hair on the other side of the horn and pull the elastic up so the horns are fully enclosed by the hair, with the tail streaming out into the rest of the hair or getting tucked behind the ear, but this only works when you're sure you don't want to mess with the eyes or faces, because then you have to redo the hair ties every time. LDD's solution is imperfect, and at the least, some judicious black paint in the hair-gap spot could have helped smooth the visual over a little, but it's more user-friendly for the modularity of the doll. I may consider adding some paint on the faceplate in that area myself for better shelf display.

As it was in Series 1, Sin's hair is shorter than her Sadie's. It has a wavier texture, which I like. It was hard to tell the intended hair textures of the S1 dolls, but for Return, it's clear Sadie was designed for straight hair and Sin for wavy. I committed to sleeker, straighter hair for Series 1 Sadie myself, so I'll leave Series 1 Sin wavier for better correspondence to the Return dynamic.

Much as I'd love to swap the wigs and test center-parted hair on Return Sadie, the two dolls' heads are built differently. As the first Return doll, Sadie's head had a slightly different build schema where the wig prongs were on the head and snapped into the scalp rather than the other way around, so Sadie being the only Return doll built her way makes swapping head parts with the other dolls (beyond the eyes) impossible.

Sin' face itself doesn't look as good without the hair framing, but pulling it away lets the sculpt shine.

In addition to the forehead-mounted horns, Sin's got the other new touch of a wrinkled monster brow and forehead that reminds me a lot of 1980s creature prosthetic makeup seen in fantasy and horror films. It's nice that Sin did get her own face sculpt beyond just the horns being present, and there is something charming and intriguingly weird about it, but it's a big tonal change even beyond the Return LDD art style being so different. She doesn't have hair eyebrows, just the wrinkled ridge which is shaded with pale purple, while the faceplate eyeholes are sculpted with a scowling shape and have black airbrushing around them. Sin's lips have a firm smile to them but are painted full and red to give her the right classic dolly charm. It's just about enough to give her some pretty sweetness and fight against the deliberately ugly monster sculpt.

This faceplate is visibly going to be directly recast for the upcoming Lou Sapphire doll. It certainly works for him, but he shares a lot with Sin and maybe that's why he was the first doll after the Series 1 remakes--Sin already made several pieces that Lou could use for efficient production.

Her eyes are based on her Series 1 original, with red sclerae and white irises with black pupils. The pupils have a bit of a blurry effect with red ringing around them.

These eyes are not the same design Eggzorcist had, though they're loosely similar.

Eggy's eyes.

Sin is paler than her matching Sadie this time, and her skintone is pinker than Return Damien's. Eggzorcist is made to look like (admittedly, bleeding) porcelain, not flesh, within this Return series, so hers is not a human skintone.

Sin and Sadie look more similar in this picture, but Sadie is darker and greyer as seen in the picture earlier. 

Sin's dress is velvet of the same type as Return Sadie's, though it makes plenty of design changes to not be "a color-swap of whatever Sadie is wearing" in the way her previous dolls have done. 

This is the first Sin to have an outright different costume cut and silhouette from her matching Sadie, rather than changing just a few details and colors within the same cut. The outfit is sewn differently. While Sadie had long sleeves with shirt cuffs and a pointed collar, a neck brooch, and no waist tailoring, Sin has short puffed sleeves, a flared skirt, no brooch, and a round collar plus a printed red 666 mark of the beast (as popularized by The Omen) on the left panel of the collar (her left). The collar is also made of cotton, not satin, and the dress velcros down the back while Sadie had a working zipper closure. Sin has now worn this kind of short-sleeve wide-skirt dress cut more often than Sadie has, adding this onto her Celebrating and Series 35 editions. Sadie was right alongside Sin wearing that cut by sharing those release formats, but Sin kept the silhouette up in Return and Sadie didn't.

It's quite possible Sin's dress is cut this way to make it look lighter and suited to warmer weather, befitting a girl from the land of fire and brimstone. The skirt isn't any higher than Sadie's, but the shorter sleeves make it look lighter.

Here's the two costumes side-by-side.

Sin's dress has a little less refined production, unfortunately. Her dress closes with velcro in back rather than a working zipper, and while Sadie's dress had an attached white slip layer and white-lined sleeves, Sin's dress has no lining inside it for potential stain prevention. Sadie's dress isn't perfect. Her cuffs don't like to stay tidily folded up and one of the buttons trimming it has loosened, but there was a bit more fancy effort put in that felt like a bold showing of high-end quality.

What I was the most curious about in the execution of Return Sin was her devil tail. It's been an integral part of the doll, she was the first LDD with one back in Series 1 and the original tail was a springy but non-bendable static plastic piece. Surely Return Sin's tail would be poseable with wire, right?

Well, it comes as a pretty big tail dragging behind her. The tail fades from red to black at the end. 

Sure enough, it's a bendy toy with wire inside. The thick casing of the tail means there are limitations to how it can bend, but the tail can be shaped and posed!

It's a little tricky bending the tail anywhere specific you want it, though, with the thick base basically not flexing or holding to any position and the rest of the tail being flexible and poseable but not with a huge amount of control for where you want it exactly to hold in place. I get that a thicker casing for the wire won't be torn or flimsy, but it also offers less control and precision than the concept seems to promise.

I only recently learned that Monster High started with tails that worked this way, with Toralei (and her Creeproduction!) having bendable tails. I came into the brand well after the tails became static pieces with only a rotation peg at the connection point to the torso. I bet the MH bendy tails are a little easier to work with.

The tail itself is plugged into the back of the torso. I didn't try pulling it out, but this isn't a rotation point.

Lou will be using this tail concept too.

Sin has the same very basic white fabric underwear with unfinished edges that Sadie had, so that part is being mirrored too. I found the element unnecessary and not very well-made on the Sadie doll, and I'd have been fine with Sin not having it after Eggy and Damien didn't.

Sin is the first Return doll with painted nails, having dark red nail polish. This detail is applied to all six of her hand pieces. Her feet have no nail polish, which is fine because they're fully covered.

Sin's shoes are not the same Mary Janes Return Sadie wore, instead being shaped more like the original LDD Mary Janes with the bar in the middle of the gap on top, creating two holes instead of one. Here, however, an extremely clever touch has been added by sculpting the dividing bar into the shape of a Satanic inverted cross!

I wasn't sure why Sin was dropping a new sculpt when she could have used Sadie's, but the devilish transformation of the Mary Jane is such a good idea that I don't blame LDD for getting it out. This honestly could have been the design of the shoe the whole time during the classic era, and it wasn't? Well, they got there in the end. The shoes are very glossy. Sin's socks have ruffled cuffs with red trim, similar to Sadie's socks, but Sadie's were all white.

Here's the three Mary Jane designs next to each other--classic LDD, Return Sin and Return Sadie.

The second layer of Sin's coffin tray contains her second face, her second eyes, her alternate hands, her fire crown, and her pitchfork. This doll doesn't have many accessories. There's a rectangular indent in the lid of this layer but it's not used for holding anything. The trays have some strange contouring to account for the doll and the layers on top of them.

Sin's second face is meant to show her even more demonic, transforming into an uglier, more sinister creature, with huge black curved and ridged goat horns and a wide mouth with cracked lips and lots of bloody teeth. The faceplate is actually pretty cartoonish in a fun way that perfectly treads the line of being genuinely scary and really stylized and kind of impishly cute or entertaining. Unlike Eggzorcist's rotted corpse "transformation" face which I could appreciate but wouldn't use, I really like the design of this demon face. 

The teeth are mostly sharp but for some flat ones in the middle of the mouth, and shaded in with black and bloody red.

Here's a look at the horns.

The ears are the same shape to keep the hairstyle working the same. It might work better with this faceplate because the wider black horns fill in more of the hair gap.

The scalp won't pull off so easily if you're gripping onto the ends of the hair wrapped around the horns as well as the hair in the back. It can help to unhook the front locks before pulling on the hair to pop the scalp off.

As you can see, Sin has a second pair of eyes to go with this one, which are solid red with no detail to make her look more inhuman. These eyes seem intended primarily for the second face, since LDD didn't photograph her with her eye options on the opposite face setups. After Damien proved to have regular Return eyes with dimensional iris chips sprayed over with color, my expectations were low for Sin, and indeed, that's what was done here too.

Bleh.

The paint isn't even fully smooth and it's translucent enough that I can tell the irises are darker. How much more expensive would it be to mold totally smooth spheres in the desired color?

It's interesting that Damien's "primary" eyes are blank per his original design, but he has a more normal eye option just to get some meaningful use out of the Return dolls' directional gazes, while Sin's primary eyes are filled in per her original design, but she has a blank extra option for special effect.

As with Damien, Sin has only one black bracket for her eye pieces.

The eviler face with the original eyes might be even more compelling to me, making the face even more cartoony and terrifying in such a way that it's both horrific and hilarious. Is this my doom or a wacky little gremlin? It's got so much personality!

Sin is the only Return LDD with entirely symmetrical hands, with three hand poses shared by both sides and no odd hands out. She has two flat hands, two gripping hands, and two hands doing the sign of the devil horns.

The horns sign was popularized by the band Black Sabbath and is often associated with the metal scene, but its origin is credited to the occultist band Coven and its frontwoman Jinx Dawson. Coven's only big hit wasn't remotely Satanist, though, being a cover of the moral parable song "One Tin Soldier". Return Lou Sapphire is going to have both horns-sign hands as well.

It would have been fun if Sin had hands sculpted for the famous Baphomet pose, too, but she'd need two more to achieve that.

This would have been a way for Lou to do something different. I'm not expecting that now that I see he just uses Sin's horn hands.

The pitchfork is very clean, with sharp flat sculpting for the head and gold paint underneath for the bands at the top. The rest of the pitchfork is red with black airbrushing and is fairly rigid solid plastic that Sin grips easily.

Sin's promo photos show her roasting a marshmallow on the center prong above the flaming circle, but this was merely a photo edit. I think a marshmallow add-on to spear on the pitchfork would have been brilliant as an actual accessory. 

Of all the pieces Return Lou could reuse, I hope it's not this one too. He's had a pitchfork in Resurrection, but I'd love if he kept his original gentleman's cane as the accessory to keep him distinct and keep him from seeming like an obvious low-investment character design. Parts reuse is smart and efficient, but individual touches need to be there, too and a whole doll reusing so many specialized parts soon after the first one feels a little inelegant.

Sin's last piece on this tray layer is a flaming crown. This is translucent orange hard plastic shaped like a ring of fire, and it's designed to be held in tension between her black goat horns so it looks like a circlet floating above her head, like a demon's version of a cartoon halo ring.

The instructions say something about "the highest part of the crown facing front" to lock it in, but the sculpt isn't super overt about which flame is the tallest and there's no hidden grooves in the crown or pins on the horns where there's a precise fit together. It does kind of pop in easily if you can figure what part to turn forward, but it's not like "oh, this fits perfectly seamless". It doesn't seem to be as technical as the instructions make it sound. It's a clever visual device because the floating-fire effect is conveyed despite the horns being the prop for it. It could feel more distractingly obvious that the horns are just holding it up, but it doesn't.

The crown could lay flat on Sin's head with the other faceplate, too--just not stably.

The third layer of Sin's tray contains her demonic circle and her cape, and this tray layer is full-size compared to previous Return dolls, whose third tray layers were half the size.

Very fittingly, Sin is the only Return Series 1 LDD besides Sadie to have a scenery piece in her kit. I'm glad the girls align on that front, even if I'd be expecting a scenery element more for Posey. Posey is so "graveyard" that the tombstone might have made sense for her. Sin's piece is a large magic circle platform made to look like a flaming pentacle. (I really feel like "pentacle" should mean the star without the circle and "pentagram" should mean the circle and the star, but it's the other way--"pentagram" is just the star alone.) This is a fun dramatic piece, but also kind of looked like a big hunk of plastic, and I was certain there must be some trick to it...like it having a hidden compartment for the poem. Again, this would mirror Sadie's piece well, and without the knowledge of the doll ahead of me this time, I wanted to investigate and possibly discover on my own.

Turns out, nope. The magic circle is just a flexible glossy pad of silicone or some such. Not hard plastic, not hiding a thing.

This is actually fairly clever because the platform clings to a hard surface and to the soles of Sin's shoes so it lends her some surprising stability when stood on it. It's not enough to class it as a doll stand, and the doll's balance is only as good as her ankle joints and the tightness of her shoes, but it's a nice piece. 

I also got some new photos with Iris, playing her pentagram scar off the pentacle platform.

The platform having no secrets meant the poem could only be tucked into Sin's cape, which is fine...but that probably means they're repeating that for Posey and I liked that all the poems had been hidden in different ways so far. While Sadie's tombstone having a secret compartment for her poem was unnecessary engineering, nothing following has beat the fun of that hidden poem. 

Like Damien's, this poem is not on glossy paper. It depicts Sin just as she was on the back of the coffin.

Here's the other poems so far.

Sin's cape is Satan satin with a pointy collar, a ribbon tie on the neck, and most wonderfully, wire in the vertical front edges of the cape and the collar, allowing it to be posed and shaped with whatever drape or flutter you please. The wire doesn't wrap into the lower edge of the cape, but that doesn't feel like a problem. It's so fun!

The ribbon tie is annoying, but what are you gonna do? It's easier to tie on with the wig off, and it would be possible to get it tied and then pop out Sin's head to take off the cape already tied so you could just pop the head on and off for future cape on/off moments rather than repeating the tie. That's what I decided to do.

Sin may not have the most display pieces of the Return dolls, but the ones she has certainly count and are very dynamic and appealing! Her pitchfork and tail and cape are so compelling to pose her with, and she might have just become my favorite Return LDD to display!

Sitting on her circle is probably my favorite display option for her, and I ultimately put her that way on my shelf. Both Sadie and Sin can sit on their scenery pieces, which is dynamic and spares me worry about them toppling over. The other two Return dolls are in doll stands.

I washed Sin's wig, but didn't boil it because I liked the texture. The feel of the hair wasn't much improved much after washing, with it still feeling fairly dry, but it's fine. I painted those black spots on her faceplates to relieve her hair issues so the hair could at least be swept behind her shoulders. 

While the doll is very dynamic for poses, I'm fairly bereft of scenery that suits a demon, seeing as I don't live in a craggy land of fire and brimstone. Sin does look good against red velvet that matches her dress.

And I went to flame backdrop on my computer screen for a couple of pictures. First, I took the eyes out of Sin's head to darken them, and used a candle flame in front of her.

Then I had the idea of putting a tiny light inside the hollow head. I edited the eye sockets of the normal face a bit because you could see the light itself inside, but I liked this effect.

Then I tried the other face with it. The visual inside the eye sockets turned out more even this time, so I didn't edit it.

Here's a front-lit pose in front of the "flames".

Don't let my relative lack of scenery or photos for this doll speak negatively to her design. I think she's very strong and dynamic. I just didn't have a lot of specific staging for pictures for her, and showed you some of her best display possibilities before staging, anyhow. Let's look at her original counterpart.

Series 1 Sin

Even if the Return line and my review structure of comparing Return to S1, release by release, didn't exist, I'd have been fairly likely to get Sin as an isolated purchase. 

My first attempt to get S1 Sin didn't work out so well, though. The seller had lost the coffin by the time I was ready to pay for the lot of dolls including Sin, so I ended up getting her incomplete without most of what I needed for my collection, and the paint on her right horn tip had gotten some abrasion and rubbed off a little. 

Not the coffin she came in (she came with none); this was the coffin I resold her in.

The seller was very kind and gave me another doll as compensation for Sin not being right, but I didn't have much use for Sin as I had her. I put her on auction on eBay, which was probably a mistake because I got a pretty disappointing, though not unfair, sale for her--it was a lower intake than the minimum I wanted and I don't like that the item is allowed to sell for lower than your minimum listing. I might have gotten more personal value from this copy if I had kept her for customization, all things considered. Oh, well. I ordered a sealed S1 Sin a little bit after getting the Return doll. I wasn't going to get her without having Return because I wanted to be sure Return was arriving at all--and then she did when I was about to give up hope.

Here's my full Sin as she came. Her hair had covered her face while packaged at some point in her long slumber.

Here's the chipboard.

This little devil has

A Pitchfork she uses

She gives you a poke

Instead of little bruises

I'm not sure if a poke is implied to be better or worse than bruises? How about:

This sweet little devil

Will play in the fires

To pierce with her pitchfork

Is her chief desire

Sin is the first 666 deathdate in LDD, dying on June 6, 1966 or 6/6/66.

While this gag would have suited Damien too, given the relevance of the Number of the Beast to The Omen, it works well for the first demon in the brand. 

Sin's certificate poem says:

Sweet little Sin consumed by flames at seven

Better to forever serve in hell

Than grow up and play in heaven

This might be the only LDD to have a confirmed death age! Seven actually seems a little too old for Sin or Sadie's Series 1 designs given the way their costumes make them look so little, and why not six? I guess you could claim she died at seven-o'-clock as another reading of the poem, but I think it's saying she died at seven years old and became a demon. This poem does nothing to explain why Sin is so similar to Sadie. If they were twins in life...well, Sadie died three years after Sin, but the two don't bear any visuals that would suggest different death ages. Even if they were sisters three years apart, they look relatively the same in death. If Sin is completely unrelated to Sadie and never knew her in life, then it becomes even more mysterious. Why would she make herself look so much like this girl she had no connection to? The poem also might imply Sin became a demon because she literally died to fire, but could also just be saying she was very young when she was sent to Hell. Here's a shorter rewrite.

A strange little girl at the age of seven

Didn't end up going up to heaven

Because my Sin was not a Japanese copy, her coffin tissue was taped to the walls of the box and annoying. Her accessory packet was loose behind the doll tray rather than taped to the back of it, probably because of the size of her pitchfork.

Here she is unboxed.

Sin is the first LDD with the devil-horns head sculpt, and it's a pretty basic design to add the horns into the mold. Most LDDs have horns a different color from their skintone, which is achieved by paint. Sin's horns are solid red, and the classic LDD horns have a stubbier, cuter design than the Return doll's. There's a slight dark mark on this horn, but I'll take it over chipped paint.

The horns are designed to poke out of hairstyles. This is what they look like on a bare scalp, as demonstrated by Lust without her hood:

Lust and her Resurrection-variant doll are the only cases where the horns are unpainted and match the skintone. Other dolls have different horn paint (the stripes on Demonique's dolls being the fanciest) and some have flocking on their horns, like Lou Sapphire in Series 2 or Resurrection Sin.

Features on top of the head would become common in Monster High to follow, with characters like the werewolves and werecats having molded top ears, Rochelle having gargoyle top ears, Luna having antennae, and later gargoyles having horns on top. MH would have originally had the werewolf ears on Clawdeen as an optional feature before changing to molded ears, and had werebeast ears as barrettes in Create-a-Monster, but most of their scalp features are molded in like LDD horns did before them.

As mentioned, horns were not afforded to Sin's LDD Mini in an astonishingly poor move. Lou Sapphire and Inferno's Minis after her did get a horned head sculpt, but it was one character too late.

Series 1 Sin's hair is mostly like Sadie's, but it's cut a bit shorter and has more wavy volume. Sadie had impressed me with how silky and nice her hair came out when I boiled and combed it, but it's since gotten dry and developed snarled ends like so many older LDDs, which is very disappointing. Observing this lowered my expectations for Sin. Right now, her hair is silky as butter, but I have zero expectation for that to stay the case, and the first copy of S1 I handled had worse hair than this one right now. The parted hair in front of her face will need boiling down to let her horns show properly, and the parting is messy, with lots of hairs being indecisive about which side they're meant to fall on and floating loose. This will need some tidying.

Sin's face is one of her most significant departures from Sadie, but the similarities are still there. Her eyes are mostly the same except for the colors. She has red sclerae and white irises and red pupils with both eyes matching, and her lips are red and outlined but the same shape. Her eye shading is grey rather than pink, and is a bit more prominent than Sadie's.

Her face still works for a sixties doll aesthetic, and it's more similar to Sadie's than I realized, but it's not just Sadie's face.

Sin's dress is just like Sadie's, just swapping black for red. That's the only difference. 

Color-swapping outfits is more common in variant dolls rather than separate characters, but Sin wasn't the only case--Abigail Crane is kind of the Sin to Posey's Sadie, being a rather similar graveyard ghoul in all aspects but coloring and paint (and possibly head sculpt--Abigail might not have skin bumps). 

S1 Posey.

Abigail Crane and Mr. Graves.

Posey and Abigail have the same dress when color is set aside, and the two dolls' similarity is highlighted by the two characters being the duo used for LDD's brief foray into larger porcelain dolls. Sin and Sadie's similarities are more obvious, and Abigail only had the first doll and the porcelain edition, but there were two unofficial twin duos involving Series 1 cast.

Sin's devil tail is a bit springier and more flexible than Lust's, whose tail is pretty firm, and it hangs outward a bit more with less bend back on itself, and is more visible from the front. It's still not poseable or wired inside and is just solid plastic.

Lust's tail. 

There was one devil tail between Sin and Lust in Series 2 Lou Sapphire, so I wonder whose tail his was closer to. Sin's tail still plugs into her back in the same manner as Lust's. While Lust's tail is stiffer and more bent-in, the 13th anniversary dolls of Sin based on her S1 design both seem to have the looser tail shape of the true S1.

Sin's shoes and socks are basic far for LDD and match Sadie's exactly, down to the inexplicable crumbling elastics that were put around her ankles for packaging. Why did any LDD ever have these on their socks?

Sin's accessory is a pitchfork. I was surprised to see the handle sculpted as a raw tree branch with a knot on the side and wooden texture, and disappointed to see the material was flexible soft plastic rather than a rigid element. The head of the pitchfork looks like black iron attached to the branch pole. 

Sin's pitchfork is not designed to be held in any way, which was my biggest hangup with this doll. Unholdable accessories aren't news for Series 1, but Sin especially begs to hold her accessory. I was almost considering getting her two anniversary remake variants--her main anniversary remake has a gripping hand, while the variant matches S1's visual, so popping the gripping hand on the anniversary variant would give me a S1 Sin with the gripping hand, but I knew that would be pointlessly expensive and all for a less authentic doll when the rest of my S1s have been the bona-fide originals. Still, a hybrid of the anniversary dolls would certainly have the better quality, with her articulation, hair, and the ability to hold the pitchfork. It's the biggest case where I can say the S1 original isn't favorable to own for any reason other than sheer authenticity. Lou will have a similar issue if I get his Series 2 doll, as his cane was not designed to be securely held despite S2 beginning the run of peg-and-palm attachments for accessories. Return Lou will outperform his original merely by being able to hold whatever accessories he has, just as it is with the Sins.

The pitchfork isn't even tall enough to lean against the doll in a satisfying way.

Ugh.

Return Sin, of course, holds the piece like a champ.

Show-off.

Other later dolls with a pitchfork (Resurrection Lou Sapphire and S35 Sin) also had gripping hands. Res Lou actually had the rare bent-elbow gripping arm instead of the more common unbent arm.

Here's Sin fixed up next to her twin. I boiled her hair enough to show her horns off, but I kept most of it wavy and voluminous. I like the sleeker look for Sadie, but the bigger hair for Sin suits her and sets her apart in a fun way.

While I love the goth spookiness of Sadie and her mismatched eyes, Sin is just as cute as her lookalike and she may honestly carry even more 1960s toy verisimilitude than Sadie. Her red dress feels more likely for a doll of the period, her face is more symmetrical and her voluminous hair adds a little something, and even her devil theme isn't beyond the pale for an actual sixties toy if you look at her like a vintage Halloween devil decoration. In fact...Sin would make an awesome vintage-style Halloween decor item. I'm going to take her up on that this October!

Here's some portraits.

Here's the pieces I've been doing for each doll--the head on black, the illustrated poem based on that image, and the colored lighting and wallpaper. I'll compare with Sadie's here, though I'll show all five for each photo type in an overview of this project once it's done. Sin got to use the same paper pattern as Sadie for her portrait per her twinning motif.

I also revised the poem illustration for Damien, because I'd forgotten several touches I'd given the others in my series. I added red coloring to the figure, added the name written on the figure, and added the Series 1 emblem in the corner.

The original version, unfinished by the rules I made for myself.

Revised.

The revised Damien poem art replaced the original piece in the Damien post, but I'm documenting the original here because this was when I fixed it.

Series 1 Sadie and Sin are such a fascinating study in the little differences making big ones. They have so much in common, including a lot of aesthetic appeal, but each has her own flavor and it's genuinely awesome having both to compare and play off each other. I'm certainly glad LDD grew and diversified artistically in the ways it did, but the humble retro theming of Series 1 has such a charm to it, and I love the artistic effect of such simplicity and subtlety driving the difference in audience connection to different dolls.

Here's the two pairs of dolls together.

To photograph the cover, I used a black foam board with holes cut in it so Sin could be on the flame circle with it lit from below, and I gradually put more holes in the board as the session continued. My first photos were just with Return Sin.

My Return covers have been themed on the new doll subjugating the old doll as a statement on comparison and competition and the Return dolls' high-end nature. For Sin, I first tried staging her as if attacking and subduing S1 with her pitchfork.

These were fine pictures, but they were lacking some of the directness or cover-photo focus I wanted. These didn't feel like a tableau shot in the same way as the pieces I shot for Sadie, Eggy, and Damien. I liked how S1 Sin's tail was highlighted in this staging, but I decided to turn both dolls to camera, keeping S1 in the crack in Hell she's "falling down" and sat Return cross-legged and brandishing her pitchfork upright, as if done with the fight or somehow channeling an energy dragging S1 into the lake of fire. 

I edited the other holes in the floor to all be glowing bright and added in some flames on the sides to fill out the space more and turn this into more of a tableau. It's the most minimalist environment I've shot with for the Return review covers yet, but it worked out.

Here's all of my S1s and Returns together so far! Series 1 of each is almost complete!

I think the Damiens are still the most similar, though which doll is most different from the original is hard to say. Sadie changes the haircut and which side her mismatched eyes are on, plus she changes her outfit a bit and changes her weapon to a cleaver. Eggzorcist keeps the haircut, but changes its shade and her costume is designed as a onesie and the doll itself is designed as uncanny cracked porcelain rather than a character made of flesh. Sin doesn't necessarily change more or less than Sadie. Her haircut is basically the same as S1 in theory, but her face is more monstrous and her dress has a more distinct cut, but her accessory is closer in spirit and her shoes are more accurate to S1. I think Return Eggy is still the most changes in design and impact. 

Of the group, my favorites are hard to name. Each Return doll has its issues. The modularity of the dolls does make them fiddly as a tradeoff. I was wowed by Sadie at the start, but it's possible I'd have liked her more as a later release with the updated head build and with a more faithful hairstyle to Series 1. If there is a Schooltime Sadie Return doll with center-parted hair and a faceplate option with no scar, that could give me a rebuild of Return Sadie with more classic features and a better head assembly, and usurp the Sadie we have right now. But that's just hypothetical for now. Eggzorcist is oddly successful for how strange she is, but she's off-putting and specific enough to give pause. Damien is probably the low point for me for both versions. I don't get that into his vintage-schoolboy theme, though the Series 1 doll has that old-toy charm to him that makes him more personally appealing to me than Return. The Sins are both pretty great. Return Sin's hair parting mechanic is bothersome but more efficient and effective than I expected. I just wish the faceplate had come with black paint around the horns to disguise the flaws in the visual. I love Sin's pieces and display options, and she's an awesome dynamic presence even if I felt I lacked the scenery or staging inspiration to put some of her cool poses into. Right now, Sin is definitely the most "fun" Return doll aesthetically with her bright red, 1980s creature-makeup face sculpts and her mischievous expressions. The other Return dolls are more sinister or eerie, but Sin is bombastic. I'm stil expecting to have very high praise for Posey's gorgeous Return doll, though that will probably be a case where I find her visual design so beautiful that it overcomes an honestly underwhelming pack of pieces. Her cloak, rose, and chains don't look like a lot to write home about. Of the classic dolls, I think Sadie and Sin are the winners of Series 1 so far. They work great alone or as a duo and have the most classic retro appeal to them gone slightly sideways in just the right way. 

Return LDD is our future now, which is bittersweet. I miss the old LDD, but I also have a closed chapter and finite supply to work my collection goals through, which is pretty comforting. Classic LDDs aren't going to keep releasing while I'm trying to get the old ones I want. I don't know where Return will keep going, but as long as it's done well, I'm fine with it!