Absolutely Losing My Mind: Living Dead Dolls Fashion Victims SYBIL!!!

Oh, what a journey to reach this review. 

Series 4 Sybil is a problematic fave in my doll collection. 

She's got definite sensitivity issues, as I've outlined in her previous review, but as an edgy caricature in an over-the-top horror fiction, she's absolutely on point and appealing, her novel manufacturing for her straitjacket binding is brilliant, and I'm still wowed by the quality of her faux-leather pieces which have zero damage or peeling to be seen after all this time. Her Minis equivalent is truly equivalent by repeating all of the gimmicks of the main doll, achieving a level of parity I'd never have expected for such a small piece. I had a lot of fun staging surrealist compositions with the two dolls sharing scenes. 

Sybil also proved to be the biggest star of Series 4, with the most releases of the S4 cast. Macumba had only his standard doll and his Mini. Ms. Eerie had her standard doll, Mini, and a pair of Resurrection editions. Inferno and Lulu had standard dolls, Minis, pairs of Resurrection editions, and Fashion Victims. Inferno also had a Dollies edition, while Lulu was also a Dolly and a face in the LDD doll-head string lights set. Sybil had a standard doll, the Mini, the pencil topper Mini head, two Resurrection variants, two blind-box vinyl figure variants, a Living Dead Dollies release, a Living Dead Dolls in Wonderland redesign, and this Fashion Victim. I understand why she had such endurance in the LDD roster. I'm not intending to get every single Sybil release, but I do expect to get the Hatter sometime very soon--I just might have my tea-themed project of the year with a series on doll-original Hatter adaptations. I could also see the Sybil Dolly coming in if/when I discuss those. This could be the year of Sybil in some way. That year, such as it may be, definitely peaks with this, though.

This damn doll is on the high tier of grails in the LDD community, clearly. And like Toxic Molly's variant doll last year, this sheer unattainability turned Sybil into an obsession for me. Well...I got variant Molly. And she did numbers for me on Tumblr after a wonderful photoshoot, so I'll always tip my hat to her for connecting with so many people. After Molly, I thought maybe I could squash the Sybil fixation too. I knew for sure I could get some awesome work with her design.

I've seen this doll floating around in states less than complete. I've seen her with only her "B" outfit. I've seen her in only her "A" outfit. I'd probably accept the latter, but the tricky thing with Sybil is that her "B" outfit includes the shoes she'd be able to actually stand up in, while her "A" outfit alone is barefoot. The "B" outfit also had bottoms which  I wondered about--might they be wearable with the jacket for a slightly more modest look? A complete Sybil was the ideal. So I tried scouring. I saw a sketchy link for Sybil where the supposed payment button didn't even work, and I realized the images and description were likely stolen from a years-past eBay listing of Sybil that sold, so the chances of receiving the doll from the purchase if it went through were low. And then, just as I started getting into this fixation, a certain auction lot of all four Fashion Victims from Wave 2 in box came along, and my plans were rewritten. At the start of February, I'd have my chance to enter that auction, but I had to wait. I indulged in a little superstition, setting big Sybil on my bedside table and taking Minis Sybil as a talisman in my backpack on work days, but I watched as the auction received no interaction at all. As I hoped, I was able to make my move, and coasted on a minimum bid that went unchallenged and made the lot attainable. In the end, the other dolls were not worthless in the path toward getting the single one I wanted. My previous Hollywood order fell through and then I got Silent Storm, so I proceeded with my original planned review structure by using the Hollywood from the big lot and adored her, and Lulu and Inferno were also good review subjects, and informative on more aspects of this doll wave than Hollywood alone. But it's still kind of all about Sybil!

Here's the costume window on Sybil's box.

Sybil's front-side window plastic was not detaching like Lulu's and Inferno's. She did not have the choking-hazard sticker that Lulu and Hollywood's boxes did.

Here she is unboxed. This doll is solid gold in my collection, I think even above variant Molly in terms of preciousness. I'm so incredibly excited to be able to share her here!

Thanks to her body sculpt, makeup/lashes, and costuming, this Sybil is the most femme of all of her releases. I kind of like the more gender-neutral punk aspects of Sybil that I see in the S4 and Hatter editions, and Resurrection has a shaved head and no obvious gendering before you see her lipstick, but I think this doll's look is fine too. I said S4 Sybil was one of the very most goth dolls in the brand, but the Fashion Victim outdoes her goth factor by a mile. She's definitely the closest any LDD gets to the goth aesthetic which is specifically particular to Tim Burton. Her high-contrast black-and-white, pale skin, dark eye makeup, messy black hair, and wide small-pupiled eyes and spiral designs are all traits that define Burton's visual style. I could see Helena Bonham Carter in this costume, hair, and makeup. Sybil could also be an Arkham inmate in Tim Burton's Batman, perhaps, though those films came before his work with Bonham Carter. 

It's also interesting how the palette is handled. In practice, it's actually the same black, white and beige as S4, only with far more white here thanks to the high-contrast jacket, while the beige has been turned into her pale skintone! S4/Minis, Resurrection, and the Hatter all feature green elements in the mouth paint, but no green is present in the FV doll. The Hatter is the only Sybil to add a new color to the character, with the two variants featuring different proportions of reddish violet. Variant Hatter and FV are the two Sybils not to have the skintone color of the original doll, though FV has redder blush accents. 

The main edition of Resurrection Sybil is something of a hybrid between FV and S4, as she has the color allocations of the S4 doll, but uses the exaggerated long striped sleeve concept of FV, using ribbed fabric rather than color contrast. 

Res I came out three years after Fashion Victims Sybil, meaning FV directly influenced the Res doll! She deserves to!

I really don't want to make Res Sybil my next obsession. I was willing to go for the FV Wave 2 complete lot because the cost was being divided among four dolls including one who was exceptionally hard to get. I'm not in the position where I feel I could pay the same, plus more, for just one doll. I'd really love to have Res Sybil, yes, but that prospect seems completely unrealistic to me.

Onto the Fashion Victim proper.

Sybil's hair is black and center-parted and falls in a tidier bob shape than S4's totally erratic hair, though S4 was rooted in the same shape and could affect the same hair silhouette. The Minis doll has tidier hair like FV; I made it messier to match S4 on my copy. With FV, I don't mind the hair shape. It suits her vibe and has potential to hang ominously over her face for a more moody threatening look. And it's certainly not tidy. It's wild in its own way.

Sybil's skin is paler than S4's, with a yellowish beige tone like Lulu and Inferno's FV dolls, and with the same subtle blushing. I think it's just the right amount of color and pallor alike to suit her palette. The doll would be less striking and beautiful with stark white skin. This is the perfect creepy pale shade for this design.

Her eyes have spiraling pupils like S4, and the spiral design works with the circular iris chips better than Inferno's embers. Her eyes are shaded with taupe, while her right eye has a thick eyelash-shaped makeup design on the lower side. The Hatter doll has somewhat similar asymmetrical makeup using the same eye. FV Sybil's eyebrows are in keeping with the other three browed Wave 2 dolls.

Like Lulu and Inferno, the waterline area inside the eye socket edge is not painted its own color, but is kept separate from the mascara paint. Her lips are black.

I realized this after the whole overview and several art photos, but on the left eye, the lashes don't meet the eyelid, so they look like they're sprouting from her eyeball at top-down views. The other Fashion Victims' lashes haven't had this manifest in a way this apparent.

I figured from my experience with removing and swapping Rainbow High inset eyes that this was merely a problem with the eye placement in the socket and that it could be adjusted. At the very late point I noticed this error, I was able to heat her head and scooch the eyeball upward with my fingertip to fix this.

You'l see the flawed lash alignment in some of the art photos in this post because I noticed the problem really late, and most of the photos were fine without editing the issue away. I noticed my Hollywood's narrowed eye also has some alignment issues, but I'm not sure the contour of the lashes would match the contour of her eye socket, and having her lashes look partially detached on the beaten eye is acceptable.

Sybil's head has the spray-painted quality and a bit of a smush on the nose, but it otherwise looks fine. Hollywood and Inferno taught me to just leave it. I'm not screwing up my solid-gold grail. 

Here's the two Sybil faces together.

The FV face is so simple, but so striking.

Sybil's straitjacket here goes more stylized goth thanks to its high-contrast black-and-white stripe pattern. The stripes are associated with old jailbird uniforms rather than asylum restraints, but it's a really fun look. This jacket has extremely long sleeves with excess length that's longer than the doll's height. In human scale, they'd probably be eleven, twelve, thirteen feet each? The complete outstretched wingspan of the doll-size jacket is four feet!

The sleeves are open at the ends, but the doll's wrists are never going to poke out. The sleeves are incredibly dramatic and dynamic, but the jacket is not rigged to be bound and has no sleeve straps or buckles. Sybil's Resurrection costume also has no bindings, using standard doll arms and the long sleeves for drama as if to imply she's gotten herself partially free, the same as this doll. FV Sybil can bend her arms a bit across her body, though, and the sleeves can wrap around a few times and knot in back if you did want to bind her or tidy the arms away.

Here's a test of bending the feet into a flat shape--kinda works, but not very reliably.

On this outfit, the collar, chain, and crotch strap of the straitjacket are all one piece, and it's separate from the black-and-white striped piece. The crotch strap is sewn into shape and is not actually able to be unbound from the buckle. The piece actually undoes in just one spot, with a snap on the back of the collar. Once that's open, the strap simply slides as a loop off the doll's left shoulder sideways to take it off. 

The swayed back of the Fashion Victims W2 body creates a gap between the torso and strap.

S4 Sybil's collar and chain were one piece and separate from the jacket, while the crotch strap was functional and attached to the straitjacket, binding before the sleeves get bound. S4's chain was the shortest, proportionally, while Minis and Fashion Victims' chains drag on the ground. I prefer the longer chains that hit the floor.

The leathery material on the FV strap looks fine for now.

The jacket is a stretch knit with a wider neckline than I think it should have, and it zippers most of the way down the back, but is still a closed piece that needs to slide up the legs. The zipper can be a little hard to open, and does not zip back up unless it's on her body. I couldn't get the removed piece to zipper fully closed and didn't want to break it. When it's around her torso, though, the costume is in the right tenson and the zipper works fine. The jacket has a few flaws and had or acquired a gap in a side seam that I needed to glue closed.

Look at those sleeves!

Long stripy noodle arms are something of an aesthetic darling of mine. I also treasure every time LDD delivers an unconventional or niche clothing piece to the doll world. You see some obscure or weirdo pieces made miniature which you can't get from other doll brands! I feel like this costume is also the most a Fashion Victim really feels like the doll turning the original design into "fashion", elevating the classic look into something from a different scene. S4 Sybil is fully utilitarian...or utility+sadism. Fashion Victims Sybil makes the costume avant-garde and dramatic, turning it into a statement in the way the original was never meant to be. This inmate is ready to run that asylum!

The sleeves are sewn with side seams rather than being a full tube knit, so they're maybe a bit less noodly and fluid than they could be, but that's fine. 

Putting Sybil back in the jacket after it's off is a matter of poking her arms in and carefully pulling and sliding the sleeves down over her big hands until the jacket is pulled up her shoulders and can close. I wondered if it was possible to leave the hands off, slide the arms in the sleeves, then roll the sleeves up the arms until the wrists came out of the ends, then reattach the hands and then pull the sleeves down to full length...but the sleeves are too long to be able to bunch up that far. Her arms can never come out of the ends of the sleeves. Sybil's hands just have to be slowly slid down the sleeves like a real person would do while gently pulling the sleeves wider to slide them down the hands. I think the sketchy Sybil listing I saw before had her sleeves bunched up in a way the official piece, at least in factory condition, could not be, so I probably dodged a bullet even if that listing had been legit.

Sybil is dressed bottomless in this jacket, with only the strap covering her up. Part of me wants to groan and complain about this being gross, and I have previously...but part of me has come to appreciate this as being pretty funny. I like a sense of humor in making something naughty, and a little twist like this is much more fun than hackneyed latex everything and the world's biggest boobs. She doesn't feel icky and obscene to me because the hem of the jacket pulls down enough. Tumblr's nanny AI didn't think so. The cut of her costume got her slut-shamed and marked as mature content, so it took a lot of rethinking and trickery to get my photo-gallery Tumblr post up and visible without the warning! I really don't want to yank Lulu's ultratight inelastic velvet pants up and down Sybil's legs, so I'm going to leave Sybil a bit revealing. Taking the pants off Lulu the first time discouraged my vision of giving them to Sybil because I could tell they'd be a small nightmare to use. I'm not a Living Dead Doll. I don't like torture!

Sybil's body is blushed with reddish shading, and I don't think it's very successful because it doesn't match her face and her arms look like a separate skintone. Her left hand has a deformed finger from packaging.

I fixed this with a hot water bath to reshape the finger, then put the finger propped in place into the freezer to hopefully reset the vinyl. It seemed to work!

I noticed Sybil's neck joint was a bit tight and restricted, and then the ball peg snapped when trying to push it. 

That's both FV body types I've experienced this with now.

I was able to extract the ball and cut the head socket a little wider, and glued the peg back in and waited. It was a clean break and tight fit back in place, fortunately. And during the heating and wrestling with Sybil's head for the neck repair and eye realignment, whatever skintone paint she has on stayed adhered perfectly with no warping or crinkling or peeling. That's good adhesion. How'd they do it? I haven't had such luck trying to repaint vinyl with spray paint myself--even the paints that seemed ideal for it. Even when LDD is skimping, their recoloring technique is more durable than anything I've tried!

While decapitated, Sybil lent me a fun photo composition. I can't believe this spiral plaque wasn't part of my kit for the S4 doll's photos!

After my first attempt to reassemble Sybil failed because her head was still too tight, I vigorously sanded the neck ball to trim it down so it would have less friction. For a doll as special as Sybil, maximum neck mobility is warranted, and lowering the friction would reduce the possibility of Sybil's head articulation snapping the repair again. The head is still a little scarily tight when turning from side to side, but she's fine. Will try very hard to not let the doll take any falls, though.

Sybil's second outfit, which can be discussed with the doll back in one piece, is an homage to the famous bizarre costuming of criminal delinquent Alex DeLarge, as seen in Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of the Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange. 

LDD made a licensed doll of Alex years later.

This is where Sybil's eye makeup comes in, with the lashes mimicking the ones Alex accents himself with. I wonder if the Hatter doll's lash design is meant to be an echo only of FV Sybil, or of Alex as well because that's where the FV makeup came from. I suppose this costume reference does play into the gender ambiguity of Sybil's other looks, though this take on the outfit is more sexual and feminine, and the lashes are only subversive on a man. The hat and cane are the opposing signifiers on this design. (Note: Alex is not at all a queer icon for wearing a lash. He's a violent heterosexual misogynistic predator.)

The outfit starts on top with a flocked bowler hat, which doesn't feel as fragile as classic early LDD flocked hats, and is actually flocked on the inside too. It's a firm fit on her head.

Sybil has a one-piece set of a top, suspenders, and bottoms, and it's all made of elastic bands! The costume really just stretches and pulls up Sybil's body with no opening pieces. You have to stick her legs between the shoulder straps and just pull up slowly!

The suspenders are elastic bands. So are the top and bottoms!

The suspenders have clip and button accents in silver. While skimpier than the referenced costume, it's arguably chaster than Alex's clothes, which use a confrontational Freudian cricket codpiece which ties into the sexual aspect of Alex's brutality. Sybil's death date and association with Alex all seem to suggest that she was not merely institutionalized for mental illness, but for violent crime as well.

On her legs, Sybil wears ill-fitting sheer stockings with unfinished cuffs, just like Lulu's, only they're white. She also has big chunky goth knee-high boots. I find the left boot to be much harder to get on. 

Sybil is the only Wave 2 Fashion Victim with an accessory, which is the gentleman's cane here. This is more of a vaudeville crook in my eye and doesn't match Alex's dagger cane, but it's a nice piece that's the right height to rest under Sybil's hands as if she's leaning on it. The arm needs to be fully extended and lowered, though.

In the Alex costume, Sybil actually reminds me of LDD's later doll Maître des Morts! Both are black and white with bowlers, androgynous elements, and stripe motifs (Sybil's stripes are outside this costume, but still).

The cane would find a great home with the Maître...if only he could hold it well. Best he can do, securely, is to stuff it down his chest cavity.

The cane is too thin and awkward for a classic LDD gripping hand, so getting the Maître one of those arms wouldn't make the cane any more viable.

Here's Sybil doing her best Cabaret.

I don't plan to use the Alex costume for Sybil, but I kind of like it without the hat. It makes her feel like some corny nineties action-sci-fi character.

I'd be more than okay with this costume having a back closure for the top half, though. Pulling everything up her body isn't the most fun.

Here's the three Sybils hanging around.

I naturally got the most out of black and white pattern papers for this doll. This first picture was so good I edited out the eyeball misalignment that hadn't been fixed yet by filling in the lid-lash gap with black. I wanted this picture to be perfect because the shot was so strong.

Feels like a frame from a 90s-2000s music video!

Here are some other shots.

I also had a small bowl with a black-and-white spiral pattern that could also evoke a brain.

Here are some portraits on beige.

I can see illustrator Lane Smith's vibe in this doll, too.

Sybil's eyes pop under blacklight, which is fun to utilize.

And a couple of filter edits I liked.

As before, given that Sybil's perception could be many levels of unfamiliar, I think it makes sense for her different dolls to share a photo frame as a surreal reflection of how her altered outlook may manifest. Here's my three Sybils chained together.

And some surreal compositions with multiple Sybils.

Didn't mean for this to convey "Kids, Mama's tired. Please play somewhere else", but I see that now!

Sybil was named for the pseudonym of a real woman described to have a complex case of DID with several alternate personalities. The Sybil book account is disputed, but it's possible to interpret LDD Sybil as a former or current DID system based upon that name origin. In such a case, perhaps the alternate dolls of Sybil could all be considered canonical under the lens that they are each a visualization of a different alter. The Hatter, the Fashion Victim, the Resurrection and/or its variant, the S4 doll, the Mini, and the Dolly could all represent different aspects of one psychological system that is Sybil...not to say this character is in any way a good depiction of mental illness, let alone DID. She's not. 

(I think the Resurrection might better represent Sybil fallen further down the torments of institutionalization after the brain surgery and with greater loss of clarity. She reads as the after to S4's before, unless S4 represents a recovery from the Resurrection. No one way to read it, but if all the Sybils were read in one story, I myself think the Res doll would be more literal and external, rather than a manifestation of Sybil's interiority.)

I have a giant beige illustration-style octopus decorating my room, and I thought the colors, art style, and tentacles would resonate with Sybil's colors and sleeves.

Here are more pictures using the basement scenery, hitting similar markers to photos I took with S4. 

I also took one of her hanging before a slatted door.

The basement is dusty and filled with house spiders and even scary cave crickets on occasion, but I have to be grateful for the scenery it can provide for industrial/institutional settings.

And some pictures using my quilt as cell padding.

Sybil could have been killer with rigid straight arms, but the ability to bind her sleeves even unprofessionally is such a bonus. Res Sybil wouldn't have that privilege. At least, I'm pretty sure. I'd be very surprised if her arms were more flexible plastic--pretty sure the concept wouldn't work with a ball-joint LDD because the shoulders would pop off too easily.

While Sybil's arms are much shorter than the sleeves, I can make some eerie surreal images by sticking her detached hands in the sleeve ends, as if the arms are the full length and floppiness of the sleeves.

Back to the basement again!

One photo idea I had back with S4 Sybil, but never did, was using her face for creepy CCTV security monitors that show she's watching the guards as much as they're watching her, and even that she may have some scheme hijacking the feed while she escapes.

To create the look of crappy CCTV camera footage, I had the idea to just use a real crappy camera. I'd been using my 3DS a lot recently as I started a new playthrough of Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and realized the abysmal 3DS camera quality would be useful.

I then used my phone to photograph the pictures on the 3DS screen and edited the results to capture the right look.

I arranged a grid of nine "screens" using other photos taken around the house, including a couple with Sybil's snaking sleeves as if to suggest her arms are winding through the whole facility.

I then set up the image on my laptop screen with a stand and some remotes as control panels and put Sybil there, as if arriving to the security office after jamming the feed with images of herself. It was hard to photograph, because the black of the computer screen isn't truly dark.

Here's more, including with blacklight popping her eyes.

And some pictures of her reveling in front of the screen.

Sybil was captivated by her own image. The face was the most beautiful woman she'd ever seen.

I can't resist the opportunity to recreate a movie poster a doll would be associated with, so I used the Alex costume for one other picture.

I think this may actually be my best poster-remake mimic yet. I had little confidence in the product because the photo didn't look like the artwork, but adding the right digital shading pieces to paint over a few parts and add shadows and contrast lifted the photo into the stylized paintlike look I wanted. This was the base photo before those last touches.

I covered over the photo eyes and added some tactical shadows to remove the obvious photographic element. 

(It took me far too long to realize Alex is coming out of the word "A" in the title. I thought it was a fully abstract shape!)

Sybil is holding Gluttony's serrated knife, digitally lengthened for the composition.

I realized the Alex costume could serve as underwear for a "jacket peeled to the waist" look where Sybil has fully freed her arms to improve her dexterity. I staged her in a very tricky spot, finding a "corridor" behind the washing machine she'd look good in. Poor straitjacket was headed for a third wash now from the basement floor. Worth it!

Then I thought of the jacket being an escape rope with its long sleeves! I built a window wall with poster board to place on the basement wall, and suspended Sybil with fishing line by her neck after trying the jacket in a harness wrap first.

Another shoot I wanted to do for Sybil was to put the lady in the scrawlings of madness across a cell. I sacrificed four poster boards for this, doodling all over while aiming for the kind of Portal 2 Rattmann-den drawing effect. 

I had a lot of fun with this, since precision and clean drawing weren't the goal. The more cluttered, messy, and illegible, the better. I covered the walls, floor, and ceiling with text and images related to Sybil and all of her doll designs. Her name is scrambled incoherently multiple times, she sometimes writes backward, her chipboard poem is written on the floor, she expresses grievances with the staff of her asylum (who I've attributed to be Dr. Dedwin and Nurse Necro), and has drawn her own Fashion Victims self multiple times. While this could be a photo set for all Sybil designs, and I did reference every Sybil doll design in here, I kind of liked keeping it specifically made for the FV doll.

The first wall I drew, with a centerpiece of FV Sybil and a brain being removed from her head. Also seen are the doll in her FV coffin, attributes of the Hatter, a Clockwork Orange "A", tallies, the cane, and a touch of Cabaret and the top of Res Sybil's head.

The other wall, depicting S4, Minis, and Dollies Sybil, the latter of which is paired with the prospect that the Dolly is literal and that Sybil was in this state since she was a baby. We also see her raging against the doctor and nurse, gloating about hacking the camera feed, and reaching fourth-wall awareness.

The floor, with more Clockwork Orange nods, including her costume, the chipboard poem, a pill bottle, and the rest of Res Sybil's face, plus a potentially flirty line serving the FV saucy side of the doll.

The ceiling, with Sybil's FV face and the text "LDD FV W2". The yarn pieces were glued to the board from an attempt to brush yarn into doll hair strands, and I left them attached to hang from the ceiling for effect.

There is something wonderfully liberating about drawing with such abandon and not worrying about tidiness or perfection. I often find a lot of doodles of mine to be better than finished pieces based upon them, and it's a lot of fun to just cover a space in an improv composition.

All of that detail needed to be shown in these images because it all ended up as secondary once the doll entered the frame!

How does she cover the walls while in that jacket? Eh. How does she do anything, really? Just let her do it however she does! The only way to properly enjoy this character is to assume she can do whatever the hell she wants despite all physical and logical barriers. So she's bound and disordered and mistreated and subjugated. But she can also spring free, express herself, and hatch a hell of a plan, even if only she has any remote idea of what it is.

Here's a Tim Burton-style illustration of Sybil. She was already most of the way there, anyhow!

I like the angles I got in her torso!

This is the second LDD to spark a Tim Burton mimic illustration in me, after Tina Pink.

I think Tina's piece ended up a spot-on mimic of Burton artwork, while Sybil's is a bit more removed.

...heck, let's do a Series 4 piece too.

Take these dolls away from me; I have gotten too much fuel from them!

Lastly, I had to try the FV jacket on S4 Sybil. It works and fits remarkably well, though S4 needs her original pants and collar to complete the look. This could have been an awesome variant edition. S4 Sybil in the FV jacket arguably has some Tim Burton vibes FV lacks with the hair, though FV has Burton synergy with the face that S4 never will.

Phew.

It's so nice to have a grail live up to hype.

I actually finished this doll review and art sessions second of my four Wave 2 dolls, and even that's a miracle given that I had about four or five false finishes on my creative work even before I started doing more work with the S4 doll too. I couldn't stop with these guys and kept getting ideas when I swore I was done! I'm glad I held this review's publication for last after the (ironically) tepid experience that was Inferno, though. 

FV Sybil is a doll with some flaws I had to treat, not least of which was her neck joint, but I'm delighted to find her relatively pristine otherwise, and boy was she rewarding. While FV Wave 2 is more timeless than Wave 1 in terms of aesthetic, Sybil is a fun reminder of the time period, being the quintessential stylized turn-of-the-decade classic goth, going heavy on the Tim Burton with her own edgy flair to spare as well. She's beautiful high-contrast design with emphasis on optical patterns and some funky, surreal spice that elevates the already brilliant visual caricature of Series 4 into something more wacky and fashion-themed. Sybil's long striped jacket is iconic, and possibly the winner for the single doll clothing piece to have given me the most direct photo fuel! Even her collar-strap thong is kind of amazing in its audacity. I prefer Sybil to wear her second outfit's boots because this doll design is not suited to barefootedness, but the boots are easily added. The Wave 2 poseability and costume design here gives Sybil the capabilities of Series 4's doll, plus more. She can do a respectable arm bind with her articulated arms, while her joints lend her some more expression than Series 4 had. Series 4 was already a pretty perfect design, but FV may be perfecter. She lifts a painful loaded image further toward the ridiculous and fantastical, and she's just so so striking. It's obvious why she rules the pack and is so exceptionally hard to find. Every time I thought I was done making photos and pieces with Sybil, another idea made me keep going. I love FV Hollywood to bits, but Sybil really is a treasure and a prize. 

Was it the green that Tumblr really liked about my Molly photos? If I use this picture in my post about this review, is that helping?