Powers of Creation

Lee-el started off by releasing some super-jacked 90cm dudes with oddly sculpted breast areas, but I did not find them interesting. Now they've finally released a female doll in the same scale, Selena. For some reason, she's only 85cm, but, despite that, she's super cool looking! Lee-el decided not to overexaggerate the muscular bulk, so she just looks really solid. The breast area shows an improvement over whatever the heck was going on with the dudes, although the antigrav effect only works with certain tops. She has a lovely, strongly marked face with harmonious cheekbones and jawline, a nifty skijump nose and a slightly open mouth with teefs!!!

I've been lusting after the Dollmore Trinity Elysia for a while now, but I think I just found a new lust object in their latest Trinity sculpt Klaire. Here are some blank pictures for comparison from the sculptor's Flickr. DOA's consensus is that she's unattractive, with features that are too large, strong and "masculine," but those traits are exactly the ones that attract her to me. She also has an amazing skijump nose! Elysia looks like she's dreaming, but Klaire looks like she's plotting. >_>

In good news, DOA says that Fabric Friends and Dolls allows year-long layaways [which, for a $3K doll, means $250.00 a month], but that still doesn't overcome my moral objections to direct purchase from Dollmore. GRRRARGH.

Oooooooh, I just discovered that IOS' Infernale head, previously commented on in March, appears to be in stock on their Web site for a mere $256.00 including s/h!

Clearly I need to get another open-mouthed doll sticking out its tongue.

Ball gag?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

I wish I had more money for dolls. I'd like ~$600.00, enough for Muggins and Tonsil Hockey II.

While I was finishing up the Great Diary Scanning Project, I discovered a diary entry from April 29, 2004, when I was first learning about and coveting BJDs:

April 19, 2004

I spent much of the weekend on the 'Net, paging through sites of BJDs. I reconfirmed that CH [CustomHouse] Gene is the most beautiful doll in the world and that I really want it. I also finally articulated what makes me uncomfortable about BJDs....

Physically, BJDs [speaking about the majority here] look prepubescent. Their heads take up a large part of their body proportions similar to the way that a baby's proportions do. They also have eyes that are large for their faces the way that a child's eyes are. Finally, the girls have no breast development, the boys comically small dicks. They look like kid dolls.

At the same time, BJDs also seem adolescent and adult. They have luxuriant wigs, the hair on which could never be so thick or full on an actual child. Only a teenager has time to grow the waist-length hair popular with these dolls. BJDs' swappable eyes recall vanity contact lenses that teens or young adults use to look cool. As the final point, every BJD's facial paint scheme -- called by the age-neutral term "paint ops" when discussing action figs, is called "makeup" or "faceup." Makeup is associated with teens and adults more than children. Hmm, maybe they're teenaged dolls. [Volks actually has a line of Super Dollfies called SD13 which is supposed to have a "more mature body," but that just convinces me that the default bodies were LESS mature and therefore childlike.]

The same ambiguity about how to relate to BJDs as characters appears among BJD owners. Lots of them refer to the arrival of the doll as its "birthday," giving the impression that it was born recently and is therefore a young child. And then you even get a few people calling their BJDs [as the Volks Web site -- "Choose what kind of daughter you would like to have" -- encourages] their kids. That's just too weird for me.

The overwhelming majority of BJD owners put their BJDs' ages in the mid- to late teens and have them act selfish, willful, mischievous -- like very stereotypical teenagers. BJD owners also usually sexualize their dolls with fetish wear, shirtless modelling and/or photostories about lust, infatuation and sex. Since the dolls are objects and they are frequently endowed with sexual meanings, I think they're sex objects.

Here is my problem -- it's a child-shaped sex object. I don't care if you say that it houses a teenaged character. It's still a child-shaped sex object that exaggerates and stylizes the youth-like features of the object [big eyes, "pure skin" -- actually a type of Volks resin for the BJDs, lack of secondary sex characteristics], so that the youth-like features become salient and attractive. There's a pederastic tinge to BJD ownership when I think of it this way.

...

I love the ambiguity of the dolls, even though it makes me uncomfortable. They have human-like shapes, but their huge eyes and overall small size make them seem like stereotypical faeries or some sort of non-human creatures. Due to purposely ill-defined sex characteristics, they look very ambiguous and androgynous. Their pre- to post-adolescent age range somehow unfixes them from the aging process so they seem outside of time or age, therefore assignable to any time or age one wants to assign them to.

Dollmore, the dirty rotten cheatin' BJD co. that recast its 70cm Model Doll male sculpts from Dollshe's sculpts of the same size, continues to piss me off. They keep making dolls that I want, but cannot buy on the primary market because that would mean supporting a dirty rotten cheatin' BJD co. Unfortunately, the Dollmore dolls I want never materialize on the secondary market.

The first Dollmore BJD I lust after is the 1:6 scale Melissa Hon, who first entered my field of vision about three years ago as the inresination of the protagonist of Intellectum, the doll-based series I never did, about a magical library, its employees, patrons and denizens. I have never seen owner pictures or sales posts for her on DOA or Ebay, and I only found someone who owned her a few months ago, but she has not procured pictures for me because she has been too busy. My desire for this particular doll has only increased over time because I have never seen her for sale outside of Dollmore, where I cannot bring myself to purchase her. In short, I want her because I haven't been able to obtain her.

The second Dollmore BJD I lust after is the latest sculpt in their Trinity series, Elysia. She's 105cm tall, which is about 41 1/3 inches. That's 1:2 scale -- child size! To compare this with dolls with which I'm familiar, the length from her shoulder to the lower edge of her wrist ball joint is 30.5cm, just a smidgen taller than any of my male Soom Faery Legends. From hip to floor, she's 54cm, which is on the smallish side for the total height of a 1:3 scale female BJD. She weighs 7.15kg, which is nearly 16 lbs.! The fullset version I linked to contains doll, faceup, wig, eyes, dress and shoes for $2780.00. $140.00 EMS s/h to US is extra.

I love her because her full features suggest childhood, but, despite her childlike size, she is generic enough to represent other older ages. Her open mouth makes her look pensive, wondering, speaking or stupefied, depending on the angle, so I like its multitude of interpretations. I like her because she is so big...not as unwieldy as a mannequin, but as big as I always think 1:3 scale BJDs should be when I see glamour shots of them: large enough to enter the uncanny valley, but small enough to remain obviously unhuman. I also like the fact that her joints are simple and almost perfectly spherical where possible, giving her the air of an antique doll.

I really like Asleep Eidolon's 1:3 scale mer-BJDs. They're really expensive, though! Maybe I can get one off the secondary market.

 Iplehouse's EID special edition Doria The Addiction is sticking out hers, at least on the fantasy head. She and IOS Infernale should get together and play tonsil hockey.

If I ever want to execute my mecha siren concept that I was going to use for Lura, I can always do it with this little therianthropic cutie by Silverbeam, an Etsy shop owner who uses a combination of digital sculpting and 3-D printing on demand to create 1:12 scale BJDs. She also offers several other therianthropic BJDs, but I am surprised that there are no merpeople, snake people or centaurs. There is, however, a design-your-own option from which you could easily get the therianthropic mini BJD of your choice.

I gotta say...I never see these types of "Fuck off and stop judging me!" comments on MWD. If I see someone's custom that's not to my taste in the world of 1:6 scale action figs, I, like pretty much all the other fanatics, either comment about some aspect that I do like or just avoid it. In over a decade in online 1:6 scale action fig communities, I have never seen there such critical sniping as I've seen on DOA.

The 1:6 scale action fig world has its own nasty aspects. For example, there's the pointless, recursive hostility toward likeness figs, as detailed in my discussion about the upcoming Hot Toys Selina Kyle. There's also the Cult of Triad, a group that remains determinedly hostile toward any legit criticism of the company. And, of course, there's the everpresent, inescapable, insidious objectification and misogyny. No sniping though, unless you're trying to bash some sniper from some army in some war with correct, in-scale camo and little bullets in his little gun and zzzzzzzzzzzz... 1:6 scale military crapola doesn't interest me at all, except insofar as I can exploit it for my kinky civilian ends. I am not, however, about to say that my mismatched, pink-haired suburbanites are more creative and therefore better than historically accurate soldier dudes.

As an extension of my interest in dolls, I've long had an interest in mannequins. For example, about 11 or 12 years ago, when I lived in small quarters in Somerville, MA, I purchased a 1950s mannequin off Ebay.

I named her Mick. She was made of wood pulp composite and had a nice old musty smell. She had a lovely, small, foreshortened head with uptilted features and knowing, side-glancing eyes.

I customized her by giving her a mohawk of blue and purple and gluing stars over the areas where her skin paint had chipped. I also gave her rhinestone studs around the border of her pinnae. Then I dressed her in all the awesome clothes that I could never wear myself. Naturally, she also dressed as Jareth, with a white blouse, my black velvet cape, the pants seen below [har!], an artificial bulge and an appropriate wig.

She was classy, demanding and vulgar at the same time, rather like Frank from Rocky Horror, as you can tell from the photos below. Incidentally, the button on her pants says "I heard it was come as you are, so I came in my pants."

( Mick and her naughty, naughty pants. )


I no longer have Mick, as I got rid of her when we were moving apartments from Somerville to Cambridge in 2005. I was in one of my phases where I thought that having dolls was rather silly and impractical, especially life-size ones. She went out on the curb on trash day, but not before crabbily socking me in the mouth with her arm when I was disassembling her. I am confident that she went on to provide enjoyment for someone else, though. Like many desireable items left out on trash pickup days in our college-student-heavy neighborhood, she quickly disappeared before the garbage trucks came. No doubt she ran off with someone to become yet another moody and glamorous art project.

There were other life-size dolls too, such as the Styrofoam drag queen head who sported glittery rainbow eyelashes and helpfully stored my hot pink bob wig. There was also the African-American model that we discovered somewhere, decapitated, and reassembled by carefully balancing her loose head on her neck. I never named them, loved them or missed them the way I did with Mick, however.

I may no longer have Mick, but I still have my memories of her, which involve either feeling either a) deviously daring as I dressed her in flamboyantly explicit outfits or b) extremely frustrated by her limited articulation. She could swivel her arms and wrists, but that was it. She detached into just six pieces: her head + torso, two arms, two hands and then her waist + legs.

Despite Mick's limitations, I really had fun with her. Clearly, I haven't stopped thinking about her after all these years. Indeed, though I no longer have her, I have still kept the quintessential items of her wardrobe -- the FUCK pants, the "came in my pants" button and the pride button -- just waiting for the time when they will be used again.

Let's face it -- I want another mannequin. I mean, really...did you honestly think I would be able to resist the prospect of a life-size doll that's positively cheap compared to the wads I regularly blow on BJDs? You can get a simply posed, full-body mannequin with a realistic head for between $90.00 and $250.00, excluding shipping. Compare that to how much I'm investing in my Jareth, one of my dream BJDs, and you'll see why I consider mannequins cheap.

Anyway, now that I shop around for mannequins, there are so many more choices than there were when I bought Mick. A decade ago, I sought in vain for affordable mannequins with "plus-size" figures and/or basic limb articulation and/or head sculpts that had features besides vacant eyes, overstuffed lips and square jaws. Look at some of the options that the Mannequin Store [which apparently hasn't changed its site layout since I first came across it over 10 years ago] now offers.... I could settle for the adjustable sitting mannequin in standard mannequin body type [albeit with relatively larger breasts] and then make her fatter with strategically placed polyfill.

Their category of flexible mannequins contains two types of articulated mannequins. First, they have soft-bodied mannequins with wire armatures. The key words here are "flexible," "bendable," "soft" and "wire armature," just as a note to myself, for future search term use. These come with blank heads or solid, realistic heads, which look rather small and incongruous. Anyway, they're poseable down to their fingers! Just $250.00 for a female soft body with a hard head! I wonder if you can swap the heads out...

Second, they have hard plastic mannequins with a combination of ball and hinge joints. The key words here are "flexible," "jointed" and "pose mannequin." The "pose woman," as she is called, has ball-jointed shoulders, swivel head and waist, as well as hinged elbows, thighs and knees. For some reason, her wrists do not move. The articulation reminds me of the non-Fashionista articulated Barbies. Anyway, she's just $400.00.

They also have another type of articulated mannequin filed under their sitting female mannequins. She is billed as an "adjustable sitting mannequin." She appears to have swivel head, neck and wrists, as well as hinges at the elbows. Unlike the hard plastic ball/hinged mannequins, she has definite body segments and exposed metal joints. She also has a larger rack than your average female mannequin. For some reason, she's priced at $250.00, much less than the jointed mannequins mentioned above, maybe because she doesn't have knee joints. Her combination of realism and naked, mechanical articulation really appeals to me. I even like her head sculpt. I would totally get her over the aforementioned jointed mannequins, even if she didn't come with knee joints. [If she did, I would definitely choose her over the earlier jointed mannequins.] Of course, she's sold out on the site. :( Damn damn damn.

There are also a few more body shapes available for mannequins. Here's a "plus-size" mannequin with more fat on her than the standard mannequin. Tragically, she does not have a head. I can't stand mannequins without heads. They creep me out.

And here's a mannequin who's "eight months pregnant," apparently with a baby mannequin? I'm not sure how they reproduce, given their lack of genitalia.

My dream mannequin would be a "plus-size" female with  the articulation and head sculpt of the adjustable sitting mannequin, plus knee joints, and the ability to stand up or at least remain propped upright against a wall. I'm thinking that the adjustable sitting mannequin with knee joints must exist, as she's shown in the photo with knee articulation. I'll have to ask the Mannequin Store who makes her. Maybe some other place has her in stock. I will find her!

Darn dolls. I know how they reproduce now...by planting seeds of ideas in people's heads that then grow to fruition and cause greater and greater purchases.

EDIT: OH MY GOD! Ball-jointed mannequins with articulated ankles [which is probably overkill] and load-bearing, locking joints! Also tension-jointed mannequins, which look cheaper.

And a standing mannequin with raw elbow joints.

I like dolls that show teeth in an expressive manner, as opposed to just having their mouths open and showing teeth because...uh... they're breathing or something. On that note, I must compliment AOD's Huixiang for having the most naturalistic of wide smiles I've ever seen on a sculpted doll. She looks so joyful!
( Read more... )

They'll be going along, issuing their standard, run-of-the-mill, ugly dolls [discussion here], and then, all of a sudden, they'll come out with something cool. Today's deviation from their usual mediocrity is Impl Young Adela. She's an engaging little girl with a slight smile and a relaxed, open mouth that makes her look very lively. She also has heavily styled wingy ears. Her body is actually a pretty good double-jointed sculpt with pleasing proportions and graceful articulation. Tragically, however, she has a forehead tumor in the shape of an orange and purple turd. She's the sort of BJD that just calls out for some minor modding to reach her full glory. Too bad she's in 1:4 scale, a scale I refuse to get into.

On the DOA marketplace, huge sums of money regularly change hands. With that in mind, I do not understand how anyone would put "concealed cash" as an acceptable method of payment. "La la la, I just committed to buying a $650.00 doll. I'll just stick some bills in a padded mailer and send 'em first class." Who thinks that is a good idea?

I love Sarah and August, but I'm very irritated by their inflexible wrists. They don't cock more than a few degrees. I'd love to get 90 degrees forward and 90 degrees back out of both of their wrists.

twigling says in an old DOA thread,

I think you can drill/cut the slot in the wrist ball so it is deeper and comes further down on both sides towards
the palm of the hand to increase the range of motion.

I wonder if I can do that with a craft blade? I'd certainly play with them more if they could move their damn hands more realistically.

EDIT: The problem may also be that the wrist balls are set too far in the sockets, in which case a thick layer of hot glue could push them out and make them more flexible.

EDIT 2: Tutorial to increase wrist mobility.

[No, I'm not outraged right now.]

Doll clothing with out-of-scale buttons. I see this a lot on clothes for 1:3 scale BJDs [i.e., ~60cm or 2 feet tall]. Makers of doll clothes will go to incredible lengths to replicate and scale down all the details of, say, a shirt or a jacket, and then WHAMMO! They'll completely spoil the whole effect by using 1:1 scale buttons [suitable for human clothes] as fasteners.

And they're not doing it for a purposeful aesthetic effect either. This is serious, unfunky clothing that they're making, insofar as doll clothes can be serious. It's especially hilarious when you're looking at suits for BJDs: "Oh I like the structure of this jacket. The detail on the lining makes it look almost GOOD GRAVY WHO PUT BUTTONS THE SIZE OF SAUCERS ON THE CUFFS???"

In-scale buttons exist! I know this because I see them with some regularity on 1:6 scale clothes. I know they exist for 1:3 scale clothes as well, but I'm not sure why they aren't used very much by makers of doll clothes in 1:3 scale.

I mean, surely, if you can be arsed to put in-scale zipper flies and functioning pockets on your denim dolly jeans, you can put freakin' in-scale buttons on your dolly shirts, right?

You know what...while I'm pissing and moaning about BJD stuff, let me get this off my chest. Asian BJD companies can now officially stop with the Alice in Wonderland [sic] special edition dolls and/or outfits. Way too many doll studios have done or are doing something with this concept. Boooooooring.

If Asian BJD companies want some non-Alice concepts, I can supply some. Let's try the Chinese zodiac, the months of the year [not the same as the non-Chinese zodiac, more of a personification theme], celestial bodies [again not the non-Chinese zodiac, more of a personification theme], fairy tales, seasons [mud season!], weather, trees/flowers, the Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, ceremonial dress from different cultures, the Major Arcana of a Tarot deck, medieval Western European character types [king, queen, knight, damsel, jester, maid, serf, etc.], characters from famous ballets, et hoc genus omne. Some of these concepts have already been appropriated by some companies, but I think they still have a lot of life in them.

Furthermore, we need more therianthropic characters. I'm not just talking dolls with resin ear attachments; I'm talking dolls with non-human limbs and torsos and such. We have not yet reached market saturation on centaurs, especially female ones, and merpeople. I also strongly advocate for naga [human/snake hybrids], human/bear hybrids and human/zebra hybrids. We definitely need more human/arachnid dolls [Soom Vesuvia and Impldoll Colin being the only ones I know of]. And we're also seriously lacking in human/insect hybrids. That's just for starters...

There are quite a few BJD companies out there that make beautiful, well-sculpted, appealing BJDs for between $200.00 and $300.00. There's Elfdoll with its line of 14cm tinies, Fairyland with its RealPukis and PukiPukis, 5StarDoll with its 60cm line, Planetdoll with its entire stock, Angell Studio with all dolls <40cm, Dragondoll with dolls <70cm, et hoc genus omne.

Knowing this, I have to wonder why other companies [coughVolkscough, coughSoomcough] charge up to 4 times that amount. Obviously, I have willingly paid for multiple Sooms and Volkses, so I'm not complaining, just wondering where the markup comes in. I think we're paying for the brand. >_>

I've long cringed at the dolls issued by Impldoll. They've been producing a steady line of sculpts with bug eyes [which, in a field where big eyes are part of the Asian BJD aesthetic, is pretty hard to do!], minuscule pinched-up mouths and weird noses. Their Impl Child Joyce, an early doll, shows the too-close-together eyes, squinched mouth and, for a bonus, a very pointy chin that I've been talking about. Impl Model Mandy epitomizes the weird nose. Why is her philtrum 6 feet long?! And I have no idea what this googly-eyed monstrosity is [hint: it's an Impl Star Lauretta], but it's not coming to my party.

Imagine my surprise when they recently released Elvira. She's certainly not original or stunning, but she's very cute. I see in her the same traits that were exaggerated flaws in earlier sculpts, here and now refined into parts of a wholly conceived aesthetic program. Nice to know that their sculptors can learn from their mistakes.

ResinSoul $160.00 w/o s/h, shoulder width 9.5 cm, neck circ 9 cm
Fantasy Doll $150.00 w/o s/h, shoulder width 8 cm, neck circ 8.8 cm
Spirit Doll $380.00 w/o s/h, shoulder width 11.5 cm, neck circ 9.5 cm
Super Gem ---, shoulder width 10.5 cm, neck circ 10 cm

Looks like the Spirit Doll body would be the most proportionate...also the most expensive...but it does have the "big boobs" option!

I got the genius, bad, tempting idea this afternoon that Bobobie Charisma looks like Jareth. And there's a Bobobie Charisma human head on the DOA Marketplace right now for $30.00. Of course, it's slate-blue, which Jareth most emphatically ain't, but that's why people who have airbrushes who can be hired to recolor a head were invented.

To quote Hoggle from Labyrinth, "Damn you, Jareth! And damn me too!"

Like I need more Jareths in my life...especially after I already got rid of a BJD one [but it didn't really look like him anyway].

EDIT: Well, shit. I see that Bobobie is on my list of cheating doll cos.

...But Charisma has a smirk...and a cheap price tag.

Did I mention the smirk? And the seductive androgyny? And the face that looks older than most preternaturally young-faced BJDs?

How morally compromised am I, considering the abandonment of my principles for a cheap smirk?

Now that I've gotten that out of my system, maybe I can go to bed.

I can't quite distinguish between Notdoll and Roxydoll, so we'll just call all dolls on the site Notdoll and forget any distinctions. I own a Tan Lucy [Susie] and a Miriam head [in the mail]. I also like very much, but will never get, their new issue, the 10cm Baby Manjou. Unlike most 1:6 resin approximations of babies, it's not horribly deformed in its proportions. At the same time, it's also extremely cute. I'm not really keen on their NDLC Lady, Man or Nari-pon lines, but their 1:6 dolls with realistic sculpts are utterly charming.

About three years ago, I joined DOA, right before it moved from a Yahoo group to a phpBB group. Here are some of my early posts [subject lines only] on the phpBB version, just for my personal amusement, I guess:

I know a lot more about BJDs now than I did back then. Other than that, not much has changed. I'm still interested in a) Jareth, b) inexpensive alternatives and c) body mods. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, I guess. This has been an irrelevant annoucement from the Boring Club.

The photo is from Zone of Zen user Marsha T. It's her grandson looking at one of her Tyler dolls with that most amusing expression on his face. Macro by me.

In my investigations, I have discovered two more companies to add to my list of companies I do not want to patronize because they are tainted by plagiarism.

This is what I said in a post to

batchix  about the Den of Demons: