Big Barbie and the Last American Girl: Halloween Spook-tacular
They're the coolest ghouls in school, and they're here to make a scream.
Welcome, dear readers… come in, come in… step through the fog-shrouded and crumbling archway of stone, and come down into my lair. There’s nothing to be afraid of… except for hell-hounds, of course!
Who-o-o-o~!
But don’t worry… they don’t bite. Hard.
Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Yes, yes - welcome, my friends, to Yakubian Ape’s Halloween Spook-Tacular! Where the rats may be rubber and the mist is just dry ice vapor, but the frights are quite real! I’ve cooked up a devilishly diabolical Halloween treat for you tonight in my over-sized novelty cauldron that I bought from Party City for $2.50. And jell-o shots. I made jell-o shots. The blue ones are Boo Hawaiian and the red ones are Strawberry Drac-uri. Ain’t that funny?
In the last installment, we explored the beginnings of Barbie and the genesis of the corporate monolith that is Mattel, and… wait… do - do you hear that? No. No, I - there it is again! Don’t you hear it? Dragging chains on a stone floor… the smell of formaldehyde… preservatives… the bubbling of most wicked and foul brews… the hum of tesla oils… the cold creep of approaching dread? What horrible creatures must be lurching down that dark and dank hallway?
No… no. It can’t be. That - that would be ridiculous. Preposterous, even. There’s no way… but - egads! By God, it’s true! My eyes, despite all logic, don’t deceive me!
You see, last we spoke, we discussed the market dominance of Barbie in the world of dolls and Mattel’s iron grip on the industry. Despite stumbles, set-backs, and lapses in popularity, well… Barbie, it seems, is something like bad Chinese take-out - she always comes back. And, as stated, come back she very much has. With a vengeance.
But, for the past several years, well before Greta Gerwig would introduce a whole new generation to the Woman in Pink, and reignite the passion of thousands of lapsed fans, her efforts carried on the backs of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, the brand itself was in serious decline and struggling with a competitor most… monstrous. And, perhaps even more interesting, one that arose like a malignant tumor from within the pulsing dark heart of Barbie’s own plastic empire, or some sort of wicked, godless experiment conducted in some remote, decrepit castle by white-coated sociopaths with no respect for nature or the divine.
Puzzled? I don’t blame you. This isn’t a story you would most likely be aware of, unless you’re a toy collector or have young daughters of your own. But I? Well, I’m more than just a stunningly handsome simian substacker. I’m an ape of many hats, and, well -
My father, Yakub, was a bit of a renaissance man; a trait he imbued me with, so that I may continue his wicked works studies after his untimely demise at the hands of that blasted and most accursed Moses. I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral, and I am the very model of a modern white Yakubian devil. So, I decided to follow in my father’s cursed footsteps and… dabble a bit in genetic engineering and biological tampering, as one does, and, as it turns out…
I was working in my lab, late one night, when my eyes beheld a most salacious sight - for my monsters, from their slabs, began to rise, and - suddenly! - to my surprise -
Forget the mash - these monsters wanted to smash… the patriarchy! And the gender binary, for good measure. Can I get a ya-a-as, sisters? It was… a minor miscalculation on my part, I’ll admit, but -
Damn it, all. Look, man, I don’t ask you why you do what you do with your hobbies, so, like, don’t ask me, either. I’m… not at liberty to disclose that information. But, I mean - being an evil, villainous Caucasoid mad scientist isn’t exactly conducive to having a very robust love life, okay? It pays a lot less than you’d imagine, and, unfortunately, most women aren’t exactly keen on going back to the subterranean chamber of horrors to have a couple glasses of merlot and watch Kitchen Nightmares on the couch. An ape’s got needs, y’know? And, if all you’ve got is a collection of cadavers, mythological monsters, and hyper-advanced Atlantean gene-splicing technology… well, you know what they say about lemons and lemonade, right?
Jests and jibes aside, the above collection of dolls belong to the Monster High line - a line of dolls that proved to be frighteningly successful, and a real nightmare for Barbie… though, not exactly a nightmare for Mattel. And if those puns are already making you roll your eyes, buckle the fuck up; we’re just getting started. And, today, we’re going to take a little look-see at them to see what they had to offer. In the spirit of the season, we’ll be taking it easier than we have in the previous installments. Dial it back a little. Take it low and slow in the back of my Dragula. There’s not going to be any political talk, or anything like that. It’ll all just be a fun, easy-going, unchallenging look at some silly and spooky dolls. There won’t be anything too weird in store us tonight!
Hard as this may be to believe, Monster High did not begin as a quirky science experiment in my underground laboratory… though, I wish it had, because if it did, I wouldn’t be writing this article, and instead I’d be relaxing on my own private island in the Aegean, sipping Mai Tais with actual supermodels. No - in actuality, the line was the brainchild of one Garret Sander.
Mr. Sander was a long-time employee at Mattel, who worked his way up from being a humble packaging designer, to a toy designer, and, finally, to spear-heading his own line of dolls. Never let it be said hard work doesn’t pay off. Sometimes. Occasionally. Every now and then.
Well, according to Mr. Sander, the idea came to him while he was shopping at Hot Topic - which in and of itself says a lot about the guy - and had the idea of, what if we had fashion dolls… but gothic. This, apparently, was quite the novel idea. In the research I did for this article, there’s a pretty consistent refrain that Monster High was “revolutionary” in the space for being more alternative, which… I don’t really see it, but, I’m also not a fashionista myself and, I assume when juxtaposed against Barbie, even a purple streak in the hair or fishnets will look alternative by comparison.
I’m not really one to split hairs - well, not about this kind of stuff, but, going off the above diagram, which I can only assume was only half-made in jest, Monster High is a lot more of the left than the right when it comes to their definition of goth. Which, hey, I get it. I don’t really need to elaborate how this -
May not be the easiest to sell to parents who were going to buy these toys for these kids, who, ultimately, are the real consumers here. So, yeah - maybe you turn down the intensity a hair. Not a bad idea. In the 2020’s, where a panoply of freakish subcultures run amuck in the streets, and you can’t throw a rock in a public space without hitting someone with enough dye in their hair to give themselves a chemical lobotomy via osmosis, it can be difficult to remember a time where the goth and scene sub-cultures and aesthetics were legitimately transgressive, or, at the very least, butted up to the boundaries of good taste. Like, today, a family can go to Disney World and expect to see someone like this at any given turn, working the rides and welcoming children to the various events around the park:
Consider that Mr. Sander fomented the idea of Monster High in 2008, when the two prime examples of goth subculture that came to the mind of the average white middle-class parents was Marilyn Mason and Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice. Maybe Robert Smith or Siouxsie Sioux, if they were more cultured.
Needless to say, it was a very different time. More than even most of us who were there to live through it realize, I think.
As he refined the concept, he must have had the epiphany that - now, wait a minute: gothic subculture overlaps heavily with horror movies. Now, no one was going to be buying their children dolls where the central conceit was, What is Jason Voorhees, but a minxy fashion doll? No - but, if you ever did want to know what that looks like, the Japanese have you covered.
But… but… those old, monochrome horror flicks of yesteryear… well, they weren’t so bloody. They had to conform to decency standards of the time. They weren’t even all that scary - not compared to modern cinematic offerings. And, for the better part of a generation, you had children staying up late to watch old black-and-white B-tier flicks like Attack of the Little Green Assholes from Mars and Blood-Sucking Degenerates of Carpathia on programming blocks hosted by pastiche characters like Elvira and Svengoolie.
Not that Elvira or Svengoolie’s public access programs were explicitly for children1, but the movies they presented - those old creature features and monster flicks - well, they were harmless, right? Relatively speaking. In an age where you have chomo Freddy Krueger dicing up horny teens or whatever the fuck was going on with the guys from Scream, Frankenstein2 and Dracula look practically tame by comparison.
More than anything, the idea seems to follow the Mad Monster Party formula, which, for the uninitiated… well, you remember those stop-motion Rankin-Bass Christmas specials? Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer? The Year Without Santa Claus? Yeah - you do. If you grew up in America after the early 70’s, you saw them at least once. It’s, like, mandatory viewing, I’m fairly sure. Around that time, they made a Halloween movie that’s basically the same thing, only with Boris Karloff voicing Dr. Frankenstein instead of Burl Ives singing Christmas songs as a snowman. And, no - this is not where the song Monster Mash debuted, though, I was kind of surprised to discover that, too.
I suppose if you want to go even further back, the idea of a good-natured, comedic romp with various monsters can be traced to when comedy duo Abbott and Costello starred in a series of hit films in which they starred alongside the most iconic film monsters of the time. The Wolfman wasn’t nearly as scary as he had been in his cinematic debut when he was getting the run-around from two hapless dorks.
Or, perhaps you might even be able to draw a line between the classic monster mash genre of a cavalcade of spooks going on a mischievous, but ultimately good-natured night on the town to the Japanese stories of the Hyakki Yagyo - literally Night Parade of One Thousand Demons - in which yokai of all size, shape, stripe, and disposition march through the city streets in a colorful and raucous procession of ghouls, goblins, and other assorted spooks.
Or maybe I’m just overthinking this, and people just like to see cool monsters hang out because it’s bad-ass. Because it is.
Hell, we even have a whole cereal brand based around it.
Whatever his reasoning or inspiration, people have always loved seeing gaggles of colorful monsters getting up to fun antics, so Mr. Sander really struck gold with this concept of, Monsters… but Hoes. And, make no mistake - as it was so eloquently put in Cardi B.’s seminal 2022 hit, W.A.P.3, There’s some hoes in this house. Barbie’s Pink Plastic Malibu Dreamhouse, I mean. And they are monsters. And they vant to suck your dick… that was - it was a Dracula joke. Y’know. Because he… he sucks blood, but - you get it.
I’m also reminded that the perfect mash-up for this entire article exists.
Maybe I’m being a little harsh to the student body of Monster High, but I did not cast the first stone, here. Type in Monster High and Controversy and you will find scads of articles written by mommies everywhere about why they won’t let their six year old play with Monster High dolls, which, I mean - yeah? I think these dolls are made for slightly older children in mind to begin with, but, also, I can’t say I don’t not understand. One of the biggest complaints registered against Monster High is that the girls have unrealistic body-types. Now, this is a complaint you also see leveraged at, like, literally every doll since the first Barbie. The argument is that seeing a skinny, twiggy little slip of a girl in the form of a doll will make young, impressionable girls A) insecure B) hate themselves and C) develop eating disorders.
Now, in the man-o-sphere, as it’s called, a lot of leading luminaries in that space will talk about the double-standard of how, for some reason, we can criticize Barbie and the Bratz and the monster hoes of Monster High for setting unrealistic standards for young girls, but no one will ever say that He-Man’s fizeek might just be outside the realm of attainable - or even practical - for young boys.
This is a perfectly valid point to make. But, I’d also say that there’s a degree of difference between how men and women process these… things, if you will. I’m under no delusion that I will ever look like He-Man. I don’t want to look like He-Man. I’ve never looked at He-Man or any other roided-out beef-cake and thought with a heavy-heart, Wow, I’ll never be as big and freakishly muscular as him. Not to say there aren’t men I’d like to resemble a little bit more, but, it usually comes down to more of an attitude or style or way of carrying oneself that I’d like to mimic more than their physical appearance. For example - I don’t particularly want to look like Cillian Murphey, but if I could pull off the whole Thomas Shelby schtick without coming off as miserably cringe?
Yeah - I definitely would. But, I can’t. Most guys would look like fools trying to ape his style, his affect, his swag, his drip, you might say. It’s a little disappointing, but, hey - them’s the breaks. Now, if there is any childhood icon I have any sincere despair over being unable to match physically… it’s definitely these guys.
I’m sorry I can’t be them, okay?
But, that’s a very masculine way of looking at things. Men have the privilege of being able to… well, go their own way is a pretty loaded term, these days, but as a man, you can skirt social conventions with a lot more ease than the average woman. If you want to dress like this every day of your life -
Well, you can. You’ll get no bitches and stack no paper, but you’ll probably be able to make friends with like-minded people and live a decent life posting on Reddit and collecting Funko Pops. If you’re a girl who would do the same thing? Well, you’d probably have gamer dudes falling over themselves and ready to engage in an outright battle royal just to sniff your seat after you get out of it, but other women would not be as kind. I’m basing this off my own experiences in high school, where even the most geeky, socially-inept losers of the male gender were usually just ignored by other boys that were higher on the social ladder than they were, but geeky, socially-inept girls?
I was friends with most of them, and, believe me, the shit they got from the girls at the top of the pecking order would have driven me into a life of hermitage and solitude, were it to have come down on me. Weak-willed, they were not.
Point is, there’s a distinct and marked difference in male and female psychology and, when older, more mature women talk about how young girls can be negatively effected by these things, I don’t think they’re totally without merit. I know I’m walking on thin ice, talking gender politics like this, and I said I wouldn't be doing that tonight but, well - if you'd humor me a moment, in my own experience, women take these social things much more personally and much deeper to heart than the average man. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s just how we’re made and how we’re predisposed to be. Woman have always had to play the game, if you will, a little more than men just to get by. After all, if you were a woman way back in the day and you got picked up by some pack of raiding vikings or Arab slave traders, if you didn’t play the game when they took you to your new home away from home, you probably would not make it very long before they decided you were more trouble than you were worth. Even in the best of times, if you were an older woman - or a lesbian - who didn't really wanna play ball with the rest of society…
Bad things could happen.
But, we’ll get into this more in the next part. This is supposed to be the spook-tacular. We’re here to have a ghoulishly good time. Eat some candy. Drink spiked apple cider. Do some shitty dancing to some goofy 60’s Scooby-Doo music, y’know?
Yeah, baby, yeah!4 I just meant to say that, y’know, when they say the Monster High characters look a bit… racy, shall we say? And that may not be great for young, impressionable girls? I don’t disagree. But, again - later. We’ll have time for that after we stop monster mashing. Whatever that looks like. To be honest, I feel like I’ve never actually gotten a decent description of what it looks like, or how to do it, but I feel like it’s one of those things you’ll just know when you see it.
So, what are we working with, here?
Well, you’ve got your bog-standard line-up of classic Universal-branded movie monsters for the main cast; you got your werewolf, your Frankenstein-esque patch-work re-animated corpse, your vampire, and a mummy, which, let’s be real - did anyone ever really find the concept of a mummy scary? Like, don’t get me wrong, real mummies are gross and weird and deeply unpleasant, but this?
This is just an ugly dude in toilet paper. This is also why you should always have a skincare routine. I don’t care how gay you think it is - moisturize and exfoliate, or you’ll look like this before you’re forty. You’ll thank me later.
As a brief aside, what’s interesting about the proto-typical horror movie mummy was that, actually, the first stories of re-animated mummies starred female mummies that were depicted as a sort of exotic, forbidden figure of romantic interest; mostly because these mummies really were either just attractive ladies wrapped up in gauze or spirits of dead Egyptian pharaoh-esses possessing priggish Victorian women of high standing and corrupting, usually resulting in a conversion from a bookish or reserved character to one that was more domineering, self-assured, and sexual in way that straddled the line of good taste for the time. Even Bram Stoker penned a story in this vein, called The Jewel of Seven Stars. There’s a very strong air of femdom around the whole thing, to be perfectly frank5. But, if you know anything about how freaky the outwardly prudish the Victorian elites were behind closed doors, this won’t come as much of a surprise.
And, hey - again, I get it. I’ve always had a fine appreciation for that whole ancient Egyptian aesthetic myself, so, I feel somewhat vindicated that, apparently, my Yakubian forebears sharing this healthy respect for exotic, black-haired bronze beauties decked out in gold is a grand tradition.
In fact, the mummy remained something of an stock character that straddled the line between erotic and horrifying in Western horror fiction until the 1932 Boris Karloff movie, where no one wanted to see Boris start sensually stripping away layers of stained, dusty gauze… though, as usual, my main man Howard Phillip of Providence was already well ahead of the curve with one of his most iconic pieces, Nyarlathotep, which predated the movie with a frightening figure of Egyptian antiquity by a full twelve years. Of course, the idea of a sinister, deathless pharaoh as a vessel for a malicious elder god probably stemmed from the fact that anyone with a complexion darker than uncooked pork would induce a panic attack in Lovecraft, but, he still gets points for originality.
And, to be fair… have you ever actually met an Italian before? They tend to be very intense people. Paulie Walnuts from the Soprano’s still gives me nightmares.
The brief history of scary mummies aside, these four monsters make up the core group of characters. The Frankenstein girl’s gimmick is that she’s only fifteen days old, which is… well, I think I'd put her in more clothes, with that being the case, but I digress. She’s the fish out of water character who has to learn everything from the ground up. The vampire is an uncoordinated sped with a secret hobby for witchcraft, which, apparently, is forbidden to practice because, ah… something about normies being scared of it. And, yes, really - normal people in the Monster High universe are actually called normies by the monsters. And, yes, they also do live amongst one another, and are aware of one another’s existence, which, so far as I’m concerned, makes normie the equivalent of a racial slur. If the normies have an equally charged epitaph for monsters, I never came across it, but I’m sure a creative mind could whip up a few colorful and disparaging terms for predatory, blood-sucking corpses. Like, I’ll be dead in the cold ground before I see some blood-sucking Fangface attend the same school as my kids.
Oh, and there’s the werewolf girl, who’s, ah… well, she’s there. I think she’s supposed to be the token ambiguously brown member of the main crew, and her main character trait is being cool and nice and having fun and generally being inoffensively diverse. She seems to be popular, though.
There’s also the mummy girl serving as the frenemy figure to the other three. Sometimes, she’s friendly. Sometimes, she’s antagonistic. Other times, she’s an outright bitch, and, generally, her only monstrous trait seems to be a penchant for acting like a two-faced snake. She’s also engaged in an on-again-off-again relationship with the only male of any note in the wider cast. From what I read and what little I watched, they had one of those popular kid relationship dynamics you see in a lot of media for young teens where, essentially, the two seem to be going out just because they’re both good looking and at the top of the school’s social totem pole and, yeah, they have the hots for each other, but they also really do not seem to like each other on a personal level and are always bickering and yelling but are too vain and possessive to let the other party date someone else. Like, it’s dynamic that’s always hilarious to watch on television, but if you ever actually knew a couple like that - and you probably did at some point, as I have - you know damn well it’s actually not all that funny to have to sit through dinner with a couple who spend the entire night taking passive-aggressive snipes at each other. Think Rachel and Ross from Friends - it’s kind of like that.
This is still the funniest bit from Friends, by the way.
There’s also the designated fifth ranger that is sometimes there, sometimes not, based on the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who is very much the fifth ranger of all the classic black-and-white horror monsters, and only gets an invite to torment Abbott and Costello or the Scooby-Doo gang with the lads when the other four feel like shooting him a text, I guess. In the rebooted lore of the series, she was re-imagined as the token latino of the group, because there wasn’t enough diversity among a cast of literal monsters with pink and blue and gray skin. This actually makes some sense - the titular black lagoon of the film was, in fact, in Brazil. I’m not sure if Brazil really counts as a latin country, and I’m fairly sure saying it is to a Brazilian will get the same violent reaction that you get when by telling an Argentinian that Argentina is not actually a European country, but, it’s close enough, right?
It doesn’t matter because, in the newest iteration of the series, they changed her backstory to make her Honduran. Not even
Haunt-duras, just… just regular ol’ Honduras. I’m not kidding.
I also really like how she’s described in the official material.
It tracks. I mean -
Hondurans, man… they don't mess around.
There’s a whole cavalcade of colorful supporting characters for B-tier monsters that sit outside of the pantheon of iconic movie ghouls. There’s a shy, mute, bookish zombie girl. She edits the… Fearbook.
There’s a yeti girl who’s entire schtick seems be that she’s a hard-nosed, joyless suck-ass that makes sure everyone toes the line at school, because something something you’re cold as ice (some day you’ll pay the price, I know). The aforementioned resident boy of the group is a gorgon, because, if all the other characters are gender-flipped variants of classically male monster figures, it only made sense to take one of the most infamous female monsters and invert that for the lone guy of the posse. Though, that reminds me that, in the story - and yes, there is actually a very… very extensive archive of lore to the series, which spans from movies to books to scraps of writing on the toy boxes and I assume coded messages broadcast on obscure radio frequencies from a single signal station in the remote Canadian wilderness - that these aren’t just gender-flipped equivalents of classic movie monsters. Oh, no.
You see, Frankie Stein? I - ugh. Hold on.
Okay, so, Frankie Stein is not another ill-conceived experiment from the labs of Doctor Frankenstein, but - fuck. One sec.
Okay, okay, so, she’s actually the daughter of Frankenstein - sorry, Fronkenschteen’s monster himself. Because I guess when the good doctor was stitching him together, he was kind and considerate enough to make sure it all worked, if you get what I’m saying. And, hey, the monster’s main gripe was that he wanted a squeeze of his own, right? If you think about it, did Frankenstein create the first incel? If he made a monster today, do you think the monster would be posting sigma male Patrick Bateman memes on twitter and feverishly following Andrew Tate, alongside unironically saying that the west has fallen and billions must die? I kind of hate that I typed out that sentence. Point is, apparently, the monster got some strange and a fully-formed teenage girl popped out of his bride like Athena springing from the skull of Zeus. Why is she all stitched up and made from disparate parts of various corpses?
Don’t think about it too hard. Just drink your cider and eat your Count Chocula shut up.
As for her… ghoul-friends…
Draculaura and Clawdeen Wolf and Cleo de Nile… well, no prizes if you guess who their daddies are. Honestly, all the puns, as groan-worthy as some can be, are kind of charming in just how lame they are. Like, they are so shameless you kind of just have to give a small, sensible chuckle. My favorite name out of all of them is actually a minor character - a fish guy named Finnegan Wake, which is actually a reference I don’t think very many people are going to get, let alone the target audience. Perhaps this is a bit biased, but I have this slight suspicion that there aren’t many twelve year old girls voraciously consuming the works of James Joyce, let alone his more… esoteric pieces.
And the monsters… they go to school. They do things that teenage girls do. Go to the mall. Shop. Have sleep-overs and wring hands over trivial drama about who's squeezing who's ass. You know. The usual. It's not exactly challenging material, you're not gonna discover any grand truth's about the human condition watching the animated series, or anything, unless you've never seen a single other piece of media in your entire life before.
All in all, the entire conceit is, I must admit, fun in theory, which is probably why I actually enjoyed doing research on the line more than I anticipated. I can’t say I like the designs of the dolls all that much, and, given that it’s made for eleven year old girls, the stories didn’t do much for me, either, but, if this concept were, say, a series of horror-comedy comics or novels, I could get down on it. It’s probably the only thing I would be interested in seeing get the Riverdale treatment, by which I mean they re-imagine something into what appears to be a rather lukewarm and boring teen drama that slowly evolves into an incoherent, borderline Lynchian head-trip.
Now, as I’ve said before, Monster High proved an immediate success upon release. Exact numbers remain elusive, but according some outlets, Monster High was a billion-dollar brand by 2013, only three years after it’s debut, and annually was raking in a tidy $500 million in sales. Between 2012 and 2013, Barbie’s sales tanked by 12% after years of slowly dwindling, while Monster High’s were up by 23%. Consistently, the dolls are touted as the second most popular brand of dolls in America. Interestingly, around this same time, American Girl was also up by 20% in sales, which speaks to a general decline of Barbie to the benefit of her own vassals. With this success, Mattel was quick to start ginning up spin-off lines to capitalize on the momentum, as such companies are wont to do. At the peak of Monster High’s success in 2013, Mattel launched the Ever-After High line. Much like Monster High’s central conceit was, What if movie monsters had kids that went to school together, Ever-After High, if the name didn’t already give it away, was much the same, albeit with movie monsters swapped for fairy tale characters.
Again - if you can’t draw the line between which character came from which fairy tale floozy, you probably need to study up on your Mother Goose lore. Apparently, they go to a boarding school and are divided into Royals and Rebels, the former of which embrace their destiny, and the others who reject it, which is hilarious to me, because it’s, like… what’s the grand destiny that’s been writ in the stars for the daughter of Goldilocks? Is she doomed to follow in the steps of her mother and become a home invader and get a couple B&E's under her belt? Apparently, being a petty criminal didn’t hurt Goldilocks in the long run, since she could afford to buy her daughter some pimped out dresses and send her to a ritzy boarding school for rich kids that come from literal royalty.
In 2015, another line in the same vein, Enchantimals, debuted, this time banking on the idea of, What if furries. And that was really all there was to that one.
Now, Ever-After High was a modest success. In my research, it seems to be less popular but more fondly remembered and better regarded than Monster High. It seems that a fair number collectors agree that, even if Monster High was their favorite line, in terms of quality and design, Ever-After High was the superior brand.
But… you know how Starbucks has this problem where they open a store, make boatloads of cash, then open bunch of stores within spitting distance of it and then, all of the sudden, profits for that first store tank as the newly opened shops eat into their profits? And then, eventually, they all close?
Mattel seemed to have a similar problem. They just can’t stop themselves. By 2015, other companies had cottoned on to Mattel’s success with Monster High and began releasing lines in the same vein to compete. MGA Entertainment released Bratzillas, which was just Bratz, but they were… no, not kaijus. Witches. Duh. With a name like Bratzillas, what else would you expect?
Competition both within and without began to chew into Monster High’s popularity, resulting in the line being rebooted in 2016 with what fans call Generation 2. What exactly the big difference is between Generation 1 and 2, I can’t tell. Comments on Reddit suggest to me that the biggest difference was in the quality of the dolls, which were simplified with different, less detailed faces, less articulation, and generally lower quality. This attempt to gin up renewed interest failed, and, in 2018, both Monster High and Ever-After High were shelved. Around this time, Mattell’s long-time nemesis, Hasbro was cleaning up on the market with a new line of dolls based on some… familiar faces.
Equestria Girls is a chapter in the story of My Little Pony’s fourth generation I’ve yet to really touch on in my series on bronies. As controversial as the move to humanize the ponies were, it paid dividends for Hasbro, and the line was popular with the target audience for My Little Pony - namely, little girls. Crazy, I know. Even though Equestria Girls would go on to be embraced by the brony community, I remember… oh, I remember that it did not sit well with some of those guys. But, that’s a story for another day. The take away from the success of Monster High and Equestria Girls tells me one thing - dolls with weird skin colors do gangbusters business, so, if you ever feel the need to start a line of dolls yourself, keep that in your back pocket.
Between 2018 and 2020, Mattel left the Monster High franchise sit dormant. Garret Sander, for his part, had long been taken off the project. I’ve read interviews with him that lead me to believe he signed a NDA with Mattel after parting with the company, since he almost never speaks about what terms he parted with them on, or his time with them at all, but according to other former employee tell-alls, it’s quite common for Mattell to take IP’s away from the creators or original design team and basically show them the door, or, at the very least, heavily diminish their role in the series development. Maybe taking the original visionary that created an original property and giving it to someone else who doesn’t know how to develop it or understand the original appeal isn’t a good idea.
Picture unrelated.
In today’s media landscape, however, only a fool leaves a once-profitable IP laying in the dirt. If all the fans of Ever-After High lamenting the fact it has yet to be rebooted tells me anything, it’s that Mattel is leaving money on the table not taking another swing at that series. But, they haven’t, and they may very well never. But, in 2020, school was back in session as the first teases of Monster High’s reboot began to be teased. And, after seeing the finished product… well, maybe Ever-After High fans should practically feel the bullet whizzing past their heads as it misses them. Monster High returned in 2021 proper with a new, rebooted mythology that was shown off in a shing new CGI animated series that aired on Nickelodeon, and followed up with a live-action movie that, uh…
There are pictures of cosplayers that look better than this.
The movie was met with lukewarm reception from long-term fans who, despite being glad to see their favorite series back in action, didn’t exactly like the way it had been changed. The reasons are manifold. There’s complaints about the designs, the changes in character’s personalities and histories, the alteration of the over-arching story and setting surrounding them, that sort of thing, but, to me, the most interesting changes in the Monster High lore is the fact that the brand, simply put, went woke.
Now, I don’t exactly like that word anymore - woke - I feel like Daily Wire types have used and abused the term to the point that much of the tread has come off the wheels, and it’s basically the center-right’s equivalent of the center-left’s favorite pejorative, fascist. But, much like fascist, even though it’s been used to the point that it really doesn’t mean much of anything in specific, there’s still a general connotation to woke that describes a very broad and generalized collection of… concepts, you could say. It may not be useful in a specific way, but, broadly, it still carries some weight. And, that being what it is, I really can’t find a better way of describing many of the changes made to the Monster High reboot.
Now, one point I haven’t touched on about Monster High was that it was always based around the conceit of Be Yourself. Literally one of the tag-lines for the brand was, Be Unique, Be Yourself, Be a Monster.
If it sounds like generic pandering self-empowerment pablum for children, it is. It’s that kind of, it’s okay to be different message that comes with the unspoken caveat of but not too different! You know the type. Not a bad message, if a bit simplistic, but, hey - we’re talking about five year olds, here. We can talk about nuance after they learn to spell their names, right?
The line’s rise in popularity coincided with the peak of Lady Gaga’s presence on the pop charts with her album, Born this Way. Her entire career was built on espousing the value of being different and being true to yourself, but in a much more adult way. Like, being true to yourself in this media scene involves indulging in grotesque and self-destructive paraphilias and behavior.
Given that Lady Gaga’s followers are known as the little monsters, and many of Monster High’s biggest fans and most avid collectors seem to be homosexual men that are into fashion and late-Millenial women, both of whom also formed the core of Gaga's passionate fanbase… well, you can draw your own conclusions.
Now, as stated before, 2011 and 2010 were vastly different times in a cultural sense than the 2020's. In 2010, I assume that Mattel, even if they knew that a subset of their consumers were left-leaning grown women and gay men, would not have risked rocking the boat with the average middle-class, suburban, white parents all that much by introducing elements of progressivism into a brand that was printing money. But, as most of us can recall, things during Obama's second term circa 2012 changed dramatically, and they changed fast. Today, in 2023, not only are topics that would have been laughable, if not verboten in 2010 are now not just in the public eye, but consistently, persistently, and relentlessly shoved onto the national stage, regardless of the vast majority of American’s taste for it. As I’ve talked about before, as a brand loses clout with children, and children make up an increasingly dwindling portion of the population charts, companies will look to adults to pick up the slack in profits. They know what this audience wants, and they seek to provide. And, hey - if it pan out? So what? Monster High had already fell off and went into a flop era, as the kids like to say. If the reboot didn’t work and it turned out that people wouldn’t take the bait, it wasn’t as if they were lighting a pile of money on fire like they would have been in 2010.
All of these circumstances led to the revival of the franchise, which the community has dubbed Generation 3.
Clawdeen Wolf has taken the position of audience surrogate character. Now, she’s not just a were-wolf, but she has a human father - a fact that makes her something of a bete-noir in the monster community, because, this time around, normies don’t know about monsters, but some do, and, apparently, some also fuck monsters, and the details are very all over the place and not worth worrying about. Even after everyone figures out her secret, no one really seems to give a damn, at least not enough to make little more than a passing mention of a shallow, paper-thin racism allegory that J.K. Rowling already beat into the ground with mudbloods in Harry Potter. She’s also a bizarre hybrid of nerd and jock, wearing glasses and being big into science, but also being cool, fashionable, and riding a skateboard. Now, in my own experience, strict social castes in high school were never as pronounced in reality as they were in fiction, and there were plenty of quote-unquote jocks who made superb grades and played chess as their were nerds who couldn’t add two and two without a calculator and opted to melt their brains with weed instead of do anything productive. But, there’s something about being a book-smart skater grrrl who’s cool and tough but also kind of quirky and dorky in all the right and inoffensive ways that just seems… too contradictory, yet too perfect. She’s just the right amount of everything to be nothing at all. No sharp edges. No flaws. And, if you think I’m reading too much into a line of dolls for kids… well, I am, but that’s what we do here.
Welcome. Must be your first time. Did you get a jell-o shot yet? There’s also some La Croix in the fridge, if you abstain from alcohol.
Anyways, we’ll touch on that more in the next (and hopefully last part), about why something being for children doesn’t also mean it can’t - and more importantly, shouldn’t - also be, y’know, good. There’s a certain amount of respect that should be paid to children in their own media where I don't think they shouldn’t be talked down to, demeaned, or treated like they’re idiots, because they aren’t. They’re ignorant, but ignorant is not synonymous with stupid. And, if you treat kids as if they are stupid… stupid is as stupid does. In actuality, if you provide children with media and entertainment that treats them with a certain level of respect and intelligence and doesn't regard them as morons…
Did you know that Mattel has three divisions? Mattel, Mattel International, and - huh. Would you look at that. American Girl is its own unique division in Mattel, and the only brand in their stable to have its own. Not even Barbie has her own division within Mattel.
Curious.
I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
Anyways, you might have noticed that, in the line-up of dolls from Monster High’s Generation 3, Draculaura is notably shorter and, uh… thicker than her peers. Gotta give some love to the bigger girls, right? And, I mean it - the body positivity movement has understandably poisoned that well and made every attempt at a diversity of body sizes in fiction look like a ham-fisted (haha) attempt to hawking more It’s okay to be five hundred plus pounds nonsense, but, c’mon. Look at her. She’s not obese. She’s fun-size. Some people really are just built that way, so, that doesn’t really strike me as… untoward.
But, nu-Draculaura isn’t just squat and chunky, but she’s also half-Romanian, and half-Taiwanese. Somehow, it seems more pandering to me to make a pre-established character a hapa instead of just making a new character that’s outright Asian. I mean, it’s not like the Chinese people have a rich folklore that’s abundant with all sorts of monsters and spirits that could make for interesting characters, or anything. It’s not like there isn’t a vampire-esque fiend in traditional Chinese mythology literally called hopping vampire that could have been used as an original character.
The token guy of the group? The gorgon? Well, Medusa is still his mom, but, this time around, he has two mommies. Turns out Medusa is a shrub scout.
Honestly, not the most shocking development. I could have seen that one coming, if I really thought about it.
The most jarring change, however, was given to Frankie Stein, who has gone from Frankenstein’s monster’s daughter to his, uh… little they/them? In this iteration, Frankie is canonically non-binary. And, in true non-binary fashion, there’s nothing about her design or appearance to suggest that she - sorry, they’re non-binary, as they still present in a traditional female way. But, you don’t really have to do anything to be non-binary besides say you are. And have an under-cut, I guess. The under-cut is mandatory for any kind of “gender non-conforming” character.
They also try to shoe-horn in some, er… I think the term is differently-abled, these days, since disabled, handicapped, and crippled are all no-no words, so, we’ll go with differently-abled representation. Point is, since, for whatever reason, people with physical disabilities are increasingly being lumped in to the ever-growing (and increasingly fractious) coalition of progressive cause-du-jours, she also has a prosthetic leg. Why she doesn’t go find a cadaver to yank a leg off and stitch it to herself, or maybe borrow one of her mother’s, I’m not sure, other than maybe the metal leg just has some drip to it. I dunno.
Cleo the mummy is also much less of a two-timing bitch and, after breaking up with the gorgon who has two mommies, now has a romantic interest in Frankie. As far as I’m concerned, that makes her a lesbian. She’s also an… Eek-Tok Influencer, which, I just…
Now that’s scarier than any grisly ghoul or thing with forty eyes. Somehow, out of everything detailed above, that’s the one that really gets me. Like, sure. There are short, fat half-Asians out there. There are a few dorks who also like to skateboard, I assume. Some women like women. Silly as I think it is, there are people who identify as non-binary, and I definitely don’t think it should be shoe-horned into material for children, but, still, somehow, introducing children to the concept of being a fucking TikTok influencer seems the most pernicious out of all of it. Mostly because, if you want your kid to end up identifying as some stripe of color on the rainbow flag, giving them a phone with fucking TikTok on it is a surefire way to make it happen because I'm fairly certain that platform is actually a lobotomy tool. Given that being a social media influencer also seems like a guaranteed way to score a one-way ticket to an all-expenses paid trip to the Laugh Academy with a nice padded room, I just really think that it is not a career path that should be glorified in any way, shape, or form. You might as well throw in a succubus character who’s an OnlyFans model, at that point. Or, sorry - maybe it should be OnlyFiends.
Oh, and, I almost forgot - here’s my favorite change. I didn’t bring her up before, but there’s a B-tier character in the line who’s name is Twyla Boogeyman. Not the most creative surname, I know, and it kind of implies the Boogeyman's name is actually Boogeyman Boogeyman, which - whatever. I don't care. I’d have just made it Twyla Boogie and written her to be at odds with her father; he wants her to follow the family tradition of scaring the shit out of kids and lurking in closets, but Twyla? No - she wasn’t born to scare. She was born to boogie, damn it.
Well, instead of giving her a disco schtick, Twyla’s gimmick in Generation 3 is that she’s autistic.
No, really.
And, that in and of itself in bad taste. After all, autism is a thing. And it’s becoming more common, too. Or, maybe we’re just learning to diagnose it better. I’m not here to split hairs over whether it’s an over-diagnosed condition used by malicious doctors use as a way to sell more medication, or caused by micro-plastics in the environment, or if it’s just a condition that, as we learn more about it, we’re better able to identify. I don’t know, and, really, it’s way beyond my scope to try and figure it all out. We’re not here to talk about that.
At risk of sounding like a Redditor, it’s not the representation itself I take umbrage with, so much as how shallow and on the nose and, more than anything, performative it feels. That goes for all these woke changes to the franchise.
Like, instead of just making a new Asian character, they just pay lip-service to the idea of diversity by ret-conning a central character to be half-Taiwanese. They add a character with a prosthetic leg, but it doesn't actually matter a damn or effect them in a way that someone who actually have a leg might. They make a character non-binary, but they don't actually have any androgyne traits aside from a shitty haircut. Instead of making a character a nerd, they have to undercut it by making them a cool skater chick on the side, because God forbid you’re too different and weird and have odd interests or fascinations that don’t jive with the mainstream crowd - remember, it’s fine to be different, but not the kind of different that actually challenges anyone or anything. You can be short, but not too short. You can be fat, but not too fat.6
You can be autistic, too. But only if you’re autistic in just the right ways. Not the ways that make people uncomfortable. The only meaningful way that autism seems to manifest in Twyla is that she doesn’t like loud noises, wears noise-cancelling headphones, and is generally awkward and introverted, but not awkward or introverted enough to not be friends with and be immediately accepted by everyone else. Her hyper-fixation is books, because that’s an acceptable thing to hyper-fixate on, unlike trains or dinosaurs or Sonic the Hedgehog. There’s no stimming, no tics, no rocking, none of that weird stuff that might actually be a little off-putting to the average person. And, look - I’m not saying that a kid’s show about monster dolls has to have a character that ticks off every symptom and sign for autism out of the DSM-5, nor do they need to sit down and explain to their juvenile audience all the quirks and nuance of the autism spectrum. I’m certainly not saying they have to go into some of the more troublesome complications that certain aspects of autism can bring about. It’s fine to just touch on the topic lightly, and in a way the audience of children can understand. But it's not done for the benefit of children or to educate them about a type of person or a condition they might not know about - it's all to get kudos and applause from the adult audience, who feel so good about giving those poor autistic kids a “voice” (but not really).
Worse still, the sanctimonious airs of the way that it’s done is really what sticks in my craw. You see it a lot these days. Progressive-minded ideologues will take a media property, do the bare minimum to include representation, and then laud themselves for breaking barriers or smashing glass ceilings and demand everyone give them ass-pats when they can’t even make a proper Asian character. Oh, these wonderful designers at Mattel - aren’t they just saints for introducing an autistic character? It’s so charitable to welcome in all these poor, slovenly, destitute autistic individuals and give them the representation that they’ve lacked for so long. Why, when Mattel began to tell me about what it’s like to be autistic, and how those freaks unfortunate souls should be treated, I sat my neurotypical ass down, and I listened. Because no one besides the largest toy company on planet Earth could ever educate me properly on the in’s and out’s of the autism spectrum. I didn’t even know what autism was before I started studying Monster High! To be perfectly honest, I thought that they were all just drooling invalids that we just kind of… locked in attics and basements and pretended didn’t exist, you know?
Disney’s the reigning champion of this kind of self-aggrandizing bullshit. They love to crow about having gay characters in their movies, but it’s always just some throw-away line or quick blink-and-miss-it clip that can conveniently be edited out with little effort for the international release.
Remember the lesbian character that they were so proud of in the last Star Wars movie?
I’m not saying that there needs to be more representation of these sorts of things, and I’m certainly not saying that it needs to be more graphic, but, it’s just… man, if you’re gonna demand everyone praise you and give you a tongue bath for being some champion of diversity and representation, at least fuckin’ commit. Put your money where your mouth is.
If it seems like that whole autism bit sticks me more than the others, it's because it does. I’m sure you probably have your suspicions as to why, so… look. I’ll admit it.
I’m not autistic.
That’s probably the most surprising statement I’ve made on this publication. But, believe it or not… it is true. I am just another neurotypical. If I have problems, it’s because I’m just a good ol’-fashioned fool. But…
I don’t want to break kayfabe here, but… let’s just say that a very special someone in my life is on the spectrum.
Over time, she’s opened up about how the complications and challenges the condition has caused her throughout her life. They aren’t anything debilitating, she isn’t dysfunctional, she can live perfectly fine on her own and has been more successful in her chosen vocation than I am in mine, but, at the same time, she has her struggles - mostly social - and they usually aren’t flattering or fashionable or cutesy, like, tee-hee, don’t startle me with those loud noises!7 She’s explained in great detail how even looking me in the eye when we speak is something that takes concentrated effort to do, and, even after years of practice, conditioning, and therapy to learn how to maintain eye contact during a conversation, her first impulse is to just… not. Doing it for too long is uncomfortable for her, as are several small, subtle things that most of us don't even consider or are just second-nature.
I’ve seen some difficulties that result from her condition, and, hell - I've dealt with more than a few myself, to be perfectly honest, but I’m not here to air her dirty laundry to the world. Suffice to say, seeing these people to treat it like autism is just another fun word of the now to slap at the end of your Twitter bio for a little bit of progressive street-cred, or act like it’s some quirky, cute costume they can just put on and take off at will… well, it just rubs me the wrong way. I don't mea like it but it also doesn’t bother her all that much, and we both have bigger things to worry about at the end of the day, but, still. It's a little annoying, and, unfortunately, these kind of things can have consequences. The way autism is treated when it’s represented like this is so often absurdly infantilizing. Which, ultimately, what I think these girls out on TikTok and Twitter flapping their hands and going, “Look at me, I'm autistic!” want. They want to be handled with kid gloves. They want to be looked at as lesser, so they get special privileges and pity and, most importantly, attention, and all without paying the price that someone who actually has autism has to. I can’t speak for her, and I don’t want to, but I know, based on what she’s told me and based on how she acts, there’s been times that even admitting that she’s on the spectrum has resulted in people treating her like she’s liable to go insane at a moment’s notice at best, and as if she’s incapable of tying her shoes or wiping her nose without help at worst, so, she generally avoid bringing it up even when she’s in a social snag or uncomfortable situation because it’s preferable to her that people just think she’s rude and/or anti-social than think she’s a clinically diagnosed imbecile.
It took her two years to tell me upfront. I remember we were at Pike Place, drinking coffee on a cool, crisp autumn morning, looking out over the Puget Sound8, and something about the texture of the hum bao we’d gotten for breakfast set her off and she said something to the effect of, I probably should have told you this already, but I have Asperger’s.
To which my reply was - “Was… that supposed to be a secret, or something?”
I mean, the girl has an encyclopedic knowledge of Pokemon and plays Factorio for fun. I figured it out pretty quick. Oh, and, when she decided to come clean, I’d already known her for two fucking years, so, yeah - by that point, I knew. I always just figured that she didn’t tell me because we knew each other well enough that it didn't need to be spelled out.
And, for the record, I’ve never seen her or any of my autistic friends ever - ever - do the flappy hand thing. They all have their physical tics and quirks, but I’m half-convinced the whole happy flappy thing is a fucking psy-op.
I actually had a lot more to say on this topic. A lot. Like, another additional fifteen minutes of content, which was basically just even more of a screed against TikTok girlies who fake debilitating mental-illnesses for e-clout. But, I actually let her read it, and she did, and her verdict?
I thought that this was supposed to be a fun article about monster dolls.
Well -
It is. Is this not fun? Are you not having fun? Because I’m having fun. I’m having so much fuckin’ Halloween fun it’s god damn terrifying! Can’t you tell?
Anyways, she did a good job at summarizing what my ultimate end-point was for me, because I'm verbose to a fault and she's much more judicious in her use of words, which is that by trying to infantalize and water-down autism into something more palatable for the masses, these people are only really reinforcing stereotypes and creating new ones that can end up resulting in people treating people with autism like they’re functionally retarded. Like, if all anyone knows about autism is hee hee flappy happy hands :), they probably will react very poorly when someone with autism doesn’t hold eye contact or says something off-color without understanding why it’s off-color or suddenly starts spitting out food on their plate because they didn’t like the texture of a bite they took, and probably think this person is a total freak that they want nothing to do with because, wait - I thought autism was just hee hee flappy hands hands and sometimes they stuttered :(.
As a humorous aside, she said that, out of all the characters, Twyla was the one she liked the most design-wise. Because of course. I thought about buying her the doll as a joke but them bitches are $25 dollars a pop. Before tax. And it’d be even more with shipping because, I may not have all that much self-respect, but I have enough to not go into Wal-Mart and take a Monster High doll to the register. Well, I guess I could just say it’s for, like, a neice’s birthday, or just be less conscious because I’m pretty sure a grown man buying a doll is one of the least conspicuous things the average Wal-Mart cashier has seen in the line of duty, but I’m also not buying a $25+ doll for a goof.
I gotta tell ya - this article did not go where I thought it would when I sat down to write it. I'm not sure I could have known it would end up going in the direction it did, or that I'd write all of… that. That'll teach me to try and cover a light topic.
So. To start bringing this monstrous article to a close, the question is this: has it worked? Did the dictum of go woke, go broke hold true? This most recent reboot and retooling of the line with all of it’s woke accoutrements - is it selling well? Hard to say. The relaunch is barely a year in, and, right now, Barbie is enjoying a colossal resurgence in popularity with the help of Hollywood. Now doesn’t seem to be an ideal time to be picking a fight with her. However, chatter on various sites seems to indicate that, even if Generation 3 is only being received tepidly by the adult collector community, it appears to be faring well enough with the target demographic of young girls. Mattel, however, also knows who butters their bread - they haven’t left collectors in the lurch. There’s an entire line - the Skull-ector line, which, c’mon… Scare-lector was the obvious name to pick. Regardless, the line is designed for collectors, and at a collector price point, too. If I thought $25 was a scary cost for a gag gift, the prices of these collector dolls are truly spine-chilling. Not only are the dolls of this line higher quality, but they tend be based on movie monsters for a more mature audience.
As I understand it, these are divorced from any story surrounding the line, which kind of blows because I think it’d be hilarious if Pennywise was a classmate of these characters. A shape-shifting, genderless alien spider from another dimension that eats children and takes the form of a creepy clown? Now that’s progressive! Getting that cannibal representation in there - very admirable. Also good to see those creepy girls from the Shining grew up to get an education. Given that they announced the addition of Jack Skellington and Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas to the line literally a week ago as of this writing, it’s safe to say that, even if they aren’t thrilled with the reboot of the core series, adult collectors are still snapping these higher-end dolls up.
The animated television series was recently approved for more content, and the live action movie, too, was greenlit for a sequel, so it looks like it’s doing well enough to stick around for a few more screams… for better or worse. There’s a lot of characters from the original line that have yet to be revamped for Generation 3, so I wouldn’t be surprised if more progressive elements work their way into the line as time goes on. All things considered, if I had a young daughter… I think I’d find some other toys for her to play with.
Well… I think that’s enough of that. Thank you, Monster High - I thought you would be a fun little side topic to explore, a small surprise for the season and my first Substack Spook-tacular, but it turns out that you were really a great allegory for the increasing creep of progressive ideology into children’s media and the continued pivot of entertainment for kids to court an adult audience. Now that’s scary.
Turns out this spooky treat… was more like a dirty trick.
Now my Halloween party has been ruined. We didn’t even get to do the Monster Mash, god damn it. I wasted twenty bucks on this stupid fucking dracula costume, too. Twenty whole dollars! And the bags of candy were in the double digits this year. Inflation these days… talk about fuckin’ terrifying.
Whatever. Party’s over. Go home. We’ll finish up this series next time. At least, we’d better. I’m beginning to get a reputation for talking about dolls.9
I swear, I’ve been reading so much about Mattel and dolls and Barbie that I’m beginning to see that blonde bimbo bitch in my dreams… calling to me… speaking in a strange language I’ve never heard before, yet, somehow… inexplicably… I still understand… telling me to take her hand… join her… down, down, down into that cursed place where black stars shine with a sinister light and the eyes of nameless and ancient things watch waiting and hungry in silent anticipation…
I have to see this through the end. I have to end it here. I have to end it for all time. I have to take a stake to her blackened, wicked, plastic heart. Next time, we bring this ill-fated chronicle to its conclusion.
In her Dreamhouse in Malibu, dead Barbie lies dreaming…
I mean, one look at Elvira’s, er… vast tracks of land speaks to the intended audience of the block she hosted.
And, yeah, I know it’s technically Frankenstein’s Monster, now shut the fuck up before I push you in a locker, dork.
Which I am just… so happy I have not heard anything about for almost a year, now, because I am joking - I hate that song.
Did you know the theme from Austin Powers was a stand-alone song not just made for that movie? Because I didn’t.
Femdom is short for female domination, which is a subsect of BDSM that is exactly what it sounds like.
I will concede to the point that this one is rapidly changing, since Lizzo is currently being held up as the new standard of beauty in the west.
Given the volume she listens to music at, an aversion to loud noises is very much not a symptom she suffers from.
Despite Seattle being a hellhole, you still can enjoy yourself in peace in certain places. Usually.
By the way, if you haven’t subbed to
to get his weekly newsletter… what are you doing? Go do it. Like, now.
That one was certainly a whopper of an article. Including the personal connection was a nice touch - it added weight to your discussion of pandering and performative wokeness that permeates current-year children's media in a thoughtful, tasteful way. I'm continually impressed with the amount of writing you can manage on the queen of Mattel. I'll try and condense my full thoughts at the conclusion of this series, but to summarise, I think pulling at this particular head of the Lernaean Lizard (Lake of Lerna - just got that!) holds more analytical value than others for studying the whole of the beast
PS. I was wondering when Equestria Girls would darken the doorstep of this blog. I daresay you underplay their controversy
It is existentially upsetting to me to learn that there are sexy doll versions of the twins from the Shining.