Long time no write blog! So this time I write a novel. I thought it would be the easiest to write down some of my thoughts/collection updates here, since so much has happened in the past months. I really need to pick up the pace here because at this rate I don't get my current dolls introduced before they're all sold or something, lol.
Some decorative material from a new acquisition of mine:
I recently sold two of my rather old doll characters' shells and one newer shell without an intention to replace them. Reasons were rather simple: I felt like it's possible to keep the characters without necessarily having a physical shell for them.
First, professor Jules Annesley, my Dollshe 28M Rey Lewis, "went to Harvard". It started out as a joke between me and a friend, but now I'm really pretending he got a transfer to another university. His sweetheart Grace can still text him when she needs him, but other than that I chose to let fate keep them apart. Mainly I sold Jules because the Dollshe 28M L4 body was too poseable for me. Sounds funny, but I don't like my dolls that well-articulated (explains why Iples are my favourite bodies, lol). All the joints break the naked figure and add quite a bit of extra weight and parts you need to manually stabilize when balancing the doll-
Let's remember the only time I actually put those joints to work, apart from the once when I did a scientific experiment on if he can bend to give himself head (not pictured, but I'll break it to you, he can't):
It do be like that sometimes.
I intended initially to keep the Rey head for another body, but the difficulty of finding something that matches Dollshe old Copper Oriental, fits a rather small SD head without being below 70cm tall, and fits my picky tastes overwhelmed me. The buyer of the body wanted to buy the head as well, so I bid Julesie farewell. I don't know if his real name was even Jules. Julian? Julius? Dude, you scream "I have a 2nd family 2 states away". The only thing I miss about him is the pretty fox arm tattoo I did on him.
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Tate Heilig, my La Legende de Temps Ballerino Roderich, was more unfortunate this time. He’s dead now. In my Ginger Gunslinger story, it was eventual that either Tate or Carol will die as they are each other’s sworn enemies. When I started purchasing these dolls and planning the plot, I wasn’t sure which one’s going to throw in the towel. There was a secret third ending, one where they bury the hatchet and live happily ever after, but with Tate being such a mess mentally, I figured he’s beyond that. With him, one of the great bloodlines of The Alliance will vanish, but his work and legacy will carry on with Jane and Abigail’s journey.
Saying this'll probably cost me all the rights to preorder anything in the future, but I'm confident about not needing more LLT boys and say it: the reason I didn’t bond with Rodi is he looks a bit like a Luts. Like, my taste of male dolls is 180 degrees from this particular head sculpt, has always been, and I think I only got him because of the hype around the sculpt. I somehow managed to make a decent looking faceup on him and got him a glorious outfit, which made me pretend for full 2 years that he's just what I wanted for this character.
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The Ballerino body alone is nice apart from its tendency to try and take a leap of faith just as you were thinking it's standing sturdy. But so are a hundred other male BJD bodies, and I don't have more than three guys, so I'm not awfully much into building an army of headless bodies that I keep "just in case a perfect head walks my way and just happens to fit this body".
After admitting Rodi is not for me, I decided not to try and reshell Tate into another doll, because my brain is fixated enough on having a certain shell for a certain character that I just cannot go about bringing home a totally different boy and reshelling a character into him. No. My Rodi might have been a puppy-faced bean (by the way, if you try the FaceApp smile filter on him, he looks like a schoolboy who let out a juicy fart in a packed school bus, which traumatized me forever), but he's still the one and only Tate Heilig. I tried reshelling characters before, and the only character that it technically worked for was Carol's wife. Jane's essence has had two shells before her current one.
I actually found the Tate smile filter picture. Would you be able to look at him and think of this man as the leader of an inquisition?
So, Tate just must die. But I've made the most out of it (as much as one can, anyway). Before his death, Tate will learn about Carol and Ted’s affair. He learns his former youth best friend is now in love with a demon, and while he initially thinks it’s wrong and horrible, then he starts to self-reflect: is he not a demon himself? Is he, due to that, not worthy of love? As he starts to struggle with himself, he feels his demon gaining on him at an increasing speed. His end is nearing, and he notices the Alliance doesn’t even care. They’ve all just used him. Tate chooses to be a better person in the end. He helps Carol and Ted buy time so that they can prepare for the final standoff against the Alliance. He prepares Jane and Abigail to the ultimate task they must now take on: bringing down the Alliance together with Carol, Theodore, and a bunch of others.
We’ll see what becomes of that. I’m not sure if Abigail will ever mention it to Carol that she was the one who killed his brother years ago… I should probably explain the basics of this plot sometime and introduce the rest of the characters before proceeding further.
And as for new dolls, we don’t have a lack thereof. First, I adopted a Soom Garion and then decided to sell him.
Basically, I have wanted a Garion for a long time. I was patiently waiting for Soom to rerelease him, since hey, that one person begged them for a Hyperon rerelease on IG for a year or something, and then they actually released him (if you read this, stranger, I salute you.) I grew tired of waiting, bought a cream white human Garion 2nd hand even if that was probably my least favorite skin tone, and behold, once I gave up and paid an arm and a leg for him 2nd hand, guess who was the next month’s Idealian release at Soom website? Garion! I woke up to half a dozen people having messaged me about the release. Soom did accept my card despite it not being a credit card, so I took it as a sign and placed an order for another Garion in NS.
...And then some unexpected health stuff struck me (I'm okay, just tired) and I realized that blank project dolls are too much of a hassle for me right now. I decided to sell Both G's. But I did manage to make an awesome wig in the little amount of time that my WS Garion has spent with me! If there's something I do still take pride in amidst all this self-doubt, then it's my wigs. (Aye, sorry for the schlong, I'll learn to crop images one of these days.)
What was I supposed to do with a Garion, then?
Garion would have been a guy called Ludvig Heilwig. No, he doesn’t like how it rhymes and how he spent his youth in a military institution in Germany, where an almost-perfect anagram of the name would be “geil HIV Ludvig” aka crazy HIV Ludvig.
I have written this book called And Let Me Redeem Myself, just a fun project I like to keep mainly to myself. In a world a bit into the future from now, the USA is split in two between a totalitarian state and the side with more liberty. The totalitarian state, East States, is run by billionaires and it basically functions like a large company where slavery is legal, as long as it brings revenue to its “shareholders”. International laws and treaties cannot help the citizens because the rest of the world is in these billionaires’ grasp: power infrastructure, telecommunications, transport, energy and fuel, banking, healthcare, private security sector, food production, you name it, they own a big chunk of it either directly or indirectly.
Among these billionaires is a brat called Milon Janus. He’s in his 30s and refuses any contact whatsoever with his parents as they dislike his homosexuality. He, however, enjoys his parents’ money very gladly. It’s described the only thing he knows about money is how to get rid of it. He lives his forever single life, partying and annoying the shit out of everyone. Milon has some boyfriends abroad, most notably a bartender named Cristophe in Toronto, but the relationships never get very deep as Milon is not able to disclose to them who he really is.
One night, Milon is out drinking in secret when he ends up rescuing a man called Ludvig Heilwig from a raid. Ludvig is 50 and works as a professor at a military intelligence academy. Milon develops a deep interest in Ludvig and invites him to work together. Like this, Milon gets to spend time with Ludvig. He takes Ludvig away from the East States, shows him the world over the years, and eventually confesses he loves Ludvig and wants to do more than just work together. At first, Ludvig reacts negatively as he is married with two daughters.
Milon’s friend warns him about Ludvig. Before Ludvig became a professor, he used to be an agent who worked for the East States' independence movement. He killed people who stood for human rights, all because there was money involved. He’s smart and skilled at pretending to be pleasant. The only reason his career ended was because he got stabbed in the hip by a 13-year-old girl some years ago. Milon’s friend warns Milon that likely Ludvig is still working for the same people.
Milon doesn’t listen. One Christmas on 23rd December, him and Ludvig get drunk in Toronto on a business trip and Milon ends up forcefully kissing Ludvig because he’s giving mixed signals. The two make out and have sex, and in the morning, Ludvig leaves without saying a thing. Milon drives him home, but Ludvig seems cold and distant. Milon doesn’t hear from him at all during the holidays. When he goes to check on Ludvig in January, Ludvig discloses he wanted Milon to come after him, and they end up likely screwing in Ludvig’s office.
Their love is not made to last. Ludvig quickly notices Milon is having affairs with other men, and while he confronts Milon about it, Milon points out how Ludvig is one to speak, being married and hiding their affair from his family. Then, Ludvig gets caught by his wife because Milon leaves some bruises on him and doesn’t tell Ludvig. Before they can resolve things, an old friend of Milon’s father arranges for a murder of Milon’s wife and two daughters. He also arranges it so that Milon finds the bodies and must tell Ludvig about it. This man, Hennigar, was responsible for Ludvig’s team back when he was an agent, and he warned Milon not to mess with Hennigar's lapdog. Milon dismissed the warning because he knew no one could harm him thanks to his father’s status, and never would he ever have thought that the man who was seemingly protecting Ludvig would allow killing his wife and children.
Their story is one about fated encounters, surviving, self-reflection, redemption and forgiveness. At first I thought I want to shell them in doll form, but maybe keeping some projects in just written form is better.
Plus there would have been the matter of visualizing Milon in a doll form and it was another exhausting task I didn't feel like taking on. I thought he’d look perfect as a Mori9’s doll Doma, but then the artist only sold it as a collab through Dollshe, who is someone I’d not even poke with a long stick. Aside from the empty promises and lies and straight out criminal action Dollshe serves, his bodies now look hideous because he went blind to hands-and-feet-size-to-body ratio looong ago. and he has a schlong size complex, too. Of course Dollshe being Dollshe screwed Mori over and, my suspicion is, never paid her due to some mimimi excuse, and Mori had to end the collab. I don't know how much crap I can talk about Dollshe’s business practices before I chew you an ear off, but the sack of shit is free to ban me from purchasing if he doesn't like me *lol*.
I did get two new dolls that I think will get to stay, though.
First, Iplehouse HID Yui whom I named Voron Amadeas:
She's Opal's mother, and I shall provide more info on her later. They're gods so she doesn't really age, hence she looks younger than her son. She has a beautiful face and a strong neck, so I decided to try something new with her, namely making bob cut wigs with bangs. I'm quite happy with my first one, although I imagine keeping the bangs looking sharp on this one will be tricky. It was definitley difficult to make a split parting that doesn't run all the way to the front of the cap, because there's so little space to work in!
Another new purchase is Dodollsdream Leona in purple resin. No pics yet as she was only ordered a mere month ago. I know, sounds different from my usual style, but I'm up for the challenge! With her counted in, my collection is now down to 13 dolls, and I don't feel like buying any more for now. And, one of my biggest goals in this hobby was fulfilled this year: I collected all of the Fantasia Doll girl head sculpts and both of the body sculpts! I did snap this groupshot of my misfits some time ago for DoA, but here it is again because it's not often that I lug six girls and one mermaid out of their cabinet for a picture:
That's it for tonight! I'm writing this more and more as my own mad ramblings of a diary, but it's interesting to follow your own collector journey, even if said journey is mostly filled with different forms of "what the fuck were you thinking when you bought that, and how do you plan on getting rid of it?"
A collector's life with an impulsive brain is never boring, nor is it filled with too much loose funds.
Thank you! ^_^
VastaaPoista