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hat_plays_dollsSo, Tonner Doll Company has given up the ghost, citing increased production costs from China (only Robert Tonner called China "the Orient," which, my dude, why) and I haven't really been into Tonner dolls in... years. The better part of a decade. So I'm starting to go through it with an eye to exchanging dolls and doll accoutrements for things like paid bills and cat food, and this one thought keeps lurking in the back of my head:
"Okay, I definitely have to keep enough dolls to justify keeping my favorite 1:4 scale furniture pieces."
Which is. An interesting level of attachment. I do have some pretty great furniture, Bespaq and other goodies, but I'm fairly certain I'm supposed to be more attached to the dolls, rather than sorting who stays and who goes by who is Worthy Of Furniture. Ah well, if it makes weeding easier, it makes weeding easier.
It's also definitely one of those moments, for a doll collector, where I have to weigh where I am now against where I was then. For a long time I sort of identified myself as a Tonner collector, it felt classy? More accessible than being a BJD collector, and also I could never get into resin. Easier to create for than dollhouse-- scale is a huge limit with dollhouse dolls but 1:4 scale lets you use a lot of real-world techniques without any problems. Definitely classier than Barbie. There was a loose storyline-- for a while, that stopped after a few years-- and lots of beautifully-made pieces to collect and play with and display. I was gently customizing or just restyling dolls as my roleplaying characters and having a lot of fun, although the fun did start to ebb as time went on.
I had a friend divorce, and the friend in question was the one who I partnered with on all that roleplaying, so I put those Tonners away for a while. When I was ready to get them out again, I was ready to sell them.
And as time goes by, I keep finding myself ready or willing to sell more and more of my Tonners. I sold my Sarah, for crying out loud, I spent an entire summer working on that doll's wardrobe. I never thought I'd sell her. (Not that I couldn't make her again, I still have the patterns I drafted.) It's a little bittersweet, but... weirdly enough, my feelings go more toward 'damn I put so much effort into this back in the day' than 'oh I'll really miss this doll.' Most of the dolls I'd Really Miss if I sold them are my old Barbies, and they're safe in a couple of sturdy Rubbermaid tubs.
And I think part of it is that the dolls I was emotionally invested in-- the ones I actually played with the most, the ones I handled and redressed and restyled and re-positioned most often-- were the ones I lost in the friend divorce. The ones where looking at them made me hurt instead of making me happy, so I put them out of sight until I was ready to sell them. The rest?
Well, I've still gotta go through the rest, but I'm no longer hanging onto valuable dolls just because they're valuable-- someone else can have that value, I need cat litter. But the dolls I ultimately hang onto are gonna be the ones where I open the box and go, "Oh hey it's this one!" all delighted to see them again.
Because one of the things I did lately-- I've been running around like Sailor J's Gemini lately, gotta clean this and sort that and do my taxes and call my insurance company and reorganize the home office and make a lasagna-- is pull my Monster High dolls back out again. Now, no, I didn't put my MH kids away because of Feelings, exactly, I put them away because Wildfire Season started early and stayed late this year. I also had my A-game clothes ready to throw in the trunk of the car, the cats have their own bag full of equipment, so on and so forth, because in the 2017 Wildfire Season, Northern California lost half a trailer park, a chunk of a couple of cities, and some potential wine. In 2018's Wildfire Season, we lost AN ENTIRE TOWN. I spent July through December (because that's when it got damp enough to get green again) with my necessities and my emotionally-load-bearing nonsense ready to MOVE. Just in case.
And as I was trying to sort the MH stuff-- to narrow it down to my favorite things, to figure out what I could leave to melt if it looked like we were gonna lose the house-- I kept hitting that roadblock of "I can't leave [character], they're my favorite/they'd be a bitch to replace/I'd feel so bad."
There were SOME I felt like I probably could have left, but I hit the point where it was just easier to keep the clothes in one box and the dolls in another and promise myself that I'd pack every spare inch of the car if it came to go time, including all the footwells and blocking off the rear-view mirror if it meant getting out with as much MH as I could intact.
In taking the MH dolls out again, to dress and style and display, I genuinely found myself happy to see each and every one of them again. ... Sure, sometimes it was in ways like "Dragon Girl CAM! ... you poor child, someday I'll get you a really cool green wig..." but mostly it was stuff like "Cupid! Aren't you lucky, I finally got the Deadluxe School Playset assembled, you have your own recording booth!"
Monster High became emotionally load-bearing. And not just individual favorite characters, either, I missed seeing all of them.
And I'm not there with the Tonners anymore.
I'm sure that's at least partly because of the Friend Divorce (I also lost EAH in the Friend Divorce, long story), but I don't think that's even most of the reason. I can't even say what made me lose interest-- beyond just the depression cycle, usually I come back around to each interest in turn. Even going through my Barbie saves, which I don't think I'd touched in fifteen or twenty years, I kept going "Oh hello I remember you!" and "oooh this is a great piece." As far as I've gone through my Tonners, my reaction tends to be "yes, you will fetch a good price." Have Tonners just stopped being fun for me?
Well, I guess I'll find out as I go through the rest of my dolls and see who I like well enough to give them furniture.
Like what I do and want to help me feed my cats, but don't need anything I have for sale on eBay? You can always support me on Patreon or throw some change in my tip jar.
"Okay, I definitely have to keep enough dolls to justify keeping my favorite 1:4 scale furniture pieces."
Which is. An interesting level of attachment. I do have some pretty great furniture, Bespaq and other goodies, but I'm fairly certain I'm supposed to be more attached to the dolls, rather than sorting who stays and who goes by who is Worthy Of Furniture. Ah well, if it makes weeding easier, it makes weeding easier.
It's also definitely one of those moments, for a doll collector, where I have to weigh where I am now against where I was then. For a long time I sort of identified myself as a Tonner collector, it felt classy? More accessible than being a BJD collector, and also I could never get into resin. Easier to create for than dollhouse-- scale is a huge limit with dollhouse dolls but 1:4 scale lets you use a lot of real-world techniques without any problems. Definitely classier than Barbie. There was a loose storyline-- for a while, that stopped after a few years-- and lots of beautifully-made pieces to collect and play with and display. I was gently customizing or just restyling dolls as my roleplaying characters and having a lot of fun, although the fun did start to ebb as time went on.
I had a friend divorce, and the friend in question was the one who I partnered with on all that roleplaying, so I put those Tonners away for a while. When I was ready to get them out again, I was ready to sell them.
And as time goes by, I keep finding myself ready or willing to sell more and more of my Tonners. I sold my Sarah, for crying out loud, I spent an entire summer working on that doll's wardrobe. I never thought I'd sell her. (Not that I couldn't make her again, I still have the patterns I drafted.) It's a little bittersweet, but... weirdly enough, my feelings go more toward 'damn I put so much effort into this back in the day' than 'oh I'll really miss this doll.' Most of the dolls I'd Really Miss if I sold them are my old Barbies, and they're safe in a couple of sturdy Rubbermaid tubs.
And I think part of it is that the dolls I was emotionally invested in-- the ones I actually played with the most, the ones I handled and redressed and restyled and re-positioned most often-- were the ones I lost in the friend divorce. The ones where looking at them made me hurt instead of making me happy, so I put them out of sight until I was ready to sell them. The rest?
Well, I've still gotta go through the rest, but I'm no longer hanging onto valuable dolls just because they're valuable-- someone else can have that value, I need cat litter. But the dolls I ultimately hang onto are gonna be the ones where I open the box and go, "Oh hey it's this one!" all delighted to see them again.
Because one of the things I did lately-- I've been running around like Sailor J's Gemini lately, gotta clean this and sort that and do my taxes and call my insurance company and reorganize the home office and make a lasagna-- is pull my Monster High dolls back out again. Now, no, I didn't put my MH kids away because of Feelings, exactly, I put them away because Wildfire Season started early and stayed late this year. I also had my A-game clothes ready to throw in the trunk of the car, the cats have their own bag full of equipment, so on and so forth, because in the 2017 Wildfire Season, Northern California lost half a trailer park, a chunk of a couple of cities, and some potential wine. In 2018's Wildfire Season, we lost AN ENTIRE TOWN. I spent July through December (because that's when it got damp enough to get green again) with my necessities and my emotionally-load-bearing nonsense ready to MOVE. Just in case.
And as I was trying to sort the MH stuff-- to narrow it down to my favorite things, to figure out what I could leave to melt if it looked like we were gonna lose the house-- I kept hitting that roadblock of "I can't leave [character], they're my favorite/they'd be a bitch to replace/I'd feel so bad."
There were SOME I felt like I probably could have left, but I hit the point where it was just easier to keep the clothes in one box and the dolls in another and promise myself that I'd pack every spare inch of the car if it came to go time, including all the footwells and blocking off the rear-view mirror if it meant getting out with as much MH as I could intact.
In taking the MH dolls out again, to dress and style and display, I genuinely found myself happy to see each and every one of them again. ... Sure, sometimes it was in ways like "Dragon Girl CAM! ... you poor child, someday I'll get you a really cool green wig..." but mostly it was stuff like "Cupid! Aren't you lucky, I finally got the Deadluxe School Playset assembled, you have your own recording booth!"
Monster High became emotionally load-bearing. And not just individual favorite characters, either, I missed seeing all of them.
And I'm not there with the Tonners anymore.
I'm sure that's at least partly because of the Friend Divorce (I also lost EAH in the Friend Divorce, long story), but I don't think that's even most of the reason. I can't even say what made me lose interest-- beyond just the depression cycle, usually I come back around to each interest in turn. Even going through my Barbie saves, which I don't think I'd touched in fifteen or twenty years, I kept going "Oh hello I remember you!" and "oooh this is a great piece." As far as I've gone through my Tonners, my reaction tends to be "yes, you will fetch a good price." Have Tonners just stopped being fun for me?
Well, I guess I'll find out as I go through the rest of my dolls and see who I like well enough to give them furniture.
Like what I do and want to help me feed my cats, but don't need anything I have for sale on eBay? You can always support me on Patreon or throw some change in my tip jar.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-24 06:52 pm (UTC)Do you have any advice for keeping 1/4 clothes in storage? I've got BJDs and somehow more clothes keep appearing.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-24 09:38 pm (UTC)And they were fun to build, but I like building things.
I do still sort of use the torso-hanger idea for Monster High, but instead of being hangers they're just... flat paperboard torsos that I put the outfit on to keep it together, then all the outfits and shoes and sturdy accessories go in a ziplock baggie labeled with the character's name. Jewelry and sunglasses and things go in these, because I can sort by character and just... dump everything out when I need to see it all at a glance.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-24 11:40 pm (UTC)Your thing would work well for dresses and things. Especially when I get my SDs in.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-25 05:37 pm (UTC)