I wanted to get my hands on a Lammily doll to turn her into a real role model for girls

aka a Proud Dwarven Warrior with a beard you can keep goats in and a bundle of Barbie skulls at her belt

Gonna preface this by saying I don’t own a Lammily and I’ve only heard most of this stuff secondhand, but I know enough to talk about what’s wrong. There are a number of problems with Lammily, really, but let’s start with the biggest one. 

Fashion dolls - like Barbie- are designed to be easy to dress. There’s a reason why Barbie has a wasp waist, and it isn’t just unrealistic standards of female beauty.  Since dolls can’t really bend at the waist (...without some serious engineering and effort) and don’t often bend at the knees, you have to make it so that they can step into their clothes or pull them down over their torso without bending over. This is why Barbie has tiny feet (and why Bratz dolls had removeable feet)- it’s so she can wear trousers. It’s why Barbies have such long necks- so it’s easy to get clothes over their heads. It’s at least as much the structural side of dressing a mannequin as it is a representation of a human body.

If you look at Lammilly next to Barbie...

... You’ll start to see the problem. Because Lammily has a ‘realistically’ proportioned torso, she’s harder to dress. 

It’s harder to get pants to sit properly on her butt, because her butt is one big piece of rigid plastic. (A lot of boy dolls have this problem too- my poor Jasper Cullen has a permanent plumber’s crack.)

(pictures from Toyboxphilosopher.com) 

 It’s harder to get clothes over her head and shoulders, because her neck is so short and her torso is so thick. I doooooon’t think it’s a coincidence that Lammily’s shipped wearing a button-down. 

There’s also... something messed up with Lammily’s hips and upper legs. Maybe it’s just that I’m used to Barbie’s body shape, but it looks like her center of gravity is too low. So her torso looks weirdly elongated and her legs look weirdly stumpy. Not sure how easy it’d be to fix that issue, but it’s certainly a thing. 

Whatever it is, it means that Lammily can’t sit down properly. Her legs splay out wide, and without some serious nudging, you can’t get her to close them. Her knees are articulated, but before looking into her, I genuinely thought they weren’t- it’s very difficult to get her to sit with her legs crossed. She also can’t stand up on her own, but that’s a problem most fashion dolls have.

Personal opinions: I really don’t like Lammily’s face sculpt. I get that she’s supposed to resemble a ‘normal’ teenager, but something about it just looks... gormlessly smug. I also really don’t like that Lammily ships with molded on underwear. 

Second big problem with Lammily- she is not a doll for children. She is a doll for their parents. And because of that, she’s dead boring. Yes, Lammily is designed as, and to an extent marketed as, a playline doll- a children’s toy, not a toy for collectors. Buuuuuuut... let’s look at the selling points for a second.

The big selling point of Lammily- as opposed to Barbie, Monster High, Ever After High/Disney Descendents, DC Superhero Girls, Bratz, etc.- is that she’s a realistic alternative to Barbie. Her tagline is “normal is beautiful”. She doesn’t really come with any special accessories (you can buy fashion packs, stretch marks, acne, period pads, and so on for her, but as far as I know, she doesn’t come with things like purses or hats). She is a (comparatively) short, stout, average-looking girl with a double-denim outfit, and her packaging contains a little story about how she travels the world and likes to meet people. It is all very harmless and nice and safe. 

Kids... do not care what brand their toys are unless their peers care. A kid doesn’t care whether their blonde fashion doll is a Barbie or an Ever After High or a Moxie Teenz or a dollar store knockoff - it’s a doll and they can dress her and have her murder Ken and resurrect him into a zombie army to their heart’s content. ...Unless all their friends have Bratz dolls, and they’re the only one stuck with a Barbie. Or all their friends have Monster Highs, and they’re the one stuck with the dollar store knockoff. ...Or all their friends have Barbies, and they’re stuck with a fucking Lammily. 

Lammily really has nothing to make her more desirable to a kid than the other dolls they could be playing with. I’ll admit that Lammily is not just double denim for days; you can get a mermaid tail, a veterinarian outfit, or a ballerina dress for her- and then unpleasantly surprised to see that the individual outfits are priced comparably to an entire Barbie set. As an example: the Lammily veterinarian outfit is $24.00 and comes with a set of scrubs, a surgical mask, a ‘vitals monitor’, and some cat treats; the Barbie Farm Vet playset is $25 and includes a doll, an outfit for her, and multiple animal friends. And...  I understand that there’s moral stuff at play here; I respect Lamm for deciding to pay his workers what they’re worth and not rely on Chinese slave labour. But in practice, it means that most kids who have a Lammily are not going to have any of her custom outfits. 

So. To make this fair to Lammily, I’m only going to compare her to the more ‘realistic’ 18-inch dolls I had growing up. American Girl dolls actually have a similar body type to Lammily (but- when I was a kid- they got around that by having cloth bodies, so when you dress them they had a bit more give). 

If you were a kid, and you had the choice, would you pick Kat the Time Explorer (who comes with a big poofy pink silk dress, a parasol, and a book about her aunt’s mysterious time machine)... or Lammily? Would you pick Laurel the Wood Fairy (who comes with a flower crown, a long flowing purple cape, and a book about her adventures tricking evil goblins to save her gentle fairy kingdom)... or Lammily? Hell, would you pick Molly (who looks more like you, AND has a book about how she grew up during World War 2 and had adventures on the Home Front)... or Lammily? 

Let me remind you, this is not even getting into Lammily’s actual competitors: you know, fashion dolls you can dress, Disney princesses, superheroes, WWE wrestlers, Harry Potter witches, Star Wars heroes, and Dracula’s daughter. There is literally no contest there. If eight-year-old me had to choose between Hermione and Lammily? I know which one I would pick in a heartbeat, and it sure ain’t the blandly nice world traveler.  

So... Lammily is not a toy that will interest kids at all. But it will interest parents- specifically feminist parents- who are anxious that their kids will play with toys that will hurt their self-esteem. So they will buy this toy for their kids, who are then just disappointed that they didn’t get the Elsa Barbie or the Optimus Prime that they asked for and who will probably never play with Lammily unless they’ve got nothing better to do. 

 Dolls are about stories. The toys you give your kids show them the kind of stories you want them to tell about the world and ultimately about themselves. If you give your son toy guns and GI Joes, he’s less likely to tell stories about things that aren’t shooting. If you only give your daughter plastic dishes and baby dolls, she’s less likely to tell stories about things that aren’t housewifery. A sufficiently determined kid can tell the stories they want to tell with whatever they have available, don’t get me wrong- Lauren Faust and MLP:FIM prove that.

This comes to the crux of why I really, really hate Lammily...and agh, ADHD brain is trying to go in two directions at the same time with this, and it’s making them the Same Thing when they’re two different things; I’ll try to tease them out separate. 

Thing One about why I really hate Lammily: well, there’s this quote I post a lot on here by Ada Palmer: 

Our world is saturated with messages telling people to give up, to settle, to take whatever path will make ends meet, to expect to face a grim job market when we reach adulthood, to expect the hours from 9 to 5 to be sacrificed to drudgery, to expect closed doors. When kids are in kindergarten they're encouraged to say they want to be an astronaut, or a race car driver, or a president when they grow up, but by the time young people reach High School the negative messages have usually won out, that the world is unfair and against them, that dreams are unrealistic, that aspiration is naive, that optimism should be mocked, that cynicism, criticism, and the realism of a pessimistic norm are the smart path. 

I think the best thing we can do to brighten the future is to stop telling people that it can't be brightened, that they can't brighten it. We can all lay down stepping stones in the long road to the stars, but we can lay down exponentially more by telling other people that they can do it too, that they don't have to waste themselves for the present, that there are a hundred thousand paths open to all of us that let us lay the vital stepping stones.

...Lammily is all about the ‘realism of a pessimistic norm’. She comes with stretch marks and acne and period pads. Most of her clothes are sturdy and practical, and the ones that aren’t are ludicrously expensive. Lammily doesn’t have magic hair that glows when she sings, or butterfly wings, or snake hair. She isn’t the daughter of Sleeping Beauty or the Wolf Man or an ancient mummy. She isn’t going to space or fighting evil empires or saving the world. She’s just... an ordinary girl. Who travels, and maybe takes pictures. 

And like... I get that kids need ordinary role models to relate to. I get that you can’t just give your kids a diet of fantasy. But ... if I was gonna try to give my hypothetical daughter a Normal Person Role Model to relate to... it’d be Grace Murray Hopper or Mary Shelley or Annie Oakley. If it was one that came in doll form, it’d be, like... Coraline Jones. Not Lammily.

The other thing. The other thing. and this is the one that makes me angriest. is just how much Lammily’s marketing and messaging and general theme fetishize being normal. There’s this whole line of subtext in the marketing about how Lammily is an average normal girl and those skanky Barbies over there who have unrealistic body proportions aren’t normal like Lammily so they’re bad. 

...And, like... okay. I get that this is most likely unintentional. I get that there absolutely should be more dolls with realistic body proportions, and that having wasp-thin waifish dolls everywhere the eye can see really can make little girls feel bad about their bodies. But at the same time.... 

Okay, let’s talk about Monster High for a second. 

Monster High dolls have some of the most stylised bodies in the doll world right now. (In this lineup, you’ve got a Barbie, a Monster High, a DC Superhero Girl, and a Moxie Teen.) 

...At the same time, though... I’d argue the messaging in Monster High’s doll line is a lot better for kids than the messaging in Lammily. Because the message Monster High sends, with all its packaging and tie-in fiction and design, is “there are lots of different kinds of ways to be a person, and it’s okay and fun and cool to be different. be a freak, be a weirdo, be a monster- no matter what kind of ghoul/girl you are, you’re welcome here.” 

Sure. Monster High doesn’t have much body diversity. They could definitely use to have more. But I think “It’s okay to be different, and the things that make you freaky make you fabulous” is a ... better message overall than “it’s okay to be normal”. It can be a competing access needs thing, don’t get me wrong... but in my experience, most of the time, ‘normal’ is much more restrictive than ‘weird’, and it’s a standard that keeps changing. It’s better to be able to say “yeah, so what if I’m fat, I don’t care if it’s a flaw, it’s part of who I am and that’s okay” than “MY WEIGHT IS OFFICIALLY ‘NORMAL’”. Because what’s “normal” could change at any time, and you might not. 

... I dunno, maybe that’s just my triggers talking. And I’d love to see a decently engineered doll with a more ‘average’ figure. 

also on that note… i look like Lammily and its so...

Hey. I saw you were in a bad place last night so I didn’t want to get in a fight with you but...

I put ‘realistic’ in scare quotes because Lammily’s body is fucked up in ways that come from being a doll, not because she has proportionately ‘short’ legs and a proportionately ‘long’ torso. If you look at the renders of Lammily made to market the doll, she actually looks okay...

But if you look at Lammily proper... I’m sorry, but there isn’t a woman alive who has an inch-long flap of skin between her collarbone and the top of her shoulder.  Or a two-inch-long square gap between her coochie and the tops of her hips. 

Curvy Barbie has some of these problems too, but she gets around looking truly uncanny by being - yes- more stylised. Her shoulders are more sloped, so the transition between her shoulders and her arms is less jarring; her hips are bigger, and her pelvis is positioned in such a way to minimize the gap between her thighs and her torso. She’s worse at being a realistic human being, but she’s much better at being a fashion doll. 

It’s not that plenty of women don’t have bodies with Lammily’s proportions- she is, after all, modeled to have the proportions of the average American teenager. There’s nothing wrong with having short legs and a wide torso, and I’m sorry if I implied that.

But most women with Lammily’s proportions aren’t made of vinyl. They don’t have to have the adaptations that you have to put into a surface that’s both slippery and sticky in order for a small, uncoordinated human to be able to cram clothes onto it. They can have things like “chub rub” and “broad shoulders that meet their arms instead of gapping weirdly” and “hips that have a full range of motion without also being absurdly fragile”.    

Trying to make a fashion doll with realistic proportions, without accounting for the structural differences between a fashion doll and a regular human being, makes those proportions look.... weird.  Lammily, in trying to be more realistic, does an acrobatic motherfucking pirouette straight into the uncanny valley.

 That’s why I put “realistic” in scare quotes.