Why I Choose What I Choose

Upper left to right, Princess Ariel from "The Little Mermaid" and my own character, William Duckson, made for "Howard The Duck". Lower left to right, my own Texas Chainsaw character, Cain Sawyer and Casper McFadden from 1995 Universal Pictures' "Casper".

 My Nursery Is A Space Where My Fandoms Become Tangible

 

    The Reborn Doll Collecting Hobby is a hobby that, traditionally, focuses on doll collectors who curate collections of baby dolls which are made to seem as realistically close to actual babies as possible. Since it began, doll artists and collectors in the hobby have strived to achieve and maintain a visual and physical quality in their dolls that strongly calls to mind the expressions, the details and the tactile presence of real infants. Now, every artist and collector has their personal reasons for wanting this in the hobby. For some, it is simply that they think real babies are adorable, for others, maybe they just enjoy baby fashion. For still a few more, such dolls can help them cope with daily challenges presented by disabilities or grief. I would even venture to say that a few people in the hobby may even utilize the dolls as part of their age regression journeys, a type of therapy that can help people to heal their past childhood traumas. For many, these dolls are comforting, healing and realistically beautiful... and I personally think that that is awesome!

 

    That is just a quick overview of the hobby though. On a much closer inspection, you might notice that some collectors and artists have also realized that the hobby can also be a great avenue for fantasy themed roleplay and cosplay. Running the gamut from vampires or House Elves, all the way up to the Grinch, the artists and collectors in this side of the hobby are choosing to use the artistic skill to bring characters from their own minds or their favorite fantasy realms into a more realistic looking and feeling light. This route is actually how I was introduced to the Reborn doll hobby when I was still a teenager in 2008. I was attending a local anime convention as a cosplayer and I happened to spot a beautiful lady wearing her finest gothic regalia, pushing a hauntingly amazing, antique black pram. Assuming she must have had an adorable- real- baby in that pram in matching gothic attire, I peeked in. What I saw instead, to my pleasant surprise, was a werewolf pup! I could not believe my eyes! He seemed so real! But he was a silicone doll that had been created by the lady with the pram. She introduced herself with a polite smile as his artist and gave me her calling card. She explained that he was a Reborn doll and elaborated to me what, exactly, a Reborn doll was. I was completely enthralled. I realized then that there was new life in something I had enjoyed since I was a little girl, that dolls could be used for more than just simple Little Tykes Kitchen pretend games between friends. Before that point, in years past, I had been the girl that always wanted to play with her realistic baby dolls, even when her friends deemed dolls too childish after a certain age. To keep up with my friends, I had tried to pretend I was done with dolls. In that moment, when I realized for the first time that dolls could be the canvas for a more mature art form, it occurred to me that maybe I did not have to just give up my love of dolls. 

 

    I do not remember too much about the rest of that day. I assume that I probably joked around with friends at the convention and maybe bought something at the convention's dealer room. What I remember next about that day is later that evening, when I was home and jumping on my laptop to talk about the adventures I had just had with others online. I suddenly remembered the lady's calling card and fished it out of the shopping bags containing the stuff I bought at the convention. There was a link to her online Reborn doll store on the card that I typed into the search bar of my internet browser. As I looked through her gallery of dolls that she had created, two things happened simultaneously. One was that my face sort of fell because one look at the price tags told me that I was not going to be allowed to have any such dolls anytime soon. No one I knew was going to buy me a $300 doll for my birthday or Christmas, and I did not have the capacity to maintain an after school job to pay for it myself. So my hope momentarily died. The other thing that happened was I noticed something more about these dolls- the artists seemed to be able to create just about anything, and that meant that the hobby was technically limitless. Fun. With that realization, I opened another tab and went to Google, to see if any results returned a doll artist who had created one of my favorite fictional characters, Edward Scissorhands. Imagine my excitement when I found a link to a website where a doll artist was selling a beautifully, realistically rendered Reborn doll of Edward! Right away, I found myself daydreaming about a time in my future where I might eventually be able to have such a doll physically in my arms, in my care. I started imagining what sorts of props and clothes I would get for him, the crib I would display him in... and that sort of daydreaming never really left me alone again afterward. Sometimes, hours, days, weeks, months and even years would go by where I had not thought much about Reborn dolls but then out of the blue, something would happen to remind me of that goal of mine and I would find myself spending hours sometimes, daydreaming what characters I would want as dolls, how I would like to dress them up, what kinds of props I would want to display them with and why. 

 

    I could say that I never gave up on the dream but in truth, the dream never gave up on me. Years flew by, life lessons were learned and I was landed in a situation where, suddenly, I started making enough money to pay off such dolls. Which could not have been better timed, despite the fact that I had to wait about fifteen years for it. Because something that I'm not going to go into detail about here happened when I was in my twenties that changed my expected life path in ways that I never anticipated, ways that I have to face and deal with for the rest of my life, ways that are not easy to live with at times. There was a character that I created in my quiet hours spent with someone that mattered a lot to me and in the aftermath of what happened, as the metaphorical smoke cleared, I noticed that character again in the mental periphery of my imagination. His name was Christopher Gray and he had been an OC that I had created for Stephen King's "IT" in those quiet hours spent with that person. I suddenly found myself thinking of him as a fictional child that had just had to deal with watching his parents split and I began to feel like he deserved comforting over what had happened. So I started writing about him again and imagining him visually, spending time with him in my imagination, developing him further as a character in an effort to distract myself and to sort of "heal" both of us after what had occurred. It was during those years when I finally began to have enough money to collect Reborn dolls. So the moment I had the chance to pay for my first doll, my first commissioned work, I chose to send the artist I had selected, CamellynCreations, reference images or rather, my own artwork of Christopher.

 

    After that, things kind of just snowballed. As I excitedly awaited the day that I would finally get to hold little Christopher in my arms, I found it increasingly difficult to wait, so I purchased a more affordable Reborn doll in the meantime that was already made and ready to be shipped home to me. That doll was my little Vinnie, who was obviously created to be a 2017 Pennywise doll but I pretended from the start that he was Vinnie, Christopher's little brother and that Vinnie has decided to shapeshift to look more like his father. That technically marked the point at which a canon film character first entered my collection, as Vinnie is a Pennywise doll, like I mentioned. That following September, just a few months later, I found myself with enough money again to commission another original character of mine to be made as a Reborn doll. So I went back to CamellynCreations and got her to create my "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" character, Cain Jedidiah Jr. Sawyer, also based on my own artwork. In the span of a single year, I had commissioned two dolls and purchased one already made, all spurred from the notion that I found comfort in trying to comfort fictional characters. That was 2023. Since that point, every doll I have collected has been a character that spoke to me on a deeper level at some point, be that one of my own characters or a character I had fallen in love with in film, TV, books or video games. Now, to make things easier to break down, the rest of this post is going to be in the form of a Q&A. Questions will be in black while answers will be in orange to help set them apart. Ready? Let's dive in. 

1.  What makes a character "worthy" of being turned into a Reborn doll? Is it emotional resonance? Visual aesthetic? A personal connection? I think it's the emotional resonance that helps form a personal connection and it's the personal connection that drives the decision the most when it comes to choosing characters to collect as Reborn dolls. I can probably pinpoint my personal connections with every character that I have as a doll, actually.
2. How do you decide which canon traits to preserve or reinterpret? For example, with Vinnie/Pennywise, what was important to keep versus transform? I would say, for me, that decision is based on what I find I immediately like or do not like about a fictional character. With Pennywise in particular, I'm actually not a fan of It hurting people, especially children. But I love It's clown appearance and I enjoy It's chaotic villain energy, so I went ahead with writing Vinnie, a character that keeps the transformation ability, keeps the chaotic villain vibe and to some degree also keeps the 'humans as food' bit as well but I tend to write that in for him in a manner that I would call "off screen" or "off page" for now. As far as the doll version is concerned, I appreciate the fact that his kit is a sleeping one, so I never have to imagine the baby version of Vinnie eating anyone if I do not want to.
3.  Is this a way to reclaim disturbing or misunderstood characters? Can dolls serve as a form of soft rehabilitation? Sometimes, yes, it is. Not every character I would seek to collect seems to need or even deserve comfort or reclaiming but so far, every character I do have in my collection as a doll has. I believe as well that dolls can serve as a soft rehabilitation for overwhelming emotions and unprocessed grief or trauma. In fact, I have a doll that would make a great example here from my own life. Disney's Princess Ariel, from "The Little Mermaid". For most of her story in her film, her father, King Triton, never really understood her and it led him to do and say things that had an impact on both Ariel and the trajectory of the story. For example, the scene where he comes to her grotto, scolds her and destroys her statue of Prince Eric out of his concern for his daughter's exposure to the human world above. With an adult lense, I recognize the fact that he just wanted to make the point that in his experience, he had come to understand humans as dangerous and a threat to merpeople like himself and Ariel, that he just wanted his daughter to remain safe. But when I was a kid, all I understood was that the man seemed to unreasonably hate where there should have just been curiosity, love, patience and understanding like Ariel had. At the time as well, I also had my own father who never really understood most things I did (and he still does not, even now). He would usually only speak to me just to scold or yell at me, sometimes even mess stuff up in my room or unplug my unsaved video games that I had spent hours of my life on. Coping with those memories of being considered different enough for my father to not really understand me sometimes gets a little tough and at that point, I find, it's nice to pick Ariel up for a snuggle. The relief I feel from holding a character that knows how I felt canonically is, to me, very soothing.
4. Do you see these dolls as surrogates for experiences you didn’t get to have—or are they extensions of characters who need care?  Both, actually. Disturbing and misunderstood characters, like what I collect, are usually abused in their stories at some point, unfortunately. For that reason, I've often wished I could comfort them in some way. About the dolls being surrogates for experiences I didn't get to have, I grew up wanting to be a mom someday and certain events in my life have denied me that. So these dolls of mine are a way for me to reclaim at least some of that missed experience.  
5.  Does comforting a fictional character help you process real-life events or grief?  Yes, it does. It gives me the solitude, the space and the time to pause, think, reason and let my emotions out. It also makes me feel a bit less alone in doing so, knowing that the character I'm interacting with may have also gone through something similar. That, if they could hear and respond, they would show me that they understand. 
6.  What does it mean to build a nursery for a character instead of a baby? Is it symbolic, therapeutic, or a way of giving them a home they never had?  It is therapeutic as well as symbolic and it gives both myself and the characters in question the home that they never had and the home that I seek to have inside myself. The action is an acknowledgment of my old desire to be a mother someday, symbolic of the parts of love that maybe were not given to me either in the amount that I needed or the way that I needed when I needed it at times. My parents definitely love me in their ways and even the person that left me after seven years loved me definitely at some point in our relationship. However, no one knows how to love perfectly. Everyone says or does something at some point that has a lasting impact, whether good or bad, on someone else. Every cuddle, every pretend feeding, every diaper change, every outfit change helps me feel a bit less pain for a little while from not getting that lifelong dream and from the times that people have said or done something that made me feel negatively. The therapeutic effects of that help provide me with a sense of "home" and comfort within myself when I am with one of my dolls.
7.  How do props, fashion, or display decisions deepen character narratives?  Props, fashion and display all impact guests' and viewer's first impressions of my dolls and by extension, of their characters. The smallest additions can really change and reframe how someone processes one of my characters on seeing them for the first time. So I really like to add touches that reference parts of the characters' stories, to help introduce them better to other people. For example, Christopher Gray in my mind is a chaotic little guy who sometimes can have a macabre or filterless sense of humor, so for a while, I had a button pin stuck on his onesie that read, "I put the FUN in funeral!" so that people seeing him in my basket while I was in a store would get some sort of introduction to what he would be like as a character. Or maybe I might dress Cain in a onesie that says, "Daddy Is My Bestie" to convey to others that he has a close relationship in my mind with his father. As a third example, I will also detail that in my imagination, Anne-Marie loves frilly, lacy, princessy dresses, so to show that to others, I'll often dress her in beautiful, photo-worthy dresses. Of course, I do not think that people really notice these things generally. I do it more to make myself happy but if someone does happen to notice, well, that just makes me smile.
8.  What role does aesthetic rebellion play in your choices?  I think I would say that I maybe somewhat rebel against the 'stereotypical' aesthetic that some might have of the Reborn doll hobby. The general aesthetic falls between cute babies, baby fashion and therapeutic practices. It does not necessarily include fictional characters that some might find unattractive or unsettling visually. But for me, for someone who loves fantasy characters that may not be conventionally attractive in any sense, who also seeks artistic realism and emotional comfort or therapy, characters like that offer comfort comparable, I think, to that of what someone else might feel while interacting with their more human or normal dolls. It could also be said that I try to use my love of these strange little characters to try to open others up to the possibility that there might be beauty in places they would not expect.
9.  Are there others in the hobby doing similar fandom-driven collecting? Do you ever worry about being misunderstood?  Unfortunately, there do not seem to be many of us. There are others, surely, but we are few and far between. So yes, I do worry some about being misunderstood sometimes, though I did not have that concern when I first started collecting. I gained it after having a somewhat upsetting experience soon after getting my very first dolls. See, what happened was this. I was in some fan groups online for Reborn doll collecting and roleplay and some for "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and I wanted to show little Cain and his papa off together in both at the same time (I also happen to have a life sized animatronic of the original Leatherface that I pose Cain with in photos). In the TCM groups, I was loudly told that my OC Cain didn't belong in the TCM universle even though I'd explicitly created the character for it and in the Reborn doll roleplay groups, I was told I would be banned if I tried to post him with his daddy again because the horror aspect of his story was too triggering for group members. I was upset because it makes me feel good to imagine Cain having the relationship with his papa that I did not have with mine and I felt I deserved to enjoy that with my dolls and to share the joy it brought me with others. That was when I learned that my behaviours in this hobby could be heavily misinterpreted and I started to stop sharing so much about my characters and their stories in the online groups. It arguably has made the hobby a little less enjoyable for me in the long run and I turned to trying to manifest an in-person social group for doll meets but that did not work out either. I showed up to a handful of planned meets with my dolls just to spend the day just me, my doll and my mother, with no one showing up. Still, I have not completely given up! Occasionally, it does cross my mind to try to start a Facebook group only for local Reborn doll collectors near me. Someday, in the future, maybe I'll attempt it. Who knows?
10. How does your approach differ from age regression or traditional grief doll collectors? Is it important to distinguish that? First of all, grief collections are not "traditional" in this hobby at all. I will repeat: most collectors are interested in the hobby purely for the art form or the fashion. People assume that everyone in the hobby collects and roleplays for therapy for grief of some kind just because that is the representation that has been the loudest in media. I almost want to say that it does not differ though, not really. Yet it also does. It is important to distinguish that though for the people who collect dolls to deal with grief and for people who exclusively use age regression roleplay for therapy. Someone who collects Reborn dolls for helping themselves cope with something is usually doing it because of the level of realism that these dolls can offer. For those people, a doll based on a fictional character may feel disruptive to the therapeutic aspect of the roleplay because it can interrupt the realism in their view. So they may go out of their way to avoid collecting or even seeing dolls that break their preferred pattern. Those people might not want to be lumped in with people like me who turn to fictional characters as dolls for our coping mechanisms. I do think it's possible that agre regressors might be more welcoming to people in the Reborn hobby similar to myself at times but I doubt they would all count us as fellow age regressors because we do not get as immersive with it as they often do. For a Reborn doll and art doll collector like myself, the playtime might be enhanced with the use of a curated nursery room surrounding with a crib, a changing table, bassinets, blankets, toys, clothing, diapers, bottles, high chairs, etc. but it is all directly related to our Reborn dolls, whereas an age regressor may curate their bedroom into a young child's or teen's room and it may not stop there. They may act, dress and sound like the age they intend to represent for themselves while in their "little space" and I do not know of any Reborn dolly 'parents' who go that far. We more or less just wear what we are already wearing as our adult selves and spend a little time with one of our dolls.
11. Do you ever imagine your dolls responding to the care you give them? What do you imagine they’d say—or how they might change—if they could sense their surroundings? Yes, I do a bit of that at times. I enjoy imagining how their individual little personalities or preferences as characters would make them react. Each character, each doll would be different with different things though, so that would take a lot of explanation to really answer. For example, where Cain and Anne may feel to me like they would be happy to wear frilly dresses, Babi may not care or Vincent may outright reject the notion. There's a lot of possible varying reactions I could write about because I have around eight characters as dolls in my nursery.
12. What does “home” mean in the context of your nursery space? Is it about safety, softness, transformation, or rebellion against what was denied? I would say that it's mostly about safety to completely be myself and softness to comfort me after taking emotional spills. It could be argued that it is also a way that I can rebel against the path that I have been made to take in life to a degree but that is not what goes through my head while I am interacting with any one of my dolls most of the time. Usually, I look at whichever doll I am holding or roleplaying with and I think to myself that I am then in a space where I can openly express whatever might be on my chest and that in turn creates a softer feeling within me. A feeling of comfort. "Home", to me, has always been connected to safety and softness. When I was a child, "home" was a place where I could escape school bullies or the pressures of assignments (with the exception of homework), a place where I was guarded from strangers that might seek to hurt me. Safety. "Home" was also where I could cry freely in my mother's arms about anything that was upsetting me or forget my troubles with a good book or a video game. Softness. Comfort. Though my concept of home around that has shifted with things that have happened to me since that time in my life, my idea that "home" should be a place of safety and softness still persists. 
13. What does it mean to mother something that isn’t alive—but feels emotionally real? Is that motherhood, caretaking, creation, or something altogether different? This is a difficult question to answer for most people in the Reborn doll hobby who roleplay for therapeutic reasons. I think most of us would hesitate to call it "motherhood" but a few of us in my experience have anyway. It is not "motherhood" in the traditional sense of taking care of someone or something that is living and growing... at a glance. The odd thing is, we are taking care of someone that is living and growing through our engagement with this hobby- ourselves. So you could make the argument that the therapeutic aspects of the hobby help provide us with tools to 'mother' ourselves through our dolls and some people have made that argument already. In effect, this is not motherhood yet it is at the same time. Not motherhood in regards to raising an actual baby but motherhood in the way that it can help us to heal and mother ourselves. This goes for a wider spectrum of collectors and artists in the hobby than simply the odd ones out like me, who collect and roleplay with pre-existing fictional characters. 
14.  Does your nursery rewrite canon stories—or gently amend them? Is it resistance? Redemption? Or simply a safer place for the stories to rest? Depends on the origin of the character for me. If the character is one of my OCs, it's pretty much guaranteed that I am writing an extension to a canon story and using that to amend them in some degree. However, if the character in question comes from a pre-existing piece of media I love, such as a film or a TV series, I'm probably just sitting with the existing story for that character while I comfort them (and myself by extension) but there are some such characters for which that might not be the case. Casper for example. Even as a little girl, I felt the ending of the 1995 film was a little unfair to him and Kathleen, so now in my nursery, Casper gets to exist in a doll form that presents him as if he is living and I will soon be having Kathleen custom made to join him here, making it so that in the space of my nursery at least, they do not ever have to be parted by death. I don't know that I would call this resistance though, as I love the stories that were already written quite a lot just the way they are. Maybe it is instead redemption but even that's a stretch to claim, because I do not feel I am redeeming most of my characters with this either. It is also not a place for these stories to rest. It is instead a place for me to continue playing with resuming these stories for myself in a space and a way that is healing for myself.