New doll time!
This is a continuation from my prior post discussing my thought process leading up to getting Reda Venir from Volks, and it's more image-heavy than usual...but this is an unboxing, so I'd hope so! Click each picture to see the fullsize version.
Friday, May 15th, 7:30 P.M.: I was sitting on my friend Nova's couch, phone in hand, half-watching an episode of Frieren in between the occasional Volks JP refresh. I knew the clickwar wasn't scheduled til 8, but this was my first time trying for one of the Super Dollfies, and I had no idea what to expect, especially since the scheduling had been a little strange for this one. Not only had the JP after-Dolpa event been announced later than usual (late enough that even Volks US had posted about their plans to sell their allotment of Dolpa items before JP did, which I'd never seen), it was also the first one I'd seen with a staggered schedule for drops - the clothes and Dollfie Dreams had been up on the site since 7! So I was a little anxious. Enough to do it at Nova's house, since she had fiber internet and understood the stakes.
Frieren ended, and with 15 minutes to go, we didn't put on another, instead filling the time with some idle conversation...I got laughed at a little when I cut myself off mid-sentence to wildly refresh as soon as the clock hit 8. The next 2 minutes were extremely tense - the clickwar, as the name implies, is a race to be among the first to add a doll to your cart, check out, and pay for it. Websites crash. Tears are shed. It's intense. So...this one felt a little anticlimactic when I managed to get him on my first try!
He sold out four minutes later.
The wait for him to ship was agony. With a typical preorder resin doll, I knew I'd be waiting at least 3 months, but usually more like 6-12, for it to be cast, sanded, wrapped, and shipped over, so I could sit and be patient just fine. But stock from Dolpa was already cast and finished, Volks just had to get through their shipping backlog to ship it out - which, for those who know how a doll preorder goes, is like when the doll finally gets a shipping label from the dealer. Even if you'd been waiting for 6 months already, that last two weeks is always the longest two weeks.
I spent each day at work anxiously checking my email in between looking up pictures of him on Twitter from Japanese owners who'd gotten him from Dolpa (I printed out a few to look at while I waited) and window shopping for outfits, and I was very pleasantly surprised by the shipping email when it came in 6 days later. Not even a full week! 3 days after that, thanks to the incredible speed of DHL Express and my own impatience leading me to tell them I'll just pick it up from the nearest service point instead of having them deliver it (which both let me skip signature shenanigans and cut a day off the delivery estimate, very good to know), I walked out of the DHL building with a 3 foot long box and a spring in my step.
And, rather than wait until I got home (I had errands to run, and that'd add another hour minimum to my wait!), I proceeded to do the unboxing right there in my car like some kind of doll gremlin, posting it live to my Discord friends.
The first thing I noticed was that my poor car's passenger seat was only barely big enough to fit this box. I had to contort myself into some fun angles to get this thing to lay mostly flat, and turning it around was a process in and of itself. I'm persistent, though, and was happy to finally get it open and see...a second box! Volks doesn't mess around with packing their Super Dollfies, and I'm grateful both for the extra security around Redda's actual box and the fact that I basically got two doll-sized shipping boxes for one. Those are a real pain to find, and I always need some for my secondhand sales endeavors!
There it is, a beautiful Interstellar Dormitory box. The doll is pictured right there on the front with the sculpt name, and the whole box has an embossed texture to it reminiscent of leather. It's not the highest quality doll box I've ever handled, but it's up there among the prettiest. Very on-theme.
Aww, they used my favorite picture of him on his paperwork! I said I liked glasses boys, but this pose with his glasses off so he can hold them instead is really cool, making good use of his side glance eyes. This was probably the picture that sold me on the doll.
This was everything piled on top of the doll - his hands, a box containing his glasses, his wig, and his full outfit, including shoes. I bought an SD16 via Volks US's Online FCS last year, so I knew approximately how they packed their dolls, but I didn't remember default hands getting packed separately like this. A way to keep the fingers from breaking?
The shoes surprised me - they're HUGE! My only experience with Volks dolls had been DDs, SDs, and SD16, all of which can share shoes. 17 is a huge step up, much closer to Zhen's 73 cm body's feet than a Dollfie Dream's. The hands were close to that size as well, now that I was really looking at them...but I didn't really mind either much. I knew what I was getting into!
Small side note, I love this part of the outfit so much. The whole outfit is neat, and I love that each doll size in this series gets a different variation of the same uniform. The outfit I had for my vinyl dolls is the SD size released with Michele, which has shorter pants, a one piece poncho-style coat, and a wallet chain with stars on it. The SD17 coat is sleeveless and has a detachable cape, which offers a lot more versatility in styling, and the star decoration that comes with it is this cute chain that hangs across the cloak, with the star dangling down from it. It's so pretty. I like the SD one a lot, but this one's coat is much cooler.
With the accessories out of the way, onto the main event!
Hiiiii, gorgeous! Oh boy, they packed you up like you're going to the hospital...
I was very nervous about the SD17 body - I've heard conflicting things about it across the hobby spaces I frequent. Some people hate it. Some people love it. I've heard it's a good stander. I've heard it's solid and poses well. I've heard its double joints are an early style. I've heard it has trouble sitting. I've also heard it compared to SD16, which terrified me (I hate the SD16 body, it's so finicky). I wasn't sure what to expect.
First impressions were...it's fine. Definitely very solid and heavy, but the pre-installed silicone disks in the joints seemed to work well with it, and the hip sockets had a bit of grippiness cast into them that seemed promising. Not my favorite doll body, but certainly not as bad as SD16 at all. I could live with it.
But I didn't think about it too much - I needed to dress my boy, stat!
Man, having seen the underwear they give limited Dollfie Dream boys, Volks really cheaped out on the undies for SD17. Plain thin white cotton, akin to the materials porcelain doll bloomers are made out of. Not even a nice waistband, just a gathered one around the elastic! Better than nothing, though.
Getting the shirt on was fun. You have to button it up by sliding the pearl bead buttons through elastic loops, which were not very fiddly at all thanks to their stretchiness. He's got 2 buttons on each sleeve cuff and 5 on the shirt itself, and the design was clearly made like that so it was both easy to fasten and looked nice when unfastened. Regulus, the other SD17, had a couple product photos showing exactly that - Volks decided he's the type of character that adheres to dress codes reluctantly.
I continue to be a fan of how Volks does pants. These have a side closure consisting of one snap and then two hooks that fit into a corresponding loop of thread. The top hook has a couple loops to choose from, so you can adjust the pants' tightness if needed. I'm a fool that doesn't know how suspenders work, so I put those on him the hard way, by completely pulling out each suspender from its buckle, wrapping it over each shoulder, and painstakingly rethreading it back through. It was a pain. Don't do that. You're supposed to just flip them upside down so they hang down over the pants as you pull the pants up, then once the pants are on, flip them back up and thread the arm through as you do. Once I figured that out, redressing him was so much easier.
Oh, and you can see something I appreciate from Volks poking out of the left arm - the S hooks for the hands are designed to sit in these little divots in the wrists when the hands are off, making it easy to dress your doll with the hands off and easy to swap hands since you don't have to maintain a grip on the elastic to keep from losing it down the channel. Convenient!
I completely forgot about his scarf, so that's not included in the dressing pictures...but here's the coat! Unlike the SD version, this coat zips up, which I'm not sure I like. The hook and eye closure on the SD version looks a lot nicer unfastened and let you play around with partially fastening it. Oh well.
The cape fastens to the shoulders with hooks on thread loops, and the cape chain attaches with lobster clasps to some different thread loops just in front. The star's at a good dangly length. Cute.
I had to put him back in the box so I could huck his giant cushion into the back seat and give myself more room to work with. I love the zippered cushion Volks sends with their dolls, it's a useful swaddle during travel so they don't get knocked around, but man is it huge when unzipped. While I was at it, I put his shoes on. They fit his giant feet nicely, not too loose or too snug!
With him fully dressed at last, I finally took his face protector off to get a good look at his head and put his wig on. This wig stopper is a very controversial recent change Volks made. There's this one right on top of the head, and one near the nape of the neck. They're intended to keep wigs from falling off, as Volks's heads are notoriously slippery (they actually sell a silicone ring to apply to the head to keep a wig on), but they only really work with certain kinds of wigs. I intend to keep Redda in his default wig, so they didn't really bother me (I kinda like not having to choose between fighting to keep his wig on, or fighting to get it on over the silicone), but doll owners who prefer tighter wigs or lace fronts hate them, they completely ruin how the wig fits and looks. Luckily, they seem easy enough to sand off...it just sucks that you have to do that, especially if you bought the doll not knowing that and have the wig all ready to go. Stopping to sand these off would be awful.
Free from baldness! Straight out of the package, this wig is pretty nice! I can't get it to lay nearly as nice as the product photos, but I didn't have any wig mist or anything to smooth it out, so of course I can't. His bangs still sweep away from his face like they're supposed to, and he still looks cute, so I'm happy with it. I especially like his hair color, now that I can get a good look at it. It's hard to describe, sitting somewhere between blonde and a matcha green. Definitely a unique color. I may need to add his default wig to my wishlist so I can have some hairstyle options without swapping wig colors. I really like it.
Also, take a moment to really appreciate his face. Scroll back up. Or, heck, take a break and go look at his gallery real quick. He's charming!
Less charming are his glasses. I own a couple pairs of Volks's glasses from their Jewelry Box line (or if you read the box, Jewely Box...lol) and I've sung their praises constantly. Real metal, with lenses, nicely hinged, they just...exude quality. These...are plastic. Look at that big nasty seam line right at the top of the nose bridge. The whole thing, one piece of plastic. Lenses aren't removable. Arms aren't adjustable. Plastic. And apparently, all the Jewelry Box glasses from this Dolpa (a pink pair and a black pair, released along with the clothes from the event) are plastic, too! Why!? I'm incredibly disappointed, this feels like a real step back in quality. It's the one truly sour point of opening up this doll I otherwise really love. I was considering getting him some different glasses anyway, gold ones to better match his other accessories, and now I'll definitely have to.
Still...they look nice on him.
With Redda all dressed, I stuck the packaging back in the box and stuck the box in the back seat to deal with when I got home. For now, I had errands to run, and Redda would be right there with me for it! Buckled in, of course. For safety.
(Side note, buckling him in was a whole adventure. I now understand some of the complaints about this body - it was really hard to get the elastic into the proper channels in the thigh joints so he could sit! Sitting was hard! What!? And I found out later when changing his outfit that his underwear got all bunched up in his thigh joints from my attempts, which was annoying to fix and left them horribly wrinkled. Definitely something I'll have to figure out if I stick with this body, that's crazy.)
The following day, I brought the horns I'd settled on for him with me when I took him to work, and after installing some magnets, he was as complete as I could get him until his proper white horns arrived. I love this sculpt (Dragonborn by Synthetic Ephemera), their serpentine shape is really cool and I like how this orientation makes them sweep around the head like a little crown before pointing up into proper horns. Lovely!
With horns applied, my personal demon was here, ready to be a bad influence and convince me to spend all my fun money on him for a while. I'm excited to see what adventures we go on, and I hope you are too! Thanks for following along!