Monster High: The First Generation

In the early 2010s, fashion dolls such as Barbies and Bratz were everything a little girl could dream for and more. They dominated large sections of every toy aisle at every department store you walked into. During that same time period, there was also a rather prevalent explosion of emo (“emotional”) and scene culture that influenced different forms of media and would eventually lead to the creation of one of the edgiest fashion doll lines in the history of toy dolls.

The Rise of Emo and Scene Fashion

As previously mentioned, the early 2000s saw a rise of several emo and scene bands such as Jimmy Eat World, My Chemical Romance, Fallout Boy, Metro Station and Pierce the Veil. Not only did they popularize the music, but also popularized the culture and, most significantly to Monster High, the fashion of the time. 

Emo fashion is characterized by a moody, dark, grunge aesthetic. As described in the InStyle Article, “Emo Style Is Back,” “We saw blunt side-swept bangs, stacked leather cuffs, Doc Martens, studded belts, and color always grounded by black.” Emo was known as unconventional, niche, and even rebellious, demonstrated at the time by stars such as Avril Lavigne and Hayley Williams; it is still prevalent today, though often in different forms than seen in the 2010s. 

Scene fashion was somewhat similar to emo fashion. The Fashion Bean Article, “Scene Style Unleashed,” describes the fashion by writing, “Imagine skinny jeans paired with graphic band tees, topped off with a healthy dose of black eyeliner and a hairstyle that looks like it was attacked by a rabid straightener. It’s a look that’s equal parts punk rock and Hello Kitty, with a dash of ‘I’m so misunderstood’ thrown in for good measure.” That is to say, Scene fashion is emo’s more colorful cousin. This style could be seen back in the day with popular ‘scene queens’ like Kiki Kannibal and even still today, looking similar to its original form, from creators like @clawed_beauty101. 

These styles were not only popular for their connection to great music, but also for their connection to rebellion, which resonated and still does with many teens and tweens. Several fashion companies and store chains like Hot Topic capitalized on this, which also assisted on the popularity of scene and emo fashion. Of course, no one had considered creating anything like toys or dolls for this demographic. Fashion dolls had always been for the girlies and younger kids, after all. That was until Mattel, the creator of Barbie, started development on the concept of an edgier doll line marketed for tweens and teens; in comes Monster High. 

The Conception of Monster High 

Monster High is a fashion doll line inspired by emo and scene fashion as well as monster, sci-fi, and thriller films, along with general folklore, myths and pop culture monsters. Garret Sander is credited as the creator of and design manager of the original Monster High series, along with his brother, Darren Sander. Sander explained in a YouTube video, “Behind the Design of Monster High,” that he actually went shopping with teens to see what they were buying, finding that many of them were gravitating to edgier styles such as goth and emo.

With the understanding of teenagers’ newfound interest in these darker aesthetics, along with the inspiration of old monster movie stories, the brothers designed the main girls – or rather, ghouls – of Monster High. 

On the now defunct old website – which you can access via the wayback machine – you could find profiles for some of the ghouls, such as Frankie Stein who was the daughter of Frankenstien’s monster and is described as 15… days that is. Each character would have their own favorite color, food, pet peeve, a list of friends, and favorite school subjects. They even each had a self-described “freaky flaw”, such as Clawdeen complaining about the amount of hair on her body, Draculaura’s inability to function without a schedule, or even Cleo’s fear of the dark. 

Monster High famously launched without any dolls, instead marketing the website and web episodes with the commercial, “Higher Deaducation | Monster High,” which would become a smashing success. The web show was funny and the opening song, “Fright Song,” was catchy, with over 101 million views. 

With the love, care, and research put into the development of Monster High, there's no wonder why it exploded with popularity among tweens, teens, and even adult collectors. There is one group, though, that it managed to majorly miss the mark with - less edgier, more conservative parents.

Conservative Parents

You can’t please everyone, especially people who weren’t particularly keen on seeing their children grow interested in things that were outside of their normative, predated standards. While there aren’t particularly many archives of complaints about Monster High, there are some. For example, Melissa Wardy of Pigtail Pals explained how she told her daughter that Monster High was archived on not one but two sites, all the way from 2011.  She stated that the doll’s faces were “mean, not nice” and also expressed how unhealthily skinny the dolls looked. One particularly standout statement was, “I told her that girls who dress like that often don’t have full and happy hearts, and they use clothing like that to get attention and make themselves feel full.” She ended off the statement by saying, “...I tell myself there is no way in hell that dolls like Monster High or Bratz or hooker Barbies will end up in my home. I respect my children far too much to feed them a diet of garbage like that.”

While Melissa Ward’s thoughts on Monster High seem particularly extreme, it is not too unlike complaints many parents have about many fashion doll lines. Dolls often have body types that seem extreme, but fashion dolls in particular have bodies that are still “extreme”, but seem almost achievable. The concern is that children will yearn to look like these dolls, and dress like these dolls. Monster High had many complaints about the clothes being “too adult”, to put it nicely because of the style of clothes and how short some of the skirts of the dolls could be. The makeup of Monster High dolls was a particular point of contention, as not many doll lines had such dramatic makeup save for exceptions such as Bratz dolls, which were controversial in their own right. 

For the most part, though, conservative parents did not hinder the production of Monster high. Rather, the phone was ringing from inside the house. 

Executives Being Executives

There were already problems going into the creation of Monster High. For one, the executives wanted Frankie Stein, the daughter of the Monster of Frankenstein, who was famously green, to not have green skin, but, as Ball State Daily explains in this article, it actually ended up confusing some children in the initial tests that she wasn’t green. In the end, luckily, her skin did turn out green. 

Of course, there were issues with the color of some of the doll’s skin, particularly Clawdeen’s. Clawdeen was the darkest skinned character among the main characters and often ended up washed out in merchandise or had her skin color changed while everyone else such as in the Freak du Chic line of Monster high. Her sister, Howleen Wolf, faced similar problems but with her hair. Originally, she had orange, curly hair styled in a faux-hawk. Afterwards, though, her hair was suddenly pink, at most way and all the way down her back. It was changed, especially considering she was one of the only dolls with that hair type. Garret alleged in 2022 on his Instagram stories that Mattel had had it changed because they thought her original hair would not appeal to little girls, though I could not find any surviving screenshots of his stories outside of YouTube videos. 

Along with [allegedly] whitewashing the only POC-coded characters in the show, Mattel is known to have prevented Kieran Valentine from becoming the first explicitly queer character in the doll line. As the Ball State article puts it, “In 2015, Mattel also dismissed Garrett’s idea to have the character, Kieran Valentine, come out as gay. Garrett said at Power-Con that the executives felt it was not the right time. Being gay himself, Garrett was extremely disheartened by this response.” At the very least, Garret Sander was able to allude to it in Kieran’s dairy with the lines, “Meeting him totally made me space out and forget to send a text that was supposed to help Clawd. He asked if I went to MH (Monster High), and I said I was just visiting, but I would love to go to MH if I can. He said he'd keep me up on the groanings on around school if I wanted, so I gave him my number.” While Mattel has attempted to remedy this now, with a new line of comic books, New Scarmester, and their pride editions, it feels disingenuous at best.

As someone who is queer, reading the Monster High Pride 2024 feels like they’re simply trying to make up for the mistakes they made by confirming their relationship and Valentine “not liking ghouls” and Clawdeen’s relationship with Toralei Stripe, aka a lesbian relationship. I’m sure the individual creatives who created it poured buckets of love into the comic, but the media conglomerate behind it makes me feel like it was just a grab for cash.

The End of the First Generation

In 2016, the first generation of Monster High was rebooted, replacing the gothic ghouls with something more ‘child friendly,’ but would just kill the doll line’s reputation and fanbase. Besides the few comics that have come out and special collector dolls that have come out since, the original spirit of the dolls live on, albeit in a different form.