“Fascinated with peril” is one of the best descriptions of kids being Like That

Fanfic writers have just not grown our of that state of mind, we just channel into words

I vividly remember freezing mlp toys in a tub of water and having other mlp toys go ice skating and seeing the dead bodies in the ice

That's why the Sims is theeeee best thing ever. You dress up, build a wonderful house and then the drama/thriller starts 🎉

As a former little girl, we love to play games where something terrible and traumatizing and fucked up happens to the toy characters but "they get saved at the end so it's okay"

I had a male doll and I imagined that the mafia is after him, so he had to cross-dress to hide from them.

When I was little, I made a (mostly) historically accurate dunking stool and dug a little "lake" in the garden so I could play witch trials with my dolls.

I put my dolls in a wedding soap opera that makes drama shows look like a preschool kid wrote it.

I loved playing “Princess fashion show” and “dance recital”, but I also loved playing “torture the hostage for information”

I remember giggling maniacally while waterboarding a Snow White doll

I had Ballet Sindy as a kid. I used to twist her legs in opposite directions, then let them go like a helicopter! Eventually her legs fell off, so I built her a wheelchair and accessible house out of Lego. I went on to be a Disability Access Advisor, so perhaps it was destiny!

My Barbies could be living out your average teen movie plot one week and surviving a brutal robot apocalypse the next.

i remember vividly making my polly pockets escape from an abusive home life. shit was crazy

i once had my disney princesses fight in a war and Cinderella died in battle and to symbolize that i took her dress off and all the princesses were just sitting around her dress talkin’ about “her sacrifice won’t be in vain” 😭

I made entirely new wardrobes out of tinfoil and toilet paper and they were warrior Barbie’s. They battled the Pollypockets and stepped on all of them like huge giants. I also made a similar fashion decision with moss, leaves and mom’s kitchen twine. Then I made my Barbies sleep overnight in the stone wall behind my house. They were cavemen Barbies. My cat was the saber tooth tiger. It was amazing.

Reminds me of when I first heard of the "Saw" franchise and my internal response was "Oh, yeah, that thing I used to do with my Polly Pockets."

As a single father of a daughter this is incredibly helpful.

My niece played "crucify Barbie" to demonstrate what she learned in Sunday school this Easter. Fantastic stuff

I never had fashion dolls bc i didn’t like them but i had tons of horse/pony toys. I had this giant walking horse that was the horse queen and she regularly executed the other horses by throwing them off a cliff (my dresser). At one point my applejack toy tried to poison her with an apple like in snow white but she got caught and thrown off the cliff, but she survived and came back with an army to take over the castle. There was also a plot where the queens daughter was kidnapped and replaced as a baby and she came back to fight the imposter in a death match and take control of the throne. The horse queen was eventually executed via guillotine and balance was restored to the horse kingdom lol

i remember a popular story line with my barbies was since i only had one ken doll but multiple barbies, they would fight over ken. there would be cheating, divorce, baby traps, and girl fights. it was iconic.

"I thought you described her as sugar and spice!" ". . . Capsaicin's a spice."

“Burned at the stake” 😂 yeah I had my barbies doing backflips and high kicks.

She was my favorite as a child. She stood up to abusers, And I’ve done that from childhood, too. Love her sm

When my daughter was a child I’d come home from work and find Barbie dolls tided up and hung by nooses around their necks and all their hair cut off….all over my house. From the ceiling fans, kitchen cabinets, bed frames, shower rod, everywhere 😩🥴🙈 thank god she’s a very normal well adjusted woman now. Bc for a few years I was a little concerned.

I've seen my little ✨boy✨ cousins horrified at my little sister playing with her Barbies as if they were G.I. Joes, yet they were trying to just play house with there super heroes😂😂😂

Yup, you got little girls right lol. When I was younger I'd ALWAYS make my favourite characters suffer just to be saved later after a traumatizing experience. I love angst.

My stories were always a group of girls living with each other, then a guy moved into their mansion and they all fought over him, hunger games style until one person got him and the others were killed and reborn as random pedestrians

Me and my sister always did "crossover' games where we had the stuffed animals play with the barbies and usually the barbies enslaved the stuffed animals and put them on display in zoos because they didn't realize they had human levels of intelligence. I specifically remember using ribbons and shoelaces as "chains" on the stuffed animals necks and they were carted away on the backs of barbie cars

Oh, no, don’t get me wrong. I WAS one of those girlies who loved to brush the doll’s hair and change their outfits and make them pretty. But I was ALSO creating various plots of backstabbings and exile and forbidden romance and fierce battles. They just looked fabulous doing it is all.

My Barbies went through messy divorces and had gay awakenings, my littlest pet shops had wars where soldiers were often captured and tortured for information, my Polly pockets were spies hiding in my pockets trying to get information on how to kill me and take over my body, my bratz had formed a tyranny that was entirely women-ran where they often sacrificed random men and left them in the town square as a message to anyone else who thought to stand out of line, and then my monster high dolls lived happy healthy lives with healthy relationships and communication. I absolutely love the fact that the dolls the elder generation of my family feared, and claimed would lead to violence and Satan worship, were the sole toys I played with where everything was sunshine and rainbows. 😂

I always put cotton balls under my Barbie's dresses & made them go through labor & delivery often. The babies usually died, Barbie died in labor a lot as well.

I remember when I was so fixated on the phrase “string you up by your toes” that all my Barbie’s were in a string spiderweb that laced through my room. 😂

Let's be honest here....we were all tiny semi-psychos with our dolls 😂

I will always remember whenever me and a friend would play with dolls, we would always pause as any parents or adults walked by. We weren't even scared of their reactions or anything, we just somehow knew silently between each other like a universal child rule that the adults would be expecting cartoonishly wholesome stories in play and that they would just not be ready for the truth.

As kids my friend and I (both girls) used to play werewolfs, demons, fighters, have misterious secrets and crazy love triangles with our barbies.. we both had an action man and a Mulan barbie doll, and they would always fall madly in love.. my guy her girl and the other way round.. There would always be a reason they couldnt be together, but i would alsways work out in the end.. And sometimes, on few occations we would dress them in big lacy dresses and pretent we went back in time to like 1800s.. like bridgeton time.. and have all crazy scandelous things happen.. it was a good time.. and we could play for hours sometimes days in the same story.. great time

This is FUNNY AF!!! This is so relatable! Can’t even describe the awful things my lil Barbie got up until I was a tween… and PLS BELIEVE Ken & Skipper met the same fate😂😂😂😂

I had a Ken doll deemed something along the lines of “underwear man” who lived in the dollhouse’s bathroom, wore no clothes, and was hated by everyone 😂

"These children are ..sugar, spice, ans everything nice.....and are feral little monsters" 😂 THE ACCURACY.

My sister had that exact Esmeralda doll. I also played "burnt at the stake" by putting her in a lamp shade with the light on. I forgot, the family left, came home and the doll was charred. Sister cried, i laughed, got grounded. Great memory!

As a 7-10 year old child I had a whole plot about one girl getting on the magical shoes she couldn’t get off her feet, so then the magical portal appeared and the got dragged into other realm by masked people. They got trapped and in front of them appeared a girl looking the same as the main character, but she had a big violet scar all over her body (made of plasticine). She wanted to take the shoes off by force by cutting the other girls legs, because they granted a really big power, and the main character accidentally had stolen them. They escaped and for the whole plot tried to find a way to take the shoes off. Also it turned out that the girl looking the same as main character was her from a different timeline. This whole universe was. Different timeline. They met other people similar to them whose were crazy like in the Alice in the wonderland vibe. One of them was completely animal like and was a monster even and tried to kill them. The girl with a scar had it cause she got cursed and that scar was turning her evil. And the main character also got that scar cause obviously they were one person from different timelines. She hid it from the others for most of the story cause she was really into handling things on her own and that was her main flaw and that’s why she suffered and it backfired when she got possessed by it. The evil twin was always like “we are the same” “soon you will understand and give me the shoes” “we are one person I’m just ahead in time” etc. Main character tried to pursue her to free from the curse. She saw the good in her. The other never listened. They fought for so long. But… in an arc where they fought in a volcano similar to the Mordor in Lord of the rings, the evil one had changed. When everything was collapsing and they all would die she after a long battle inside her mind won over her curse for a moment. The plasticine was taken off. She could be herself. She threw herself into the volcano as a sacrifice to the gods so the others will have more time to escape their rage. It was her final moment. I remember creating it for months with frickin dolls 😭😭😭

My unicorn ended up in jail and her unicorn friends had to break her out. There was an elaborate Mission Impossible style escape sequence. They should sell doll sized jails, stakes with faux bonfires, handcuffs, etc 👍 I remember that SNL skit, My Little Step Child, where kids could role play the evil step parent. I would've bought that doll 100%

Ngl, this is really nice to hear. I genuinely thought I was just a sick minded child compared to everyone else.

It’s funny because as a child I was fully feral and had elaborate storylines but when I was a preschool attendant and played dolls with my students I really enjoyed the fashion and hair play 😂

When I was a kid, my twin brother and I would find violent and disturbing ways to play with our Legos. We made a “Sled War”, where he would make Lego sleds and bash them into each other by throwing them down the hallway. We, after reading the Hunger Games books when they first came out, also once made a “Cornucopia” and reenacted the bloodbath. We were strange.

My Barbies' lives should have been both murder mysteries and soap operas for how much drama there was 💀

Dude! I’m so happy someone is talking about this!! The imaginary scenarios always got so dark with Barbies!! Like my friends and I used to play out kidnappings/death/ghosts/abuse/betrayal/lust/adultery/fraud/manipulation ..little girls aren’t all pink and sparkles 😂

i used to bring my littlest pet shops into the pool on this big aircraft carrier ship toy and do dramatic titanic recreations. The fun part was the ship actually floated and sank really realistically, so i could tip it over slightly and it would start very slowly sinking while i made my bobbleheads say their last goodbyes and get into drama

Ooh I remember this! I used to have my dolls fight, hitting them at each other, biting, scrating and kicking each other. My ballerina barbie was some sort of transforming super hero (by transforming- I meant just pulling off her tutu skirt and leaving her with just her leotard on), while my Vet barbie was a heinous super villain who uses her cats and dogs to attack and maul people alive. I remember drawing bruises with washable markers to make it seem "realistic". I think my mom noticed cause she didn't let me open any more barbies out of their boxes LMAO.

I definitely played with them as “fashion dolls” but my parents were nurses so there were definitely some, “died in childbirth” days.

I’ll still never forget the look on my moms face when she walked in my room and found me standing with all my Barbies, Bratz, and stuffed animals sitting lined up on my bed while we watched my Dylan doll (male Bratz) swing on the ceiling fan. She asked wtf I was doing and I just went “he’s being punished” and went back to watching him. She shut the door and didn’t come back in 💀💀😭 He’d been two timing one of my bratz and one of my Barbie’s WHILE he had a pregnant wife and toddler at home smh. (Yes I did have the pregnant Barbie). He was ostracized for a month and got banned to the bottom of the toy box I was ruthless

i used to make up stories in my head so my parents wouldn't hear what I was saying. it mostly involved sad stories and a lot of talent shows provided by my radio xD (couldn't risk letting my parent see me making my dolls kiss.)

I used to play surgery, and every time, the same thing happened, and it went in this order. Ow im in pain, oh no! I need emergency surgery. Everything is going fine in surgery. She flatlines, and we can't get her back. That's it no good ending or anything. I remember this because it was one of my favorites.

I used to love playing “go to war and die dramatically” Those toys were breaking their limbs and sacrificing their lives on the battle field; i had fun ❤

The fact that some of my barbie doll play sessions had more drama than a soap opera 😂

That vintage Esmeralda is exactly like the one I had! I was thinking of that doll as I was watching this and nearly squealed when I saw her! It was my favorite doll. She had a soft body so she could move a lot more fluidly than the other dolls and I would make her dance all the time. I still think she is one of the most gorgeous Disney characters of all time!

My older sister forced Esmeralda to be the maid of the other princesses (I think we had snow white, ariel and Cinderella) but our gameplay always had a breaking point where Esmeralda would get fed up and violently get revenge over the other princesses who slaved her.

as a kid i loved dressing up my dolls and decorating their “houses” to make them pretty and nice and then make them act out messy telenovela scenes, they committed murder so many times lmao

Growing up and hearing other people talk about this has been so weirdly healing for me. Even as a little girl, I thought something was deeply wrong with me because I did this. I had really serious trauma early on in my childhood and always thought it had messed me up so badly that I couldn't just be normal and brush the dolls' hair like other little girls, I had to come up with all these morbid perilous scenarios. Now I know that I was traumatized, yes, but also behaving well within the realm of normalcy for girls my age.

I played with them how they were intended to, because when I was younger, I liked everything to be done “the right way”. So it spilled over to my play time, which included lining up things in rows. Never knew why I did it, I guess it was the extreme perfectionism that I still have to this day.

I used to have INTENSE arguments with my sister over which dolls were allowed to be killed off vs put into a coma vs injured. Like there was a distinct hierarchy in my mind and a complex equation to rank which were my favourites and would be spared altogether, whilst others suffered.

I use to make them sit at a table for a family reunion and it always ended it as a murder mystery party.

I had the pregnant Barbie doll when I was little, and I remember my cousin used to make her 'miscarry' a lot when we were playing. Or she'd have mental breakdowns about not knowing who the father was (I had 3 Kens).

Me and brother always played with LPS (Littlest Pet Shop) and everytime it stared off innocent, like them in a normal highschool, until they either get stranded in the middle of nowhere during a field trip or a zombie apocalypse would start-and it’d suddenly become a gritty story of survival. The LPS would divide into rival clans that’d fight and kill each other, with forbidden romance and brutal bloody war. Pretty fond memories ngl

Can confirm. I used to dismember my Barbie dolls and have my stuffed animals go on scavenger hunt’s to find all the body parts while they figured out who killed her

This is legitimatly the best comment section I've ever seen. I relate to it all so much.

My barbies went through so many divorces and physical violence

I used to play with dolls half the way they were intended, swapping their clothes and brushing and doing their hair, to facilitate playing out stories about kidnapping and human experimentation, I remember really loving exploring the concept of dehumanization before I knew that was a thing, and this still reflect in my reading choices

my best friend as a kid was pretty well-off and had a lot of barbie accessories (bunch of clothes, the dream house, pets, moped, the works). specifically, she had a barbie car. so what was my favorite game to play when we were at her house? “barbie car crash” of course! lots of fun for little girls and boys alike

As a former little girl, I was obsessed with the idea of being socially isolated from one’s community. My little pet shops were miserable. Loved those days. ☺️

I used to have a dollhouse aswell, and my favourite thing to do was “Ken and Barbie get into a fight, get divorced, huge court scene for the kids, Ken gets depressed, drunk drives and then gets into a car crash”

I had a Cinderella doll that somehow lost a leg and her clothes. She became “one legged itchy witchy” and was the evil witch in everyone of my games. It was so much fun!

I remember playing with my littlest pet shops and deciding one of the cats' children were systematically kidnapped by cannibals and replaced with robot duplicates, but no one believed her so she went crazy.

I'm so glad someone acknowledged that little girls are also kids who like destruction and mayhem

100% true. I always got so bored when people played with Barbies in what I would consider a “boring” way… like “let’s go to the mall!” No! My Barbie was lost in the woods, falling off the roof, getting in a car wreck, etc. 😂 maybe I had issues but I wanted DRAMA!

This is so real. Me and my sister used to play a game where our bratz dolls enslaved the lps and created a whole camp out of bricks, then staged an uprising 😭 no questions please

When I was a little girl, I was a Littlest Pet Shop girl, and my god, with the story lines I came up with, 8 year old me could've been a writer on East Enders

I used to love to make a “opposite” zoo where my stuffed animals would go see the different Barbie’s in their enclosures . 🤣🤣

I used to play “ken on the prairie” all the time with my friends where Barbie was a hard working farmer and ken was her wife/husband. He wore a old styled dress.

i remember pretending my favorites got thrown out of their houses into the woods in the middle of winter with no clothes so they'd get hypothermia and almost die, and then make one of the other dolls find them half alive in the snow and rescue them. it was my favorite story line

I used to put baby dolls in big salad bowls and ‘put them into a river’ like in the opening scene of prince of Egypt 😂😂😂😂

i always gave my dolls the most dramatic and tragic lives. like, 6 divorces, dead parents, the works

Nearly all my Barbies ended up looking like they were trying to survive in a Post Apocalyptic Wasteland. Full Mad Max.

“Peril and fear and violence” It’s the drama. My Barbies were constantly finding out about evil twins, who their real fathers were, discovering the horrific secret behind the mysterious haunting of the Barbie car.

Absolutely! And my Barbie was in film scenarios all the time. Sometimes the stories were dark. I asked for this educational toy called Anatomy 2000 which was basically a human body exploration, with a skeleton. And that skeleton was only a little bigger than Barbie and much fun was had all around. I grew up to love horror cinema.

One of my favorite Barbie scenarios as a kid was having my dolls board the "Titanic." Yes, I was a 90's kid and no, Ken usually never made it 😅

I loved playing “single mother with her baby ✨in thee olden days✨ all alone in a snowstorm, about to die from hypothermia”

I used to pretend my dolls and stuffed animals were in a cult, and there were a few who were consistently plotting how to escape.

My Belle doll was a single mother who abandoned her 11 children to be a fashion designer. She visisted from time to time and gave them money, but the oldests (the quadruplets, three barbies and one ken) were sixteen and had to take care of their younger siblings and they all lived in a trailer home

I used to put "makeup" on my Barbies with markers and pens. I was adding some "mascara" to one before her wedding day and the pen exploded all over her face, so that was the day Barbie tragically died before her wedding, leaving Ken broken-hearted and devastated at the altar 😂

I cannot express how often I turned wicker backets into jail cells and cages for my dolls. My grandma had a decorative bird cage and it was my favorite thing in the world when we would visit her. My dolls rarely knew freedom lol

I think Made-To-Move Barbies facilitate perfect dolls for this kind of peril fascination, but we need the play sets to match!

I used to dress up my barbie dolls in the most fashionable fits, brush their hair (I dyed them even), and set up their house. Then, I gave them race cars and sent them to fight a war with my lego figurines. It was not my fault that the legos started a whole a hate propaganda against "the giant species".

I had a friend when I was younger that would "crucify" her barbies and then I'd have to attend the doll's funeral

As a dad of three girls this is pretty accurate all my kids have different personality types but when they play dolls it almost always goes from tea and weddings to a full on witch trials.

Kidnapping, Natural Disasters, homeless shelter, and tieing a Maleficent doll up with string floss and taping her to the roof of the Crystal Empire Castle was my childhood until my parents found out where the floss kept going.

Oh yeah, we used to play blood and guts barbie. Arguably the most fun way to play with Barbies.

The amount of ‘private time’ my dolls had was actually crazy

"oh, they're probably playing dress up or smth :)" "MISS LADY UNICORN YOU ARE ON TRIAL FOR FIRST DEGREE MURDER AND TWELVE COUNTS OF ARSON"

Dolls are a great way for kids to reenact new experiences, emotions and problem solving in a safe controlled environment. Most of the time the emotions and situations they explore are ones they’re not familiar with, like grief, terror, romance, sex, fear, rebellion etc. it’s a totally normal and healthy tool for them to teach themselves in a safe way how to navigate new things.

Never forget my step-father walk in to ask in horror why my doll was hanging by the neck with a shoe-string. To which I responded something like "oh that's where she went to!", and proceeded to explain she kidnapped a child, for which there was a public hanging.