March 16th, 2009: In which Elizabeth consoles herself with treasure, Anna teaches Lyra the fine art of self-defense, The Littlest Edward struggles to maintain his composure, and Fugagorn is observant.

She did at least a couple of times, although I kind of wanted to shake her because she's visibly torn between the handsome, strapping Ranger of Ithilien who’s crazy about her and the eternal seventeen-year-old half her size WHO DOESN’T EVEN CARE. What IS that? Is it just that she thinks that he could care someday in some crazy alternate universe, and that his hypothetical future caring would be worth more because she had to "earn" it? Or because she’s just intrigued by what the caring of a gloomy joyless whiny brooding loner like him would possibly be like seriously, E, I can't even tell you what a lost cause this is? Is it just that the sparkle is always greener on the other side? I’d tell Faramir to act more like Edward and play hard to get, but I’m afraid that’d backfire like whoa and it’d be all my fault. And also, I don't think he has the hair for it.

Featuring

• Anna Dollerious
• Eowyn

• Purple Arwen

• White Arwen

• Fugagorn, the Fug of Men

• Ellowyne Wilde
• Elizabeth Swann
• Helm's Deep Aragorn
• Lyra Silvertongue (and Pan)
• Iorek
• Faramir One
• Faramir Two
• The Littlest Edward

Notes

• In the picture of Edward counting change, the pink lacy thing in the background is a three-foot-tall porcelain doll, handmade for me about fifteen years ago by a friend of my mother's. Beautiful Victorian/Edwardian dress, hat with feathers, long sausage curls, the whole works (I named her Elizabeth Rose). It's also the kind of doll that tends to scare the hell out of doll-phobic people, as a number of readers have identified themselves. (Apparently posable "character figures" (as Tonner, for example, tends to call them) don't weird them out so badly.) So I'm careful not to show this doll in any of the pictures.

• White Arwen is reading The Secret Garden.

Icons

See also

• Dolls

• The Secret Life of Dolls