Hey guys! Sorry for the post so late at night - I’m sure most of you guys won’t be seeing this until the morning tomorrow, but I figured I’d post anyway.
I was thinking about some of the false rumors I have heard about dolls that American Girl has released, only for them to NOT be true when the doll actually came out. Usually, the rumors for the historical dolls are pretty spot-on, but with the Girls of the Year, rumors are more commonly wrong. Here’s a few Girl of the Year rumors that turned out to be wrong:
Lanie has a connection to Ethiopia. Girl of the Year 2010 Lanie’s author, Jane Kurtz, lived with her parents in Ethiopia from when she was 2 years old to when she was in her 20s, so some AG fans suspected Lanie would have a connection to Ethiopia or another African country. This proved to be the opposite when it came to Lanie - Lanie’s stories were all about finding the adventure in her own backyard!
Saige, Grace and Lea are going to be dolls of color. For three different reasons, Saige, Grace and Lea were initially rumored to be dolls of color - all stemming from their movies. Starting with Saige, Girl of the Year 2013, New Mexico, where it leaked she was going to be from due to her movie being shot there. New Mexico has a high Hispanic/Latine population, so there were theories Saige was going to be Latina, but that proved not to be the case, as Saige is a white redhead. Then, two years later, when they were filming Grace (Girl of the Year 2015)’s movie in 2014, pictures leaked of Olivia Rodrigo, who played Grace, on set with the girls who played Maddy and Ella. Her exact ethnicity couldn’t be determined from the picture (Olivia is mixed race, half-white and half-Filipino), but I suspected Grace to have the same skin tone as Olivia - and then, I was wrong. Lastly, the casting call for Lea’s movie in 2015 (for release in 2016) asked specifically for girls of mixed heritage to apply, and the mini doll that leaked of her around the same time had darker skin than the actual Lea doll, so we assumed she would be mixed. She technically was mixed - but we weren’t expecting only 1/8th Brazilian. Luckily, we finally got 2 dolls of color to be Girl of the Year after that - Gabriela and Luciana - and then got Corinne and Kavi a few years after that.
Kavi is going to be a poet. This one’s on me, guys - I did the name research, and found that Kavika, her full name, had a connection to poetry. So the entire time, we expected a poet - only to get a theater kid instead. Blame me for this one, lol!
Are there any other false rumors that you remember about Girls of the Year? (Besides Tenney being rumored to be GOTY 2017 - we all know that story!)