Lonely Doll Girl

At least they have good table manners.

"You want to know why I have a bunch of weird dolls of all the girls? I have a lot of time on my hands."

— Anemone, Sleepless Domain

A friendless female character who, to ease her loneliness, spends her time making or collecting dolls. Seeing her kneeling or sitting surrounded by her dolls, with a sad look on her face, adds to her Woobie factor.

Not always a child; in some cases, she's an adult with a Kitsch Collection. Though if she is a child, she might have doll tea parties to make up for the fact that she has no real friends to invite. She might be in the Princess Phase because she's a Lonely Rich Kid or imagining that she and the dolls just have to wait until her hero on his White Stallion would come to rescue her or she has a Changeling Fantasy of how her parents are actually royalty.

May or may not be dark and disturbing.

A sub-trope of Toy-Based Characterization. See Marionette Master, Baby-Doll Baby, Mummies at the Dinner Table, and Living Doll Collector for when the Lonely Doll Girl takes it too far.

Not to be confused with the The Lonely Doll series of picture books by author Dare Wright, in which the doll herself is lonely.

If you were looking for lonely girls with a "doll-like" quality, you may be looking for the Rei Ayanami Expy.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Usa-chan Hates Being Alone, but also tends to be clingy with friends, which means she had very few before joining the Rentarou Family. Chapter 172 reveals that in her downtime she talks to her favorite stuffed animal. Said stuffed animal has a playback function built into it, so she would essentially be talking to herself.
  Usa-chan: Hello there!
  Stuffed Animal: Hello there!
  Usa-chan: What are you up to today?
  Stuffed Animal: What are you up to today?
  Usa-chan: Who, me? Just lazing around!
  Stuffed Animal: Who, me? Just lazing around!
  Usa-chan: Oh, wow! Me too!
  Stuffed Animal: Oh, wow! Me too.
• Zigzagged with Mei Misaki in the horror novel Another and its manga and anime adaptation. Misaki is a mysterious member of class 3-3 who is apparently invisible to everyone except Kouichi Sakakibara, and due to her dollmaker mother's work, she lives in a creepy doll store. In reality, Mei has a fairly good relationship with her peers (the only one who straight-up dislikes her is Izumi), but she was chosen to be the annual "One Who Does Not Exist" to prevent the deaths of her classmates from the curse. Plus the kids from other classes aren't affected by the curse, so she can talk to them freely.
• Rei "Hana no Saint Juste" Asaka from Dear Brother, to a degree. We don't see her carrying dolls around 25/7, but the only "company" of sorts that she has in her apartment is her porcelain doll "Poupee-chan". Which doubles as a Tragic Keepsake as it's a gift from her abusive half-sister Fukiko, whom she's obsessively in love with.
• In the OP of the Descendants of Darkness TV series, there's a Rare Male Example: A young boy is seen touching a porcelain doll's face, picking it up and hugging it to his chest like a Security Blanket, and we see many other similar dolls are in the background. Said boy is a pre-teen Dr. Muraki, and the dolls are a part of his mother's enormous collection.
• Miranda Lotto from D.Gray-Man would collect broken dolls and fix them back when she lived in her hometown. Being a Butt-Monkey who was seen as useless, she hated to see things get abandoned. She certainly gives off a Lonely Doll Girl image in Chapter 24.
• Juvia from Fairy Tail had no friends as a child because it would always rain when she was around. In a few rather woobifying scenes, she's shown making dolls. Justified as the dolls are Teru-Teru Bōzu, which are supposed to stop the rain.
• One was featured in the "Solomon Grundy" chapter of Godchild; because of her heart condition, she lived alone with only the dolls she made for company until she took in an amnesiac young man, who she soon fell in love with. This being Godchild, it ended badly for both of them.
• Great Teacher Onizuka: To make up for her lack of friends, Tomoko plays with dolls, and treats them as Companion Cubes. One of her dreams is to have the largest doll collection in Japan.
• Anju Maaka from Karin, the titular Karin's little sister, is a vampire girl who has a doll... a fairly creepy one, of course.
• Sophie Montgomery from Lady Lady!, who cuddles with a pretty doll that's a gift from her emotionally-abusive mother.
• Creepy Child Laetitia from Madlax is first seen holding on her handmade doll, and she's shown with it several times. She's implied to take the doll with her when she's Happily Adopted as (her "creator") Margaret's little sister.
• Sabrina was this in the Pokémon: The Original Series. She turned Misty and Brock into dolls, just so she'd have some company, and carried around a doll that represented an innocent, childlike, and playful part of her personality.
• Princess Jellyfish:
  • Nomu, who views her Blythe dolls are her children and everyone else as "maggots" (though she does help the protagonists due to her skills in dressmaking).
  • Chieko is more of a downplayed case; she's obsessed with traditional Japanese dolls (who she refers to as her daughters) and doesn't like interacting with men or stylish people, but she's usually the Only Sane Man of the Amars and has the best social skills when having to interact with those outside their group.
• In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Kirsten is a Hikikomori witch with two doll familiars.
  • The spin-off Puella Magi Kazumi Magica had Mirai Wakaba, whose only friends growing up were her teddy bears.
• Another somewhat darker version, in the Sailor Moon anime is lonely girl Hotaru Tomoe (Sailor Saturn) who is supposed to be the Apocalypse Maiden who will destroy the world. In the original anime, she is often seen being taken over by the Mistress 9 persona in a dark room full of stuffed animals and dolls as her Mad Scientist father talks to her. At least once she would grab a stuffed animal and rip it apart while speaking.
• In Sakura Wars (2000), Iris Chateaubriand was a little Lonely Rich Kid with massive Psychic Powers, locked away in her room by her parents. When Ayame Fujieda went to recruit her, she found the kid all alone in her room with only her plush dolls for company. Even now, Iris is shy and withdrawn and often carries around her favorite teddy, Jean Paul, as her Security Blanket.
• In School-Live! it's revealed that, following a Sanity Slippage, Cool Big Sis Yuuri has begun hallucinating that a teddy bear is her little sister. As a result, she becomes The Load because her Big Sister Instinct is so strong that she'd do anything to protect Ruu.
• Genderflipped in Slayers NEXT. There's a legend about an abandoned tower where a handsome doll maker lived only in the company of the dolls he crafted and sold; after he fell in love obsessively with a Girl Next Door named Anne, he made a Deal with the Devil and transformed Anne into his personal Creepy Doll. Decades later, Lina and her group must enter the tower in search of the Bible of Clair, fighting the demonized man and Anne the Creepy Doll in a series of contests and riddles. In a subversion, the legend is actually a lie: the doll was the real demon, and the man that claimed to be the the dollmaker is a puppet controlled by said demon doll.
• Sunako from The Wallflower has two anatomical dolls that she considers to be her friends.
• A darker version in Witch Hunter Robin: the girl in question was a witch with multiple personalities manifesting through her dolls, personalities which considered any slight to her "unforgivable!"

Comic Books

• Gaja Perron from Lady Doll is rich and pampered, but has experienced rejection all her life due to a noticeable facial deformity, and she understandably assumes the worst of people on principle; as a result she only talks to and "listens" to her dolls, ragdoll Betty most especially, and believes them to be her only true friends. This belief is only exacerbated when her mother, the only person Gaja truly cares about, seemingly succumbs to her illness (in reality dealt the killing blow by her husband, who has been covertly poisoning her for years), prompting Gaja to turn away from people for good. Gaja grows up to be a famous, respected but reclusive dollmaker with no shortage of prospective suitors interested in her wealth, but she still carries Betty around everywhere with her, and years of only dolls for conversation partners have made her come off as somewhat loopy at best, violently misanthropic at worst.

Fan Works

• Strongly hinted at in The Second Try. Being the child of the last two humans left alive on Earth after Third Impact, Aki Ikari doesn't really have anyone to talk to except her parents and her ragdoll Kiko. Mercifully averted after the events of the last chapter. While not in the same way, this also applies to Asuka after she finds herself in the past, as it becomes her only memento of Aki when she buys it again.
• Discussed in Surface Tension. Ruto mentions that if she was isolated, like Sheik, that she'd quickly devolve into talking to dolls made out of fish bones. She needs socialization.
• Alice Margatroid is often Flanderized as this in Touhou Project fanworks. While in canon she tends to talk to her dolls occasionally, some fan works portray her as a social recluse who pretends her dolls are real people as a way of coping with her loneliness.

Films — Animated

• Lilo & Stitch: Lilo has one homemade doll named Scrump, whose appearance freaks out the other girls. Later she is seen making Voodoo Dolls of her friends and dipping them in pickle juice. ("My friends need to be punished.") Scrump may or may not be intended to be a "menehune" (Hawaiian dwarves).

Films — Live-Action

• Hideko in The Handmaiden never left the mansion of her uncle for years, substituting friends with her doll that she had since childhood. In the extended version, the doll is implied to be a confidant. She's 25 according to Word of God and still carries it around. This might or might not be part of the ruse, as she genuinely appears to carry it. Sook-Hee meanwhile jokingly remarks how ladies are nothing but big dolls to dress up for their maids.
• Claudia in Interview with the Vampire has a whole bunch of dolls. Which, while she was growing up, she used to camouflage the fact that she'd kept the corpse of a woman she killed out of envy for the woman's adult body.
• The title character in May has a doll that she considers her only friend. She eventually becomes a Living Doll Collector after enduring the events of the movie.
• Alice of The People Under the Stairs makes a doll to commemorate each person who dies in her house.
• Barbara Barry (played by Shirley Temple) does this in Poor Little Rich Girl (1937). She has several dolls in national costumes. She has a loving father, he's just busy or away all the time.
• Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens: Heroine Rey has a doll dressed as a Rebel pilot in her home. Given that she's lived on her own since she was a child, and had no friends before the events of the movie, that doll was probably the only thing she could really talk to.

Literature

• Twelve-year-old Trudl Ehrenteil in Doris Orgel's A Certain Magic has traveled alone from her home in Austria to England to escape the Nazis. She left her dolls behind, wanting to reassure her mother that she was "grown-up". The daughter of her English foster family has a splendid doll, Felicity, which she pretends to be too old for. Trudl, feeling awkward and alien, covets Felicity and writes a beautiful story of bringing her to life and taking her on nighttime adventures. Years later, when Trudl's niece Jenny discovers the tale, she goes to nerve-wracking lengths to locate the English family and the doll.
• Willie Connolly in J.R. Lowell's thriller Daughter of Darkness could be assumed to be this as she is a Child Prodigy with an immense IQ and no friends her own age, and she does collect dolls but uses them as poppets ("voodoo" dolls).
• Fear Street Sagas had one in the form of Lucy, although while she looks like a little girl, she's in fact a physically stunted 17-year-old. She also owns multiple copies of the same doll, girls with black hair and dresses, and they're all named after her. She altered one doll into a boy she names after Tyler Fier, and she owns one with blonde hair and blue eyes, but the doll was damaged because "The others didn't like her." But ultimately, Lucy is sick of her dolls because she's tired of Tyler treating her like a child, and in a massive temper tantrum she destroys them all.
• One is mentioned in the Goosebumps book The Headless Ghost. After Spoiled Brat Andrew Craw was murdered, his sister went insane and spent the rest of her life inside her room, doing nothing but playing with her dolls up until the day she died.
• The Heritage of Shannara has the Mole, a Rare Male Example. He's an extremely hairy man who lives underground and collects discarded toy animals, thinking of them as if they were real.
• The Killing Doll by Ruth Rendell centres around Dolly, a disfigured girl who's too shy to go out and make friends. When her father gets remarried to a less-than-pleasant woman, Dolly feels like a stranger in her own home and starts making dolls. Including an effigy of her stepmother, which she uses as a Voodoo Doll...
• Sara Crewe of Francis Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess gets two fancy dolls at critical stages: one when her father leaves her at boarding school, and one at the birthday party when she finds out her father has died. Sara treats them as though they were alive.
• In Stephen King's Needful Things, Myrtle likes to be alone with the dolls she collects because they don't call her stupid, whereas her abusive husband Danforth does.
• In The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin, student Magdalene Chase—who is bullied and perhaps abused by other schoolmates, including her older sister—is never seen without her porcelain doll. the doll turns out to be alive and her only protector.
• Strawberry Panic!: Kagome is this, as she doesn't seem to have any real friends and never seen without her teddy bear Percival, who she often pretends to speak through.
• Jennings from the autobiographical book They Cage the Animals at Night is a male example. His childhood wasn't stable because he was shuffled from foster home to foster home for several years, with some being abusive. The only concrete thing in his life was his stuffed animal "Doggie".
• Linda Nielsen in Alfred Bester's novella They Don't Make Life Like They Used To is this. She's one of the last humans on earth After the End, and is competent and practical, but cherishes her dolls as companions.
• Seven-year-old Tia Cade in The Ship Who... Searched is subject to some major Parental Neglect, left alone all day and sometimes for week on end. She knows that if she appears childish or "needy" in any way they'll either withhold still more affection from her or the Department of Child Disservices will take her away from her totally good and happy life. So she presents herself as a Cheerful Child, even after becoming paralyzed, and only confesses her unhappiness or cries when alone with her stuffed bear. As a shellperson she's much happier overall and keeps her bear in a glass-faced cabinet in her cabin, more of an Iconic Item. When she has a Remote Body made, the first thing she does it take Teddy out to cuddle.

Live-Action TV

• George Bluth, Sr. is a rare male version in Season 2 of Arrested Development as a result of being cooped up in an attic while he's a fugitive.
• The Criminal Minds episode "The Uncanny Valley" gives us Samantha Malcolm, who was molested and abused by her father, leading to a sad, lonely life. She used to have teatime with her favourite dolls before her father took them away from her, forcing her to kidnap women, drug them and dress them up as surrogates for the dolls at teatime. She does eventually get the dolls back at the end.
• A sheltered and developmentally stunted adult version appears in an episode of Inside No. 9. The protagonist suspects she's an abducted child whose "parents" have been hiding her away from prying eyes, but the last shot reveals she abducted the child in question when she was 10, and disguised its body as the doll she carries everywhere.
• Creepy version in the episode "The Collection" from The Twilight Zone (2002): Danielle, a lonely little girl, has a strangely lifelike collection of dolls. They're babysitters she turned into dolls because she didn't want them to leave.

Music

• In the music video to Melanie Martinez's Sanity Slippage Song "Pity Party", Cry Baby sends out invitations to her birthday party but no one comes. She ends up throwing a party with her stuffed animals but loses it and by the end, everything is trashed and her toys ripped apart.

Theatre

• An adult version: Laura and the titular menagerie of The Glass Menagerie, which besides her mother and her taken gentleman caller are her only social outlet.

Video Games

• Agarest Senki: Ryuryu is this. Duran accidentally eavesdrops on her when she talks to her doll. She admits that her isolated upbringing causes her to have no real friends, which is one of the reasons why she so readily joins the party. However, she still has problems with opening up to people, so she still turns to her doll when she feels the need to pour out her feelings honestly to someone.
• Dollmaykrs from the Doom mod Angelic Waifus are friendless angels who are avoided by other angels due to their power. To compensate, these angels surround themselves with dolls who act as their friends and bodyguards.
• Elite Four Lorelei in Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen is revealed to have been this. She lives alone in a house on Four Island filled with dolls, and mentions in Pokémon Masters that she was Delicate and Sickly as a child which forced her to isolate indoors for long stretches of time. As an Easter Egg, every 25 times you beat her a new doll appears in her home.
• Donna Beneviento of Resident Evil Village is very quiet and reclusive, and her house is filled with shelves upon shelves of dolls. Most of these are handmade by her, with the exception of Angie, who was a gift from her deceased father.
• Dorothy from Rune Factory and her stuffed doll Fern, who speaks for her(?) when she doesn't feel brave enough.
• Iris in the Sakura Wars games isn't quite as withdrawn as her anime counterpart, but she still grew up with only her plush dolls for company and continues to carry around her teddy bear as a Security Blanket.
• A common interpretation of Alice Margatroid from Touhou Project, who is a Marionette Master. Though fanworks tend to greatly exaggerate this trait, it's worth noting that she does occasionally talk to her dolls even though they aren't sentient and she can only control them remotely.
• Very Little Nightmares: Played for Horror. The main antagonist is a monster with the appearance of a prettied-up little girl who lives alone in an Old, Dark House. To keep her loneliness at bay, she collects life-size dolls made of the skin of actual children her servants capture and kill. She seems to believe they are actually living children.

Visual Novels

• Eri in Nameless has parents who seldom visit and her grandfather, who brought her up, recently died. She deals with the loneliness by collecting BJDs. Then they become human, starting the plot.
• Umineko: When They Cry:
  • Due to having no friends at school, Maria Ushiromiya is this, making her toys into Imaginary Friends. Sakutaro, a stuffed lion that her mother Rosa gave her, was the most important one to her though unfortunately, Rosa tears him apart during a massive argument. To make matters worse, Rosa's declaration that "SAKUTARO IS DEAD NOW" practically destroys Maria and convinces her he really is dead, operating on the logic that since Rosa created Sakutaro, Rosa is the only one who can revive him.
  • The manga adaption of EP 8 reveals Rosa herself was one when she was little since her siblings were much older than her, and she spent most of her time on her family's island. She was particularly attached to a stuffed rabbit doll that served the same function Sakutaro did for Maria. And like Sakutaro this rabbit doll was ripped to pieces because the siblings thought Rosa was pathetic for clinging to it. When the adult Rosa remembered what happened to her doll, she automatically remembered what she did to Sakutaro, and was horrified by her actions. In at least one way to atone for that, Rosa plays with Maria and tells her, through the rabbit doll, that they can play with Sakutaro as a means to rescind her previous statement.

Webcomics

• Sleepless Domain: Anemone, the enigmatic Fourth-Wall Observer and literal Barrier Maiden maintaining the Inner Barrier that protects the city, seems to find her task an exceptionally lonely one. In Chapter 8 - Interstitial, she is seen to have several handmade dolls of the cast, and she is also often seen taking up a variety of other creative hobbies to keep herself occupied, such as painting and knitting.

Web Original

• Looming Gaia: Lilian was taken in by the Dusk clan of vampires at an young age, who forced her to act as a sexual bait for their victims. Otherwise they kept her isolated from the outside world, and the dolls they gave to her became her only friends once she realized she couldn't trust the Dusks.

Western Animation

• Family Guy: Meg Griffin probably would be this ... except all of her dolls and stuffed animals ran away. One fell behind the rest and chose to jump in front of an oncoming truck rather than return to Meg's room.
• In King of the Hill, Hank's mother Tilly collects little glass statue figurines. Hank is annoyed by this until he realizes that her hobby was one of the few things keeping her sane during her marriage to Hank's father Cotton.
• In one of the Madeline cartoons, there was a girl named Giselle, who had something wrong with her leg (polio?) and her doctor recommended that she get out and play with friends...which she doesn't have because she can't keep up with other kids. So the doctor recommends that her mother buy her a doll. Meanwhile, Madeline and her classmates visit a doll factory, and the eponymous character gets packaged as a doll and decides to keep up the charade when purchased for Giselle. Giselle is heartbroken when she learns the truth about her "doll," but the girls arrange a playdate/picnic for her, and she gets a new doll.
• In Moral Orel, Nurse Bendy has a small group of teddy bears as a substitute family. She gets rid of her 'son' teddy when she's reunited with her biological son, Joe.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Party of One", Pinkie Pie thinks her friends have abandoned her, so she has a party without them. She gets a bunch of objects and animates them like puppets as she descends further into her Sanity Slippage.
• In the Recess Direct to Video movie, Recess: All Growed Down, it's revealed that Spinelli used to be one as a kindergartener (surprisingly).
• In South Park, Rare Male Example Cartman has a small collection of dolls to compensate for how even his close circle of friends don't like him all that much (because he's a sociopathic Jerkass). A later season episode, "1%", offers a dark examination of Cartman's toys. He uses his dolls to assure himself that he is "awesome and kewl" after the kids at school express their anger at him, especially after they tell him to grow up. Then it looks as if someone is destroying his dolls as revenge for making the school fail the President's physical fitness exam because he's so out of shape. Cartman acts as though they're literally being murdered, holding a funeral for Clyde Frog and bursting into tears when Peter Panda is destroyed in a fire. It's then revealed that Cartman is the one destroying them, but doing so by pretending that his other doll, Polly Prissypants, is the one responsible. Because this is the only way he can "grow up", as his horrifically warped mind can't imagine any other way of getting rid of his toys. It all culminates in Cartman performing a Mercy Kill on Polly Prissypants, sobbing the entire time, while his friends and mother look on in shocked, disturbed confusion.

Real Life

• Marilyn Monroe's first husband described her as behaving this way during their marriage.
• Presumably the guy who started Isla de las Muñecas, the Island of the Dolls, though he thought it was the ghost of a dead girl who'd be lonely.

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