American Girl Dolls Grow Up

The morning of September 17, 2025 saw generations of Xennial, Millennial, Gen Z and Gen Alpha doll collectors buzzing out of their minds. After months of leaked photos on social media message board Reddit and weeks of pink Barbie Movie gingham emails and teasers, American Girl finally launched their 2026 Girl Of The Year Raquel Reyes.

Raquel is mixed-race. Her mother is Caucasian and her father is Mexican. Her family is full of folks who have married outside of their race, which makes the story a welcome sight for girls with mixed heritage, unique to doll collectors looking for something fresh to add to their collections, and the bane of existence to racists, especially those who screamed "woke" at their smartphones.

Much like the 2023 GOTY (Girl Of The Year) Kavi, she loves being a DJ. Like 2021 GOTY Kira, she wears pink and loves animals, going so far as to rescue a dolphin in her story. Like 2025 GOTY Summer, she cares about rescues, her family makes and sells food for dogs and Raquel raises a rescue pup named Luzita. Her doll shares a face mold with 2020 GOTY Joss and she likes to play pickleball. What other American Girl doll does she share something in common with?

Samantha Parkington. "Sam" is Raquel's maternal great-great grandmother. She even shares a necklace with her.

Fans took to social media to share their shock. Some were eager to order the doll ahead of the holiday rush. Some made meta connections to other dolls. (More on that below.) Racists of course couldn't help themselves from crying "foul" over Samantha's descendant being the type to worry about the then-recent ICE raids while some of the oldest fans cried for a completely different reason.

Samantha's birthday is generally accepted as being on May 26, 1895. This means that as of 2025 when Raquel was officially revealed, she would be 130-years-old, and 131 by the time 2026 rolls around.

The world's longest-living recorded and verified human being was Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days. Though some believe that there were those from small countries, impoverished villages and slave plantations who may have lived as long or just slightly longer, Calment as of 2025 is the longest-lived person that has been verified legitimately. Putting this into context, when she was Raquel's age, (10) she was expected to play the piano. A year before she died, she recorded a rap track. She existed long enough to see the invention of both Kodak family photos and Nintendo's N64.

If Samantha was able to live that long, she still would have been dead by 2017 at the very latest. There are no records of humans living to be 130-years-old.

Raquel being Samantha's great-great granddaughter verifies two things that many American Girl fans - especially adults - now have to accept. The first thing is that eventually, their favorite characters die. And for Millennials, that means all of the original historical girls are dead, except for 1934-born Molly, who would probably still be causing trouble at 91-years-old in 2025.

If All of the American Girls consistently live to be 122-years-old, then Rebecca Rubin at 120-years-old would be the eldest, followed by 112-year-old Claudie, 102-year-old Kit and 93-year-old Nanea. After 91-year-old Molly, Maryellen would seem like a kid at 80-years-old with Melody seeming practically infantile at 71-years-old.

There is nothing quite as traumatizing as realizing that your childhood doll has been legally dead for ages. The trauma of those holding Kaya at 270-years-old and Felicity at 260-years-old is palpable.

American Girl hasn't shied away from the subject of death, as many of the books tackle it head on, such as Changes For Addy where Auntie Lula and Uncle Solomon are bested by old age, stress and the elements. But it's one thing if a character with no merchandise and barely more than a scrap of art as a background character meets their end, and another thing entirely when you pour your childhood into playing with a girl "just like you" but from a bygone era, whose real-life counterpart would have been eaten by worms and gone full skeletal decades before your parents were even born.

And that second thing? Well...

"But you promised you wouldn't grow up!" Laments a mournful and angry Peter Pan in the non-Disney stage play based on J.M. Barrie's aging-like-milk story about a tween girl and her two little brothers who all get whisked away to Neverland, a mythical place where racial stereotypes, child abuse and ableism run as wild as your imagination.

And this is also a phrase screamed at many a screen by American Girl fans who weren't ready to accept that their favorite dolls might actually follow Wendy and exit adolescence. Considering the fact that Kirsten's BFF Marta died of cholera and never saw her teen years, you'd think more people would be thrilled to know if everyone made it to adulthood?

But this isn't American Girl's first dance with adulthood. 2012 GOTY McKenna grew up and became the coach of 2024 GOTY Lila, though it's a shame Girl Of The Year dolls are never re-released, as a Lila + McKenna double-pack would have been amazing for those new to collecting and those who missed out on the original.

And McKenna wasn't alone. American Girl had already started selling dolls of Disney Princesses Tiana, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Elsa and Anna, all of whom are canonically over the age of 18. Although her items suggest that she is based on the first Little Mermaid movie, you could also count Ariel, mother of Melody, making her the first mom to get a released American Girl doll before Samantha. Glinda and Elphaba of Wicked soon followed.

It should be noted that there are shorts on the official American Girl channel involving 2022 GOTY Corinne's mom and step-dad, yet their dolls were never released. With Corinne's mom getting pregnant and then giving birth to Blix during Corinne's stories, a doll of her mom with a Pregnant Midge body would have destroyed the brains of every conservative.

Fans grow an attachment to their dolls, wanting to shield them from the pressures girls often face as they enter the adult world. While labor laws, poverty and unemployment are nothing for Samantha or Kit who saw those things affect them, their friends and their families in real-time, Samantha having descendants means that at some point, she had to deal with relationships, marriage, the dangers of child birth and childcare that goes harder than babysitting.

Samantha's stories start in 1904, which means that she was subjected to the unmitigated horrors of prenatal care in an era where death by childbirth was still "normal", a postpartum where she would have been expected to do too much for the home before healing, and a day and age where grown men marrying underage girls was not treated as the crime it absolutely should have been. (Sam's biggest fans of course would like to believe that "Uncle Gard" would never endanger Samantha by sending her off with an older man.)

But again, American Girl has never been afraid of tackling hard subjects in a way that's easy to digest if you're 8-years-old and above, so naturally, Samantha's entry into adulthood isn't something they would be afraid to address.

There's also the metaverse issue. Historical Girl Courtney owns a Molly doll. Her videos allude a connection to Maryellen. Isabel and Nicki shop the American Girl catalogue, which includes AG dolls. Would Raquel also own a Samantha doll?

In 2014, Samantha was one of a handful of dolls to get a re-release with shortened books and a new dress for the "hated era" BeForever line. In some of the advertisements for the revival, Mattel softly nudged that these characters would "live forever" or that their stories would "live forever" in your heart and mind, so long as you kept their stories alive. This can be taken as a gentle nudge towards Samantha already being dead before that 2017 cutoff where she would have made it to 122-years-old.

In case you're wondering, despite being drenched in historical goodies, American Girl as of 2025 has no plans to sell coffins, tombstones or a $300 sparkly mausoleum to house your dead dollies. No attached pool, sarcophagus that converts into a bed or bathtub, fold-away toilet, memorial flames that really light up with a pack of AA batteries, nor any urns for the dolls that couldn't be saved for $55 at the Doll Hospital. Raquel's pendant is an heirloom from Samantha, but does not contain her ashes. Mattel wouldn't even consider any of this for their American Girl Wednesday doll, though they did give her Thing, who looks very decayed.

Fans not grieving over Samantha's confirmed death at least have the story of Raquel to read, as the tween finds Samantha's diary in the attic of the mansion she left behind. Turning the pages, she will likely find that 1904 and 2026 are much more alike than they seem, and seeing the similarities she has with her great-great grandmother is more fun than lamenting adulthood.