Would die for all my favorite characters
Icon tiny_tealeaf and header by rgboys
25, queer, They/Them
Okay so for what it’s worth
Neil Gaiman has said that season 2 is not the story he and Terry had plotted out 20 years ago, season 2 is the bridge that needed to be there to fill in the gaps between season 1 and season 3
So in other words. Season 2 is a bridge season. Season 3 is the season with actual meat in it
So we better work hard to get that season 3. I swear to god Amazon. Pay your fucking writers
And also the way Barbie and Ken are role playing heterosexuality without any inherent sexuality of their own, without any understanding of what it means, or even any genitals at all! Just pretty-girl + handsome-guy = obviously a couple. And the way it fucks them both up! Because they’re both stereotypes, neither of them is a specialist version, no brain surgery or pilots license or Nobel prize for either of them. They’re just assigned the roles of Every Man and Every Woman. And Ken ends up doing Way Too Much because he’s hanging his entire self-worth on being important to Barbie. And Barbie just isn’t interested in him, she was assigned a boyfriend she didn’t ask for and doesn’t want and doesn’t know what to do with, just because that’s what society expects of men and women, that they will necessarily couple up and fall in love because… that’s what they do. Regardless of any personal quality of either party.
It’s about heteronormativity and amatonormativity and the unrealistic expectations society sets boys and girls up for from infancy. Barbie and Ken are every pair of toddlers sharing a sandbox while the adults around them call them each other’s little “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” even though neither party understands or is capable of understanding the implied meaning of that. Or wants to.
It’s a literal funhouse mirror of that weird pressure put on kids to perform heterosexuality from an early age. It examines how that leaves us unprepared for the complicated reality of actual relationships even if it turns out that you are heterosexual and do want sex and romance. Boys and girls aren’t really allowed to be just kids on the same team, so they grow up into men and women who generally want very different things from each other and are trained to look for it in everybody because anybody is better than nobody, and try to force it to work.
Barbie and Ken letting each other go in the end was perfect. Barbie the Every Woman realizing that she doesn’t have to be special, she just has to be, and Ken the Every Man realizing he has to seek validation elsewhere and lean on his fellow Kens for emotional support, WHICH THEY GIVE.
Truly a movie of all time.
Remember how we were little and we loved pink and Barbie and dolls and princesses?
Remember how we got old enough to realize that people were making fun of us and not enough people told us to ignore them so we got embarrassed and we hated ourselves. Pink was our least favorite color until perhaps recently when we were neutral towards it at best.
But something in us changed when we decided we needed to see Barbie (2023). The women and girls I saw wearing their best pinks today. I purposely bought MYSELF something pink for the first time I can remember.
We’re giving ourselves the freedom we took away.
sitting anti-kink posters down in front of a wrestling match and explaining kayfabe to them with the patience of a preschool teacher
You see that one? He's called the "heel." He looks mean and says a lot of scary things, but it's not real and he's actually very nice. When he says "I'm going to break you in half" you don't have to be scared because it's pretend. These two talked about this beforehand, and now they're playing pretend together. Can you think of any other situations that might be like this?
