Throw back Thursday to this chart I made for whether I should date someone or not.
It also works for other types of relationships, but I find that I need to remind myself of it more with romantic relationships so I framed it around that.
do you think people who are into reylo wanted fiona to go through with the wedding to lord farquaad
no, you know what fuck this. fuck you. we need to talk about the FEAR in max’s eyes here. Like all he wanted was to be loved by someone. by ANYONE. And to be a fair and decent leader. like wow Shrek and dreamworks i expected better from you than a message about how abuse victims ultimately deserve to be eaten by a big dragon. i suppose you think that’s feminist because she’s a girl dragon. what about fiona’s sexual empowerment? Fuck this. max deserved better. i’ve had it with this franchise. whatever at least we have fanfic. new chapter of my farqiona kinktober entry will be up on friday
I saw barbie and can’t stop thinking about how we all experienced childhood innocence until we were faced with something horrible that took it away from us
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.
the barbie movie is not “anti-man”, it’s anti-oppression.
in the real world, that oppression takes the shape of patriarchal power and women feeling like an afterthought or an accessory. in barbie land, it takes the shape of kens not knowing who they could become as independent beings because their existence has been irrevocably tied to barbie. barbie occupies the place of power, and ken is the afterthought and accessory.
the point of the movie is that any imbalance in the equality of any group of people makes the world a bad place to live in. ken feels unfulfilled and unappreciated in barbie land. He’s been told his purpose is Barbie, but he’s failing at that and doesn’t understand what’s wrong. He doesn’t think he could be more than Barbie’s love interest. Similarly, women in the real world feel forgotten, stunted, and held to impossible standards. Their purpose has been warped by other people telling them what it should be.
That’s why it’s So Important that both ken and barbie have their own reckonings of how they’ve reaped benefits at the expense of each other. neither of them wanted to hurt the other. Barbie just liked being a hero in Barbie Land and Ken liked feeling appreciated (and horses) when he was in the real world. But they both see and dislike how the other has been hurt by the power disparity in the real world and in barbie land. And they resolve to not perpetuate that cycle of hurt.
the reason barbie is a good movie is precisely because its main thesis is not Women Better Than Men. Nor is it a preservation of the binary or gender roles.
It’s main thesis is that your identity is not the same thing as what you are to other people. And that’s not exclusively a moral for Barbie herself. Sure, Barbie isn’t Barbie because she’s Ken’s girlfriend - she’s her own person to the point that the actively chooses humanity at the end. But a large portion of the movie also is devoted to explaining that Ken isn’t Ken because he’s Barbie’s boyfriend. That Ken is his own person and should be allowed to be that, because that’s (k)enough. Even Alan exists separate from the binary convention and has his own identity and story arc. He serves as a foil for the falsely symbiotic Ken/Barbie role dynamic.
anyway, my point is, no one should be (exclusively) defined by what they mean to someone else, or by what they have (whether that’s power, a casa house, or a romantic partner). Everyone is a person deserving love, equality, and their own story, whatever that is.
