barbie movie: is marketed as “haha barbie has to go to the real world with ken and mattel wants them to go back to barbieland haha funny adventure movie!”
me after watching it: is sobbing hysterically and undergoing an existential crisis, a breakdown, and a metamorphosis into a more confident and secure individual with the knowledge that under the patriarchy it is next to impossible to appease others and that you just have to go “fuck it” and be your genuine self while doing what makes you happy
the thing that gets me about about barbie is that barbie land wasn’t even purposefully a matriarchy, barbie land came about because of the way little girls were playing with their barbies, it wasn’t created by mattel it was created by the people using the toys, so the fact that the barbies ignored the ken’s and had girls night every night wasn’t because they had some bias against him, it was just an accurate depiction of how kids play with barbies. I had some ken dolls as a child and they were essential to the plot in the sense that of course my barbie has a boyfriend because that represented the world i saw around me, but also he didn’t have any purpose in my dream world because i was only interested in what the girls were doing because they represented me and how i wanted to be, I wanted girls night every night I wanted the girls to be president and austronauts and not because of some inherent feminist idea but because I was a girl and I wasn’t thinking about boys, ken was an accessory. this movie wasn’t made to change the world but it showed a different perspective than what we usually see which I thought was fun. Men don’t have to be the centre of all our stories and its not even because we hate them, sometimes we’re just not thinking about them
me when ao3 is down so I'm forced to go to bed early and have a good 8 hours of sleep before going back to work tomorrow instead of burning my retina on my screen phone reading about the same guys falling in love over and over until 3 am