#took like a ten minute break from writing this and thought 'weird barbie and jo march two sides of the same coin' so now that's there also

[mistyheartrbs]

cannot stop thinking about weird barbie and queercoding and how her subplot mirrors margot robbie barbie’s main plotline and the Implications of it all. because like. weird barbie is introduced as this outsider who lives on the fringes of barbieland society (it’s intentionally never made clear whether she was exiled or chose to set up camp there herself; the way mckinnon plays her makes me think probably a mix of both) who, as one of the other barbies (i want to say alexandra shipp/the author?) explains, was one of the prettiest barbies until a little girl played with her too hard, and now she’s an outcast. the barbies call her Weird Barbie behind her back and to her face. this is because of something she couldn’t control (first parallel to robbie’s barbie, whose crisis is brought on by gloria’s own feelings of negativity) and yet she’s forced away because of it. going to hop onto a brief tangent here and say one of the things that never sat right with me in toy story 3 was the weird...demonization? of the preschoolers who chew on/break/otherwise harm the toys because in a story where the Very Ultimate Dream of any toy is to be loved and played with it’s bizarre that they then seemed to be saying well, actually, there are Wrong ways to play with toys when these kids didn’t know any better. and it would’ve been easy for that to be weird barbie’s deal - a freaky little girl played with her in the “wrong” way and doomed her as a result. but she gets to be a hero! she leads the resistance!

robbie’s barbie is immune to ken’s brainwashing bc she experienced the real world’s misogyny and more specifically felt gloria’s messy complex human emotions - her “dark and crazy” drawings, as sasha calls them - stemming from the pain of being a woman in society. weird barbie has never been to the real world and still manages to stay immune, along with her mansion of misfit toys (including, as other tumblr users have pointed out, magic earring ken aka Gay Ken) - there’s layers to that. in both robbie’s barbie’s and weird barbie’s cases, their girls placed Weird and Unpleasant feelings onto the perfect ideal that is Barbie™ and absolutely upended their lives as a result - but they became fully realized people because of it. barbie chooses to go back to the real world to live as a human woman because she wants to feel all those messy and bizarre human feelings! she loves them! she loves humanity and the avenues through which she reaches that love are women being unabashedly freaky and weird both within and outside of her understanding of the world she lives in. what a queer experience. what a way to showcase that scary exciting feeling of being on the very fringes of girlhood and needing to define it for yourself. pink birkenstocks. she leaves barbieland better than she found it. she can’t stay there anymore. she loves the people around her and she loves herself and that self-love is something she’s earned now. weird barbie gets to run sanitation. gloria’s ideas for ordinary barbie foster understanding. barbie is sasha’s stepmom now probably. greta gerwig you’ve done it again.

#barbie #barbie (2023) #barbie spoilers #weird barbie #took like a ten minute break from writing this and thought 'weird barbie and jo march two sides of the same coin' so now that's there also #still thinking also about the fact that mckinnon and gerwig went to barnard college together #natsuki's terrible disco pants