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Barbie X Text Posts pt.20

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Barbie X Text Posts pt.33

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inktober day 18: saddle

(annika and brietta from barbie magic of pegasus)

took a couple days break because ❗shocker❗drawing full pieces every single day is not good for you physically or mentally❗and thus i had a bit of a breakdown BUT WE GOOD NOW

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back when barbie actually looked like barbie

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I know I'll sound kooky for saying this, but I suspect that Barbie & the Diamond Castle was queer-coded on purpose. I mean this so seriously. There were probably hundreds of people working on this movie. You're telling me none of them were queer? So many queer people have worked for Mattel. Maybe a person (or people) working on this film wanted to make a queer Barbie movie as a form of self-expression or what have you, but couldn't explicitly do so because it was 2008 and that would've been seen as inappropriate for a family film (still could be seen that way 🙄). So they got as close as they could with Diamond Castle.

Just the essence of this film is so sapphic. Alexa and Liana live alone together, away from whatever town might be nearby. They see nothing more important than their relationship with one another and Liana says that Alexa "knows me better than anyone else in the entire universe" (it's almost like no one else in this medieval world could know Liana that well, maybe because she's gay and the only person who could safely know that is Alexa) and "I feel like a part of me is gone" after they fight and she believes their relationship might be over.

They get what looks like male "love interests" on the surface, but they don't actually behave like couples. The girls butt-heads with them a lot as if it'll be an enemies-to-lovers type of romance like Annika and Aidan from Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus, but it never really becomes romantic. They don't even imply a happily ever after with the twins (whatever their names were, no one cares), they go back home together without them in their lives, at least not majorly. I think the fact that they don't have male love interests is the crux of this whole theory. The boys' existence is enough for kids and even adults watching to believe there's a straight romance in this film, especially if you've seen other Barbie films and know the formula, but there isn't. The movie just has male characters who take interest in the girls in a completely one-sided infatuation, heteronormativity does the rest when it comes to the audience thinking there's a romance with the boys.

Alexa and Liana's relationship is the most important aspect of the movie; the entire story is about their relationship, not their relationship with the boys at all, which separates Barbie & the Diamond Castle from other Barbie movies from this time, which all had hetero-romances in one way or another. This is probably why so many sapphic kids who grew up with it, like myself, loved it so much.

All these factors together just make me wonder if the queerness was intentional on someone's part.

Even if you bypass the queer interpretation, it's really refreshing to have a story that's about female friendship and that's it. No forced or unforced romance, just a story about girls and their friendship(s). There's no issue with romance, but also there's no issue with a lack of romance as well. That kind of message is hard to come by, even in more "adult" media.

(As a bit of a sidebar, the only queer aspect to this film that is surely coincidental to me is Alexa and Liana's dresses looking like the lesbian and bi pride flags. Liana's dresses do share a color scheme with the Emily Gwen lesbian flag, but that particular lesbian flag wasn't in existence till 2018, ten years after this movie was released. By association, I assume Alexa's dresses having the colors of the bi flag is also a coincidence, even though that flag was created in 1998 before this film. It is very cute how that turned out, though.)

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have one of the best portraits i've ever done of a character no one asked for

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Autumn, another excuse to draw new clothes and orange colors

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Chụt chụt

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100 DAYS OF KINGDOM HEARTS DRAWINGS:

DAY 41

mfw traitor doesn't silence

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The BEST Christmas movie

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Kiss me under the mistletoe

Beautiful artwork from my dear friend Alyssa (instagram: alyssaandritz | https://www.instagram.com/alyssaandritz/) for my fanfiction: "Kiss me under the mistletoe" - Shalea (https://archiveofourown.org/works/52200505)

Hugs and Kisses to them <3

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Eden: *chiding Catherine about needing to stay warm*

Catherine: hnnnng lips are close,,

Barbie in A Christmas Carol wip I don’t know if I’ll ever finish🫠

It’s been sitting in my wips for a while though and I’d rather post it than not in case I never get it done

Anyway,, friends to enemies to lovers am I right?

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Reblog if you didn’t write My Immortal

We’re going to find the author by process of elimination.

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Roxner karaoke time !

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Magnet redraw with Zemyx! OwO