i have such a love for characters who descend into madness or villainy out of deep, deep empathy. characters who fundamentally cannot cope with the cruel realities they find themselves in and blow up about it in spectacular fashion. fallen angel type characters with tears of outrage in their eyes. characters who break before they bend, and break so badly they splatter blood all over their noble ideals. every variation on it gets me so good
the energy of ashton’s “i’m just the dirty old drummer” moment has the same energy as ken’s sunglasses reflecting barbie’s greatness. ashton is SUCH a ken because he just wants to hype the local 5sos barbie aka luke hemmings.
Barbie (2023)//Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (2017 National Theater)
"That's why I was created: I only exist in the warmth of your gaze"//"The single assumption that makes our existence viable: that somebody is watching."
but the hot take that y’all aren’t ready for yet is that all the barbies and kens in barbieland are asexual. when ken suggests that he stay over because he and barbie are quote “boyfriend/girlfriend” and she asks “to do what?” and he says “…i honestly don’t know” it’s because they may be a reflection of stereotypical human relationships in the real world, but they lack any of the substance beyond the superficial. this is supported when barbie explicitly states that she doesn’t have a vagina and ken doesn’t have a penis (despite ken’s insistence that he quote “has all the genitals,” okay intersex king). therefore if neither barbie nor ken have genitals and presumably no sexual organs or biological functions (such as the need to eat/drink/bathe with real water/etc. as shown in the film), then none of the barbies or kens should experience sexual attraction or desire, just like they don’t experience most of the human emotion spectrum (perhaps making an exception for weird barbie in this case, who remarks about wondering what “plastic blob [ken] has got going on in those shorts” to paraphrase. i really don’t have an answer for this one, maybe she’s bisexual or maybe she’s just being weird. who’s to say). ergo (at least prior to main barbie becoming human and having her vaginoplasty surgery), she and the rest of the residents of barbieland are canonically asexual by default and any sexualized projection onto them are merely that: projections. that all being said, barbie can be anything, including an ace homoromantic non-binary trans woman. in this essay i will—