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Grad School Sucks

@higherthanheroes / higherthanheroes.tumblr.com

Viva la Pluto, fuck you.

After watching the Barbie trailer, my parents are arguing over whether, as a previous diplomat, Barbie should have diplomatic immunity in a foreign country (her home country being Barbieland) and thus whether her arrest by LAPD is unlawful.

Neither of my parents are lawyers or have studied international relations, they just got excited by the trailer

The idea that the LAPD actually cares about unlawful arrests is the punchline.

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Look, this is probably going to end up as an unpopular post, because God knows the level of brainrot capitalism and fast consumption caused in people's brains, but I'd rather not get TV shows for a while if it means writers get their rights defended and recognized.

Entertainment can't come at the cost of fair pay, healthy work environment and ethical practices.

In Barbie (2023), directed by Greta Gerwig, Ken says he wants to spend the night with Barbie because they're boyfriend and girlfriend and when she asks him "to do what?", he replies "I'm actually not sure". This is a perfect analogy to kids playing with Barbie dolls, as they know that couples "do things" but are too young to know exactly what. In this essay I will

I want everybody who’s calling Ken a Trophy Husband to know that he’s actually a Trophy Boyfriend, because when Ruth Handler invented Ken in the 1960s, she was adamant that he would never marry her and instead be her “handsome steady”, so that Barbie remained a figure of independence for the little girls and was never put in the position of housewife.

Her house is hers. She bought it and furnished it with money she made in her own job. In STEM, in politics, in healthcare, in fashion, in academy, in customer service. Her credit card is in her name (women in the US couldn’t have their own regardless of marital status until 1974). And it’s all pink and fashionable because femininity and badassness aren’t mutually exclusive. No matter who you are, you can be anything.

That’s why Barbie’s slogan is “you can be anything”. Teaching these ideals to little girls is why Barbie was created. Empowering women and empowering femininity is the original meaning of the Barbie doll. It’s not that you have to be all this to be a woman, but if you are all or some of this, you too are awesome.

And somehow pop culture deliberately changed that narrative. Sexualised, bimbofied, and villainised her, when she actually isn’t responsible for the impossible beauty standards — people are, she’s just a stylised, not-to-scale toy like most others.

Men are frothing because he’s just Ken and I guess they were expecting her to be just Barbie, but that’s exactly what Ken is. Canonically. A badass woman’s himbo boyfriend.

This movie has the potential to change the way we collectively see Barbie radically into what Ruth Handler’s intended, I’m so very excited

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tumblr is so weird because like it FEELS small but then your favorite character loses a fandom poll bracket to a character you’ve never heard of in ur life and suddenly it’s like oh this hellsite is CROWDED crowded

twitter is like. DNI with me unless you are a perfect clone of me. and tumblr is like. hi. you share exactly one interest with me. would you like to subliminally influence each other's thought patterns through funny text posts until we develop a hive mind? yeah? cool.