okay but the thing about the barbie movie was that it was so, so unbelievably soft. ken is crying and he doesn’t feel like he’s enough, but neither does barbie and when she tells him he is more than the things he loves, you can see the exact moment she realises the truth in her words. and maybe the main theme isn’t really about how power corrupts (it does) but about how the absence of understanding, of feeling, corrupts. the reason we all didn’t like ken for a bit was because he was trying to force his worldview on barbie. he was trying to control her, subliminally. but here’s the thing- barbie did that to ken too. he was living in a world so barbie, that there seemed to be no room for ken. and how is that resolved? by talking. by crying. by feeling.
I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven’t seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka “raptures of the deep”
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you’re good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here’s what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they’re not dying, they’re not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he’d told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he’s at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can’t go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
just saw Barbie so here are some (non-spoilery) highlights:
ken becoming DEEPLY obsessed with horses
MULTIPLE highly choreographed dance numbers that last for several minutes
kens job is beach
a tween calls Barbie a fascist (?????? ok screenwriters)
mojo dojo casa house
kens big mink coat having a HORSE THEMED LINING
i know we were deeply obsessed with the outfits but good god. the OUTFITS.
extensive Barbie lore
Barbie’s heart to heart with a lovely old woman
the kens building a wall
beaching one another off
KENS SONG THAT HE SINGS FOR LIKE 5 MINUTES
like twelve executives on one tandem bike
depression Barbie
ALLEN
i am kenough :)
gynecologist.
beautiful beautiful deeply camp coming of age story with layers and so much life. ive gained twenty new sewing projects from the opening shots of Barbieland alone. made my gf cry. 20/10
Tumblr already has a personalization algorithm it’s called my beloved mutuals who have great taste and only wish to psychologically damage me sometimes
