I Hate The Commercial I See On Tumblr With The Guy And The Elongated Torso To Look At His 24 Pack Abs

fyi today is a monster day

And also the way Barbie and Ken are role playing heterosexuality without any inherent sexuality of their own, without any understanding of what it means, or even any genitals at all! Just pretty-girl + handsome-guy = obviously a couple. And the way it fucks them both up! Because they’re both stereotypes, neither of them is a specialist version, no brain surgery or pilots license or Nobel prize for either of them. They’re just assigned the roles of Every Man and Every Woman. And Ken ends up doing Way Too Much because he’s hanging his entire self-worth on being important to Barbie. And Barbie just isn’t interested in him, she was assigned a boyfriend she didn’t ask for and doesn’t want and doesn’t know what to do with, just because that’s what society expects of men and women, that they will necessarily couple up and fall in love because… that’s what they do. Regardless of any personal quality of either party.

It’s about heteronormativity and amatonormativity and the unrealistic expectations society sets boys and girls up for from infancy. Barbie and Ken are every pair of toddlers sharing a sandbox while the adults around them call them each other’s little “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” even though neither party understands or is capable of understanding the implied meaning of that. Or wants to.

It’s a literal funhouse mirror of that weird pressure put on kids to perform heterosexuality from an early age. It examines how that leaves us unprepared for the complicated reality of actual relationships even if it turns out that you are heterosexual and do want sex and romance. Boys and girls aren’t really allowed to be just kids on the same team, so they grow up into men and women who generally want very different things from each other and are trained to look for it in everybody because anybody is better than nobody, and try to force it to work.

Barbie and Ken letting each other go in the end was perfect. Barbie the Every Woman realizing that she doesn’t have to be special, she just has to be, and Ken the Every Man realizing he has to seek validation elsewhere and lean on his fellow Kens for emotional support, WHICH THEY GIVE.

Truly a movie of all time.

Theoretically I don’t object to the idea of Harley Quinn moving away from The Joker’s influence and having that reflected in her costume, but that’s… not what her character designers have done. They’ve dropped the clown theme for a design based on a skimpy cheerleading uniform in the same colors as her traditional costume. If Harley’s costume change is supposed to reflect a new idependence, it shouldn’t be based on her old costume at all and should be something new and cool to represent self-reinvention, not just “we didn’t think the clown theme was sexy enough to sell to a modern audience”.

HOWEVER. You know what would be fun? If Harley decided to out-clown the Joker and steal his theme from him. Commit to the act in a way he never could and actually take up classes on clowning and physical comedy. Become Dr. Harley Quinn, the DCU’s leading expert on being a clown. When people think “the clown from Gotham” they don’t think of The Joker at all. That would be sweet, sweet revenge that I would love to read.

Someone ought to tell Harry…

Have a wonderful week everybody 🌻🐝💚

#girldad

SO SOMEHOW MY YAOI SHIRT ENDED UP IN MY DAD’S LAUNDRY BASKET HELP I CAN’T BREATHE

💚💛❤ • Dragonfruit and Trio sketch • ❤💛💚

we really devolved as a society when we stopped using fully painted pictures on romance novels and started using cheap photoshop instead