CGI animators should unionize next. normally, their jobs would be too precarious to strike, since studios would replace them without a second thought, but if it’s part of this larger general film strike, they might finally have meaningful power to better their working conditions
if CGI animators unionized, it would kill the MCU. straight up. the the entire business model is built on exploiting CGI animators
THEY ARE TRYING!!!!! SIGN THE PETITION TO GET THE DISNEY ANIMATORS’ UNION RECOGNIZED
this petition is from IATSE (union), btw! it actually has credibility, unlike most change.org/etc petitions! please sign it!!
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
saw a post a while back like “cis girls and boys should be able to get bottom surgery if they want it” so now im curious. in a perfect world, would you want bottom surgery
the fact that the first female human experience barbie goes through is being self conscious and experiencing sexual harassment mirrors how growing up as a girl one day you’re okay and the next all of a sudden you feel bad about your appearance and are receiving unwanted advances is something that can be so fucking important to be recognized in film
At my theater, I literally saw a group of 9 women all dressed like fairy princesses, and they sat behind me and they laughed and giggled the loudest and held hands and when the movie ended, they screamed and shouted and applauded.
And it was beautiful.
I felt like every adult woman in my theater was 10 years old again, bashing their Barbies together with their friends and wearing glitter on their cheeks.
crazy that anyone thinks barbie is “anti-man” when it literally depicted the ways society also has a set of rules for men and how they feel empty having their worth be defined by their girlfriends, material goods, and their expression of masculinity — and how boys are victim to falling down an alt-right pipeline trying to get that value back. even when it’s all said and done and ken cries, and barbie tells him it’s okay, he’s embarrassed and says he shouldn’t be — but barbie talks him through how it’s important. where are all of the men’s mental health warriors now?? how is it anti-man when barbie acknowledged the emotional suppression men face at the hands of the patriarchy as well?
Anyway Barbie sitting on a bench, just having cried for the first time and looking over at an old woman and very genuinely complimenting her beauty was such a lovely moment. Because not long before, Barbie was freaking out about cellulite. But here in the Real World, where everything is so much more complicated than she could have imagined, so much more painful, she looks over and sees a woman who has actually lived. Aging is a privilege not afforded to everybody, and this little old woman, with all these years and experiences inside her, quite happy and at peace and secure with herself (she knows she’s beautiful), represents what Barbie is only starting to understand, that real death is staying the same forever.
That’s why it’s so important that The Ghost Of Ruth Handler, a little old lady herself, is the one who guides her into real life. She warns Barbie that by choosing to live, she must by necessity die. But in keeping with the themes of growing up, of adulthood, of womanhood, Barbie now knows that you can’t ever really return to the version of yourself that didn’t know something. Children, most children anyway, don’t really understand death. Part of the emotional struggle of adolescence and young adulthood is having to come to grips with the inevitable fact that your parents will die someday, as will everyone you love, and you yourself. If you’re lucky, not for many years. But it will happen.
And I think that’s why the turning point is “do you guys ever think about dying?” That’s why it matters that the girl playing with Barbie and changing her is a middle-aged woman. Gloria is grappling with her own morality and stifled creativity and feeling her daughter slip away from her and looking back on those days of innocent joyful play and the thing is that it’s all so sweetly painfully joyously human that it changes Barbie.
There’s a maiden(s), mother(s), and crone(s) aspect at play, and Barbie is all three and none at all. She is Ruth’s daughter and she is at once old (64 this year) and young (a toy for children, sexless and innocent and optimistic). Sasha is her past and Gloria is her present and the old woman on the park bench, filled up with years and life and peace and joy, is her future.
Barbie chose to become human, but it was also never really a choice. You can’t un-know something, you can’t ever go backward, you can only go forward. Humans only have one ending. The only alternative to growing is dying. And death may be inevitable, but better later than sooner. The child must become the adult. The adult must become the elder. The elder must eventually die. And living all those years is a gift even when it’s painful and Barbie embraces it.
*says a fact in a conversation and a wikipedia citation appears next to my head*
*clicks the citation*
*text pops up saying “this is not true. He saw this in a youtube video once in 2014 and took it as fact”. the words “youtube video” are underlined and in blue”
See, historically there have always been people who saw an extra layer of gayness on certain pairs of fictional people (you just thought of several), and people Back Then even wrote their own fanfic (or as they were called at the time, “pastiches”), but the first widespread queer fanwork to really define the fanfiction genre was KIRK AND SPOCK. Kirk/Spock. K/S. The very first slashfics.
Why this work was vastly, overwhelmingly written by straight women is a discussion for another time, but it was, so that’s the main perspective I’m gonna consider here.
How do you - a statistically middle-class, 30+, stay-at-home wife and mother - how do you write slashfic ao3-style in the 1960’s before the internet?
Carefully.
Through letters with friends, phone calls, pen pals, and sometimes - sometimes - clandestine meetings of small groups. Whole novels were written communally, round-robin style, by sending typed or handwritten additions chapter by chapter to each other. These were all underground, some deep underground; even the early Trekkie fanzines of the time wouldn’t touch them.
And keep in mind, few of these stories were explicitly even sexual! But they were all about a very, very close relationship between two men. In the 1960’s.
Guess how cool everyone else was about this.
Actually, for their part, Gene Rodenberry and the other writers were fine with it, saying that they had deliberately written the characters to be two halves of a whole, and if you wanna read it that way, yeah sure, go right ahead. Shatner and Nimoy took it all in good humor, and seemingly still do, each guy basically gesturing to the other and chuckling “I mean, who wouldn’t?”
But elsewhere there was vicious backlash against The Premise, and not just within the fandom. This was still at a time in the US and UK when various “sodomy” and “decency” laws made no distinction between homosexual sex acts and just, like, directly lighting another man’s cigarette with your cigarette in public. (That, sadly, is not a fucking joke.)
It was probably the closest some suburban cishet women came to understanding the pain of being in the closet. They had to protect this secret from their friends and family at all cost. There were cases of divorces where women lost custody of their children because their writing had come to light.
Can you imagine having such a burning desire to write for your OTP that you were willing to lose everything over it? Even if you were never caught, you still had to be willing to wait weeks, months, to receive a letter in the mail that you had to carefully intercept, read in secret, and then add your own chapter t, also in secret, and then send off, perhaps never to be seen again.
These people were goddamn heroes, and they laid the foundation for the world we live in today. A world where we can read, write, comment on, or share - in a matter of seconds! - literature about two background characters from two different franchises enjoying a really specific kink involving vacuums or something. And that’s objectively amazing.
Raise a toast to our fanfiction elders, who simped in the darkness so we could simp in the light of day.
This is important and should have more notes.
This is great, OP! Thank you!
I wanted to add something regarding the idea that most slash was/is written by cishet women. This is entirely from my own experiences in fandom since around 1999/2000, so I don’t have data to back it up, but the overwhelming majority of ‘cishet women’ I knew in fandom in the 2000s are not cishet women anymore.
Most of us have since come out as queer in some way—if not irl then at least in fandom—and I have to wonder how many Spirk shippers from the 60s, had they been exposed to current ideas about sexuality and gender, would eventually realize that they weren’t cishet women. Maybe some of them have by now. Who knows?
As I said, this is just anecdotal evidence based on a very small sample size of 'people I’ve known in fandom,’ but I would love to see some kind of research on this topic.
Either way, yes, fandom stands on the shoulders of people who identified, at least publicly, as cishet women, and their efforts should be appreciated. <3
