Being Kenough

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I was hoping to save this in the currently nonexistent buffer I’ve been trying to put together since things settled down but…let’s just say I’m having a bad day and move on.

I am not the target audience for the Barbie movie because I’m a man who used to be a boy. That doesn’t mean I don’t have respect for it as a story fan and toy collector, though. I only played with Barbies once with a neighbor (oddly not with my cousins or even their kids), but I do respect that there’s some serious history behind this toyline created in 1959 by Ruth Handler. Barbie is supposed to be a model/actress/occasional musician, with fellow model Ken as her beau. We’ve seen celebrities date and marry co-stars before. The girl has a whole history with friends and little sisters.

And Greta Gerwig ignored all of it.

Instead she decided to make a story that treats the dreamworld as a problem, pushing for Barbie to enter the real world and learning to be her own person. That kind of ignores the various animated movies, specials, comics, Little Golden Books (they actually used pictures of the dolls for the images), games, and other media that existed for years. It’s a shame because the franchise who once bore the tagline “we girls can do anything” opted to reject Barbie’s world in favor of what appears to me as a weaker message. I could almost get myself to watch prior Barbie content if the story is good. The movie just doesn’t appeal to me and, not surprising for modern Hollywood, seems antagonistic to what your average militant feminist sees in Barbie’s world.

However, some defenders of the movie has actually looked to Ken’s story arc. Instead of the fun-loving boyfriend he and the other Kens (because Gerwig also didn’t notice that Barbie’s world includes guys not named Ken, as if every doll is supposed to be all of Barbie’s world and not just an excuse to sell a new outfit for as much moolah as Mattel can get out of the parents) are basically the purse puppies of the Barbies. That is until he undergoes an actual character arc. It’s not surprising that fellow Y chromosome bearer Literature Devil would focus on Ken’s journey. It does sound interesting, but not enough to get me to watch the movie. Enough out of me, though. Let’s hear from LD.

Catch more from Literature Devil on YouTube

Because I want to feel like I’m contributing something I want to talk more about Barbie continuity. Here’s a list of her current friends and family, but she’s had other friends and characters in her life. None of them was named Barbie until recently, when Mattel was forced by the usual suspects to create a “black Barbie” as if just being Barbie’s friend, and she’s had friends of various races, wasn’t enough. It’s all about that branding, you know. You aren’t important if you don’t have that Name. Ken…has a last name? I’m not surprised that Barbie, named for Ruth’s daughter Barbara, shares her creator’s last name, but I didn’t know Ken had one until just now. See what I mean? So much lore to work from…though choosing which of Barbie’s sisters to go with would be fun, as apparently they and a brother disappeared from the toyline and were replaced while Barbie barely ages. Either her parents are very active or they adopt a lot.

Sorry, I got off-track there. Wiki research can be a rabbit hole when you’re trying to do more than prove your dumb ideas were right based on flimsy research. I’ve already gone into that. Anyway, Ken and Barbie were always a couple, outside of a brief period in the 2000s where Mattel thought they should split up. That was rejected by the fans and they got back together. Having a “Barbie” movie where the two break up because Barbie treats Ken like garbage and Ken needs to learn how to properly “man up” and learn what that really means just feels wrong to someone who mostly knows Barbie and Ken through advertisements and watching part of an animated Barbie production out of boredom. I’m surprise more Barbie fans didn’t complain, and I don’t know how many little girls noticed unless they’ve seen the other Barbie media.

It may seem an odd thing to comment on…in which case this is your first time here. I never understand why someone would toss out existing work at establishing a world to create something completely different unless they’re using a popular intellectual property to push their “clearly superior” story or outright mock the source material. I can understand people liking the altered material (my favorite movie being The NeverEnding Story means I’m guilty of this myself) but with so much rich history to play with, why toss out of one toydom’s biggest romances, if not most biggest (sorry, Optimus and Sailor Moon…if you know, you know), to basically tell kids that romance is a joke and to give it up? And with Ken you’re telling boys this as Barbie, according to LD, didn’t even want to be involved with Ken and just kept him because Mattel demanded it in our world. (Well, the fans did. Mattel tried to break them up, remember. They listened to fans better than Spider-Man writers and editors.) I expect the “don’t need no man” bit as a bad message to girls, but telling boys that girls will just use you and you’re better off without them?

And you wonder why so many videos on YouTube are girls complaining they can’t find a guy and stories about how lonely and isolated guys have become.