No Escape From the Bear Police

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
sadistas
akajustmerry

friend sent me an Instagram reel yesterday with 1000s of likes that was basically like "pride and prejudice is timeless actually because it's about an autism romance 🥰" and then the creator proceeded to cite moments in the book and film where Lizzie and Darcy are "socially awkward" and....listen. I'm far from an Austen scholar, but I have taught Austen novels as an educator and this kind of psycho-pop analysis that views characters as individuals with autonomy over their actions, rather than tools in a story written at a particular time to say something about that time, pisses me off more than I can say without sounding like an asshole. I'm sorry but Darcy isn't rude and awkward and even cruel to Lizzie because he has autism, he says and does those things because he's a wealthy upper class land owning man raised to see a middle class woman from a large family with no male heirs like Elizabeth as inherently beneath him which he expresses to her multiple times because it is socially acceptable for him to do so in a society where someone like him is privileged above almost all others. He is "socially awkward" around her because of misogyny and classism (PREJUDICE) and she is "socially awkward" around him because a woman of her standing at that time simply wouldn't have had much to do with the gentry but to actually push back against the shit that Darcy says would be social suicide for her whole family so she protests the only way she can which is refusing his advances (PRIDE). not to be the "context collapse is the death of media literacy" guy. But this is the problem with the kind of head empty, let people enjoy things, if I can't relate to it what's the point type crowd. Youse think you're being so quirky justifying incoherent and anachronistic interpretations with your rampant individualism, ensuring that other people never confront anything that challenges them in these stories like patriarchal misogyny and classism. Pride and Prejudice becomes an "autism4autism romance", completely undermining the historical context of its status as one of the great social satires about the class and gender politics that Austen so expertly observed around her. This attitude is why we have nonsensical historical dramas that actively hate history like fucking edgy bdsm "Wuthering Heights", Bridgerton, The Buccaneers, and even a 2025 Frankenstein movie where the monster is just misunderstood and does no wrong uwu etc. because individual relatability and catharsis is king over anything actually saying anything about anything now. Everything is relatable and nothing is meaningful.

literature some have been saying this.
jelloapocalypse
scorpio-system

AAA video game publisher voice: "Look. The goose layed a golden egg, and that's nice! Everyone loved that egg. But keeping the golden goose means paying for bird feed and I don't want to, so I killed the goose."

vanshira

#‘that goose keeps laying golden eggs. that’s stagnation. I’m going to kill it and go look for a goose that lays diamond eggs’#‘that goose normally lays golden eggs but this time it laid a silver egg. I’m going to kill it because even though I can still make good#money with that it’s not as good as a golden egg’#‘that golden egg laying goose only lays an egg once a day instead of constantly shitting them out. I don’t care that golden eggs take time#if they’re not constant the goose is worthless to me’

@thebaldursmouthgazette y u leave all the good stuff in the tags

video games
jelloapocalypse
itsbenedict

having now watched every 3D animated Barbie movie (don't ask), here is my tier list:

image

notes:

  • the top tier is not S tier. the top tier is like "6 or 7 out of 10, by kids' movie standards, if I'm being generous".
  • "enjoyable elements" usually boil down to a villain who is completely batshit insane and chewing the scenery. sometimes it's "clown plane" or "she always milked the cow her own way" though.
  • most of these tiers are sorted chronologically, not by quality within the tier. special exception to the bottom tier, which does descend in quality, steeply.
  • don't. watch. all the barbie movies.
brazenautomaton

1: who did this to you

2: which one is Mass Effect But Barbie

itsbenedict

  1. a fellow by the name of Freshmin who I don't know if he has a Tumblr, acting as executor of the will of the people
  2. that's Barbie: Star Light Adventure (or, as Freshmin would call it, "BARTBIE: SATR LGITB ANDVERUTE"), which is one of the kinda tolerable ones. like, it's visually interesting, it kinda wants to be Star Wars, and while it has no actually good characters and its moment-to-moment writing is dull and frequently nonsensical, it does make an attempt to tell an original story instead of having Mattel executives play paint-by-numbers with tired kids' movie tropes. (you can tell the executives were still involved because Frozen had just gotten huge and so Barbie has Elsa hair in this one, at least for the cover art and the first twenty minutes before they put her in a worse outfit that's easier to animate.)
itsbenedict

image

It means various things! Those movies are weird and hard to categorize and I didn't even understand what they were going for.

  • Barbie in The Nutcracker (or BASEBIE IJN THE NUTCRACKERT) was the very first animated Barbie movie, and one Mattel wants people to forget (Barbie in A Christmas Carol was billed as "the first Barbie Christmas movie). It's a kind of surreal movie that features lengthy wordless plotless ballet sequences, random D&D monster encounters, a horrible-looking bat, and a Rat King who doesn't make sense from basically any angle. It's also got this really bizarre ending twist in its framing device that I really don't know what to make of. It was kind of entertaining to watch insofar as being baffled and boggled is enjoyable, but "good" isn't a category of thing that feels like it could even be applied to it.
  • Barbie & The Diamond Castle (or BAURVE & THE DIANOD CAALT) is the one I find hardest to figure out if the writer thought they'd accomplished what they wanted or not. It's the most lesbian Barbie movie, insofar as it has two leads who are women who live together and sing about how much they love living together in their cottagecore fantasy house in the woods and show no interest in the male love interest supporting characters- but it's a chaste 2008 possibly-somehow-unintentional kind of gay that doesn't really do anything. The weird thing is its bizarre original story about magic music witches that runs on a fairytale logic that keeps zagging out of the way of making sense- it's the one I'd have the hardest time describing what it's about.
    Also it has maybe the worst CGI animal sidekicks in the franchise. Those horrible little dancing dogs feature in my nightmares.
  • The Barbie Diaries (or THE NAIRNE DIARIES) is not a Barbie movie. It's a Disney Channel original movie that got lost on its way to the shoot and fell into the Barbie basement by accident. Not animated by the same studio, stylistically and tonally completely different. Leaving aside the weird inconclusive subplot about a magic good-luck book, it's a perfectly serviceable teen movie about high-school popularity drama- a subject I cannot fucking stand and so I hated every minute of it. I can't honestly call it bad, but I've got an allergy.
  • Barbie: Princess Charm School (or BARBE: PREINCFWESS CHARM SCXHOOL) is a fever dream. It's kind of funny and high-energy, but, uh... well. The plot: there is a, uh, prep school type thing for "lady royals", which doesn't appear to have any correlation with hereditary noble standing and might just be a state of mind. Barbie, a commoner, is enrolled sort of by mistake and has sort of a fish-out-of-water plotline where she learns to be the Barbie franchise's deranged hallucination of what a princess is, and embroiled in a complex inheritance manipulation scheme that doesn't make any sense. The school incidentally has like, fairy slaves flying around and they're weirdly involved in the action despite not talking or having their deal explained ever. It kinda turns into a girl power heist movie towards the end??? This is like, the most running-on-vibes a Barbie plot has ever been, besides BARBIER: S FASHIN FWAIERYTALEW which is kind of the same movie (down to the poorly-explained fairy slaves) if it were tedious and ugly and about nothing.

I wasn't really sure how to sort any of these into their own tiers so they get their own Mystery Bucket in the middle.

barbie animation hm