I know. Barbie.
If you’re a regular around here, you probably wouldn’t expect to find that name headlining one of my posts. But here we are.
For the record, I ignored the Barbie movie when it first came out. Too pink. Too cute. Too much like a plastic toy commercial wrapped in a pop culture sugar rush. I gave it a hard pass when the hype began, and I barely registered the Oscar controversy—though the irony of a movie about women winning only one Oscar (awarded to a man, no less) did elicit a wry eyebrow raise.
Then someone—can’t even remember who—urged me to watch it. “Why?” I asked.
“I can’t say. Just watch it.”
So onto my long “get-around-to-it-one-day” movie list it went. And then a couple of weeks ago, fate (or maybe just technical failures) intervened: every streaming service we subscribe to was out of commission except one. We combed that lone catalog for a while, and then I got impatient. Pulled out my tagged and sorted movie list. Top of the list for that service? Barbie.
I grimaced. I almost moved on. But lately I’ve been trying to say yes to more things than I say no to—a challenge, as anyone who knows me can attest. So… we put the movie on.
I shed tears at the end.
Yes, the plot is ridiculous. Yes, it’s an outrageous, candy-colored, self-aware, fourth-wall-breaking farce. A diatribe about the socio-political state of the world wrapped in hot pink and plastic. But it packs a wallop anyway.
The thing is: that furious women’s rights monologue? I’ve felt that way about being a woman in a white man’s world for years. Decades, really. I’m only sorry that it took Barbie—a literal doll—to come out and state it flatly and without apology. Hopefully some people (men) heard it this time. Because let’s be honest, all the carefully crafted stories that have carried those themes—whether subtle or obvious—haven’t exactly moved the needle, as the state of women’s rights almost everywhere in the world amply demonstrates.
And here’s the kicker: even if you resent “women’s issues” being shoved in your face, you can still watch Barbie and appreciate what it really is at its core: a very sweet finding-her-humanity story.
That’s what got me. I’m a sucker for those narratives: Data’s quest for humanity, The Doctor’s, Seven of Nine’s. Yes, it’s a theme that creeps into my own fiction all the time. It’s the quintessential fantasy premise: what does it mean to be human, and why do we long for it?
Thinking about it more—and this is probably why Barbie caught me so off guard—it’s the “finding humanity” arc that gets me every time. In my own Magorian & Jones series, nearly everyone would have gone back to being human in a heartbeat… if only they could. But here’s the catch: both Magorian and Michael Jones were human—and yet they spent most of the series painstakingly re-learning what that even means.
It’s a funny thing, this theme. I didn’t set out to write about humans rediscovering their humanity, but it’s all over those books. For all the orcs and hobgoblins, angels, water-leapers, and magical shenanigans, so much of the tension boils down to this: how easy it is to lose track of what it means to be human…and how hard it is to earn it back.
No wonder I fell for Barbie. Beneath all the plastic and pink, that’s exactly the story it tells too.
So if you’ve avoided Barbie until now, and if none of the above convinces you, watch it anyway. I can almost guarantee you’ll be surprised.
.
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