@jack-of-ash liked for a "turned into a monster" starter
Dean stumbled back to the impala, bloody hands smearing on the handle and steering wheel of his beloved car. His head hurt, the lights from the dashboard hurt his eyes, and the tangy blood on his lips only made his heart sink further into his stomach. He just counted himself lucky that John hadn't been able to make this hunt with him; Dean was sure he'd be dead already if he had.
He drove away from the barn that the vampires had been using as a nest. He didn't drive back to the motel. He didn't stop at Bobby's house. He drove. He drove and kept on driving and changing the radio stations, anything to distract himself from the hunger growing deep within him.
Dean groaned and sat up. “Hey,” he muttered, scrubbing a hand over his face. He still felt tired but thankfully there was no sign of a hangover. “Where are we?”
me seeing my serb-made aesthetic or arts posts where i name the serbian artist or photographer but don't mention they're serbian getting thousands of notes and my posts about human rights abuses against serbs getting like 2, observing the same theme repeating itself for years now:
so, let's talk about this. because it's not quite true
Barbie was not the only fashion doll on the market (much less the only one to ever exist, a worrying claim from the first Barbie movie trailer). Dolls like Madame Alexander's Cissy, Ideal's Miss Revlon, and Uneeda's Dollikin were all available before Barbie's 1959 release
While Mattel would love for you to believe that Barbie was the first, Cissy- released in 1955 -would like a word.
Ruth Handler might well have SAID that she "noticed the only dolls on the market were babies," but she and her husband ran an existing toy company; Barbie was not Mattel's first project. She 100% would have been aware of the other fashion dolls available. In short: if she said that, she was...almost certainly stretching the truth.
There was indeed pushback against fashion dolls from cultural commentators who thought little girls should only play with baby dolls, to encourage Maternal Instincts(TM)...but that dates at least back to the French fashion dolls of the 1860s-1890s, which were accused of making little girls "worldly" in magazines of the day. It wasn't a new idea developed especially in response to Barbie.
What set Barbie apart from other fashion dolls was twofold:
She was smaller and cheaper. Cissy retailed for like $13 in just her lingerie, which was quite pricey for a doll at the time (Barbie cost $3 originally), and stood 20" tall. Miss Revlon was similarly large and unwieldy for a child to carry around. As I understand it, Handler noticed her daughter's fondness for movie star paper dolls and sought to create a 3-dimensional version.
She had an adult face. As you can see above, Cissy may have had breasts, but she was also quite baby-faced. Barbie, with her arched brows and narrow cheeks, looked more like an adult woman in her facial proportions.
Still unusual! Just not unique
But I'm not really here to split hairs about which was the actual first 1950s fashion doll. My main thesis is this: Barbie was NOT originally meant to be empowering.
...or disempowering. Or anything but a fashion doll for which a businesswoman trying to make money felt there was a niche.
Yes, she had a career at the beginning- as a fashion model. Hardly a job many men were trying to keep women out of. The first non-modeling careers she had were ballerina, flight attendant, and registered nurse, female-dominated fields that nobody was challenging women's right to pursue.
(Original Barbie box. If you can't read the text, it says "Barbie(T.M.) Teen Age Fashion Model.")
That's not to say that Handler was completely without deeper thoughts on Barbie's place in the world. She was adamant that, while Barbie might model a bridal gown, she would never actually marry Ken to prevent her from being tied down as a wife and mother. And certainly later in her life, she got onboard with the "girls can do anything!" messaging of later Barbie generations.
But to say that Barbie was intended to be #empowering or make a statement from the beginning is just revisionist history that's bound to leave people disappointed. I mean, what's Twitter OP going to think when they discover that an early Barbie babysitting set came with a little book called "How to Lose Weight" that simply said "Don't eat!" on the back? Handler was still president of the company at the time- how does that fit with this starry-eyed vision of her creating an empowering doll for little girls?
Putting Barbie on a pedestal is going to lead to just as rude an awakening as casting her in the "worthless bimbo doll" role.
@jack-of-ash liked for a "turned into a monster" starter
Dean stumbled back to the impala, bloody hands smearing on the handle and steering wheel of his beloved car. His head hurt, the lights from the dashboard hurt his eyes, and the tangy blood on his lips only made his heart sink further into his stomach. He just counted himself lucky that John hadn't been able to make this hunt with him; Dean was sure he'd be dead already if he had.
He drove away from the barn that the vampires had been using as a nest. He didn't drive back to the motel. He didn't stop at Bobby's house. He drove. He drove and kept on driving and changing the radio stations, anything to distract himself from the hunger growing deep within him.
Samantha Winchester had been very quiet for the last few days. She knew her father and brother would chalk it up to her being moody about having to move again. She wished that were the case; at least they were leaving her alone to stew.
But she needed to tell them the truth. No matter how scared she was of telling them what happened during the last hunt, she couldn't keep it from them forever. Especially after hearing her dad compliment him so much.
If she had to see that bastard again, it would be too soon.
God, this is a tight race. Guess it's time for propaganda part two.
Candace's summer has sucked. She's been dragged onto her brothers' dangerous inventions despite being terrified of them, she's been turned into various things against her will, including a fly and a liquid. She's been attacked by animals, stampeded by cows and humans, accidentally got high once while lost in the middle of a forest, and regularly falls from high places. She had hair grow all over her body on a date and her boyfriend's mum tried to shoot her with a tranquiliser dart because she thought Candace was an orangutan. Her boyfriend's psychopathic little sister put squirrels in her pants (giving her a fear of squirrels) and trained her dog to attack her.
And worst of all, rather than getting acknowledgement that any of this actually happened, her mum thinks she's insane because everything vanishes into thin air before she sees it. The universe is genuinely against her.
And how does she feel about that? Well, how do you think she feels?
Once again, these are all canon lines and scenes.
Her brothers can do anything and everybody loves them, leaving her feeling overshadowed and irrelevant.
And indeed, Candace has attempted to run away from her life and society three separate times (in two episodes and one movie). And who can blame her? Her life sucks.
Candace mostly just wants her mum (Linda) to believe her and appreciate her, but usually, she just gets in trouble, made fun of, or ignored. Even Linda's apologies are backhanded:
In the episode "Mom's Birthday" she's trying her absolute heart out to do something nice for Linda's birthday and P&F outdo her at every turn while everything she makes gets destroyed. The breakfast she prepared for Linda gets slammed in her face without Linda even noticing, the cute dress she bought as a present gets eaten by moths, she eats her own card because she thinks it's inferior to what Phineas and Ferb made, and all her musical instruments disappear so she can't play the song she wrote.
And then even the happy ending of that episode where she finally gets a moment in the spotlight, it lasts all of five seconds before Phineas redirects her attention away gain.
Candace has a whole collection of depressing-ass songs, too. In this episode Candace's personality gets split into two and they sing a song about how much they can't stand one another. It never gets resolved either, they get merged back together without reconciliation and it's clear she's just as much at war with herself after this episode as she was before.
The worst part is, there will never be a lasting happy ending. Because if Candace is happy then the show doesn't work, and Disney will never let the show go. Even in the 20-years-in-the-future flash-forward ep Candace relapses the second she sees the boys, suggesting even in all that time she never really gets over it.
Papyrus is indeed capable of saying fuck and may or may not be willing to, but he is a kind soul and would willingly give it up as he would recognise that Candace needs the fuck far more.
