4 Comments

Also notable the brunette Barbie's comment early in the film about ostracizing other women, it's not a true utopia, and then bookended by America Ferrera and daughter at the end. When they say to the dad/husband, who has been similarly sidelined as Ken the whole film, that him saying "Si se puede" a very basic sentence in Spanish which he has been earnestly learning on Duo Lingo to be closer to his Latina family, is either a political slogan (millennial bias) or cultural appropriation (zoomer bias). He is dismissed and slightly ostracized for totally neutral and earnest, even pro social, behavior.

Now the trick is the audience is supposed to read that scene subversively and not straight. That we should be more respectful to the good men in our lives and stop making everything about our biases. It's a good message.

Expand full comment

"Ludonarrative dissonance is the conflict between a video game's narrative told through the story and the narrative told through the gameplay."

Reminds me of my blog post "Superman taught me to kill" (https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/354089/).

Expand full comment

The Dan Olson video spends like the first half talking about the history of the concept of ludonarrative dissonance and discussion about it, and then introduces the idea that Transformers is cinemanarratively dissonant. I think you've either misplaced some memories or some words in that paragraph, because as it is you have a sentence linking to a video that contradicts that sentence.

Expand full comment
author

Well I'll be gosh darned, I did mix it up. Been a long time since the video came out :) Fixing, thank you!

Expand full comment