Ballerina is Perfect 2010s YA

Have you ever played Connections? Let's see if you can get this one:

What do these four things have in common?

Legend. Matched. Selection. Testing.

Think on it. We'll come back to it later.

Something about Ballerina felt eerily familiar when I first saw it, and it wasn't just that it's set in the John Wick universe. It felt more like...

Déjà vu.

And I couldn't figure out why until I went home for a family dinner.

Amidst the smell of ham, the din of clanging pots, and overlapping conversations, my 12-year-old cousin Maisie was hunkered down on the couch, nose firmly in a book. I couldn't help but smile. I was exactly the same at her age.

Before I fell under the intoxicating spell of action movies, novels were my drug of choice. My own personal brand of heroin, if you will. Curious, I glanced at the cover of her book. On it, young girl brandished a sword, facing down a dark landscape.

Then it hit me.

Eureka

THAT'S what felt so familiar about Ballerina. It didn't remind me of a movie, it reminded me of the books I loved as a kid.

Did you figure out the Connection?

Legend, Matched, Selection and Testing are all names of female-led YA series' from the 2010s. Series I devoured. And Ballerina follows the formula to a tee.

A lone woman with a tragic past taking on the world. A corrupt system to topple, and a trail of bad guys standing in the way of her revenge. Or truth. Or--

You get it, she saves the day.

Ballerina is a perfect addition to the pantheon. It unlocked memories I didn't even know that I had, of watching in awe as a female protagonist filled up the space that I'd only ever seen occupied by men: the lead.

In a post-Hunger Games world teenage girls ruled pop culture. I was 11 or 12 at the time, and it felt like the world was made just for me. What a time to be alive!

Dozens of books and shows and films flooded the market, feeding the ravenous appetite of girls who'd never seen themselves as heroes or action stars.

At last, the main character didn't have to look like Schwarzenegger or Stallone to be formidable.

These leading ladies were more than love interests or props. They were complex characters with their own backstories and motivations.

It doesn't sound groundbreaking anymore, but to me at the time, it was revolutionary.

I wasn't the only one who caught the bug. I vividly remember swapping books with other girls in my class. At recess, we role-played as assassins and freedom fighters. A few of us even took up archery. I'm still not a bad shot.

When I watched Ballerina, that adolescent inspiration—the same one that had a younger me tearing through YA dystopias— came rushing back. In Legend, June Iparis questioned authourity. In Divergent, Tris Prior was confident in herself. In The Testing, Cia Vale refused to let the society she lived in define her. And in Ballerina, Eve doesn't wait for permission, she goes after what she wants and kicks ass while doing it.

Unlike Transformers or Fast and Furious, Ballerina doesn't reduce women to a sidekicks or objects. The story is Eve's alone. There are no lingering shots of the female figure, not a whiff of a pointless love interest. This is the kind of story that redefined what girls were capable of when I was younger. What I was capable of.

Most importantly, Ballerina lets Eve be a girl. She leans into her femininity and uses it to give her strength. She can't use brute force like John Wick. She uses her grace, her skill, and her surroundings to win. As the movie says, she fights like a girl, and that girlhood defines her.

In hindsight, the pop feminism that these stories traded on is easy to critique. The 2010s were the time of girlbosses and Lean In. Women were becoming more visible, but the stories, or at least the parts of them that were given oxygen, were always about individuals rising above the system, whether it was Katniss Everdeen or Emma Watson. Mainstream feminism was surface level and individualistic, uninterested in challenging what caused a world nearly devoid of female action heroes or CEOs in the first place.

I know all of this now, but without stories like Ballerina I'm not sure that I would.

Fictional female badasses empowered me to question norms simply by existing. I started to ask myself why it felt so paradigm-shifting to finally see strong female leads. That turned out to be a very important skill for a little girl raised on schlocky action movies that rarely had any interesting female characters. I still love Arnie and Sly, but I don't have to accept the testosterone-fuelled male-centric worldview of their movies. These new kinds of stories showed a perspective that I could actually relate to. Without that, I fear I may have burned myself out on action movies long ago. There's only so much baby oil and bazookas a girl can take before she needs a little nuance.

Ballerina shows girls that they can be the protagonist of their own story, that being a girl doesn't make you weak.

It doesn't offer little girls a full treatise on gender, but it does offer a jumping off point. One that is far more accessible than Judith Butler or bell hooks. Those will come later. They did for me.

That's why I went to see the movie again, this time with Maisie. She loved it (and not just because she's 12 and got to see something R-rated). She came out of the theatre with buttery fingers and a massive grin on her face.

"Did you see when she took down that guy using her fannypack? And when she got stabbed and kept fighting? That was so cool. I want a flamethrower. I want to take karate lessons. I want to be like her."

I might make an action junkie of her yet, but that's besides the point. For now, I'm just glad that she gets to see someone like her onscreen, kicking ass and doing things that she might have thought were impossible before.