Whatever success the upcoming Barbie film is going to have in the box office is going to have to depend on countries outside of Vietnam. According to reports, the film has been banned in Vietnam for containing a forbidden image, namely a map that appears to bolster China’s own competing claims in the South China Sea with Vietnam’s based on the fallacious “nine-dash line” that China has used to justify its own bullying in the area that has drawn widespread disagreement with nations like Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and Vietnam, who all have their own competing claims over the oil rich Spratley Islands in the region. By taking Chinese propaganda as fact in an area where a massive disagreement exists, the film may seek to pander (unintentionally, we hope) to Chinese interests while sabotaging its chance to appeal to Vietnamese audiences.

I have thoughts on this, and these thoughts are complicated. For one, I am confused that the makers of the Barbie movie chose to enter needlessly into one of the thorniest areas of the world when it comes to competing claims. What does Barbie have to do with the Spratley Islands in the first place? When I think of Barbie and Ken and their fictional antics, the thought that the filmmakers chose to involve themselves clumsily in a deeply complicated geopolitical matter would appear to be remote. It would be easy to simply avoid talking about an issue that is not well-known for most world audiences and extremely contentious for those people who do know about it. And given that Vietnam’s own claims in the region are comparatively moderate compared to China’s in particular, why would filmmakers be so inclined to treat dodgy Chinese propaganda as fact, not least given the fact that pandering to China has seldom benefited movie studios anyway.

After all, this is not the first time in recent memory that a film has been banned in Vietnam for failing to take into consideration its sensitivity to Chinese maximalist territorial claims. Given Vietnam’s own long and troubled history with Chinese invasions–the most recent one being in 1979–their sensitivity to Chinese territorial claims is hardly unusual. And if one is going to include maps of the Spratleys, which made far more sense in the Uncharted movie than it does for Barbie, it must be readily admitted, it would be no great matter to pick maps that indicate the competing claims rather than only including China’s own claims. It is a telling irony that a film called Uncharted should fail to make at least a few million dollars in the box office because of its failure to include balanced enough charts of one of the most hotly contested spots on the globe, but the fact that two films in the last few years should make the same mistake is quite baffling.

One thing that this sort of problem indicates is that Hollywood studios simply do not care about Vietnamese sensitivities. The fact that these sensitivities are easy enough to understand and not at all unreasonable is irrelevant when one considers that two movies have touched on the issue of the South China Sea and neither of them felt any need to do more research than to take Chinese claims as the basis for their own presentation of the area, nor felt it necessary at all to ponder how other people in the region may feel about Chinese aggressiveness and territorial aggrandizement. Despite the poor rates of return for Hollywood films in China as a general rule, the large potential market of China blinds many Hollywood studios (and other businesses, it must be admitted) to the possible returns that one could gain in a country like Vietnam. You know that people care about you based on the fact that they take your sensitivities into account, and when repeated failures to respect these sensitivities can be noted, the obvious conclusion to draw is that people do not indeed care about your own feelings or perspective. How one responds to this is up to oneself.