#but yeah gahhhh there could have been better ways of saying what was said fr

[bugeyedfreaks]

So I was thinking about the whole “misogyny behind the supposed lack of interest in teenage girl Powerpuffs” statement you made and something hit me: the reason why the reboots suck is because they’re trying to squeeze edgy, Cinemasins-style teenage and adult situations and humor out of perpetually five year old girls and it makes me so mad that Craig said that because teenage girls ALREADY think that their lives end once they have boobies or are interested in girly hobbies and it would be so subversive to have a show that continues off of the “GIRLS CAN BE ANYTHING.” message of the original with “TEENAGE GIRLS CAN DO ANYTHING. THEY DON’T HAVE TO BE MEN LITE TO BE HEROES.” but instead, we get like five reboots of various levels of quality, all because he thinks teenage girls have cooties or whatever.

Oh yeah, what I said on this post! I could have given you a short answer like a normal blogger, but here is my long, rambling answer where I basically agree and get a little off track and go more in detail about the suckiness of the reboots/the suckiness of saying the girls aren't special if they're older... behind the cut. 🤣

“Teenage girls ALREADY think that their lives end once they have boobies or are interested in girly hobbies.” It's definitely not an inherent thought by any means, but I totally know what you're saying. Society and culture and the media and the internet push girls into thinking they have to become a certain kind of "mature" by a certain age and it's awful. And to say that the girls wouldn’t be “special” if they were older felt as if it was reinforcing the whole gross notion that women allegedly turn into completely different creatures at puberty and from there on out rapidly lose their worth/usefulness as they get older. To say that the girls wouldn’t or couldn’t be “special” when they grow up… yeah, the wording was pretty yikes.

I guess I should quickly clarify that I prefer Craig doing what he does best, and I'm perfectly fine with the girls continuing to be kindergarteners if the show gets rebooted or continued. And he hasn't been involved with the series since 2008, so he's not responsible for any of the content in the reboots that have already happened. I don’t believe he’s some raging sexist (…well, I hope not) either, it’s just that the way he’s said some of the things he’s said concerning this topic are kinda… ugh. Poorly communicated. It's frustrating sometimes! 😩

I get what Craig was trying to say: having the girls be ass-kicking kindergarteners is a fun and unique premise (true, and I love them that way, it's OG, baby!), and having them be teenagers or adults… well, there are already a lot of ass-kicking superheroines who are teenagers/adults. But that's such a limited view of who the girls really are. Their being kindergarteners isn’t the only thing that makes them unique compared to other superheroes/hero teams. They’re three sisters (essentially triplets) with a creator who acts as their single-parent father figure (so they have a loving and stable family life), and each one of them has distinct personalities and talents. They’re fully fleshed-out characters on their own, but they’re also incomplete if they aren’t together. How many other superheroes or superheroines are like that?

Regarding the comment he made about their “kryptonite,” I definitely think that an interesting setback (and strength!) of theirs– regardless of them being in kindergarten– is that none of the girls have alter egos, so they can never just have “normal” lives. At least Clark Kent and Diana Prince could maybe pretend to be regular people once in a while. Blossom and Bubbles and Buttercup can’t! No matter how old they become, the girls will always have to deal with their “real world” responsibilities in tandem with their “superhero” responsibilities because they don’t have to hide anything about their powers from the world. Other superheroes’ lives would end if their “normal” identity was exposed: theirs wouldn’t. And then again, no matter what unique responsibilities they’d be facing, no matter their stage in life, they’d continue to have to deal with the positives and negatives of that kind of existence, and, like I've discussed on here before, I think there are soooo many stories that could potentially be explored stemming from that. So... like... come on. Not special, my foot! It's not like their adventures would all of a sudden end or could never be just as unique as they've always been!

In the case of making a story with the girls being older, yeah, that doesn’t automatically mean you need to stuff your show with edgy, "adult" humor. You barely even have to change how they talk. They don’t have to talk about sex or comment on the latest pop culture thing to be “mature.” They don’t have to get all serious and gritty to be “mature.” Those are the kinds of things people in Hollywood think maturity is (does a certain someone who's also in Hollywood believe that, too? 👀). The problem is in the writing, in misunderstanding what the show is and who the characters are in the first place, how they deal with life to begin with, and so far it seems that the right storytellers who could tell really cool stories in that sort of setting who do understand all that haven’t come along yet.

Also, a thing that I feel is critical to getting the tone of the girls as characters right is that they exist in a universe that, while it may have exciting action and fighting and carnage, is still a very silly place. The goofiness of that universe comes with a very specific tone that has not been well replicated in these other iterations of the series. The balance of the girls' “normal” and “superhero” lives is always off-kilter (and I’m gonna be controversial… I think the live-action script didn't hit the mark but was a billion times closer to getting that balance than the 2016 reboot), and the type of humor that gets used is way off in tone (PPG humor ≠ twerking/Simpsons humor/lazy pop culture jokes/sex jokes). Plus, that small but critical dose of sincerity in the writing of the original show barely ever feels like it’s present in any of these newer iterations.

...but what do I know, I dunno, do I even get the characters? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That's just how I feel about it all. Sorry for all these words, haha.

#me to myself after writing all of this: shhhhh grandma let's get you to bed #but yeah gahhhh there could have been better ways of saying what was said fr #serious time