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fedoranonymous · 3 years

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Okay okay okay

If we're gonna do a powerpuff girls reboot, let's do a

Powerpuff Girls Reboot!

We open with the intro text from the original cartoon. It's iconic, it's been basically unmodified since they were the Whoopass Girls, you've gotta have it. Either use the original animation or hire three cute lil things to do it, but have your new Professor read it out.

When we get to "but a secret ingredient was added to the concoction..." start pulling out to reveal that it's coming from the TV, and the Girls are reacting to the portrayal of their childhood in real time. They keep saying the girls are cute, but they have things to say about the plot. Blossom wants to know if this is a period piece or isn't it, make up your mind. Bubbles is worried about people confusing fiction for reality and blaming them for things that happen on TV. Buttercup just wants to watch a mindless action flick.

The Professor narrates again. "It's been ten years since the Girls first woke up in that Lab. Of course, they were already physically six by then. Mentally... Well, they certainly had the intelligence of adults 7 times their age. Along with the innocence of children. That was our goal -- people who could really, honestly, and without cynicism plot an attainable future for humanity. The superpowers? Well they caught everybody by surprise."

Flashback to the girls earliest moments perhaps, or just go straight to: for their safety, and to try and dissuade the onslaught of costumed villains that have come to Townsville seeking a fight with Real Superheroes, the Mayor and the Professor have decided that there will be No More Superheroing In Townsville Anymore. They get to live the next twelve years as ordinary girls, have real lives, isn't that exciting?

Well, if it's what you think is best.

In the intervening decade, the girls have grown. They're not perfect little girls anymore.

Blossom has clearly seen the Incredibles. She has a meticulous line of silver medals: science fairs, races, MMA. Straight 95% As across the board. Her golds are all in team sports, and her clear eye for tactics has garnered her the attention of the junior ROTC, who she has to dodge frequently and ever more creatively because "it just doesn't seem right to train with them like an ordinary soldier when I have heat vision and two purple hearts".

Major drama comes from her science fair partner who seems... Weirdly well researched about weapons manufacturing. And obsessed with superheroes. During the midseason finale, they get way too riled up working on their automatic water purification system and end up inventing a weather machine that goes haywire. Science fair partner is way too into "something exciting happening for once". Even though it nearly destroys the city, they get a Tidy defense contact for the technology. Blossom adds it to her secret safe absolutely bursting with various patents.

Bubbles, meanwhile, is working herself to the bone trying to do as much good as it's possible for a "normal girl" to do. She volunteers at the hospital. She gets yelled at by the Professor for giving plasma when they can't know it wouldn't hurt a normal human. She volunteers at the soup kitchen, at Big Brothers Big Sisters, at Habitat for Humanity. She's a religious follower of the "only eat what can be grown within x miles of where you live" (I think it's 100?) While being vegetarian, obviously, she can talk to animals. She had to get yelled at for volunteering at the pound for that reason, too, but the vets missed her so much, she got brought back in. She's much more vocal about shopping locally, though, and she is never not eating a handful of nuts, because this girl needs protein! She feels bad even though she knows squirrels eat a different kind of nuts.

Definitely a scene at a farm where her cow friend tells her that food is love and that she needs milk so she can have bones string enough to punch through steel, right after Bubbles had punched through some steel.

Definitely the instigator of Let's Fight Crime Again and early season drama of her learning that she needs to accept some reciprocation of all the love she puts out into the world. Like, she drops out of the sky out of exhaustion, shit like that.

And Buttercup? Buttercup is just fine. Never been better. Cruising down easy street. No complaints here. Yeah, she's been suspended for starting fights with normal kids again, and that's super dangerous, but that kid's an asshole and all they've got is a couple of bruises. Yeah, she stays out all hours of the night, trying to drink and use enough that it gets past her metabolism, but like, it hasn't yet? Honestly this is science at this point. And yeah, no one knows where she got the money for that bike (until an early season episode reveals that she's been cutting hair at a publish barbershop that is either part of or adjacent to a tattoo parlor, and that her coworkers there are the only people she feels like she can talk to. All the characters here are blatantly queer.) But the bike isn't stolen, or anything, back off.

The only thing that lets on that there might be something deeper than "takes no shit, gives a mean right hook" is the way she JUMPS at the chance to fight "for real" again.

As a Powerpuff Girl, as a kid, Buttercup always felt like all she could do was fight. Blossom was the smart one, the leader; Bubbles was the kind one, the friend to all. Yeah, they all had the same capabilities, but like most twins and triplets, they specialized. So the could hit, too, but she could hit best.

Having their hero work taken away from them hit Buttercup hardest of all. Especially because when they started trying to take up "normal" hobbies, Blossom and Bubbles had an easier time holding back their powers while she felt like she had no middle ground between laughably weak and giving her all. Basically, a feedback loop. So Buttercup has spent the last ten years walking on eggshells Constantly and is ready to go Ape Shit.

All of these skewed self esteem issues make her crazy self sacrificial and beastly to fight. She's not holding back anymore, and she never will again! This is who she is, this is all she'll ever be, and she'll die as herself rather than give anything less than 100%!

You know, terrifying.

Comes to a head when one of her sisters takes a hit meant for her and she realizes that she might be the most fucked up, but they kind of all are a little fucked up. The same, but more so.

Obviously everyone's going to want the Rowdyruff Boys to feature heavily, maybe the teaser after the midseason/season finale is them making parole or something? I've got to admit, they were never my favorite villains. If the series leans more comedy, maybe start with them coming (back?) to school and purposefully starting trouble while making direct eye contact, since they Know.

I definitely see the Gangreen Gang being involved with Buttercup's tattoo parlor place. Not even commiting crimes, just being Green and sleezy. Or, shit, that's a racial profiling allegory. Very CW, but no thanks! I have no trust in my senshi heart, you will fuck it up, forget I said anything.

That being said, if you don't get the license for ANY Gorillaz music, when Ace has canonically played for them? Fuck right off.

I really want HIM to appear in a place of prominence, like a season finale. Just rip HIM straight out of the cartoon, don't try to update HIS appearance or schtick at all. But HE is all about getting into your head and toying with your insecurities, right? I just went through all this effort to give the girls imposter syndrome and negative self worth, let HIM play.

I regret my formatting choices on that last paragraph.

Also Halloween episode where they go as their alter egos from Super Zeroes and the monster is like "Oh not this shit again" and the girls are like "hey, we can dress up AND kick ass".

#let me know if there are other characters you want to see me do treatments on #i can do the rrb for real too i just need to rewach their eps first #long post #Powerpuff girls #powerpuff girls reboot #eli's writing tag

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thesswrites · 5 years

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Global Terror

Fear is a universal constant. Everyone on earth is afraid of something; it might be irrational like the number thirteen or clowns, or a very abstract concept like death of a loved one, but everyone knows fear, down in their bones. A lot of factors will eventually decide what an individual fears - someone who was stung by a bee as a very small child may well develop a fear of flying insects in later life, for example, while someone who was in a car accident is likely to find car journeys stressful in future. While individual experiences are likely to define our fears, the experiences that we share as a culture are equally likely to define our more abstract fears. This in turn will define trends in horror media in a nearly self-perpetuating cycle of societal fear response. This essay takes a look at various cultures and their reactions to societal terrors as shown in horror media, beginning with some of the less examined cultures and ending with the 'melting pot' that is, for better or worse, the perceived core of mass media.

Europe is an interesting source of horror, largely because of its early fairy tales being the progenitor of most commonly-used modern Western horror stories. Eastern Europe as a whole has lived with monsters for a very long time, from the narrative perspective. While the vampire mythos has existed since ancient Greece, and the forerunners of the modern vampire were British and Irish (John William Polidori first with the much-forgotten Lord Ruthven and Bram Stoker with Dracula), Romania and Slavic Europe have a surprising number of myths about vampires. Slavic and Romanian folklore is, in fact, so riddled with monsters that it's almost impossible to be truly afraid of them, as most fear is, at its root, of the unknown. That combined with the ease and blamelessness in which one can become a vampire in Slavic folklore means that there is an entirely different kind of horror involved in tales involving the blood-drinking undead; combined with the fact that everything from birth defects to an animal jumping over someone's open grave can make a vampire, the only way to truly find the fear and horror from these creatures is to become these creatures, at least from the narrative perspective. Films like Night Watch, Let The Right One In and Not Like Others delve into the lives of these cast-out souls, and the horror is found in the tragedy of their haunted, hunted existence and their battle with their own natures, not in the fates of their victims.

There is another purpose to the focus on the monster as the terrorised party in Slavic culture; the fear of standing out. Up until fairly recently, to stand out in Eastern Europe was the worst thing, when survival largely depended on keeping one's head down and not being noticed. Particularly post-World War II, the idea of birth defects or living 'impiously' by local standards being an offense punishable by death is a familiar one to those in Germany, Poland and Russia, even if that last is largely because of a significant guilt for letting it happen to countries that were ostensibly under its purview beginning with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. All told, in the tale of 'the different need to be exterminated because the world says they're wrong and dangerous', countries with their chequered history are likely to show sympathy for the different. Since supernatural creatures have been used as an allegory for the different and bizarre for at least a century, that makes it entirely unsurprising that that entire section of Europe will find the horror in being the 'different' one, rather than being the one hunted by the 'monster'.

Great Britain is a particularly interesting case, given its approach to life as a whole. The British Empire, and the two islands in general, have suffered a great many highs and lows, to the point where 'Keep Calm and Carry On' was effectively its motto long before they quasi-officially adopted it during World War II. Also, its folklore is full of just as many horrors as those found in Eastern European folklore, though British folklore mostly focuses on trickster beings that live somewhere in the middle of the Venn diagram covering spirit, monster and god. All things taken into account, it's surprisingly difficult to find a truly terrifying British horror story. The 'Keep Calm and Carry On' mentality mean that even the great classics, such as Dracula and Frankenstein, convey more of a clinical if occasionally suspenseful retelling than a conventional horror story. More modern British entries into the hallowed halls of horror show the other side of British esprit de corps - the ability to laugh at themselves in even the most dire of circumstances. This is a country that deals with terrorist attacks by stating in a ha-ha-only-serious way that "I've been blown up by a better class of bastard than this", flagging up that the surest show that this was an emergency was that a popular sandwich bar chain had run out of chocolate cake, and interrupts live coverage of the incident to air a popular soap opera. These are not a people that seek visceral terror as a form of entertainment, simply because it's so difficult to achieve. Even the few things they do find scary are often subject to parody; for every 28 Days Later apocalypse scenario, there's a film - usually by or starring Simon Pegg - to parody it, a Shaun of the Dead or a The World's End or, most recently, a Slaughterhouse Rulez.

However, looking at that example, as well as classics like Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, there is one thing that the British seem to fear: a breakdown of the normally accepted rules of conduct, be they scientific, political or societal. Victor Frankenstein brought on his own doom by over-reaching himself in his field, and compounded it by ignoring his responsibilities to his creation. There are too many examples of this to count in Dracula, though the most notable is the fate of poor Dr Seward, who delved too deeply into things he should not have touched. This trend continues in microcosm and macrocosm in British cinema today; The Quiet Ones follows scientists tormented because they breached a realm of study best left unexplored, whereas 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later touches on both "Science Shouldn't Go Too Far" and "What Happens When The Rules Stop Working?".

Going to the other side of the globe for a moment, some of the front-runners of the horror genre are from the Pacific Rim. Japan and South Korea are renowned for their dark, suspenseful horror films, with Japan adding extra bombast with disaster movies whose messages and cultural impact have stood the test of time even if their special effects have not. The disaster movies are easy ones to dissect from a cultural standpoint; nuclear radiation and its effects, as well as large-scale property damage, have been a stark scar across the Japanese consciousness since 1945. Like the aforementioned car accident victim attempting to ride in a car without panicking, the radiation fears and mass-destruction imagery of the Godzilla movies are an almost guaranteed poke to the hindbrain.

Going back further in the consciousness of the region, however, we come to the underlying cultural fear evoked by the more subtle horror films of both Japan and South Korea. From Ringu in Japan to South Korean films such as The Wishing Stairs, the largest driving force for the supernatural plot elements are guilt and revenge, evoking the honour code that has driven both nations for a very long time, while also touching on the horrors left after their various wars of attrition with the 'death of innocence' trope. However, while Japan focuses on these themes in a more general way, South Korea often approaches the matter in a somewhat more focused - and, to the modern eye, disturbing - way in that many of its defining offerings to cinematic history touch on the latent homophobia of the nation. The Wishing Stairs, Whispering Corridors and particularly Memento Mori all focus on teenage girls, and all of them either imply lesbian relationships or outright feature them. It's unclear whether this is a call to arms, trying to see homosexuality as something more acceptable by framing it as a trait held by a sympathetic character, or a show that 'queers get what they deserve'. It's certainly seen as a common enough situation to be nearly commonplace in movies of that type, though blending it into the horror genre so completely frames it as something to fear.

Across the Pacific, we find Hollywood, and the so-called 'melting pot' that is the United States. Arguably the primary source of the world's entertainment media, the US should theoretically produce a range of horror as broad as the cultural heritage of its people. In a way, that's the case, as American horror authors and scriptwriters often borrow from the folklore of other nations or even simply remake them. However, as these are framed in the American idea of what 'scary' is rather than tapping into the cultural fear that inspired the originals, these remakes seldom come off as well unless they deviate significantly from the source material. Even going back past the days of cinema, consider HP Lovecraft - while born in the United States, America at that time was still only a few generations removed from being a British colony, rebuilding on its own after a bloody civil war. It had hardly been long enough for the nation to develop its own cultural identity, although it was clearly trying. Lovecraft began that in terms of horror; while still deeply entrenched in the "break rules to delve into things you should not examine and be damned" mentality of British horror, his deep-seated racism showed the first glimmer of a largely American fear of the black population, so recently freed.

Nowadays, however, US horror is a difficult subject to examine because of the subgenres on offer in the wider horror genre. Paranormal romance, for example, has taken a great deal of the horror out of classic movie monsters like vampires and werewolves, with the 'action-adventure' label making them one more antagonist to shoot. These days, the true horror in US entertainment media comes from a source whose very mundanity makes it all the more terrifying - other people. Born of urban legends as much as real-life serial killers, slasher movies are the one movie genre that is very specifically American (the British being too inured to the idea of the knife-wielding stranger by Jack the Ripper to really bother with it). Despite supernaturally-born outliers like Freddy Krueger, slasher-killers have always simply been troubled individuals, from Norman Bates to Jason Voorhes to the convoluted chain of Jigsaw killers. The Purge franchise takes it one step further, casting everyone in the immediate vicinity as a potential killer just waiting for the opportunity. While the actual reasoning behind this cultural paranoia is unclear, the fact that most entertainment media is optioned by committee under the auspices of swathes of marketing data means that there is at least a vocal minority of the American public that identifies enough with this mindset to engage it on an emotional level. Given the shape of US politics today, this is worrying on so many levels it's impossible to discuss them all in an essay of any reasonable length; it would probably take a proper academic paper written by someone with several degrees and preferably no personal investment. Perhaps someone living somewhere sane like Switzerland.

So what does all this tell us about the cultural makeup of the countries under discussion? It certainly indicates that Slavic Europe and the Pacific Rim are still haunted by the spectres of a particularly violent past, and that Britain has an inborn need for order that may or may not have originated with the loss of the Empire. The United States, meanwhile, shows some deep-seated paranoia, a fear of itself that shows no signs of abating and even seems to be ramping up as the years go by. It's entirely possible that the entire world needs whatever the cultural equivalent of therapy is, but given the cathartic nature of entertainment media, this is supposed to be a form of therapy from the cultural standpoint. At least most of the rest of the nations seem to be recovering, though they will always still be suffering from whatever the cultural equivalent of PTSD is; Britain, in fact, has recovered well enough to laugh about it, although given the shape of the sociopolitical landscape, they may have recovered too well and be doomed to repeat the lessons they refused to learn from history. The United States, meanwhile, appears to be wallowing in its own divisiveness from a cultural standpoint, with the primary indicator of the things it fears showing a nation that would be happiest alone in a bunker surrounded by land mines with a high-powered firearm, shooting at anyone who gets too close.

There’s no great sociopolitical message here, unless it’s one that a reader wants to find for themselves. It’s just fascinating from an anthropological standpoint how much what people - on a cultural level - are afraid of can sometimes tell us about what kind of people they are.

#general essay: genre media

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