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Boys are dumb; throw rocks at them
II.c. Debunking the Evil Absolute Theorem. Or, Boys Will be Boys, Which is to Say, Dickheads.
Can we all agree on this? Boys are dickheads. Boys are stupid. Boys are poopheads. Boys need to be set on fire. Boys are mean and nasty and gross and full of greasy grimy gopher guts.
There. Now that we've gotten the five-year-old out of our system, the question I want to address here is exactly how Evil the Boys are. Because yes. Yes, the Boys are Evil. That's right, with a capital E and everything. But how Evil are they?
(I'm not going to lie here; this is probably the most difficult argument I'm going to have to make.)
Some arguments I've seen against the PpG/RrB pairing and favoring others claim that what the Boys do to the Girls in their return ep is way, way worse than anything Mojo Jojo or even Him does to the Girls. Now, let me put another little disclaimer here. I am not trying to diminish the severity of the torture the Boys inflicted on the Girls in the return ep at all. It's disgusting and horrible. But the point I want to make is that as horrible as it is, it really is not that different from what many (not all) normal boys do or would do as children. Give them superpowers and it suddenly escalates to a very grand, very high scale of horribleness, though.
I mean, I know I'm going to have to tiptoe on this one here. We've all been bullied (and if you haven't, well fuck you, Privileged Being, and let us damaged people cry in our corners as our bad memories overwhelm us *WOE*), and part of what makes that episode so uncomfortable for a lot of us is we remember shit like that happening, either to us or to others. It's awful. But—and here I'm going to approach this from an objective standpoint—we've also all seen boys at play (I assume). They are little shits. I've seen them tear gorgeous butterflies apart, I've seen them stick all manner of gross things in girls' hair and down their shirts, I've seen them pick scabs off over and over again, I've seen them snort their own mucus and then run around with their mouths open trying to show other people or spit on them, UGH MY GOD. (Christ, boys are disgusting.) They're horrible to each other, too, even when they're friends. In elementary school I would stand around and wait for my brother and his best friend while they fought on the playground (his best friend would always kick my brother's ass). And they got nasty. It was a pebble playground, and they'd be shoving each other's faces in the pebbles and stuffing pebbles down each other's underpants. This was in the first fucking grade. It got so bad one day that a bus driver—still in the school bus full of kids—actually stopped and asked if they were playing. My brother, with half his face in the ground, and his best friend, with a handful of pebbles at the ready and the waist of my brother's pants pulled out so you could actually see his bare ass, paused briefly to tell him, “Yes.” And then they kept at it. And I just rolled my eyes and thought, 'God, boys are SO STUPID.' (They outgrew that, eventually, and continued to be best friends for a long time afterwards.)
My point in sharing that analogy is not to equate what is clearly established as play between two friends with the torture that goes on in the Boys' return ep, but to make a point about how the notion of play for boys very often employs tactics that as we get older, we recognize as being kind of horrific. As a kid my s.o. shot lizards with his BB gun, not because he hated animals, but because he had a gun and he needed things to shoot at, and living things were more interesting to shoot than cans. (For the record, years and years and years later, he still feels really terrible about it.)
As malicious as the Boys' attacks against the Girls are in the return ep, there is (and I know I'm going to get reamed for this, I just know it) an element of innocence to it by virtue of their age (and arguably intelligence level, since they seriously seem to be mentally retarded upon their initial return).
Regardless of innocence, though, obviously there is intent there to exact revenge on the Girls and torture them and harm them. And if they'd attempted this every time they fought with the Girls in subsequent episodes, we've have some seriously Evil characters on our hands, certainly Eviler than Mojo Jojo, whose Evil capers are more often cause for amusement rather than serious threats. But.
The Boys state outright in the last ep they appear in (“Custody Battle”) that there's only one thing they're interested in, and that's to destroy the Powerpuff Girls (as Brick makes the most hilarious, embarrassing, and facepalming Face of Evil I've ever seen, right on par with Trevor's from Aeon Flux in “A Last Time for Everything,” (which is a brilliant episode, btw, if you're an AF fan)). And that would be pretty hard evidence that these guys are hardcore Evil (still not Him-core Evil, though), if not for their actions in other eps that lessen the sincerity of their claim.
In the other two eps they appear in, they demonstrate an apparent lack of interest in following through on this claim that they want to destroy the Girls. They have an opportunity to attack at the end of “Bubble Boy.” Sure, it's the Girls' home turf (though really, all of Townsville is the Girls' home turf), but since the Boys are “idiots” they wouldn't really interpret the Girls having the home court advantage as a significant hindrance in battle. They can just blast through anything anyway. No, they decide to go to the Girls' home on a whim (presumably a suggestion from Bubbles masquerading as Boomer in an attempt to capture them), wander in via the front door rather than blasting through, then leave immediately after the containment ray is broken and they're freed rather than taking the opportunity to attempt to destroy the Girls.
In “Boy Toys,” the Girls (in a really weakly scripted attempt at a Xanatos Gambit (and Gargoyles btw is another awesome show that everyone needs to watch RIGHT NOW)) outwit the Boys and Princess by distracting the Boys with Princess' weapon-equipped vehicles. Now, you would assume that once the Boys rip open the hulls of these vehicles, if they really wanted to make good on their claim that they want to destroy the Girls, they'd say Fuck the toys and just start with the fighting. But that doesn't happen. They could care less about the Girls. They just want to dick around in the vehicles. They just want to play. Like little boys.
I know the whole “WE WILL DESTROY THE POWERPUFF GIRLS RARGHBLARGHTESTOSTERONEY” thing is in the last episode they appear in, which one might argue negates my argument above. The Boys very well could've mulled things over since their last fight and decided HEY, those Girls outsmarted us! We've been letting them off easy! We gotta get 'em! But that doesn't fit the limited insight we get into the Boys' characters, unless Him started them up on some Ritalin and they're suddenly a lot more focused and goal-oriented now. The thing is, actions speak louder than words. To me, based on the very limited insight we're given (easily distracted, not really that concerned with DESTROYING THE GIRLS ONCE AND FOR ALL, much less once something shiny happens), this whole “our purpose is to destroy the Powerpuff Girls” thing is really just a goal they're echoing from Him/Mojo Jojo. After all, Mojo and Him created the Boys for that specific purpose. Up to a certain age, kids are simply going to parrot what their parents tell them, especially when they're too young to start questioning things on their own. The Boys are certainly old enough to say it, but I don't think they're old enough to really mean it yet, especially given their very five-year-old boy, ADD-esque behavior in the two eps previous, “Boy Toys” and “Bubble Boy.”
Kids can be pretty Evil, it's true, and I'm not trying to say that kids are all paragons of innocence; I actually really hate any adult (and it's often one with a Ph.D.) who makes the claim that, “Oh, they're just kids, they just don't get it!” and don't give a child enough credit for being smarter than all the research data suggests. But the way the Boys are portrayed in the show doesn't provide me with enough evidence to make the claim that they are Super Evil, Eviler than Mojo Jojo, and therefore are even worse romantic candidates for the Girls since they are worse people. To me, and to a lot of the more (at risk of sounding elitist) intelligent PpG/RrB shippers, the Boys are just being boys. Horrible, nasty, stupid, mean, poopyhead boys who ought to be set on fire, of course, but boys all the same.
To touch on this briefly, Mojo, who I previously argued is understood and interpreted to be an adult, doesn't have this excuse of being an innocent little monkey. No, he definitely is making a conscious decision to be Evil and build giant robots and guns that are going to destroy things and help him take over the world. He's a little, you know, delusional at times, maybe, but for the most part he sticks to his guns and isn't going to get too distracted if something shiny happens.
And Him... dude, I can't even... Him is the Evilest of Evil. The Cruelest of Cruel. To even suggest that the RrB are Eviler than Him is just... it's no. (I really, really like Him, you guys. Him's a fucking Bad Ass Mother Fucker. He's like my favorite fucking PpG villain.) And I love the Boys, but there's no God damn way they're Eviler than Him. Him used Bubbles to turn her sisters against each other by possessing her favorite toy, a symbol of love and trust to her. (By all accounts, Bubbles should've had to go through tons of counseling just to be able to hold Octi again.) He turned everyone in Townsville against the Girls and forced them to beat their loved ones up. HE GAVE THEM A HORRIBLE VISION OF THE FUTURE WHEN THEY WERE SIMPLY RACING TO FUCK WITH THEM AND THEIR SENSE OF OBLIGATION AND RESPONSIBILITY. Him is fucking Untouchable, guys. While Mojo may be the Joker to the Girls' Batman based on prevalence in the narrative alone, in terms of mindfuckery and Evil Absolute? Him is their true Joker. He doesn't care about ruling the world; He's the fucking Devil! He stops the Sun from colliding into the Earth with a wave of His claw! And the whole reason He starts it up is just to prove a point to Mojo—that He is more awesome (which is true, sorry Mojo. You'll have to settle for being my number two. I guess you could say you'll always be... second banana (wow, somebody shoot me and put me out of my misery. And I call myself a writer)). Him just wants to fuck around, especially with the Girls' minds. Psychological torture FTW here, with an occasional Oh, let's give the world some exercise and strike a little Fear in the hearts of man today, shall we? God, Him, He's just... fucking so Above It All. King of Everything Forever.
Now there's a fucker who is way, way More Than Human. (Ahahaha seriously somebody shoot me.)
So so far I've made these points:
II. PpG/RrB fandom is full of younger shippers because they latch onto the kiss and then jump from there to Romeo and Juliet-esque romance
II.a. Many PpG/RrB shippers are actually less about the Romeo and Juliet-esque romance than they are about the counterpart > Yin Yang (but really, Jungian archetypes of the Anima and Shadow Self) > “alike, but different” element to the relationship
II.b. Why Mojo/Blossom, which also fits the Anima/Shadow Self analysis, inspires cries of bestiality and thus turns off a number of fans
II.c. In the canon of the show, the Boys really do act remarkably like little boys (though that doesn't necessarily mean they don't deserve to be struck repeatedly with blunt, heavy objects)
Next I'll be going into each pairing individually, starting with the couple that's always depicted as falling in love first: the Blues.
Can we all agree on this? Boys are dickheads. Boys are stupid. Boys are poopheads. Boys need to be set on fire. Boys are mean and nasty and gross and full of greasy grimy gopher guts.
There. Now that we've gotten the five-year-old out of our system, the question I want to address here is exactly how Evil the Boys are. Because yes. Yes, the Boys are Evil. That's right, with a capital E and everything. But how Evil are they?
(I'm not going to lie here; this is probably the most difficult argument I'm going to have to make.)
Some arguments I've seen against the PpG/RrB pairing and favoring others claim that what the Boys do to the Girls in their return ep is way, way worse than anything Mojo Jojo or even Him does to the Girls. Now, let me put another little disclaimer here. I am not trying to diminish the severity of the torture the Boys inflicted on the Girls in the return ep at all. It's disgusting and horrible. But the point I want to make is that as horrible as it is, it really is not that different from what many (not all) normal boys do or would do as children. Give them superpowers and it suddenly escalates to a very grand, very high scale of horribleness, though.
I mean, I know I'm going to have to tiptoe on this one here. We've all been bullied (and if you haven't, well fuck you, Privileged Being, and let us damaged people cry in our corners as our bad memories overwhelm us *WOE*), and part of what makes that episode so uncomfortable for a lot of us is we remember shit like that happening, either to us or to others. It's awful. But—and here I'm going to approach this from an objective standpoint—we've also all seen boys at play (I assume). They are little shits. I've seen them tear gorgeous butterflies apart, I've seen them stick all manner of gross things in girls' hair and down their shirts, I've seen them pick scabs off over and over again, I've seen them snort their own mucus and then run around with their mouths open trying to show other people or spit on them, UGH MY GOD. (Christ, boys are disgusting.) They're horrible to each other, too, even when they're friends. In elementary school I would stand around and wait for my brother and his best friend while they fought on the playground (his best friend would always kick my brother's ass). And they got nasty. It was a pebble playground, and they'd be shoving each other's faces in the pebbles and stuffing pebbles down each other's underpants. This was in the first fucking grade. It got so bad one day that a bus driver—still in the school bus full of kids—actually stopped and asked if they were playing. My brother, with half his face in the ground, and his best friend, with a handful of pebbles at the ready and the waist of my brother's pants pulled out so you could actually see his bare ass, paused briefly to tell him, “Yes.” And then they kept at it. And I just rolled my eyes and thought, 'God, boys are SO STUPID.' (They outgrew that, eventually, and continued to be best friends for a long time afterwards.)
My point in sharing that analogy is not to equate what is clearly established as play between two friends with the torture that goes on in the Boys' return ep, but to make a point about how the notion of play for boys very often employs tactics that as we get older, we recognize as being kind of horrific. As a kid my s.o. shot lizards with his BB gun, not because he hated animals, but because he had a gun and he needed things to shoot at, and living things were more interesting to shoot than cans. (For the record, years and years and years later, he still feels really terrible about it.)
As malicious as the Boys' attacks against the Girls are in the return ep, there is (and I know I'm going to get reamed for this, I just know it) an element of innocence to it by virtue of their age (and arguably intelligence level, since they seriously seem to be mentally retarded upon their initial return).
Regardless of innocence, though, obviously there is intent there to exact revenge on the Girls and torture them and harm them. And if they'd attempted this every time they fought with the Girls in subsequent episodes, we've have some seriously Evil characters on our hands, certainly Eviler than Mojo Jojo, whose Evil capers are more often cause for amusement rather than serious threats. But.
The Boys state outright in the last ep they appear in (“Custody Battle”) that there's only one thing they're interested in, and that's to destroy the Powerpuff Girls (as Brick makes the most hilarious, embarrassing, and facepalming Face of Evil I've ever seen, right on par with Trevor's from Aeon Flux in “A Last Time for Everything,” (which is a brilliant episode, btw, if you're an AF fan)). And that would be pretty hard evidence that these guys are hardcore Evil (still not Him-core Evil, though), if not for their actions in other eps that lessen the sincerity of their claim.
In the other two eps they appear in, they demonstrate an apparent lack of interest in following through on this claim that they want to destroy the Girls. They have an opportunity to attack at the end of “Bubble Boy.” Sure, it's the Girls' home turf (though really, all of Townsville is the Girls' home turf), but since the Boys are “idiots” they wouldn't really interpret the Girls having the home court advantage as a significant hindrance in battle. They can just blast through anything anyway. No, they decide to go to the Girls' home on a whim (presumably a suggestion from Bubbles masquerading as Boomer in an attempt to capture them), wander in via the front door rather than blasting through, then leave immediately after the containment ray is broken and they're freed rather than taking the opportunity to attempt to destroy the Girls.
In “Boy Toys,” the Girls (in a really weakly scripted attempt at a Xanatos Gambit (and Gargoyles btw is another awesome show that everyone needs to watch RIGHT NOW)) outwit the Boys and Princess by distracting the Boys with Princess' weapon-equipped vehicles. Now, you would assume that once the Boys rip open the hulls of these vehicles, if they really wanted to make good on their claim that they want to destroy the Girls, they'd say Fuck the toys and just start with the fighting. But that doesn't happen. They could care less about the Girls. They just want to dick around in the vehicles. They just want to play. Like little boys.
I know the whole “WE WILL DESTROY THE POWERPUFF GIRLS RARGHBLARGHTESTOSTERONEY” thing is in the last episode they appear in, which one might argue negates my argument above. The Boys very well could've mulled things over since their last fight and decided HEY, those Girls outsmarted us! We've been letting them off easy! We gotta get 'em! But that doesn't fit the limited insight we get into the Boys' characters, unless Him started them up on some Ritalin and they're suddenly a lot more focused and goal-oriented now. The thing is, actions speak louder than words. To me, based on the very limited insight we're given (easily distracted, not really that concerned with DESTROYING THE GIRLS ONCE AND FOR ALL, much less once something shiny happens), this whole “our purpose is to destroy the Powerpuff Girls” thing is really just a goal they're echoing from Him/Mojo Jojo. After all, Mojo and Him created the Boys for that specific purpose. Up to a certain age, kids are simply going to parrot what their parents tell them, especially when they're too young to start questioning things on their own. The Boys are certainly old enough to say it, but I don't think they're old enough to really mean it yet, especially given their very five-year-old boy, ADD-esque behavior in the two eps previous, “Boy Toys” and “Bubble Boy.”
Kids can be pretty Evil, it's true, and I'm not trying to say that kids are all paragons of innocence; I actually really hate any adult (and it's often one with a Ph.D.) who makes the claim that, “Oh, they're just kids, they just don't get it!” and don't give a child enough credit for being smarter than all the research data suggests. But the way the Boys are portrayed in the show doesn't provide me with enough evidence to make the claim that they are Super Evil, Eviler than Mojo Jojo, and therefore are even worse romantic candidates for the Girls since they are worse people. To me, and to a lot of the more (at risk of sounding elitist) intelligent PpG/RrB shippers, the Boys are just being boys. Horrible, nasty, stupid, mean, poopyhead boys who ought to be set on fire, of course, but boys all the same.
To touch on this briefly, Mojo, who I previously argued is understood and interpreted to be an adult, doesn't have this excuse of being an innocent little monkey. No, he definitely is making a conscious decision to be Evil and build giant robots and guns that are going to destroy things and help him take over the world. He's a little, you know, delusional at times, maybe, but for the most part he sticks to his guns and isn't going to get too distracted if something shiny happens.
And Him... dude, I can't even... Him is the Evilest of Evil. The Cruelest of Cruel. To even suggest that the RrB are Eviler than Him is just... it's no. (I really, really like Him, you guys. Him's a fucking Bad Ass Mother Fucker. He's like my favorite fucking PpG villain.) And I love the Boys, but there's no God damn way they're Eviler than Him. Him used Bubbles to turn her sisters against each other by possessing her favorite toy, a symbol of love and trust to her. (By all accounts, Bubbles should've had to go through tons of counseling just to be able to hold Octi again.) He turned everyone in Townsville against the Girls and forced them to beat their loved ones up. HE GAVE THEM A HORRIBLE VISION OF THE FUTURE WHEN THEY WERE SIMPLY RACING TO FUCK WITH THEM AND THEIR SENSE OF OBLIGATION AND RESPONSIBILITY. Him is fucking Untouchable, guys. While Mojo may be the Joker to the Girls' Batman based on prevalence in the narrative alone, in terms of mindfuckery and Evil Absolute? Him is their true Joker. He doesn't care about ruling the world; He's the fucking Devil! He stops the Sun from colliding into the Earth with a wave of His claw! And the whole reason He starts it up is just to prove a point to Mojo—that He is more awesome (which is true, sorry Mojo. You'll have to settle for being my number two. I guess you could say you'll always be... second banana (wow, somebody shoot me and put me out of my misery. And I call myself a writer)). Him just wants to fuck around, especially with the Girls' minds. Psychological torture FTW here, with an occasional Oh, let's give the world some exercise and strike a little Fear in the hearts of man today, shall we? God, Him, He's just... fucking so Above It All. King of Everything Forever.
Now there's a fucker who is way, way More Than Human. (Ahahaha seriously somebody shoot me.)
So so far I've made these points:
II. PpG/RrB fandom is full of younger shippers because they latch onto the kiss and then jump from there to Romeo and Juliet-esque romance
II.a. Many PpG/RrB shippers are actually less about the Romeo and Juliet-esque romance than they are about the counterpart > Yin Yang (but really, Jungian archetypes of the Anima and Shadow Self) > “alike, but different” element to the relationship
II.b. Why Mojo/Blossom, which also fits the Anima/Shadow Self analysis, inspires cries of bestiality and thus turns off a number of fans
II.c. In the canon of the show, the Boys really do act remarkably like little boys (though that doesn't necessarily mean they don't deserve to be struck repeatedly with blunt, heavy objects)
Next I'll be going into each pairing individually, starting with the couple that's always depicted as falling in love first: the Blues.