"I really feel like the Powerpuff Girls is in and of itself a horrible place to try to tackle this issue, and the approach of doing a 'trans episode' is just as bad. "Society is on a see-saw right now about us… This kind of media goes beyond simply unhelpful to being actively damaging," Melody explained. The depiction of Donny as flippant, and easily pressured by friends into irreversible life choices, was particularly hurtful. "Plenty were ready to give it a chance, and took what I was saying with a grain of salt before they watched it themselves… Those feelings vanished upon their actually watching what they could only describe as an utterly transphobic trainwreck of anti-transgender propaganda." "I've not found a single transgender individual who's not been immensely offended by that episode," she said. She said her response was shared by trans friends who watched the episode. "We see outdated stereotypes that only fundamentalists are still trying to hold onto, and what basically ends up reading less as an affirmation of transgender individuals and more as a warning to avoid gender affirming procedures at all costs." "This episode throws everything back 50 years," she said. Melody explained her response to me in a Tumblr chat. Musician and trans advocate Delia Melody wrote about the plot on Tumblr in comparison to her own experiences with a brother, who wanted her to "stop and consider that I could just be a really feminine man before I 'did anything drastic' and 'ruined' my own life." She concluded that the only way to tell these stories correctly is to let trans people speak for themselves: "Either put us in charge of our own narratives, or kindly shut the fuck up." "We see outdated stereotypes that only fundamentalists are still trying to hold onto"Īt worst, fans were deeply offended and reminded of uncomfortable personal memories. Then the transmogrified Donny, no longer a little white horse with a unicorn horn taped to his head but a bulbous, heaving bogeyman with a snout, five eyes, and a crude human physique, goes on a rampage, before he's stopped by a group of marauding unicorns who magically turn him back into a pony, only to inform him that he was actually a unicorn all along. Powerpuff Girl Bubbles, taken with the idea of having a unicorn friend, pressures Donny into an experimental transformation. At best, viewers seemed baffled by the episode's bizarre plot twists. "Resonating" isn't always a positive thing. The reboot's attempts at modernization also came in for particular loathing, including a ham-fisted take on meme culture, a gratuitous twerking scene, and the presence of demi-misogynist villain Manboy, a would-be lumberjack criticised by Slate's Eric Thurm as an overly obvious take on the men's rights movement. They highlighted a curious chastening of the characters, only mildly adult to begin with, including the sudden disappearance of teacher Ms Keane's breasts, and the absence of the scheming, seductive Miss Sara Bellum, one of the old series' defining female presences, who controls the town in secret from the office of the witless Mayor. But Tumblr users were specific in their criticism, accusing the writers of lazy dialogue and "Flanderized" characters (a term describing exaggeration of character traits to the detriment of their believability, in reference to Ned Flanders, the zealous, obsessively-doodling neighbour from the Simpsons). Given the renown of the original Powerpuff Girls among fans as levitating, laser-shooting torchbearers for feminism, and after a wait of over a decade, perhaps the new show could only ever disappoint. Cartoon Network was not able to comment by time of publication). (Wikipedia credits five writers for the episode, called "Horn, Sweet Horn," all of whom I approached for comment two responded explaining that, contractually, they were not able to talk about it. It seems doubtful the Powerpuff Girls writers are actually Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, and more likely that this episode, as others in the series would indicate, began with good intentions and got lost along the way. One Tumblr post, which gained thousands of notes, spelled out the community's reaction plainly: " THE POWERPUFF GIRLS WRITERS ARE TERFS. Tumblr users, in particular, are in revolt against the series. The new series has already offended trans viewers and their supporters with an episode involving Donny, a horse who thinks he's a unicorn (a clumsy allegory for gender dysphoria) who is pressured into an operation and subsequently transforms into a monster. But it appears the reboot may be falling short of its aim.
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