Equal Fights (The Powerpuff Girls, 1998)

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Equal Fights This episode doesn't have any equality. Series: The Powerpuff Girls (1998) Part of Season: 3 Episode Number: 12b Air Date: January 5, 2001 Writer: Amy Keating Rodgers Lynne Naylor-Reccardi Lauren Faust Director: Randy Myers Craig McCracken Previous episode: The Headsucker's Moxy Next episode: Powerprof.

Equal Fights is an episode of The Powerpuff Girls (1998) from season three.

Summary

A villainess named Femme Fatale convinces the Powerpuff Girls to hate men so she can steal all of the Susan B. Anthony coins in Townsville.

Unequal Qualities

1. Elephant in the room: this episode is incredibly misandrist, which means it's a hate episode towards men.
2. Femme Fatale is an extremely unlikable supervillain as not only does she manipulate the girls into setting her free, but also to hate men in general. She also only takes the money with a woman in it.
   • She's also very hypocritical as she committed crimes on other women, which included her injuring a police woman.
3. The girls are influenced by Femme Fatale to hate men around Townsville, including every boys in the kindergarten, and even Professor Utonium and the Mayor, which made the girls turn into men haters.
4. And because of the above reason, the girls are very unlikable in this episode as they do some pretty awful things:
   • At school, the girls notice a boy knocking a girl down while playing catch, and they begin to act like jerks towards the rest of the boys, even though the girl was actually laughing.
   • At home, Professor Utonium is in the middle of cleaning the house and asks the girls to clean their bedroom, to which they give him a death glare.
   • Later on Blossom destroyed her male doll, a doll designed after Ken, Barbie’s boyfriend, by zapping its head with her eye lasers for no reason other then Femme Fatale's influence.
   • Finally Blossom gets a call from the Mayor asking them to save the day. She refuses, angrily yells at him to go do it himself in a way that is just plain mean-spirited.
5. Overall, this episode does a very poor job of teaching children about feminism in general.

Equal Qualities

1. Satisfying ending: With the conversation of Ms. Keane and Ms. Bellum, the girls realize that they went too far on hating men just by playing and asking for help and everybody has a duty to protect everyone regardless of gender. The girls confront Femme Fatale and ask her if she ever know who was Susan B. Anthony and she doesn't, the girls tell the true story behind Susan B. Anthony, and received her comeuppance by getting beaten up and sent to jail, the narrator says that the Powerpuff Girls really saved the day.
   • Furthermore, the girls were remorseful for their misandrist behavior after Ms. Bellum and Ms. Keane called them out for their actions as well as showing them that Femme Fatale was hypocritical in her behavior.
2. Professor Utonium, Ms. Bellum and Ms. Keane are likable.
3. Good morals:
   • Similar to another PPG episode, "Members Only", it has one of which does teach us that equal rights is meant to mean women getting treated on the same level as men and not treating men like crap.
   • Ms. Bellum and Ms. Keane pointed out that there's always injustice in the world, regardless of gender.
   • Femme Fatale also stated that there's not much female superheroes and supervillains are well-known compared to males.
4. Some legitimately funny moments, like with the teenage girl's grievance against Femme Fatale being that she copied her hairstyle compared to the female bank manager's and the female police officer's legit grievances.

Trivia

• Femme Fatale asked the girls if they have their own movie yet, which they actually did a year later. In fact, there are three more special episodes after that
  • This is a likely reference of how popular male superheroes, such as Batman and Superman, and later Spider-Man, The Hulk, and Thor, get their own movies more often than female superheroes. Though Wonder Woman does get her own movie in 2017.
• The Mayor actually did try to save Townsville by himself early in this season in, "Hot Air Buffoon", but with disastrous results.

Reception

The episode received mixed reception from fans with some praising the good morals and others disliking it for its blatant misandry. Even the episode's writer, Lauren Faust, who would later create My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, didn't like it very much.

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