New Powerpuff Girl Bliss’ messaging is messed up
The new Powerpuff Girl, Bliss, is black. Her addition ends up being an unintentional cautionary allegory for the failings of intersectional feminism.
Seeing the initial details of the new Powerpuff Girl, that of an older, apparently blacker sister joining the family, was curious but exciting. The execution could use work.
The return of the beloved show last year, The Powerpuff Girls, to its original run from 1998-2005, needs no explanation. It was a Cartoon Network fan favorite. A show about girl power always feels needed and welcome.
Its creators brought it back very intentionally, getting rid of an original character like Ms. Bellum because the character did not represent the “messaging” they wanted, according to the L.A. Times. The show also gave the original three Powerpuff Girls “stronger personalities” to better understand the individual girls. There also created new villains, like Brawny-Man, described as an “old-thinking type of male character,” to quote the Times.
The reboot is a nod to the new-thinking new world, one in which women are represented more and represented better. A show for young girls to build toward an ever-bettering feminism of the future. And it’s fun.
A new sister
What’s not fun is the addition of another new-world but bungled nod to a female character of color joining the rest of her sisters in the fight for — what’s right in the title — power, only to be singled out, her essence differentiated from her fellow, lower-melanin girls, her otherness discombobulating the entire girl power front.
After introducing the new Powerpuff Girl, Blisstina Utonium (Bliss for short), the show never explicitly refers to her as black but she is voiced by black voice actors and has much darker skin and purple hair (she gets her purple hair from drinking grape soda, just kidding, which is what you do when you want to punch a screen). That’s pretty intentionally black.
Another new-world move — origin story time! Before the original three Powerpuff Girls, their father, Professor Utonium, created Bliss. The original three, Bubbles, Buttercup and Blossom, were created on accident. They became the unintentional result of a battery of experiments to create the perfect little girl (kind of a weird idea, the perfect little girl?) using sugar (wait), spice (um), everything nice (c’mon) and Chemicals A-V.
The reason Professor stops at V is because, before this, Utonium made Bliss intentionally, using the now-known to be too volatile Chemical W, which gave Bliss powers the others don’t have. According to io9, she’s capable of telekinesis, teleportation and other energy powers.
The Professor raises Bliss like he would the other girls, but Bliss’ powers prove beyond control. She loses control when her emotions — sadness, anger, anything — heighten, causing her to literally combust and lay waste to everything in her midst. After a bunch of emotional and physical blow-ups, Bliss leaves on her own in shame. The Powerpuff Girls TV movie that introduces Bliss, The Power of Four, is the tale of her origin as well as her return. Once she is back, over the course of the movie, she has some flare ups, but ultimately, learns how to harness her emotions, and thus, her abilities, and, uh, leaves apparently.
Okay, we have a lot to unpack. That’s a snapshot, just one night of TV. Maybe more appearances by Bliss will add more, proper context. But the proverbial thousand words of this snapshot do not paint the prettiest picture. The show cares about messaging, so let’s see what’s received when considering Bliss.
And the message she sends
First, let’s talk about the notion of Chemical W, the essence of Powerpuff Girls of color. Chemical W imbues Bliss with higher powers than her evidently white counterparts. This smacks of typical, exaggerated Maria-Sharapova-Serena Williams-like description of black bodies and abilities: “(Williams) has thick arms and thick legs and is so intimidating and strong. And tall, really tall.” Williams is five inches shorter than Sharapova, a relatively diminutive figure. It feels like Maria Sharapova is an uncredited executive producer of The Power of Four.
That’s what hurts so much from a feminist perspective, that it would be a woman that says these things about Williams. This, unfortunately, follows a long history of women’s movements being racist. That a peer of Williams’ like Sharapova, but, ultimately, a white woman afforded privilege over Williams, would be the first to say simply untrue things rooted in describing blacks as physical behemoths, so strong that there is little need to ascribe things to them, like Williams’ eminent tennis intellect or unparalleled work ethic, is just another example of this troubling tradition persisting today.
Bliss seems to be another. By far the most glaring black coding is the notion that Bliss cannot control her emotions, and that her lack of control is a direct threat to everything and everyone around her. Are they describing a rabid hyena? The first image that comes to mind is that of Bliss, or, you know, any black girl, being pinned down — or worse — by 12 police officers because they somehow feared for their lives from the one black person that isn’t a regular person but sub or superhuman in their eye, like a “monster,” or “Tasmanian devil.”
This may seem a stretch, but the so-called messaging leads to no other interpretation. Not yet, at least. And the white Powerpuffs Girls have powers, too, that regular human girls see as metaphors for a strong identity. Look at what Professor Utonium does next — he continues his experiments after Bliss leaves, making sure to never use Chemical W again. And so we get three, regular, levelheaded, safe, non-monster, good, white Powerpuffs.
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For a show that’s super intentional with its messaging, this is messed up. It’s dangerous for impressionable minds, the unintentional cautionary animated allegory for when a black woman enters the world of white feminism — she tends to be generally differentiated from the rest and relegated.