I’ve had my share of run-ins with various leftists for the past few years, given my takes on their sacred movies that I either didn’t like or thought weren’t as left as they thought.
Today, I ended up the scorn of rightists. Why?
Because I didn’t notice that a rat named Splinter is portrayed as “gay” in the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.
And why didn’t I notice that the rat named Splinter is supposedly gay?
Because said rat gets married to a stinkbug — um, excuse me, cockroach — and that bug is allegedly male.
The Internet is up in arms about this because some reviewer got upset at the marriage between Splinter and classic TMNT character Stinkbug, a character I personally have never heard of — and I just played the new beat-em-up Turtles videogame after watching the TV show as a kid, watching the first two movies as a kid, and playing probably three or four other videogame incarnations.
But there’s a problem: director Jeff Rowe says Scumbug the stinkbug — pictured above and to the left of the big rat — is really a female.
Apparently, the marketers for the movie screwed up and called Scumbug a male in various promotional material. Yet Rowe and his team meant for the character in a movie to be a female.
Which means our homosexual rat isn’t gay.
Nope, he’s really heteronormative, or cisgendered, or whatever.
Sorry outraged right-wing Youtube commenters: you must focus your outrage somewhere else.
Now honestly, I couldn’t tell whether the cockroach marrying the rat was hetero or homo or something else. Given that we are talking about mutant animals in a cartoon movie, I would’ve bet heavily on “something else.”
Such as: “This rat-stinkbug thing really stupid and who cares?”
But my right-wing interlocuters are up in arms about Hollywood portraying a “classic” character as a homosexual, which to them shows that They Control You and Me. Whoever “They” are.
You cannot underestimate the paranoia of these people. However correct they might be of the degeneracy of the entertainment industry, the fact remains that there are some cases where nobody in the history of the world has or will ever care about certain things.
And one of those things is whether a cartoon rat marrying a cartoon cockroach is a homo or hetero relationship.
To any onlooker, it is supposed to be the stupidest of juvenile humor, in a movie where a character vomits for about an entire minute on-screen. And also turtles are milked for green mutant ooze. I mean literally milked. (How do you milk a turtle? That’s in the same philosophical realm as how you tell the gender of a cartoon stinkbug.)
I would’ve thought that the entire scope of the Turtles Movie — juvenilia that I just wrote about in my last Substack on Pee Wee Herman — would be a bigger cultural problem than how a rat and cockroach are portrayed in a one-minute span in a movie nobody’s watching and no one will remember.
And as usual, by playing up the supposed homosexuality in this movie, which is apparently not real at all, my right-leaning haters end up giving more voice and influence to the things they don’t like.
You really can’t teach these people the basic lessons of marketing.
Rule #1: if you really don’t like something, don’t ever talk about it. And certainly don’t talk about it on social media, where the algorithms will notice and start passing on free advertising about the movie. Your outrage is channeled right into dollars for people promoting what you dislike.
My three-pronged response to people calling me out on Youtube is:
I will never care about a rat marrying a cockroach in a forgettable movie
I won’t ever know the pedantic details of canonical lore of a minor franchise that will disappear within a couple of decades (very likely)
I won’t be inspecting the gender of a cockroach/stinkbug in a cartoon scene that is supposed to be only for the dumbest of juvenile humor addicts
In most things I am thorough. I am a meticulous scholar by training, after all.
But not in reviewing another so-so Turtles movie that’s generating pointless controversies that only end up helping to sell tickets.
So I don’t know what Scumbug is supposed to be, and I’ll never care.
And that’s the case with about 99.9% of the world anyway.
I cannot help wondering if the people who post about their precious cartoons are
Emotionally stunted adults who have not moved on from their childhood tastes and cling to them
Or
People whose brains are so fried from the various culture war things that they pretend to care about / work themselves into a genuine fury about something as trivial as a gay cartoon rat.
Either way it’s pathetic! Grow up! It’s for kids! The kids want to see the turtles do whacky things! Log off!