#episodes explained badly

[iamapoopmuffin]

Powerpuff Girls episodes explained badly

Monkey See, Doggy Do: Everyone is a dog and/or naked.

Mommy Fearest: The girls try to turn some lady they just met into their step-mother and regret it immediately.

Insect Inside: Bugs are gross. Or are they?

Powerpuff Bluff: Cosplay for crime reasons. And to look cute.

Octi Evil: Bubbles trusts in her plush toy when it suddenly starts talking to her like one of those imaginary friends that tells you to burn things. It goes as well as you'd expect.

Geshundfight: There's too many people on this earth, we need a new plague.

Buttercrush: 1 1/2 year old develops crush on 17 year old who uses her crush to manipulate the shit out of her.

Fuzzy Logic: You don't touch another man's banjo. Ever.

Boogie Frights: An endless disco party ends in Bubbles turning off her targeting computer and blowing up the Death Disco Star

Abracadaver: Zombie magician comes to town and does zombie magician stuff.

Telephonies: Crank calls lead to the one moment in the entire cartoon my family constantly quotes, literally any time anyone says 'him' in any context. Also we learn how HIM stays so fit!

Tough Love: HIM farts on the entire city and it makes everyone hate the Powerpuff Girls.

Major Competition: Pretty much the exact kind of thing I'd expect Jeff Bennett to voice comes to town, kicks a puppy and gets praised.

Mr. Mojo's Rising: Mojo reveals he is both the Professor's former pet and the technical other parent of the Powerpuff Girls.

Paste Makes Waste: Be careful who you bully in kindergarten because they might eat a radioactive fly and become giant glue monsters.

Ice Sore: It's a hot summer's day and gee whiz, Blossom sure blows!

Bubblevicious: Bubbles is hardcore.

The Bare Facts: Your typical 'no-one's account is fully accurate as they piece together the story' story, but with crayon drawlings and a naked old dude.

Cat Man Do: Evil cat possesses the professor and does evil cat things.

Impeach Fuzz: Fuzzy becomes the perfect mayor. Crime is down 100%, the Powerpuff Girls now get called to catch pigs.

Just Another Manic Mojo: Mojo Jojo's morning routine ft. annoying children.

Mime For A Change: Clown steps into oncoming traffic, gets covered in bleach, causes an environmental disaster and ruins everything.

The Rowdyruff Boys: Rule 63 the episode.

Uh Oh Dynamo: Kaiju vs murder robot. The city loses.

Stuck Up, Up And Away: Spoiled brat tries to buy superpowers, like Batman.

Schoolhouse Rocked: Teenagers who were abandoned in a dump before ever going to school meet a truant officer who becomes the first person to ever care about them, then go to school and get expelled on the very first day.

Collect Her: This is you, you obsessed freaks.

Supper Villain: Man gets sick of pancakes for breakfast and lives out secret supervillain fantasies. (Second most quoted line of the show in my family is here.)

Birthday Bash: Happy birthday, here's some death. Also why the hell is a 5 year old girl in a prison where every single other inmate is a grown man?

Too Pooped To Puff: When completely exhausted from their constant hero work, the girls tell the city to put a toaster in a bathtub full of water.

Beat Your Greens: These kids are so reluctant to eat the only good green vegetable that vegetable aliens arrive to teach them to stop being pussies.

Down n' Dirty: Buttercup refuses to bathe and it's fucking disgusting.

Dream Scheme: In The Sand Man you play as Sophie Grundler, a girl suffering from insomnia. Exhausted and unable to sleep, Sophie wanders into town to discover everyone else has fallen into an eternal sleep. Wait, wrong sand man-

You Snooze You Lose: Mojo falls asleep, loses some schematics and goes completely batshit insane. Then the girls eat gum that was in Junior's mouth earlier. Then probably get sick from Amoeba Boys germs again.

Slave The Day: Billy, who we thought was dead, pledges allegiance to the girls and Blossom yells at him.

Los Dos Mojos: Bubbles is Mojo now. But twice as hardcore.

A Very Special Blossom: Blossom turns to a life of crime.

Daylight Savings: Actual consequences to these small children having to go out at all hours to fight crime.

Mo Job: Mojo and Princess build a gun and shoot children with it.

Pet Feud: The Professor genetically engineers a neopet that eats everything.

Imaginary Fiend: A child's imagination is a dangerous weapon. And may tell the child to set the school on fire.

Cootie Gras: A kid who never bathes decides to play kiss chase. When that grosses people out, he gets used as a dangerous weapon.

The Powerpuff Girls Best Rainy Day Adventure Ever: The Powerpuff Girls play The Powerpuff Girls.

Just Desserts: Man's supervillain fantasy is adopted by his entire family.

Twisted Sister: The girls create a new sister who is severely disabled and then promptly dies.

Cover Up: Security Blankie the episode

Speed Demon: Back To The Future but scarier.

Mojo Jonesin': Mojo deals crack to toddlers

Something's A Ms.: Sedusa has sex with the Mayor so she can steal shit.

Slumbering With The Enemy: Mojo goes on RuPaul's Drag Race and infiltrates a child's sleepover.

Fallen Arches: Old People Fight Club!

The Mane Event: Blossom gets a new haircut and gets bullied. I like her hair like that though.

Town And Out: The Utoniums move to a new town with real world consequences for senseless property damage.

Child Fearing: Mojo babysits and regrets every decision that led him to that moment in life.

Criss Cross Crisis: Mandatory body swap story from hell.

Bubblevision: Bubbles has sudden sight loss issues and gets ripped to shreds for it. Also there are ants.

Bought And Scold: Princess' dad buys the city and she legalises everything, then gets robbed.

Gettin' Twiggy With It: Neglected trailer park kid abuses a hamster.

Cop Out: American Police officer attempts to kill three children. Nobody is surprised.

Three Girls And A Monster: Well, they aren't adopting it, but they aren't murdering it either.

Monkey See, Doggy Two: Everyone's a dog again except the girls, so they can beat the shit out of things still.

Jewel Of The Aisle: Cereal mascot tries to rob diamond.

Super Zeroes: Cosplay 2 electric boogaloo. Also who the hell trusted Blossom with a car?

Candy Is Dandy: What happens when you introduce sugar to children who aren't allowed sugar.

Catastrophe: Don't shove cats up your arse.

Hot Air Buffoon: The Mayor goes into the sky and punches people.

Ploys R' Us: The Professor sleep steals and the girls profit from it.

The Headsucker's Moxy: BRAINS BRAINS IT'S ALRIGHT, I'LL EAT THEIR BRAINS TIL THEY'RE ZOMBIFIED

Equal Fights: The Powerpuff Girls get brainwashed by a TERF.

Powerprof.: Embarrassing dad becomes superhero just to spend time with embarrassed children.

Moral Decay: Buttercup steals teeth and sells them on the black market.

Meet The Beat Alls: Mojo, Fuzzy, Princess and HIM form a band and live in a yellow submarine.

Him Diddle Riddle: HIM canonically has the power to end the entire world with a flick of his wrist but instead spends his time making the girls solve riddles to inconvenience them for shits, giggles and not having customers Karen their way out of paying for flapjacks.

Film Flam: Fake director tries to take advantage of impressionable young girls and it takes their dad in drag to stop him.

All Chalked Up: Butterfly HIM teaches Bubbles art therapy and then brings the therapy to life.

Get Back Jojo: Back To The Future again

Members Only: Big manly men have their masculinity threatened by little girls, then a giant dick joke from space voiced by Mr Krabs kills everyone.

Nano Of The North: Tiny robots eat your clothes

Stray Bullet: Squirrel with huge nuts becomes super squirrel after small child force feeds him chemicals

Forced Kin: Mojo has beef with some shiny silver dude

Knock It Off: Dexter's estranged uncle or something comes to town, makes a shittonne of artificial children to sell for profit and many of the children die.

Helter Shelter: Bubbles kidnaps a baby whale

Power Lunch: Teenagers with terrible diet have stomach issues.

Superfriends: New kid in town falls victim to peer pressure.

Keen On Keane: Girls, seriously, have you not learned your lesson about setting your dad up on dates with random women yet?

Not So Awesome Blossom: Blossom has an anxiety attack and loses all self confidence.

Power-Noia: The girls eat cheese before bed and have weird nightmares.

Monstra-City: Segregation is right.

Shut The Pup Up: The girls consider beating a dog to death.

Toast Of The Town: Babysitting an old guy who wants toast.

Divide And Conquer: A glorified maths lesson featuring amoebas.

Burglar Alarmed: The girls try to silently deal with a burglar because daddy is tired.

Shotgun Wedding: Fuzzy tries to marry Professor Utonium, then has sex with a pile of mud.

Save Mojo: Vegans ruin everything.

Substitute Creature: Ms Keane is sick and the girls learn they're racist against green people.

The Boys Are Back In Town: Oh yeah rule 63 is back and spikier.

Pee Pee G's: Mojo breaks into the girls' house and pisses on their bed. He faces absolutely no consequences for this.

Boy Toys: Boys don't like girls, boys like cars and weapons.

Seed No Evil: Frozen caveman steals sunflower seeds. This one feels like a really shit fever dream.

City Of Clipsville: The show runners take the absolute piss out of every fanfic writer in the fandom.

Lying Around The House: A lie gains sentience and fucks shit up.

Bubble Boy: Bubbles steals Boomer's clothes, identity and family.

A Documentary: Guy stalks children and tries to record videos of them.

Girls Gone Mild: Karens ruin everything. Again.

See Me, Feel Me, Gnomey: Jack Black a gnome creates communism through the power of music

Curses: The girls learn how to swear.

Bang For Your Buck: Kids compete in a life or death struggle to earn enough money for ice cream.

Silent Treatment: Silent movie kidnaps man and steals his voice.

Sweet 'n' Sour: Plushies rob entire city and get away with it because they're cute. Also they hate children.

Prime Mates: Brainless monkey ruins everything. Just like Twitter.

Coupe D'Etat: Sentient car is a homewrecker.

Makes Zen To Me: Buttercup joins a peace cult.

Say Uncle: The girls adopt a sasquatch and Utonium does not recognise his own brother.

Reeking Havoc: How do you fight a giant fart? Asking for a friend.

Live & Let Dynamo: Kaiju Robot is back and is committing crimes for fun.

Mo' Linguish: Mojo teaches a class at an adult education centre. Sadly it is not street dancing for self defence.

Oops, I Did It Again: Normal little girl AU

A Made Up Story: In which makeup is evil

Little Miss Interprets: Bubbles ruins a surprise party

Night Mayor: Another weird cheese dream but this time it's the Mayor dreaming about having relations with pickles

Custody Battle: HIM and Mojo have a messy custody battle in the middle of Townsville and both lose.

City Of Nutsville: Bubbles swallows a bee and squirrels kill everyone.

Aspirations: Sedusa takes advantage of a group of teenagers who have been abandoned by their mothers and also never gotten laid while also turning them into criminal masterminds.

That's Not My Baby: The girls find an abandoned baby and decide caring for it will convince their dad they're ready for a hamster

Simian Says: Mojo takes over the show

Sun Scream: PSA: Wear sunscreen.

City Of Frownsville: Man with terrible depression develops machine that cures his depression by giving it to everyone else

West In Pieces: Back To The Future 3, the wild west one

Crazy Mixed Up Puffs: Oh god they've fused

Mizzen In Action: Pirates of the Caribbean but less interesting

Roughing It Up: The Professor takes his kids on a camping trip and becomes rival dads with Fuzzy

What's The Big Idea?: The girls are made giant and it's a whole mess.

Nuthin' Special: Buttercup has no unique abilities. Any she had before are no longer unique.

Neighbour Hood: Children's TV show demands money.

I See A Funny Cartoon In Your Future: Gypsy and goose steal things along to a terrible rhyming narration.

Octi-Gone: Bubbles holds a fancy dinner party hostage to solve the mystery of the murder of her plushie, the one that told her to burn things.

[quietwingsinthesky]

like it feels obvious on doctor who. the show who’s main gimmick is that the guy running around goes only by a title they gave themself and whose identity revolves around a dialogue with that title, constructing it, interrogating it, redefining it, endlessly as a part of their journey. it feels obvious to say that you absolutely cannot on this show give something an incredibly symbolic name and then Not say anything about that.

so why does kerblam spend the latter half of its runtime emphasizing The Foundation, right. the foundation is where power gets stored when it goes out everywhere else. the foundation is where workers are being killed and melted down into goop. the foundation is so old that the original plans of the building on paper are needed to understand it. The System is in The Foundation before it is anywhere else.

and then that. doesn’t matter. we aren’t going to use this to say anything. in fact, we’re going to assert that the system is so Fine, Actually that filling the foundational level of it with ten million bombs doesn’t even do any lasting damage to it. and hey, hey. remember when the system decided that the Correct option was to kill an innocent person uninvolved in all of this because she happened to be someone that charlie liked. remember when it lured her down into the foundational level to fucking murder her. yeah, that was justified of it actually, the blood on its hands is worth the point it was making.

how do you build the perfect set-up for the most obvious critique: Space Amazon Is Built On Bad Foundations That Lead It To Hurting The Workers And Customers In The Long Run. and then stumble ass backwards into uhhhhhh no actually it was this one guy. with bombs. and also his bombs are so ineffective and meaningless that blowing them up in the center of the facility did Nothing. he is both an unimaginable threat and also powerless. please take our doctor who episode about how good space amazon is very seriously.

[idkwhyyouaskingm3-blog]

I know a lot of people compare Lena to Elias but her position feels a lot more like Jons or Gertrude to me. Trying to run a department that unknowingly puts its' staff in danger. Attempting to keep the higher ups appeased but not really agreeing with them. Taking care of her staff the best she can while trying to keep them as far away from the dangerous information as possible. Actively discouraging people to sign up, trying to convince Gwen to go back to her desk job etc etc.

She's not a CEO she's middle management. We're watching TMAGP from the equivalent of Sasha, Tim and Martins perspective this time not Jons.

[lightbulb-warning]

i used to freehand comics all the time as a child and since the part i liked was the drawing part i would just draw panel after panel because i didn't want to stop drawing to think about icky icky words, plus the story TOTALLY still made perfect sense! to me! and noone else, but 'whoooo caaaaares omgggg its not like comics and sequantial art are a communicative meeediummmm lmaoooooo'. i spent my entire childhood telling myself stuff like "oh pfft I know this story by heart- ill SIMPLY remember the dialogue and write it later" ...and. I can't help but admire baby maiora's (call that a minora ba tm tsk) fucking audacity? hubris? confident wrongness? kid couldn't even remember to finish the comics in the first place? INCREDIBLE levels of unearned self assurance, wish that were me, genuinely- what an icon!!! anyway i think i have forever cursed myself

[local-falsettos-obsession]

If you want to consume Helluva boss media but don’t have time to watch Sinsmas, I would like to present my summary I gave to my friend, word for word (Spoilers ahead):

SO LIKE STOLAS IS FUCKING DEPRESSED CAUSE HE YOU KNOW GOT HIS POWER AND SHIT TAKEN AWAY YADAYA I.M.P GO ON A MISSION TO KILL SOMEONE WHO CHEATED ON THEIR WIFE WITH MAN AND YOU KNOW STOLAS DID THAT WITH BLITZØ SO AHHHHHH VIA FINALLY GETS TO SING A SONG AND USES LINES FROM STOLAS’S LULLABY IM CRYING AND BACK ON THE MISSION BLITZØ LOOKS IN THE WINDOW AND LITERALLY CAN’T AND IMAGINES HIM, STOLAS, LONNA, AND VIA LIKE THAT (cause the couple has two daughters) AND MEANWHILE STOLAS FREAKS THE FUCK OUT CAUSE HE HASNT SEEN HIS DAUGHTER IN A MONTH SO HE GOES TO THE PALACE WHILE VIA COMES TO THE I.M.P. OFFICE AND THEN THE FUCKING ELSA ICE BITCH COMES IN AND TRIES TO KILL STOLAS BLAH BLAH BLAH BLITZØ RISKS HIS LIFE TO SAVE STOLAS AND VIA COMES IN TO SAVE THEM AND THEN SAYS ‘you never loved mother and you don’t love me, you love him” WHICH HIT HARD AND THEN STOLAS GOES BACK TO BEING REALLY REALLY DEPRESSED ANYWAYS THEY HAVE LIKE A SINSMAS PARTY WITH SOME OF LOONA’S FIRENDS AND WHILE THIS WHOLE EPISODE IS HAPPENING MILLIE HAS BEEN ACTING RLLY WERID AND TURNS OUT SHES PREGNANT??? HUH???? SO STOLAS GOES OUT ON BLITZØ’S BALCONY TO SMOKE CAUSE HES REALLY DEPRESSED AND SHIT AND BLITZØ GOES OUT AND JOINS HIM WAIT I FORGOT TO MENTION THAT ANDRE MADE LIKE A HUGE ICE MONSTER AND BLITZØ KILLED IT I GUESS??? AND STOLAS IS LIKE ‘You saved my life 😍” MAKING HEART EYES AT BLITZØ AND SHIT AND THEY MAKE OUT WHILE FALLING THROUGH THE AIR???? ANYWAYS THEY HAVE A TALK OUT ON THE BALCONY AND THEN BLITZØ GETS UP ON THE RAILING SO THEY CAN DANCE TOGETHER CAUSE THE HEIGHT DIFFERENCE IS CRAZY AND THEY DANCE AND SHIT BUT STOLAS IS STILL DEPRESSED AND THE EPISODE ENDS WITH THEM HUGGING AND BLITZØ HAS A SMILE AND STOLAS HAS A FROWN AND IT HURT

Sorry guys I’ll be in a Helluva coma for the foreseeable future

[aromanticasterisms]

wait some of y'all don't think that death was narratively satisfying??? he spent the entire season rotting away and sloughing off of (and OUT of) bodies he was not meant to be in, grasping at a life he had outlived because he was unwilling to let go, literally got ripped out of the HEART of the world he tried so hard to destroy and then that world summoned up a 5 second rainstorm to boil him alive and burn away his facade of humanity so he could grovel at the feet of a witch and then get stomped into nothing by the denizens of the world, symbolizing the people he hurt by enforcing the covens, people ostracized and punished for not conforming, and the titan he used to manipulate people with by claiming he knew its will. what's not clicking

[iamthekarmapolice]

so like am i reading too much into this or is the cannibalism in yellowjackets a metaphor for the specific ways women hurt each other as a way to survive in harsh unforgiving environments that fundamentally dont seem to want them there

[hideyseek]

SHEN WEI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!! ! !

[leatherbookmark]

idk maybe it makes me a child or Someone With Shit Media Literacy, but i feel like when people discuss fictional events that were good or bad writing, they often look to general fiction tropes rather than what makes sense for the individual story? like, oh, well, this is a [genre] story, and in these, it's either X or Y, so it's going to be either X or Y. or: this character technically could count as a [character archetype], so obviously they only have one very predictable ending. what wonderful, emotionally moving writing!

and like. are we writing stories, or producing products that check off all the most common boxes on the Successful [Genre] Story list? this is not to say that you can never kill off your mentors/father figures, or that your protagonist should never fail miserably in this or that point of the story -- sometimes it really is the most fitting and sensible solution! sometimes leaving a character alive would undermine or muddle up the message, if there is one, or it would simply make it more difficult for the writer. and it's fine. but when your reason for this or that writing choice is not "because it makes the most sense" but rather "because that's what happens in other stories", it's, uh, not good writing at all. it's barely any writing, really!

[electricpurrs]

i keep having embarrassingly deeper-than-they-should feelings about caboose that im not sure what to do about, with how i feel like i relate in a pretty genuine and sweet way to him in an autistic level and i do feel like reading him that way makes real sense but im just incapable of feeling very good about it when its very very clear caboose's neurodivergent esque behavior is applied exclusively to make the butt of the joke off how stupid he is. i care about him a lot as a character but i mostly just wanna rip him off r-slur-loving rooster teeth's hands and handle him with a minimum level of respect

[true-blue-sonic]

If Eggman Nega created Silver that would mean Triple-S were all created by Robotniks in some capacity(Shadow was created by Gerald and Sonic was created by Eggman in the very first American Sonic comic)

Oh yes, that was the odd one with Kintobor who turned evil because his machine exploded while he was holding a rotting egg and Sonic being brown at first before randomly turning blue when he broke the sound barrier for the first time, while having like a dozen sisters and a dad who drowned in toxic waste, right? Thank god that's not canon, what an odd story😅😂 Which does mean Sonic was not created by Eggman, though. Currently what is said on the topic is that they've just met before Sonic 1 already and had been fighting each other for a while when that game's events happened. So I guess the only way wherein Eggman 'made' Sonic was through making him the planet-renowned hero he is now, though even if Eggman had not been around, I am certain Sonic would still have been helping others and adventuring all over.

Still, I find it intriguing indeed that all three male hedgehogs are so intrinsically interlinked with the Robotnik bloodline. Shadow was created by Gerald for the good of Maria and humanity, whereas Sonic and Silver fight with Geralds' descendants to protect said humanity. And even more intriguing to me is that for Silver, this might not have been planned originally, since he has nothing to do with Eggman Nega in '06. But then again, Rivals and '06 were released so closely together, maybe it always was the plan to have him become nemeses with Nega because they all knew '06's events would be wiped from the timeline. I do not think we will ever get a clear answer for this topic. Regardless, it makes me wonder what Gerald would think about it when things had not yet gone amiss on the Ark and he was still sane. I figure he would be quite horrified this is going to be his legacy, but in the same vein also hopeful that Sonic and Silver will be able to protect the world from Eggman and Eggman Nega.

[hazbinbabbling4ever]

Every fan of every piece of media made by an actually problematic or just "problematic according to tumblr" author

[fitzhastoomanysideblogs]

Can literally anything good happen please I am running out of reasons to keep going PLEASE GOD ANYTHING

[anothermonikan]

hate that the character I dislike most in G5 is the one I have the strongest headcanons about. Talking about Hitch Trailblazer yeah

Look I don't like this pony, I have not forgotten he's supposed to be 'The Cop' of the group, I am happy they've been leaning on it less because some of the earlier MYM and TYT episodes are borderline unwatchable because they lean so much into 'oh he's a GOOD cop :)) He loves following rules and keeping ponies safe!' and it's just a little bit disappointing after everything that the G5 movie was supposed to be about that they just let Hitch go back to being a cop and not only that but then they put so much emphasis on how "good" of a cop he is in the show up until like. Sparky's introduction. He's kind of just the dragon dad character now, I can't remember the last time him being sheriff was even mentioned in TYT, I would complain about how inconsistent that makes his character but I honestly would just prefer if they didn't lean on the good cop thing ever again so I won't

BUT. Not ignoring that but it's irrelevant to what this post is really about, um. Hitch has to have some sort of blood relation with Fluttershy right?? Like okay here is my evidence:

Appearance wise, Fluttershy's family has a pretty consistent thing with the colours yellow and green

Like I know none of them have green manes specifically but colour throughout family in MLP is weird. This is probably my most flimsy piece of evidence BUT I think it's interesting when in conjunction with these two other things:

Hitch can talk to animals and

2. I don't really understand what they're going for with the whole cutiemark magic thing in G5 but like. All of the mane cast ponies have different elements that align with their cutiemarks or something and you know what Hitch's is? Kindness. And it's the only one that has a G4 counterpart with an Element of Harmony

I only really started putting this together in my head after the second season 2 episode of TYT when they say their cutiemark magic things out loud and I was like. huh Kindness. like Fluttershy. and then the piece started to fall together in my head and I was like. Oh! Okay! I really hope that's intentional!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/940944/000092189514002031/ex991dfan14a06297125_091114.pdf

Everyone loved this story. As David Dayen wrote for Salon, it let readers "mock that silly chain restaurant they remember from their childhoods in the suburbs" and laugh at "the silly hedge fund that took the time to write the world’s worst review":

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/

But – as Dayen wrote at the time, the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, Starboard Value, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks. They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company. They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars, while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden, converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.

They wanted to asset-strip the company, in other words ("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

Starboard didn't have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO's ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden's food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain.

*assholes

Starboard was bent on eviscerating Darden like a couple of entrail-maddened dogs in an elk carcass:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051220005944/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/

They had forced Darden to sell off another of its holdings, Red Lobster, to a hedge-fund called Golden Gate Capital. Golden Gate flogged all of Red Lobster's real estate holdings for $2.1 billion the same day, then pissed it all away on dividends to its shareholders, including Starboard. The new landlords, a Real Estate Investment Trust, proceeded to charge so much for rent on those buildings Red Lobster just flogged that the company's net earnings immediately dropped by half.

Dayen ends his piece with these prophetic words:

Olive Garden and Red Lobster may not be destinations for hipster Internet journalists, and they have seen revenue declines amid stagnant middle-class wages and increased competition. But they are still profitable businesses. Thousands of Americans work there. Why should they be bled dry by predatory investors in the name of “shareholder value”? What of the value of worker productivity instead of the financial engineers?

Flash forward a decade. Today, Dayen is editor-in-chief of The American Prospect, one of the best sources of news about private equity looting in the world. Writing for the Prospect, Luke Goldstein picks up Dayen's story, ten years on:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/

It's not pretty. Ten years of being bled out on rents and flipped from one hedge fund to another has killed Red Lobster. It just shuttered 50 restaurants and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ten years hasn't changed much; the same kind of snark that was deployed at the news of Olive Garden's imminent demise is now being hurled at Red Lobster.

Instead of dunking on free bread-sticks, Red Lobster's grave-dancers are jeering at "Endless Shrimp," a promotional deal that works exactly how it sounds like it would work. Endless Shrimp cost the chain $11m.

Which raises a question: why did Red Lobster make this money-losing offer? Are they just good-hearted slobs? Can't they do math?

Or, you know, was it another hedge-fund, bust-out scam?

Here's a hint. The supplier who provided Red Lobster with all that shrimp is Thai Union. Thai Union also owns Red Lobster. They bought the chain from Golden Gate Capital, last seen in 2014, holding a flash-sale on all of Red Lobster's buildings, pocketing billions, and cutting Red Lobster's earnings in half.

Red Lobster rose to success – 700 restaurants nationwide at its peak – by combining no-frills dining with powerful buying power, which it used to force discounts from seafood suppliers. In response, the seafood industry consolidated through a wave of mergers, turning into a cozy cartel that could resist the buyer power of Red Lobster and other major customers.

This was facilitated by conservation efforts that limited the total volume of biomass that fishers were allowed to extract, and allocated quotas to existing companies and individual fishermen. The costs of complying with this "catch management" system were high, punishingly so for small independents, bearably so for large conglomerates.

Competition from overseas fisheries drove consolidation further, as countries in the global south were blocked from implementing their own conservation efforts. US fisheries merged further, seeking economies of scale that would let them compete, largely by shafting fishermen and other suppliers. Today's Alaskan crab fishery is dominated by a four-company cartel; in the Pacific Northwest, most fish goes through a single intermediary, Pacific Seafood.

These dominant actors entered into illegal collusive arrangements with one another to rig their markets and further immiserate their suppliers, who filed antitrust suits accusing the companies of operating a monopsony (a market with a powerful buyer, akin to a monopoly, which is a market with a powerful seller):

https://www.classaction.org/news/pacific-seafood-under-fire-for-allegedly-fixing-prices-paid-to-dungeness-crabbers-in-pacific-northwest

Golden Gate bought Red Lobster in the midst of these fish wars, promising to right its ship. As Goldstein points out, that's the same promise they made when they bought Payless shoes, just before they destroyed the company and flogged it off to Alden Capital, the hedge fund that bought and destroyed dozens of America's most beloved newspapers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Under Golden Gate's management, Red Lobster saw its staffing levels slashed, so diners endured longer wait times to be seated and served. Then, in 2020, they sold the company to Thai Union, the company's largest supplier (a transaction Goldstein likens to a Walmart buyout of Procter and Gamble).

Thai Union continued to bleed Red Lobster, imposing more cuts and loading it up with more debts financed by yet another private equity giant, Fortress Investment Group. That brings us to today, with Thai Union having moved a gigantic amount of its own product through a failing, debt-loaded subsidiary, even as it lobbies for deregulation of American fisheries, which would let it and its lobbying partners drain American waters of the last of its depleted fish stocks.

Dayen's 2020 must-read book Monopolized describes the way that monopolies proliferate, using the US health care industry as a case-study:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

After deregulation allowed the pharma sector to consolidate, it acquired pricing power of hospitals, who found themselves gouged to the edge of bankruptcy on drug prices. Hospitals then merged into regional monopolies, which allowed them to resist pharma pricing power – and gouge health insurance companies, who saw the price of routine care explode. So the insurance companies gobbled each other up, too, leaving most of us with two or fewer choices for health insurance – even as insurance prices skyrocketed, and our benefits shrank.

Today, Americans pay more for worse healthcare, which is delivered by health workers who get paid less and work under worse conditions. That's because, lacking a regulator to consolidate patients' interests, and strong unions to consolidate workers' interests, patients and workers are easy pickings for those consolidated links in the health supply-chain.

That's a pretty good model for understanding what's happened to Red Lobster: monopoly power and monopsony power begat more monopolies and monoposonies in the supply chain. Everything that hasn't consolidated is defenseless: diners, restaurant workers, fishermen, and the environment. We're all fucked.

Decent, no-frills family restaurant are good. Great, even. I'm not the world's greatest fan of chain restaurants, but I'm also comfortably middle-class and not struggling to afford to give my family a nice night out at a place with good food, friendly staff and reasonable prices. These places are easy pickings for looters because the people who patronize them have little power in our society – and because those of us with more power are easily tricked into sneering at these places' failures as a kind of comeuppance that's all that's due to tacky joints that serve the working class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

[wilwheaton]

In a new interview with the New Yorker ahead of his 70th birthday on Monday, the comedian explained his theory about why there’s no “funny stuff” to watch on TV anymore. “Nothing really affects comedy,” he said, “People always need it. They need it so badly and they don’t get it.” Instead of getting sitcoms like M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and All in the Family, audiences miss out, he said, as a “result of the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.” [...] A look back at some of his earlier comments on a similar subject adds some context, if not clarity. In 2015, Seinfeld sat down for an episode of The Herd with Colin Cowherd podcast, where he explained his aversion to performing stand-up on college campuses. “I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, ‘Don't go near colleges. They’re so PC,’” he said on the show. After giving an example of his teenage daughter using the word “sexist,” he concluded that young people “just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist’; 'That’s sexist’; ‘That’s prejudice.’ They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Jerry Seinfeld Draws Right-Wing Praise for Comments on ‘Extreme Left’

This is such a bummer. Tell me you’re a privileged, entitled, myopic Boomer without telling me you’re a privileged, entitled, myopic Boomer.

It’s interesting to me that he says these legendary sit-coms, none of which were cruel, punching down, or hurtful, but were actually satirizing power, celebrating women, changing societal norms through representation, and using comedy to do it all, wouldn’t exist if “the extreme left” had anything to do with it.

Umm. Who does he think created these shows? And is he really that ignorant? Has this guy never read a single interview with Norman Lear? Or literally anyone in the cast of Mary Tyler Moore? I mean. Come on, man!

Teenagers and college students don’t know what they’re talking about when they tell a privileged, entitled, multimillionaire Boomer that his “jokes” can be hurtful, and maybe he could use his tremendous talent to do comedy that is just as funny without being hurtful. Okay. Got it. Keep saying that, and see how far it gets you, buddy.

Hey, Jerry Seinfeld: when blue checks on Twitter are celebrating you being a dick, it’s not because you’re so funny and such a brilliant comic; it’s because they love how you’re validating what garbage they are. You can’t see that, or don’t care, and that’s such a huge bummer.