Horn Sweet Horn (The Powerpuff Girls (2016))

Horn, Sweet Horn is the fifth episode of season one of The Powerpuff Girls (2016) and revolves around a pony named Donnie's attempts to become a unicorn, which end up going horribly wrong.

Why It's Not Sweet

 * 1) The topic about the episode, gender identity, ended up backfiring and offended many people in the transgender community, causing another controversy similar to that of the previous episode, "Painbow".
 * 2) * To make things worse, this episode aired during the fallout from the North Carolina "Bathroom Bill" controversy.
 * 3) * As a matter of fact, the episode wasn't even intended to have a transgender message, but the higher-ups at Cartoon Network examined the episode and thought that a trans message could come out of it so the show could appear "woke".
 * 4) * Not helping is that like previously mentioned episode, it is storyboarded and written by Julia Vickerman, who is an infamous pedophile.
 * 5) Donnie agrees to becoming a unicorn without even caring about what negative consequences might happen.
 * 6) Bubbles is unlikable in this episode, as she gets angry when the Professor says that the transformation might be dangerous.
 * 7) They take the Mayor's pickle obsession WAY too far as he has a pickle museum, which is just weird.
 * 8) Animation Error: The Professor's boards suddenly going from being blank in one scene to being filled in the next.

The Only Redeeming Quality

 * 1) The voice acting, backgrounds, art and animation are at least still passable.

Reception and Controversy
This episode received scrutiny from the media after the episode's handling of transgender themes prompted criticism from LGBTQ+ viewers. Sulagna Misra, writing for Fusion's official website, described the character Donny as an "interesting metaphor for transgender identity", but saw poor judgment in the choice to present the transformed character as a monster. She found the larger topic of identity reversed by making the plot so "convoluted" and preferred if the character's monstrous transformation had been a temporary gag instead. Marie Solis of Mic also viewed the episode as a failed attempt to convey social issues, on par with the "Twisted Sister" episode from the 1998 Powerpuff Girls series, in which the main characters conjure up a mentally challenged and physically deformed sister. Dorian Dawes of the magazine B**** was extremely critical of the episode, calling its message questionable and dangerous in the wake of the North Carolina "Bathroom Bill" controversy. Dawes denounced the episode as irresponsible to the series' primary demographic and felt it was written solely to make the producers feel righteous about their inclusion of transgender themes. It was eventually revealed that the writer didn't even mean for the episode to be about gender identity, and it was just marketed as such.