The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name (The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy)

The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name is the 4th episode from Season 5 of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy. In the episode, Billy falls in love with Blandy, a girl resembling him in appearance. But she is actually in love with Grim.

Why It Should’ve Dared Not Speak It’s Name

 * 1) This episode started Billy's flanderization and the downfall of the show.
 * 2) Billy is extremely unlikable in this episode. He is portrayed as a jerkass of an oblivious and loudmouth maniac who assaults Grim repeatedly throughout the whole episode for a petty reason: a girl named Blandy loves Grim instead of Billy. His constant screaming and yelling is also irritating to hear due to his voice actor, Richard Steven Horvitz, shouting at the majority of his lines throughout the episode.
 * 3) The writing for the episode's plot is very dumb and lazy (more on that below).
 * 4) On the subject of Blandy, she is a piss-poor excuse of a lazy plot device for a villain. She is not only evil, a shapeshifting creature whose sole purpose is to specifically pit Earthlings into jealousy, but both her name and the human form are completely unoriginal. Her human form is just a female version of Billy. Her true form is also quite generic, or otherwise disgusting to look at it.
 * 5) Billy's repeated assault on Grim throughout the episode is supposed to come off as humorous, but instead, it comes off as sickening.
 * 6) The episode tries too hard to make it obvious to the viewers that Grim has no such feelings for Blandy, only for Billy to continue assaulting him.
 * 7) Likewise, Billy is a massive hypocrite as well. At the beginning of the episode, he says that nothing will ever come between his and Grim's friendship and wants to grow up to be just like Grim, but of course, as mentioned already, the rest of the episode says otherwise.
 * 8) Even after Mandy reveals to Billy about her discovery of Blandy's true colors from a book, Billy remains madly in love with Blandy, which goes to show how much of an absolute idiot he is.
 * 9) Grim does nothing back to Billy throughout the whole episode till the very end. This is because of course, the writers endlessly portray him as the show's cowardly punching bag, which is very frustrating and tiresome for those who are fans of him, unlike Billy and Mandy. However, Grim's punching bag days have been largely minimized as the season went on, including in the next and last season.
 * 10) Horrible ending: Years later into the future shows Billy and Blandy supposedly getting ready to be married at their wedding, only for Blandy to respond by saying "But I thought I was marrying Grim", and Billy's assault on Grim continues...

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The start of the episode is passable.
 * 2) Grim and Mandy are the only tolerable characters here. However, Mandy's flanderizations will eventually start kicking in, too, as the season goes on.
 * 3) Billy's dad, Harold, does have a few decent funny moments.