They are DUDES! And they have ATTITUDE! The stereotypical young female wants to be pampered by soft, cute guys who respect them. Which is named "Dude-itude," a moniker that rejects the innocuous androgyny of the Tiger Beat set. Guys want to appear gritty and genuine, which is why Dreamboat Express quickly mutates into by a three-piece hard rock band. Knuckles fears that dressing snappy, looking pretty, and doing synchronized dances will threaten his "street cred." Tails directly says boy band behavior isn't manly. Most adolescents would never stoop to that level because the blustering, macho ego cringes when presented with such one-size-fits-all-teen-girls fantasies. This is an unspoken reason why Sonic immediately forms his own boy band. Many a sweaty, stubbly teen boy has secretly wished the Bieliebers and Directioners and BTS Army were creaming their panties for regular guys like them. Denton/Hahn seem to understand the root behind that as well. Most guys as you probably know, haaaate this. This contrasts with the lewd, awkward behavior of actual teen boys, further marking teenybopper icons like Bieber/Beaver as blatant fantasy figures. Beaver's image is also blatantly non-threatening, as he promises to return home before curfew and perform only symbolic vandalism in the name of his love. Justin Beaver's song titles include "Girl, I Like You" and "Yes, I'm Actually Talking About You." He tells every female at a record signing they are "the only fan he cares about." Yet his songs are filled with generic platitudes like promising to take you places you like and unspecific praise like "complex" and "interesting." Boy bands are designed to have as wide an appeal as possible while simultaneously making every girl's fantasy feel validated. Alan Denton and Greg Hahn's script nails the reason why. Teenage girls, and sometimes older females too, have been losing their collective shit for popular musicians since at least the days of Franz Liszt. Regardless of how relevant a specific reference like "Justin Beaver" was by 2015, some things are evergreen. What was the show gonna do to be more relevant in 2015? Introduce a character named Shawn Muskrat? Doesn't blend as well! Or maybe this cartoon was just written by old men who are perpetually five years behind whatever's current. But I guess the pun of combining the Canadian crooner with his home country's national animal was too hard to resist. Bieber Fever had been successfully inoculated by this point. Two months before this episode debuted, he was the subject of a typically ribald Comedy Central Roast, confirming Justin as a punchline. His 2014 concert movie made 67 million less than his previous one. The cherubic castrato with the lesbian haircut had grown into a tattooed, abbed bad boy who was pissing in public, renting Brazilian sex workers, egging his neighbors' houses, and earning the obligatory aging child star DUI. Actually, by the time this episode aired, Justin Bieber had been a hugely successful pop star for five years. "Battle of the Boy Bands" takes us back to that frightful time when an earlier pandemic gripped the globe: Bieber Fever.
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