The Powerpuff Girls / Tropes J to Q

The Powerpuff Girls (1998) Trope Examples
A - B | C - D | E - I | J - Q | R - S | T - Z

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J

• Jerkass: Princess Morbucks. She's like a spoiled brat who thinks she's entitled to whatever she wants.
  • Other villains like Mojo Jojo, HIM, Fuzzy Lumpkins, Sedusa, the Rowdyruff Boys and The Gangreen Gang are all obnoxious and mean-spirited as well.
  • Mitch Mitchelson can act like one sometimes, especially in the episode, Getting Twiggy With It.
  • And a few one-shot characters like Femme Fatale, Mike Brikowski, Major Man and Lenny Baxter.
  • Professor Dick Hardly was the absolute worst one on the show. He was a sleazy jerk who pretended to be a good friend of Professor Utonium, and later make shoddy knock-offs of the Powerpuff Girls out of sociopathic greed.
  • The whole townspeople in Citiesville, though since this is more of the effect of Deconstructed Trope, it may be intentional.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Mojo and Him started a heated discussion about which one of them was more powerful. And then, Princess interrupted them: it does not matter if Mojo has all those machines, or if Him is evil incarnate, Princess has the most powerful superpower, AND IT'S CALLED MONEY!!! Mojo and Him stopped their discussion, and agreed that she had a point there.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Buttercup and Mitch Mitchelson both tend to be very rude and sometimes quite insensitive, but have proven to be capable of being nice to others.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Dick Hardly claims to be mass-producing Powerpuff Girls knockoffs to help others, but he's really only doing it for the money.
• Just for the Heli of It: Played for laughs in the episode "Jewel of the Aisle": A jewel thief loses a precious gem in a box of Lucky Captain Rabbit King cereal, which he then has to recover from the Powerpuff Girls. Among his attempts to get the jewel back are taking a helicopter up to the roof of their house, getting knocked off the roof by a squirrel attack, and then taking a second helicopter back up to the roof.
• Just Whistle: The Powerpuff Hotline.

K

• Kaiju: The PPG frequently fight Kaiju assaulting their City of Adventure when not engaging their Rogues Gallery. It is later stated that enduring a fight with the Powerpuff Girls has become a rite of passage on Monster Island.
• Karma Houdini: At the end of "Shut the Pup Up" when it turns out the Talking Dog was wrong about the two men dumping a dead body in Townsville Harbor, there were hints that they actually were mobsters and they're left to go free. When the "wrapped up corpse" turns out to be beef bones they're just as surprised as everyone else.
  • HIM is this, while he does get defeated by the girls on every occasion but one, foiling his latest Evil Plan is all they can really hope to ever accomplish with him, since as their version of Satan there isn't really much they can do to actually hurt him, let alone permanently destroy him.
• Karmic Injury: In "Moral Decay", Buttercup knocks villains' teeth out to get money from the tooth fairy. When she becomes too impatient to wait for crimes to happen, she starts breaking their teeth unprovoked. Blossom and Bubbles hear of this and send Buttercup to the bank so that the villains can beat the crap out of her. The next scene reveals that she has also lost a good chunk of her teeth from the beating.
  Buttercup: (frightened) Uh, girls, uh...a little help here?
  Blossom: Sorry, Buttercup, you know what they say; an eye for an eye...
  Bubbles: And a tooth for a tooth!
• Kick the Dog:
  • Or rather, Beat The Living Crap Out Of The Talking Dog, if "Bubblevicious" is of any indication.
  • How Major Man reveals what's Beneath the Mask.
  • When Mojo Jojo transforms everyone into dogs, he literally kicks the Dog version of the Powerpuff Girls.
• Kids Are Cruel:
  • Princess Morbuck is a Spoiled Brat who's extremely cruel to the Powerpuff Grils and shows a severe Lack of Empathy to anyone but herself.
  • The Rowdyruff Boys are shown to be incredibly violent and sadistic, especially when they're fighting against the girls.
  • In "Town and Out", the Citysville kids are mean to the Powerpuff Girls.
• Kids Hate Vegetables: In "Beat Your Greens", the Girls refuse to eat their vegetables, until Townsville is attacked by aliens that resemble them. They and the other kids eventually discover that the only way to defat them is to eat them, and after that they love vegetables.
• Kids Play Matchmaker: In "Keen on Keane", the girls try to set up their father figure The Professor with their teacher Ms. Keane. It works, until they break up over an argument involving cats.
• Kneel Before Zod: Thrice.
  • Princess Morbucks: Prepare to bow to your princess!
  • Mojo Jojo: You will bow before me!
  • Alien Force: And you will now bow down to me!
• Knight of Cerebus: What do all the darkest episodes have in common? HIM always makes things Darker and Edgier; that is when he's the main antagonist of the episode.
  • Even more so with one-shot villain Dick Hardly from "Knock It Off". He tricks the girls into giving him some Chemical X, and then starts making shoddy knock-off Powerpuff Girls to sell around the world and become rich. He has them made intentionally poorly, so that they fall apart and he can sell more of them, and when he sees a perfect Buttercup copy, he angrily orders it to be melted down for its excess Chemical X. When the girls go to his factory to stop him, he starts draining their Chemical X, nearly killing them. And when the Professor offers to become Dick's slave and make Chemical X for the rest of his life in exchange for the girls' safety, Dick laughs at him and says that he'll destroy the girls and keep the Professor as a slave.
• Knights and Knaves: In the episode "Him Diddle Riddle", they come across the "Are you wearing a sombrero?" variant. And they leave it to Blossom to figure out the riddle. And she uses the correct line of reasoning to deduce the "correct" variant. And she gets it wrong. But Him gives them the point anyway, presumably because Blossom has a really good poker face.

L

• Lady Looks Like a Dude: The Powerpuff Girls believe Twiggy to be male.
• Lab Pet: Mojo Jojo started out as one to Professor Utonium. It was his own meddling that added Chemical X to the Professor's concoction of sugar, spices and everything nice, resulting in the explosion that created the Powerpuff Girls and mutated Mojo.
• Landline Eavesdropping: One episode had the mayor listening in on the Professor and Ms. Keen flirting with each other for hours because he couldn't bring himself to interrupt despite the fact that he needed the girls to save the day.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice:
  • Professor Utonium, surprisingly, is one of those rare non-superhero examples, given the genre of the series.
  • Major Man has one, too. Though, the "justice" part doesn't really apply.
• Large Ham: Mojo Jojo, Fuzzy Lumpkins, HIM and the narrator all have moments of chewing the scenery.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Things play out very similarly between Buttercup and Ace in Season 1's "Buttercrush" and between Ace and Sedusa in the final season's "Aspirations".
• Later-Installment Weirdness: After the movie, Craig McCracken left the show to create Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Chris Savino took over, and the show became more or less a gag comedy instead of a lighthearted action show. The show also switched to digital paint-and-ink animation.
• Latex Perfection: Sedusa disguises herself as Bellum perfectly; to their credit, the girls aren't fooled.
• Laughably Evil: All of the villains, especially Mojo Jojo and to a lesser extent HIM. The sole exceptions being Hate Sink's like Dick Hardly or serious villains like the Gnome
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: In "Criss Cross Crisis", one of the Townsville citizens that gets mixed up is Popeye the Sailor.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In "Paste Makes Waste", Ms. Keane warns Elmer Sglue against eating paste because it's an "imitable act", meaning that other children (in the class) might want to try it too. "Imitable act" is a phrase censors use for any potentially dangerous action in a children's show that the audience might try to imitate. The punchline is that the kids all go up to the window at that point and simultaneously yell "Ew, no!" in response.
• Legalized Evil: In "Bought And Scold", Princess Morbucks convinces her dad to buy the entire city and make her mayor, and her only command is to declare that "Crime is Legal" (with a printed document for criminals to show off in the page image). Morbucks plunges the city into chaos purely to spite the Powerpuff Girls, who she threatens to throw in jail if they try and stop any criminals from doing any immoral acts they would otherwise be punished for. This bites Princess in the butt when she gets robbed and, as the girls note when they're summoned, there's nothing they can do since the theft was perfectly legal, thus forcing Princess to re-illegalize crime to get her stuff back. Turns out it the girls themselves were the theives in an effort to force Princess to change the law back and the get the old mayor his job back.
• Leitmotif:
  • Whenever the Powerpuff Girls arrive to save the day or do something heroic, they have a little tune that plays.
  • Many of their most often reoccurring villains have their own theme music as well.
    • Notable leitmotifs are those of Princess Morbucks, Fuzzy Lumpkins, Gangreen Gang, HIM, The Amoeba Boys, and of course....MOJO JOJO!!.
• Lemony Narrator: The narrator of the series has been known to cross into this territory from time to time, occasionally interacting with the characters, correcting himself when he makes a mistake, and winds up getting caught up in the drama of the scene.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: In the Shotgun Wedding episode, in which the Professor tries to learn more about Fuzzy Lumpkins for the purpose of science, he's mistaken for a female of Fuzzy's species (whatever he is), and the Professor ends up nearly marrying him. After the Professor is saved by the Powerpuff Girls, he writes "never speak of this again" on the notepad that he was using... and then eats it. He gets really mad when the Powerpuff Girls tease him about it 10 seconds later.
• Lethally Stupid: The Mayor. How did that moron even get to be mayor, anyway?
  • Also Big Billy, and many other villains who are too stupid to notice the havoc they make The Amoeba Boys are a notable example, as at least a couple of episodes serve as examples as to how much damage evil germs could create... if they had half a brain.
• Lighter and Softer:
  • Bubbles' new identity as a cute bunny-themed heroine in "Super Zeroes".
  • Seasons 5 and 6 when compared to the first four seasons. The violence is way less brutal, the story are more comical and light-hearted, and all the villains, with the exception of the Gnome, are either joke villains or far less of a threat than earlier episodes.
• Limited Animation: Definitely influenced by the style, especially in the earlier episodes.
• Line-of-Sight Name: In "Mojo Jonesin", a disguised Mojo Jojo takes on the alias "Joe Overcoat" after the overcoat he's wearing.
• Longer-Than-Life Sentence: In "Crime 101", when the Powerpuff Girls rob a bank to show the Amoeba Boys how it is done, the judge nearly sentences them to one million years in Townsville Correctional Facility until the Amoeba Boys decide to take the blame.
• Loose Tooth Episode: In "Moral Decay", Buttercup accidentally punches out Bubbles's tooth. She's remorseful until she hears that Bubbles will get money from the tooth fairy, so Buttercup spends the rest of the episode getting profit by stealing teeth from villains. Later, the villains she attacked come to beat the crap out of her and a good chunk of her teeth get knocked out as well, and the Professor even uses Buttercup's secret stash of coin to pay off her dental bills.
• Lost in Translation: None of the Beat-Alls jokes work in the Swedish dub. The translator doesn't come up with any Woolseyisms, since that wouldn't be possible in Swedish.
• Loophole Abuse: "Schoolhouse Rocked". The rules are there's no fighting in school. So Miss Keane suggests to the Powerpuff Girls they "play dodgeball" with the Gangreen Gang instead.
• Loved I Not Honor More: "Superfriends" has the Powerpuff Girls facing the difficulty of balancing their crime-fighting career with spending time with their new friend Robin.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Played with - Mojo Jojo is the main reason the girls actually exist, since he caused the Chemical X incident. The girls teasingly call him "Dad" while he stands in utter stock at this revelation. Mojo becomes doubly responsible when he goes back in time and sparks the professor's interest in science and the desire to create the "three perfect girls".

M

• MacGuffin: The Key to the World in "The Powerpuff Girls Rule". The Professor lampshades the utter ridiculousness of the concept.
• Made of Iron: Many of the villains are this (aside from HIM and the Rowdyruff Boys as they at least have superpowers to protect themselves), but Princess Morbucks get a special mention, as she's merely a young girl. Despite this, the vicious beatings she receives from the Powerpuff Girls is not enough to kill her or even send her to the hospital.
• Magical Clown: Rainbow the Clown only developed powers after being hit with bleach — at which point he became sad and angry, and used his powers to leech color out of the world until the Girls figured out a way to stop him. When he got his own color back, he went back to being an ordinary clown.
• Magical Girl Warrior: The series can be said to be an Affectionate Parody of the genre just as much as of Western brand superheroes.
• Magical Realism: For the first four seasons, the show always tried to crouch its outlandish plot points in cod pseudo-science (cf. the Professor's explanation of why everybody in Townsville switched bodies in "Criss Cross Crisis"). But by season five, it just let weird, surreal stuff happen entirely without comment. How can a little white lie obtain physical form? How can the girls travel inside a film projector? How can a monster with a porcelain toilet for a head even exist? They just do, apparently.
• Magic Meteor: In one comic book story of The Powerpuff Girls, they had to deal with everyone in the City Of Townsville getting powers from a meteor ("Power Play," DC Comics issue #3).
• Makeup Is Evil: Him always wears a lot of make-up, and he's basically the devil with lobster claws for hands. There is also the one-off villain Mask Scara who ran across the city covering everyone in make-up that wouldn't come off. When she came across the already made-up Him she dressed him in clown make-up.
• Male Gaze: In "Criss Cross Crisis", Blossom is stuck in Ms. Bellum's body for the majority of the episode. The camera is very flattering with her action shots.
  • Even more so in "Dance Pantsed", where Ms. Bellum's dancing outfit and krumping put a heavy focus on her pronounced abs.
• Manipulative Bastard: HIM has a tendency for manipulating the girls against each other, though they always overcame his manipulations.
  • Ace to Buttercup in "Buttercrush".
  • Dick Hardly. He manipulates the girls to give him Chemical-X to make botched copies of the girls and pretends to be someone who sells them to help others when he only made them for profit.
  • The Gnome to the girls and all of Townsville in "See Me, Feel Me, Gnomey."
  • Sedusa to the Gangreen Gang in "Aspirations".
• May the Farce Be with You: The Death Star trench run scene in "Boogie Frights".
• Meaningful Name:
  • Blossom was named by the Professor for her directness, and being the first to open up to him.
  • Bubbles was named for the fact she's cute and bubbly.
  • Buttercup doesn't receive any true meaning to her name, but it could have some meaning to it since buttercup flowers are poisonous to bugs, referring to her rebellious persona.
  • Ms. Sara Bellum, who is named after the term "cerebellum", showing she does most of the thinking for the cloudcuckoolandish Mayor.
  • Sedusa's name is a portmanteau of "seduce" and "Medusa", which perfectly describes she has prehensile Medusa hair and can seduce and manipulate unsuspecting victims to do her bidding.
  • Resident and snobby Rich Bitch Princess Morbucks, who always screams to get something she wants.
• Medium Awareness: Him once grumps about how after several years none of the villains have come close to defeating the girls. Mojo Jojo also complains that "after six seasons [of] this show" he still hasn't gotten the respect he feels he deserves.
  • Blossom gets a giant match from the same place she got a giant jar, to which she references the specific episode number and season of that event.
• Me's a Crowd: The girls' "copycat" power, used in "Forced Kin" and in "Nuthin' Special."
• Medusa: Has a character named Sedusa with hair that works like tentacles.
• Metronomic Man Mashing: A common technique used by the girls as they take the criminal or monster and bash them from side to side with just one arm.
• Midair Bobbing: The girls are the queens of this trope; they even do it in unison.
• Mind-Control Eyes: Professor Utonium and several others in one episode.
• Minor Flaw, Major Breakup: In "Keen on Keane", Professor Utonium ends up breaking up with Ms. Keane because she owns a cat. In his defense, the last cat that the professor had spent any prolonged time with turned out to be an evil mastermind that tried to make him jump off a building.
• Miracle-Gro Monster: B.E.E.B.O. was only intended to be fed once, but since the girls all obliviously fed the Professor's creation without telling one another, he ended up growing bigger and becoming gluttonous.
• Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher: Ms. Keane inverts this in "Speed Demon", where she goes from a math problem with apples to Einstein's Theory of Relativity and how it pertains to potential Time Travel. It was relevant to the plot, but the class just kinda stared blankly.
• A Mistake Is Born
  • Powerpuff Girls are born by a mistake of Professor Utonium, since she wanted to created a single girl as her daughter, but then the Chemical X was added by mistake, giving birth to 3 little superheroines.
  • Also, various supervillains are born by mistake in the series, prominently PPG's Arch-Enemy Mojo Jojo, which also has an accident with the Chemical X, becoming him since a normal monkey to a uplifted maniac mastermind.
  • In the season 4 episode Superfriends, appears Robin Snyder, a new neighbor that moves in next door to the girls and befriends them. While introducing her to the professor, there's a (un)noticeable moment with an uncompfortable conversation.
• Moment of Weakness: In the episode A Very Special Blossom, The Professor unintentionally puts pressure on his daughters to get him the set of limited-edition Pro Excellence 2000 series golf clubs on Father's Day. While cleaning up the aftermath of a battle with Mojo Jojo, Blossom sees the clubs through a broken window in a store, Blossom actually resorts to stealing so that she could make the Professor happy. She pays the consequences of her actions when the Professor is arrested for having a stolen item, and when she tries to frame Mojo for stealing them before she is forced to confess. She has to pay for her crime by doing community service.
• Mondegreen Gag: Used with many, many Beatles lyrics in the "Meet the Beat-Alls" episode.
  • With the show itself, some sources list the city of Townsville's name is "Toonsville". Probably because there is an actual Townsville in Queensland, Australia.
• Monochrome Casting: All the main characters are white ^note  with the possible exception of Sara Bellum and there are no non-white recurring characters except the Gangreen Gang^note Among them, Little Arturo is evidently Hispanic.
• Moral Luck: After Rainbow the Clown is turned into an evil mime in an accident, he goes on a crime spree, draining all the color from Townsville and its citizens, but after he's turned back to normal the girls don't realise he's not really evil and had no control over his actions, and beat him up anyway. (This was an instance of Executive Meddling; Craig McCracken didn't intend this to be the climax of the story.)
• The Most Dangerous Video Game: In "Dance Pantsed" Mojo takes advantage of Bubbles's addiction to a dancing video game to send her a fake sequel bundled with a peripheral that turns the Girls into evil cyborgs.
• Motive Decay: An In-Universe example would be the crook who dressed up like Lucky Captain Rabbit King, who went through so much torment trying to get the box of cereal he forgot he was originally after the stolen jewel hidden in the box.
• Motor Mouth: Mojo Jojo. Villainous rants are one thing, but he often does it just for the sake of doing it. He loves to talk so much, he rants even when there's no-one around to listen to him.
• Mistaken for Profound: Mayor is running for reelection, spouting his usual, tired lines. Fuzzy Lumpkins gets tired of Mayor's shouting to the crowd interrupting his sleep, so he yells "SHUT UP!", and people act like it's the best campaign slogan ever.
• MST: In "Silent Treatment", the girls make fun of the silent movie they're watching, complete with silhouettes in front of the screen.
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • The Professor's description of the time he went to the DMV to get his driver's license renewed in "City of Clipsville".
  • Eat your pea, Professor.
  • The entire concept of "Beat Your Greens". What better way to get children of the '90's to eat their veggies by making a race of hyperintelligent, nigh invulnerable broccoli invade earth only to be defeated by Townsville's children banding together and devouring them all into oblivion?
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: "The city of Townsville: a place filled with some of the most brilliant, clever, and ingenious criminal masterminds ever to hatch an evil scheme! ...Then, there's the Amoeba Boys."
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: At the end of "Stray Bullet", Blossom and Buttercup attempt to speak "squirrel". The subtitles translate what they are saying as "Ouch! The broccoli is on the roof." and "Happy to you log pony."
• Mythology Gag: The exterior of the Pokey Folks retirement home in "Fallen Arches" is what used to be the Hanna-Barbera studio. The numerical address seen is 3400, and the studio was at 3400 Cahuenga Blvd. in Hollywood.

N

• Naïve Animal Lover: Bubbles. A friend to just about every creature great and small. Magnified in "Helter Shelter" when she brings a beached baby whale home.
• Naked People Are Funny: In "Nano of the North," the girls set out to fight the microscopic Nanobots, which can melt any object into nonexistence. They discover offscreen that this includes their clothing, causing them to return to the professor in embarrassment... and in nothing but their hands.
  • "The Bare Facts" is about the Mayor trying to figure out why the girls were laughing when they rescued him from Mojo, and it turns out to be because Mojo had taken his clothes.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Despite being elderly people, The Ministry of Pain in "Fallen Arches", are such a pretty big deal no one wants to mess with them. The Mayor justifies the girls "giving up" once he learned the villainous trio returned.
• Narrating the Obvious: From "I See a Funny Cartoon In Your Future":
  Madame Argentina: Please sit.
  Narrator: Which the girls did.
• Nerd Hoard: An episode has an obsessed collector who eventually gets all of the Powerpuff Girls merchandise ever made. His life goal suddenly complete, he decides to collect the girls themselves. Naturally, when the people of Townsville come to the rescue, they get him to confess by opening his mint-in package items.
• Never Mess with Granny: The episode "Criss Cross Crisis" involves Mojo Jojo being body-swapped with the only citizen of Townsville stronger than the main characters. Or, more specifically, ''senior'' citizen! A cookie-baking old lady who carries knitting balls of steel wire tough enough to trap even the girls!
• Never My Fault: In one episode a cop is fired for being lazy and not doing his job and he assumes the reason he was fired was because the Powerpuff Girls' crimefighting was causing the police department to make cutbacks. He proceeds to capture the girls and try to dunk them in acid.
  • He actually pulls it off, but then everyone present (including the girls themselves) learn that acid doesn't hurt them.
• Never Recycle Your Schemes:
  • Doubly Subverted when Mojo Jojo actually repeated one of his previous plans exactly, except for one minor detail that led to the plan's previous failure. The minor detail being to actually try to hinder the Powerpuff Girls from simply beating the snot out of him from the get-go. As Mojo Jojo starts smugly stating how not trying to hinder them, because they overcame it the last time, will make the plan certain to work this time, the Powerpuff Girls respond by simply beating the snot out of him.
  • Also, HIM explicitly states that he never "gives repeat performances" in one episode.
• New Ability Addiction: One episode has Blossom discovering that she can use freeze breath and using it willy-nilly, annoying her sisters. After she unwittingly helps some crooks escape with her ice breath, she promises to stop... just before there is a massive flaming asteroid about to drop on Townsville. And she can't be convinced to use it.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: The girls will occasionally use a power they never showed before as a Deus ex Machina to defeat the villain. The Power of Rock is just one example.
  • That barely scratches the service. Nuthin' Special has Buttercup trying to find the one power she has that her sisters don't. They go through EVERY SUPERPOWER IN THE BOOK in that episode.(Her special power is rolling her tungue, by the way.)
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • The first time they use the Dynamo, they end up causing more damage then the monster they were fighting, causing the Mayor to demand that they never use it again. The Professor is also held accountable for having forced them to use it in the first place when he became overly protective.
  • In the "Fallen Arches" episode, if Blossom hadn't called for Captain Righteous and Lefty to fight against the Ministry of Pain, then the elders themselves wouldn't be hospitalized.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: In "Forced Kin" Mojo Jojo helps the girls fight an alien, only to find the alien is seemingly using all his own ideas! When the alien defeats the girls, Jojo literally goes ape and physically forces the alien to submit, driving off the threat and becoming the reluctant hero.
  Mojo Jojo: You've. Ruined. My. DREAM!!!!!
  • Mojo is also responsible for the afforementioned Stable Time Loop.
• Nightmare Weaver:
  • In "Power-Noia", HIM visits the girls in their sleep and torments them with nightmares based on their respective fears.
  • In "Dream Scheme", the girls inversely do this to the Sandman when he gets fed up with constantly having to put people to sleep and get no sleep for himself, thus leaving him to decide to just force everyone to sleep at once. The girls find out that they have the power to communicate through dreams, and use this to give the Sandman so many nightmares that he never wants to sleep again.
• Nobody Poops: The girls don't ever seem to need bathroom breaks, but this is averted a few times.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • In an episode in which Buttercup tries to find her own unique power, she finds out she is the only of the girls who can curl her tongue. Cut to many Townsville inhabitants trying to do the same and failing miserably - among them, Gene Simmons!
  • The two senior superheroes Blossom coerces to come out of retirement in "Fallen Arches" are caricatures of Bill Hanna and Joseph Barbera.
  • Series creator Craig McCracken appears twice in "The Powerpuff Girls Rule", as does fellow staffer and his wife, Lauren Faust.
• No Inner Fourth Wall: In "Silent Treatment", Buttercup reads some dialogue in the Show Within a Show Silent Movie, but is unable to finish as she is tripped up by the Dastardly Whiplash villain's name, Max Von Nitrate. When Buttercup complains, Von Nitrate facepalms and pulls the dialogue back up. Later on, the girls jeer the movie, causing Von Nitrate to lose it and reveal the Damsel in Distress is actually Professor Utonium (who had left to get popcorn before the movie started), and he intends to steal his voice, leaving the girls to enter the film themselves to rescue the Professor.
• No Power, No Color: The one-off villain Mr. Mime had the ability to drain the colors out of other beings, leaving them in a coma afterwards.
  • The girls lose their powers when they enter the black-and-white silent movie in "Silent Treatment."
• No Prison Segregation: Whenever they get arrested, the various villains and criminals are seen in the same prisons together with other people, regardless if they're men, women, children, or even non-human characters.
• Nominal Hero: Major Man from the episode "Major Competition" set people in dangerous life risks only to save them himself, just to be known as a hero. In the end, he admitted everything and was never seen again.
• Nonchalant Dodge: The Girls and Princess both.
• Noodle Incident: In "Him Diddle Riddle," the Girls manage to solve Him's hardest riddle (by far!) neatly during the commercial breaks.
• Not Allowed to Grow Up: Over the course of the show, the girls celebrate their birthday, and there are 2 separate episodes set at Fathers’ day. Which clearly take place on different Fathers’ Days since Mojo Jojo is a main character in both episodes, and in the first of these episodes the professor recalls the gifts the girls made for him last year’s Fathers’ day. This means that, at the very least 3 years pass over the course of the series. Yet none of the girls or the other kids in their class ever age or move up from kindergarten to elementary school.
• Odd Friendship: The girls show up Major Man with the help of a cooperative sea monster.

O

• Oculothorax: The Monster of the Week of "The Mane Event" is a beholder-like creature consisting of black orb full of blue eyes. It's large enough to block out the sun's lightning in Townsville, and its eyes shoot vaporizing lasers. It can only be attacked when its eyes are shut.
• Oddball Doppelgänger: Bunny from "Twisted Sister". Same dress design, has a B name, and like the others has a different color scheme to make her different from the other three... besides the fact that she is mentally handicapped and is very physically deformed.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: In "Him Diddle Riddle", the trio are given the riddle "In the ear of corn, you will find; happiness, joy, and the ties that bind; squirrels store nuts and birds sing songs; but in the cave of eternity, everyone's wrong; on the limb of a tree, there's a monkey who's free; and there he will give you something for me.". Cut two minutes later to the next shot with the girls exhausted. Him, who is holding an ice cream, even states "I can't believe you got that right. You got the right flavor and everything."
  • Him also appeared in "Moral Decay" with his teeth knocked out by Buttercup
• Off to Boarding School: In "Mommy Fearest", Sedusa does this to the girls while disguising herself as a kind woman named Ima Goodlady, that the Professor goes ga-ga for.
• Older Than They Look
  • Implied with Ms. Keane and Professor Utonimum. The series takes place in The Nineties or early 2000s but they go back to their childhood in The Fifties. That means they're around fifty to sixty, while they don't look any older than their mid 30s. Of course, it could be a case of Writers Cannot Do Math.
• Ominous Pipe Organ:
  • In the episode "Get Back Jojo", the scene in the past where the young Professor Utonium crazily drops red dye ("blood") and excessive chemicals into his model volcano ("monster"), which results in explosion, is accompanied by a creepy organ music.
  • Downplayed in the episode "Mime for a Change". Rainbow the Clown's evil alter ego, Mr. Mime, has a creepy calliope music as his leitmotif.
• One-Winged Angel:
  • Don't swallow a whole beaker of Chemical X. It has this side effect. This is something Dick Hardly learned when he accidentally swallow a whole bottle of Chemical X when he refused to give them to the girls.
  • HIM's demonic forms in "Speed Demon" and "Power Noia".
  • Sedusa's giant asp-haired form in "Aspirations".
• Onion Tears: In "Dance Pantsed," the girls are able to break free of their brainwashed state by conjuring memories of times they comforted Professor Utonium crying over various matters, including a financial audit and onions.
• Opening Shout-Out: The "Run of the Mill Girls" from the episode "Oops, I Did It Again".
• Opponent Switch: One episode had them facing impostors in Paper Thin Disguises, which nonetheless fooled the girls (and the crooks) into attacking each other until they got the idea to only attack their own counterpart, allowing the Girls to easily trounce the imposters.
• Out-of-Character Moment: In "That's Not My Baby!" when the girls try asking Ms. Keane to look after the baby temporarily while they look for the parents, Ms. Keane claims that she's too busy. This is actually a lie and gives the false implication that she hates children, showing the bin next to her desk full of gifts from her students.
• Overly Long Gag: Betty, Buttercup's "Run of the Mill Girls" counterpart from "Oops, I Did It Again", goes back to get her schoolbooks as soon as everyone's ready to go to school, causing the rest of her family to wait a long time for her until she comes back with the books. If she had superpowers like Buttercup, she would have gone and came back in no time flat.

P

• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • The three crooks who wear rather unconvincing Powerpuff Girls costumes in "Powerpuff Bluff".
  • Mojo Jojo in "Slumbering With the Enemy". Partially averted in this instance, because the girls see through his disguise immediately. Though everyone else is still unaware.
• Parental Bonus: Tons and tons.
• Parent Service: Miss Bellum, Sedusa, Femme Fatal.
• The Parody Before Christmas: In "'Twas the Fight Before Christmas", Princess Morbucks goes to the North Pole to switch the names on the Naughty and Nice Lists so she can trick Santa Claus into granting her wish of being a Powerpuff Girl. The Narrator speaks in rhymes throughout the special, and he opens it with this:

  Narrator: 'Twas the city of Townsville, and all through the town, all the townsfolk are stirring as snow's falling down. It's bitter and freezing in the dead of December, but there's reason for joy, if you can remember, for it's this time of year that our story unfolds, when our hearts are the warmest, despite all the cold. Yes, it is Christmas, just two days before, and all through the town, none can wait anymore...for the timely arrival of one certain fat guy...who brings us all goodies from out of the sky. Full of anticipation are these urban folks, none more so than the students at old Pokey Oaks.

• Parody Commercial: The Pickle Patch, from "I See a Funny Cartoon In Your Future".
• Paste Eater: In one episode, there's a boy in the girls' class named Elmer Sglue who gets teased for eating paste. A mosquito tainted by toxic waste falls on the paste he was eating, turning him into a giant glue monster who wreaks havoc on the city.
• Personal Raincloud: In the episode "The City of Frownsville", Lou Gubrious has a storm cloud over his head due to him being so miserable.
• Pie-Eyed: The girls gain these in "Silent Treatment" when they get trapped inside a silent cartoon.
• Pietà Plagiarism: Done in "Mommy Fearest" with the Professor and Ima Goodlady after the latter pretends to faint.
• The Pig-Pen: Buttercup became one for an episode when she refused to take a bath.
• Plot Hole: In "Not So Awesome Blossom", Mojo issues an ultimatum to Blossom in exchange for the lives of her sisters and the Professor, an ultimatum of servitude. Blossom asks "How do you know I won't lie?," to which Mojo responds "Because you're Blossom." They must have forgotten "A Very Special Blossom", where she steals a set of golf clubs to give the Professor for Father's Day then not only lies about how she got them but when cornered tried to frame Mojo for it.
• Police Are Useless: Subverted and played straight in the same episode, which focused on the Townsville Police Department and how they handle crime in the city. The police are more geared towards handling non-supervillain related crime, but are still grateful when the girls decide to lend a hand. It's played straight, however, with one specific cop, Mike Brikowski, a lazy Small Name, Big Ego Jerkass who did nothing but eat donuts and sleep, all the while thinking he was up for a promotion. When Mike finally got fired for his laziness, he blamed the girls saying they take away work from "hard-working cops". The other, more competent police step in to save the day when Mike kidnapped the girls.
  Mike (after being arrested): Well, this looks like the story of a good cop gone bad.
  Blossom: You're not a good cop gone bad. You're a bad cop gone worse!
• Political Correctness Is Evil: Basically the premise of the episode Save Mojo, in which a group of clueless animal activists prevents the Powerpuff Girls from arresting Mojo Jojo each time he sets to commit a new crime, insisting that he is an oppressed animal unable to perform evil deeds because he's, well, an animal. Mojo himself is more than happy with such a turn of events if not the least bit grateful.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Major Glory and the other heroes from Dexter's Laboratory are portrayed as sexist and ageist in the episode "Members Only", where they deny the Powerpuff Girls membership in their team solely because they're girls and children.
• Politicians Kiss Babies: On one episode, the mayor was running for his re-election, he mentioned that it was one of his favorite parts.
• Potty Failure:
  • "Powerprof" confirmed Bubbles used to wet the bed, much to her embarrassment.
  • The episode "Pee Pee G's" was about the girls thinking one of them was wetting the bed, but unsure of which it was. It turned out to be Mojo Jojo who, in a completely OOC manner, just wanted to pull a prank on them by spilling water on their bed while they were asleep. Leads to his own Potty Failure at the end of the episode.
• Power Nullifier: Antidote X, first appearing in "Mo Job" and later in "Slumbering with the Enemy" and The Movie.
• Powers as Programs: Season 2 introduced the idea that the Powerpuff Girls' powers can be given to normal people with Chemical X, or taken away from them with Antidote X. this has been exploited several times.
• The Power of Love: Has revived the girls on several occasions.
• The Power of Rock: Used to defeat Mr. Mime and turn him back into Rainbow the Clown.
• Power Trio: The Powerpuff Girls and The Rowdyruff Boys.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • Mojo Jojo stopped an alien only because the said alien was copying his plans.
  • Mojo also called Him out on how Stupid Evil it is when the latter redirects the sun into Earth, stating that doing so, Him will destroy everyone including HIMself. But then it was shown that Him was bluffing.
• Precocious Crush: Buttercup develops one on Ace in "Buttercrush".
• Prefer Jail to the Protagonist:
  • The episode, "Child Fearing" has Mojo Jojo being released from prison to babysit Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup while the Professor is at a meeting. At first, he wants them to help him take over Townsville, but taking care of them is too much for him to handle, and he calls the police so they can take him back to jail.
  • The Amoeba Boys avert this - they simply want to go to jail to prove they're as much of criminals as the other villains in Townsville.
  • In the episode, "Sun Scream", two criminals are disgusted by the girls' sunburnt skin peeling and beg to be taken to jail. However, the girls decide to leave them stranded on an island with only a tube of sunscreen instead. The criminals get sunburned as a result of not using the sunscreen, claiming it's only for now.
• Previously on…: The episode "Just Desserts" is a sequel to "Supper Villain", which came 16/8 episodes (depending on your definition of an episode) prior. It opens with a recap of "Supper Villain" that begins "Last week, in the city of Townsville..." Once the recap ends, the actual episode begins with "The City of Townsville!" as per usual.
• Prison Rape:
  • This is implied to happen to Mojo Jojo.
    Narrator: Love is in the air, can't you just feel it?
  • Mojo Jojo was also turned into a dog once, and left in the pound. A big burly dog woofs at him suggestively. At least it wasn't a human prisoner that time.
• Product Placement: Averted with the episode "Collect Her." The writers went out of their way to write in some of the most absurd, impossible-sounding tie-in-products, such as gold club bags and waffle makers, so as not to seem as if they were just plugging the show's real-life merchandise. And humorously enough, the waffle maker did eventually happen!
• Progressive Instrumentation: Twice in the very short song "Love Makes the World Go Round," first with drums > bass > guitar, then with vocals.
• Pro Wrestling Episode: "Impeach Fuzz," and comic Issue #18.
• The Psycho Rangers: The Rowdyruff Boys, Distaff Counterparts later brought Back from the Dead by Popularity Power.
• Psycho Serum: In one episode, Mojo Jojo exposed some kids from the girls' class to Chemical X. In addition to giving them superpowers, it also caused them to become needlessly violent and aggressive.
• Pun: "I See a Funny Cartoon in Your Future" has several, being an obvious tribute to Rocky and Bullwinkle, but the one that takes the cake is delivered by Blossom, complete with a humorously extended Beat for good measure.
  Blossom: A tarot card! Girls, this is worse than we imagined!
  Bubbles: Whatever do you mean, Blossom?
  Blossom: Not only are we dealing with a petty criminal, we're dealing with... A tarot-ist.
  [5 second beat]
• Punch-Clock Villain: According to the episode "Super Zeroes", EVERY monster that invades Townsville is this.
  • This also applies to the show's recurring villains (Mojo, Fuzzy, HIM, etc.)
• Pungeon Master: The Narrator sometimes slips into this. Especially noticeable in "Daylight Savings".
• Punny Name: Sara Bellum = Cerebellum
  • In the 2014 special "Dance Pantsed," Ringo Starr voices mathematician Fibonacci Sequins, a play on "Fibonacci sequence."
  • The Gangreen Gang. They're green, and they're a gang. They don't actually seem to have Gangreen so that part of the title's only there for the sake of the pun, but "hygenic" is about the last thing that you'd call them and Professor Utonium claims that they have at least some sort of skin condition so it's still fitting.
  • The Morbucks family honestly couldn't have more bucks.
  • Sedusa, the seducer Medusa. She once disguised herself as a woman named Ima Goodlady ("I'm a good lady").
  • Femme Fatale isn't a Femme Fatale, but she is a villainess who's themed around heavily misguided feminism that's actually only a ruse she uses to shield herself in order to get away with crime more easily (and brainwash the Powerpuff Girls), and while she doesn't actually kill anyone she's' plenty vicious enough to fit the "Fatal(e)" part of her name.
  • In the episode "A Made Up Story", Mask Scara's name is a pun on "Mascara", and she absolutely embraces it by peppering her dialogue with even more silly makeup puns.
  • All over the place in the Pokey Oaks class, which includes Harry Pitt (hairy pits), Elmer Sglue (Elmer's Glue), Julie Bean (jellybean), Wes Goingon (what's going on), and Mike Believe (make believe).
  • In the episode "The City of Frownsville", the villain Lou Gubrious' name is a pun on "lugubrious" meaning tearful, and he's a miserable scientist who cries non-stop. After when everyone's infected by his Miseray, he turns into Hal Larious, whose name is a pun on "hilarious" meaning very funny.

• Pyrrhic Victory: In "Uh-Oh Dynamo", Professor Utonium threatens to ground the Girls if they don't use his Dynamo invention to stop the Giant Fish Balloon Monster. They reluctantly comply, destroying the Giant Fish Balloon Monster, and huge portions of Townsville are also damaged in the battle.

Q

• Quivering Lip:
  • Bubbles, being Prone to Tears, has gotten a quivering lip on various occasions. A few examples include when Ima Goodlady^note Actually Sedusa steals Octi from her in "Mommy Fearest", right before her Inelegant Blubbering breakdown in "All Chalked Up" after Buttercup stomps on her chalk collection, and when Hal Larious steals her trophy in "The City of Frownsville".
  • In "Bought and Scold", the Powerpuff Girls have no idea what to do after Princess has made crime legal. Buttercup's lip quivers as she's Trying Not to Cry.
  • In "The Boys Are Back in Town", after the Rowdyruff Boys become giants and are more powerful than the Powerpuff Girls as a result, all three girls all have quivering lips due to panic, though they don't cry.

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