Rocksteady, Bebop and Street Sharks
Two posts ago, I wrote about how I’m still surprised it took so long for me to realize that I wanted to get big, even if it seems a little more understandable considering that I also didn’t grow up knowing I was gay. Most gay guys I know figured this out way before I did, and similarly most gainers grew up at least knowing they were attracted to fat guys, if not also that they also wanted to be fat themselves.
I’d say I’m dense, but that’s maybe not the most useful word when it comes to discussion of putting on weight.
Until about two years ago, I didn’t have much awareness of either urge, and maybe that’s more a sign of self-repression than anything else. But if I take stock my whole life, there are maybe two things I could point to as being early signs of my sexuality being rooted in big sexy guys and sexy guys getting big. One of those is a sexy personal story, and I do look forward to typing all that out, but first: Rocksteady and Bebop.
As a kid, I really liked Greek mythology, mostly because I was raised Catholic and the mix-and-match monsters of ancient Greece were a lot cooler than anything that was in the Bible. One of the things I liked best was its many stories of transformation — people turning into animals, people turning into monsters, things becoming other things. I can’t say that it was sexual, exactly, but my interest in this carried over into pop culture, especially comic books and cartoons and especially especially Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, where body transformations were a major theme. In particular, however, I was stuck on Rocksteady and Bebop, the main goods of Shredder the series’ big bad. You actually meet them as human characters before they get turned into an anthropomorphic rhino and warthog, respectively.
(They still wear their human clothes post-transformation, and it was not lost on me that both show off their bellies in their new forms.)
Importantly, you don’t see their transformations. They happen offscreen, and instead you just see the before and the after, which left my little brain to fill in the gaps with what it would look like as these two punked-out lugs turned into hulking man-beasts. I might have spent too much time playing and re-playing that sequence in my head. It’s like how Alfred Hitchcock preferred to leave most of the violence offscreen, because what the viewer would imagine would be more tailored to their own personal schema of horror than anything Hitchcock himself could show them. I had such a vivid mental memory of the transformation — muscles bulging, torsos swelling, ordinary manhood giving way to something beastly — that I was surprised to go back and watch the episode and realize that all of that was wholly made up by me.
I was also surprised to see how immediately both Rocksteady and Bebop fall into line with Shredder. Before they get turned, both are apprehensive about this whole operation. After, they seem grateful for being made bigger and stronger. They don’t even seem to mind that they’re monsters — they might even like their new bodies — and they’re happy to do the bidding of their “Master Shredder.” I’m not saying that this imprinted on my mind in any significant, cause-and-effect way, but if I’m being honest, it did make me think of a fantasy I’ve entertained more than once, where another guy — a more experienced gainer, bigger than I am now, if not both older and bigger — takes me under his wing and transforms me into a big, hulking brute with a belly. I’d be grateful too, monsterism notwithstanding. I’d let him push me to go further and gain more than I could on my own.
Likely because Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles proved to be so successful, this sort of transformation became recurrent throughout kids’ cartoons of the era, but maybe the example that I can pick out as most likely to create a fetish would be Street Sharks. The clip really needs no introduction,
The brothers are forced to turn into man-shark monsters, and that makes them both incredibly strong and incredibly hungry. They know they’re monsters and they know they can’t go back to their regular bodies, so they might as well lean into it and have a good time. Yeah, as dumb as it sounds to say this about a nineties cartoon where a bunch of dudes get turned into shark monsters, there’s more than a bit to relate to here.
In pulling clips for this post, I found out the second of the more recent TMNT movies shows every step on Rocksteady and Bebop’s transformations. It’s something for sure, even if what I have in my head still works better for me.
This scene, however? Where Rocksteady and Bebop take a break from inhaling a barrelful of spaghetti to celebrate how fat Bebop’s belly has gotten? Yeah, that probably created a gainer or too, just because it was undoubtedly many viewers’ first glimpse at any kind of scene where one guy gets giddy at how fat he’s gotten and another guy is all for helping him get even fatter.
The kind of anthropomorphic transformations I grew up watching don’t happen in real life, so turning in a bigger, fatter, stronger version of myself is basically as close as I can get. I don’t know if exposure to sequences like these put me on the path to crave transformation the best way I can manage or if they simply appealed to me because even back then I had the seeds for this urge buried deep in my subconscious. It kind of doesn’t matter, because this is where I am now. I guess I wonder if the people who put these elements into the cartoons I watched and the comics I read did so because they were working through their own issues and also trying to experience transformations the best way they knew how.
This is a blog I’m writing about my journey to body acceptance, a sort of “how I became a gainer” story for anyone interested to hear it. This is a work of creative nonfiction, in that these events did happen to me, but for the sake of narrative coherence, I’m moving some details around. The quotes I’m putting into my recollections are, obviously, a combination of what I remember and what fits the essence of what was communicated during the various conversations I’m recalling.
