Valiant’s Bloodshot blunder shows why rage bait marketing is boring and cringe

It’s been very annoying to be a minority consumer these days. Between Sydney Sweeney’s now infamous “Good Jeans/Good Genes” ad (clearly riffing on the infamous Calvin Klein ad from the 80s, which featured then fifteen year old Brooke Shields) and Matt Rife, a C-list shock jock comedian who made a “joke” about domestic violence, was featured in an E.L.F. ad, there seems to be a trend of using rage-bait in advertising and media to generate clicks.

There’s this idea over the past decade that screwing with minorities is funny or that minorities wait around to get offended by things. I view it as similar to someone walking down the street and stepping in dog poop. Did I walk outside expecting to step on dog poop? No, but now I have to clean my shoes. It’s annoying, sure, but it was an accident. It’s like advertisers are placing the poop where I’d usually walk. If that’s a weird image to think about, good because it is weird.

People who use “trigger the libs” or “anti-woke” statements and jokes are losers. I could go into a whole spiel about how it’s wrong to do this (which it is) or that it’s an indication of a right-wing shift in the broader culture (which it is), but above all else, it’s lame and boring. Or cringe as the kids call it.

Which brings us to Mauro Mantella‘s Bloodshot #1 from Alien Books. 

This variation of Bloodshot is marketed as a jumping on point for new readers of the 30 year old franchise. The story follows the titular Bloodshot, a supersoldier antihero on a mission in Tokyo to kill vampires that have been turned through usage of the drug. It’s a very 90s plot which I expect. What I didn’t expect was the 90s politics leaping from the page in 2025.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’ll keep it brief. This is a dog-whistle about trans people, specifically trans kids. 

The line stating “irreversible change” is eerily similar to the commentary about “Irreversible damage” being “inflicted” on trans children seeking gender-affirming care. Which, for the record, includes reversible puberty blockers, social transition and on occasion hormones. Surgeries before the age of 18 are exceedingly rare. This rhetoric is the same rhetoric that is removing trans people from public life, making it illegal for them to live decent lives, and criminalizing using the bathrooms of their correct gender instead of the one they were assigned at birth.

Also, comparing monsters to a marginalized group in 2025? Conflating queer people to predators that infect people with something that changes them forever? Is this 1992? Was the script sent to the editor via fax?

I know I’m being facetious but it’s just hacky writing on top of being deeply bigoted toward trans people. You can talk about vampires influencing the youth in a number of ways but using that rhetoric is lazy. Oh no, the edgy hero has something to say about the culture these days. “I’m not a man yelling at a cloud or pissed that my wife took the kids, I’m a man! I’m not sensitive like these ‘liberals’”. 

The other side of this is if the writer was liberal and tried to flip conservative talking points on its head. Again, that’s bad writing for the same reasons I explained before.

The thing about all three of these events is that they aren’t new. Advertisements that trends toward political incorrectness are not new. Growing up, it was common to see ads of women being viewed as objects or being compared to food in hypersexualized ways. When darker skin women were depicted, they were never seen as feminine. When lesbians were on TV (if that was even allowed), the word was used as an insult or a fetish. I could go on. 

What I’m getting at here is that for a brief moment in the 2010s and early 2020s, companies at least pretended to care about minorities. We all knew what they really cared about was their bottom line, but it was a signal to the broader culture that treating minorities decently is okay. 

Since the reelection of Donald Trump and his ‘crusade’ against DEI, a number of companies have been capitulating in advance or changing their marketing strategies to fit the zeitgeist. Or what they believe the zeitgeist is because this is a horrific short-term strategy for getting eyes on your products or story in the case of Bloodshot. You offended a bunch of people to get 15 minutes of fame, and you’re gonna end up with years of shame. The pendulum on the public’s opinions on equality will swing back. The internet’s memory is long and trans people have enough shit to deal with.

Update: During the writing of this article, Alien Books has released a statement that says that the lines in the issue were a translation error. Around 15 hours after that, tweets and Bluesky posts surfaced of Mantella espousing and supporting anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ beliefs and posts. All of my points in this article still stand.