The Kardashians Can’t Hold a Candle to the Insane Penguin Relationship Drama Lighting Up Twitter Right Now

ByElizabeth Licata

Warning: This penguin fight is brutal and pretty graphic. There will be blood.

There are few things in life as much fun as anthropomorphizing penguins, but last night National Geographic took it way too far and embroiled all of Twitter in a violent, sordid penguin soap opera that has more drama than literally anything the Kardashians have ever done, including that time they didn’t invite a woman to her own baby shower. It’s insane and delicious and it will make you feel a little dirty, but also good because it’s National Geographic, and National Geographic is for smart people, right?

National Geographic has a TV program called “Animal Fight Night,” which is just footage of animals fighting while a narrator talks about the animals’ relationship drama. I’m not sure what the market for that particular show is. People who think they’re too smart for reality TV but really just want to watch something scream and bleed? Well, it sounds like they’ve got a hit on their hands, because last night they Tweeted out a three-minute preview of a “cuckold penguin revenge fight,” and Twitter has not stopped talking about it.

“A fight breaks out when a husband comes home and finds his wife with another penguin,” National Geographic says, because these penguins are definitely legally married.

The husband penguin comes home and finds his wife having sex with a different penguin. Then, instead of getting mad at the cheating spouse, the husband penguin decides to fight the homewrecker penguin to get his wife penguin back. (Look, I’d object to words like “husband,” “wife,” “homewrecker,” and “cheater,” but literally every penguin in this video looks exactly alike, and we need some way to distinguish them. Because even when one penguin finally wins, everyone watching is like, “Wait, who won? Is that the husband or the homewrecker? They look the same!”)

Lest you think the way they are batting their flappy penguin wings at each other is the Antarctic version of the passionate but harmless slap-fight between Hugh Grant and Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’ Diary, the narrator bursts in to clarify that penguins don’t fly, so they don’t have hollow bones, and they’re using their solid-bone wings “like baseball bats, delivering up to eight blows a second!”

Both penguins stop, bloodied, after the first round of the fight and decide to let the female decide which penguin she wants. But she chooses the new penguin, not her old penguin, and the old penguin is still not having it. He tries to follow them into the burrow and peck the new penguin’s eyes out, and everyone just winds up even bloodier.

All through this whole thing, a fourth, unrelated penguin is sitting in a nearby burrow just watching the whole thing go down. You know if he had a phone he’d be filming this.

“The husband makes one last plea for the female,” the narrator says after the fight is over, “but she’s got no time for losers.”

Jesus, that’s cold.

Then, having been thoroughly pummelled and sent packing from his burrow, the husband penguin tries to walk away with his dignity intact, and stumbles right over a branch and falls down, because the world is cruel and humiliating.

Twitter, of course, is eating this shit up.

The main lesson to take away from all this is that even the cutest animals are totally crazy, and also that nature is basically one long-running Real Housewives marathon.

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