And while I'm on the topic...
Sep. 24th, 2020 01:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plonqI'm going to put this behind a spoiler tag for those of you who haven't watched, but still intend on someday watching the reboot of She-Ra on Netflix. I'm guessing that at this point, you've already seen it, or are not interested, but a cut tag is just the polite thing to do.
First, I want to start off by appreciating some of the beautiful imagery they used through this series - especially as they moved into the last couple of seasons. This picture of Adora carrying the body of Catra1 out of Horde Prime's ship is a wonderful example of that. This also has to be one of the gayest scenes from the show as well. The buff heroine is taking her woman home and daring anyone to try and stop her.
I also want to pause here and appreciate her new look in this scene. I'm aware of the fact that her new costume contains elements of all the people closest to her in its design, but I also think that it just looks better. Plus, it's got much more practical pants.
1 Yes, Catra was canonically dead at this point. The show's creators were forced to show here breathing after her fall, but the voice actress delivered a pretty convincing death rattle shortly after that scene to make up for it. There were a lot of earlier scenes in the show where viewers were left wondering, "How did Catra survive that?" The answer is that she didn't. If you kept count, you'd see that she actually died nine times through the seasons. She-Ra reset the counter when she resurrected her later in this episode (I've linked the clip of that further down).
I know that I made a brief post about this show earlier, but I wanted to expand a bit on some of the reasons I love it so much. All of this is my personal headcanon, mind you, and may not fit with the intent of the show's writers.
I love the layered and nuanced nature of this story. On its surface it's a hero's journey; she discovers her identity, comes to terms with her destiny, overcomes obstacles, and then saves the world with the help of True Love's Kiss™. On the other hand, if you peel back a layer, it's actually the story of two children who were brought up in a harsh, sometimes abusive environment where they are forced to try and live up to unrealistic expectations. Catra and Adora are battling themselves, and everything else is collateral damage.
Adora is pushed into far too much responsibility too quickly, leaving her to feel like she is responsible for everybody - including Catra. She is brokenly selfless, determined to sacrifice herself for the common good to the point where it actually makes her self-destructive. She embraces what she sees as her destiny with chilling toxicity, throwing herself unprepared into battle with reckless abandon. You can especially see this in the final season after she broke her sword and was not yet able to summon She-Ra. She would grab whatever was at hand and run screaming into a hopeless battle.
Catra, on the other hand, grew up believing that she was never quite good enough. She lived in Adora's shadow, but unlike the other, she was brokenly selfish. She was willing to sacrifice anything or anyone to prove her worth, but too selfish to openly acknowledge or care that she was actively hurting anyone who actually cared about her. She was aware of the harm she was doing, but she lacked the emotional maturity to deal with it, choosing instead to betray them and drive them away or (in Adora's case) attempt to kill them a bit.
I liked how, in their parallel journeys, Adora had to learn how to value herself, and Catra had to learn how to value others. This was a story about two children coming of age, maturing emotionally, reconciling with their childhood traumas, and incidentally saving the world along the way. Speaking of parallel journeys, in the final season, there is a wonderful symmetry between episodes 5 and 13. When Catra is trying to pull Adora back from the brink in the heart chamber, her exhortations mirror those of Adora when she was trying to save Catra from the grip of Horde Prime. The difference was that Catra had finally reached the level of emotional maturity to confess her love for Adora without knowing if it was reciprocated.
There have been a lot of comments about how the universe was saved by the power of a gay kiss, but I think that it was Catra's confession. Through the entire series, Adora had been willing to sacrifice her life for others, but at this moment Catra gave her something worth living for. Catra stayed with Adora at the end for selfless reasons, and Adora saved the world for selfish reasons. The circle was complete.
When I mentioned the nuance of the writing, I would point out that Catra and Glimmer also followed parallel paths. It was no accident that they both ended up as prisoners on Horde Prime's ship - make no mistake, they were both prisoners, regardless of which side of the cell barrier they were on - after letting their ambition and need to prove themselves drive away everyone they cared about. I like to think that it was the recognition of an unexpected kindred spirit in the princess that finally awakened the selfless part of Catra and drove her to do the "one good thing" in her life.
I am not going to touch on Shadow Weaver's arc other than to say that I am satisfied with the way it was resolved. I don't think she fully redeemed herself with her sacrifice, but the fact that she sacrificed herself for Catra is an important point. Did it atone for all of the harm she had done earlier? Maybe - maybe not. On the other hand, having the only mother she'd ever known tell her that she was proud of her, and literally throw herself into the maw of a monster to save her gave Catra some measure of closure. This one his pretty close to home for me. My family has always been fairly reticent when it comes to expressing feelings, so it was only when he lay in hits deathbed that my own dad ever spoke the words, "I love you" and "I'm proud of you."
Other things I appreciate about the show are its handling of gay and non-binary characters. It is not the first show, nor even the first cartoon to address these things, but I loved the fact that it did so without ever calling attention to the fact that it was doing so.
When Double-Trouble entered the show, there was no attempt to point out the fact that they were non-binary. We didn't have somebody use the wrong pronoun so that the show could correct them and give a covert nod to the viewer to say, "Hey, look what we've done here!" The others simply used their pronoun with such natural ease that I didn't even notice it was happening. The fact that they were form-fluid was not lost on me either - just another of the delightful parallels that the writers put into the show.
Bow's dads were also delightful and treated with equally seamless aplomb. Nobody mentioned the fact that he had two dads, and their own behaviour showed no hint that there was anything unusual about them. They were ordinary dads living an ordinary home life, telling ordinary dad jokes. They're just his dads.
I also liked the handling of Netossa and Spinnerella. I mean, setting aside their representation of diverse body types, they are also married. They could have left it at that, and had them as a couple of same-sex background characters who occasionally kiss. But they didn't. There's a wonderful scene in the final season where Netossa is outlining her plan on how to save Spinnerella from Horde Prime's control by exploiting her weakness, and she goes off into a bit of a tangent before they reel her in again. "Ugh. Everyone knows she twisted her ankle when she was a kid. If you keep her off-balance, her injury will act up on her. Next time we fight, I'll target it, and subdue her, and un-chip her, and save her, and remind her of it every time she tells me it's my turn to clean!" There's also a sketchbook she's flipping through with diagrams of her plan that you have to see to appreciate. It's ultimately a reminder that they're not just a couple of token lesbians, but a married couple living a normal, domestic home life when they are not out on world-saving adventures.
In the end, I think the best part of the show is that it is well-written and animated. They get you invested in both the heroes and the villains, giving depth and nuance to everyone. The writing is layered with parallels, and mirrors, where late scenes call back to earlier scenes, bringing the story full-circle. It has redemption arcs, and characters who break conventional tropes. Broken heroes and tragic villains. Scorpia starts off as a villain, yet is arguably the kindest character in the show, with a tragic, heartbreaking origin story that she delivers with her usual upbeat flippancy.
Adora starts off as the chosen one - the child of the First Ones who finds the sword of destiny that puts her on a path of heroism. Then as the show goes on, they pull the rug out from under the trope. We learn that the sword is not the source of her power, it's there to control her. She's not a heroine, but a weapon. Her people were not mysterious saviours of the universe, but colonists and conquerors who stripped planets of their resources and - in the case of Eternia - turned it into a giant dooms-day machine.
Until the true enemy shows up in the last season, Catra is arguably the primary villain of the show, doing some truly horrific things that might make one question if she is beyond redemption. But one would almost have to be dead inside not to tear up with joy at this scene. When she grabs Adora in this desperate hug, it shows that the cat has finally come home.
First, I want to start off by appreciating some of the beautiful imagery they used through this series - especially as they moved into the last couple of seasons. This picture of Adora carrying the body of Catra1 out of Horde Prime's ship is a wonderful example of that. This also has to be one of the gayest scenes from the show as well. The buff heroine is taking her woman home and daring anyone to try and stop her.
I also want to pause here and appreciate her new look in this scene. I'm aware of the fact that her new costume contains elements of all the people closest to her in its design, but I also think that it just looks better. Plus, it's got much more practical pants.
1 Yes, Catra was canonically dead at this point. The show's creators were forced to show here breathing after her fall, but the voice actress delivered a pretty convincing death rattle shortly after that scene to make up for it. There were a lot of earlier scenes in the show where viewers were left wondering, "How did Catra survive that?" The answer is that she didn't. If you kept count, you'd see that she actually died nine times through the seasons. She-Ra reset the counter when she resurrected her later in this episode (I've linked the clip of that further down).
I know that I made a brief post about this show earlier, but I wanted to expand a bit on some of the reasons I love it so much. All of this is my personal headcanon, mind you, and may not fit with the intent of the show's writers.
I love the layered and nuanced nature of this story. On its surface it's a hero's journey; she discovers her identity, comes to terms with her destiny, overcomes obstacles, and then saves the world with the help of True Love's Kiss™. On the other hand, if you peel back a layer, it's actually the story of two children who were brought up in a harsh, sometimes abusive environment where they are forced to try and live up to unrealistic expectations. Catra and Adora are battling themselves, and everything else is collateral damage.
Adora is pushed into far too much responsibility too quickly, leaving her to feel like she is responsible for everybody - including Catra. She is brokenly selfless, determined to sacrifice herself for the common good to the point where it actually makes her self-destructive. She embraces what she sees as her destiny with chilling toxicity, throwing herself unprepared into battle with reckless abandon. You can especially see this in the final season after she broke her sword and was not yet able to summon She-Ra. She would grab whatever was at hand and run screaming into a hopeless battle.
Catra, on the other hand, grew up believing that she was never quite good enough. She lived in Adora's shadow, but unlike the other, she was brokenly selfish. She was willing to sacrifice anything or anyone to prove her worth, but too selfish to openly acknowledge or care that she was actively hurting anyone who actually cared about her. She was aware of the harm she was doing, but she lacked the emotional maturity to deal with it, choosing instead to betray them and drive them away or (in Adora's case) attempt to kill them a bit.
I liked how, in their parallel journeys, Adora had to learn how to value herself, and Catra had to learn how to value others. This was a story about two children coming of age, maturing emotionally, reconciling with their childhood traumas, and incidentally saving the world along the way. Speaking of parallel journeys, in the final season, there is a wonderful symmetry between episodes 5 and 13. When Catra is trying to pull Adora back from the brink in the heart chamber, her exhortations mirror those of Adora when she was trying to save Catra from the grip of Horde Prime. The difference was that Catra had finally reached the level of emotional maturity to confess her love for Adora without knowing if it was reciprocated.
There have been a lot of comments about how the universe was saved by the power of a gay kiss, but I think that it was Catra's confession. Through the entire series, Adora had been willing to sacrifice her life for others, but at this moment Catra gave her something worth living for. Catra stayed with Adora at the end for selfless reasons, and Adora saved the world for selfish reasons. The circle was complete.
When I mentioned the nuance of the writing, I would point out that Catra and Glimmer also followed parallel paths. It was no accident that they both ended up as prisoners on Horde Prime's ship - make no mistake, they were both prisoners, regardless of which side of the cell barrier they were on - after letting their ambition and need to prove themselves drive away everyone they cared about. I like to think that it was the recognition of an unexpected kindred spirit in the princess that finally awakened the selfless part of Catra and drove her to do the "one good thing" in her life.
I am not going to touch on Shadow Weaver's arc other than to say that I am satisfied with the way it was resolved. I don't think she fully redeemed herself with her sacrifice, but the fact that she sacrificed herself for Catra is an important point. Did it atone for all of the harm she had done earlier? Maybe - maybe not. On the other hand, having the only mother she'd ever known tell her that she was proud of her, and literally throw herself into the maw of a monster to save her gave Catra some measure of closure. This one his pretty close to home for me. My family has always been fairly reticent when it comes to expressing feelings, so it was only when he lay in hits deathbed that my own dad ever spoke the words, "I love you" and "I'm proud of you."
Other things I appreciate about the show are its handling of gay and non-binary characters. It is not the first show, nor even the first cartoon to address these things, but I loved the fact that it did so without ever calling attention to the fact that it was doing so.
When Double-Trouble entered the show, there was no attempt to point out the fact that they were non-binary. We didn't have somebody use the wrong pronoun so that the show could correct them and give a covert nod to the viewer to say, "Hey, look what we've done here!" The others simply used their pronoun with such natural ease that I didn't even notice it was happening. The fact that they were form-fluid was not lost on me either - just another of the delightful parallels that the writers put into the show.
Bow's dads were also delightful and treated with equally seamless aplomb. Nobody mentioned the fact that he had two dads, and their own behaviour showed no hint that there was anything unusual about them. They were ordinary dads living an ordinary home life, telling ordinary dad jokes. They're just his dads.
I also liked the handling of Netossa and Spinnerella. I mean, setting aside their representation of diverse body types, they are also married. They could have left it at that, and had them as a couple of same-sex background characters who occasionally kiss. But they didn't. There's a wonderful scene in the final season where Netossa is outlining her plan on how to save Spinnerella from Horde Prime's control by exploiting her weakness, and she goes off into a bit of a tangent before they reel her in again. "Ugh. Everyone knows she twisted her ankle when she was a kid. If you keep her off-balance, her injury will act up on her. Next time we fight, I'll target it, and subdue her, and un-chip her, and save her, and remind her of it every time she tells me it's my turn to clean!" There's also a sketchbook she's flipping through with diagrams of her plan that you have to see to appreciate. It's ultimately a reminder that they're not just a couple of token lesbians, but a married couple living a normal, domestic home life when they are not out on world-saving adventures.
In the end, I think the best part of the show is that it is well-written and animated. They get you invested in both the heroes and the villains, giving depth and nuance to everyone. The writing is layered with parallels, and mirrors, where late scenes call back to earlier scenes, bringing the story full-circle. It has redemption arcs, and characters who break conventional tropes. Broken heroes and tragic villains. Scorpia starts off as a villain, yet is arguably the kindest character in the show, with a tragic, heartbreaking origin story that she delivers with her usual upbeat flippancy.
Adora starts off as the chosen one - the child of the First Ones who finds the sword of destiny that puts her on a path of heroism. Then as the show goes on, they pull the rug out from under the trope. We learn that the sword is not the source of her power, it's there to control her. She's not a heroine, but a weapon. Her people were not mysterious saviours of the universe, but colonists and conquerors who stripped planets of their resources and - in the case of Eternia - turned it into a giant dooms-day machine.
Until the true enemy shows up in the last season, Catra is arguably the primary villain of the show, doing some truly horrific things that might make one question if she is beyond redemption. But one would almost have to be dead inside not to tear up with joy at this scene. When she grabs Adora in this desperate hug, it shows that the cat has finally come home.
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Date: 2020-09-28 05:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-28 11:16 pm (UTC)