Initial Shera Season 3 feelings
These feels are all very spoilery! I've given some backstory if you're not familiar with the show.
I currently at the start of Episode 4 of Season 3, and enjoying this season a LOT. The only thing that really bothers me so far is the disability issues the show has always had.
Content note: abusive parents, ambiguously incestuous shipping, iffy portrayal of disability
****SPOILERS****
So if you're not familiar with the show, here's the premise. If you are, skip forward to the asterixed section.
Bear in mind that it is VERY much aimed at young kids, and is fluffy and silly a lot of the time. I just haven't summarised those parts.
The plot so far:
About 30 years ago the Horde, a colonialist army run by this weird looking guy called Hordak, showed up on planet Etheria and started trying to take it over. One of the good guys, Shadow Weaver, was caught doing Evil Magic (which backfired and left her facially scarred) and she left to join the Horde.
From about 18 years ago, Adora and Catra were raised to be part of the Horde by the abusive Shadow Weaver. Adora was the golden child while Catra was never good enough, but Adora and Catra were very close. At the start of Season 1, Adora joined the good guys, and Catra and Shadow Weaver took out their pain about this on each other. By the end of Season 1, Shadow Weaver was defeated and disgraced, and Catra took over her job as second in command to head villain Hordak. By the end of Season 2, Shadow Weaver had manipulated Catra into helping her escape Hordak's prison, and Hordak saw Catra as having betrayed him. Also one of the good guys, a cheerfully amoral scientist called Entraptra, had joined the bad guys because they supported her research.
So! Season 3 begins with Shadow Weaver showing up at Good Guy Headquarters, saying she wants to bring down Hordak out of revenge. She says Hordak wants to open a portal to let in more of his kind, and finish colonising their planet, Etheria.
Etheria is littered with ruins of The First Ones, an ancient vanished people with amazing technology. Adora gets the ability to turn into She-ra via a First Ones sword, and is the first person able to wield that sword since the last She-ra, Mara, who supposedly went Evil and cut Etheria off from the rest of the universe thousands of years ago.
According to Shadow-weaver, Adora can become She-ra because she's a First One. 18 or whatever years ago, Hordak managed to briefly create a portal, and baby Adora fell through, so he gave her to Shadow-Weaver to mould into a useful soldier.
Adora's First Ones AI mentor gets cagey when asked about all this. So Adora and her bffs Glimmer and Bow go to the deadly, lawless Crimson Waste to find information on Mara. They are betrayed and then helped by a hot buff butch warrior woman called Huntara, who runs the biggest gang in the Crimson Wastes.
Meanwhile: Catra, on the outs with Hordak, is sent into the Crimson Waste to either find useful First Ones tech or die. With her sister/bff/crush Adora working for the other side, her abusive mother escaped, and her boss trying to kill her, Catra has nothing left to lose. By belligerently kicking the crap out of anyone who gets in her way, and with the help of her second in command Scorpia, Catra somewhat inadvertently takes over Huntara's gang and the next biggest gang. Here's an amazing scene they released as a teaser.
Meanwhile: Entraptra has been working alone with Hordak. She sees him without his armour on and realises he's sick and weak, help together by his armour. And he looks a lot like the weird little bat-demon things he's growing in vats.
Hordak explains that he is a failed clone. Horde Prime created an army of clones to take over the galaxy. Hordak was a successful general until his "failure" (congenital disability) became apparent, at which point he was sent to the front line to die. He happened to fall through a portal to Etheria, and has been doing his best to take it over and prove his worth to his "brothers" ever since. But he hasn't succeeded at taking it over, nor at cloning a new body for himself or opening a portal to the rest of the Horde.
Hordak wallows in self pity about being a failure and Entraptra cheers him up saying she's a failure too, everyone thinks she's weird, but failure and difference is what allows for scientific advancement. She makes him a cool new set of armour.
Back in the Crimson Wastes: Adora and her friends discover Mara's space ship! There is a recording of Mara saying that she cut Etheria off to save it, and that while the She-ra sword can be used to create portals the new She-ra must NEVER let that happen.
...and then Catra and her gang come in, capture Adora, and steal the sword. Huntara barely escapes with Glimmer and Bow while the gang destroy Mara's ship for parts.
Catra is jubilant. This is the first time Scorpia has ever seen her happy, and she suggests they stay here and rule the Crimson Wastes together. It's SHIPPY AS HELL. But then Catra finds out that Shadow Weaver escaped Catra to get to Adora and says, with tears in her eyes, "We're going back. WE WILL OPEN A PORTAL AND DESTROY THEM ALL".
!!!!!
**** TIME FOR MY FEELS ****
First off: I love how science fictiony it's getting!! I am genuinely excited to know what's up with all the First Ones stuff. Were they an evil empire too?? The Horde are more interesting than they seemed at first. Still evil and colonialist, but the psychology of the clones is great.
Second: Man, I would be a lot more comfortable with Hordak's sympathetic disability-related backstory if there were ANY NON-BAD-GUY DISABLED CHARACTERS. There's him and Shadow Weaver, and they are both more complex than a lot of disabled bad guys because this show loves making bad guys complex, but they are still the two most overtly villainous characters on the show. THAT IS FUCKED UP. So now I have this interesting disabled character whose arc I kinda sympathise with but I also feel GROSS about it.
Third: SHIPPING FEELS.
One of the notable aspects of She-ra is that it has a LOT of romantic subtext, much of it queer, but very little romantic text, even for a kids show. Like off the top of my head:
-Angella and Mika (Glimmer's parents) were married and had a kid together and she's very sad he is dead (m/f)
-Bow's dads act about as romantic and married as any "parents in a kids show" couple (m/m)
-Seahawk swoons romantically over Mermista in a courtly love way (m/f)
-Netossa and Spinneralla come across as a couple (f/f)
And that's it.
Instead there's a very strong emphasis on friendship, which sometimes gets very subtextually romantic, eg there is a lot of blushing and doing stuff that is romantically coded. Again, off the top of my head:
- Bow and Perfuma have some shippy interactions, which ping differently to his stronger but clearly platonic friendship with Adora and Glimmer (m/f)
- Bow plausibly has a crush on Seahawk (m/m)
- Scorpia has a blatant crush on Catra (f/f)
- Catra has a repressed tsundere thing for Scorpia (f/f)
- Adora seems to have a (very one sided) thing for Huntara (f/f)
- Huntara flirts with a barmaid (f/f)
- Adora and Catra are OBSESSED with each other (LOOK AT THEM) (f/f)
- there is a weird amount of romantic chemistry between Hordak and Entraptra (m/f)
And while I would enjoy a canon that had this level of femslash as overt text (a) Cartoon Network would never let them and (b) The ambiguity has it's advantages. You can give support to competing ships without having to settle things one way or another, and also play with problematic pairings without having to get into the Issues.
For example: Catra and Adora are incredibly shippy and also kind of sisters. Shadow Weaver isn't called their mother, and they described themselves as friends, so there's some leeway. But it's very much on the sibling-esque end of "childhood friends". I have a pretty strong incest squick, and am not sure how I'd feel if they became an explicitely romantic couple in canon, but this intense angry quasi-incestuous quasi-romance is amazing.
And I can simultaneously have complex Scorpia/Catra feels! Scorpia basically fell in love with Catra at first sight, and spent the next 2 seasons soppily coo-ing over how much she wants to be friends despite Catra treating her like crap and clearly only really caring about Adora. So until now I mainly wanted Scorpia to get over it and fall for someone who treats her with respect. But then Catra was in prison, while Scorpia retained her position, and Scorpia still wanted to help Catra, even though there was no advantage to it. And Catra said "You really care about me, huh"...and then did her best to push Scorpia away for her own good, saying "Caring about people got me into this mess!" She tsundere-ly grumbled about how Scorpia SHOULDN'T HAVE COME all the way through the Crimson Wastes, while failing to hide subtle blushes and smiles whenever they bonded about beating people up together etc. So now I kinda ship it.
And then there's Hordak and Entraptra, hoo boy. He's got to be at least 50, while she's in her mid twenties at the most. And he's an evil sociopathic coloniser who treats even his own troops like disposable tools! I'm not sure I even actually ship it, but I feel like 12 year old me would have, and can imagine there's some VERY IDDY fic being written as we speak, they have that whole Snape/Hermione thing going on, with the weird smart girl finding acceptance with a cold lonely older man who is overcome by her brilliance and kindness.
So again, while I would feel uncomfortable about it as an actual canon ship, I am enjoying this quasi-romance a lot more than I would have expected (My earlier feels: "Wait, is the show shipping Entraptra/Hordak now?? WAIT, AM I??!"). In my case, partly for the "weird smart girl finds acceptance" thing, but also because while she does genuinely see him as a friend and want him to be happy, she also very clearly sees him as a fascinating science subject. Like the armour she made hurts him and neither of them care, she fixes anything that's glitching but doesn't apologise or try to comfort him. I'm wondering where it's going through. He's so evil.
In general I am really enjoying the way this show approaches villains: it makes them sympathetic and complex, everyone's the hero of their own story, but it doesn't erase the bad things they've done or expect the good guys to like them. But while the people who do bad things have complex motivations, the actual morality of the show is pretty black and white, and it's clear that Good will prevail. So I'm curious to see how it will end for the villains. So far, while loyalties have shifted a lot between the villains, the only person to actually change from bad guy to good guy is Adora, and she did it the moment she realised the bad guys were bad. Is the show going to go all Steven Universe and eventually have all the villains realise the error of their ways? Or will there be some redemption through death? Bittersweet defeat where you know someone has to be stopped but you feel bad it ended up this way?
I'm also expecting the First Ones AI, Light Hope, to end up becoming more of an antagonist, she has evil mentor written all over her. Which is a bit weird since she's black but I guess there's a bunch of other unambiguously good black characters.
AND NOW TO KEEP WATCHING AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.
(and avoid fandom, who do not handle this sort of moral/shippy ambiguity well at all and are presumably going to be appalling about all of it)
This entry was originally posted at https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/741541.html. There are
comments.
I currently at the start of Episode 4 of Season 3, and enjoying this season a LOT. The only thing that really bothers me so far is the disability issues the show has always had.
Content note: abusive parents, ambiguously incestuous shipping, iffy portrayal of disability
****SPOILERS****
So if you're not familiar with the show, here's the premise. If you are, skip forward to the asterixed section.
Bear in mind that it is VERY much aimed at young kids, and is fluffy and silly a lot of the time. I just haven't summarised those parts.
The plot so far:
About 30 years ago the Horde, a colonialist army run by this weird looking guy called Hordak, showed up on planet Etheria and started trying to take it over. One of the good guys, Shadow Weaver, was caught doing Evil Magic (which backfired and left her facially scarred) and she left to join the Horde.
From about 18 years ago, Adora and Catra were raised to be part of the Horde by the abusive Shadow Weaver. Adora was the golden child while Catra was never good enough, but Adora and Catra were very close. At the start of Season 1, Adora joined the good guys, and Catra and Shadow Weaver took out their pain about this on each other. By the end of Season 1, Shadow Weaver was defeated and disgraced, and Catra took over her job as second in command to head villain Hordak. By the end of Season 2, Shadow Weaver had manipulated Catra into helping her escape Hordak's prison, and Hordak saw Catra as having betrayed him. Also one of the good guys, a cheerfully amoral scientist called Entraptra, had joined the bad guys because they supported her research.
So! Season 3 begins with Shadow Weaver showing up at Good Guy Headquarters, saying she wants to bring down Hordak out of revenge. She says Hordak wants to open a portal to let in more of his kind, and finish colonising their planet, Etheria.
Etheria is littered with ruins of The First Ones, an ancient vanished people with amazing technology. Adora gets the ability to turn into She-ra via a First Ones sword, and is the first person able to wield that sword since the last She-ra, Mara, who supposedly went Evil and cut Etheria off from the rest of the universe thousands of years ago.
According to Shadow-weaver, Adora can become She-ra because she's a First One. 18 or whatever years ago, Hordak managed to briefly create a portal, and baby Adora fell through, so he gave her to Shadow-Weaver to mould into a useful soldier.
Adora's First Ones AI mentor gets cagey when asked about all this. So Adora and her bffs Glimmer and Bow go to the deadly, lawless Crimson Waste to find information on Mara. They are betrayed and then helped by a hot buff butch warrior woman called Huntara, who runs the biggest gang in the Crimson Wastes.
Meanwhile: Catra, on the outs with Hordak, is sent into the Crimson Waste to either find useful First Ones tech or die. With her sister/bff/crush Adora working for the other side, her abusive mother escaped, and her boss trying to kill her, Catra has nothing left to lose. By belligerently kicking the crap out of anyone who gets in her way, and with the help of her second in command Scorpia, Catra somewhat inadvertently takes over Huntara's gang and the next biggest gang. Here's an amazing scene they released as a teaser.
Meanwhile: Entraptra has been working alone with Hordak. She sees him without his armour on and realises he's sick and weak, help together by his armour. And he looks a lot like the weird little bat-demon things he's growing in vats.
Hordak explains that he is a failed clone. Horde Prime created an army of clones to take over the galaxy. Hordak was a successful general until his "failure" (congenital disability) became apparent, at which point he was sent to the front line to die. He happened to fall through a portal to Etheria, and has been doing his best to take it over and prove his worth to his "brothers" ever since. But he hasn't succeeded at taking it over, nor at cloning a new body for himself or opening a portal to the rest of the Horde.
Hordak wallows in self pity about being a failure and Entraptra cheers him up saying she's a failure too, everyone thinks she's weird, but failure and difference is what allows for scientific advancement. She makes him a cool new set of armour.
Back in the Crimson Wastes: Adora and her friends discover Mara's space ship! There is a recording of Mara saying that she cut Etheria off to save it, and that while the She-ra sword can be used to create portals the new She-ra must NEVER let that happen.
...and then Catra and her gang come in, capture Adora, and steal the sword. Huntara barely escapes with Glimmer and Bow while the gang destroy Mara's ship for parts.
Catra is jubilant. This is the first time Scorpia has ever seen her happy, and she suggests they stay here and rule the Crimson Wastes together. It's SHIPPY AS HELL. But then Catra finds out that Shadow Weaver escaped Catra to get to Adora and says, with tears in her eyes, "We're going back. WE WILL OPEN A PORTAL AND DESTROY THEM ALL".
!!!!!
**** TIME FOR MY FEELS ****
First off: I love how science fictiony it's getting!! I am genuinely excited to know what's up with all the First Ones stuff. Were they an evil empire too?? The Horde are more interesting than they seemed at first. Still evil and colonialist, but the psychology of the clones is great.
Second: Man, I would be a lot more comfortable with Hordak's sympathetic disability-related backstory if there were ANY NON-BAD-GUY DISABLED CHARACTERS. There's him and Shadow Weaver, and they are both more complex than a lot of disabled bad guys because this show loves making bad guys complex, but they are still the two most overtly villainous characters on the show. THAT IS FUCKED UP. So now I have this interesting disabled character whose arc I kinda sympathise with but I also feel GROSS about it.
Third: SHIPPING FEELS.
One of the notable aspects of She-ra is that it has a LOT of romantic subtext, much of it queer, but very little romantic text, even for a kids show. Like off the top of my head:
-Angella and Mika (Glimmer's parents) were married and had a kid together and she's very sad he is dead (m/f)
-Bow's dads act about as romantic and married as any "parents in a kids show" couple (m/m)
-Seahawk swoons romantically over Mermista in a courtly love way (m/f)
-Netossa and Spinneralla come across as a couple (f/f)
And that's it.
Instead there's a very strong emphasis on friendship, which sometimes gets very subtextually romantic, eg there is a lot of blushing and doing stuff that is romantically coded. Again, off the top of my head:
- Bow and Perfuma have some shippy interactions, which ping differently to his stronger but clearly platonic friendship with Adora and Glimmer (m/f)
- Bow plausibly has a crush on Seahawk (m/m)
- Scorpia has a blatant crush on Catra (f/f)
- Catra has a repressed tsundere thing for Scorpia (f/f)
- Adora seems to have a (very one sided) thing for Huntara (f/f)
- Huntara flirts with a barmaid (f/f)
- Adora and Catra are OBSESSED with each other (LOOK AT THEM) (f/f)
- there is a weird amount of romantic chemistry between Hordak and Entraptra (m/f)
And while I would enjoy a canon that had this level of femslash as overt text (a) Cartoon Network would never let them and (b) The ambiguity has it's advantages. You can give support to competing ships without having to settle things one way or another, and also play with problematic pairings without having to get into the Issues.
For example: Catra and Adora are incredibly shippy and also kind of sisters. Shadow Weaver isn't called their mother, and they described themselves as friends, so there's some leeway. But it's very much on the sibling-esque end of "childhood friends". I have a pretty strong incest squick, and am not sure how I'd feel if they became an explicitely romantic couple in canon, but this intense angry quasi-incestuous quasi-romance is amazing.
And I can simultaneously have complex Scorpia/Catra feels! Scorpia basically fell in love with Catra at first sight, and spent the next 2 seasons soppily coo-ing over how much she wants to be friends despite Catra treating her like crap and clearly only really caring about Adora. So until now I mainly wanted Scorpia to get over it and fall for someone who treats her with respect. But then Catra was in prison, while Scorpia retained her position, and Scorpia still wanted to help Catra, even though there was no advantage to it. And Catra said "You really care about me, huh"...and then did her best to push Scorpia away for her own good, saying "Caring about people got me into this mess!" She tsundere-ly grumbled about how Scorpia SHOULDN'T HAVE COME all the way through the Crimson Wastes, while failing to hide subtle blushes and smiles whenever they bonded about beating people up together etc. So now I kinda ship it.
And then there's Hordak and Entraptra, hoo boy. He's got to be at least 50, while she's in her mid twenties at the most. And he's an evil sociopathic coloniser who treats even his own troops like disposable tools! I'm not sure I even actually ship it, but I feel like 12 year old me would have, and can imagine there's some VERY IDDY fic being written as we speak, they have that whole Snape/Hermione thing going on, with the weird smart girl finding acceptance with a cold lonely older man who is overcome by her brilliance and kindness.
So again, while I would feel uncomfortable about it as an actual canon ship, I am enjoying this quasi-romance a lot more than I would have expected (My earlier feels: "Wait, is the show shipping Entraptra/Hordak now?? WAIT, AM I??!"). In my case, partly for the "weird smart girl finds acceptance" thing, but also because while she does genuinely see him as a friend and want him to be happy, she also very clearly sees him as a fascinating science subject. Like the armour she made hurts him and neither of them care, she fixes anything that's glitching but doesn't apologise or try to comfort him. I'm wondering where it's going through. He's so evil.
In general I am really enjoying the way this show approaches villains: it makes them sympathetic and complex, everyone's the hero of their own story, but it doesn't erase the bad things they've done or expect the good guys to like them. But while the people who do bad things have complex motivations, the actual morality of the show is pretty black and white, and it's clear that Good will prevail. So I'm curious to see how it will end for the villains. So far, while loyalties have shifted a lot between the villains, the only person to actually change from bad guy to good guy is Adora, and she did it the moment she realised the bad guys were bad. Is the show going to go all Steven Universe and eventually have all the villains realise the error of their ways? Or will there be some redemption through death? Bittersweet defeat where you know someone has to be stopped but you feel bad it ended up this way?
I'm also expecting the First Ones AI, Light Hope, to end up becoming more of an antagonist, she has evil mentor written all over her. Which is a bit weird since she's black but I guess there's a bunch of other unambiguously good black characters.
AND NOW TO KEEP WATCHING AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.
(and avoid fandom, who do not handle this sort of moral/shippy ambiguity well at all and are presumably going to be appalling about all of it)
This entry was originally posted at https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/741541.html. There are
comments.