I watched the whole thing over the last couple weeks. It's good, especially looking at it as a children's show. Even though I suspect the target audience was weirdos like me who watch children's shows and not children. Regardless, it did an impressive job of adapting a silly character designed to sell toys to children in the 80s to a more serious story without losing all the charm of the dumb 80s children's fantasy setting.
In particular, it's kind of refreshing to see a very unironic "power of friendship" story. Love and friendship are strong and the characters seriously, genuinely embrace that. And even the big bad evil guys make friends and have understandable motivations even when those motivations lead them to unforgivable actions.
For a significant chunk of the first few seasons it made me think of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but in a negative way. Like they were trying to imitate it in a sense, and not quite nailing it. However, I'd bet that (as someone who hasn't watched any of the popular / "good" kid's shows between Avatar and whatever's popular now) I'm probably missing some context, and that what I see as imitating Avatar is probably more accurately following tropes that Avatar helped to cement. But also, maybe Bow is just a sub-par Sokka. Both are possible
Something that pleasantly surprised me, on the other hand, is how well executed the ending was. Avatar was fantastic all the way through, and then really fumbled the end. And it wasn't a terrible ending, but it was confused and muddled and just not executed very well. The second half of She-Ra's final season was flawlessly executed imo. It delivered on everything it had been setting up in such a satisfying and sincere way.
In particular, I was so happy to see the relationship between Catra and Adora actually ... follow through. Throughout the entire show that shit has been building up, and I was really concerned they weren't going to be particularly explicit about it. Of course, there's plenty of gay shit going on in the show throughout, from Bow's dads to Netassa and Spinnerella to subtler stuff like Scorpia maybe crushing on Catra (am I reading too much into that dynamic? possibly) but even these didn't convince me. Because the theme I noticed is that they never wrote romance. All the couples were already couples before the events of episode 1. They don't usually say anything particularly romantic to each other, with the exception of Sea Hawk which is played so silly that for most of the show it's not even clear whether there is any mutual affection at all.
But then they were just like "lol you thought we were chicken? actually the gay kiss is the most powerful magic you've seen in the entire show."
the kind of ending which elevates an otherwise only pretty-good show to ... idk. really good.
its good folks.
HELL YES!!! I love Lesbians Forming Coalitions To Defeat Fascism, it's my absolute favorite show, super down to talk about it with you!
I really enjoyed your analysis and write-up, thank you so much for sharing :stalin-heart:
No pressure to respond to any of this, media analysis discussions are some of my favorite things so I just went ham on some of the parts that stood out to me the most in your write up:
I suspect the target audience was queer people, queer women in particular lol — you know how the saying goes, lesbians will watch anything with lesbians in it
Also not sure what your relationship to the word weirdo is — I'm a proud weirdo myself, but that said I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with enjoying children's shows as an adult. I think that being geared towards children puts a lot of restraints on the show that forces the writers and designers to be more creative than media targeted towards adults, especially with the trend in adult media towards being ~ grimdark ~ or whatever. It keeps the writing from being lazy or pulling cheap punches for the sake of drama (like, say, having characters brutally murdered for the shock value) and you can end up with some really interesting metaphors for certain heavy topics, like death or whatever.
It's really interesting to me that you compared it to AtlA because other than being a Good Serial Childrens Cartoon I never really considered that they have much in common, but they definitely do share more similarities beyond applying The Hero's Journey narrative framework to a fantasy setting. In particular, the enemy being an imperial power with more advanced technology compared to the heroes.
I find She-Ra's takes on the adventuring aspects to be way less exhausting than Avatar's personally, since I tend to be very "are we there yet" about travel and resource management in fantasy settings, and that's a big throughline of AtlA — they're always on the run, they're always trying to find food/shelter/etc. I like that the gang in She Ra has a home base and can usually get between destinations on the relatively-small planet with ease. I also like that there's less focus on trying to learn or master their magical skills — it comes up sometimes, but it's not so frequent that it feels stale or tiring (i.e. no need to rinse and repeat for two additional elements, or for additional characters.)
I understand the comparison from a "guy with no magic powers in a crew of people with magical powers" but they're wildly different characters to the point where it doesn't really make sense to compare them IMO. Sokka is sarcastic and heavily cynical — he's been dealing with a huge amount of responsibility since his dad left the southern water tribe for the war and his mom was killed, back when he was still like 12. He doesn't really have as much of a choice to do what he's doing because he has this responsibility. Bow on the other hand is usually positive and upbeat, even though he's still cautious and the voice of reason. He's been actively concealing his involvement in the rebellion from his dads, and choosing to be part of the rebellion because it's the right thing to do. Also he probably texts people at 3am to remind them to respect women, whereas Sokka has to get the shit beat out of him several times to take women seriously. They don't usually have the same narrative role in their respective stories, apart from being the voice of reason for the group occasionally.
Yesssssss!!! I think during an interview around the release of the first season the showrunner explicitly said to assume everyone's queer unless otherwise stated :sicko-yes:
This made me realize that I've only ever talked about this show with queer women before lol, it's absolutely fascinating to me that it reads as subtle to you! (Unironically fascinating, your perspective is really interesting!)
Scorpia has a huge and obvious crush on Catra up until around when she finds out that Catra betrayed Entrapta — I think she even asks her out in the Season 2 episode where they're looking for First Ones Tech in the really frozen region, after acting really jealous of Adora while babysitting her, having her moments of commiseration with Sea Hawk who's been feeling super dejected about his relationship with Mermista, and choosing to destroy the virus-infected tech to protect Catra over the course of the episode. That episode IMO is where it's most obvious/explicit, and from a narrative standpoint it reads as super intentional.
A couple other more subtle dynamics you might've missed:
Hahahaha yeah, perfect summary! The showrunner talked about very intentionally making the culmination of Catra and Adora's (explicitly, canonically gay!) relationship central to the plot of the whole story so that it couldn't get censored or cut at the last minute by studio execs.
Not only that, but that Adora is the latest in a long line of reincarnations of the same hero, who is told by mentor figures to embrace a destiny she doesn't really want based on the conditions of her birth. Tasked with "bringing balance" to the various elemental forces of the world as part of that destiny.
Beyond that, he's the 'funny guy' who cracks jokes and embraces the comic relief side characters where the other main characters won't give them the time of day, who is also the smart guy inventor who is constantly looking for new gadgets/tricks he can use to bridge the gap between himself and those born with powers.
Yeah, I mean, I guess most of Scorpia and Catra's friendship takes place pretty early on in the show, when it's unclear to me how hard they're going to commit to the idea of friendship as opposed to more intimate relationships. But something I like about this story is that it seems to respect that any intimate romantic relationship is also a friendship, and that the two might not always be easily distinguishable.
But yeah, if I were in their world and witnessing Scorpia and Catra's interactions I'd definitely be nudging Catra like, "hey, so, what do you think of the big lobster lady? like, really?" but in the context of the narrative I thought it was on the subtle side. Like, I'm more than familiar with the aesthetics of a crush being played for laughs, where a character has no romantic feelings whatsoever but "haha that was kind of gay" is considered a joke of its own. So in a show almost devoid of romance to that point, I wasn't confident the story was actually taking Scorpia's behavior seriously, if you get what I mean? Or, like, the writers were being more deliberate than I gave them credit for, is another way of putting it.
I definitely noticed that reaction, but I guess in a similar way I didn't connect that sort of deliberate meaning in my head.
Funnily enough, this is the one that I did catch as an explicit thing, because, uh, Scorpia kind of outs them by accident. While trying to brag about how good she is at keeping secrets lmao
But I admit that it came out of nowhere for me, I hadn't thought of them that way at all before Scorpia said it.
I would never have thought of this at all. I figured Bow was just enamored with the idea of a successful 'normal guy' adventurer who hangs around with princesses without feeling like an obvious dead weight, like him.
do you have fanfiction I can collect