#but my heart tells me they have evil and neutral catgirls

[gayrobos]

every combiner team needs an evil catgirl (desires to torture mouses) and a neutral catgirl (desires to push things off counters). wildrider vortex and bonecrusher should go out on the town to cause devastating property damage and loss of life, whereas drag strip mixmaster and blast off should slap the shit out of each other and bash their autisms together like bumper cars, you see?

[malachi-walker]

thought: I know almost nobody would think this unironically because it’s utterly fucking deranged, but the unfortunate implicative intersection between “the fiction you consume and create is indicative of your morality” and “a proper redemption arc for Catra would’ve ended with her dying” is “if you realize that you have done bad things in the past and want to redeem yourself, the first step is to kill yourself”, which, uhhh,,,,,, yeah

Ok, fair warning, I am really tired thanks to several days of family emergency, so I am incapable of gauging how coherent this is. Also please note there is some vitriol, but it's not meant to be directed at everyone who dislikes Catra, just that special brand of anti who decides liking Catra is a good reason for them to pass judgement on you and make sure you know you're scum. Pissbabies, basically.

But sadly I do think this is something that carries over into reality more than anyone wants to admit, especially when you consider how often sacrificing your life is considered to be an ultimate expression of good and not a tragic waste of human potential in spite of what it accomplishes. Or--and this is just the one that's affected me most personally since the tender age of 12--the double standard of how men are allowed to do awful shit like aid in totalitarian conquest, burn villages, and nearly kill the hero (looking at you, Zuko) but their redemption arcs are accepted and hailed as narrative brilliance whereas a female character who does the same from an equally if not worse background of abuse is an awful bitch who should just be left to die. And again, I was 14 the first time someone told my parents right in front of me that I was just a lost cause and they should give up on me, without even knowing anything about me beyond me being a troublemaker with emotional problems beyond what a pep talk could fix, so despite how deranged the implication is it IS something that has real world carry over. The kind of carry over that tells a 14 year old responding badly to a lifetime of abuse at the hands of her murderous birth father that she's just evil and should be given up on because she'll never get better even though she's only just now getting a shot at therapy. Yeah. That happened to me personally. (Did I mention I grew up in the bible belt?)

But back to narrative stuff. The problem with the redemption = death trope is that it only has a net outcome of (and that's if done correctly, a lot of uses fuck it up regardless) cancelling out the bad you did in the past, but also leaves someone incapable of creating any further good and thus taking that score from a neutral zero into positive digits. And it is very much a cultural double standard that you see everywhere narratively, but I don't know about you, but even in situations where it would be absolutely the only option I would still see it as a horrible waste of potential future good.

Also those people conveniently forget that if Catra had died, no one would have stopped Adora's sacrifice. So whether or not you believe Catra's survival is a net positive (I obviously do) calling for her death because of that bullshit double standard does pay massive negative dividends down the line, where Adora at best dies heroically and wastefully against Prime to be hailed as a hero but never get a chance to live a happy life for herself or at worst fails completely due to the poison and the Heart of Etheria ends up in Prime's hands to skullfuck the entire universe with. In fact, the fact that they both survive is a perfect refutation of the narrative concept of sacrifice being a positive under any circumstances. It's a waste, whether it's Catra dying after getting a chance to finally do some good but being unable to or Adora sacrificing everything without ever getting to live for herself because the hero always has to give everything.

Oh, and that whole "fiction consumed being indicative of your morality" thing? If they're saying my morals are trying to give people a second chance to make some good out of their lives instead of just killing them and taking the neutral or negative, then those are morals I'd be pretty damn proud of to stand by. Because I've been there. Because I've been a bad person and done my best to become better, and maybe I would have been able to do it better if everyone around me didn't insist on constantly punishing me for it instead of trying to understand me. And because it's easy as fuck to sit on your ivory tower judging everyone below... Right up until you're the one falling to the ground and hoping someone gives you a hand up before you splatter. And frankly I don't buy that correlation to begin with, so it's already a flawed argument. If there were a correlation between morality and the media you consume, for one there would be a hell of a lot more serial killers running around considering the true crime genre exploded a few years ago and is now more popular than it's ever been in history.

But let's be real here. None of these people are actually considering the overall implications of the view they're espousing. They're just pissy because the mean catgirl didn't get murdered (except she did. And only survived via deus ex She-ra) and will come up with any faux-intellectual argument for why they're right and anyone happy with Catra's redemption is wrong because they can't fathom a world with grey areas or no clear right or wrong answer that they can't fall into. Honestly, this purity rhetoric reminds me of something...

But I'm not surprised that point would escape those people.