#ensuring this kind of wild thematic swerve doesn't happen is literally the showrunner's job

[acephysicskarkat]

Adora’s arc is such a goddamn mess in the end.

Adora, as a character, never seems particularly motivated by a desire for romantic love. Like, she’s capable of crushes, as witnessed with Huntara, but “I want to be loved” doesn’t seem to show up on her radar at any point. Friendships, yes, she seems to value those a lot. She wants to understand herself and her place in the universe. She wants to find her family, which is generally portrayed as an extension of the previous two points: a place she belongs, and which helps her understand who she is.

Romantic love, though? Never seems particularly significant. Never really shows up on her radar. There’s no Fantasy Valentine’s Day episode where she seems lonely or haunted. She never seems either confused about or jealous of the known romantic couples she encounters, like Bow’s dads or Spinnerella and Netossa. She’s unaware of terms built on blood relationships, like “aunt”, but never seems to question the concept of a husband or wife.

This is why her arc in S5 ends up so weird, because it decides to concentrate on how Adora deserves to focus on her own wants sometimes at a point in the narrative when the show does not care what Adora wants.

Her desire to find her family turns out to be totally irrelevant. We get confirmation that they’re probably dead and Adora barely reacts. She showed more emotion when confronted with a cake that looked like her the previous season than when she discovers that Horde Prime has taken away something she previously valued so much she was willing to leave the Horde for a chance of finding it.

Her friendships are mostly just used for cheap Drama Points as part of the overall sidelining of the Princess Alliance. (Because, you know, a show called She-Ra and the Princesses of Power should spend its entire final season vaguely annoyed that it has to have Princesses of Power and mostly treat She-Ra as a Save The Day button that’s activated by filling out the showrunner’s shipping chart.) Significant friendship breaches like the breaking of the BFS in the previous season or Catra’s history of treating her like shit, which we received confirmation in season 5 dates back to about the age of nine, are breezed past in like twenty seconds. And that’s a really wild shift given that the power of her friendships within the Princess Alliance blasted away an entire army and healed Glimmer’s glitching back in season 1.

As a result, the final resolution feels weird. Adora gets the thing the show decided, like a third of the way into the final season, she had always wanted, and that makes it okay that the things that she literally has always wanted per the actual episodes they put on Netflix were bluntly shoved into the background or forgotten about entirely.

I’m not saying that you can’t or shouldn’t do a show where The Power Of Love saves the day. I’m just saying that, even overlooking the whole “Catra's entire personality is made of red flags and the script keeps undermining any attempt to develop or redeem her” issue, it’s an awkward pivot when the show had previously seemed to be focused more on friendship than romance.

You have a character who wants to find a family, you have the best candidates for her found family literally in the name of the show, and then you go for “the day is saved by Toxic, Badly Written Romantic Love (TM)!”

The disconnect between what the show had previously seemed to be going for and what we’re told was the plan all along is wild.