#god please dont castrate me in the comments this is my opinion

[trueneutralrants]

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and How it Handled Shadow Weaver

I want to talk about She-ra. 

She-ra and the Princesses of Power is a 5 season Netflix cartoon that premiered in November of 2018, and finished it’s 5th and final season barely a year and a half later in May of this year. The final season was extremely well received, due to its strong emotional theme, well-explained complex topics, and the resolution and redemption of one of it’s strongest characters, Catra.

But the show did not hit only home runs, especially in regard to the strong narative of abuse that had been built up in previous seasons, and that's what I'm here to talk about today.

Let's talk about how to write abusive characters in fiction, and more specifically, how She-ra failed in regard to some of those characters.

Now before I get father into this, I want to just say that the final season of She-ra was, in my opinion, a fantastic end to a wonderful series. The amount of good that show did far outweighed any gripes I have with the show itself, and I honestly think it's a wonderful piece of media, albeit one with some missed opportunities.

Anyways, back to the topic at hand.

She-ra is a very personal, character-driven show, with a strong emphasis on the cycle of abuse, and breaking free of said cycle. This is most strongly presented with the character of Shadow Weaver, the mother figure to the 2 main characters, Adora and Catra. Shadow Weaver is emotionally abusive to the both of them, but obviously hold Adora in higher regard than Catra, and gaslights and manipulates Adora significantly more, keeping Catra in check through physical and emotional abuse, while manipulating Adora into believing it is her duty to carry the responsibility for the both of them. If Catra is abused, it is Adora’s fault for not being better.

That’s the set up for the characters, and shapes both Catra and Adora’s actions throughout the series.

In the first season, we see Adora break free from the Horde after realizing that she is on the wrong side of the war, finding friends who she can depend on. She’s even shown an example of a healthy, non-abusive relationship in Glimmer and Angella. On the other side of the war, Catra stays with her abuser, Shadow Weaver. This shapes the conflict between Adora and Catra, as well as Catra’s motivations to take over the Horde., being that since Shadow Weaver has always lusted after power, Catra sees taking power as her only way to ‘best’ her, while still craving Shadow Weaver’s affection. This leads to Catra verbally and emotionally abusing others, most notably Scorpia.

So many of the most toxic behaviors in both Adora and Catra were learned from Shadow Weaver’s upbringing, and throughout the series, we see them struggle to undo what Shadow Weaver ingrained in them. 

But what is Shadow Weaver’s motivations for her actions, her abuse? Is she pure evil? Is it a misplaced sense of responsibility? Part of a scheme?

We know a few things about Shadow Weaver. First, she has always lusted over power. Second, she was once a magician at Mystacor, then fled to the horde when her lust of power led to her exile. Third, she has very little sense of loyalty, going wherever she feels she will be safest or in the highest position of power. She fled to the Horde after Mystacor because she knew she could gain power and influence there as Hordak’s second-in-command. She fled to Bright Moon after the Horde threatened to send her to Beast Island because she knew she could gain a foothold there manipulating Adora, and later, Glimmer. Fourth, she holds the emotions of others in very little regard unless it directly benefits her. 

So hypothetically, someone who has always put herself first, has always lusted after power and has no problem manipulating and abusing people, including children, for her own benefit is put in a situation where the side she is on is at an extreme disadvantage, as it looks near hopeless. Like, say, fighting a galactic emperor with millions of soldier clones. 

How do you redeem a character when the obvious course of action for that character is to jump ship and save herself?

Before I go into how, I should warn any of the 6 people who’ve watched both She-ra and The Promised Neverland that this next section will include spoilers for the first season of the anime.

Meet Mama Isabella. A selfish, abusive mother figure who manipulates and gaslights all the children under her care, essentially selling the children under her care to demons who kill and eat them. She emotionally abuses Ray, her biological son and the one child who discovers the plot, using him as a spy under constant threat of being ‘shipped out’ or killed and served to the demons. Ray grows up watching the other kids live peacefully, knowing that his own mother has been sending her adopted children to die, and one day it will be his turn. When some of the other children discover her plot, she breaks one of the children’s left leg, verbally taunts the other kids present, and ships out one of the children the next day as a threat to the other’s planning to escape. Her abuse was so damaging to Ray that he tried, at the age of 12 years old, to commit suicide by setting himself and the childhood home on fire as a distraction, so the other kids can escape. Overall, she is Shadow Weaver to an extreme, abusive both physically and mentally.

And her redemption is the best written redemption of any abusive parent i’ve ever read.

Reading that, you’re probably thinking I’m a psycho, but no. Here’s the thing about Isabella that makes her such a fantastic villain. She used to be one of the kids at the farm. She used to be like Ray and all the other children. The way the farms work, some of the older female children who get shipped out are allowed to survive, and are put in training to become “moms” or caretakers and enforcers at the farms. They essentially raise children to be slaughtered, as they themselves were raised. It’s horrific, and it’s the only surefire way to survive into adulthood. But the mom’s are replaceable. Isabella is under as much threat of death as anyone else, including the kids. She has what is essentially a taser implanted in her chest, that’ll stop her heart if she escapes or rebels. Ray’s very existence as someone who knows the secret of the farms puts Isabella's life at risk. One mistake, one slip up, and her life is forfeit. Essentially, it’s the kids lives or hers. 

So she justifies shipping the kids off by telling herself she can take such good care of them for their 6-12 years of living that it doesn’t even matter that they died. She is such an inherently selfish person, but she’s understandable. We understand exactly why she’s doing everything she’s doing. 

And then the kids escape, and we realize Isabella is happy for them. We realize in the last few scenes of the first season, that she’s given up hope on living after they escape. The kids, whether they realized it or not, just traded their mother’s life for their own. They outsmarted her, and thus, Isabella must die at the hand of the farm. Isabella has to accept there are no other options before doing one final act of good to help the children, untying the ropes that show where the children escaped from to throw off the demons, essentially buying the children time. 

And by this point, from the point of view of the audience, Isabella is redeemed, even though she didn’t make any heroic sacrifice, or jump in front of a gun for our heroes. She is redeemed through the small, subtle step of untying the ropes. Though that, we are shown that Isabella isn’t resentful or malicious. She doesn’t want the children to be caught. She doesn’t harbor any hope of them capturing the children and bringing them back to the farm. She doesn’t harbor any hope of living, seeing the children’s escape and her eventual death as penance for being complicit in so many deaths over the years. 

 One of the last things we hear her say in the last chapter of the escape arc is this: “I wish I could have just loved them normally.”

And by that point, we understand exactly the kind of person Isabella was, a person who deeply wanted to love, but wanted to survive more, someone who both justified and regretted the things she had done. And that regret, in itself, was her redemption.

Now going back to Shadow Weaver, we notice many of the same traits that made Isabella a good villain are present in Shadow Weaver. Someone who has always put herself first, has always lusted after power and has no problem manipulating and abusing people, including children, for her own benefit. But unlike Isabella, we never understand why Shadow Weaver is doing what she’s doing, except a general sense that she’s doing it for power. If power is truly her only motivation, she should not sacrifice herself for others, and if there is truly love for others inside her heart, there needs to be a more present way to explore it. 

We can tell she hasn’t really changed in season five due to her forcing Adora to carry the burden of the failsafe, despite the fact it could kill her. Unlike Isabella, we never feel that Shadow Weaver is being forced to do bad deeds or manipulate from an outside force or even her own bad habits. She has the freedom to be both a redeemed hero or a full-on villain, but she does.. neither. 

Up until her sacrifice.

I don’t like Shadow Weaver’s sacrifice. If you wanted her out of the picture, you could’ve had her 1. try and join Horde Prime and have him kill her, 2. Have he chipped and forced Adora and Catra to contemplate whether to save her or not or 3. Just kill her without a sacrifice to show the horror of Prime. All three would feel in character and fit well within the story, because if there is one thing Shadow Weaver isn’t presented as at any point in the story, it's a selfless person.

But instead we get... her sacrifice. First of all, it's confusing. The audience doesn’t know whether we’re supposed to feel that Shadow Weaver was redeemed or not. There is a decidedly mixed feeling in her sacrifice, where the show seems to want to be able to pull on our heartstrings, but still knows half the people watching hate this character and another quarter don’t care about her. 

And Adora and Catra also seem conflicted. The one good thing in the scene, at least for me, is that both Shadow Weaver and Catra seem to acknowledge that the sacrifice, it itself, is not selfless. Shadow Weaver is taking the easy way out, going out with a blaze of glory instead of trying to improve herself and atone for her crimes.

I honestly think in previous seasons, or even just in season 5, if Shadow Weaver were to spend more time trying to apologize and made amends to Adora and Catra, or we got some inner monologue or scenes showing how she cares for the children she abused, and feels she made mistakes, then the sacrifice would’ve worked, at least for me. But Shadow Weaver always felt like an antagonistic force, even in the final season when she was squarely a ‘good guy’. There was no point where it felt like she was sorry for her actions, and nothing that justified them.

I honestly think Shadow Weaver shouldn’t have been redeemed. And that’s what it was, redemption through death. It doesn’t work with her characterization in previous seasons, or even season 5, and it felt, for lack of a better word, cheap.