#s4 cinemanarrative dissonance

[ericas-spop-blog]

Man, it it weird that Adora spends two whole episodes looking for the First One's secret nuke, only to have the show then act like she innocently stumbled over the Heart, and never once in a million years thought about using it? That the idea of using the First Ones Magic nuke was only ever Shadow Weaver and Glimmer's idea?

[ericas-spop-blog]

This is a scrap - and should be read as a criticism of the story telling moreso than of the (fictional) characters - but...

One of the results of Season 4 framing Adora as purely a victim of "crazy ex" Glimmer - Presenting it as if Glimmer was reacting to nothing, that Adora wasn't controlling or jealous or secretive - is that it deeply undercuts the idea that Adora treats Catra badly because She Just Doesn't Know Better.

If Adora treats Glimmer in the same (bad) ways she treated Catra, then it tells us she has flawed assumptions about what a "good" relationship looks like; that her behaviour (if not innocent) is at least sincere, and that she is continuing to apply bad models even in a situation where it does not benefit her(or anyone but Shadow Weaver). Having these models fail her would drive the character towards self-examination and personal growth.

But if Glimmer was the core problem in Season 4 - if Adora was nothing but supportive, even when the circumstances of her youth are recreated nearly 1-to-1 - then we're saying that Adora is already perfect, that actually she does know how to have normal, healthy relationships even under trying circumstances.

Which makes her refusal to extend that care to Catra incredibly suspect. Does she think that Catra is uniquely unworthy of respect?

Or does she just know that other people think Catra is unworthy of respect, and aren't going to say shit (especially when they still need She-Ra to save them)?

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Look, obviously none of this is the intended read; And fwiw, I think that at least the script of Season 4 actually does show Adora replicating her bad behaviours -

being high-handed, controlling, jealous of Glimmer's relationship with Shadow Weaver, and unhealthily invested in her role as The Hero -

and then has those flaws drive personal growth - reflecting on if she is making things worse, recognizing that her idea of being A Hero is to be a weapon in someone else's hands and explicitly rejecting that -

but that this is undermined by the directorial lens overwhelmingly framing Glimmer as The Villain (and thus Adora as In The Right/The Victim/Smol Bean), and that this conflict drives these really ugly implications.

In absolving Adora, the story inadvertently validates her beliefs - even the ones that it set up as false and harmful. Which, yeah, creates the implication that Adora knows when she's acting badly, but just doesn't care (and that we shouldn't either). That her status as "Good" protects her from criticism, and allows her to cast any opposition as defacto "Bad" and not worthy of acknowledgment or examination.

[ericas-spop-blog]

#but it lacks the framing that would make that explicit?#the short scenes of Glimmer asking where she is or what she's doing and getting silence or lies in return?

Speaking of. Glimmer's surprise here certainly implies she didn't know where Adora went or when she would be back, yeah?

Like, this isn't a continuity error per-se, but it definitely feels like some set up was skipped over?

Relatedly - why was Bow on Mara's ship? Like, not diagetically, I get he's trying to repair the control panel. But narratively? What did his presence add to the scene, besides some light Razz shenanigans?

'Cause it kind of feels like he's mostly there to stand witness, so that when they return to Bright Moon, he can deliver the HoE exposition as a neutral observer - and the audience doesn't have to be reminded of what Adora was looking for when this information came to light.

Man, it it weird that Adora spends two whole episodes looking for the First One's secret nuke, only to have the show then act like she innocently stumbled over the Heart, and never once in a million years thought about using it? That the idea of using the First Ones Magic nuke was only ever Shadow Weaver and Glimmer's idea?

[ericas-spop-blog]

'Season 4 is Like That because it's shot through Adora's POV; she's acting as an unreliable narrator.'

I do agree that we as an audience should at least intuitively understand POV and that Adora specifically has serious and suspect biases.

The first problem is that this is not Adora's POV.

At the nuts-and-bolts level the camera, if anything, biases towards Glimmer's POV - what she sees or what she's focusing on - in scenes where they're together, and just generally spends a lot of time in scenes Adora isn't in, viewing events she doesn't know about.

[An aside: The inverse of this is actually why the Portal Horde does read as Adora's Perfect World - It's exclusively shot through her POV! Adora is always present, either the focus of the camera or the one directing it's attention. Adora is the center of the (collapsing) universe. They do know how to get this right!]

That's one of the reasons I keep coming back to this particular sequence; it's the most overt example where the direction - the camera choices, the cuts, the soundtrack - communicates something wildly different than what actually happened in-universe. And it is not done in Adora's POV, because these are things Adora can not see and does not know about. When Glimmer's framed as The Bad One here, it's the (assumed neutral and objective) "narrative lens" doing that.

And it does so persistently, regardless of who's attention we're following. The narrative lens is biased in Adora's favour, which is a very different thing than occupying her POV. But even then, it's not an unreliable narrator.

And that's the second, bigger problem. An unreliable narrator isn't just biased - it is one written in such a way as to expose and highlight that bias, a story-telling tool where the audience is invited to critically examine the superficial 'false' narrative so as to identify and engaged with the underlying 'true' story.

And there is no such invitation in season 4.

Bow (the show's moral lodestone) is framed as trying to appease both sides (and being destroyed by the attempt, as neither pause their catfight to give the slightest shit about him) - but he is constantly biasing in Adora's favour, which in turn frames that bias as the neutral, "balanced" position.

Indeed - after telling Glimmer off, he ceases to have any conflict with Adora, falling right back into providing her with endless peptalks and emotional support.

Adora's desire to find a super weapon is so completely and utterly dropped as soon as we reveal "weapon bad" that it's easy to forget she was ever looking for it.

Even when Adora is experiencing self-doubt - when her perspective is that she sucks and has screwed up - the show distances itself from that emotion by using Bow's sympathetic POV [he is literally the one in focus here!].

And, ultimately, Glimmer ends season 4 on "Adora was right", followed by outright groveling in Season 5. The resolution of their conflict is Glimmer's utter and complete capitulation. There is not the slightest whiff of a question of Adora being anything but a passive victim here.

This is the heart of my complaint. I think the S4 narrative lens is unreliable in consistently "taking Adora's side" - And fwiw I think the show's creators probably did as well (it would be hard to set up all of Adora's bad behaviour and not be aware of it!) - but I don't think the show does.

In a story that is otherwise very willing to challenge and re-frame characters, to have them be told they're wrong, or realize that they don't know how to be good friends, S4 Adora is constantly being slid out from under the examiner's lens, uniquely coddled and reassured out of more than the briefest moment of introspection.

Her personal revelations are defanged, presented not as growth, but as who she has always been. (Which makes her bad behaviour a quirk, just 'how she is', neutral and not worth further examination).

There's a really compelling, challenging and ultimately uplifting narrative for Adora in season 4 - we can constantly see parts of it surfacing, peeking through the obsfucation - but it ultimately lies fallow because confronting Adora's issues would be uncomfortable, and the show refuses to sit with that discomfort. And that's. Frustrating? Fascinating? Worth exploring?

This is a scrap - and should be read as a criticism of the story telling moreso than of the (fictional) characters - but...

One of the results of Season 4 framing Adora as purely a victim of "crazy ex" Glimmer - Presenting it as if Glimmer was reacting to nothing, that Adora wasn't controlling or jealous or secretive - is that it deeply undercuts the idea that Adora treats Catra badly because She Just Doesn't Know Better.

If Adora treats Glimmer in the same (bad) ways she treated Catra, then it tells us she has flawed assumptions about what a "good" relationship looks like; that her behaviour (if not innocent) is at least sincere, and that she is continuing to apply bad models even in a situation where it does not benefit her(or anyone but Shadow Weaver). Having these models fail her would drive the character towards self-examination and personal growth.

But if Glimmer was the core problem in Season 4 - if Adora was nothing but supportive, even when the circumstances of her youth are recreated nearly 1-to-1 - then we're saying that Adora is already perfect, that actually she does know how to have normal, healthy relationships even under trying circumstances.

Which makes her refusal to extend that care to Catra incredibly suspect. Does she think that Catra is uniquely unworthy of respect?

Or does she just know that other people think Catra is unworthy of respect, and aren't going to say shit (especially when they still need She-Ra to save them)?

========================

Look, obviously none of this is the intended read; And fwiw, I think that at least the script of Season 4 actually does show Adora replicating her bad behaviours -

being high-handed, controlling, jealous of Glimmer's relationship with Shadow Weaver, and unhealthily invested in her role as The Hero -

and then has those flaws drive personal growth - reflecting on if she is making things worse, recognizing that her idea of being A Hero is to be a weapon in someone else's hands and explicitly rejecting that -

but that this is undermined by the directorial lens overwhelmingly framing Glimmer as The Villain (and thus Adora as In The Right/The Victim/Smol Bean), and that this conflict drives these really ugly implications.

In absolving Adora, the story inadvertently validates her beliefs - even the ones that it set up as false and harmful. Which, yeah, creates the implication that Adora knows when she's acting badly, but just doesn't care (and that we shouldn't either). That her status as "Good" protects her from criticism, and allows her to cast any opposition as defacto "Bad" and not worthy of acknowledgment or examination.