#she doesn’t like animated shows cause after binging all five seasons of she ra she decided she didn’t like it

[crimsonmonsoon]

gonna start saying I don't like movies cause I don't like the mcu so it's easier to say I just don't like movies

I love marvel tho

Gloomy put you up to this didn’t they

[thesleepykuma]

Overall Thoughts on She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

I talked about my feelings and complaints of individual seasons, and I won’t get into that here. This discussion on what works and what doesn’t in the series taken in aggregate.

The story was an engaging watch the vast majority of the shows run. I have an attention span the size of a mustard seed and rarely watch a show longer than around 2 seasons, so the fact that I binged all of it in about a week and a half says something about how compelling the narrative was.

Helping my desire to continue to watch the show were that the vast majority of the cast was extremely likeable. Even most of the villains were either incredibly sympathetic or well-written enough to serve their narrative purpose. The few characters that I didn’t appreciate so much I mentioned in my other discussions, but Hordak stands to be mentioned here because my frustration is mostly with how he is treated in the narrative (we’ll get to that). The only character I think should have been removed entirely is Seahawk as I personally think he was not a very good fit for the show.

There were some tonal issues in my opinion. Balancing comedic moments and serious scenes is very important in shows like this, especially in shows for young children where too grim a tone for an extended period of time may start to scare them too much. Most of the time the show manages the balancing act decently. A few times there are some gaffs. One of the more egregious examples was when they followed an episode where Salineas is razed to ground with one where Seahawk gets himself and two other characters kidnapped via stupidity and wacky hijinks ensue. There were a few other parts of the story with similar sudden jumps in tone.

There are two main issues with the redemption arcs in the show. First, There is a ceiling on the severity of the bad actions you can have your redeemable characters commit before people won’t want them to be redeemable characters anymore. This is the main issue with Hordak’s redemption; the war he was directly responsible for and the amount of deaths and suffering that followed would realistically make most of the characters not really want to see him anywhere but in front of a war tribunal. You’ve trapped yourself into a corner when it comes to the typical redeemed character narrative of children’s shows because you can’t have anyone forgive the character without writing them egregiously out of character. I will say that it’s my personal belief that just about anyone could become a better person if they tried, and having a character make the slow and difficult journey to being a better person in spite of the fact that nobody will forgive what they’ve done and some things can never be taken back would be an amazing and mature lesson for a children’s show. She-ra, however, wants the kind of redemption where people are forgiven and become friends at the end, and having the characters you intend to redeem in that fashion commit widespread atrocities is a poor writing choice.

The second issue with the show’s redemption is that, for a good redemption arc, the character needs to specifically apologize for every major wrong they committed and make amends for it. They got so, so close with Catra’s redemption arc. She was sympathetic from the beginning and a lot of the most egregious bad things she did were poor treatment of specific people that she apologized to and forgave her. The portal and being Hordak’s second-in-command during the war skirts kind of close to the moral event horizon, but it could be reasonably argued that the things that she did to save the universe could cause people to forgive a lot of that (that happens a lot in real life wars when people defect to the right side and get immunity for some of all their past actions). The stain on what was otherwise a well-written and clearly planned redemption arc for her is the fact that she kills someone (Angela) and it is not mentioned once after they get her back. I’m not saying she has to go to prison for murder, though that would certainly be a reasonable reaction. Maybe she gets a pardon because she helped saved the universe, mitigating factors from being an abused teenager, Adora begged for leniency, Queen Glimmer is merciful, or some combination of the above. But the show should be addressing it. Catra should be apologizing for it. Glimmer should be angry about it. It should be the main factor that causes a huge barrier making her an ally. Background characters should be upset that the killer of their beloved monarch is just walking around like nothing is wrong. The show should at least mention it. As of right now, this unresolved plot thread is the biggest elephant in the room and the one thing that will bother me long after I’ve moved on to other shows.

One of the main things that this show wanted to do was have a realistic portrayal of abuse in a children’s show. The show succeeded. I especially appreciated that it went out of their way to show that even though Adora was the ‘favorite’, that Shadow Weaver fucked her up too and gave her a different, but equally severe set of psychological issues from it and the show doesn’t compare their suffering or try to portray what happened to her as ‘not as bad’ as what happened to Catra. Well done

The animation was very solid all around. I noticed that they did a better job in later seasons of portraying Adora as noticeably taller than most of the other characters when she’s transformed into She-Ra.

The soundtrack was generally decent. There are only a few particular tracks that I would go back and listen to outside of watching the show, but the tracks as a whole did a good job setting the appropriate tone for the scene they were played in (as a side, if any of you have the clip for the ost that plays when Catra fights Tongue Lashor, please give it to me, I’ve been looking for it everywhere).

Best characters: Entrapta, Bow, Scorpia, Frosta, I love most of them to be fair

Worst Characters: Shadow Weaver, Hordak, Seahawk

My favorite moment of the series is difficult to choose but the moment where Catra apologizes to Entrapta and Entrapta gives a quiet “I forgive you” had a weight that not a lot of scenes in the show had. That baptism scene was also one of the more creepy scenes I’ve seen in a children’s show in a while

The score for the show gets -1 point for Angela not being brought up once in season five, -1 point for Hordak’s redemption arc in general, and -0.5 points for the tonal issues and basically everything else that I complained about while watching the show but I didn’t feel was bad enough to warrant a significant deduction on it’s own, for a grand total of 7.5/10. That is not bad on my scale. For reference a 1 is something you couldn’t pay me to see again, a 5 is a show that I would be willing to let run while I study but otherwise wouldn’t care about one way or the other (e.g Bleach), a 7.5-8 is where I would start recommending the show to most people, and a 10 is one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen. She-Ra and the princesses of power is not the greatest show I’ve ever seen. It has flaws. But I’ve had genuine enjoyment for shows with far, far more serious flaws than this show. And it’s one of the few recent nostalgic reboots that appears to far surpass the original. I would recommend She-Ra.