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that-ari-blogger · 7 months ago

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The Cooler She-Ra (Huntara)

Let me clear something up.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power doesn't get good, and it doesn't go places. It is good, and it has been in those places since day one. The first story discusses the cost of war with considerable nuance, lest we forget. Yes, the quality of the writing, animation, and debatably the acting increases as the series goes on as the crew finds their feet. But the themes of this series are explicit from the jump and do not change.

Reading that back, that was a bit more confrontational than I intended, so let me try and phrase it a different way.

For a lot of episodic stories, good and bad, the overwhelming vibe is of acceleration. The themes start out slow, then get piled in over time. Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated, for example, starts with the basic idea of friendship and secrecy, but matures to discussion of family, history, and legacy over time. This isn’t a flaw with the writing of Mystery Inc. at all, it’s just a way of writing.

Watching She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is like being in a single roomed house with a few small windows. You can see the outside world and the story through those windows, its clear enough to know there’s something interesting, but you can’t see the whole thing.

Then in season three, the walls start falling down and you start to realise where you have been the whole time.

Let me explain.

SPOILERS AHEAD: (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power)

I’m going to start with something small that isn’t particularly related to the rest of the post, but I think it’s of equal importance and can’t be ignored. Huntara is gay.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it kinda reframes the rest of the series. Because up until this point, the queer coding we have seen has been a few background characters, and Spinnarella and Netossa, who have an implied relationship.

That’s just what it is, coding. They are coded together, but it isn’t dwelled upon. If it had only been season one that got made, I guarantee you there would be eejits online who would argue that they were platonic friends.

But Huntara explicitly flirts with another woman in a bar. This is a named character, who is casually queer, and that is what sets the precedent retroactively. Now it can no-longer be argued that this series isn’t interested in showing queer stories. Now Spinnerella and Netossa’s relationship is essentially confirmed, as the series has made itself and its stance abundantly clear. This is a show with queer people, it isn’t subtext, and it hasn’t been subtext this whole time.

Let me be clear, I am not arguing that Spinnarella and Netossa aren’t married in the first season at all. They are together, end of argument. But on a literary level, it is coding in that season, and it stops being coding retroactively.

The reason for the coding angle is actually linked to the casualness of Huntara’s sexuality.

Unfortunately, in popular culture and mainstream storytelling, the idea that a character is straight unless proven otherwise is a general attitude. This often means that a queer character isn’t queer unless proven so.

But Huntara establishes a different precedent, casualness. Huntara is just gay, there is no fanfare about it. The episode doesn’t dwell on it. But at the same time, it’s undeniable. This is a series where people are just queer, there doesn’t need to be confirmation, you can assume.

Anyway, Huntara, the episode, is still early on in season two, so it is still setting up what ideas the series will focus on. I mentioned earlier that the series as a whole has themes that it has been discussing from the get go, and I stick by that, but every season and every episode has to zero in on something (with exceptions) for clarity’s sake. In this case, Huntara centres around the idea of revelations, hence this post. Nothing in this episode is what it seems.

Worldbuilding is a key storytelling concept that is rarely dwelled upon except by Game Masters for TTRPGs, and Necrit. But it’s actually one of the most important elements of any work of fiction. Stories are based around vibes, and the easiest and most effective way to set up a specific feeling is to evoke that through the setting.

For a few key examples, Bloodborne is a story about injustice, horror, and monsters hiding in plain sight, so what better place to put it than the false civility of Victorian London? Similarly, The Magnus Archives is a story about injustice, horror, and monsters hiding in plain sight, so it is set in modern London. As a contrasting example, Robert Galbraith’s series, “Harold Pots and the Magicky Magic Stuff”, is about how the status quo is fine, actually, and that any attempts to change that is tantamount to murder, so it is set in a British boarding school. I disagree with the premise of one of these stories, can you tell which one?

The Crimson Wastes is an area where nothing is what it seems and everything wants to kill you. The ground could easily be quicksand, or deadly bushes, or a pile of snakes.

The opening scene is a phenomenal way of establishing the new territory. Not the dialogue, but what it shows you. Enormous skeletons of creatures that couldn’t handle the environment litter the ground, fossils that stand as a testament to life that had to adapt to survive

A bird drifts past the characters, landing on a plant. It’s peaceful. Then the bird literally iced, and falls from view, leaving the camera to focus only on the plant itself and all of that terrifying glory. This is telling you a few things. One, look twice at things before jumping in, not everything is as it seems. Two, this story is dangerous, and not even a cute little bird is safe from death. Three, nature and magic are one and the same. I wonder what that will mean going forward.

Also, there is a reason that the Horde hasn’t managed to conquer this area. I think praise needs to be given to the sound design of this episode. The scratching noise that accompanies the skeleton is unsettling, and it exists to make you remember that image. This area is dangerous in a different way to anything you have seen before. Not even the villains of this story can reach you here.

However, there is humanoid life here, which comes back to the theme of revelations and things not being what they seem. Making a living in the Wastes is possible, and that bar being literally inside an enormous skeleton is about as blunt of a metaphor as you are going to get. Surrounded by death, there is life.

Enter Huntara’s eponym, and let's take her apart, starting with her character design.

Huntara is practical, first and foremost. She carries a weapon that can double as a stick to poke things with from a distance (remember this), in case they turn out to be dangerous. She is dressed in simple clothes, not too heavy as to cause her to overheat, but enough to protect her from the sun. She is partially armoured (remember this too), and wears the exact same shoes as Adora, hinting at her background, although she has reinforced and repaired them, again, she’s practical.

But there are two things that I’m missing, and they are the two most obvious things about her. She’s built like a brick privvy, and she’s cool as all hell.

The coolness thing is partly based on her sense of self image. This is someone with a distinct sense of style, utilitarian as it may be. She has styled her hair, wears clawed earrings, and has that tattoo across her head, as well as the torn crop top. Despite her surroundings, Huntara has taken effort to make herself look good. She’s confident in herself.

The strength thing, on top of being the other seventy percent of her coolness factor, leads me into something weird about her design: she looks like Adora. Bear with me on this one.

This isn’t exact. Don’t get me wrong, the designs aren’t a one-to-one thing. Her design just has the same energy as Adora’s. The short jacket, with its jagged collar, kinda matches Adora’s jacket. But where Huntara’s is open (remember this too), showing off her strength and confidence, Adora’s is closed in, restricting her and keeping her polished and refined. I mean “polished and refined” here in less of a mark of quality, but more in the sense that she has a lot holding her back and holding her down.

Similarly, Adora has those shoulder pauldrons, making herself look bigger, like a prey animal with false eyes. But Huntara has boxy shoulders that form a shape language, as she has actually developed the defences Adora pretends to have. In that way, she acts as a more completed version of Adora, which is interesting.

Finally, there is that hair, which is put up in a similar way to Adora’s, not the same, but alike enough to make the silhouettes echo. The shot below is about as much proof I have for this crackpot theory.

But she’s not exactly a good role model, is she? She’s duplicitous, which harks back to those ideas of revelations and second glances that I mentioned earlier. But she’s also standoffish, at which point I will bring back those elements of her design I said to remember, the spear, the partial armour, and the open jacket.

Huntara isn’t emotionally healthy, she has just dealt with PTSD in a different way to Adora, she has run. She has adapted to keeping things at a distance, and not letting people get close, exemplified by the polearm that doubles as a long range weapon. She is also terrifying, which also helps her stay isolated.

This all covers up for the fact that she has very few emotional defences. She is only partially armoured, and despite her best efforts, she has nothing protecting her heart. Adora brings up something that is a little too close to Huntara for comfort, then asks her about it, and her only reaction is to make a threat.

She does this twice in this episode. She feels emotionally vulnerable, and immediately pins the cause of that vulnerability to the closest wall. It's as if it's a stock reaction.

“Huntara doesn’t run from anything. I want to be here.”

I call bollocks on that. It’s a mantra, a myth, not an actual response. It’s like saying “haven’t you heard the legend”. But I actually want to talk about the vernacular a bit here.

The second sentence is reminiscent of a character not yet mentioned in this episode. She has intellectually acknowledged that things are bad, but she has convinced herself, emotionally, that this is where she wants to be. She wants this, this is her life, she cannot be out of control. Similarly, if things go wrong, it’s what she deserves, because she wanted this. If the phrasing of that and the need for a feeling of control doesn’t sound exactly like Catra, I don’t know what does.

On a different note, the third person thing isn’t done by many other people in this series, but isn’t it a funny coincidence that two of the people who do it are in the same place at the same time? Who could have foreseen this?

Putting it mildly, Adora, throughout the series, has an identity crisis going on. She cannot decide if she is Adora or She-Ra, and it leads into a true Jeckyl and Hyde plot that I discussed in more detail in this post, which manifests most acutely as her referring to herself in third person. When she is most powerful, she is She-Ra, and Adora is a different person. But when she is feeling weak, she is Adora, and She-Ra will save her.

Although, in another weird twist of fate, Huntara knows more about She-Ra than anyone else besides Razz and Light Hope, because she has heard of the legends and has studied what Mara left behind, she gives us a summary of what this whole She-Ra thing is, through all the biases of Adora and Mara. So don’t think this line escaped me:

“She-Ra is a person?”

From everything that Huntara has seen and heard, nothing has told her that She-Ra is an individual. Instead, it's a thing to be revered, a concept rather than an identity and this is… correct?

She-Ra isn’t another person who Adora becomes, it isn’t an identity for Adora to assume, its something to be, like a hero, or a friend. It’s a facet of Adora, rather than her whole being. But Adora can’t see that, because of the aforementioned identity crisis.

I mentioned in my last post that season three gets as close as this series gets to evading the tragic format without actually breaking free, and I think that the talk of identity is a good place to explain where Adora fits into this.

Adora’s tragic flaw is also her greatest strength. She thinks incredibly quickly. This makes her a phenomenal tactician in the short term but causes her to be incredibly shortsighted. This is in contrast to Catra, who is always about ten steps ahead of everyone, ut can’t see the forest for the trees most of the time.

So, Adora internalises things quickly, and a majour side effect of this is that she doesn’t always complete things rationally. Her identity problem isn’t so much this incarnate as just this problem exactly.

She has been given a magic sword and told a bunch of things about it, and she has taken that at face value and moved on, internalising this in a way that isn’t accurate. She is She-Ra, but that doesn’t remove everything else about her.

Adora has been tossing up the idea of giving up her past and embracing this new identity that she has been given, and season three presents her moving away from that idea. Huntara is an example of that extreme, and it isn’t enviable.

But at the end of the season… well, you will just have to wait for more of my blog to see how that works out.

Or you could just watch the show.

Lastly, I would like to talk about Hordack and Entrapta, because their scenes in this episode are both really cute and really thematic.

The reveal of Hordack’s frailty plays into that idea of revelations that I have been talking about, but it also plays into his and Entrapta’s themes of failure and self worth and sets up those themes in Horde Prime.

Stylisation is something that this series plays around with a lot when it comes to backstories and asides (I conveniently have a post talking about this idea in detail), and that comes back for Hordack’s flashback.

This is simple, incredibly so. There are simple shapes, and very few colours on display. It is flat, but in a way that is very clearly intentional. Hordak has an extremely simple worldview. He isn’t a two dimensional character, but like Glimmer, he sees the world in an overly reductive way.

The colouration also sets Horde Prime out from the rest of the scene here, holding him up on a pedestal. Hordak and everything around him is a shade of red, orange, or yellow. It’s warm in tone, but also blends together with the purple to make Hordak look at home, and one with his surroundings. But Horde Prime stands out, and the eye of the viewer is drawn to him because of that abrasive green. He is at the centre of Hordak’s mind.

The flashback does this multiple times, using that green like a highlighter to focus the viewer's eye on the most important part of the image.

Also, this looks like a political poster, doesn’t it? It’s propaganda, and Hordak has taken it, hook line and sinker. That actually serves to explain the flat stylisation, it’s conveying simple ideas. Horde Prime doesn’t get any detail to what he actually looks like other than “he probably looks like Hordak” and “he’s got a cape and that collar thing”. This is the idea of Horde Prime, not the actual guy. We are looking at the pedestal this character stands upon, rather than the character itself.

That collar thing is actually a neat little character design element that is reflected in Hordak until this episode. Entrapta replaces it with her armour, and I think its important that Entrapta and Horde Prime are immediately presented as opposites.

The literal only thing we learn about Horde Prime’s personality in this episode is that he doesn’t particularly like individuality. Failure, defects, and deviations are all worthy of being killed for. You have to prove your worth, instead of it being assumed. And even then, I am inclined to doubt whether Hordak will be able to prove himself, no matter what he does.

Entrapta is villainous, kinda. She is aligned with a machine of war and death, which isn’t the most ethically sound of activities. But, she opposes the main villain of this story on principle.

“Everybody needs help sometimes. And you shouldn't be upset that you're not perfect. Take Emily! Her programming is glitchy, the left leg sticks, and she's loud. Emily's got quirks, but that's why I like her. Imperfection is what makes scientific experimentation possible. Imperfection is beautiful. At least to me. … And you're really too obsessed with this whole failure thing, I mean, I'm a failure... I don't fit in. I became friends with Adora, but she abandoned me. Then, I became friends with Catra, but she doesn't talk to me anymore. But that doesn't mean I give up. I scrounged up a few more pieces of First Ones Tech, and I can't think of a better use for it than this.”

Imperfection is beautiful.

There is also the scientific aspect of Entrapta, which I think hasn’t been discussed that much. She-ra makes a point of equating the natural with the good, and the artificial with the bad. But Entrapta is a scientist and an inventor, where does she fit into that?

Curiosity. Science is the study of the world. It is a means of learning more about nature, and to create things from that nature. She experiments, and understands. Imperfection is beautiful, and if there is one thing nature is good at, it’s variation.

Entrapta doesn’t exist in contrast to nature, but parallel to it. All she does is express the natural aspect of this story in a different way to everyone else.

Final Thoughts

The sound design of this episode is unrivalled so far in the series, and it will get better over time. The sting at the start with the skeleton is perfectly unsettling, and the ambience of the Wastes is superb.

Also, the cinematography of the fight in this episode is really well done, filled with motion and dynamism and tactical expressions of character. The sword duel is cool, and the fact that Glimmer is out for blood isn’t really dwelled upon, but it's notable that both of the goons she fights survive the experience through sheer force of luck.

However, Huntara figuring out Adora was from the Horde because of how she fights was a little weak to me. “I recognise that training”, really? Not the boots? Not the fact that she keeps bringing up the Horde? Ok.

Next week, I will be looking at One Upon A Time In The Wastes, so stick if that interests you.

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