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horde prime knows all. especially on the topic of complicated lesbian situationships

#catra #adora #horde prime #catradora

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The thing is, until you get past the mindset of "justice=punishment" you will never be able to create lasting change. We have actual proof that punitive justice creates more crime and makes criminals more violent. We have actual proof that rehabilitation reduces crime and recidivism. But some of y'all are so stuck on this idea that the wrongdoer must be punished for justice to be done that you will choose sating your need for revenge over actually moving toward a better world every time. And that's sad!

#not fandom #but relevant to this blog

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is that piece of media actually bad, or is it just not following the blueprint you projected onto it? is that work actually not good, or are you just demanding something from it that is absolutely antithetical to its themes, genre, tone, and narrative goal? is that story actually poorly written, or do you just dislike that it is not the specific things you wanted from it that it never set out to be, never was, and never is going to become? is it actually bad, or is it actually well-executed and you just dislike the story it chose to be because it isn't catering to your specific desires and expectations?

#fandom #oof #i do try not to fall down this hole #i wouldn't continue coming back to this show if i thought it was *bad* #and when i do have criticisms #i am attempting to meet the show where it's at - the ways it succeeded or failed to achieve what it was trying to do #rather than just 'what I wanted it to do'

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*Files 'The Crystal Palace is a Mindscape that just LOOKS and ACTS like holograms in a physical space' under 'glad they shoved this design choice down a memory hole'*

#spop #s1e12 #seriously #this never comes up again #every other episode treats it as a holodeck #a physical space capable of elaborate set dressing

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#spop #adora #catra #just some screenshots

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Haha wow. I had actually forgotten that Light Hope was it's own episode; I remember most of the events, but mentally appended/prepended them onto Promise/The Battle of Bright Moon.

Oof. Although maybe not surprising. It's very much an Exposition Episode.

#spop #s1e12 #its not a - #okay well it's kind of a bad episode #but not like offensively so? #it's just meandering #and on rewatch you really notice where the exposition is weighted all wrong #for the story they ended up telling

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#spop #adora #shadow weaver #just some screenshots #if ever an expression said 'I'm in this photo and I don't like it' #s5e11

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S4E04 - Glimmer Thinks

Adora: "Glimmer thinks that they're tracking She-Ra somehow."

...I'm sorry, Glimmer thinks that they're tracking She-Ra?

'Cause I don't think this is Glimmer.

And Adora certainly doesn't seem to be rejecting the idea.

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This is subtle, but significant - Adora believes that the Horde is tracking She-Ra. She's not the only one who does, and isn't the one who came up with it, but she still absolutely believes it.

But. It's also a belief that is unpleasant and uncomfortable for her. It makes her feel helpless and powerless, pushed to the sidelines.

So, when she talks about it, she doesn't express it as a belief she shares (eg, "We think" or "it seems like"). She also doesn't attribute it to it's actual source (Juliet). Instead, she finds someone she's in conflict with - someone she can be angry at - and attributes it to them.

That uncomfortable, unpleasant thought? That's not hers. She doesn't have to unpack it, or examine why it makes her feel this awful.

Because it's Glimmer who's responsible. She's forcing Adora to think them. Because. Because she's just bad, okay?

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After all, that's how it's always worked.

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Isn't it?

#spop #adora #problematic adora #corrupted catra #adora is an absolute mess #made up of a thousand destructive little tricks #for not processing her feelings

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you ever see a character and go "wow, this character is so nuanced and morally gray! their actions and morals don't always align! they're complicated and make bad decisions and behave painfully realistically! I hate them and love them at the same time and that's on purpose! they're so cool! .... fan content is going to misinterpret them completely, isn't it."

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free my girl she did all that shit but the fandom is mischaracterizing her for it

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Fandom Problem #4815:

The character is not you, stop taking things other people say about the character, or if they write character not acting like you in a situation as a personal attack

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#spop #poll #final results #peer reviewed tags

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the "canon isn't real we make our own rules" to "i am begging you people to revisit the source material" pipeline

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When I first started watching She Ra in like 2018 I deadass thought Shadow Weaver was Catra’s biological mom and she just wanted to forget the fact she had a whole ass baby 💀

#spop #catra

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The Portal and Perfect Worlds

(And kicking this out of my drafts because I don't feel like marking it up with screenshots. Um. Should be read as canon-compiant headcanon for the most part.)

When the portal machine is connected to the Sword and turned on, it taps into the pool of magic that has been accumulating in the Heart for the last 1000 years. But, since the proper channels have not been activated, that release is uncontrolled.

Or, well, mostly uncontrolled. Because the magic of Etheria is first and foremost tied to people; when the magical nuke is set off, and the world is wiped clean, the subconscious of the people most intimately tied to the Heart reflexively attempt to rebuild it, with varying levels of influence:

Madame Razz. ????? Seems to exist outside of portal!Etheria, and is able to manipulate it in ways even Adora can't. Has seen this before. [Kind of very worriesome, actually].

Adora. Bearer of the Sword, Key to the Heart, and Eye of the Storm Adora is linked to the Sword, and the Sword is the conduit between the Heart and the portal. She is the center of the storm, and most of the power is flowing through her. She is (nearly) the sole architect of the portal!Horde, and has a large degree of freedom to navigate and access other locations in the portal world.

Angela. Queen of Brightmoon, First Among Equals Angela is the most powerful of the "normal" Runestone Princesses, and is the primary creator of portal!Brightmoon, although her control and freedom of movement is less absolute than Adora's.

Frosta, Mermista, Perfuma. Lesser Stars We don't see them, but there's no reason not to believe the rest of the Runestone Princesses didn't have their own perfect worlds.

Glimmer. Princess in Training, Her Mother's Daughter Glimmer's Runestone connection is a gift from her mother, so it is unsurprising that she remains trapped in Angella's orbit, reshaped to fit her mother's fantasy. But because she does have a link to the Moonstone (and because being mommy/daddy's little girl forever is not what she wants), the fantasy's hold on her is incomplete. She sees the gaps in it, all the little places where it doesn't make sense, the ways it doesn't make her happy, even thought everyone says it should.

Scorpia. The Unawakened Scorpia's connection to the Heart is very thin - her bond with the Garnet is almost entirely dormant - but it is still there. She can't override or split Adora's vision of The Horde, but she can shape the small corners that Adora did not care to fill. She retains her dislike of Adora, but more interestingly - portal!Scorpia introduces herself. In the fantasy, she isn't the "Covered in Force Captain Orientation" Scorpion Princess; she isn't clingy or needy or overbearing. She's just a normal person, safe and included and unremarkable; confident and happy with her place in the world. (even if there's a nagging sense that something's missing).

Entrapta. Wild-Type Princess Entrapta isn't tied to the Heart, but she's still connected to Etheria's magic. That - and the fact she isn't close enough to any of the more powerful princesses to be drawn into their orbit - is enough to get her her one-room protective bubble of I Can't Fail At People If I Never Meet Them. (We can assume a similar tiny world for Spinnetossa and other wild-types.)

Micah, Bow, et all. Normies and Scrubs The little people don't get much say in the fantasies they find themselves entangled in, but they're none-the-less important, because the portal can't create fake people. It can drastically rewrite them - it can turn Shadow Weaver into a doting mentor - but there needs to be someone for the fantasy to latch onto (someone who will remember the dance they were puppeted through when all this is over).

Catra. Not Herself. Knows It. Of all the non-princesses seen in portal!Etheria, Catra is somewhat notable, if only for the violence with which she (once able) rejects the fantasy. So, first off - this is not because she has any special level of power over the portal world; All she did was complete a circuit. It no more granted her control over what happened next than hitting a light switch grants me divine control over photons. She's not even unique in having her true personality break through as Adora loses her grip on the fantasy/pulls attention to it's decomposition - Scorpia and Lonnie experience pretty much the same thing. The difference is purely in that, while the others are mostly frightened and confused, Catra is incandescently, burn-the-world-down furious. Because she knows this. She knows exactly what it is to be a prop in Adora's fantasies, to be forced to pretend that everything is fine("you said you didn't care about things like that."), everything is perfect, simple("I wish that things could be simple [again]."), even when the world is broken and coming down around their ears("The way they used to be."). Adora demands she help fix things, but has never confronted how they were broken. Is it any wonder that she is done with letting Adora control her? Letting Adora win?

Errata/Headcanons:

The show never explains wtf is actually going on with Razz, and I love that. She's an extremely weird, extremely powerful immortal, and that's all we're supposed to know.

Razz's aggressive prodding was 100% necessary to snap Adora out of the fantasy. Without someone else breaking the illusion - and providing the explicit goal of Fixing Things - Adora would have just kept doubling down as the world fell apart around her.

There was never a version of portal!Brightmoon that meaningfully accounted for the Horde(it wouldn't be Perfect if it did). Adora is being sincere when she says they don't remember it because it fell into the void; she just drew a reasonable but incorrect conclusion from the little she knew. (in the same way that Angela believing portal!Micah was fabrication was reasonable, but wrong.)

Portal!Brightmoon is as much a fantasy as the portal!Horde was. While it feels more like a want-of-a-nail alternate history, that's emergent from Angela being a more grounded person, who's fantasy is more could have been than should have been.

To repeat: Glimmer is not unhappy in portal!Brightmoon (because that would run counter to what Angella wants for her) - but it's not her perfect world. What Glimmer wants, more than anything else, is to escape her mother's shadow and her father's ghost, and become her own person. Being mommy and daddy's baby girl forever would be anathema to her full self.

Glimmer's reaction to Adora confirming Micah is 'gone' in the real world isn't sad - it's grim. She asked because she knows something's not right; that she doesn't actually know this man the world tells her to adore.

I'd say Glimmer is responsible for Bow being in portal!Brightmoon, but Angela is responsible for casting him as the "good boy" his dads wanted him to be.

(This implies that Angela knows about his dads and their expectations! My preferred head-canon is when a random kid showed up at Brightmoon she, you know, did some digging, and knows about his family. She's a good enough person to not out him to his folks...but maybe not quite good enough not to wish that her daughter's bestie was the safe, controllable person his dads thought he was.)

Catra is the most explicitly angry about it, but Lonnie's discomfort/disgust when the portal world is brought up is probably pretty typical of folks who got cast as 'extras' - having your self-identity sublimated into what someone else wanted you to be is ... it's not going to be a super fun experience for most folks.

#spop #long post #person headcanon #The Portal #Season 3

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I need all of you to understand that if you are intentionally *hurting someone to feel more powerful, you are abusing that person

I've seen way too many posts recently saying like "sure, it's not productive, but it can be empowering and therapeutic to get your anger out" Yeah, that is abuse.

making someone feel lesser so that you can feel more powerful is what abusers do. that's why they do it. nobody wakes up in the morning rubbing their hands together, stroking their beard, planning all the evil abusive things they're going to do today. yhey just do those things because it's cathartic and empowering

you can be abusive, yes you, even if you're oppressed, even if they have privilege over you, even if you're a woman, even if they're bigger and stronger than you, even if it's "just a joke," even if you think they shouldn't be upset because it's a stupid thing to be upset about. it doesn't matter. you're not uniquely harmless.

some of you guys are turning into your parents shockingly quick

*I don't specifically mean physically hurting someone. I mean doing anything against another person's consent. this post is not about kink. as long as you've negotiated and are using safewords, there is no problem with beating someone up for fun

#not fandom #but relevant to this blog

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Honestly(if tangentially)? One of the missed opportunities of season 4 was not having Mara focus on the RUNESTONES instead of the Sword in her Final Message; it wouldn't be wrong - they are the mechanism through which the power is gathered - and it'd smooth out a number of things (make the Beast Island sequence with Manic Entrapta less repetitive, increase Arora's "I feel useless" conflict level, and yeah, help establish why Glimmer thinks she can/should pull this off).

Rewatching Season 4 and thinking about how Bow and Adora talk about the Heart of Etheria and the magic / the power with some distance in that language while Glimmer refers to it as “taking some of our power back” and “the magic of my people.”  

Bow has never had the ability to do magic. Adora, as far as she knows at this point, is only using the power of the sword. For both of them, Etheria’s magic is largely a thought exercise, something they have witnessed but have never felt connected to personally.

But Glimmer has been connected to the magic her whole life. It’s part of her and every single member of her family has been able to tap into it. She feels ownership to it.

And she’s used to being able to control it.

Which is why she would be less likely to view The Heart of Etheria as something malicious than Bow or Adora. It explains why she’s more willing to believe there’s a way to control it and use it for good no matter what Light Hope plans.

She just has a totally different relationship to it than the other two.

(Yes, this rewatch is absolutely turning me into a Glimmer apologist.)

#spop #glimmer #s4