#reposting this here bc the original got lost in the sea of reposts

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

so.. non-c//a criticism about spop. because, you know, c//a wasn't the only thing that spop messed up. I'll just get straight to the point.

Horde Prime was a bad villain.

he had such a cool character design, i had high hopes for him. but like everything else in s5, horde prime's potential was wasted.

to put it shortly, he was boring. he was the typical pure-evil villain archetype with none of the charm. his motives weren't very interesting, we know nothing about him except that he's hordak's brother and an egotistic fascist with a god complex. his VA did a good job but his character was so badly written, even they couldn't salvage it.

even hordak was more intimidating than him until he got defeated by the inexperienced teenager who was never shown to be improving her skills but that's a whole another post

i thought the whole religious trauma aspect of it was going to be explored more, but it just turned out to be cartoonishly stupid, with the typical brainwashing trope.

not to mention, they even added shipping fodder in scenes with horde prime, because of course they had to. how else would people know that catra loves adora? she hasn't ever shown it so the only way the crew can convince everyone that she cares about adora is by having the main villain point it out (not to mention the scrapped off script where he says "you always wanted more but all she ever wanted was you" because we love a villain who exists solely to provide the viewers with ship angst)

the first one pisses me off so much because they didn't even bother to draw catra's eyes dilated yet had horde prime mention it?? all while glimmer was sobbing and pleading him to not hurt adora, but she's not the one in love apparently. i feel like this show was trying to gaslight us

anyway, shipping aside. one common trope in media you may have heard about is the third-act breakdown. this is something that usually happens to villains where their once intimidating and confident façade starts to break apart as they are close to being defeated by our hero.

the keyword here is third-act. if you want a villain to be genuinely scary or an actual threat, you cannot make them lose their cool as soon as something goes wrong. because it just makes them look insecure and weak, and you're left wondering why they're even the main villain in the first place.

and the problem with horde prime is exactly that. as soon as adora swoops in and saves catra, horde prime is immediately angered and upset that his plans failed. and from there, we see him get irritated and lose his cool easily multiple times.

this lessens the anticipation because you're not wondering how the protagonists will defeat him, you're wondering when they'll do it. because if he loses his cool so easily, it's clear that he's not cunning or calculating, he doesn't have a backup plan. and a good villain always has a backup plan, they are always one step ahead of the heroes, because that's how you raise the stakes.

it's no wonder horde prime isn't even a memorable villain and people only talk about how he brainwashed catra or how he "ships catradora". there's nothing else notable about him and it's honestly so evident that he was only introduced so that the previous villains could be redeemed for the sake of making certain ships canon.

they literally had to make it so that adora might die because of the failsafe thing, because having horde prime as a villain wasn't enough stakes.

they tried to make a connection between adora and horde prime with mara being his previous nemesis, but it was really hamfisted and didn't provide enough tension or exposition. it certainly didn't feel as tense as any of the fights between catra and adora.

horde prime could have been a really cool and threatening villain, but spop decided to focus more on handing out free redemption arcs for all the antagonists and butchering everyone's character arcs instead. bravo.

#reposting this here bc the original got lost in the sea of reposts #anti catradora #anti catra #spop discourse #spop critical #spop salt #spop catra #spop criticism #spop #catra #horde prime #hordak