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ericas-spop-blog · 18 hours

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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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ericas-spop-blog · 4 days

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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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ericas-spop-blog · 5 days

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

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ericas-spop-blog · 5 days

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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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ericas-spop-blog · 5 days

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#spop #poll #final results #peer reviewed tags

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ericas-spop-blog · 5 days

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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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ericas-spop-blog · 5 days

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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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ericas-spop-blog · 5 days

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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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ericas-spop-blog · 6 days

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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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ericas-spop-blog · 6 days

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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

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ericas-spop-blog · 6 days

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i love how Adora’s second She-Ra headpiece mirrors Catra’s silhouette and that her hair retains the style she wears as Adora. it’s like now that she’s relying on her own strength to become She-Ra, her appearance reflects her authenticity and what she’s fighting for (her loved ones)

#spop #adora #oh yeah #genuinely lovely little bit of character design #where season 5 She-Ra feels so much more like ADORA #instead of a costume she's wearing

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ericas-spop-blog · 7 days

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Before we continue, is this a personal moral failing or a mental illness? I need to know whether I should treat you like an evil monster or a helpless child when I unperson you.

#not fandom #(not strictly)#but relevant to this blog #(in both directions)#just sub “trauma response” for “mental illness”

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ericas-spop-blog · 7 days

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And I guess I'm adding this here, because this is the more "technical" of my posts about the Portal Horde - we know the Perfect!Horde is Adora's, and not anyone else's, because it's shot exclusively in Adora's POV.

Adora is always present, either the focus of the camera or the one directing it's attention.

Adora is so much the center of the (collapsing) universe, that as far as the camera is concerned, anything outside of her immediate attention does not exist.

It's just that blunt, honestly.

Death of the Author, I guess

(moving this out of comments because I’m going to need paragraph breaks and screenshots….)

@garnetsfists

true but Stevenson has said that [the portal world] was manifested by both Adora and Catra’s (different) wishes to go back. Adora wishing she could go back and fix her mistake of leaving Catra behind and Catra wishing she had Adora and other friends and was liked by SW

I see but I don’t see how else the scene of Catra having a friendly chat with the two cadets who were threatening her in the 3rd ep could be manifested by Adora and not her inner wish to have had friends. Similar how she is close enough with the trio to comission a cake when in reality they were always at odds

Like I said in the comments: Whatever Stevenson thought they were writing, it does not dictate what the show actually ended up being. Stevenson’s opinions on her scripts are potentially interesting, but they’re not automatically more valid than any other read.

And… I’d consider this framing deeply, deeply flawed vis-a-vis the episode as it actually aired.

Talking about Catra and the trio:

Firstly, Catra doesn’t have a secret inner wish to have had more friends. That is an assertion not only not backed by the text, but actively running counter to it. Catra cares about others, and cares deeply, but she does not want to be friends with them at this point in the story.

Even excluding the S5 flashback where her standoffishness is explicitly established as one of the few ways she has to control her experience of the world - if Catra wanted more friends…she would have more friends.

She would not have constantly told Scorpia to back off. She would be using her social power as a force captain to buddy buddy with the trio, not doing the emotionally distant leadership thing.

Catra is a loner because that’s a conscious choice she makes. It’s a bad, self-destructive choice, but it’s a very deliberate one.

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Secondly, Adora very much wants all her friends to be friends with each other.

Again, this is just super, super explicit from that one S5 flashback, but also again, it’s well-established prior to this episode.

When Shadow Weaver and Catra are in conflict, she bullies Catra into saying it’s fine and not a problem. She derails in-group confrontations to stop them, rather than letting them resolve. She makes completely unbacked assertions that Glimmer’s conflict with Bow is immaterial. Adora wants people to get along, or at least appear to.

But she doesn’t really care about how real that consensus is, so long as it looks good. While the changes in Adora’s experiences and relationships in the portal world are explained as her being just that awesome (she conquered Thaymor, she convinced Shadow Weaver to deploy the entire squad, she was the leader and the reason for their success, they needed her), Catra’s mended relationship with the trio is presented completely devoid of comment. Catra didn’t do anything in this fictional world to get the trio to like her. They just did, because the only important part to Adora would be that they’re all unified in their adoration of her.

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And also, like… If this is Catra’s Perfect World, in whole or in part, then you’re saying Catra wants a world where she is stuck forever as the happy little sidekick, where she is never anything more than an extension of Adora, and where any aspirations beyond that are immediately undercut. Where the greatest desire she is actually allowed to achieve is “be friends with the people who bullied and beat her in the real world”.

I know I say my headcanons are a barrel of laughs, but that? That is some bleak shit.

#spop #adora #S3E05

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ericas-spop-blog · 8 days

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I just truly truly cannot understand people who see a character doing fucked up things reflective of deeper character and hate them instead of thinking it's cool writing

#fandom #i love characters doing fucked up things!#I want to spend more time with them exploring the fuckedup-ness!

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ericas-spop-blog · 8 days

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I saw these put on Zelda characters by @wanderingnightingale and used them for the greater good

edit: oh actually it was @creativesplat oops

#spop #meme #incorrect quotes

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ericas-spop-blog · 8 days

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The power of friendship versus the power of incredible violence is a false dichotomy. The violence of which you are capable all by yourself lies firmly within the sphere of the credible. It is the power of friendship which enables the power of incredible violence.

#spop #violence

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ericas-spop-blog · 8 days

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'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)?

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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.

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