1. Raison d'être
It's a story of childhood abuse, and different ways to cope with it.
It's also a western magical girl cartoon, a remake of the original 80s cartoon She-Ra: Princess of Power, a cute science fantasy show for children and people who used to be children. If you want that, it's pretty good in its own right.
But the reason it resonated with so many people is the childhood trauma aspect. It's realistic, it's sympathetic, it’s heartfelt, it's cathartic. The victims of trauma see themselves, identify with the characters, and then are given reasons to heal. Their friends watch the show and become aware of the struggle, which is probably even more important. I can only hope the abusers are tormented with guilt, but we all know they don’t, and the show knows they don’t, and they know they don’t, so might as well not give them a redemption arc. And the magical transformation – the one that makes it a magical girl cartoon – is something that only the secret third target audience, people who never got to be children, can catch on to, and it’s the reason why I think this review is important. But I am getting ahead of myself.
2. The part you will look back at
It starts like a children’s TV show would start.
Adora and Catra are to-be soldiers of the Evil Horde. Orphans, trained for that purpose since birth by a sorceress Shadow Weaver. Some sibling rivalry takes place, mutual expository teasing and bonding; it’s established that they are very good friends, committed to always having each others’ backs.
In a fit of mischief, they sneak out of the base and go to the nearby forest, where they find a magic sword. This is where Adora and Catra get separated, Adora learns that she is a reincarnation of the ancient magic warrior She-Ra, and can transform into a super-powered form using the sword. She is captured, and then befriended by Princess Glimmer and Bow, of the rebel faction.
Soon, Adora sees for herself that the Horde is evil by watching them slaughter a town full of innocent people for a minor strategic advantage. The slaughter is led by Catra. Adora tries to turn her from evil, telling her that Shadow Weaver is lying to her and manipulating her. Catra says “Duh”, stuns Adora and is forced to retreat.
This begins the strategic conflict. Adora as She-Ra with her friends are on the side of Good, and Adora is trying to liberate Catra. Catra with the Horde are on the side of Evil; and Catra is trying to capture Adora.
Standard adventure show stuff.
3. Promise
When Adora and Catra talk again, we get to see their upbringing in flashbacks, and have a different look on their relationship with each other and with Shadow Weaver. Catra, as it turns out, really did put more faith in Adora than she showed, her identity intimately tied to Adora’s. Shadow Weaver’s abuse put her in a position many traumatized people find themselves in: fiercely independent, and yet only functioning through other people.
I’ve seen someone comment that they were a “reverse solipsist” – they only exist in other people’s heads – and that when they told it to their therapist the first time, he said that it’s the best description of cPTSD that he had ever heard. I can confirm that this line resonated with me, and it certainly would have resonated with Catra. Catra only existed in Adora’s head. Their rivalry was the most important war Catra ever fought, Adora’s teasing was a genuine humiliation, and Adora’s promise to have her back was the lifeline. When Adora left, everything good in Catra left with her.
This is a wham episode in many ways, but one thing in particular it does best is showing people make stupid choices without handing them an Idiot Ball. If you ever thought Catra was being dumb and irrational, after this episode you can see: you were right, but also, this is what you would have done, too. Trauma isn’t just an extra subroutine in your brain that occasionally takes over and makes you act stupid. It’s not a black box, it's an understandable cause-and-effect. If you couldn’t sympathize before, now you can.
4. Interlude: Traumatis Personae
4.1. Shadow Weaver
The abuser. Cruel, selfish, manipulative, and unrepentant. There are reasons she does all that, understandable reasons. She is not ontologically evil. She is not broken. It’s just a thing-she-does. Some people perceive her as a cool, competent, impressive villain, a Professor Quirrell. Traumatized people invariably see her as a bottomless hate sink. This is not an accident.
When I first wrote the previous paragraph, it went “reasons she is like that”. But on a revision, I changed it. It would look like she herself is a victim, or imply that her sin is in any way absolved. But that’s not how reality works, and therefore, not how the show portrays it. She is a realistic abuser that many watchers project their own experiences at. Her arc is flawlessly executed: no matter how many good reasons the abuser claims to have, no matter how difficult they had it, no matter how much what they did was justified – they are still evil, and you are allowed to hate them, and they do not deserve a happy ending, and their cruel choices are what would be their downfall. No matter what you think of the morality of this framing, you cannot deny its therapeutic value. Depicting her any other way would be diminishing the experience of victims. No other story I’ve seen manages this.
4.2. Adora
This is what happens when they let you heal.
Trauma makes you lonely. That loneliness isn’t a property of how many friends you have, but of you as a person. Lonely doesn’t mean alone, but you still cannot heal alone. Trauma makes the nature of Homo Sapiens as a social species plainly obvious.
The reason why Adora healed and remained functional is because when she started her healing journey, she had loving friends ready to accept and support her.
4.3. Catra
This is what happens when they don’t let you heal.
Catra doesn’t start with positive reinforcement. She starts with a failure, a betrayal, and a punishment. She could heal if she left the toxic environment, and she knows that. She still doesn’t do it. This is not to blame Catra. This is to blame everyone else.
The reason why Catra didn’t heal for so long is because nobody else wanted her to, and that makes it impossible.
4.4. Others
Hordak, the appropriately-named leader of the Horde, is coping with generational trauma. I won’t elaborate; it’s not the kind of trauma I have, so I cannot add anything here that other people haven’t said.
Entrapta is autistic. She is very socially dysfunctional, and her disorder legitimately limits her in many ways and is the source of many problems. But she is still loved and accepted, and that makes her both happy and likable, as well as genuinely valuable. Here, the show executes the representation flawlessly again. You have all been told that accommodating neurodivergent people and accepting them instead of trying to force them to be normal is good. But most see it as some kind of charitable sacrifice for the weak, a Neurotypical Man’s Burden. It’s really not. It’s just a no-brainer.
5. Anthrodicy
In the culmination of the first major arc, Catra learns that Hordak’s goal that she worked so hard to achieve will destroy the world and kill everyone. She still does it.
Why do people do evil? Do they know they’re evil, or are they just in error? One answer I’ve been fond of is given by Mikhail Bulgakov, speaking as Jesus:
There are no evil people in the world – there are only people who are unhappy
— Master and Margarita
Right now, if you give me a button that destroys the world, I would press it. Yes, I am serious, this is not an exaggeration. I won’t even try to “resist” anything; there is nothing to resist. I know that this would be very evil and very stupid. I know that on a different day, I might make a different choice. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a thing-I-do. Scorpion on the back of a frog. Trauma brain resists comprehension.
I don’t know how universal this opinion is, but I’ve heard it from some therapists. There is no disorder that fundamentally changes you as a person as much as cPTSD. Not even schizophrenia, for all of how it undermines the fundamental assumptions of how your brain processes information. Being afraid of healing is common. Trauma is all you know and all you are; you might be unhappy, but are you unhappy enough to disappear and replace yourself with someone else who is happy?
When Adora tells Catra that she’s been lied to and manipulated, Catra says “Duh”. What does it matter to trauma brain? A paperclip maximizer will hear humans lament that this is not what they intended to build, and that extinguishing the light of consciousness forever is unspeakable evil, and then it will say “Duh” and get to work.
There is nothing that shows the workings of trauma as sympathetically as She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.
6. Holes in reality
What happens next is psychosis.
Well, what happens next is that reality starts to unravel and timey goes wimey. Adora wakes up in Horde barracks, this entire thing with She-Ra being a dream. But something isn’t right, something doesn’t add up, the memories are confused but too persistent. Time skips around, objects disappear and reappear, evidence appears that it was real, and nobody seems to notice, everybody just reassures you that it’s business as normal and asks if you’re not feeling too well. To others, you’re speaking gibberish; to you, everyone is wrong.
It’s not psychosis in-universe, it’s just a malfunctioning time loop. But if it was psychosis, nothing would go differently. If you watch this episode in isolation, then only Doylist reasons would convince you that it wasn’t just that Adora went into psychosis, convinced herself that she was a reincarnation of a legendary warrior destined to save the planet and that everyone is gaslighting her, assaulted Catra and escaped into the forest to join the magic princesses. If you want to see what psychosis feels like from the inside, watch the show.
7. Henshin
Adora can transform into a legendary warrior, She-Ra. She becomes much more powerful, stronger, capable of things she couldn’t even imagine. Compared to the mighty She-Ra, Adora is a weakling, even if the transformation is temporary.
I can, too.
It’s a common thing with dissociation. Trauma keeps you in chains; sometimes the chains unlock. Many transgender people are familiar with this: the wrong-gender version of you isn’t just more depressed, it’s weak. Even something as simple as going on the Internet and performing as the correctly gendered version of yourself can transform what you are capable of; and actually transitioning is a life-changing boost to your power level. This is not mania; this is just the time that you can control your actions, rather than being dissociated from yourself and reality. Instead of making decisions based on what your hyper-aware brain tells you on a second-to-second basis, interested only in avoiding anything that the trauma taught you to avoid, thinking only the thoughts you are allowed to think – you can just do good things and not do bad things.
Before my first henshin, I didn’t even realize how much in chains I was, and how easy it is to do things when you don’t have to fight with your own head every second of every day. Being able to decide something and just do it, rather than inventing a strategy of negotiation with your own demons to allow it, is supremely liberating.
I don’t know if this connection was intended in the show. But I, and some other people I know, adopted She-Ra as the go-to metaphor of being able to act as yourself.
What doesn’t kill you, doesn’t make you stronger. It makes you so, so much weaker. Surviving a traumatic ordeal doesn’t mean you’d be better at surviving it the next time. It means that next time anything is even slightly difficult about it, you just fold down and die. It means you won’t even be capable of the bare minimum. Things that are utterly trivial to normal people become insurmountable to you. To the point where temporarily overcoming it is comparatively like transforming into a legendary superhero.
8. Love
True love and friendship being powerful is a stock literary cliché. But it’s usually just magic, a reverse Whale Aesop. The hero loves the heroine very very much and it makes him immune to mind control. The little ponies are very good friends and it allows them to blast baddies with their friendship beams.
The last thing that She-Ra and the Princesses of Power shows you is the ultimate power of love. And for real this time.
9. Afterword by Anton Chekhov
We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes… Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition… And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It's a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him – disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree – and all goes well.
— Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries