For the Honor of Greyskull - A She-Ra and the Princesses of Power Thread

those sorts of things suck. i am sorry you're going through that sort of deal too...

 

(Reposted because I'm an idiot and made my own thread because I didn't know about this one.)

I've started watching it and I have two Main Thoughts.

1. Shadow Weaver reminds me of GK (my ex-mother) and freaks me out.

2. The first two episodes kinda made me think that 'princess' didn't mean 'female heir to a kingdom' necessarily, which was a cool idea, but I'm up to Ep 8 now and all the princesses so far have been rulers or the kids of rulers. Except She-ra herself. Even so...what defines a princess, as opposed to just a very talented sorceress? Adora's reaction at finding herself She-ra was 'oh shit I'm a princess, wtf' even though she obviously isn't...well, okay, the tropes say she prolly is a long lost royal heir or something, but SHE doesn't know that. She just went 'princess' based on her looks. And the training sims the Horde do talk about the woods being 'full of princesses', and there was that one line of Bow's that 'everyone here is a princess, except me'...I'unno man.

 

same

 

Shadow Weaver's interesting in that she either seems to read as a mother or not. Everyone I personally know who reads her as one to Adora and Catra has, like myself, been reminded of their own mothers. But I've seen just as many people say that she just doesn't come off as a mother-figure to the girls. Which I just find to be fascinating since she's like 'OH HELLO MOMMY AND GRANDMA. FANCY SEEING YOU HERE,' for me.

 

I think it's sort of a muddle? Even Adora's first response to Glimmer asking if she was her mom was to immediately correct to 'commanding officer' before admitting she was sort of a mom, too. So... kind of a mess of both? and the worse parts of both too.

 

Shadow-Weaver raised them. So it kinda depends on whether "mother" means Kala or Gothel.

 

Ah. I'm less interested in that, per se, and more in how people who are watching the show perceive the character. Which has in my experience been a split between 'Not at all a mom' and 'She reminds me so much of my family I am actually uncomfortable'. That's what I find interesting. Not so much as stated fact in the show and more how audience perception reads the character and things she does. My boyfriend in particular couldn't read her as motherly at all, though upon having it explained to him he seems to at least get how people can make that read.

Spoiler: shit for later in the show since goldenflowertea just started it

Similar to how I find the Catra as coded for BPD thing interesting. Many don't perceive it that way and thus have very different reads of certain scenes. Friends I have with it though that have seen the show have reads far more similar to mine. The one in particular also completely had a mental breakdown at the same episode as I did. She's not at all stated in the show to have the disorder and given her age she couldn't be diagnosed for it anyway. But she reads as similar enough to ping people as having it and it can result in people just absolutely breaking down during episode 11. Either because they have done that to someone they love or they were so close to it that it's an uncomfortable show of what they could have been and still could potentially become.

The most interesting on this front though for me are the reads of things like the asking Catra to come thing because I've seen some very different reads of that situation. And in particular on whether or not Catra would have been capable of leaving.

 

That's interesting and I'm going to have to watch it again. Do you have any recommended reading for learning about it?

Spoiler

BPD

 

Does anyone else have problems with not being able to remember characters' voices right?

Like, Swiftwind... Bojack has more horsey-grumbles in his speech than he does, and I keep thinking of 80's Starlight with his haughty-breathy speech pattern or 80's Swiftwind with almost every word ending with a horse-grumble.

For Bow, I keep thinking that he sounds just like Sokka from ATLAB. Maybe it's because I was also watching Dragon Prince.

Scorpia is the worst. I keep expecting brain-damaged Rocky. (Actually could be the boxer or the moose.)

I guess Catra didn't stick in my head enough for me to expect all of her dialog to be yowling.

I guess it's like preferring the BBC version of Aslan.

 

It's interesting, and weird. I think even if Shadow Weaver isn't necessarily what people envision as a 'parent' she is the guardian Adora and Catra had throughout their childhood. It's kinda like, a distant abusive guardian who's like 'but don't call me mom'.

 

tfw a friend of yours gets to a particular episode and you're like it's popcorn time

 

Spoiler: Episode 10

When Catra says, "They left you," I wonder if Catra honestly thinks that Adora and the rest honestly didn't care about Entrapta because of how they never liked Scorpia. It's not like she would know that the rest think Entrapta's dead or something, right?

I love how Scorpia is barely done saying "you can't just touch another woman's tail without asking" when Catra goes in and starts stroking Entrapta's hair. I think she keeps doing it through the rest of the season, just playing with it when Entrapta's not paying attention.

I'm kinda interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

 

Man, I've been looking at the marks on Glimmer's back. I thought for a bit that she might be a Haibane, but it's probably just a tattoo.

https://goo.gl/images/oEWcRU

 

YOO guess who totally forgot to share his opinions after finishing the cartoon?
anyways, sea hawk is love sea hawk is life. glimmer is FRIGGIN ADORABLE, CHILD...sweet glitter hobbit. she tries so hard.
queen angela is a badass and i'm so looking forward to more family dynamics if we get a second season. balancing worry with your kid being an active soldier...gotta be tough. the final battle scene was pretty awesome, too, even though i found the close-combat a bit lacking in impact, but that's not the important thing for me! the best thing, imho, was how naturally the main kids acted around each other while also never feeling like their wartime fantasy backgrounds were just slapped on. everything about them fits together so well, i especially love adora's reaction to complicated social things being LET'S STRATEGIZE, and her being unused to sleeping alone. also, glimmer's dependence on her teleporting...that was a good little chunk of fitting worldbuilding and art and story together!

 

I liked how glimmer didn’t try to make Adora STOP strategizing. Normally the makeover montage would include scenes of the Fashion Perpetrator trying to pull the other person away from their thing, and I kept expecting to see glimmer pin pictures of dresses over the strategy board or surreptitiously throw away adora’s papers or something, but she let Adora prepare for a new and stressful situation in the way she needed to while also making sure she was prepared in the ways glimmer was familiar with. It was a really nice scene of supportive friendship!

 

Honestly they're really good at letting Adora do her thing in general. It's really nice to see that she's allowed to like...own her methods of doing things that aren't like awful. So things like the strategizing or the need to train and what not. She's able to take shit from her shitty upbringing and use it for good things and she's allowed to just be Adora and learn new things but in her own way. As opposed to it being stuffed down her throat.

 

I'm not going to try to claim that Scorpia is intentionally coded as trans, but between the "big and strong and scary and actually just wants to hug everyone" thing and the "outcast because of physical differences" thing, I am going to just officially stick a lil flag in her and claim her as Extremely Relatable.

 

So I just watched the first two episodes with some friends and I have 3 things to say.

She-ra is good.
Catra is gay.
And Bow (Bo? Beau?) is dumb.

 

Bow, like archery.

 

Bow is great :(

Spoiler: spoilers up to ep 8-9, not in response, but about Bow because I started thinking about Bow

I've been thinking about the main best friends, and it's interesting to me that Adora, Glimmer and Bow are all a group of jocks but Bow has the most restraint among them despite that simply because he has to. Just loves his friends. It was rare to see a character who is so on the side of his friends and mother henning to them also stand up for himself when it comes to boundaries (princess prom).