Catra - Blog Posts
Small warm up with water colours.
And as I promised - here’s a video post for Crossing the Line, my Catradora animatic! ^^ Slight flashing warning! Please do not download and re-post this video! Sharing the link is okay and loved ;v;
It’s finally done!!! AHH!!! I have been working on this project basically non-stop for nearly a month and it feels like a dream that its here ahah! I don’t really know what to say about it, except that I love this song and I am so happy that I got to make this video for catradora to it (because it matches them So WELL I mean c'mon.) There are probably some mistakes still in it but hey!! Thank you for watching my video!! Please leave a comment and tell me what you think! :D
so, listen, when Adora was in the heart she saw a sort of future where she was with catra as Glimmer was with Bow. Now if we look closely we can see both Bow and Glimmer wearing a twin earring just like Angella' s earrings, and after a researching a bit, just like Micah earrings, and Glimmer stared wearing it after she became queen....so what does that mean? That perhaps Bow is King? And they are also wearing matching capes, I just ....AAAAAAAAAH
Also wouldn't it be cool that since there are supposedly four earring ( even if Angella' probably brought hers with her in the afterlife ) that the remaining two went to Catra and Adora, not as a romantic thing but just as a "best friend squad" thing?
spop x article titles
It took ten whole minutes just to find the original post to link
Catradora is canon king.
#cick
If you want Scorpia to gently hold you clap your hands *clap clap*
Bow thinking Catra is adorable...
... and a not pleased Catra.
Bow thinking Catra is adorable...
... and a not pleased Catra.
"Princesses are easy to take down. You and your files don't have anything on real threats, like me."
Oh honey.
So I did a thing.
Catra’s a vampire so she could have glowy eyes and hiss at people.
Making Adora’s outfits was SO MUCH FUN (in some her shoes have little cat faces on).
I made actual-cat Catra because I was sad you can’t give Sims hetrachromia. And then labr-adora so she wouldn’t get lonely.
Ima make Perfuma and Scorpia next because they be cute. Then everyone else.
thinkin about s4 catra and how her outfit changed and a big part of it is that black sleeve on the same arm that was black when she was corrupted. and i wonder if it was like some kind of operant conditioning she was imposing on herself, just having a constant reminder always right there in her face of the fact she knew she'd gone way too far when she freaked out and fcked up bad several times during the whole portal ordeal. after all that, there's no going back, and she'd ruined any hope of even considering other options. so anytime she might even let the thought of it flit across her mind, it'd help force her to bury it immediately and help her keep it that way -
- cause there's no chance of her having any other life now - and partly cause she firmly believes adora is done with her to the point of hatred, cause why wouldn't she be when catra's already there w herself at that point? but trying hard af not to let that or any other vulnerability show, and tryna adjust to looking at a life of wearing a mask. cause she'd made her choice, and now she had to live with it, and she was literally just trying to figure out how to do that.
every now and again i just have to reflect on how fucking traumatic catra’s chipping process must’ve been. like this girl didn’t need ANY more trauma in general, but especially not any more trauma relating to losing control of herself. she’s already had so much taken from her, and she already felt so alone and unloved. she was so sure that adora wouldn’t come back for her, that she would die there all alone, just hoping that her sacrifice meant something to adora :(((
not to mention that horde prime electrocuted her in that baptismal pool, the same punishment that shadow weaver tortured catra with all of her life.
the pseudo-religious implications of catra’s chipping process too…
UGH THIS SHOW ITS GONNA FUCKING KILL ME
THIS THIS THIS
watching arcane s2 completely fumble jinx’s arc genuinely made me so so upset, i’m still fucking mad about it honestly
I think I took for granted how good She-Ra is. Like it is a MIRACLE that a show like this exists, you know?
Idk, watching the Arcane finale and seeing it fumble the things it set up for itself in season 1, ditching complex and complete set-ups and pay-offs for cheap parallels that don’t always make sense; it made me realize how fucking lucky we got with spop.
There are a lot of incredible things about the show, about how pretty much every character in the show is queer, how trauma is represented, complex themes interweaved beautifully in a TV-7 rating show.
BUT
I feel like we as a ~ society don’t talk enough about the set-ups and pay-offs in the show. The fact that nothing in the show comes out of left field and how every piece of dialogue serves a function and sets the characters up. The characters in spop will never act out of character for a line, or to further the plot. Their consistency is incredible.
Let’s take Jinx and Catra for example. Jinx has complex mental health issues that were at the center of everything in szn 1, so she had a lot of symptoms and she was able to be messy and frustrating and realistic in her disorder. Then szn 2 came around and somehow her symptoms are mostly cured - which ok, we can chalk that up to Isha’s presence in her life, which yeah, her hallucinatory symptoms partly come back when Isha goes missing. Although, this would mean that they’re setting up that if Isha is not in Jinx’s life, then her symptoms would come back full force no?
Isha dies and there is absolutely nothing that pays off in terms of this little set up they did. Jinx becomes suicidal, but her other, more complex, more “able to ruin plot plans” symptoms disappear in its entirety. This is a character whose complexity is determined by what the plot needs to do.
Catra also has complex mental issues, and those NEVER go away for the sake of plot expediency, in fact, the plot baked Adora and Catra’s conflict in the center of it all from the very beginning. This means that Catra gets to act realistically all throughout the show and that furthers the plot. Catra doesn’t get rescued and all of a sudden her trauma goes away for the sake of redeeming her faster. Catra has not been healed at the end of the show, she is beginning to heal. She is allowed to explore the depths of her trauma and symptoms and instead of speeding through it, the show says - here, go down to rock bottom, get rescued and be unable to say thank you, get re-triggered by your abuser and run away at the very end of the show. And also, here are some characters that will call you out on your behavior, here is an emotional support animal, here, the person you love and have pushed away from, never hated you!! Her healing always feels like it’s a deliberate choice from Catra bc of what tools the show is giving her, not bc the plot needs to move forward now.
And in terms of set-ups and pay-offs. I mean…. It’s actually nuts. Characters’ dialogues literally bake themselves into other characters. Shadow Weaver tells Adora “Catra distracts you, confuses you” and Adora later tells Bow and Glimmer (after calling SW out btw) “I am distracted and confused and I cant be any of those things if this is going to work” which creates the final moments of the show.
Angella tells Adora “take care of each other” and Adora internalizes it as “I have to take care of Glimmer” bc of her trauma, and that leads her to be very controlling with Glimmer, which creates conflict in their relationship, which creates the heart of Etheria situation, which creates the Horde Prime situation.
SW tells Catra that she abused her bc Catra reminded her of herself. In that same episode, where SW’s past is explored, they both say “it doesn’t matter what I do, my authority figure doesn’t trust me”, we can see how Catra begins to emulate SW’s authority style throughout the show.
The show starts with SW telling Adora “isn’t this what you’ve wanted since you were old enough to want anything?” and it ends with Catra asking her “what do you want, Adora?” which sets up the conclusion of Adora’s entire arc.
Even little things, like Entrapta telling Wrong Hordak it’s ok to make facial expressions and Wrong Hordak being animated copying character’s facial expressions for practice after that.
ITS JUST SO GOOD THE WRITING IN THIS SHOW IS RIDICULOUS.
“she was afraid in the end. and she suffered”
can you hear my heart breaking :((((((
Content note for discussions of eternal damnation, and all sorts of other shit that will trigger a lot of folks with religious trauma.
Before I get started I might as well explain where I’m coming from - unlike a lot of She-Ra fans, and a lot of queer people, I don’t have much religious trauma, or any, maybe (okay there were a number of years I was convinced I was going to hell, but that happens to everyone, right?). I was raised a liberal Christian by liberal Christian parents in the Episcopal Church, where most of my memories are overwhelmingly positive. Fuck, growing up in the 90’s, Chuch was probably the only place outside my home I didn’t have homophobia spewed at me. Because it was the 90’s and it was a fucking hellscape of bigotry where 5 year olds knew enough to taunt each other with homophobic slurs and the adults didn’t know enough to realize how fucked up that was. Anyway. This is my experience, but it is an atypical one, and I know it. Quite frankly I know that my experience of Christianity has very little at all to do with what most people experienced, or what people generally mean when they talk about Christianity as a cultural force in America today. So if you were raised Christian and you don’t recognize your theology here, congrats, neither do I, but these ideas and cultural forces are huge and powerful and dominant. And it’s this dominant Christian narrative that I’m referring to in this post. As well as, you know, a children’s cartoon about lesbian rainbow princesses. So here it goes. This is going to get batshit.
"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." - John Calvin
“We’re all just a bunch of wooly guys” - Noelle Stevenson
This is a post triggered by a single scene, and a single line. It’s one of the most fucked-up scenes in She-Ra, toward the end of Save the Cat. Catra, turned into a puppet by Prime, struggles with her chip, desperately trying to gain control of herself, so lost and scared and vulnerable that she flings aside her own death wish and her pride and tearfully begs Adora to rescue her. Adora reaches out , about to grab her, and then Prime takes control back, pronounces ‘disappointing’ and activates the kill switch that pitches Catra off the platform and to her death (and seriously, she dies here, guys - also Adora breaks both her legs in the fall). But before he does, he dismisses Catra with one of his most chilling lines. “Some creatures are meant only for destruction.”
And that’s when everyone watching probably had their heart broken a little bit, but some of the viewers raised in or around Christianity watching the same scene probably whispered ‘holy shit’ to themselves. Because Prime’s line - which works as a chilling and callous dismissal of Catra - is also an allusion to a passage from the Bible. In fact, it’s from one of the most fucked up passages in a book with more than its share of fucked up passages. It’s from Romans 9:22, and I’m going to quote several previous verses to give the context of the passage (if not the entire Epistle, which is more about who needs to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions but was used to construct a systematic theology in the centuries afterwards because people decided it was Eternal Truth).
19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?
20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?
21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?
22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:
The context of the allusion supports the context in the show. Prime is dismissing Catra - serial betrayer, liar, failed conqueror, former bloody-handed warlord - as worthless, as having always been worthless and fit only to be destroyed. He is speaking from a divine and authoritative perspective (because he really does think he’s God, more of this in my TL/DR Horde Prime thing). Prime is echoing not only his own haughty dismissal of Catra, and Shadow Weaver’s view of her, but also perhaps the viewer’s harshest assessment of her, and her own worst fears about herself. Catra was bad from the start, doomed to destroy and to be destroyed. A malformed pot, cracked in firing, destined to be shattered against a wall and have her shards classified by some future archaeologist 2,000 years later. And all that’s bad enough.
But the full historical and theological context of this passage shows the real depth of Noelle Stevenson’s passion and thought and care when writing this show. Noelle was raised in Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. To my knowledge, he has never specified what sect or denomination, but in interviews and her memoir Noelle has shown a particular concern for questions that this passage raises, and a particular loathing for the strains of Protestant theology that take this passage and run with it - that is to say, Calvinism. So while I’m not sure if Noelle was raised as a conservative, Calvinist Presbyterian, his preoccupation with these questions mean that it’s time to talk about Calvinism.
It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that Calvinism is a systematic theology built entirely upon the Epistles of Romans and Galatians, but only -just- (and here my Catholic readers in particular will chuckle to themselves and lovingly stroke their favorite passage of the Epistle of James). The core of Calvinist Doctrine is often expressed by the very Dutch acronym TULIP:
Total Depravity - people are wholly evil, and incapable of good action or even willing good thoughts or deeds
Unconditional Election - God chooses some people to save because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not because they did anything to deserve, trigger or accept it
Limited Atonement - Jesus died only to save the people God chose to save, not the rest of us bastards
Irresistible Grace - God chooses some people to be saved - if you didn’t want to be saved, too bad, God said so.
Perseverance of the Saints - People often forget this one and assume it’s ‘predestination’ but it’s actually this - basically, once saved by God, always saved, and if it looks like someone falls out of grace, they were never saved to begin with. Well that’s all sealed up tight I guess.
Reading through these, predestination isn’t a single doctrine in Calvinism but the entire theological underpinnings of it together with humanity’s utter powerlessness before sin. Basically God has all agency, humanity has none. Calvinism (and a lot of early modern Protestantism) is obsessed with questions of how God saves people (grace alone, AKA Sola Fides) and who God saves (the people god elects and only the people God elects, and fuck everyone else).
It’s apparent that Noelle was really taken by these questions, and repelled by the answers he heard. He’s alluded to having a tattoo refuting the Gospel passage about Sheep and Goats being sorted at the end times, affirming instead that ‘we’re all just a bunch of wooly guys’ (you can see this goat tattoo in some of his self-portraits in comics, etc). He’s also mentioned that rejecting and subverting destiny is a huge part of everything he writes as a particular rejection of the idea that some individual people are 'chosen' by God or that God has a plan for any of us. You can see that -so clearly- in Adora’s arc, where Adora embraces and then rejects destiny time and again and finally learns to live life for herself.
But for Catra, we’re much more concerned about the most negative aspect of this - the idea that some people are vessels meant for destruction. And that’s something else that Noelle is preoccupied with. In her memoir in the section about leaving the church and becoming a humanistic atheist, there is a drawing of a pot and the question ‘Am I a vessel prepared for destruction?’ Obviously this was on Noelle’s mind (And this is before he came out to himself as queer!).
To look at how this question plays out in Catra’s entire arc, let’s first talk about how ideas of damnation and salvation actually play out in society. And for that I’m going to plug one of my favorite books, Gin Lun’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (if you can tell by now, I am a fucking blast at parties). Lun tells the long and very interesting story about, how ideas of hell and who went there changed during the Early American Republic. One of the interesting developments that she talks about is how while at first people who were repelled by Calvinism started moving toward a doctrine of universal salvation (no on goes to hell, at least not forever*), eventually they decided that hell was fine as long as only the right kind of people went there. Mostly The Other - non-Christian foreigners, Catholics, Atheists, people who were sinners in ways that were not just bad but weird and violated Victorian ideas of respectability. Really, Hell became a way of othering people, and arguably that’s how it survives today, especially as a way to other queer people (but expanding this is slated for my Montero rant). Now while a lot of people were consciously rejecting Calvinist predestination, they were still drawing the distinction between the Elect (good, saved, worthwhile) and the everyone else (bad, damned, worthless). I would argue that secularized ideas of this survive to this day even among non-Christian spaces in our society - we like to draw lines between those who Elect, and those who aren’t.
And that’s what brings us back to Catra. Because Catra’s entire arc is a refutation of the idea that some people are worthless and irredeemable, either by nature, nurture or their own actions. Catra’s actions strain the conventions of who is sympathetic in a Kid’s cartoon - I’ve half joked that she’s Walter White as a cat girl, and it’s only half a joke. She’s cruel, self-deluded, she spends 4 seasons refusing to take responsibility for anything she does and until Season 5 she just about always chooses the thing that does the most damage to herself and others. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Catra is morally culpable in every step of her descent into evil (except maybe her break with reality just before she pulls the lever). The way that Catra personally betrays everyone around her, the way she strips herself of all of her better qualities and most of what makes her human, hell even her costume changes would signal in any other show that she’s irredeemable.
It’s tempting to see this as Noelle’s version of being edgy - pushing the boundaries of what a sympathetic character is, throwing out antiheroics in favor of just making the villain a protagonist. Noelle isn’t quite Alex ‘I am in the business of traumatizing children’ Hirsch, who seems to have viewed his job as pushing the bounds of what you could show on the Disney Channel (I saw Gravity Falls as an adult and a bunch of that shit lives rent free in my nightmares forever), but Noelle has his own dark side, mostly thematically. The show’s willingness to deal with abuse, and messed up religious themes, and volatile, passionate, not particularly healthy relationships feels pretty daring. I’m not joking when I gleefully recommend this show to friends as ‘a couple from a Mountain Goats Song fights for four seasons in a cartoon intended for 9 year olds’. Noelle is in his own way pushing the boundaries of what a kids show can do. If you read Noelle’s other works like Nimona, you see an argument for Noelle being at least a bit edgy. Nimona is also angry, gleefully destructive, violent and spiteful - not unlike Catra. Given that it was a 2010s webcomic and not a kids show, Nimona is a good deal worse than Catra in some ways - Catra doesn’t kill people on screen, while Nimona laughs about it (that was just like, a webcomic thing - one of the fan favorite characters in my personal favorite, Narbonic, was a fucking sociopath, and the heroes were all amoral mad scientists, except for the superintelligent gerbil**). But unlike Nimona, whose fate is left open ended, Catra is redeemed.
And that is weird. We’ve had redemption arcs, but generally not of characters with -so- much vile stuff in their history. Going back to the comparison between her and Azula, many other shows, like Avatar, would have made Catra a semi-sympathetic villain who has a sob-story in their origin but who is beyond redemption, and in so doing would articulate a kind of psychologized Calvinism where some people are too traumatized to ever be fully and truly human. I’d argue this is the problem with Azula as a character - she’s a fun villain, but she doesn’t have moral agency, and the ultimate message of her arc - that she’s a broken person destined only to hurt people - is actually pretty fucked up. And that’s the origin story of so many serial killers and psycopaths that populate so many TV shows and movies. Beyond ‘hurt people hurt people’ they have nothing to teach us except perhaps that trauma makes you a monster and that the only possible response to people doing bad things is to cut them out of your life and out of our society (and that’s why we have prisons, right?)
And so Catra’s redemption and the depths from which she claws herself back goes back to Noelle’s desire to prove that no person is a vessel ‘fitted for destruction.’ Catra goes about as far down the path of evil as we’ve ever seen a protagonist in a kids show go, and she still has the capacity for good. Importantly, she is not subject to total depravity - she is capable of a good act, if only one at first. Catra is the one who begins her own redemption (unlike in Calvinism, where grace is unearned and even unwelcomed) - because she wants something better than what she has, even if its too late, because she realizes that she never wanted any of this anyway, because she wants to do one good thing once in her life even if it kills her.
The very extremity of Catra’s descent into villainy serves to underline the point that Noelle is trying to make - that no one can be written off completely, that everyone is capable of change, and that no human being is garbage, no matter how twisted they’ve become. Meanwhile her ability to set her own redemption in motion is a powerful statement of human agency, and healing, and a refutation of Calvinism’s idea that we are powerless before sin or pop cultural tropes about us being powerful before the traumas of our upbringing. Catra’s arc, then, is a kind of anti-Calvinist theological statement - about the nature of people and the nature of goodness.
Now, there is a darker side to this that Noelle has only hinted at, but which is suggested by other characters on the show. Because while Catra’s redemption shows that people are capable of change, even when they’ve done horrible things, been fucked up and fucked themselves up, it also illustrates the things people do to themselves that make change hard. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, two of the most sinister parts of her descent into villainy are her self-dehumanization (crushing her own compassion and desire to do good) and her rewriting of her own history in her speech and memory to make her own actions seem justified (which we see with her insistence that Adora left her, eliding Adora’s offers to have Catra join her, or her even more clearly false insistence that Entrapta had betrayed them). In Catra, these processes keep her going down the path of evil, and allow her to nearly destroy herself and everyone else. But we can see the same processes at work in two much darker figures - Shadow Weaver and Horde Prime. These are both rants for another day, but the completeness of Shadow Weaver’s narcissistic self-justification and cultivated callousness and the even more complete narcissism of Prime’s god complex cut both characters off from everyone around them. Perhaps, in a theoretical sense, they are still redeemable, but for narrative purposes they might as well be damned.
This willingness to show a case where someone -isn’t- redeemed actually serves to make Catra’s redemption more believable, especially since Noelle and the writers draw the distinction between how Catra and SW/Prime can relate to reality and other people, not how broken they are by their trauma (unlike Zuko and Azula, who are differentiated by How Fucked Uolp They Are). Redemption is there, it’s an option, we can always do what is right, but someone people will choose not to, in part because doing the right thing involves opening ourselves to the world and others, and thus being vulnerable. Noelle mentions this offhandedly in an interview after Season 1 with the She-Ra Progressive of Power podcast - “I sometimes think that shades of grey, sympathetic villains are part of the escapist fantasy of shows like this.” Because in the real world, some people are just bastards, a point that was particularly clear in 2017. Prime and Shadow Weaver admit this reality, while Catra makes a philosophical point that even the bastards can change their ways (at least in theory).
*An idea first proposed in the second century by Origen, who’s a trip and a fucking half by himself, and an idea that becomes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which protestants vehemently denied!
**Speaking of favorite Noelle tropes
understanding catra in taking control s5: ep 6
(lots of awesome people have already said some amazing things about this, but it’s been on my mind a lot especially since i’ve been seeing some anti catra bullshit lately)
first off, i want to say that i don’t think that catra is necessarily handling the situation well, but i often see people saying some crazy shit about how she’s so “ungrateful” to adora for rescuing her or whatever and just generally being incredibly insensitive to her.
you have to remember everything that catra has gone through up until the point. horde prime had just completely violated her body and mind, electrocuting her in the baptismal pool, cutting off her hair, and infiltrating her memories. catra, who is already deeply afraid of the losing control (namely to shadow weaver, who taught her that power and control were necessary to be safe from her abuse), just lost all of her autonomy in the most fucking disturbing, pseudo-religious way possible.
before this, catra fully expected to die. i’ve seen a lot of different takes and i’m relatively open-minded to about what it is that catra thinks specifically when she remembers that scene with her and adora’s younger selves in corridors, but i think that it’s something along these lines:
“all i’ve ever done is hurt adora, and all she ever tried to do was love me instead. i’ve loved her and wanted her more than anyone else, and still all i did was hurt her. adora finally gave up on me, like i deserved all along anyway. but maybe, just maybe, the last thing i do could be for her. maybe that last little piece of goodness in me could live on in her.”
hence the:
“all i do is hurt people. there’s no one left in the entire universe who cares about me.”
anyway, my point is that catra has been through fucking hell :(
adora rescues her, and in the moment, catra is (obviously) relieved, shocked, surprised, confused, even. (“why did you come back? we both know i don’t matter.”)
the confusion is the main thing i want to focus on. catra really truly believes that adora hates her (shadow weaver has conditioned her to believe that she has always been inherently worthless and unlovable), so catra can’t understand why adora would ever come back for her.
catra eventually comes to the conclusion that adora just wanted to feel like a hero. she just came back to rescue catra to prove her virtue or her moral superiority to catra.
so she lashes out. she feels so completely out of control, and bitter with adora for her actions, convinced that there is no way that adora came back for her out of love.
adora handles this like shit. the literal first thing she does is throw the mattress onto the floor, and later slams catra into the wall. adora lashes back at catra, hurt that catra doesn’t “appreciate” adora’s love for her. adora doesn’t even try for two fucking seconds to understand where catra is coming from.
(adora does have a consistent issue with only seeming to be able to empathize with catra’s emotions when catra is weak, vulnerable, and powerless throughout much of series honestly)
ugh and calling her a stubborn brat? like i love you adora, but that makes my blood fucking boil. it is SUCH condescending, shadow weaver-coded language to use toward catra. i understand, catra is being “difficult” or whatever, but god it’s so easy to see why catra is acting the way she is.
and ofc catra is scared of entrapta! obviously, catra wronged entrapta deeply, and catra has never lived in a world with grace and forgiveness. shadow weaver physically abused her all her life, and hordak suffocated her for losing shadow weaver and lying to him about it. catra knows that she hurt entrapta, so naturally she immediately assumes that entrapta is going to fucking kill her the minute she has a chance.
then adora’s reaction is to fucking shove her into the wall and tell her to “grow up”. catra just looks fucking terrified, backed into the corner in her little horde pjs :(
adora backs off for a moment and tells catra that she would respect her wish to drop her off somewhere, catra realizes that adora really could leave her, and immediately rushes to beg adora to stay, kneeling on the ground, reaching up for her hand. something about that whole scene just absolutely fucking breaks my heart.
it kills something in me when i hear people say that catra didn’t do enough for redemption. it’s never what her redemption was ever about. catra is genuinely so, so much more complicated than that. and so is adora! i’m still sad that adora never really made up to catra for some of her shitty behavior.
i don’t believe that their arcs are meant to be done at the end of the show. there’s still so much room for them to grow. and that is what the post canon fics are for lol
oops this ended up being wayyy more of a rant than i intended; i think about catradora all the time :)
catra in her princess prom suit, gotta be one of my favorite genders
catradora and the perfect victim complex
(i literally fucking think about this all the time so this just gonna be a rant lol)
i really, truly think that people in general don’t put the effort into understanding characters who are imperfect victims. for them, it destroys the appeal of victimhood. victimhood (especially when the victims in question are girls, women, femme presenting people, etc.) needs to be beautiful and tragic. think characters like ophelia, snow white, odette, juliet, the lisbon sisters. otherwise, their victimhood is no longer attractive.
catra is an imperfect victim. shadow weaver’s abuse did not make her soft, weak, timid, or fragile. it made her bitter, angry, and resentful.
i once saw a catra anti saying some bullshit about how they might’ve liked catra more if the writers had spent more screen time showing shadow weaver abusing her, specifically her when she was a kid.
this person wanted to see catra’s pain as beautiful. they wanted to see her ONLY as a child to be pitied, the little kid who cowered in fear instead of fighting back, and not have to acknowledge catra’s more complicated character traits.
i also think this is why these same people often talk like they love adora, like “adora deserves better than catra” and all that shit. adora (to them) is easier to see as a perfect victim. shadow weaver’s abuse made her obedient and self-sacrificing. it made her put others before herself, even to the point of fucking death. adora is selfless and brave. she’s so determined to be a perfect hero, to protect people, to care for people, to love people. these traits are easier to romanticize. it makes her seem beautiful.
if you ask me, this is a really fucked up way of viewing adora. i don’t love adora bc she’s a “perfect victim”, i love adora bc she, like catra, is also flawed. adora’s determination to be perfect leads her to abandoning catra. her inability to empathize with catra leads her to behaving the way she did in taking control. adora isn’t fucking perfect.
(for context i do also think that catra was in the wrong in that episode too, but i feel like we don’t talk enough about how badly adora was handling the situation. like seriously girl catra is here basically telling her “i don’t trust you bc i don’t believe that you could ever love me bc i’m inherently fucked up and unlovable” and adora’s immediate reaction is to blow up at her. it makes sense given what adora has just done for her, but it’s another example of adora being incapable of empathizing with catra. also calling her a stubborn brat? yeah uh that wasn’t funny adora, especially not with the ways that shadow weaver talked about catra.)
but i love that adora is flawed, and i love that catra is flawed. they’re not archetypes. no real person experiences abuse like they did and comes out perfect. catra’s intense fear of abandonment and resentment issues are a very fucking real response to the way she was traumatized. regardless of how ugly it is.
at the end of the day, i think that people can’t wrap their brains around this concept and refuse to empathize with imperfect victims bc they don’t want to admit that they, too, are imperfect victims. the perfect victim isn’t real. it’s a fucking myth.
in real life, people are messy and complicated, like catra and adora. it’s why i love them :)
ugh i could literally go on about this FOREVER i swear.
i'd say this is the last time i'll ever mention the jump in save the cat.. but i think we'd both know i was lying.
cause i know the first time i ranted on it my focus was on how heart-wrenching it is to think adora jumped without any idea or awareness quite yet of the fact that transforming without the sword was not only possible - but would actually conjure her true she-ra form, one far more seemingly invincible, able to innately wield her magic and abilities, displaying prowess and powers she had never before reached after all her training with light hope.
and how that meant she jumped just cause she couldn't stand the thought of catra dying down there alone, and even though it meant she might end up dying down there with her, one way or another, at least catra wouldn't have to face the end on her own.
but then i was making an amv using these scenes for literally prob like the 30th time lol annnd then the thought hit me - she had to have known there was a good chance catra wouldn't have survived the fall at all. and with the bottom cloaked in shadows, there was no way for her to know how far she, adora, would fall herself if she were to jump. so her own survival of even just the impact without her she-ra form was no guarantee, either.
but she still goes after her. she takes that risk. cause she can't just leave catra in the dark.
never could
never really meant to
never will again
and catra? ends up doing the same for adora. over and over. i'd add more examples but i hit my gif limit lol
<3
this is actually so so fucking true and i cannot believe that it’s literally like fucking six years later and STILL people are saying the same silly shit about catra being primarily a sub.
and catra doesn’t just want adora’s love: she wants to be equal to adora. she wants adora to value her. that’s a major fucking piece of her character.
this post just sums up all my thoughts perfectly <3
Catradora are both tops and Catra is a dom, change my mind
(Actually, don’t change my mind. I’m not writing this to cause drama, I’m writing this because Catradora sexual discourse is frustrating me and I want basically a masterpost to link back to whenever I need to explain my apparently controversial views on this shit. Hopefully some other people will also find that it speaks to/for them and be able to use it for the same purpose. Please don’t troll me, I’m but a simple girl who needs to be understood. I am, however, totally open to respectful debate. :)
Okay, I’d like to take some time here to follow up on my previous posts about how Catra and Adora are both vers-tops and Catra is so not a sub. I feel a little silly writing a long meta about the sexual dynamics of a femslash ship in a cartoon aimed at kids and teens, but there’s reason for it. For some reason, lots of fics write one or both of them in ways that feel extremely out of character, perhaps to make them fit the mold for a particular kink or sexual trope. And people will write what “works” for them ugh, and I’m not kinkshaming on principle, but some of it feels extremely disrespectful to the characters. Particularly Catra, given her backstory and struggles so far in the series, and I find this rather troubling.
And unfortunately, some of these things that are written to fit some sexual trope have ended up entering the more general discourse and morphing the fanon interpretation of the characters into something urecognizable, something that would make the canon characters mad if they read it. That’s another big reason why I’m bothering to write all this.
Let’s start with a clarification: when I said Catradora are both tops, I meant they would fight each other for control of an encounter and that’s totally fine and we don’t need to make hard statements about who is the top because it comes naturally to both of them. But I didn’t mean they would necessarily want control for the same reasons or that they are interchangeable in the sack. IMO, Catra is a dominant vers-top and Adora is the definition of a service top (but also versatile if that’s what works for her partner). These may be unpopular opinions (honestly why?), but I am fully prepared to back them up. *cracks knuckles*
I’m going to explain my biggest point first and then put a bunch of additional thoughts under the cut. That point being we need to consider Catra and Adora’s relationships with power.
Here’s the thing. For Catra, power is safety, power is an accomplishment she is proud of. She has fought/longed her whole life to be taken seriously. She has always felt disrespected and like she lacked agency (both of which are true, actually), so feeling respected and in control is very important to her.
This is especially true of her relationship with Adora, as she feels like Adora has been controlling her for most of their lives and doesn’t respect her. She resents that Adora has been in the “power position” for ages and is actively trying to change that.
Didn’t anybody else see how she got off on those guards standing at attention as she walked by in 2x01, and how tickled she was standing on top of Dryl in 2x02, overlooking her troops taking it over? Catra gets off on power, why would she not also literally get off on it?
To Catra, giving up power would feel like a failure.
For Adora, power is a burden. Yes she is an absolute control freak, but that’s because she feels like she needs to control everything because if anything goes wrong it’s all her fault. Shadow Weaver instilled this idea in her when she was very young, the way she was groomed to be a leader in the Horde reinforced it, and now being She-Ra has made that feeling inescapable for her.
I’ve seen people use the “person who has a lot of power irl wants to give it up in the sack” concept to explain why they see Catra as a sub, but imo it works way better for Adora because she has always been saddled with power, even when she didn’t want it. I will get into this more under the cut, but we have seen Adora resenting and struggling with all her responsibilities on multiple occasions.
To Adora, giving up power would feel like a relief (once she got past the mental block of needing to control everything).
(This isn’t all to say that Catra would be running shit 100% of this time, I do actually think both are somewhat versatile in terms of top/bottom and dom/sub classification. I’m just making a hard case in this direction because I think they lean this way and because so many people seem weirdly convinced that Adora would 100% dominate Catra all the time and it’s weird and a little offensive.)
Now, let’s move on to my additional thoughts! The tl;dr of it all is: brattiness =/= submissiveness (quite the opposite, in fact), why the hell would an abuse survivor want to relive her trauma, this master/pet nonsense is racist af, Adora is not a starfish wtf, and Adora is a good little soldier who likes following orders.
(Plus new bonus content: Catra’s love and protection of Adora signals she’s a top, not just a dom.)
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casings by ethel cain is SO catradora-coded that it's driving me fucking insane and i can't think about anything else.
ethel asking "am i not good enough for you, is there something wrong with me?" and literally all i can imagine is catra not understanding why she wasn't good enough for adora to stay with her :(
and catra thinking that adora replaced her with glimmer and bow, how adora was so willing to give everything up she had with catra for them
ofc we, as the audience, understand why adora left (we understand adora's savior complex and her moral drive), but the only explanation that catra can imagine is that she never mattered to adora as much as as adora mattered to her.
and actually, if you ask me, i think that's partially true. shadow weaver made is extremely fucking clear to catra that she had no worth outside of adora. without adora's affection, catra meant nothing. growing up, catra's whole sense of herself is so intrinsically tied to who she is to adora. adora is her lifeline.
this isn't true for adora. her worth is tied to her usefulness, her strength, her obedience. shadow weaver also made that incredibly clear to her too. it's why becoming she-ra in the first season is the worst possible thing that could've happened to her.
it's why she leaves and catra stays and grieves.
it's not to say that adora doesn't love catra. adora loves her so, so much. she loves her with everything that she is, but she can't let herself love catra, because she has to be perfect. the perfect soldier, the perfect she-ra, the perfect hero, etc.
ugh the catradora angst is just unmatched. and now every single time i hear this stupidly beautiful and heartbreaking ethel song, all i can think about is them :((
stop it hurts :((((((
jumping into the abyss goodbyeeeeeeeee
some catra faces i feel like ranting about
^^here have some silliness before the wounds below <3
their only direct interaction all of season 4 whyyyy does it kill me so much to know that. damnit. it's not all that surprising catra would feel it confirmed: adora's done with her. the look she gives catra after she hops out of the way just in time says only one thing to me- "dodge it or don't. idfc."
that little smile on catra's face when she says "don't sound so happy to hear me" - because she's so fucking happy to get to hear adora one more time. just kill me already, i'll even dig the grave myself aight
this is a darker thought forsure, just a heads up, but i've always been fairly certain (and i don't think it's an uncommon theory) that at some point between catra's ragged breathing in adora's arms and her complete lack of breath when she attempts to heal her - catra has actually died. and i've kinda come to theorize this is the moment she exhales her last as her head tips back and to the side, looking up at adora and almost sorta smiling. it would make sense too as to why adora doesn't bother much with tryna be careful w her after that point - it becomes more crucial to get her out of there and somewhere safe for her to try n heal her asap.
and the moment catra sees adora just gave up. the first time she yells her name cause she knows that's what adora had just done. are you fcking kidding me 💔🪦
and closing w this one cause well the way adora smiles when she looks at her is just dumb amounts of sweet <3
i’m sorry to say that this part of catra’s story hits a little too close to home :(
i love her sm
dude…… the nuance with which she-ra netflix reboot approaches a relationship an abuse victim has w their abuser…. the fact that catra hates shadow weavers guts for everything she put her through but also fundamentally cannot help but care about her…the fact that despite everything she still wants shadow weavers love and approval even if its unhealthy and she knows externally that shadow weavers not worth it…….. bro the understanding of the complexity of these things that the show exhibits……