Review: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)

Current mood: THEY'RE GAY YOUR HONOR

Ok. I can't believe I'm actually writing a review post before a new year post that was in my drafts since January. And I only have one post in 2021 which is crazy to even think about but I digress. I'm not here to reflect on my inconsistent updates but to scream about a Netflix show. So here we are.

See, the thing about Youtube is that you can watch one random video and get 5814467412 more recommended and you just spiral down. That was what happened. SPOP might have came out in 2018 and officially ended mid 2020 (so that's 2 years since) but I have some scenes shoved in the back of my mind that make me go 'huh that was a thing', which prompted me to actually watch the show  ̶o̶n̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶d̶a̶d̶'̶s̶ ̶T̶V̶b̶o̶x̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ so anyway I made a bad decision to binge it a day before work starts and it was bad. I spent every waking moment of the first week of March thinking of nothing but fucking gays. Spoilers I guess?

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018) is a Dreamworks production aired in Netflix with 5 seasons in a cartoony-anime style reminiscent of ATLA. It has little to do with the og She-Ra cartoons from the 80s, instead taking its concept and characters to tell a different story. It also has no ties to He-Man so basically you can go into this blind.

Title card for S1-4, featuring a gay ass rainbow

Season 1 starts by introducing our focus characters: Adora, who is obviously the main character and Catra, her childhood best friend/rival of sorts, who is, as the name suggests, a catgirl. They're orphans raised as child soldiers in the Fright Zone by the Horde, an alien colony on Etheria. Against the Horde is the Rebellion, led by the magical princesses, who fight to protect the people from the Horde. Adora doesn't know this because she was so thoroughly indoctrinated by the Horde, believing the Horde to be good and the princesses violent and evil. Catra, meanwhile, always had a hunch because she was abused as a kid by their parental figure Shadow Weaver (who is a bitch you will see me calling her this every time she is relevant to the plot), so you know. If the Horde truly was good they wouldn't be abusing a literal kid. In the middle of it all is the antagonist Hordak whose agenda for the Horde is as vague as world domination.

The story progresses as you'd expect: Adora finds a magical sword in the Whispering Woods that calls to her, gets caught by the rebellion and turns into the legendary She-Ra by using the sword and saves her captors from certain death. Her rebellion captors are Glimmer, the princess of Brightmoon and Bow, your average human with a... bow. Apparently the sword is a First Ones tech that could be used to help the rebellion, and Adora being the only one who can use it to turn into a literal 8ft tall goddess means Gilmmer has to take her back to the queen of Brightmoon aka her mom, Queen Angella.

Adora starts having doubts about what the Horde actually does when tanks and shit start bombarding the peaceful village they're resting at. Catra is leading the charge and the two breakup, in ways more than one. Adora wields the sword, says the password and becomes She-Ra. She chases out the Horde soldiers and officially defects. It takes some soul searching for Adora to be accepted by the rebellion and with She-Ra on their side, Glimmer goes on a diplomatic mission to rebuild the Princess Alliance. So begins the S1 plot of 'gotta catch 'em all' and by that I mean collecting princesses/allies. Of course the 'gotta catch 'em all' plot culminates in a big battle at the end of S1 where everyone works together to push back the Horde raid on Brightmoon led by our resident catgirl Catra.

S2 and S3 have equal parts filler and plot episodes, being the two shortest seasons with 7 and 6 episodes respectively. As the story goes on, you get the sense that Hordak's plan for Etheria does not stop at world domination; there's a lot of talk about portals and dimensions and whatnot. The end of S3 takes all the plot and runs with it, ending in two what-if episodes where everything is perfect... until it is not. Angella pulls the sword out of the center of the portal, stops the illusion and saves everyone, but she is trapped forever between dimensions. With this, the breakup between Catra and Adora is official.

S4 gets into the meat of the Hordak's portal plot with new characters, conflict and overworldliness. Adora no longer holds her punches when it comes to stopping Catra, not anymore after S3. At the same time, the Princess Alliance is breaking from the inside, mostly due to a spy and partly because of Glimmer's bad decisions. They find out Etheria is a superweapon by the First Ones too late and Adora is forced to destroy the sword to save the planet. Unfortunately for everyone, Catra's shit in S3 plus Glimmer's in S4 have caught the attention of a even bigger threat - Horde Prime.

Nothing says high stakes like an intergalactic conqueror coming in to destroy your planet. Having fought each other for so long, Catra and Glimmer are now in the same frying pan for once, under Horde Prime's mercy, in space. With the sword gone, Adora is now normal ass like Bow and has a little trouble getting used to not being a literal 8ft tall goddess. Adora and Bow fix a First One's ship to save Glimmer while shit goes down in Etheria with Horde bots and clones and even brainwashing. Catra finally decides to do one good thing in her life and sends Glimmer away from Prime's ship, straight to Adora's ship, all so she won't have to come and face Prime. Adora goes back for Catra anyway, saves her, gains the ability to become She-Ra without the sword and busts out of there. They make up after all the fighting, which is pretty sweet. In the dickest of moves Prime infects the superweapon with his own virus and when all hope seems lost...

GAY SAVED THE WORLD BITCH, basically, this:

"We'll save the world with the power of gay!" indeed.

I am not going to spoil the ending because it is so fucking good. I'm so touched.

One of the many S5 title cards, featuring a gay ass rainbow

"I watch SPOP for the plot" hell yeah the plot being Adora and Catra having the hots for each other for 5 seasons! Why are you boo-ing me I'm right! There is literally no heterosexual explanation for whatever that is Adora and Catra. None. S5 just took the gay and sprinted to the finishing line. It is so gay I watched it at least 3 times. I stayed up till 2am to watch the gay so I don't have to think about it the next day at work but BUT I DID ANYWAY and finished binging everything on the office PC. The fact that ND (the producer) didn't expect everyone to catch on as early as S1 is very telling about the subtext they put in, especially the Princess Prom episode. That was gay as fuck! Ignoring the gay of the main characters there is MORE GAY in the form of gay dads! Gay moms! Gay princesses! All the gay! Is there a character that is straight in this show? I don't even know because all I see is GAY!

The reason why this ship rips your heart out is the childhood friends to rivals to enemies to lovers dynamic that started the whole story, and this is not mentioning the pining and yearning and slow burn that we all love in fanfics. When they were on opposite sides of the conflict their relationship was meant to burn and scar; only in S5 when they finally stood side by side that we see without bitch Shadow Weaver looming behind their backs, these two actually love each other. I can't even write this sentence without thinking of the many instances where Adora and Catra just hearteyes at each other.

And now for the thirst! This show is like, made for me. She-Ra? Hot as fuck! Doesn't matter if it's Adora or Mara, She-Ra will always be hot. Scorpia? Have you seen her dress? Her back? Huntara??? Those arms? Those legs? The abs??!!!! FUCK! To a lesser extent, Angella the slender, immortal angel mom? Not so much of my type but when she stands next to her husband King Micah... Oh. Oh. (nervous laugh) That's- that's a big woman. Adora has the same tastes in women as me when she's not being Catrasexual. Just- big buff women. That's it. 

Of course the show has its heart wrenching moments too. The episodes that hit me the hardest were all from S4. Hero and Destiny Part 2, the former being a whole episode about Razz trying to remember Mara, and the latter during Adora's sword-destroying sequence, where Light Hope resists her programming. There's also one in Beast Island where Adora almost succumbs to the signal but manages to break away by remembering Angella's final moments. I didn't tear up during the actual episode in S3 because I saw it coming, but the brief flashback in Beast Island did it for me.

Jokes aside, this show has done a lot for me in terms of queer rep, not in the sense of me needing any rep in media, but just letting me see a good lesbian relationship. I have read cute lesbian shit before but it always straddles the line between 'actually good lesbian smut' to 'lesbian relationship sexualized by men' and honestly it is tiring. I know the recent hit show Arcane did a fantastic job too (but its LOL so I'm kinna sorta not willing to see it) and Euphoria also has some raw moments so we've definitely come a long way from just subtext or post-finale tidbits and awful cringe-worthy lesbian relationships.

I have a new found appreciation for wlw and that opens up a whole lot of possibilities. Which is great because now I can read explicit wlw fanfics without feeling out of place or like a creep. Like any hyperfixation this will most probably be shoved to the back of my mind after a few months but it will definitely pop out once in a while. I didn't put one of the quotes into my sadface book for nothing.

There is so much more to this show than what I summarized, I know all I said was "GAY" but trust me it's not all that gay... ok it is very gay but give it a chance! In the end it is still a story about love and friendship and finding your self worth.

And here is the dark reprise of the theme song by Catra's VA AJ Michalka, with signature catchphrase at the end. Tell me this isn't gay.