or it could be a terrible curse that would provide the premise for an ominous moral parable...

You know sometimes you dislike something but you don't know what about it you dislike? Wouldn't it be an amazing talent to always be able to figure it out? Like debugging a CSS problem, if all you had to do was inspect the page source and then dig through some layers of stylesheets looking for the rule that did it.

Childhood Trauma and She-Ra: Original Series

In She-Ra (1985), our heroine was always raised by Hordak and Shadow Weaver in the Fright Zone surrounded by the Horde, and this was not going to be a healthy childhood any way you look at it, but the show didn't really deal with that. ( Read more... )

And in a change that I'm actually very excited about, the new Reboot She-Ra has made a real effort to explore all this, showing both Adora and Catra's traumatic childhoods and also showing that those experiences are still affecting them in the show's present timeline.

So excited that I took like a month to finish this next post about it (haha...).

Adora and Catra's Parallel Childhood Trauma

Authority and responsibility, perfectionism and prickliness, vigilance and security, and the 'golden child'/scapegoat dynamic

I've been working on this for almost a month and I've spent so long editing that I could've written three more posts instead. Enough. It's a bit like three different posts, but I decided to keep the trauma topic together.

( Adora and Catra are harmed by their shared experience in separate but related ways, and the parallels between them are used to illustrate the abuse they went through and how it affects them. ...*Most* of these are successful. )