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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.
Hordak and Shadow Weaver were both obviously incapable of true affection; best-case scenario would be that she has no real relationship with either of them and bonds emotionally to her governess, Shakra; far more likely would be emotional abuse, brain-washing and mind games.
Even if the worst Adora suffered from her guardians was propaganda and insincere simulations of affection, growing up with your only stable attachment being to a governess in the midst of a military base run by a sadistic megalomaniac for the purpose of brutally crushing a conquered planet and extracting its natural resources? Yeah, even if the governess was able to shield her from danger and awareness of it, it can't be a healthy environment. If nothing else, the governess is privately aware she lives in an authoritarian dictatorship subject to the whims of a ruthless, capricious tyrant.
(In reality, the children of powerful and wealthy people who are violent and evil at work may well be so insulated from their parents' lives that they don't learn about it until they're as old as Adora in She-Ra (1985), but that typically involves boarding schools, or at least very nice neighborhoods far from the scene of, you know... villainy. It's hard to imagine keeping these secrets successfully, even from a child, in a place like the Fright Zone, which seems to be of normal size for a military base and lacks any civilian infrastructure.)
Someone raised by literal cartoon villains is not going to emerge without scars. The old show... didn't show any of this, and there was no plausible way to interpret that.
Rather, when we first meet the original 80s Adora, she's a bit of a sheltered princess. The story of her awakening throughout the first few episodes is actually reminiscent of Guatama Buddha's (and of plenty of folklore), with her complete ignorance of the Horde's nature (exploitative and tyrannical) and of the terrible suffering that exists outside the walls of the Fright Zone, and then her running away on a quest to learn the truth for herself. After she joins the Rebellion, she is, as I stated in my last She-Ra post, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (s1) Review: Some Ways it is Better & a Couple of Differences (hereafter "Ways it's Better"), "a very self-confident, shrewd, and self-controlled woman, who at least gave the impression of being calm and in control and knowing what she was doing when she was She-Ra".
As I argued there, it's not unrealistic for Adora to present herself this way, but it would be the result of dissociating from her emotions, perhaps even subconsciously (a frequent coping mechanism for abuse survivors). Conscious emotional control is equally taxing; the performance of effortless calm and confidence would be the same sort of classic emotional labor as the service industry performance of friendliness and endless patience. There are moments in the old show where Adora needs time on her own or a vacation, but that's the extent of it. We get no glimpses of her struggles or the scars left by her past.
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...).
Hordak and Shadow Weaver were both obviously incapable of true affection; best-case scenario would be that she has no real relationship with either of them and bonds emotionally to her governess, Shakra; far more likely would be emotional abuse, brain-washing and mind games.
Even if the worst Adora suffered from her guardians was propaganda and insincere simulations of affection, growing up with your only stable attachment being to a governess in the midst of a military base run by a sadistic megalomaniac for the purpose of brutally crushing a conquered planet and extracting its natural resources? Yeah, even if the governess was able to shield her from danger and awareness of it, it can't be a healthy environment. If nothing else, the governess is privately aware she lives in an authoritarian dictatorship subject to the whims of a ruthless, capricious tyrant.
(In reality, the children of powerful and wealthy people who are violent and evil at work may well be so insulated from their parents' lives that they don't learn about it until they're as old as Adora in She-Ra (1985), but that typically involves boarding schools, or at least very nice neighborhoods far from the scene of, you know... villainy. It's hard to imagine keeping these secrets successfully, even from a child, in a place like the Fright Zone, which seems to be of normal size for a military base and lacks any civilian infrastructure.)
Someone raised by literal cartoon villains is not going to emerge without scars. The old show... didn't show any of this, and there was no plausible way to interpret that.
Rather, when we first meet the original 80s Adora, she's a bit of a sheltered princess. The story of her awakening throughout the first few episodes is actually reminiscent of Guatama Buddha's (and of plenty of folklore), with her complete ignorance of the Horde's nature (exploitative and tyrannical) and of the terrible suffering that exists outside the walls of the Fright Zone, and then her running away on a quest to learn the truth for herself. After she joins the Rebellion, she is, as I stated in my last She-Ra post, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (s1) Review: Some Ways it is Better & a Couple of Differences (hereafter "Ways it's Better"), "a very self-confident, shrewd, and self-controlled woman, who at least gave the impression of being calm and in control and knowing what she was doing when she was She-Ra".
As I argued there, it's not unrealistic for Adora to present herself this way, but it would be the result of dissociating from her emotions, perhaps even subconsciously (a frequent coping mechanism for abuse survivors). Conscious emotional control is equally taxing; the performance of effortless calm and confidence would be the same sort of classic emotional labor as the service industry performance of friendliness and endless patience. There are moments in the old show where Adora needs time on her own or a vacation, but that's the extent of it. We get no glimpses of her struggles or the scars left by her past.
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...).