cimorene

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.

I refer to Adora and Catra as siblings or sisters in this post. This is mostly because 'foster or adoptive siblings/sisters' and similar phrases are less convenient, and the distinction isn't necessary when it comes to the dynamics in question. It's not a judgment about their own concepts of each other.

In contrast to the original (discussed in my previous post, Childhood Trauma and She-Ra: Original Series), the new She-Ra and the Princesses of Power has worked hard at showing the trauma of growing up in the Fright Zone for both Adora and Catra. The new show takes a secondary villain with a two-dimensional personality cobbled together out of a toy-selling superpower¹ and a weird vocal affectation and turns her into a complete counterpoint to Adora, and the parallels between them are used to illustrate the abuse they went through and how it affects them. Most of these are successful.

There are several flashbacks of Adora and Catra at different ages growing up in the Fright Zone that suggest Shadow Weaver has had more or less sole charge of them. She treats them very differently - in effect uses their attachment to each other to torture them both, with the result that they are both harmed by their shared experience in separate but related ways. Both have issues with authority; Catra resents it as the source of all her pain and Adora, unable to trust it, takes all available responsibility on herself. Both Adora's and Catra's abilities to connect emotionally to other people are warped: Catra avoids closeness to protect herself from further hurt and Adora compulsively seeks praise through achievement, subconsciously believing any fault will result in affection being taken away. They've both been traumatized by never knowing true security; Catra pursues power at all costs, believing the only safety is the power to hurt others first, while Adora's perfectionism rarely lets her relax her alertness for signs of danger. Overall it's a very complete picture of a particular abusive dynamic and the children's roles in it often referred to as 'golden child' and 'scapegoat'.

The most obvious consequence of a childhood without trustworthy adults or safe places is an inability to trust authority figures and an inability to feel safe. Shadow Weaver has sole responsibility for them and is shown to be abusive, unpredictable, manipulative and sadistic, and has been deliberately grooming ("conditioning", in Hordak's words) them to command Horde forces. There's no hint that she was ever even slightly nurturing, and the only interactions we're shown with other adults are Catra and Adora pranking one and racing away (evidently there was no nanny). This teaches them both that authority figures are not to be trusted, though Catra suffered worse and consequently hates them intensely, while Adora simply takes for granted that she has to take responsibility for everything directly herself. This also explains Catra's determination to seek power, which she views as the only form of security: she has experienced power only when it makes her someone's victim, and as for security, for young children there can be no security without a trustworthy caretaker. The more they suffer at the hands of the adults they rely on, the less security they ever feel, and Catra's suffering was the worst.

Catra's avoidance of emotional intimacy, pathological need for security, and emotional dysregulation

The fact that their trauma continues to affect them in their adult lives is most obvious in Catra, because her anger at Adora runs through the plot. Even apart from Adora, though, Catra's quest for power is explicitly tied to security for her when she says something about how it's the only way to prevent people from hurting you. She's also prickly all the time and wholly cynical about the universe and the people in it, which are sensible reactions to a very bad childhood in a very bad place: she's been hurt and her prickliness and low expectations are attempts to keep from being hurt in the future, just like her quest for power is. And then there's what is perhaps the most striking feature of this new Catra: like many "disaffected youth" characters, Catra is always simmering with anger. She sees the unfairness all around her and she rightly resents it, and that resentment - which, like all anger, at its root is hurt and fear - sometimes even overwhelms her better judgment. While that might not be saying much for most people, it is very significant for Catra, because in every other way she's shown herself to be observant, strategic, and cautious above all. She's a thinker, a planner, a player of the long game; and keeping herself safe is her primary (or sole) goal for most of the first series, yet she still allows herself to make impulsive decisions in the grip of emotion: decisions that, in her situation, could well have fatal consequences. In other words, Catra quite definitely has some trouble regulating her emotions, which can be associated with early trauma.

Adora's compulsive perfectionism and parentification

Adora, too, displays signs of her childhood trauma. As iconically illustrated in the sequence where she can't get to sleep while a) alone in the room or b) in a giant floating "princess bed" cloud thingy, Adora's life has clearly left her unfamiliar with freedom - even free time, as mentioned in the episode with Castaspella. She is a perfectionist, and, we're shown, a lifelong overachiever. Both her anxiety to excel (and win approval) and her self-flagellation over failing to achieve faultless perfection (as in the Perfuma episode) are typical of the children of narcissists. This is because narcissists see their families (and often underlings etc) as extensions of their own egos and award or withhold affection according to how good the children make them look. This dynamic takes an even darker cast when we learn through flashbacks later in the season that Shadow Weaver has given Adora (at what looks like age 8-10 or so) literal responsibility for her sister's life, threatening to get rid of Catra if Adora fails to keep her in check (and earn both their places through her own usefulness, is implied). For Adora, staying in the good graces of Shadow Weaver and Hordak by excelling as much as possible at everything has been a way of life - not just a way to get what she wants (as is the case with many perfectionists), but to ensure her and Catra's safety - and that meant she could never rest, could never let her guard down. This terrible responsibility is an exaggeration, or even a literal manifestation, of the typical parentification that children of abusers and addicts often undergo, in which they are made responsible for caretaking of family members.

That makes quite a few facets of Adora's and Catra's personalities that rang true to me, but not all of them did.

Adora and Hypervigilance (?)

Where the original Adora never revealed weaknesses, Reboot Adora is shown stumbling along, trying her best, obviously with no idea what she's doing, and that's achieved by her making a range of missteps and displays of naivety, some of which work better than others. She makes quite a few errors in judgement that, while they sound teenaged on paper, in my view don't fit with what we know of her. Youth, inexperience, and blind spots resulting from childhood trauma should all lead to some unwise behaviors, yes - but that doesn't mean that they should lead to just any unwise behaviors. It's not enough to slap on a Teenaged Problem and call it a day.

Bow and Glimmer in Reboot She-Ra, for example, are easy analogues for modern teenagers. Glimmer is literally a princess, who has been sheltered for much of her life and is struggling for greater freedom. The similarity to familiar sitcom teenagers is clever and funny on Bow and Glimmer. But for a traumatized, unsocialized orphan raised on a totalitarian military base by a manipulative sadist, adolescence is going to look very different. Children who have been adultified still have adolescence - but that doesn't mean that it works the same way in them as it does in pampered teenagers feeling stifled by protective parents.

Teenagers who haven't faced real peril or hardship do have difficulty prioritizing problems by seriousness, even really dangerous ones, because they haven't faced enough danger to condition them to it. They're often self-centered, in the sense that their own problems consume most of their attention. They often lack confidence because they lack experience. But for Adora to, for example, absent-mindedly forget her very real concerns about safety and survival because of a minor interpersonal drama among her friends? To simply be too busy apparently to worry about the fact that her sister and heretofore only friend elects to remain in the Horde (and perpetrates violent attacks on her)? To doubt her own increasing sense of danger in the Castaspella episode, even to the point of seeing Shadow Weaver's shadows - which she's surely seen before! - under the mild peer pressure of a couple of friends telling her she's "just tired"? To fall silent and leave the Fright Zone after a mission she was leading and which she planned without part of her team without even asking what happened in more detail than "she's gone"?

My suspension of disbelief broke.

And the crux of the matter is, I'm just not happy with Adora, with the childhood we're shown in the reboot, being anything but hyperalert, ready for threats at all times. And most of her behavior is consistent with that, including the anxious perfectionism mentioned before - it's even essentially spelled out on Mystacor. I'm not arguing that she should be cautious or jumpy or frightful, or that all her actions should be well considered. But what I can't buy is her just kind of letting down her guard - that is, apparently failing to react appropriately to a dangerous situation like Glimmer's powers glitching, or failing to react promptly to a sign of danger, or failing to ask what happened to Scorpia in greater detail. Those are all things that would be typical for a normal modern teenager thrust into a dangerous situation to fail at - triaging which emergency is the top priority is hard. But keeping genuine threats firmly in focus should be the main thing their Fright Zone childhood taught to Adora and Catra. PTSD creates hypervigilance - that's its most well-known feature.

Now, it's not impossible for someone to react to trauma with atypical, or completely self-sabotaging and useless behaviors (or for someone with hypervigilance to fail at picking out the true threats). Everybody responds to trauma differently, and many of us have self-sabotaged as a result. So I can't say it's unbelievable; it was just... counter-intuitive, and therefore a bit confusing, to watch. I was expecting her hypervigilance to have said "No, Glimmer's magic doing that weird thing is not good and I don't want anybody to explode or whatever, so we should deal with that now". And "No seriously, I keep seeing things, and I think it's Shadow Weaver's magic." And "Later - right now I’m really focused on what Catra and Scorpia are doing, and that could have fatal consequences." I, at least, would have swallowed the whole thing much more easily with a few tweaks of this kind.

Cutting Off Abusers and Siblings Left Behind

The final question that haunts me is this: How does suddenly learning about imperialist exploitation and hence determining to leave your abusive imperialist society equate to the one significant connection in your life seemingly breaking in a few minutes' conversation?

Does this abused child, with only one human attachment - one sole source of affection, one lifelong companion, another child who has been her only friend and whose safety she's felt responsible for half her short life - does she, after a short disagreement, "This family is evil and the worst I want to leave" vs "This family is evil and the worst but I want to stay", apparently give up?

I know they're getting dramatic mileage out of it. And I know we need to sympathize with Catra's feeling of abandonment which means that Adora's actions are definitely not supposed to read as unimpeachably blameless. But surely they are supposed to read as internally consistent characterization? Would Supergirl or her sister Alex, or Jessica Jones or her sister Trish, leave each other behind in an abusive situation without a sustained attempt at persuasion, without significant emotional upset at the rift and the separation? These two sets of sisters haven't even been raised together since they were toddlers as Adora and Catra have.

This storyline does reflect a common dilemma for survivors of abuse: if they choose to abandon their families literally (running away from home) or figuratively (cutting off contact as adults), they often have to contend with losing siblings/fellow victims who can't or won't leave. But in reality, an unwillingness like Catra's to leave an abusive environment (if one has any other option) is likely coming from someone who has bought into the warped reality of the abuser.

Catra hasn't done that; she implies that she knew already that the entire Horde was terrible. This seems to support Adora's argument, if anything, because it doesn't seem logical for someone to know their abusive family is the actual worst and would happily kill them, yet choose to stay anyway, as Catra does. But it's important to remember here that outside the Horde she could plausibly expect to be treated as an enemy combatant and not just a homeless teenager (Catra has an extremely pessimistic and untrusting view of human nature, and her upbringing has given her every reason to) - plus she would certainly fear reprisal from the Horde, who outgun the Etherians massively.

Catra's response to Adora's revelation is essentially an accusation that Adora already should have known as well, but it sounds more like she's saying Adora knew that the Fright Zone is a toxic environment and Shadow Weaver is an evil parent. Apparently Adora did know those things - from the flashbacks we see, she couldn't avoid it - but that's not the same thing. Catra may not realize that, but it's clear that Adora did know about Weaver's abusive parenting, but not about the Horde's program of brutal planetwide oppression.

Perhaps Catra was equally uninformed of Etheria's suffering as Adora, but unlike Adora unsurprised simply because she sees the character of the Horde and tends to expect the worst, and so she draws a logical connection. (Not, I want to emphasize, an inevitable one: a terrible parent is always a terrible person, but it doesn't mean the whole organization they manage does only the most evil things possible. And conversely, when it comes to imperialist exploitation, the military commanders in question are often nice or normal people in private life.) But are we to take it that Adora knew that was what she meant? And even if so - if Adora at this point concludes that Catra is gambling on rank and power within the Horde because she sees the alternative as an even less secure existence - shouldn't Adora still think Catra is wrong about that and want to change her mind?

The levels of hurt, shock, and concern Adora displays for most of the season feel more appropriate to a relationship with a typical childhood friend. It wouldn't be out of place in an anime set in a Japanese secondary school. But Catra and Adora aren't like classmates or neighbors or cousins, who share only specific areas of their lives and spend much more time apart, and who typically have plenty of people in their lives: they've been raised side-by-side from the time they were toddlers, and they lacked any stable presence of other peers a large part of that time² , going by the earlier flashbacks. So why isn't Adora more concerned?

Scapegoat and Golden Child

It has to be mentioned here that, as has been fairly widely noted, Catra and Adora have been played against each other all their lives in an extreme example of parental favoritism, which often does result in alienating adult siblings from one another (my grandmother was a victim, my mother-in-law another). In typical fashion, Adora was heaped with praise and could do no wrong, while Catra was scapegoated - blamed for everything, subjected to a neverending gamut of unfair punishment, humiliation, and verbal abuse. Given the instability and flawed judgment we see elsewhere from Shadow Weaver, I feel confident in saying that she's a narcissist³ , and this style of favoritism is a well-known pattern of behavior from narcissistic parents. It's true that favoritism, even more mild forms of it, is frequently a strain on sibling relationships. Favored children often participate in the abuse of their sibling or (even unconsciously) absorb their parent's contemptuous attitude towards them, while scapegoated children are often unable to overcome their resentment and envy.

But this result of favoritism is far from universal, and we already know it hasn't been successful here. Adora doesn't identify with Shadow Weaver, idolize her, or, obviously, even regard her with affection. We have no reason to think Adora would ever side with Shadow Weaver against Catra; if anything, Shadow Weaver has perfectly conditioned Adora to instead blame herself for anything that happens to Catra, as laid out in this meta by

mustloveshera. Of course, responsibility for taking care of someone isn't the same thing as love (although that confusion, otherwise known as codependence, is also a result of childhood abuse), but it is pretty much the opposite of what happens to a favored child who becomes spoiled enough to coolly reject their scapegoated sibling.

[Contradictory] Issues with Authority: the Scapegoat's Hidden Weakness

To the show's credit, Catra's switch from staying behind out of fear and hurt over what she sees as Adora's rejection to determining to excel (and prove everyone wrong) when she gets a taste of first Shadow Weaver's, then Hordak's praise are more or less pitch-perfect for the adult scapegoated child being 'promoted' when the former Golden Child betrays the narcissistic parent. The fact that she has essentially triumphed over her abuser by the end of the first season is a significant step for her in ultimately dealing with her damage, even if her nominal empowerment is still within the framework of an evil organization that she herself already knows the truth about. She is so easily swayed by acclaim and recognition (from authority, specifically, even though consciously she hates and rejects even the concept of anyone having authority over her) because it directly addresses a lifetime of jealousy and because she's never had it before. That, too, is perfectly on point for a scapegoated child. In short, it makes perfect sense of Catra's motivations, but falls apart for Adora's.

What I would expect from Adora, since she doesn't blame Catra, would be anxiousness to see her sister again - to know that she's all right, to tell her about all the weird new culture shocks she's having, and just to experience friendship with her again. If anything, going by my parentified mother's responses to her younger siblings' terrible statements and actions, I would expect Adora to compulsively seek her out to assure her that she still loves her and then endlessly engage her in pointless circular debate on the subject ("Well if I can't change your mind can I still call you next weekend?"). If she's not feeling that, then I want an explanation, because the lack of that concern for your sibling - especially for a sibling you have been conditioned to feel responsible for! - is... pretty surprising. And absent any other explanation, I would take it as a sign that the person in question had something wrong with them. Like, a blind spot caused by trauma often creates an anomaly like that, but... I can't figure out any way for what happened to Adora to produce that one alongside all the other stuff we see.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that's not what the show wanted us to get out of this. If she wasn't really de-prioritizing Catra, it was just that things kept coming at her and she didn't get a moment to breathe and there just weren't enough chances to reach Catra more often and she didn't trust her new associates by confiding in them about her... then her behavior when they met again and afterwards did a poor job of conveying that. Even if Adora can plausibly accept the necessity of focusing on pressing war matters in the short term and she doesn't know how she might try to persuade Catra, she surely shouldn't be able to put the worry down after so many years of habit. It might be shoved to the side when necessary, but it must be looming in her mind, and it must be painful, and we should see more evidence of it.

I think they're going for misunderstanding - that Adora is meant to earnestly care about Catra and the levels of concern she feels about the situation are meant to be not inappropriate. And I think if I'm right they needed a bit of a rewrite to bring it out more. I don't think that this is deliberately illustrating a particular character flaw in Adora, e.g. a childishly binary view of morality that would enable her to write off the 'bad' people like the flip of a switch - the show has mostly demonstrated its characterization pretty clearly, and they could easily have made that more clear if it's what they were going for.

1. She's a were-panther, so they sold a... pink fuzzy big cat with a curly mane that looked nothing like her cat form as a 'friend' since the doll couldn't transform. The superpower is worth noting, though - in s1 Catra evinces no sign of being able to shapeshift into a cat, but saving it for a reveal could make sense, particularly as a cat-person among the stained glass portraits on Mystacor has already sparked some 'Princess Catra?' speculation. The power wouldn't have to be associated with a monarchy. back

2. I think it's clear from the sequence of flashbacks that the other trooper trainees were not a part of their lives at those times, so perhaps they arrived to train together somewhat recently - with a training period a bit like a boot camp? - or perhaps a couple of years earlier. They're friends, but it's not the same level.back

3.Just like the current occupant of the US's highest office.back