Precarious Enchantment: Analyzing Frenemies and Missing Mothers in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
Fig. 1 - Netflix’s She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Noelle Stevenson, 2018-2020).
Amidst a sea of reboots and remakes, perhaps none have made quite as big an impact on pop culture audiences as Dreamworks’ She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018-2020) (Fig. 1). Helmed by cartoonist and animation producer Noelle Stevenson, the animated series debuted on Netflix in 2018 and ran for five seasons before concluding in May 2020. Inspired by the fantasy and sci fi media she enjoyed in her youth, Stevenson set out to reimagine She-Ra’s adventures on the magical planet Etheria in truly epic and intentionally inclusive ways. Unlike some of her favorite childhood fantasy films however, the majority of the main characters in Stevenson’s series are young women who appear in all shapes, sizes, colours, and who represent the diversity of LGBTQIA+ people.
Indeed, it is precisely the show’s queer representation that has garnered the most acclaim. Media critics have described the show as “hands down the best queer representation on television,” as “13 [plus] episodes of battles, worldbuilding, powerful friendships, and lots and lots of gayness,” and as having “set a high bar for what [LGBTQIA+] inclusive storytelling looks like.” The last season of the show in particular has been hailed as groundbreaking for the ways it centres on the reconciliation between two female characters, Adora and Catra, whose long estrangement ends with declarations of mutual love and an on-screen kiss. According to TV critic David Opie, “LGBTQ+ characters have appeared on children’s TV before, but to our knowledge, a queer lead has never been given the chance to find domestic bliss so openly and without fear of reprisal. The impact of She-Ra’s finale will have on children (and also adults) watching is impossible to overstate, validating queer fans everywhere who have longed to see their own stories told on screen.” Despite these groundbreaking aspects, She-Ra also seems to adhere to certain norms of fantasy storytelling. In particular, the focus of “frenemies”—relationships that combine enmity with friendship—and the narrative reliance on missing mothers, detract from the show’s ability to present a radically different vision of the world.
Like many fans of the show, I fell for She-Ra hard and fast. When I began watching, I was truly enchanted. According to scholar Jane Bennett, “the overall effect of enchantment is a mood of fullness, plenitude, or liveliness, a sense of having had one’s nerves or circulation or concentration power tuned up or recharged” (2016, 17). During the first several seasons, every time Adora powered up to become She-Ra (an homage to the transformation sequences of protagonists in Sailor Moon) I too felt a sense of possibility, hope, and excitement. In short, I was pumped! Unfortunately, by the conclusion of the show, a number of factors worked to reduce my enchantment with the She-Ra universe, one of them being Adora and Catra’s relationship.
More specifically, while the show concludes with the two characters reconciling, the majority of episodes present a tumultuous, even toxic relationship. As orphans raised to be soldiers in the Horde, and under the tutelage of the cruel Shadow Weaver, both Catra and Adora are survivors of trauma and abuse. While that manifests for Adora as a difficulty in processing her emotions, Catra, like some survivors of abuse, goes on to become an abuser herself. Throughout the majority of the series, she is verbally abusive, psychologically manipulative, and physically violent. As one of the primary villains of the show, much of her ire is directed at Adora and her princess allies, but she is also violent towards her own comrades (Lonnie, Rogelio, and Kyle), and her harmful treatment of Scorpia, a fellow Horde soldier who is unwavering in her devotion to Catra, makes Catra a particularly toxic character. In fact, several pop culture sites, like The Mary Sue, commended the show early on for various episodes wherein Adora, and later Scorpia, call Catra out for her violent behavior and take steps to cut Catra out of their lives. Despite many attempts at extending understanding, patience, and even love towards her, characters like Adora, Scorpia, and Entrapta eventually realize that their love will not quell Catra’s abusiveness. As Alex Mell-Taylor observes, this trope of “victims trying to appease their abusers… is common in popular culture, especially in children’s stories.” More specifically, Mell-Taylor suggests that “a lot of popular culture has taught young children, especially young girls, to be passive figures in their own stories. Many of these stories tell children to be kind, supportive, and accepting in the face of abuse. This message is one that ultimately gaslights future victims.” They go on to praise early seasons of She-Ra for the ways it resists these trends in so far as we see the characters listed above take active steps to leave Catra’s cycle of abuse.
I was somewhat dismayed, then, to watch Catra become the key to Adora’s empowerment via their shared romantic love. I was not surprised to see Catra change from “bad guy” to “good guy,” the show’s creators sufficiently demonstrated her vulnerability to such a shift throughout the course of the series. However, without any real accountability on Catra’s part, or any indication that the characters she had abused had processed their trauma, it was jarring to watch her being embraced (quite literally) by all of those whom she had hurt. Did I want Adora to win, to live happily, and to kiss a cute girl? Yes! Did I secretly want it to be Catra? Also, yes. But our desires do not come from nowhere and as Mell-Taylor argues, a long history of problematic relationship dynamics in media may predispose me to such longings. Like io9 writers Jill Pantozzi, Beth Elderkin and Charles Pulliam-Moore, I found “Catadora” both exciting—the show actually brought a queer love story to fruition—and unnerving. I struggled to shake the concern that the “rushed” reunion with Catra overshadowed the powerful messages about cutting toxic people out of one’s life from previous seasons, and instead, had the effect of echoing harmful traditions of storytelling that imply that persistence in the face of abuse will result in love.
The uneven treatment of Catra’s villainy versus her redemption, and the princesses’ rapid acceptance of her was most likely a result of poor pacing. As Pantozzi, Elderkin and Pulliam-Moore state, “The final season had so much to get through that, at times, it felt like some things were rushed. Several emotional arcs were either dropped or resolved too quickly,” including, they note, “the final meeting between Catra and Scorpia.” Their observations are seemingly substantiated by numerous interviews given by Stevenson in which she admits having to keep the intended arc of the show “close to [her] chest,” that it wasn’t until relatively late in production that she was finally able to combat the entrenched homophobic norms that dictate what is “appropriate” for children to see and thus, reveal to the studio how the series would conclude. Given Stevenson’s inability to openly map out the show as she intended, the pacing problems in the final season are unsurprising. To echo the io9 writers then, my critique “comes from a place of understanding that’s shot through with a fair amount of saltiness.”
Fig. 3 - She-Ra’s Shadow Weaver.
I had a harder time understanding the show’s treatment of mothers and mother-figures. As numerous feminist scholars of fairytales have noted, “restrictive archetypes of femininity, such as passivity, voicelessness, and self-abnegation” were often contrasted in children’s literature with equally prevalent portrayals of “maternal violence, cruelty, and wickedness” in order to reinforce patriarchal gender norms (Hawthorne 2006, 180). Lynda Haas has shown how those patterns informed more contemporary children’s media like animated Disney films wherein representations of mothers are typically “absent, generously good, powerfully evil, or a silent other” (1995, 193). I found it curious, then, that She-Ra, a show that seeks to focus on and empower girls and women, seemed to adhere to this very same representational pattern. Throughout the series, we are introduced to two main mother-figures: Glimmer’s mother, Queen Angella, and the sorceress who raised Adora and Catra, Shadow Weaver. Angella is animated in normatively feminine ways, she is dressed in soft pastel colors, abhors violence, and is very protective of Glimmer. Although she seems to depart from traditional mother characters, owing to her leadership role and the amount of dialogue she enjoys, Angella manifests as both “generously good” and “absent” when, in season three, she sacrifices her life in order to save the princess rebellion and the planet (Fig. 3). Shadow Weaver, who long served as second-in-command of the Horde, is a powerful sorceress who is animated in markedly sinister ways with dark red clothing, flowing long black hair, and a mask that (we come to learn) covers a disfigured face. She is manipulative, abusive, mercurial but eventually, in an attempt to redeem herself in the eyes of her adoptive daughters, she too sacrifices her life, making her both “powerfully evil” and again, “absent.”
That said, problematic mothers are not the sum total of how family is depicted in She-Ra. King Micah, Glimmer’s father, proves to be a loving, supportive husband and father. Bow was also raised in a loving family consisting of twelve siblings and two dads. As kind, attentive, affectionate queer men, Bow’s dads, George and Lance, productively disrupt racist, heteronormative stereotypes of Black men (Hill Collins 2005). And as Mey Rude observes, She-Ra queers bonds of friendship and intimacy through the relationship between Adora, Glimmer, and Bow: “there are times when they cuddle, have sleepovers, and sit in a sauna together. She-Ra shows us that a variety of physical intimacies are healthy and good for kids of all genders together.” These varying depictions of family do not cancel each other out, they coexist. As John Fiske writes “Popular culture is shot through with contradictions” (2010, 84), and while She-Ra may adhere to conservative representational norms in some ways, it radically departs from them in others.
Stevenson has consistently pointed to the fantasy stories of her youth as a guiding force, both for the ways they enchanted her and for the ways they made her, as a queer girl, feel unseen and excluded. So, in making She-Ra, Stevenson wanted “for little queer kids to see that this is normal, that these are stories that can happen and that exist, and that can center them and make them feel seen and understood.” In short, to utilize fantasy to envision a more inclusive world. As scholar Ramzi Fawaz writes, certain types of fantasy have the ability to enchant “its potential audience by presenting a vision of a different world and offering encounters with figures of radical otherness that provide tools to subvert dominant systems of power and reorient one’s ethical investments” (2016, 30). Ultimately, I think She-Ra achieves those ends, even if somewhat precariously.
**Article published: May 14, 2021**
References
Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Fawaz, Ramzi. 2016. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York: New York University Press.
Fiske, John. 2010. Understanding Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Haas, Lynda. 1995. “‘Eighty-Six the Mother’: Murder, Matricide, and Good Mothers.” In From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, edited by E. Bell, L. Haas and L. Sells, 193-211. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Hawthorne, Sîan. 2006. “Origins, Genealogies, and the Politics of Identity: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Myth.” Ph. D. thesis, London: School of Oriental and African Studies.
Hill Collins, Patricia. 2005. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. London and New York: Routledge.
Biography
Sam Langsdale is a Research Fellow in the Department of Rhetoric, and in association with The Program in Critical Theory, at University of California, Berkeley. Her interests include feminist philosophy, visual cultural studies, contemporary critical theory, and women in popular culture. Her work explores the politics around representation of gender, race, and sexuality in media and in public discourse. Her recent publications include an article in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, as well as chapters in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies (2018), and Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero (2020). She is also the co-editor of the volume Monstrous Women in Comics (2020), published by the University Press of Mississippi.