“she Was Afraid In The End. And She Suffered”

i'd say this is the last time i'll ever mention the jump in save the cat.. but i think we'd both know i was lying.

cause i know the first time i ranted on it my focus was on how heart-wrenching it is to think adora jumped without any idea or awareness quite yet of the fact that transforming without the sword was not only possible - but would actually conjure her true she-ra form, one far more seemingly invincible, able to innately wield her magic and abilities, displaying prowess and powers she had never before reached after all her training with light hope.

and how that meant she jumped just cause she couldn't stand the thought of catra dying down there alone, and even though it meant she might end up dying down there with her, one way or another, at least catra wouldn't have to face the end on her own.

but then i was making an amv using these scenes for literally prob like the 30th time lol annnd then the thought hit me - she had to have known there was a good chance catra wouldn't have survived the fall at all. and with the bottom cloaked in shadows, there was no way for her to know how far she, adora, would fall herself if she were to jump. so her own survival of even just the impact without her she-ra form was no guarantee, either.

but she still goes after her. she takes that risk. cause she can't just leave catra in the dark.

never could

never really meant to

never will again

and catra? ends up doing the same for adora. over and over. i'd add more examples but i hit my gif limit lol

<3

a house in nebraska by ethel cain is one of the most catra-coded songs i’ve ever heard and i think it’s a shame that i’ve never heard anyone say that.

like it’s just catra’s whole perspective on adora leaving her to me. the way catra feels like her whole world is ending, because adora is her whole world, adora’s love being the only love catra has ever known, the breaking of their promise :(

it actually makes me feral when i think about it bc it’s already just such an insane song (thank you mother cain)

i truly don’t think i will ever stop thinking about this

i love alice madness returns so much ⋆⭒˚.⋆

i actually could rant about it forever

i've been copying my daily makeup look off hers for like years now and i get so happy when somebody recognizes it (which happens very rarely but still)

Content note for discussions of eternal damnation, and all sorts of other shit that will trigger a lot of folks with religious trauma.

Before I get started I might as well explain where I’m coming from - unlike a lot of She-Ra fans, and a lot of queer people, I don’t have much religious trauma, or any, maybe (okay there were a number of years I was convinced I was going to hell, but that happens to everyone, right?). I was raised a liberal Christian by liberal Christian parents in the Episcopal Church, where most of my memories are overwhelmingly positive. Fuck, growing up in the 90’s, Chuch was probably the only place outside my home I didn’t have homophobia spewed at me. Because it was the 90’s and it was a fucking hellscape of bigotry where 5 year olds knew enough to taunt each other with homophobic slurs and the adults didn’t know enough to realize how fucked up that was. Anyway. This is my experience, but it is an atypical one, and I know it. Quite frankly I know that my experience of Christianity has very little at all to do with what most people experienced, or what people generally mean when they talk about Christianity as a cultural force in America today. So if you were raised Christian and you don’t recognize your theology here, congrats, neither do I, but these ideas and cultural forces are huge and powerful and dominant. And it’s this dominant Christian narrative that I’m referring to in this post. As well as, you know, a children’s cartoon about lesbian rainbow princesses. So here it goes. This is going to get batshit.

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." - John Calvin

“We’re all just a bunch of wooly guys” - Noelle Stevenson

This is a post triggered by a single scene, and a single line. It’s one of the most fucked-up scenes in She-Ra, toward the end of Save the Cat. Catra, turned into a puppet by Prime, struggles with her chip, desperately trying to gain control of herself, so lost and scared and vulnerable that she flings aside her own death wish and her pride and tearfully begs Adora to rescue her. Adora reaches out , about to grab her, and then Prime takes control back, pronounces ‘disappointing’ and activates the kill switch that pitches Catra off the platform and to her death (and seriously, she dies here, guys - also Adora breaks both her legs in the fall). But before he does, he dismisses Catra with one of his most chilling lines. “Some creatures are meant only for destruction.”

And that’s when everyone watching probably had their heart broken a little bit, but some of the viewers raised in or around Christianity watching the same scene probably whispered ‘holy shit’ to themselves. Because Prime’s line - which works as a chilling and callous dismissal of Catra - is also an allusion to a passage from the Bible. In fact, it’s from one of the most fucked up passages in a book with more than its share of fucked up passages. It’s from Romans 9:22, and I’m going to quote several previous verses to give the context of the passage (if not the entire Epistle, which is more about who needs to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions but was used to construct a systematic theology in the centuries afterwards because people decided it was Eternal Truth).

19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

The context of the allusion supports the context in the show. Prime is dismissing Catra - serial betrayer, liar, failed conqueror, former bloody-handed warlord - as worthless, as having always been worthless and fit only to be destroyed. He is speaking from a divine and authoritative perspective (because he really does think he’s God, more of this in my TL/DR Horde Prime thing). Prime is echoing not only his own haughty dismissal of Catra, and Shadow Weaver’s view of her, but also perhaps the viewer’s harshest assessment of her, and her own worst fears about herself. Catra was bad from the start, doomed to destroy and to be destroyed. A malformed pot, cracked in firing, destined to be shattered against a wall and have her shards classified by some future archaeologist 2,000 years later. And all that’s bad enough.

But the full historical and theological context of this passage shows the real depth of Noelle Stevenson’s passion and thought and care when writing this show. Noelle was raised in Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. To my knowledge, he has never specified what sect or denomination, but in interviews and her memoir Noelle has shown a particular concern for questions that this passage raises, and a particular loathing for the strains of Protestant theology that take this passage and run with it - that is to say, Calvinism. So while I’m not sure if Noelle was raised as a conservative, Calvinist Presbyterian, his preoccupation with these questions mean that it’s time to talk about Calvinism.

It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that Calvinism is a systematic theology built entirely upon the Epistles of Romans and Galatians, but only -just- (and here my Catholic readers in particular will chuckle to themselves and lovingly stroke their favorite passage of the Epistle of James). The core of Calvinist Doctrine is often expressed by the very Dutch acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity - people are wholly evil, and incapable of good action or even willing good thoughts or deeds

Unconditional Election - God chooses some people to save because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not because they did anything to deserve, trigger or accept it

Limited Atonement - Jesus died only to save the people God chose to save, not the rest of us bastards

Irresistible Grace - God chooses some people to be saved - if you didn’t want to be saved, too bad, God said so.

Perseverance of the Saints - People often forget this one and assume it’s ‘predestination’ but it’s actually this - basically, once saved by God, always saved, and if it looks like someone falls out of grace, they were never saved to begin with. Well that’s all sealed up tight I guess.

Reading through these, predestination isn’t a single doctrine in Calvinism but the entire theological underpinnings of it together with humanity’s utter powerlessness before sin. Basically God has all agency, humanity has none. Calvinism (and a lot of early modern Protestantism) is obsessed with questions of how God saves people (grace alone, AKA Sola Fides) and who God saves (the people god elects and only the people God elects, and fuck everyone else).

It’s apparent that Noelle was really taken by these questions, and repelled by the answers he heard. He’s alluded to having a tattoo refuting the Gospel passage about Sheep and Goats being sorted at the end times, affirming instead that ‘we’re all just a bunch of wooly guys’ (you can see this goat tattoo in some of his self-portraits in comics, etc). He’s also mentioned that rejecting and subverting destiny is a huge part of everything he writes as a particular rejection of the idea that some individual people are 'chosen' by God or that God has a plan for any of us. You can see that -so clearly- in Adora’s arc, where Adora embraces and then rejects destiny time and again and finally learns to live life for herself.

But for Catra, we’re much more concerned about the most negative aspect of this - the idea that some people are vessels meant for destruction. And that’s something else that Noelle is preoccupied with. In her memoir in the section about leaving the church and becoming a humanistic atheist, there is a drawing of a pot and the question ‘Am I a vessel prepared for destruction?’ Obviously this was on Noelle’s mind (And this is before he came out to himself as queer!).

To look at how this question plays out in Catra’s entire arc, let’s first talk about how ideas of damnation and salvation actually play out in society. And for that I’m going to plug one of my favorite books, Gin Lun’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (if you can tell by now, I am a fucking blast at parties). Lun tells the long and very interesting story about, how ideas of hell and who went there changed during the Early American Republic. One of the interesting developments that she talks about is how while at first people who were repelled by Calvinism started moving toward a doctrine of universal salvation (no on goes to hell, at least not forever*), eventually they decided that hell was fine as long as only the right kind of people went there. Mostly The Other - non-Christian foreigners, Catholics, Atheists, people who were sinners in ways that were not just bad but weird and violated Victorian ideas of respectability. Really, Hell became a way of othering people, and arguably that’s how it survives today, especially as a way to other queer people (but expanding this is slated for my Montero rant). Now while a lot of people were consciously rejecting Calvinist predestination, they were still drawing the distinction between the Elect (good, saved, worthwhile) and the everyone else (bad, damned, worthless). I would argue that secularized ideas of this survive to this day even among non-Christian spaces in our society - we like to draw lines between those who Elect, and those who aren’t.

And that’s what brings us back to Catra. Because Catra’s entire arc is a refutation of the idea that some people are worthless and irredeemable, either by nature, nurture or their own actions. Catra’s actions strain the conventions of who is sympathetic in a Kid’s cartoon - I’ve half joked that she’s Walter White as a cat girl, and it’s only half a joke. She’s cruel, self-deluded, she spends 4 seasons refusing to take responsibility for anything she does and until Season 5 she just about always chooses the thing that does the most damage to herself and others. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Catra is morally culpable in every step of her descent into evil (except maybe her break with reality just before she pulls the lever). The way that Catra personally betrays everyone around her, the way she strips herself of all of her better qualities and most of what makes her human, hell even her costume changes would signal in any other show that she’s irredeemable.

It’s tempting to see this as Noelle’s version of being edgy - pushing the boundaries of what a sympathetic character is, throwing out antiheroics in favor of just making the villain a protagonist. Noelle isn’t quite Alex ‘I am in the business of traumatizing children’ Hirsch, who seems to have viewed his job as pushing the bounds of what you could show on the Disney Channel (I saw Gravity Falls as an adult and a bunch of that shit lives rent free in my nightmares forever), but Noelle has his own dark side, mostly thematically. The show’s willingness to deal with abuse, and messed up religious themes, and volatile, passionate, not particularly healthy relationships feels pretty daring. I’m not joking when I gleefully recommend this show to friends as ‘a couple from a Mountain Goats Song fights for four seasons in a cartoon intended for 9 year olds’. Noelle is in his own way pushing the boundaries of what a kids show can do. If you read Noelle’s other works like Nimona, you see an argument for Noelle being at least a bit edgy. Nimona is also angry, gleefully destructive, violent and spiteful - not unlike Catra. Given that it was a 2010s webcomic and not a kids show, Nimona is a good deal worse than Catra in some ways - Catra doesn’t kill people on screen, while Nimona laughs about it (that was just like, a webcomic thing - one of the fan favorite characters in my personal favorite, Narbonic, was a fucking sociopath, and the heroes were all amoral mad scientists, except for the superintelligent gerbil**). But unlike Nimona, whose fate is left open ended, Catra is redeemed.

And that is weird. We’ve had redemption arcs, but generally not of characters with -so- much vile stuff in their history. Going back to the comparison between her and Azula, many other shows, like Avatar, would have made Catra a semi-sympathetic villain who has a sob-story in their origin but who is beyond redemption, and in so doing would articulate a kind of psychologized Calvinism where some people are too traumatized to ever be fully and truly human. I’d argue this is the problem with Azula as a character - she’s a fun villain, but she doesn’t have moral agency, and the ultimate message of her arc - that she’s a broken person destined only to hurt people - is actually pretty fucked up. And that’s the origin story of so many serial killers and psycopaths that populate so many TV shows and movies. Beyond ‘hurt people hurt people’ they have nothing to teach us except perhaps that trauma makes you a monster and that the only possible response to people doing bad things is to cut them out of your life and out of our society (and that’s why we have prisons, right?)

And so Catra’s redemption and the depths from which she claws herself back goes back to Noelle’s desire to prove that no person is a vessel ‘fitted for destruction.’ Catra goes about as far down the path of evil as we’ve ever seen a protagonist in a kids show go, and she still has the capacity for good. Importantly, she is not subject to total depravity - she is capable of a good act, if only one at first. Catra is the one who begins her own redemption (unlike in Calvinism, where grace is unearned and even unwelcomed) - because she wants something better than what she has, even if its too late, because she realizes that she never wanted any of this anyway, because she wants to do one good thing once in her life even if it kills her.

The very extremity of Catra’s descent into villainy serves to underline the point that Noelle is trying to make - that no one can be written off completely, that everyone is capable of change, and that no human being is garbage, no matter how twisted they’ve become. Meanwhile her ability to set her own redemption in motion is a powerful statement of human agency, and healing, and a refutation of Calvinism’s idea that we are powerless before sin or pop cultural tropes about us being powerful before the traumas of our upbringing. Catra’s arc, then, is a kind of anti-Calvinist theological statement - about the nature of people and the nature of goodness.

Now, there is a darker side to this that Noelle has only hinted at, but which is suggested by other characters on the show. Because while Catra’s redemption shows that people are capable of change, even when they’ve done horrible things, been fucked up and fucked themselves up, it also illustrates the things people do to themselves that make change hard. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, two of the most sinister parts of her descent into villainy are her self-dehumanization (crushing her own compassion and desire to do good) and her rewriting of her own history in her speech and memory to make her own actions seem justified (which we see with her insistence that Adora left her, eliding Adora’s offers to have Catra join her, or her even more clearly false insistence that Entrapta had betrayed them). In Catra, these processes keep her going down the path of evil, and allow her to nearly destroy herself and everyone else. But we can see the same processes at work in two much darker figures - Shadow Weaver and Horde Prime. These are both rants for another day, but the completeness of Shadow Weaver’s narcissistic self-justification and cultivated callousness and the even more complete narcissism of Prime’s god complex cut both characters off from everyone around them. Perhaps, in a theoretical sense, they are still redeemable, but for narrative purposes they might as well be damned.

This willingness to show a case where someone -isn’t- redeemed actually serves to make Catra’s redemption more believable, especially since Noelle and the writers draw the distinction between how Catra and SW/Prime can relate to reality and other people, not how broken they are by their trauma (unlike Zuko and Azula, who are differentiated by How Fucked Uolp They Are). Redemption is there, it’s an option, we can always do what is right, but someone people will choose not to, in part because doing the right thing involves opening ourselves to the world and others, and thus being vulnerable. Noelle mentions this offhandedly in an interview after Season 1 with the She-Ra Progressive of Power podcast - “I sometimes think that shades of grey, sympathetic villains are part of the escapist fantasy of shows like this.” Because in the real world, some people are just bastards, a point that was particularly clear in 2017. Prime and Shadow Weaver admit this reality, while Catra makes a philosophical point that even the bastards can change their ways (at least in theory).

*An idea first proposed in the second century by Origen, who’s a trip and a fucking half by himself, and an idea that becomes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which protestants vehemently denied!

**Speaking of favorite Noelle tropes

“your trauma doesn’t define you” no actually it does. it dictates every aspect of my shitty life.

catra in her princess prom suit, gotta be one of my favorite genders

catradora and the perfect victim complex

(i literally fucking think about this all the time so this just gonna be a rant lol)

i really, truly think that people in general don’t put the effort into understanding characters who are imperfect victims. for them, it destroys the appeal of victimhood. victimhood (especially when the victims in question are girls, women, femme presenting people, etc.) needs to be beautiful and tragic. think characters like ophelia, snow white, odette, juliet, the lisbon sisters. otherwise, their victimhood is no longer attractive.

catra is an imperfect victim. shadow weaver’s abuse did not make her soft, weak, timid, or fragile. it made her bitter, angry, and resentful.

i once saw a catra anti saying some bullshit about how they might’ve liked catra more if the writers had spent more screen time showing shadow weaver abusing her, specifically her when she was a kid.

this person wanted to see catra’s pain as beautiful. they wanted to see her ONLY as a child to be pitied, the little kid who cowered in fear instead of fighting back, and not have to acknowledge catra’s more complicated character traits.

i also think this is why these same people often talk like they love adora, like “adora deserves better than catra” and all that shit. adora (to them) is easier to see as a perfect victim. shadow weaver’s abuse made her obedient and self-sacrificing. it made her put others before herself, even to the point of fucking death. adora is selfless and brave. she’s so determined to be a perfect hero, to protect people, to care for people, to love people. these traits are easier to romanticize. it makes her seem beautiful.

if you ask me, this is a really fucked up way of viewing adora. i don’t love adora bc she’s a “perfect victim”, i love adora bc she, like catra, is also flawed. adora’s determination to be perfect leads her to abandoning catra. her inability to empathize with catra leads her to behaving the way she did in taking control. adora isn’t fucking perfect.

(for context i do also think that catra was in the wrong in that episode too, but i feel like we don’t talk enough about how badly adora was handling the situation. like seriously girl catra is here basically telling her “i don’t trust you bc i don’t believe that you could ever love me bc i’m inherently fucked up and unlovable” and adora’s immediate reaction is to blow up at her. it makes sense given what adora has just done for her, but it’s another example of adora being incapable of empathizing with catra. also calling her a stubborn brat? yeah uh that wasn’t funny adora, especially not with the ways that shadow weaver talked about catra.)

but i love that adora is flawed, and i love that catra is flawed. they’re not archetypes. no real person experiences abuse like they did and comes out perfect. catra’s intense fear of abandonment and resentment issues are a very fucking real response to the way she was traumatized. regardless of how ugly it is.

at the end of the day, i think that people can’t wrap their brains around this concept and refuse to empathize with imperfect victims bc they don’t want to admit that they, too, are imperfect victims. the perfect victim isn’t real. it’s a fucking myth.

in real life, people are messy and complicated, like catra and adora. it’s why i love them :)

ugh i could literally go on about this FOREVER i swear.

oh my god this is so fucking beautiful <3

I owe u a black eye and two kisses!!! (teeth eater)

i love being a weird girl ♡

Both Catra and Adora defying death at the height of their character journeys in such a powerful and subversive way. Whenever I think about it deeper, both deaths were very traditional and demeaning ’feminine’ deaths. Catra had a man literally controlling her body and mouth to fight against her friend (and lover) for seemingly his own amusement, and when she resisted, he disposed of her by throwing her off a cliff (the gwen stacy method), she was barely present in the entirety of the episode, her agency stripped (not for the first time), the emotional stakes were felt, but by Adora not catra and how bad she felt to see catra this hurt, even though catra was the one in pain, we don’t focus on catra’s perspective at all during it, so if she did die at the end of it, she would have just been another name to add to the list of female love interest violated and killed by the hand of men for the development of the main character’s story. Except she didn’t die! that wasn’t her end, but her beginning, that part was just a step on the rest of her life that she grew and recovered enough to have power to control. To change.

As for Adora, there’s no shortage of self sacrificial women and female martyrs both in history or fiction, it’s been romanticised and encouraged since the dawn of the patriarchy for girls to grew up being conditioned into giving up their own needs, desires and even lives and health for the convenience and goals of others, and when they obey that to the extreme (like with the failsafe) they’re celebrated as the ultimate heroes. The perfect women are dead women after all. but instead Adora doesn’t die not just because of her power or sense of duty but because she learns to be selfish and choose something for herself for once and that’s what ultimately saves her. She rejects her conditioning and the message of what a hero must be and choose to live for her own self. Self love is radical.