hazelspacecadet - Tumblr blog

[hazelspacecadet]

i made this today thinking about the girls™️ ,,,anyway stan catradora for clear skin 😌✨

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so no one is going to talk about the time dostoyevsky said “and i seem to have such strength in me now, that i think i could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘i exist.’ in thousands of agonies- i exist. i’m tormented on the rack- but i exist! though i sit alone in a pillar- i exist! i see the sun, and if i don’t see the sun, i know it’s there. and there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.” because hOly fuckkkk

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Adora still sleep fight probably

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that moment where adora thinks its the last time she’ll ever see catra, so she takes her face in her hands and puts her forehead to catra’s like what catra did with her in the simulation (which was just her subconscious) because in her head that was the most intimate display of affection she could imagine happening between them, and she was about to die so she wanted to live this dream she had if only for a second. and she slowly caresses catra’s face as she lets her go.. god it kills me

but then catra stops her and adora’s heart breaks like please, please dont make this any harder. but catra doesnt ask her not to do it. instead she says she’s following adora to the ends of the universe. because after three years of refusing to follow her she realizes adora did always love her unconditionally, that adora’s the only thing she ever wanted, that now she’d rather die with her than live in a world without her

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catra things idk

glimmer: “so i looked it up, and having an animal companion technically qualifies you as a princess.” catra: “i will literally eat your entire face.” 

the princesses have to start the whole “teach the horde kid how to be a person” process all over again 

catra: “wtf is a brunch?” 

adora: “it’s a part of a tree, catra.” 

scorpia: “wait, i thought it’s something you eat.”

adora: “you can eat tree branches!?!”

bow has an entire album filled with photos of catra doing cute cat things and has a will prepared in case she ever finds out he has it. adora contributes most of the content. 

perfuma goes around etheria saying how great a meditation buddy catra is but catra doesn’t have the heart to tell her that she’s just napping the whole time 

adora spread a accurate rumor that catra was the little spoon and everyone gave her so much shit for it she went off the grid with melog for two whole days. 

catra brainstorms with adora on how to get mermista to warm up to her after the whole salineas thing, and what eventually does it is helping mermista take down the hit man who’s been stalking sea hawk for like three weeks.

mermista: “she’s like…really good at setting things on fire.” 

adora: “so i’m chaperoning all of your friend dates ok?” 

catra has a whole wall in her closet devoted to finding out netossa’s weakness because she won’t let the spray bottle incident go 

an entire princess alliance meeting was devoted to deciding whether catra should grow her hair out again and it got so ugly they had to throw the minutes out. 

afterwards, catra asks melog how hard it would be to create an illusion that would make her look bald for the next meeting

the only princess that catra is scared of is frosta and she will take that shit to her grave 

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Glimmer is my favorite She-Ra character because she’s a pink princess with sparkle powers named Glimmer but left unattended she WILL commit war crimes

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a sweet prompt by @writerthoughts02 “I always jokingly imagine catra and Adora yelling validating compliments to each other every morning. So do with that what you will 😂“

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this made me cry why the fuckkkk

imagine catra loving adora all those years, maybe even for her whole life, and trying to tell adora so many times and in so many ways but the words always just die in her throat. but then suddenly it’s her very last chance to tell adora and finally, maybe without even thinking about it, she does, and then adora loves her back and they kiss and their home is safe and their friends are safe and their love literally saved the planet. imagine how happy she is after so many years of pain

[hazelspacecadet]

She Ra - a full analysis

WARNING - THIS ANALYSIS CONTAINS MAAAAAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRETY OF SHE RA!! 

“You look out for me, and I look out for you. Nothing really bad can happen as long as we have each other”

She Ra is a show about two people torn apart. It’s important to recognise that this multifaceted masterpiece centres entirely on the Catradora dynamic; Noelle herself has expressed that the show was always about those two, and in a broader sense much of the wider world in the She Ra universe can be seen as a complex manifestation of Adora and Catra’s ever changing bond. Adora is not a hero in the traditional sense, as everything about her character is designed to subvert and deconstruct expectations of the hero’s journey. She is a powerful, strong and determined fighter with healing powers, a morally stubborn and highly empathetic person raised in a genocidal regime, and she runs away from the only home and only exponent of love she has ever known because her internal moral compass is just so intense it overrides the truest bond she will ever feel, at least until external factors allow for reconciliation. 

But what defines, at a thematic level, the human interactions in She Ra is a cycle of abuse that begins with oppressive control - Horde Prime. He punishes the imperfections in Hordak to the extent that Hordak feels compelled to lash out, to prove himself powerful by any means. Horde Prime is an interesting villain because his rhetoric centres not around darkness, but light and purity. This is not only a more subversive type of manipulative language than is often seen by cartoon villains, but it clearly establishes Horde Prime as being a fundamental representation of abuse and its tendency to beat away at character traits deemed weak, anomalous, or more importantly unable to be controlled. Horde Prime needs control; he needs subservience and pure, untouched power, which is why he forms his empire around a hive mind. Hordak of course breaks the hive mind itself, but abuse is a parasitic thing, and controls Hordak’s deplorable actions on Etheria right from his first introduction, talking directly to Catra. But the cycle does not stop at Hordak; his monstrous coping methods cause subtler damage by affecting Shadow Weaver. She is an interesting character because unlike Hordak, she was shown to have independent agency in her harmful actions before finding her way to the Horde, but it is clear that the intense sensation of being cast out, before the Horde rescued her only to thrust her into a cycle of rage and exploitation, leads to the final stage of this particular cycle: Adora, and more importantly Catra.

The show makes it abundantly clear that Catra gets the short straw in interactions with Shadow Weaver; and not only that, but it is shown that Catra’s narrative of Adora being a neglectful, selfish pretend-hero is one instilled not by Adora, but Shadow Weaver and her often-times violent favouritism. Adora isn’t selfish or neglectful - her strong moral compass certainly isn’t perfect, and letting go of complete undirected empathy is something she learns in the conversation with Mara in season 5 (“you are worth more than what you can give to other people”) - but those traits are at odds to how Adora is presented, and in particular how her relationship with Catra is presented. Shadow Weaver neglects Catra, and does it to such an extent that Catra is forced into a mindset of breaking her bond with Adora over an injustice that was never her friend’s fault. Shadow Weaver’s manipulation is so powerful, it makes Catra believe that Adora’s protection, her deep-seated love, is malignant. That is abuse: it turns love into hate and protection into violence. 

In this cycle, this systematic abuse from Prime to Hordak to Shadow Weaver to Catra, there are two anomalies. They have to be anomalous, uncontrollable, natural, because this cycle begins with oppressive control, and therefore only two variables can violate that base injustice - love, and imperfection. From a meta-narrative sense, She Ra is a unique beast because characters do not simply have flaws for the sake of flaws, but those flaws are the direct reason for the eventual collapse of the show’s main antagonism. What breaks Prime is a kiss, and a mad scientist. The kiss is Adora and Catra displaying a desire for closeness that represents years of struggle against systematic abuse, abuse that has deliberately forced love to become hate, and that only when the cycle reaches its peak and the initial abuser makes a final bid for absolute control, can the true reconciliation begin. The mad scientist is of course Entrapta, whose powerful adoration of imperfection ultimately destroys Prime, or at least his preferred vessel. Abuse of the kind shown in She Ra cannot exist when people find beauty and joy in the things it seeks to eliminate, and Entrapta is exactly the anomaly needed to help break the cycle. Returning to the core of those two lovers, Catra finds her want for Adora, and it is reciprocated because the underlying love was always there, but the intent, the desire for closeness only became apparent when years of unnecessary hurt had been recognised and their true cause exposed: not each other, but the cycle.

Of course, abuse in the She Ra universe is only actively broken by one thing: love. I touched on this theme earlier when discussing abuse as the two are somewhat intertwined but love, in platonic and romantic forms, is so crucial to the functioning of She Ra’s characters and their motivations. Catra and Adora have always loved each other (they only express this at the climax because they must fight through abuse to find a shared desire), and this love is shown right from both the start of the show, and the first time we see them interact chronologically - in Promise. What’s interesting is we never know how they meet, or what they say to each other first, but instead the earliest canonical Catradora interaction is the promise itself: a dedication so strong it defines Catra’s actions years later on an alien ship as she saves a person she does not even claim to like. The show puts Catra and Adora’s love first, as that is the establishment of their truly meaningful connection, with other flashbacks and all of season 5 expanding upon that bond. We know that love breaks abuse because Horde Prime is abuse and he is defeated by a kiss, but what does that imply? 

The kiss, and therefore the confirmation of She Ra’s central love, carries with it a moral lesson, a message, that hurt and abuse can be overcome through the mutual reconciliation that comes with unconditional love. In the show, all kinds of love shown to be beneficial and non-toxic are unconditional: Catra can only want Adora when she accepts that Adora will always be morally upstanding and stubbornly empathetic, and Adora can only want Catra when she accepts that Catra defaults to self-hatred and pushing away, and only when both of these conditions are made meaningless by the force of attraction and belonging known as love, can the kiss be shown and the abuse broken. 

Love is not just shown between that central relationship, but throughout She Ra and its characters. Glimmer is a flawed and sometimes maligned character, but her importance to the show and its progression cannot be overstated, especially in season 5. On the ship in episodes 1 and 2, Catra needed something to hold onto. Torn from her home, powerless and very clearly unable to manipulate and fight Horde Prime like she could with Hordak, Catra’s only option became Glimmer. Their bond forms quickly and shakily, but what is so crucial about their interactions is that in order to reconcile with Adora, Catra needed to see someone like Glimmer, who had both made huge mistakes and at one point believed her own mistakes to be the right decision, completely and unconditionally forgive Adora and desire to be home with her. They share love for Adora, different kinds of love, but a strong connection and belonging that in the case of the open and empathetic Glimmer is very obvious. It’s also no accident that later on, during interactions in the expanded Best Friend Squad, Catra takes several social cues from Glimmer first, with Adora a trusted support. Catra is always going to care about Adora more than anything, but it takes the model example of Glimmer to show her how. 

But Adora is not just the subject of Catra’s attractions. As the main character, the dual figure around which the show is built both emotionally and plot-wise, she has a striking amount of agency, but also experiences a corruption of her truest desires at the hands of abuse. The abuse of Adora is subversive and difficult to spot, but it all comes down the pedestal that Shadow Weaver built for her, as well as her own innate morals and how those two factors, in Adora’s mind, prevented her from loving and caring for Catra in the right way. Throughout the show, Adora treats her own need to help others and her desire to be with the people she loves as mutually exclusive; even when Bow and Glimmer remind her that she is not alone, Adora has a penchant for going it alone, believing herself to be this chosen hero who must rescue the people of Etheria without reconciling with herself and her closest friends. In fact, the part of Adora that pushes people away in the name of heroism is not actually her, but instead the cycle of abuse exploiting her moral compass to fulfill corrupt desires that are not and never could be her own. Even the purported good guys do it, the First Ones making Adora believe that her path, her destiny, is to be a weapon. She fights this at the climax of season 4, but never comes to terms with it mentally until the conversation with Mara. And after it has all become hopeless, lost and Etheria is destined to burn away, Catra flips the script. Adora’s truest desire was Catra, but the abuse was too ingrained, the hurt too deep, for these desires to become reality, to be found within themselves. Only when Adora knows her blind heroism has lost, and therefore all to be lost, can Catra, whose arc has now culminated, save the universe. They both found not only their own destiny, but learnt to accept the intertwining of their lives as something that can be a force for good, a force for love. 

So to conclude, She Ra is not just about being torn apart, but in the end is about two girls fighting abuse as they learn to love each other, and eventually watching the patterns of abuse fade away as they express pure, unconditional love through a kiss that changes everything. 

“Don’t you get it? I love you. I always have.”

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This is everything!!!!!

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First & Last Appearances (Part 1 of 2)

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I present to you: the most beautiful ladies in history ♡

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all i can think about is how adora opens and closes her mouth twice before asking catra “you love me?” because she can barely bring herself to believe it’s true. even right as catra kisses her, her eyes widen in surprise, and she only closes them just as their lips meet. adora’s really just so shocked that she has someone who loves her back like this, and that the person who loves her is catra, the person she’s wanted so long. she can’t believe it and honestly neither can i.

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do you all just think about how Catra and Adora are gonna spend the rest of their lives being gay and happy and smooching whenever they want to and you just……..you juustt ….. ;—;

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what adora really wanted the whole time but didn’t realize until the end of the show is that what she really wanted was a life with catra…. i’m emotional

[hazelspacecadet]

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✨✨✨CATRADORA CANON QUEENS✨✨✨✨✨✨✨