#being surprised when people don't like her trying to control them and then Adora spinning it defensively in her favor

[nny11writes]

i dunno, i feel like there's one thing with saying that adora hurt catram and another with saying that it's all her fault and she's an abuser too and i feel like that person's posts have always veered towards the latter category

you dont have to reply to this ask but thats the impression ive gotten from that blogger, excusing other characters while somehow shifting everything onto adora

I can see where you see that, but I’ll be honest I don’t interpret their posts that way. 

I like the tag line “Adora needs to own her shit” because that is a part of her character growth that we don’t talk about. Adora, just like Catra, does some awful shitty things during the show. Like, on screen explicitly bad behavior that often gets swept under the rug due to Adora’s usually good intentions.

I interpret the posts less as everything is Adora’s fault and she’s an abuser, and more as Adora has fucked up and been able to side step a lot of things she needs to unlearn. Some of these things can be abusive, especially if she never works on it.

But the posts also aren’t there to be well rounded extoling the bad and the good. They are laser focused on the bad behaviors and why they’re bad with a dash of here’s some reasons this happened which usually boils down to Shadow Weaver’s abuse of Adora, Adora’s maladaptive coping mechanisms, or ego. All of which are things that negatively impact Adora’s reactions and behaviors.

Just like any meta analysis, I don’t think it’s all true nor do I agree with everything presented. But I also think that the goal was to explore hurtful things that Adora does, so it’s going to focus more on that slant that anything else. In a hilarious twist one of the biggest things I really disagree with was an interpretation involving Glimmer, but there was plenty in there that I went “huh, that is a way to interpret the show”.

One of the things that is difficult with metas specifically is that they are often presented as a be all end all because that’s what makes a strong point. The point that Adora does often guilt trip Catra or that she does behave more physically violently at times towards her has to be broken down and explored, and stopping that to reassure (even more than was done in those posts) that Adora is a good person is reductive to the point of the analysis.

I don’t know if that makes sense, and this is probably just something we won’t see completely eye to eye on. But yeah, for me the posts don’t feel like they’re saying “Adora is an abuser who does everything wrong to hurt Catra on purpose” so much they read to me as “Adora is a victim of abuse who is struggling to learn new ways to live, who doesn’t (in the show) get to fully confront the ways she hurt someone due to growing up in such an unsafe and cruel manner. So let’s talk about the hurtful things she does that are heavily influenced by abusive behavior and tactics, the same way we’ve dived into Catra’s side of this coin.”