adora is such a fascinating protagonist. a
single sentence description of her might make her seem like some generic yawn-inducing
super-powered chosen one but she's both subversive and psychologically fascinating she
bears resemblance to a lot of my other favorite supernatural female with the weight of the world
on her shoulders characters bringing up questions of responsibility love versus duty and i don't
think these comparisons are wrong but there are two main differences adora like her deuteragonist
catra is a victim of abuse and adora also starts the show on the side of the bad guys not to
mention her abusive upbringing heavily informs her character particularly the typically heroic parts
of it so there's a key word in a door story here expectations adora is bombarded by them force
captain shadow weaver's prodigy the fail-safe that will save us all from prime and some of these
aren't bad like expecting the strongest mystical warrior among you to you know contribute to an
intergalactic war isn't unreasonable but it's a pattern burden adora has had to put ahead of
herself over and over since she was a child. so let's start at the beginning
we impact catcher's childhood to understand her better and we're
going to do the same here with adora. while catra experiences a spiral
throughout the course of the show adora's path is more gradual rather than a
whipping girl adora is made to shoulder the golden child half of the dynamic to catra's scapegoat.
she's praised and lauded in ways catra isn't and so avoids the overt cruelty that catra
gets shadow weaver takes her on as a baby because she senses some power emanating from
her. adora's future has been predetermined by someone literally before she can even articulate
her own interests before she can even speak this marks the beginning of the denial of adora's
agency the effects of which will stick until the end of the show as i've said before if catra and
adora are vessels for shadow weaver's world view, adora's is her ambition but to be perfectly clear
favoritism is not privilege what this favoritism does do is give adora conditional love, gives
these ultimately unattainable internal goalposts for her being able to relax there's this feeling
that anyone's approval is this bottomless parking meter that she has to constantly pay or it'll run
out and monitoring this makes her like catra hyper vigilant she's constantly on alert for something
to go wrong anxiously feeling like the work is never done the result of this is that adora
can never feel secure in her value of herself or in the way others see her so how does her
relationship with catra factor into this? it's the greatest threat to shadow weaver's pet project
because that relationship is something adora wants when adora shows affection towards catra
it's an expression of her personhood so shadow weaver does her best and not only to demean catra
but to demean her in front of adora the message is clear you should feel ashamed for this person you care about. but her orchestration of adora's shame is even more subtle than that. the most insidious
type of manipulation is that kind that makes you believe you aren't being manipulated at all. is
this not what you've wanted since you were old enough to want anything. it's phrased as a question
but really, we can tell it's an order the kind that doesn't just do this but wiggles around
into your brain to make you think you're the one choosing and in fact when catra reveals that
shadow weaver's been manipulating them all along adore is completely taken aback. catra's had no
delusions about being elevated by the horde so she's had little incentive to idealize it but for
adora favor was handed out like breadcrumbs so this is all the baggage contextualizing adora
at the time she finds the sword so adora has been programmed with conditional love and
perpetual instability around her own self-worth now she finds a magic sword that turns her into
an eight-foot tall warrior that everybody loves huh. upon getting the sword adora has a pretty
speedy turnaround from i'm a horde soldier to "i'm she ra pledging my loyalty to the rebellion" now
i'll chalk some of this up to plot expediency but it is also in character. what's happened is that
adora has taken on a whole new role full of new expectations and a new set of people watching
her every move. she saves towns and they praise her it feels good but i imagine it also built
an increasingly bubbling anxious need to not let them down. "then rise, the rebellion accepts your
allegiance, she ra princess of power" pay attention to this. they don't even call her by her own name
when welcoming her so how is she to believe that this isn't also conditional acceptance sure bow and
glimmer like her but would they have befriended her as just a horde soldier? there's really no
way of knowing. probably something that keeps her up at night. adora embraces the she ra mantle
extremely quickly and forms a habit of using her in every situation as though she's invincible and
even going as far as showing off for grateful and adoring towns. the first thing she does to make
her case for her acceptance by the rebellion is that she is she ra and she can help her case for
herself is how she can be useful to them. and she does revel in she ra's power, who wouldn't but this
is "what adora can do" taking precedence over adora herself even if it makes rational sense right now.
and this is exactly what alienates her from catra, for whom "what adora can do" was the very reason
for the distinction in the way shadow ever treated them. the demands of force captain, shadow weaver's
prodigy, and she ra all resemble each other. each seeks to harness some untapped power within
adora, but in a way as though she might just be the vessel for this potential. the power
could be in anyone and it would be valuable but even as a child adora slightly more unburdened
is able to cultivate something she wants: a friendship. a friendship with someone who
seems to be hurt a lot at her expense. and so she makes a promise. promise is a story told
from catcher's perspective and for a reason light hope strategically picked the most upsetting
memories to broadcast that would dial catra's resentment up to a boiling point enough to tear
her apart from her weapon, her she ra. the selected memories are intended to create conflict. but
there are important things about adora here let's look at the memories from her perspective.
when shadow weaver punishes capture she does so very deliberately in front of adora. as we've said
catra is the overt target but the clear message being sent is: i know you love this person and i do
not approve you must feel responsibility for when i am angry with her and shame at the fact that you
care about each other. the fundamental lesson we see adora learn here is that she is responsible
for other people and their behavior so when she says things like you are kind of disrespectful
and catra says you never protected me we shouldn't really be surprised. the tragic two-sidedness of
their conflict exemplified in that line. there very well may have been many times that adora
would have seen catra get needlessly punished and kept quiet for her own safety in the system. anyhow
adora is taught early on to feel guilty about her attachments as a detriment to her responsibilities.
then when she becomes she ra light hope tells her "you must let go" exactly what she's already been
told her whole life in one matter or another: love care and acknowledging herself is not useful
to a cause it's not easy to control. but in season 1 episode 12 she shares what seems like clarity.
"i'm not mara i'm not the she ra's of the past. i didn't do this to fulfill some destiny i became
she ra to help others my attachments my friends are a part of who i am" so her attachments are
part of who she is and she fights because of them great. on the surface this seems like she's
figured it out, right? but this is half the story giving love isn't the problem. where do adora's
worth and she-ra's diverge? even though she accepts her ability to love and care the way she
sees herself in those relationships still has a transactional piece to it: what is and what is not
fixable. so she ra eventually provides an outlet for adora's hypervigilance, this constant anxiety
that she has to quell by doing something. were adora to relax she might have to sit with herself : her thoughts, her feelings. and she can't have that even when she's a skilled strategist that's
influenced by her pathological need for nothing to go wrong. and really it's a survival skill: one
she actually shares with catra even in scenes that are played as a joke. she's not planning she's
on autopilot trying to satiate a defunct mental system. do enough so maybe you can finally relax.
"you are the ambitious cutthroat ruthless warrior i raised you to be" but that's the catch, right. it was
never going to be enough for shadow weaver. and on some level adora knew that. it's a reflex a relic
from when she had to continually prove her use to collect scraps of approval. and these programs that we
learn as children stay long after they've outgrown their relevance to the distressing situation they
were adapted. for as an adult sure adora rebels against authority -- pretty frequently actually-- but
even begrudgingly still obeys the original ideas instilled in her. she can tell off shadow weaver
when she appears in moon dying because that's external but what she doesn't realize is she's
actually still doing shadow weaver's work for her shadow weaver's programming has fused itself to
adora. so adora's anxieties and then she ra's power co-morbidly fuse to give this poor girl a crisis
of identity so if she can find someone to tell her who she ra is maybe she'll have something solid to
hold on to meeting mara's hologram gives her some answers some more questions and unfortunately adds
another load to her shoulders adora always based her identity off of mara. first as who not to be
and then eventually whose legacy i need to uphold adora is the successor of a she ra so burdened by
a warped narrative that it precedes her. she's not remembered as mara, she's remembered as the one who
went nuts. and when she finds out the truth, adora sees firsthand how cruel this rewriting can be.
and it's happening to her while she's still alive. adora has trouble seeing herself outside the
perception of others because of that initial childhood lesson that she was responsible for
other people. so adora's convicted "no it's not" to a portal corrupted catra is one of her
most significant moments in the entire show catra's blame towards adora is certainly part
of shadow weaver's same design to exacerbate each other's issues creating a dynamic that i'll
definitely talk about in another video, but in adora's no she rebukes this. not with finality
because obviously this idea that she's responsible for other people will come back again, and again.
but in this moment we see that adora is able to recognize this. and that's huge. in hero, adora
experiences a betrayal almost identical to shadow weaver's. she thought she was being guided towards
some purpose but she was actually just being used let's look at what happens when this is challenged
practically. glimmer, in a moment of frustration tells her point blank that she's failed and
that she's angry because she hasn't done enough adora is such a resilient person and this breaks
her. it's not often we see adora's black and white thinking on such clear display but here it's
front and center. her response when bow tries to facilitate reconciliation is telling: "glimmer
doesn't need a weapon she needs her friends" "no, she doesn't. but it doesn't matter. i will
fix this. no matter what glimmer thinks of me." for adora, friendship is already off the
table. in her mind glimmer's demeanor towards her is permanently broken. and this
is because to some degree right adora doesn't feel that she deserves love. she's so disconnected
from herself. and yet we'll see later that her powers ask of her to connect to the world and to
do so inevitably she has to connect to herself she has to admit to herself that she is human. if
she realizes that she deserves love she realizes that she never actually had to prove to earn it.
accepting that she is worth loving is accepting her innate value as a person. her sacrificing
all the time is acting on this impulse in her mind that they don't want adora they want what
adora can do. SW: "the princesses don't care about you they want to use you for your strength return now
to the fright zone rule by my side." even when she's around people who prove her wrong, she would still
have to ask herself: would they have accepted her if she weren't she ra? and then glimmer uses her
as a decoy. and then glimmer conspires with shadow weaver, the woman who preyed on her as a child
for a plan that will make her a weapon. glimmer was obviously dealing with her own tunnel
vision, this isn't a personal attack of malice. but it's another thing chipping away by the
time she gets to beast island. beast island is such a massive turning point. it's where we see
adora's internal narrative collapse when her emotions are so high that she can't just turn
away from them like she normally would. it's the first time we see adora's power emerge from her
eyes and not the sword. it's this placebo effect, right, if she believes it's all the sword it's
easier to be calm and confident in herself because she already believes it's gonna work. this whole
episode the sword has not been working for her, which clues us into something important: the sword
is actually harnessing some of her power, that's why she couldn't transform without it. she was
powering the sword, the sword was not powering her anybody see a metaphor in here? hearing from
entrapted that the weapon is she ra, that she's a part of it, is shattering. she's built it for so
long what she remains to her, only to be literally told that she is a cog in a machine. as if to
confirm: no you do not get a choice. that her values and her motivations might exist, cute, but they
don't actually matter. she doesn't have a choice, she has a destiny. so smashing the sword, she
declares "i won't be used," but breaking the sword alone doesn't mean she's able to choose herself
yet. these things aren't linear, right, the few times that she's believed in her own self-determination
some external force proves her wrong. "the weapon is etheria" "she ra is the key" everything has
this fixed purpose. "i was brought here as a baby." all things that tell her that she doesn't,
and never had, agency. if the sword chose her then she's beholden to it. if she ra is a legacy,
adora doesn't matter. and with regards to choice? LH: "no, this is your destiny. you do not choose
you were chosen." light hope makes she ra's relationship to choice crystal clear. and
without choice there's no identity. the same cycles of her childhood. so the next
question is: without the sword, who is adora? season 5 has adora at her most introspective
simply because she has no other route. stripped of the identity that she's built, she's forced to
interrogate her own desires for the first time we don't get the sense that she regrets it: "you
have to stop acting like you're invincible. you aren't--" "you don't need to say it. i know. i made that
choice. i'm living with the consequences." you're not she ra anymore, as though it was something she was
and no longer is. maybe for the first time she's being okay with disappointing people. but at
the same time, she's at war with herself, like it was her choice to break the sword, which
for her understanding has cost her she ra so how can she possibly reconcile having destroyed
the thing that gave her purpose and worth, especially now that she's needed more than ever?
maybe it's self-punishment then, too when she neglects her sleep, and her health because, well,
if she's lost she-ra, then adora should make a huge effort to make up for it. in her dreams she
starts to follow a silhouette of what will become her most self-actualized form. the shera that
integrates rather than separates her identity and that's what really this has all been
about. the show so far has been a four season struggle for adora to integrate her she
ra -- or her duties, the way the world sees her and the use she can be of -- with herself, her
aspirations, and her self-worth. and this crisis of identity comes across pretty clearly
in the way that she ra just speaks about she ra "I AM she ra" "okay she ra i know YOU'RE in there"
"i don't know i just i lost HER" "i hear horde prime's been looking for ME. figured it was time
we met" whether she's referring to her in first or in third person. it's like she can't decide
whether she wields the power or she is the power and that's an important distinction. something she
wields can be taken away something she is not so easily. and untethered from the sword that actually
weakened her adora has to tap into something else this power re-emerges partially in stranded, when
her friends are in danger, and then finally fully and save the cat. and it's no accident that this
happens at the intersection of identity and choice on prime ship, she's confronted with her childhood
friend who is being puppeted without choice, turned into a mindless drone. and horde prime the greatest
threat of them all is the enforcer of a clear idea: no identity and no choice. but on his ship saving
catra adora embraces both. she does so knowingly without she ra-- it's a reckless move to risk she
ra by flying into an alien empire for a personal rescue mission. but she acts on something that
matters to her. and smack in the middle of the symbolic bastion of dehumanization, adora's backed
into a corner... and allows herself to feel grief. but she's not just grieving catra. she's grieving
the person she was with her. that adora catra knew that first expression of her personhood. the rest of the season sees a back
and forth of adora speaking in first and third person when talking about she ra. she
still isn't completely sure. what's particularly interesting is the way that she refers to herself
in shot in the dark. "you're magic aren't you? me too." she doesn't just say "i'm
she ra" like she has before, she says i'm magic too. and as i've talked about
in another video, in the series, magic tends to be shorthand for things like self-actualization and
authenticity. for the first time she's referring to her own relationship with she ra in
a really organic way. but then. failsafe. adora has grown so much -- she's made choices
for herself, she's unlocked her true she ra form, reconnected with catra -- and still, adora's
childhood programming shows its resilience and as the architect of it all shadow weaver
is able to exploit it at the 11th hour, and it works, just enough. this doesn't mean,
of course that all adora's growth has come undone, that it doesn't matter just that these
patterns take time to unlearn. and that's all the more difficult around the environments or
the people that enabled them in the first place we see this nicely visually represented in how
adora falters in her self-actualized she ra form around shadow weaver. adora's traumatic backsliding
making her second guess the confidence she's even built herself. shadow weaver knows exactly what
buttons to push to make adora regress to a more malleable version of herself. and here we get
another instance of adora seeming to understand what's going on but having trouble undoing it. she
might say "i'm not doing it for you," but it doesn't matter. the outcome is the same. adora falls into
line. she even frames her own self-destruction parroting shadow weaver's own words as
though they were her own thoughts. "catra, she distracts you, confuses you." "i'm distracted and
confused." it's a little weird. everyone has sort of accepted that adora, she ra, will take the failsafe
and maybe -- ideally survive but if it's a potential sacrifice why her why not shadow weaver?
maybe because adora seems determined enough that no one really wants to stop her, but why is it this
kid who has to go and be the willing martyr? just because she's broken enough to accept that? adora
seems dead set on ignoring her own humanity but it seems as though catra's last appeal to adora the
person has struck a chord: "what do you want, adora?" and she runs back. but there's still one more thing: unconditional love. this isn't to say
that bow and glimmers doesn't count, but there's a reason that catra's works. catra is
the only person that she's been close with who hasn't known her as she ra. that first expression
of her personhood. and now it seems to be shouting at her from a million miles away, telling her the
one thing she probably never believed she'd hear we make fun of her in the heart for the
incredulous "you love me," but adora has never really let herself seriously consider her own
feelings. and that only disappears when her guard is down. most clearly... i mean... she's... she's dying...
here. in adora's future wish, she's dressed in she ra's colors, but in more relaxed clothing. this
is what she wants, this is what she thinks she might be able to have, i mean, nothing she'd
ever say out loud, but, this is an adora who has integrated her responsibilities with her
humanity and found balance. and it's right here. right where adora believes she deserves it
least, because she's failed, and she can do no good anymore, that catra reveals not only
that she's loved her, but that she always has and so she can release what she was holding on
to too: "i love you too" and accept what maybe we've all known: "you know how you're always trying
to save oh every single person in the world? did it ever occur to you you were one of them?" that
if there's anyone who deserves a future, it's her. so in the end, the message of adora's
story is relatively straightforward: don't betray yourself for the expectations
of others. but like most apparently simple emotional adages it's easier said than done. we are
constantly inundated with narratives about who we are or who we're supposed to be. people give this
to us because of their own insecurities, to justify their own feelings, and occasionally, to use us.
and there's not really a solution for this, or at least, i don't have one. except the fact
that there's really no substitute for the ownership of our own choices, at the end of the
day, mistakes included. so if adora indeed made a mistake in shattering the sword, that
was hers to make. from basically day one, adora was fed these narratives that she was
responsible for other people, that her value was contingent on what she could do, and somehow,
this was always because of some power she had but of course, power is authenticity, and
self-compassion. because the recognition and the respect and the love that will come, will come. and
it'll come to a version of us that is being honest not in a "screw other people their opinions
don't matter." we owe the others around us a modicum of respect, of course, and the opinions
of the people we care about matter deeply just not so much, or so indiscriminately, that
we allow ourselves to be defined by them and it's also not mutually exclusive we can be
mindful of other people's feelings and reactions and have self-respect and draw boundaries
where those no longer meet our needs. it's a hard balance to find, and i think self-compassion
is something we're constantly in the process of learning. adora frees herself of the parasitic
mental cycles of conditional worth and by the end, one thing stands out amongst the debris: adora. the
life she wants, and the love she chooses. finally. just adora
