She-Ra and the Princesses of Power Rewatch 1.1, "The Sword: Part 1"

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A new Netflix reboot of an older cartoon begins, and a new rewatch series with it.

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1.1, "The Sword: Part 1"

Written by Noelle Stevenson
Directed by Adam Henry

Synopsis

Not an auspicious starting place, to be sure.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

A quiet opening moves towards a tortured-looking place, in which a young woman suits up and warms up in advance of a military training exercise. The young woman and her unit, from which a member--Catra--is absent, are to practice reaching and liberating a rebel stronghold. The practice is successful, and the young woman, Adora, acquits herself most ably.

After the exercise, Adora and Catra confer briefly before Adora is summoned by a hierarch, Shadow Weaver, and promoted to an officer's position. Shadow Weaver also tasks Adora with a mission against a prominent rebel stronghold, Bright Moon.

That looks a bit better.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

In said stronghold, the princess Glimmer confronts her mother, the queen Angella, over her conduct in the field. In a fit of pique, Angella grounds Glimmer, and Glimmer storms off in an equal pique.

Adora and Catra confer about Adora's elevation and Catra's jealousy and angst. Adora takes Catra out on an illicit escapade outside their stronghold--the Fright Zone. Adora is lost along the way, finding a sword after waking from falling from her vehicle. Touching it sends her into a mystic-seeming vision, from which she wakes to find Catra anxiously tending her.

In Bright Moon, Glimmer angrily writes in her diary. Bow "surreptitiously" calls upon her, and the two confer about Glimmer's annoyance at Angella. They head out of the castle to pursue a strange reading Bow has received.

I can't get you out of my head...
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Back in the Fright Zone, Adora wakes from a dream to find Catra sleeping at the foot of her bunk. She heads out to find the sword again, drawn to it. Bow and Glimmer are bound to the same place, as it happens, and a melee begins. Adora makes contact with the sword and has another vision, one that explicates the sword to some extent; she is chosen to be its wielder long since. It also allows Glimmer and Bow to take her captive, and they purport to take her to Bright Moon for interrogation.

Along the way, they confer about their circumstances until coming across the ruins of an attacked village, for which Glimmer upbraids Adora. They are also attacked by local megafauna. Adora defends them from the attack, transforming into She-Ra for the first time to do so.

The heroine of the day.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Discussion

I have to note that I do not have the nostalgic feelings for this series that I did for Voltron: Legendary Defender. I did not watch She-Ra: Princess of Power as a child, though I did watch He-Man (and several others); I had already had an experience being rebuked for watching a "girls'" show. (It might be said I was a brony before there was a word for it.) I am aware of the earlier series, certainly, and there are parts of the present series that make more explicit reference to the earlier series than others (or so I infer; the evidence suggests it, even without watching the earlier series). But I'll not be focusing much on callbacks and throwbacks.

There's enough to do with the present series's overall medievalism. Even in the first episode, much reads as Arthurian, though there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between characters in the series and antecedents in the romances; there's not a direct counterpart to Malory's Sir Dagonet, for example, or to the Gawain-poet's Gawain. But a chosen hero who is meant to draw a magic sword that is itself held in a restricted place evokes Arthur and the Sword in the Stone, and a seeming hero emerging from a morass of villainy seems somehow to call to mind Tristram and the Cornish in Malory, as well.

Another major point of discussion emerges, too. The names given to people and places are clearly emblematic: Catra is cat-like, Glimmer glimmers, Angella has an angelic form, Adora is clearly adored, and the Fright Zone is clearly frightening. It should be obvious which is the side of "good" and which "evil" to any who hear such names--yet Adora seems not to realize the perfidy of the Fright Zone and its inhabitants. Given Adora's appearance--pale skin, blond hair, blue eyes--she can be read as something of a stand-in for a great many people who enjoy privilege unaware of it and unaware of its foundations on structures of ignorance and hate. It is the kind of thing with which medieval studies, perhaps more than many other areas of inquiry, has had to grapple in recent years, with the execrable openness of ideologies that deserve all opprobrium and their proponents' empty-headed attempts to invoke the medieval to justify themselves to a world that is beginning to admit it might actually know better.

The medievalism in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is not "straight," of course, but it is no less "crooked" than that bruited about by groups and people who should be abjured in the strongest terms, and it does not purport to be "how it really was," either. It may be that the invocation of the medieval can be read as a rebuke to those who would (continue to) misuse the medieval to (continue to) justify their racist, colonialist ideas and practices. More such rebukes, and stronger, would be welcome.