She-Ra and the Princesses of Power Rewatch 2.4, "Roll with It"

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A punning title points to a potential set of references in an interesting aside.

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2.4, "Roll with It"

Written by Noelle Stevenson and Josie Campbell
Directed by Jen Bennett

Synopsis

Screen and all...
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary

Adora, Glimmer, and Bow assail a Horde fortress that commands a passage. The assault goes poorly, despite some reasonable planning. It is fortunate, then, that the whole matter is but a game, soon reset.

The trio is gaming out strategies to take the real Horde fortress from its occupiers. Adora frets about the lack of successful planning in their past exploits, worrying about the quality of defenders--though Scorpia seems to be in command of the Horde forces in the fortress.

Glimmery.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary

Glimmer takes control of the gaming situation; narrative and artistic styles change to suit. Even so, the proposed plan games out as unworkable. Others soon join the "planning" sessions, with narrative styles and planning change--though no more effective plan emerges.

In the fortress, the Horde becomes aware that princesses are in the area. They send out a robot to gather intelligence, finding the princesses amid planning. Scorpia is convinced of the "plans'" veracity before the reconnaissance feed ends.

Yep. That looks like victory.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary

Adora has an outburst, from which Glimmer talks her down. United, the princesses and Bow proceed to assail the Horde fortress. It has hardened itself against the incoming assault, but it is not able to hold out against the attack. Despite a struggle, the Horde is beaten back.

Discussion

Given the content of the present episode, a passage from my earlier write-up of an episode of Voltron: Legendary Defender would seem to apply:

As a loving and evidently well informed call-out to Dungeons & Dragons, the episode is inherently medievalist; the game referenced is itself noted for its medievalist origins, borrowing extensively from Tolkien and from various military and political histories of the Middle Ages. Borrowing from it, in turn, is a continuation of the trope it embodies--one that itself pervades medieval literature and art, with the frequent appropriation and refiguring of characters and whole stories by other creators in other times and places. (The retelling of Chaucer's Miller's Tale in Heile van Beersele, per Frederick M. Biggs's 2005 Review of English Studies piece, "The Miller's Tale and Heile van Beersele," offers one example. The accretion of myth around King Arthur, beginning in Gildas and Nennius and extending through Geoffrey of Monmouth through Malory, offers another and more extensive. There are any number of others.)

The call-out is every bit as overt in the present episode as in the Voltron episode; a screen on the table is a giveaway, and references to "making checks" cement the invocation. It also hearkens back to Dungeons & Dragons' origin story; by report (attested in Daniel Mackay's The Fantasy Role-Playing Game, Gary Alan Fine's Shared Fantasy, and Lawrence Schick's Heroic Worlds, among others), the game emerged from tabletop miniatures wargaming, which gives occasion for the competing narrative views on display in the present episode. What was true of the Voltron episode, then, is also true of the present episode, in terms of its medievalist leanings.

Such 80s. Much wow.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary

Notable also amid the call-out is the shifting narrative and animation style. While each shift presents an homage to another artistic style--including one to the original series--the shifts themselves echo the multiple textual traditions that emerge in medieval practice. To explain: a lecture by Prof. Chris Healy at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette makes reference to the "medieval Xerox," which, maugre some popular accounts, is not a person but a process. To wit: medieval copyists would, per Healy, not seldom work from oral readings. That is, one scribe would read aloud, while another or others would write what they heard. Owing to differences in pronunciation, hearing ability, and the lack of orthographic standards, different versions of the same text would emerge from such sessions. While a simplification of processes, it is a useful explanatory model, and one that seems to be at work in the present episode; each of the rebel narrators works with the same basic structure but imposes a wildly different interpretation on it. In the end, the fact is that something corresponding to parts of each is present; it is textual transmission in reverse, but inversion is a common appropriative technique...