She-Ra and the Princesses of Power Rewatch 1.13, "The Battle of Bright Moon"

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As the first season of the series draws to a close, battle is joined--and won!

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1.13, "The Battle of Bright Moon"

Written by Noelle Stevenson, Katherine Nolfi, and Laura Sreebny
Directed by Stephanie Stine

Synopsis

Target acquired.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Cold winds blow through the woods, freezing all they touch as a storm spreads from the Fright Zone outward. Adora, Glimmer, and Bow race back to Bright Moon to secure it against the coming threats. Catra looks over her handiwork and its devastation with no small joy. Entrapta is enraptured by her own efforts, and Catra plots how to capitalize on the situation: an attack on Bright Moon.

In Bright Moon, Angella uses the rune-stone's power to repel the storm and summon aid. Adora, Glimmer, and Bow return, and they assess their status. Adora realizes an attack is imminent, and planning to resist it begins. Matters look grim, indeed; allies are not coming, and Glimmer still suffers her strange malady. Adora volunteers to stand in defense alone, knowing that Catra will be leading the incoming attack. Light Hope's earlier comments about endangering her friends ring in her ears.

It is a touching moment, if an unfortunate one.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Glimmer opens her personal armory to Adora and Bow. Angella confronts her, initially, and confers her father's weapon on her. The attack comes then, and the Bright Moon forces rise to meet it as best they may.

Battle is joined, but it is clear that the Horde anticipated the defenders' likely reactions. Adora's efforts are blunted, though she struggles valiantly, the more so after Catra presents her self directly. Still, the fight goes poorly for the defenders; they slow the assault, but they cannot stop it. Not alone.

The cast shot seems obligatory.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

It is fortunate, then, that they are not alone; the other princesses join the fight, relieving the siege and repelling the Horde. Catra escapes, coming to be appointed to a higher position in the Horde, but in the wake of the battle, the princesses are reconfirmed in their alliance. Clearly, more is expected to follow.

Discussion

Regarding the present episode, comments I made here and here suggest themselves as needing further consideration. In the earlier commentary, I note that "there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between characters in the series and antecedents in the romances," while in the latter, I remark that "While it is the case that Adora evokes Arthur in many details, in her conduct, she tends to be more of Lancelot or Gawain." In that same commentary, I point out--in insufficient detail, to be certain, but I am not so much an academic now as once I was--that there are parallels between Adora and Lancelot; the present episode seems to point out more parallels to Gawain, particularly as he is presented later in Malory and in some others such as Chrétien de Troyes. Both characters are powerful, yes, and possessed of both notable swords (whether Excalibur or the Malorian Galatine for Gawain); both also notably have special horses (Gringolet for Gawain, Swift Wind for Adora). Both are also headstrong and intemperate, given to excess anger and to charging in without considering the ramifications of their actions. (Victoria L. Weiss's 1976 "Gawain's First Failure" stands out in my mind as one useful discussion; Gawain's first expedition as a "dubbed" knight in Malory presents an example, too, here.)

In some ways, having Adora presented as such a pastiche of characters--borrowing from Arthur, Lancelot, and Gawain in Malory, as well as other sources--is a frustration. It would be far easier to make arguments about the medievalism of the series were there a direct correspondence between her and a single figure or even a relatively restricted group of them. (And, lest it be noted that "Round Table Knights" is a "relatively restricted group," there are 150 of them in Malory at any given time, so while it is a restricted group, it is still far larger than admits of easy analysis in such a medium as this.) That I have not been able to point one such out is something that might well be used to argue against the position that the series is more than minimally, nominally medievalist, and that such scholarship as I might still perform should be directed to other ends (or that the fact I write as I do justifies the refusal of institutions to accept my applications for tenure track positions, back when I still sent them in). And I have to accept that there is some (small) merit in such critiques--as in the refrain I have often heard when discussing this kind of work: "It's just a cartoon; it's not worth getting so wrapped up in."

At the same time, the fact that there is not a direct, one-to-one alignment of characters is representative of medievalism, generally. That is, works that make use of the medieval rarely do a straight lifting of the medieval into other settings; there are almost always refigurings and adjustments. Some may have to do with translations across languages; some may have to do with translations across media. More, though, lines up with Paul Sturtevant's assertions in The Middle Ages in Popular Imagination (about which more here) and which I end up noting here--namely that the broader "popular" audience does not come to medievalist materials with a particularly informed understanding of the medieval (because they are not, themselves, scholars of the material--which is not meant as a slight, though I recognize it might be taken as such), and that even those members of it who do, following Kavita Mudan Finn, are not always using good sources. It is the kind of thing that leads to the woeful misapprehensions about the medieval that permit presentist bias, and it is the kind of thing that allows execrable racist jackasses to ground the filth that they claim as their rhetoric in a pseudo-intellectual justification that too many scholars who damned well ought to know better will not even bother to repudiate with feeble, pallid words--though they will happily lambast those with the audacity to rail against evil. (I am echoing Cato in some ways, I know. Carthago delenda est, with racism as Carthage.)

When they are not taken to foolhardy or outright evil ends, though, medievalist works tend to work in an amorphous amalgamation of what is perceived of as the medieval. Characters are compressed together, as are centuries and nations and continents. Adora borrowing from so many characters as she does does not make her less medievalist; it makes her more typically so. And given that the medieval sources themselves often borrow from, compress, and amalgamate their own antecedents, rather than necessarily following a one-to-one correspondence, she and the series in which she presently appears find themselves in abundant, long-lasting company.