Throwing Off Their Chains
I just… haven’t seen anyone so far take the time to really appreciate the poetry of Adora and Catra’s personal confrontations with Shadow Weaver and how both scenes reflect the specific abuse they suffered and how they overcame it.
We’ll start with Adora’s scene, since it comes first. Adora’s abuse was primarily mental and emotional (at least as far as we KNOW). She was propped up from early childhood as the special golden girl, the one who had to take charge and do better than everyone else. We have already seen that the pressure of having to be the best at everything, all the time, has seriously messed up Adora’s self-perception and her emotional health. She’s anxious, paranoid, she overthinks things constantly, and her self-worth hits the ground like an H-bomb any time she fails to do something or live up to expectations. On top of that, Shadow Weaver put the illusory responsibility for Catra’s behavior on her tiny child shoulders. Not only did she have to be the best in everything, she also had to look out for Catra’s actions too, to protect her friend and to protect herself from Shadow Weaver’s abuse. It’s honestly no damn wonder that she’s got a complex about “protecting” Catra to this day when this idea has been ingrained in her mind since preschool.
When she faces Shadow Weaver on Mystacor, SW is very on brand, that is to say, patronizing and emotionally manipulative, appealing to Adora’s fears of rejection and self-doubt, and she tries to make her doubt her friends’ allegiances. She touches Adora’s face (can we talk about Bad Touch?) and makes creepy pretty statements about ruling Etheria together, blah, blah, blah…
You can see in the scene that Adora is momentarily tempted. She’s confused and scared, but then she fights it off. She stands up, rejects Shadow Weaver’s words, and throws this back:
“You never loved me! You just played your twisted mind games! I am none of the things that you say I am. I’m not like you. You are bitter and cruel, and you’re the one who used me!”
She takes up her Sword, and it turns into a Shield, a literal barrier between her and SW’s magic and a symbolic barrier between her heart and her abuser’s lies.
“I’m not going back! You have no power over me anymore!”
Adora has erected a wall against Shadow Weaver’s manipulations, and has thereby stolen Shadow Weaver’s power to abuse her further. When the light shines through from the eclipse, SW is blown away like the harmless shade she has become in Adora’s life.
The girl can finally take a dang breath and go to the beach.
Then, of course, there’s Catra. Catra, as we know, suffered from severe physical and verbal abuse from Shadow Weaver, and it has shaped who she is today, from her distrust of authority to her crippling need for validation to her resentment of Adora, her only real friend. Adora was the golden child, and Catra was the whipping girl.
But when she starts to rise through the ranks, becoming a Force Captain and getting closer to Hordak, her feelings and perceptions change. She begins to realize that she can actually fight back against Shadow Weaver now, and it shows. She becomes bolder and snappier, and when she gets the chance to take the Black Garnet from SW, she pounces on it with glee.
Shadow Weaver attacks her, ranting and raving about what a useless disappointment she is, how she’s learned nothing, all while Catra is nimbly dodging all of SW’s attacks.
And she throws Shadow Weaver’s last condemnation right back in her face.
“Oh no, I’ve learned everything from you! How to predict when you strike, how to dodge, how to RESIST! You thought you were punishing me all these years! Wrong. You were training me for this day!”
And it’s true. Catra was beaten but never beaten down, and in this moment, she finally strikes her abuser right where it hurts the most. Shadow Weaver’s mask shatters and her magic fades, as does her power to ever hurt Catra again.
It’s just sooooo nice. These two damaged children have grown into strong-willed adults with their own power and agency, and they have thrown off the one who tried to break them their whole lives.
Their problems aren’t fixed, of course. Their traumas still affect them, and, I imagine, will continue to affect them for awhile yet. One thing they must do before they can repair their own relationship is sit down and actually talk about what they have both been through. They need to address Adora’s hero complex and Catra’s poisonous resentment and self-destructive need for validation, and they need to address the ways they’ve hurt each other. I hope that we will see this happen in future seasons, because I believe the last step they need to truly break free of their past is to be honest with each other and forgive.
So, yeah, just wanted to talk about these two scenes and how great they are.
annaxmalina
turnnoffyourmind
tangentwithtanner
vaporwave
titsay
romaincrisis
