why cassandra is the traitor- not adira
now before y’all hit me with the “but adira!!” hear me out. as we know, adira has been set up as a morally ambiguous, wandering individual who doesn’t seem to have much to lose since we met her. the very first time we meet her, she attacks raps and cassandra for kicks. just about everyone in the gang gets off untrustworthy, even ‘villainous’ vibes from adira. even later on, after multiple encounters with adira (including ones where she helped the group get out of trouble!) not much has changed, not made better by hector’s warning about her.
now you would think that, for being set up this long as someone who is untrustworthy, adira is the traitor. but that’s too easy. it’s too predictable, if it happened, we wouldn’t be surprised- and we know that the tangled crew too well to expect something so obvious.
adira is the red herring.
what we know about tangled antagonists:
quickly looking back at varian in early season 1, we had a lot of material to warn us of his antagonist/villain potential. this is important. first, pre-existing weakness/personality traits. his alchemy was shown to be unstable, and so was he- unwilling to back down or accept his mistakes. he wanted to be successful. second, imagery and foreshadowing, primarily being the first appearance with his mask and coat in ‘what the hair’. third, and most importantly, the means/reasoning to turn into an antagonist. varian’s poor relationship with his disappointed father (who he lost shortly right before everything went downhill) which would later be exploited and lead to his breakdown.
cassandra, throughout her entire life, has been pushed down, overshadowed, patronized, and in general, not seen as capable of the things she clearly is skilled at. the most obvious of these things being her swordfighting ability (throughout the show), strong leadership/independence (finally put to the test in ‘secret of the sundrop’) and skill in disarming enemies (as seen in ‘under raps’). cassandra has the capability to be a captain of the guard possibly even greater than her father. in the first season we are shown her being forced instead to work as a lady in waiting, put down during ‘challenge of the brave’ as simply ‘rapunzel’s handmaiden’, and at the slightest mistake, rejected from chances to ascend as a guard.
“to you this was just a fun way to blow off a saturday but to me, this was my chance to show everyone that i am more than just your lady-in-waiting. and just when i thought i might even get the slightest bit of respect… never mind.”
not until the finale does corona truly see her shine as a leader and soldier, and even then, she is overshadowed by rapunzel.
in both the first and second season, cass bickers and fights with rapunzel quite a bit, she is smug when she’s right, and bitter when she’s wrong. rapunzel showed up out of nowhere after 18 years and has already garnered more acclaim than cass has ever had, simply because she’s back home, whereas cass had to work her whole life to get a small sliver of respect. during S2’s midseason, ‘rapunzel and the great tree’, cassandra gets her hand severely burned by touching rapunzel during the reverse incantation, when she was a second away from stopping the vines herself with the spear. that burn, though not directly rapunzel’s intention, was still her fault for not trusting cass to save the day on her own. not only did she steal cassandra’s spotlight again, but she literally physically injured her. i think this is a kind of metaphor for the severe damage rapunzel causes, without directly intending it, to cassandra.
they try to talk once later about it, but to no awry; when rapunzel tries to help her injured hand, cassandra pulls away and says she’s fine when she clearly isn’t. later in ‘rapunzel: day one’, they talk about it again, arguing, cass clearly not accepting rapunzel’s reasoning for the tree incident, and at the end, they don’t say sorry and full get over it. cass admits that she’s “still mad” at her, and that she’s going to be for a while, though not forever. her tone shows that she doesn’t know if she can forgive rapunzel so easily, especially after all the past wrongs they’ve never even addressed. the writers are very obviously sending strong messages of resentment and bitterness building in cassandra, more than ever before, indicating to me that a tipping point is very near, especially with the finale coming up.
let’s review my three points for building up an antagonist from earlier, this time with cassandra.
#1: pre-existing weakness/personality traits
though she shows warmth occasionally and sometimes even apologizes for her actions, cass in general gives off a morally ambiguous vibe throughout the entire series. she lies to varian and others without batting an eye, disobeys orders from the king, and can be quite violent and threatening to members of her own court. (it also doesn’t help that her design and color palette are quite dark and shadowy, but i digress.) when given the opportunity to win and proceed in her path to recognition, she takes it, rarely regarding the impact on others.
#2: imagery and foreshadowing
she literally has an entire ‘i want’ song about how bad she wishes people would see her and respect her (‘waiting in the wings’), and give her the chance to shine, but she is never given the chance. past trends of ‘i want’ songs in disney usually lead later to some sort of chaotic ‘answer’ to the need, as pointed out by many already.
cassandra also appeared in a ‘nightmare’ vision to rapunzel during ‘rapunzeltopia’, surrounded by green flame and especially villainous if compared to the other nightmares presented to her at the time. she is angry and bitter. “you did this to me rapunzel. it’s all because i FOLLOWED YOU.” the emphasis on ‘followed you’ is especially interesting to me. is she tired of following rapunzel’s lead? maybe even corona’s lead?
#3: the means/reasoning to turn into an antagonist
i thought this over after the aforementioned ‘rapunzeltopia’ especially. cass made it clear she hasn’t gotten over her anger. she’s covered in armor now, metaphorically and physically. when she wandered into that door in the shell house, we don’t know what happened to her, but what we do know is that whatever was inside was able to convince her to abandon her friends (who were trying to save rapunzel’s life!!) and that, as far as i can tell, is a major red flag. when she emerged from that door, clearly winded, the very first thing she did was scowl at rapunzel in a very menacing, bitter way.
whatever or whoever she saw in that place, it obviously changed something. i do think it’s the real cass who came out of that door, but she has been tampered with. whether it was a vision of her future, a person who told her her skills were more valued by zhan-teri, or someone who wanted her working in the dark kingdom, a lot of things could have happened to sway her allegiance. i don’t specifically think she’d hurt her friends, but she doesn’t feel so inclined to help them at the moment either. maybe she saw something that told her to stop rapunzel from reaching the opal, and she believed that she needed to protect the group from it. she has, of course, always taken the secondary option to save the group (think back to the spear in the great tree).
all this to say that cass has the buildup, unsolved resentment, and skills to pose a threat to the group. we know that ONE member of the party will turn against them. the finale is drawing very close. and only ONE member fits the formula of a twist antagonist that tangled used last season. that’s cassandra.
will this be for forever? of course not. i see this being a major plot thread in the finale and being resolved later in season 3, it would make an excellent storyline for rapunzel to deal with and add a lot of angst (which we all love).
however, for the time being, cassandra made it clear she’s constantly ‘left waiting in the wings’, and the next opportunity that comes for her to prove herself might not have been from corona.
amandla
pixelskylines
2087
stormborns
