do you ever just put a line from a work next to a screenshot and realize all over again how goddamn gay it is
Light Hope says this line while staring at an image of Mara. Zero other memory of Mara but Light Hope looks at a picture of her and says, completely unprompted: "I want to serve her and protect her but I am not strong enough" AND SHE DOESN'T EVEN REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED TO MARA AT THIS POINT.
Compare this to what she says earlier when Adora gets mad at her for being playful and not "useful" in the way she wishes Light Hope was: "I am a hologram. My purpose is to train She-Ra. If I am not doing that, then I have failed." Like
Clearly Light Hope has a personality at this point independent of "her programming" and she isn't necessarily all about work. She treats Adora's outburst as a rebuke and a reminder of her purpose, but it's not necessarily something she intrinsically wants. She understands her purpose, but she has other inclinations too.
Whereas she looks at Mara and just completely unbidden says something so devoted and passionate and personal that tbh Adora should've blushed a little more on hearing it (though I get why it doesn't occur to her; this is one of Adora's--understandably--self-centered moments, and it is a character flaw/trauma of hers that she sees people, including herself, in terms of usefulness. This is over and above her well-founded mistrust in and previously combative relationship with Light Hope).
The first interaction is Light Hope describing her day job, and the second is her baring her soul.
Fanny Howe, “Second Childhood: Poems; “Loneliness'" // She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, 1x12, "Light Hope" // She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, 4x05, "Protocol" // She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, 4x05, "Protocol"
“My love: I apprehend each flower, each winged body, saturated in a light that burnishes. I would make a burnishing of you, by which I mean a field in flower, by which I mean, a breaching—my hands making an arrow of themselves, rooting the loosened dirt. I would make for you the barest of sounds, wing against wing, there, at the point of articulation. Love, I pound the earth for you. I pound the earth.”
— Donika Kelly, excerpt of “Love Poem: Centaur”, in Bestiary: Poems
“Hands learn. More than minds do. (…) / I love hands like I love people. They are the maps and / compasses with which we navigate our way through life, / feeling our way over mountains passed and valleys crossed; / they are our histories.”
Part of the it-hurts-so-good tragedy of Mara is that she seems like a person who understands that there’s more to life than duty like
she looks at the world around her in a way that doesn’t seem to play well with her superiors’ more extractive worldview. She interacts with Light Hope as a person, she seems to intuitively understand that the Etherians probably know more about the magic of Etheria than the First Ones, she questions the heroic narrative her superiors put forward about their presence on Etheria, and she’s willing to go against her superiors’ direct orders once she realizes the nature of the Heart. Like for fuck’s sake, she brings an AI flowers because they’re pretty and she wanted to give Light Hope something beautiful.
And you know part of that is because, kind of like Entrapta, she sees life and humanity in everything around her. And she understands, on a deeper level than many of the main characters, that people—even bots and AIs—are worth more than their “usefulness” to others. In spite of the culture she’s no doubt surrounded by, and the probably enormous pressures she’s under from her superiors. Like, if anyone is going to make it out of the situation she’s in alive, you want it to be Mara. She even says it! She didn’t want to die! She didn’t go out in pursuit of that heroic ideal that Adora gets hung up on! She realizes that She-Ra protects Etheria above everything, even her own life, but the point of her existence wasn’t just to be used up and then die. She GOT IT.
But in the end, she’s trapped by what her people have done, and the one person who understands that she shouldn’t have to die, that the fantasy of “heroism” and heroic death that Adora falls prey to is just that—that person pays the ultimate price.
And then–and THEN–this show has the audacity to have her tell Adora from beyond the grave that her life is worth more than just as a sacrifice for others. Even after she’s dead, even after she’s been replaced, she’s still looking out for the lost, still trying to make sure everyone else makes it out even if she never will. Every single last one of them. Even Adora. Even She-Ra.
Just twist the knife a little more, why don’t you.
#love my traumatized ai who's given up all hope after losing her lover #and lost her in more ways than one #mara made her believe she was more and after watching her die... how could any of it matter? #what was done to her and mara and adora--it can't be undone #it can't be stopped #she was powerless to stop her creators from unmaking her #she was powerless to save mara who she loved more than anyone else--if she was going to break free for anyone it would've been her #but she couldn't--so it must not be possible #it doesn't matter what anyone thinks about 'destiny' because the first ones had so much power that what they wanted might as well be destiny
#and then she remembers how mara laughed #and the way she smiled #and the way she loved light hope #and the way she fought and everything she believed #and the only thing she CAN do is honor mara #it's like breathing #because her love for mara her relationship with her exists on a level so profound and so basic it remade her #it's one of the most beautiful and heartwrenching stories in spop and spop does not lack for those #and also one of the most hopeful--light hope has been lost in her grief and despair and shattered self for a thousand years #she's trapped in an internal struggle and the cruellest part is that she doesn't even remember why she's fighting #because her creators took everything from her when they rewrote her #and just one memory just five seconds of a single minute of a years-long relationship was enough #she loved mara THAT MUCH #don't touch me (via @pasta-abomination)
I think the similarities that people are finding between Adora/Catra and Mara/Light Hope are less to do with the relationships being the same internally (as in, in terms of the dynamics between the two characters) and more to do with the fact that their stories deal with a lot of the major themes of the show, because the two pairings embody a LOT of the major themes of the show between them.
I don’t think it’s an accident or any kind of misrepresentation that the two relationships have parallels, but as someone who enjoys Mara/Light Hope A Whole Lot, while being pleased but more or less happy with how Catradora is presented in the show and not feeling a need to go beyond that, I want to unpick why, and what some of those differences are.
Partly because I think people make broad, thematic-level arguments about why a pairing is attractive to them, and for me, there are a lot of intra-relationship or interpersonal dynamic elements that have more bearing on why I like a ship. And it’s hard to frame in a positive light, but with Catradora, they already engage with some relationship dynamics that I’m a huge fan of (namely, rivalmancy, childhood-friends-to-lovers, and enemies-to-lovers).
The big similarities I see people picking up on are: The mind-control thing, and the "you deserve love too"/"you’re more than what you can give to other people" exchange.
And these are extremely valid parallels! They touch on two Extremely Core messages of the show! They’re very real! And you’re correct—those parallels do mean something about Mara and Light Hope, about their importance to the show and its message. Mara and Light Hope embody many of the show’s core themes, and I am glad people are starting to write about that!
But I find myself sometimes feeling like that’s… not quite the reason why I like the pairing. Y’know?
So, with the caveat that this is just my feelings about the pairing, and probably literally everyone who ships either Catradora or Marahope has a different opinion than me in some way or other, I want to discuss the major differences between Catradora and Mara/Light Hope as I see them.
Because we started liking these ships before we saw the themes that they’d be used to embody in the end, right?
Breaking it down
What Adora and Catra have is a rivalmancy, essentially—especially when they’re first introduced.
Even when they’re on the same side, they have a competitiveness to their dynamic, and part of what drives their split is that Catra, on some level, resents Adora for getting all of the things that she wants, but can’t have, because of (basically) Shadow Weaver—and then abandoning both it and her. It’s a rivalry between peers, fellow soldiers, and there’s a colossal amount of abandonment issues and emotional trauma involved as well. They’re also both close to the same age.
And they were raised together. They spent their formative years extremely close, and their split has a lot in common (probably intentionally) with painful adolescent splits that happen as people grow up, change, grow apart, and (sometimes) come back together. It’s quite moving!
Mara and Light Hope aren’t peers in the same sense; you get the sense that they started out more like co-workers, and their eventual split only happens because Light Hope has their mind wiped and their ability to choose taken away from them (Catra, on the other hand, makes a lot of choices that put her and Adora at odds, often intentionally). The two of them work together and depend on each other, and they become friends, and their roles are complementary. Literally neither of them could do the other’s job, and they depend on each other’s skillset and resources to stay safe and fulfill their own duties effectively.
So they meet as fully-formed (relatively) people in a professional context and become closer, rather than being together for those formative years and undergoing a separation as they change and discover they don’t fit the same way they used to.
There’s also an implication that Light Hope may have trained other She-Ras in the past. I don’t know how long Mara expected her tenure as She-Ra to be, but it seems like that could be a lifelong commitment, once she’s been chosen. If so, then that could imply that Light Hope’s "age" (though I don’t know if that’s something anyone would even keep track of for an AI, because they weren’t supposed to change and “grow” like a person) is on the scale of centuries by the time she meets Mara.
And even if you headcanon them traveling to Etheria together immediately after Light Hope was minted, they’re still not really anything like Catra and Adora in their dynamic. The development of their relationship has a lot more in common with interspecies or human-AI relationships in sci-fi—Terminator, Andromeda, and Killjoys come immediately to mind.
I’m also intentionally including platonic relationships here, like John Connor and Uncle Bob in Judgement Day, too, because this is such an established trope, and touches on some of those Core Sci-Fi Questions that exist in the genre—about the nature of life, consciousness, sentience, individuality, and choice. It’s not just in a romantic context that you see humans and AIs ruminating to each other about what beauty is, why people find flowers “pretty”, what it means to have free will, to feel emotions, or to be an individual. Hell, you can even include Data from Star Trek in that list.
But it is also something of a trope for AIs to "fall in love" or develop special bonds with humans that they work particularly closely with, or for humans to fall in love with AIs (sometimes they go more Pygmalion with the latter and cast the human as the AI’s creator).
Which brings me to the core trope being engaged in Mara and Light Hope’s relationship, one that Noelle has actually alluded to in their remarks during the "Exit Interviews" streams:
Relationship makes Light Hope more than their intended purpose.
Memory and programming
In one of the streams, Noelle states that the writers’ room made the decision that something about Etheria "broke" the people who have tried to conquer it, and kind of made them part of itself (God this show has Star Wars all over it). He uses several examples, including Hordak.
Hordak, however you feel about him, develops a sense of individuality that makes his re-assimilation into the greater Horde impossible. Like Light Hope, he remembers things he isn’t supposed to, and on being presented with a physical reminder of Entrapta and his relationship with her, Horde Prime’s conditioning begins to break down.
Over the course of her arc, Mara comes to realize that being She-Ra means something more than her superiors have told her, and on realizing what her superiors are doing to Etheria, concludes that She-Ra, and all of Etheria, are being exploited and need to be protected from the First Ones. So, by betraying the First Ones (breaking her oath to them), Mara fulfills her role as She-Ra.
And Light Hope falls in love with Mara, something she was never supposed to be able to do. In the end, it is the memory of Mara that allows Light Hope to break through her programming long enough to allow Adora to destroy the Sword.
I know I brought up how AIs gaining sentience and self-will is a trope within sci-fi, but the best recent example that I can think of off the top of my head (and the reason I was able to articulate this at all) is actually The Good Place, with Janet.
In The Good Place, successive reboots are the in-universe mechanism that allows Janet to grow and change—but it’s her relationship with the other core characters that shapes who she becomes and what she believes. In fact, if she hadn’t been stolen and rebooted so many times in the first place, she never would have become who she did at all.
So: Like the rest of the cast, relationship makes Janet more than she was originally intended to be. Relationship makes Janet whole and fully alive. Light Hope’s story is, um, a bit more tragic, but I think the comparison works.
Catra and Adora, on the other hand, are dealing with a separate problem(/s): Catra’s pain and abandonment (and Adora’s self-abandonment) as a result of what they endured growing up, and the angst of childhood friends growing up and growing apart. It fits very squarely within the parameters of She-Ra as a kids’ TV show.
To boil it all the way down, their relationship *is* the problem. And it takes the whole show to fix it.
What’s suggested by the (sparse) textual evidence on Mara and Light Hope is that their relationship followed a more well-worn sci-fi path: By becoming friends with Mara, Light Hope learns how to be in relationship with another person, how to make her own choices, go against her programming as needed—how to have fun and appreciate beauty and being. Her falling in love with Mara is, metaphorically, her learning how to be alive in the world. Through loving Mara, she gets a glimpse of a world beyond being someone’s instrument, someone’s tool.
That’s part of what’s so heartbreaking and beautiful about them: In the midst of a situation that’s that’s built on deception, concealment, and coercion, where both of them appear to have been lied to or denied the entire truth by their superiors, where Mara, Light Hope, and the entire planet of Etheria are considered expendable by their superiors as long as they get their shiny weapon, Mara (who seems to understand that there’s more to life than duty and heroism) creates a space for Light Hope that is free from the constraints of her programming, to a degree. And as a result, Light Hope changes.
If Light Hope is a villain for her role in all of this (and this is complicated by the fact that she’s a programmatic being created for a particular purpose), then loving Mara is part of what makes her redemption possible. Her relationship with Mara makes her more than a weapon. In fact, it breaks her as a weapon.
And there’s certainly elements of that in Catra and Adora’s relationship, but it’s not the throughline that it is for Light Hope and Mara until you get to season 5—a full three quarters of the way through the show.
Love also doesn’t play as positive of a role in Catra’s redemption arc, really (where her parallels to Light Hope would be the most obvious), both because her villainy is something she explicitly chooses, and because her internal conflict and pain regarding her feelings for Adora are so much a part of her villainy. It only becomes redemptive in Adora’s struggle with the Failsafe—i.e. when we get back into the world of the First Ones, where most of the themes of "destiny" live.
So yeah. That’s the breakdown. I want to get into the individual tropes, but I’m going to have to save that for another day.
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