Hi, I want to talk about more emotionally devastating moments in She-Ra!
(Fun for everyone, right?)
So this scene/screenshot:
I was talking to @bluedandylyon about this a bit last night, but out of all the scenes in the show that make me emotional or are hard to watch, this is the one that's the most straight-up painful to me.
And yeah, part of it is that I'm...familiar with what Catra's doing/feeling due to my own Traumatic Childhood (tm). It's instinctive to go to your caregiver/parent for comfort even when they're the one that hurt you, and like a lot of other people I have painful personal experience with that.
But also:
We so rarely see Catra this openly needy for kindness/affection. (Actually, do we ever?) And it's not like accepting that affection was easy for her--when Shadow Weaver reaches for her she almost has to force herself to move closer, because she's (justifiably) scared of SW. So when the touch is affectionate, part of Catra's reaction is just relief--but also, she leans into SW's hand, like she's trying to get as much gentle touch as she can because she's so starved for it.
And I think this scene is actually harder to watch on re-watches, because you know. You know that moment of vulnerability and her attempt at kindness bites her in the ass--that SW escapes, and Hordak responds by cutting off her air supply, throwing her in prison after she passes out, and banishing her to the Crimson Waste. I've said before that the moment her mental state falls off the cliff that leads to her pulling the switch is finding out SW is in Bright Moon. But bluedandylyon pointed out to me--it's actually the immediate fallout from this scene, when Catra comes back and realizes SW used her (and specifically manipulated her desperate need for SW to love her) to escape. That's actually what just breaks her--and why when she finds out SW is in Bright Moon, it sends her spiraling so badly.
BUT ALL THAT SAID. I think the reason that the moment in that screenshot, specifically, hurts me every time; is that Catra looks so young. She's already started going down the path of villainy at this point, and as Double Trouble points out a season and a half later, her heart was never really in it. But this is a moment where we actually see it: that all that scrambling for power (and via power, safety), all that rage and violence--it's all just a mask, and under that mask is a terrified, lonely child who wants nothing more than to be safe, and for the people she loves to actually love her back.
