All right. I’ve cried enough about it; now let’s try to do something useful.
I’m going to try to articulate my interpretation of the scene between Hordak and Adora. I’m not certain that I will be able to do so adequately, but I will attempt it.
It’s… it’s everything, this scene. Everything haunting and terrible and tender and wonderful about this story. And I want to express why it affects me so deeply. So. Let’s try.
Upon having Horde Prime’s consciousness purged from his body, Hordak experiences a flashback to the moment he found Adora. The triumphant music that has been playing suddenly stops, and we experience this utterly silent moment between two characters that have, over the course of the show, interacted directly only a handful of times.
Hordak looks so very young, so innocent. He wears an outfit that appears to be a sort of mix of clone attire and his future armor, and it makes him look small, non-combative. He has his dyed hair and black eyeshadow, but none of it is as dramatic as it becomes later on. His face carries none of the stern bitterness and rage that we’re so used to seeing in him.
He’s just… quiet. Contemplative, perhaps. Maybe even a little confused, but entirely devoid of any malice, of any hint of evil that one might anticipate, remembering his demeanor back in the first couple of seasons.
He holds Adora gently, almost tenderly, the way one would expect someone, a regular, non-clone someone, to hold an infant. As he appears to adjust the blanket around her face, her hand rests close enough to his that, if she wanted, she could touch his skin.
This moment… I don’t know if I can properly express the emotions this moment instills in me. A sense of immense importance in an seemingly innocuous act. Something foreboding and melancholy, yet tentatively hopeful.
Here is a Horde clone, a cultist whose sole purpose is the glorification of Horde Prime, and here is a tiny infant girl. They are so very different, so entirely unlike one another, and yet they are the same. Both infinitely far from home. Both lost and alone in this strange place. Both beholden to others’ machinations, whether they recognize it or not. Both fated to suffer so terribly, for reasons entirely outside of their control. And neither knows it: what the future holds for them.
Hordak will suffer through chronic illness, and shame, and loneliness, and the terrifying disgrace of failure. He will visit grievous harm upon Etheria in his desperate bid for validation and acceptance. He will return to his god-Brother full of misguided hope, only to be mentally and emotionally destroyed.
Adora will be given to an abusive woman who will instill in her insecurities and traumas that will affect her for life. She will spend her days driving herself to meet everyone else’s needs while pointedly ignoring her own. She will experience the horror of being groomed to be a weapon.
They will both suffer immeasurably, and yet within that suffering, they will find friendship, and love, and strength, and eventual peace.
And this moment? This moment that Adora is too young to remember, and that Hordak once claimed to forget? This brief moment of a Horde clone’s inexplicable mercy towards an infant girl is what starts a chain of events that ends with the death of a monstrous tyrant and the liberation of an entire universe.
Neither recognizes this moment. Neither knows its significance.
They don’t know that Hordak, by indulging in mercy and saving this child, has likewise saved himself and the rest of the known universe. They don’t know how incredibly important this brief moment is to the both of them, to everyone. They won’t know it until everything is said and done, until the journey is over.
It’s such a poignant, haunting realization: that everything we see happen, everything they all go through, every triumph and frustration, is the result of this single decision Hordak made for reasons he likely doesn’t quite understand. The result of a small connection that neither Hordak nor Adora realized they shared.
But once they do realize it, once She-Ra purges Prime from Hordak’s body and mind and recognizes this connection, we witness a beautiful moment of understanding and forgiveness.
Her hand gently cupping Hordak’s cheek, She-Ra sees that, despite everything, despite all that Hordak has done, there was no malice in him. Not really. Not when all of the anger and frustration and fear are peeled away.
She sees him not as a tyrannical conqueror, but as the wounded, frightened, emotionally sick person he truly is.
She-Ra sees that, in the end, Hordak is a victim of terrible circumstances, of another’s sordid plans, just as she herself was. She understands that what drives him is not the desire to rule, or to destroy, but rather something so much more tragic and painful and desperate. Something that necessitates healing, rather than punishment.
She sees all of this. She understands it. And so she chooses to forgive.
And because She-Ra is Etheria, and Etheria is She-Ra, it is as if the planet, too, recognizes what Hordak is and what he has done. Etheria sees Hordak, Etheria understands Hordak. And Etheria, too, forgives him.
Despite everything that’s happened, despite the war and the destruction and the litany of pain and fear he has wrought, Hordak is forgiven.
And as She-Ra smiles at him, he quietly realizes that the tiny infant he rescued from a silent field all those years ago is the reason all of this has happened. The reason he is free. The reason he is forgiven. He remembers her. Hordak remembers a moment and a connection and a choice he once made, and he recognizes the loving act of kindness that has resulted from them.
It’s so tender, all of it. So kind. So compassionate and gentle, that this man’s wrongs can be seen for the cries of pain that they were, and that he can be helped up off the ground instead of subjected to vengeful justice.
Because that is what this story is about: compassion and forgiveness. People and how their most unassuming connections can radically change their lives. Choices and personal agency rising above destiny. Recognizing the pain and trauma in other’s mistakes and reaching out to them in healing rather than retribution.
And all of it started and ended with two lost individuals who, without knowing, without meaning to, would forge a connection and save one another’s lives.
This brief scene is a loving celebration of everything this show stands for, every compassionate message it has conveyed, and every hopeful lesson it has taught. It makes me weep more than anything else this show has offered, and though I will never be able to truly express my feelings about it as well as I would like, I hope I’ve provided at least some idea of why it is so important to me.
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