What character(s) from other fandoms that you're a part of remind you the most of Catra? Personally, I don't think I've seen too many, aside from maybe Vegeta from DBZ and maybe Jason Todd from DC comics but that's about it for me
Ok, anon, thanks for your patience. Let's go.
Firstly, I have two ladies that do give me a similar vibe to Catra (though they aren't 100% matches as you'll see.) And I want you to take particular note of that: it's very telling that the characters you mentioned are both dudes. This is something I have been thinking about for literally decades because it is a deeply entrenched stereotype in our culture: male abuse victims are angry, frustrated loners who lash out until they find that one (girl) person that gets through their facade, female abuse victims are portrayed as either anxious messes (more common in recent years) or as just... These smiling caricatures who continue to pretend to be happy because that's what our societies expect women to be. And this is something I took note of at a very early age, because as someone growing up with an abusive birth father I looked to the MALE characters as a guide book on how to act, because getting angry and lashing out was what made sense to me at the time and I resented the hell out of that unspoken implication that I was supposed to just suck it up and plaster on a smile when I wanted to rage against the injustice of what I was dealing with. In hindsight it wasn't great behavior, but it was what I needed to keep myself sane at the time. I'm not even exaggerating when I say I have waited my whole life for a character like Catra: someone who is reflective of my experiences as an ex-abuse victim, someone who is angry and wrathful and still allowed to be sympathetic. Now on to our two ladies.
First up: Vriska Serket from Homestuck. (I know, Homestuck is a huge fandom with a lot of assholes, but I do still enjoy the original comic. I just don't interact with the fandom.) Vriska and Catra both have similar vibes in the way they project their outward personas of being the badass bitch who takes no shit and is on top of things, but we all know that's a lie. And they both come from abusive backgrounds: Vriska was forced to become a killer at a very young age because her parental guardian (a literal giant spider) would eat her if Vriska didn't feed her other kids. Doesn't excuse her jerkass tendencies or her terrible actions, but that was how she started out. And Catra's deal with SW needs no explanation.
They both have developed very similar gadfly tendencies in order to maintain a sense of control around other people (though Vriska is a lot more mean spirited about it) and both have moments when the facade cracks and they show actual sincerity and frustration at themselves and other people. The main difference between them is that Vriska's actions are driven by a sense of grandiose self-importance that she has cultivated and fed into as a way to avoid looking at her own actions (because she's the best, so everything she does is awesome, right?) whereas Catra's primary driving motivation is pain: either making sure she doesn't have to hurt anymore or hurting those who hurt her. Plus Catra grapples with her sense of guilt a lot throughout Spop and maintains those sympathetic undertones while Vriska's moments of clarity are so rare that you basically have to keep a chart to locate them. But you could totally picture them both teaming up to make fun of their respective frenemies, assuming they didn't kill each other first for reminding themselves of their deep underlying self-loathing.
Second candidate: Anthy Himemiya from Revolutionary Girl Utena. And boy howdy, if anyone is interested in this show and wants to avoid spoilers, skip to the end now, because we're going on a deep and dark journey here.
At first glance, she and Catra don't have much in common. In fact, she seems to fit the stereotype I described above: the placid smiling doll who takes the abuse and keeps going. Key word: seems to. Anyone who actually watches the show knows exactly where I'm going here.
We're introduced to Anthy as the "Rose Bride": the prize in a series of sword fights between students at a very strange school, with the ultimate promise being that whoever owns the Rose Bride at the end of the duels will gain some nebulous ultimate power. And yeah, I said "own" for a reason: whoever possesses the Rose Bride effectively owns her and some of the most uncomfortable scenes in the show reinforce the fact that Anthy tailors her thoughts and actions to whoever currently controls her. And as you can expect, this leads to BUCKETS of abuse. Literally everyone in this show is culpable in some manner for this, no matter how well intentioned.
But remember that "seems to?" Because that's only one side of Anthy; the outward persona if you will. On the other side of the coin you have Anthy the Witch, and that's where the parallels with Catra come into play and why Anthy was my go-to abuse representation before Spop rocked my world. Because the big twist we find out at the end of the series is that Anthy and her older brother Akio (formerly Dios) are the former literal personifications of the fairytale damsel in distress princess and the noble prince on a white horse, respectively.
But the balance was upset: having to constantly go around saving people was literally killing Dios, because one of the major points of RGU is that you can assist people in saving themselves but doing it yourself strips them of agency and traps them in a cycle of needing to be saved again and again. The more people the noble prince saved, the more people needed saving. When it became clear that he couldn't keep going, Anthy took a stand and prevented the people coming for Dios (angry that he wasn't saving them anymore) from getting to him, and thus incurred the wrath of everyone and got skewered alive by an angry mob in the process. This isn't hyperbole: the role of the Rose Bride is to instinctively bring out the disdain and hatred of everyone on the planet. It's a punishment for stepping out of line, for not being the placid princess who needs to be rescued anymore.
Because we're operating on fairy tale logic, no longer being a princess means that Anthy became a witch, and no longer being the prince made Dios into satanic archetype Akio. So behind the scenes of the entire show, Anthy is the witch assisting her brother in orchestrating the duels, and their ultimate goal is to find someone pure of heart enough to embody those princely virtues Dios once possessed and to steal that power so Akio can return to being who he once was. All of the psychological torments and head games are designed to weed out the potential candidates to find that special someone... Except it's an impossible goal because no human being can live up to that standard. And with each atrocity they commit it becomes even more impossible to return to being that person.
Ok, tangent done, here's where it gets interesting: Anthy is a character with two sides to her, the suffering Rose Bride fated to endure the hatred of the entire world and the Wicked Witch who manipulates and orchestrates the torment of those around her. But here's the deal: she's a victim too. She's a victim of a system that won't let her be anything other than these two binaries; she's a victim of her brother who has all the power over her and has trapped her in a codependent incestuous relationship, and I don't care how awful the things she's done are: nobody deserves to go through the shit she does. So with all of that in mind, the actions that she goes through as the witch make perfect sense. Why shouldn't she torment these people who do nothing but abuse her and deny her of agency? Even the best hearted of the duellists (aka the ones who don't hit her or abuse her sexually) nonetheless fall into the trap of projecting their own biases and expectations onto her, biases that her role dictates she carry out. Her actions as the witch aren't right, but nothing about this situation is. That's the entire point.
And that's where she ties into being like Catra. Catra does some truly fucked up things, but it doesn't cancel out the fact that she's an abuse victim that has been literally tortured for most of her life for no good reason and has received zero acknowledgement of that abuse in universe. And much like Anthy, she can't begin to heal until the situation is acknowledged, because that's literally step one of breaking the cycle: confirming that this is not okay and that no one deserves the shit she's been through. Just knowing that herself isn't enough: it's acknowledgement from others that enables that process to begin, because no one can recover from abuse in a vacuum. You need outside people to be touchstones, because so much of recovering from abuse is confronting the way it warps your perception and thought processes. You need at the minimum one normal perspective to give you that, preferably more, but one minimum.
Hurting the people who care about her is definitely not okay and I'm not excusing her actions in that category, but it doesn't change the fact that she is justified in wanting to rage and lash out, because she is still trapped in that cycle. She can't heal or let go because the process hasn't even been started. She's not off the hook for the things she's done, but neither should she be automatically condemned without taking those factors into account (which is the entire reason why the distinction between an excuse and a justification exists.)
And if I can be a little pithy... The other similarity between Catra and Anthy is I can guarantee that in twenty years people will STILL be arguing over whether or not Catra "deserved" to be freed from her abusive situation.
Good God this turned into an essay. Hope this makes up for how long it took, anon. And anyone else who makes it this far, treat yourself. You earned it.
