Why Catradora Matters

Why Catradora matters

Okay, so I have something to say about She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. It’s going to take me a while to get there, but bear with me. Spoilers below.

(A quick disclaimer: I am a heterosexual cis male. This isn’t a choice, just a fact that I’ve come to accept about myself. But, as the saying goes, I’m straight but not narrow. I have friends and family who are variously gay, bi, trans, and asexual, and I love and respect them all. Still, I’m going to have to discuss some stuff I haven’t personally been affected by in order to make my point.)

I watch a lot of Western children’s animation, ranging from Batman: the Animated Series, to Gravity Falls, to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, to Clone High, to Teen Titans, to Steven Universe, to Invader Zim, to Avatar: the Last Airbender and Legend of Korra, to Star Vs. The Forces of Evil, and, most recently, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. While I do also enjoy non-Western animation, adult-targeted animation, and non-animated media as well, this medium appeals to me in particular and I seek it out.

The fascinating thing about media targeted towards children is that it cannot help but define and reinforce societal values. Adult media is often a means to indulge in the taboo, the scandalous, the terrifying, and the profane, all of which is well and good. But we don’t show these things to children. The younger a target audience is, the less experience and knowledge they have to process troubling content, so we filter what we show them. What we include, and what we exclude, says something about what society does and does not see as normal.

Moreover, there is often the expectation that kids’ shows will teach their audience a lesson in how to behave, what values to embody. While an adult show might be fine living in a haze of moral ambiguity with no clear answers, children’s shows often seek to show how pro-social behavior leads to positive outcomes for all. This idealism is part of the charm.

Which brings me to the topic of the depiction of romance and sexuality in kids media. There is usually a pretty hard line that nudity or explicit depiction or discussion of sex is not okay in kids shows. But romance is usually acceptable, along with kissing, holding hands, or (if the show is feeling frisky) beach episodes.

This sex-vs-love distinction gets complicated fast when it comes to LGBTQ+ identities. For a long time in American history, being anything other than cishet was seen as a mental disorder or sexual perversion. You don’t show crazy sex perverts to children, so explicitly gay characters were not okay. But, this has changed. Over the last few decades, society as a whole has grown more accepting of openly queer identities, so the guidelines about their depiction has moved from “absolutely not” to “sure, if you’re careful about it”. At the same time, the expectation of promoting pro-social values in these shows prompts many creators to portray these relationships as normal. 

So I’ve watched the media transition from Harley Quinn x Poison Ivy innuendo, to the Korrasami implication, to the gay-but-technically-it’s-not-sex “fusion” of Steven Universe. And I’ve been cheering from the sidelines; good representation is good and I’m all for it. 

But I’ve always had this doubt. Often it feels like this representation is just taking a good romantic subplot, one that could work well as either hetero- or homo-sexual, and deciding “okay, let’s make this one gay”. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s an efficient way to break the straight-as-default trope. But all of the value is external to the work itself, helping society mature, but the art itself is largely unchanged. And furthermore, romantic subplots are often secondary in kids shows; you could remove romance entirely and leave the show intact, if a bit worse overall. 

And this is where She-Ra is something new and different. Catradora is not token representation for brownie points. It’s not a palette-swap straight-to-gay plotline. It’s not superfluous to the main story. Catradora is the entire show.

The inciting event of She-Ra is, essentially, a date between Catra and Adora; they steal a skiff and go on a joyride. But then, Adora’s status as the Chosen One is revealed, and she’s forced to choose between the comforts of home, and giving up on her own happiness to become a hero. But Catra doesn’t go with her, jealously driving her instead to prove to Adora (and herself) that she’s a tough kitty who don’t need no woman. From there, they start fighting a proxy war, with Adora easily assuming a leadership role in the Rebellion, and Catra clawing her way up as high as she can go in the Horde, each amassing more and more power to try to defeat each other. The cracks begin to show when Catra opens the portal, nearly killing herself and everyone else, and Adora is prevented from martyring herself when Angella takes her place. The conflict comes to a head when Horde Prime arrives and Catra realizes she’s lost control, and that she might be forced to live in a world without Adora, who is prepared to literally kill herself at the drop of a hat. The day is saved when the two combine forces, choose to live for each other, and use the power  of their newly admitted love to save the galaxy.

So, She-Ra’s overall narrative is two people, with mirroring emotional baggage, progressively making things worse until they finally resolve their issues through love. If you remove this throughline, the entire show collapses: either Adora never leaves the Horde and becomes She-Ra, or she does does and she easily defeats the inept Hordak. The conflict of the show is incited, driven, and resolved by the love of these two characters. That’s super cool and incredibly rare in any medium, let alone kids animation.

But is it gay? I mean, trivially yes, they’re both women. But on a deeper level, does this need to be gay? 

Yes, I think it does; if Catra were Cat-bro it wouldn’t work. I think a big part of this is, ironically, because the show is relying on the historical invisibility of gay romance in media. For any of the early seasons to have believable tension, it can’t be immediately obvious that Adora and Catra are going to end up together at the end of the show. The flirt-fighting that Adora and Catra engage in constantly throughout the show starting as early as S1E8:”Princess Prom”, would be instantly recognizable if it were a hetero relationship; we’ve seen this song and dance before, we know how it goes. But make it gay, and suddenly the audience is unsure. Even in a show with an extremely gay supporting cast, even if you recognize the sexual tension between the two leads, you have to question “Are they really going to go there?” And, according to some interviews with Noelle, it almost didn’t.

In-universe, it works because of a particular component of the gay experience (as it’s been explained to me): the doubt of not knowing if someone you have a crush on is into your gender. The statistical reality is that hetero people can often assume a compatible sexual orientation in a potential partner, but gay people cannot. This feeds into Catra’s extreme reluctance to admit that she loves Adora, and the driving conflict of the entire show is much more believable as a result. 

This means that She-Ra isn’t just a good show with a good gay romance in it. It is a show that could only be as good as it is because of the great gay romance at its core. It is a show that can only exist in a world where LGBT experiences are celebrated on their own merits, and not isolated into “special interest” sections or forced to conform to cishet experiences. It builds on all of the efforts of representation that have come before, and then takes a leap forward into uncharted territory.

That is why Catradora matters.