Oh God Yes, “don’t Go” Does An Awesome Job Of Filling In The Gaps In Canon :)

i'd say this is the last time i'll ever mention the jump in save the cat.. but i think we'd both know i was lying.

cause i know the first time i ranted on it my focus was on how heart-wrenching it is to think adora jumped without any idea or awareness quite yet of the fact that transforming without the sword was not only possible - but would actually conjure her true she-ra form, one far more seemingly invincible, able to innately wield her magic and abilities, displaying prowess and powers she had never before reached after all her training with light hope.

and how that meant she jumped just cause she couldn't stand the thought of catra dying down there alone, and even though it meant she might end up dying down there with her, one way or another, at least catra wouldn't have to face the end on her own.

but then i was making an amv using these scenes for literally prob like the 30th time lol annnd then the thought hit me - she had to have known there was a good chance catra wouldn't have survived the fall at all. and with the bottom cloaked in shadows, there was no way for her to know how far she, adora, would fall herself if she were to jump. so her own survival of even just the impact without her she-ra form was no guarantee, either.

but she still goes after her. she takes that risk. cause she can't just leave catra in the dark.

never could

never really meant to

never will again

and catra? ends up doing the same for adora. over and over. i'd add more examples but i hit my gif limit lol

<3

do you see the vision or am i running out of things to say about this show?

thinkin about s4 catra and how her outfit changed and a big part of it is that black sleeve on the same arm that was black when she was corrupted. and i wonder if it was like some kind of operant conditioning she was imposing on herself, just having a constant reminder always right there in her face of the fact she knew she'd gone way too far when she freaked out and fcked up bad several times during the whole portal ordeal. after all that, there's no going back, and she'd ruined any hope of even considering other options. so anytime she might even let the thought of it flit across her mind, it'd help force her to bury it immediately and help her keep it that way -

- cause there's no chance of her having any other life now - and partly cause she firmly believes adora is done with her to the point of hatred, cause why wouldn't she be when catra's already there w herself at that point? but trying hard af not to let that or any other vulnerability show, and tryna adjust to looking at a life of wearing a mask. cause she'd made her choice, and now she had to live with it, and she was literally just trying to figure out how to do that.

my brain melting when i hear the digital bath by deftones ♡

Looking at utenanthy official art, I love how genuinely happy Anthy is portrayed in art that is meant to be post-anime.

Look at how happy she is!! Another notable detail is that she tends to be more in control in comparison to her art with utena as the rose bride (I mean, that's a bit obvious considering she was the rose bride but I still feel the need to point it out)

She is held (damsel in distress style) by utena, who looks to be more in control and still has the prince mentality. (not all the art before the ending is like this, but a lot of it is). So it makes me really happy to see a genuinely happy and free anthy be more in control. They're in love!! They're free and they're happy!!

This post doesn't bring anything new to the table and I'm guessing this has been pointed out a million times before, but I want to gush about 90s anime lesbians. I love them dearly. Did you know they changed my life forever.

oh yes catra is absolutely having a massive bpd episode this whole time :( trying to explain bpd episodes to people who don’t experience them is very hard i fear

another big part of this is that catra wants to be loved and cherished as much as she wants to be respected. she wants adora’s love, but she also wants to be an equal to her. adora, meanwhile, has been made to feel that in order to protect catra, she must control her (thank you shadow weaver). you can really see that mentality on display in this episode.

telling adora that she must be dumb to have never hated her :(

then adora saying “i’m such an idiot. i thought that things would be different this time, but clearly nothing has changed”

my heart breaking :((((((((

damn this episode is genuinely insane how it just peels back so many layers of their relationship

understanding catra in taking control s5: ep 6

(lots of awesome people have already said some amazing things about this, but it’s been on my mind a lot especially since i’ve been seeing some anti catra bullshit lately)

first off, i want to say that i don’t think that catra is necessarily handling the situation well, but i often see people saying some crazy shit about how she’s so “ungrateful” to adora for rescuing her or whatever and just generally being incredibly insensitive to her.

you have to remember everything that catra has gone through up until the point. horde prime had just completely violated her body and mind, electrocuting her in the baptismal pool, cutting off her hair, and infiltrating her memories. catra, who is already deeply afraid of the losing control (namely to shadow weaver, who taught her that power and control were necessary to be safe from her abuse), just lost all of her autonomy in the most fucking disturbing, pseudo-religious way possible.

before this, catra fully expected to die. i’ve seen a lot of different takes and i’m relatively open-minded to about what it is that catra thinks specifically when she remembers that scene with her and adora’s younger selves in corridors, but i think that it’s something along these lines:

“all i’ve ever done is hurt adora, and all she ever tried to do was love me instead. i’ve loved her and wanted her more than anyone else, and still all i did was hurt her. adora finally gave up on me, like i deserved all along anyway. but maybe, just maybe, the last thing i do could be for her. maybe that last little piece of goodness in me could live on in her.”

hence the:

“all i do is hurt people. there’s no one left in the entire universe who cares about me.”

anyway, my point is that catra has been through fucking hell :(

adora rescues her, and in the moment, catra is (obviously) relieved, shocked, surprised, confused, even. (“why did you come back? we both know i don’t matter.”)

the confusion is the main thing i want to focus on. catra really truly believes that adora hates her (shadow weaver has conditioned her to believe that she has always been inherently worthless and unlovable), so catra can’t understand why adora would ever come back for her.

catra eventually comes to the conclusion that adora just wanted to feel like a hero. she just came back to rescue catra to prove her virtue or her moral superiority to catra.

so she lashes out. she feels so completely out of control, and bitter with adora for her actions, convinced that there is no way that adora came back for her out of love.

adora handles this like shit. the literal first thing she does is throw the mattress onto the floor, and later slams catra into the wall. adora lashes back at catra, hurt that catra doesn’t “appreciate” adora’s love for her. adora doesn’t even try for two fucking seconds to understand where catra is coming from.

(adora does have a consistent issue with only seeming to be able to empathize with catra’s emotions when catra is weak, vulnerable, and powerless throughout much of series honestly)

ugh and calling her a stubborn brat? like i love you adora, but that makes my blood fucking boil. it is SUCH condescending, shadow weaver-coded language to use toward catra. i understand, catra is being “difficult” or whatever, but god it’s so easy to see why catra is acting the way she is.

and ofc catra is scared of entrapta! obviously, catra wronged entrapta deeply, and catra has never lived in a world with grace and forgiveness. shadow weaver physically abused her all her life, and hordak suffocated her for losing shadow weaver and lying to him about it. catra knows that she hurt entrapta, so naturally she immediately assumes that entrapta is going to fucking kill her the minute she has a chance.

then adora’s reaction is to fucking shove her into the wall and tell her to “grow up”. catra just looks fucking terrified, backed into the corner in her little horde pjs :(

adora backs off for a moment and tells catra that she would respect her wish to drop her off somewhere, catra realizes that adora really could leave her, and immediately rushes to beg adora to stay, kneeling on the ground, reaching up for her hand. something about that whole scene just absolutely fucking breaks my heart.

it kills something in me when i hear people say that catra didn’t do enough for redemption. it’s never what her redemption was ever about. catra is genuinely so, so much more complicated than that. and so is adora! i’m still sad that adora never really made up to catra for some of her shitty behavior.

i don’t believe that their arcs are meant to be done at the end of the show. there’s still so much room for them to grow. and that is what the post canon fics are for lol

oops this ended up being wayyy more of a rant than i intended; i think about catradora all the time :)

first off i wanna preface this by saying that i’m not actually a trans man/masc, but i had an experience with my mother in high school that i think definitely relates.

so i come from a super conservative fundamentalist christian household. like my mother has a fake ass degree in christian apologetics (if you don’t know what that is, you don’t wanna know) and helped found some crazy christian mom podcast dedicated to teaching parents how to “protect” their kids from secular culture. you know the type.

when i was 14 i was forced to come out as a lesbian. my parents completely freaked out and put me through fucking hell because of it. (i won’t go into details bc it doesn’t relate to this specific story but it was like. conversion therapy type shit. i was super isolated too, i wasn’t allowed outside the house except to go to my private christian school and they took my phone away)

anyway my mom is obviously super into conservative bullshit in general, but that summer she got ESPECIALLY into anti trans rhetoric, in particular anti trans masculinity rhetoric. i don’t think people realize how big this is, specifically in fundamentalist christian circles. they run with this idea of “the left is confusing young girls!! they’re targeting and preying on young girls into thinking that they can be men! they’re demonizing godly christian femininity!” and this idea gains fucking traction in these communities. for exactly the reason that you think that it does.

my mom made me go with her to some stupid conference, and there was this lady there who gave this awful speech on all trans men are really just confused, young, impressionable girls who need to embrace their god-ordained christian womanhood. i’ve been to many events like this one and heard a lot of bullshit but to this day i think that was the worst one. my blood fucking boils just remembering it.

at some point i couldn’t fucking take hearing that lady talk anymore bc i was fighting tears and shaking with rage and ran off into the bathroom. i’m not a trans man/masc, but i’m queer and oh i don’t know a fucking HUMAN, and my 14 year old self couldn’t take hearing that anymore. my mom found me in the bathroom and made a scene about it later.

i don’t know if it was that incident or if perhaps my mom thought so before and that’s why she dragged me to the conference, but she was incredibly strict with how i could dress and present myself from that point onward. all my life she’s been strict about what i could wear, but before then it was very much in a modesty-focused way. like, no short skirts, no tops that showed off my figure, no bikinis, no crop tops, etc. that all changed suddenly. suddenly i was forced to wear dresses, flattering tops, anything that looked stereotypically “feminine”. this drove me fucking crazy bc i don’t feel comfortable presenting myself super femininely. i don’t really usually present myself overtly masculinely either, but i definitely don’t like to be perceived as feminine.

even at the age of 14 i knew that my mother wanted control. she wanted power of my body, my sexuality, the clothes i wore, and even the fucking thoughts in my head. which really is just the same as the rest of the fundamentalist christian right.

The way mothers allow themselves to treat their daughters is already fucked up enough but when their kid is a trans man/masc it just gets so much worse. I’m literally not allowed baggy clothes, the simple and normal act of wearing baggy clothes, which is banned for me in particular because they don’t “frame my figure.” I should only be wearing clothes that cling to my body and show off my hips, and this is because my mum has some weird idea that if my “feminine form” isn’t on show at all times, I will turn into a masculine weirdo because I’ve already expressed my transness to her before and she’s doing everything in her power to stop it, and therefore I’m not even allowed the option of wearing baggy, loose fitted clothing. This is such a small example of the long list of things I’m not allowed to do in order to keep me from transitioning, but even something that small is incredibly fucked up to me because the level of control in forcing me to wear clothes that show off my “female” body to snuff out any masculinity is 100 times worse when you throw in the fucking immeasurable, painful dysphoria that I have to deal with by walking outside in clothes that basically have a neon sign over them telling people to look at the least favourite parts of my body.

And this is apparently normal, because mothers just want their daughters to be proud of who they are. And if those “daughters” happen to be trans men, it’s only in their best interest to detransition them back into daughters. Or whatever the fuck excuse we’ve given to them to treat their kids this way.

my great comeback

some catra faces i feel like ranting about

^^here have some silliness before the wounds below <3

their only direct interaction all of season 4 whyyyy does it kill me so much to know that. damnit. it's not all that surprising catra would feel it confirmed: adora's done with her. the look she gives catra after she hops out of the way just in time says only one thing to me- "dodge it or don't. idfc."

that little smile on catra's face when she says "don't sound so happy to hear me" - because she's so fucking happy to get to hear adora one more time. just kill me already, i'll even dig the grave myself aight

this is a darker thought forsure, just a heads up, but i've always been fairly certain (and i don't think it's an uncommon theory) that at some point between catra's ragged breathing in adora's arms and her complete lack of breath when she attempts to heal her - catra has actually died. and i've kinda come to theorize this is the moment she exhales her last as her head tips back and to the side, looking up at adora and almost sorta smiling. it would make sense too as to why adora doesn't bother much with tryna be careful w her after that point - it becomes more crucial to get her out of there and somewhere safe for her to try n heal her asap.

and the moment catra sees adora just gave up. the first time she yells her name cause she knows that's what adora had just done. are you fcking kidding me 💔🪦

and closing w this one cause well the way adora smiles when she looks at her is just dumb amounts of sweet <3