"She-Ra Review"

Some people I followed on Youtube talked a lot about the new She-Ra show and the public reception, so naturally I got this morbid curiosity to seek out the show to see it for myself. I'm a sucker for animated show and greatly enjoy studying the various techniques used and the imaginative yet silly stories. This is just some of my subjective opinions on She-Ra overall.

She-Ra is a decades old animated show that followed the adventures of said hero, as she fights the evil horde with a colorful team of misfits and comic relief characters, where almost all episodes returned to status quo at the end and nothing changed. And the titular character turned into a tall woman in a short skirt and high heels. Whom is very confident, quite clever and very strong, but at times a bit too perfect. The dialogue was very bad and the scene transitions awkward and jarring, but there was a lot of good ideas and interesting designs to go around. Shows from this period had a very morbid fascination with including cowardly and wacky sidekicks. Enjoyable but dang those sound effects and voices can be really terrible.

The new Netflix She-Ra show re imagines the old show with a bit more body type variation and a much more streamlined plot that follows a red thread. Where a magical sword turns the hero into a powerhouse. This time around She-Ra wears a much more modest costume, which still offers no proper protection, but sports a set of silly shoulder pads. A common common issue with almost all heroic characters, they never wear any sort of armor. One thing that really stood out to me is that the scenery looks fabulous most of the time. It’s very entertaining for the most part, but also painfully annoying at other parts.

Seems like most grownups have died due to a battle that went badly, thus the princesses are in power, even though they technically are queens at this point. The horde trains useless child soldiers and have no proper plans for anything and is very incompetent. The heroes are very good at doing the right thing in a very bad way and puts themselves in stupid situations. If not for the child friendly nature pf the plot, most of the cast would have been dead or dying at this point. Their interaction is lovely and all and brings a lot of life to the show and is less awkward than then the predecessor, it's also painfully cliche, in a way that hurts. Two childhood friends are trained to be soldiers in the hordes army, until Adora finds a magical sword in the forest, which turn her into She-Ra and learn how terrible and evil the horde actually is. Which causes a rift between her at Catra, due to some manipulation and poor communication skills. A major overarching theme is that the heroes suck at talking to other people. Which is a very common issue in much of animated media.

There has been a lot of noise on twitter about the show, various sites carping on fans and a lot of silly arguments to go around. To me it’s always amusing when someone calls the old show bad, but never saw an episode. Or how someone is impressed with the diversity of the new show, even if the old show had some elements of that as well. Even if most characters had that perfect super hero hourglass copy paste figure. I can at least admit that both shows while entertaining in its own right I’m not the target audience and that nostalgia is not a good quality indicator. The other thing I take away from the series is that the outrage mob is dangerously biased, absolutely hilarious and better written than these shows.