She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is a maho shoujo show. Discuss.
And no, it’s of course not just because of its transformation scene, though it is very much a magical girl transformation, but everything around it. It’s rooted in friendship and optimism and rock solid belief in the idea that nobody is wholly evil in the same way that Precure is. It centers female characters in the same way maho shoujo series do; there’s fighting and defeating the bad guys but there’s also balls and being jealous because your friend is hanging out with somebody else and other such traditionally feminine coded concerns. No wonder all the sad cat piss men and fanboy fascists hate it.
It’s not like they’re actual fans of the original series. The sort of crybaby fake fan who throws temper tantrums about “SJWs ruining animation” wouldn’t have been caught dead watching something so covered in girl cooties as the eighties She-Ra. Commercials don’t lie: this was always aimed at girls and Noelle Stevenson and her team just revamped it for 21st century girls. In other words: queering it the hell up, which a certain kind of narrowminded fanboy always has troubles with. To be honest, I can’t actually remember all that much about the original She-ra or He-man, but I certainly got the impression that especially the latter was never 100% straight anyway. It’s all so tedious and boring to whine about it now it’s a bit more explicit. Have to hand it to the crybabies though, without their tantrum I might have missed this and that would’ve been a shame.
Because the truth is that the new She-ra is really great, taking something that was meant to sell toys and lavishing the same care and attention on it that e.g. Toei does on Precure. The story sparkles and has genuine wit, the characters are great and it’s such a pleasure to see body types other than teenage supermodel: all the characters look like people you could see walking around town. Even Scorpio. What’s more, while the Horde is evil and the princesses are the force of good, all of the individual Horde members who have gotten screen time are more than just evil for the sake of evil. More than a few actually seem rather …nice? It helps of course that most of their evil is rather abstract after the first two episodes: it would be bad if they won but the status quo isn’t all that bad. It’s a kids show after all.
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