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She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

As someone who grew up watching the original She-Ra and He-Man, this doesn't rape my childhood. It also doesn't deserve the dissection that it is getting from the fanboys, especially considering how both original series were generally PSA announcements that taught kids how to conduct themselves with good behaviour.

I see your "fan-boys" comment and raise you Geeky Sparkles:

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I'm pacing myself so I'm only up to episode 3, and avoiding the thread until I watch it all, but I just wanted to pop in to say I'm loving it. :techman:
 
I was reading an article on Tor.com about old cartoon sidecicks it included Kowl from the original She-Ra, and now I'm wondering, is he in the new one?
 
Not as an actual character. Although there's a plushie thing, that looks like him, in Adora's room.

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^^
Well that's just character design mostly, and excepting the omission of He-Man, the core story seems pretty much the same so I wouldn't say it's very different than the original.

Unfortunately, many of the (IMHO) idiot fans of the original don't think so.
 
You never know. I gather there has been incest-based slash fiction before, notably in Supernatural fandom.
There's also been Powerpuff Girls incest based slash fan art, and similar art concerning the Kratt brothers as featured on the show Wild Kratts.

Remember you posted this when somebody comes to reboot "The Deep."

No, I won't be doing so: you should know me by now and about how I feel about reboots/remakes. I have no problem with them.
 
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No, I won't be doing so: you should know me by now and about how I feel about reboots/remakes. I have no problem with them.

Right...and that's exactly what I thought about myself until they rebooted a commercial property I considered inviolable...and you won't know what that is for you until it gets rebooted.

I was never really a classic She-ra fan. He-man and She-ra came on back to back and i watched He-man and changed the channel when the girly show started. In fact, i've watched more classic She-ra since the classic fans started protesting than I ever did when it was first run, and i still don't consider it a favorite...but I would never dismiss its fans as "idiots" because I've been where they are

And i've really got their backs after having seen a couple of episodes of this new nonsense.
 
I've never understood why some people get upset at the mere idea that something they once enjoyed is getting a reboot. I mean sure, there are certain shows I think are perfect as they are and a reboot would seem pointless....but then I'd have to remind myself that not everyone may have seen that show. It may have been off the air for decades and most people under a certain age might not know it even exists. In which case the absolute worst a reboot can do is rekindle interest in the IP and send people looking for the original show.

That's not the case for me here btw. My affection for the He-Man/She-Ra franchise was mostly because of the toys. I barely remember the cartoon. Hell, I've probably spent more time rewatching that crappy movie over the years than I ever did watching the original shows. And lets be honest, the strength of the original material was in the concepts, not the execution, so in that sense it's all ripe material for a rebooting!
 
There are reboots that respect the original material, like the 2002 He-Man and the 2003 Battlestar Galactica, and there are reboots that are giant middle fingers to the fans of the original. You probably think this new She-ra is the former. I disagree.
 
There are reboots that respect the original material, like the 2002 He-Man and the 2003 Battlestar Galactica, and there are reboots that are giant middle fingers to the fans of the original. You probably think this new She-ra is the former. I disagree.

Chill, dude.

You don't like the new She-Ra? Fine.

Let those who do - which includes this OG!She-Ra fan and many others as well - enjoy it in peace.
 
I'm just old enough that I saw the original He-Man and She-Ra when they were first broadcast in the UK. I found them enjoyable, though at the time much preferred Thundercats; ironically enough, I still find the original He-Man and She-Ra enjoyable, but Thundercats not so much - the dialogue and voice acting's really quite painful to me now.

This new She-Ra, though, I really, really like. It's wonderfully diverse and open-minded, dispensing with many well-worn archetypes, especially those with regard to gender, which helps create a range of strong, distinctive characters. Catra's the standout for me, with her conflicted complexity and killer dinner suit and echoes of Zuko from Avatar, which is certainly no bad thing. The only one who feels less-than-fully-dimensional is Hordak, who's little more than a standard menacing, ominous presence, but that may well be deliberate; he doesn't need to be more right now. The animation's clear and fluid and quite expressive, the tonal range is impressively wide, from playful daffiness to unflinching emotional struggles, and the voice acting's uniformly brilliant.

Frankly, if it builds from this superb start, brimming with promise, it could well challenge Voltron (an absolute knockout of a show) for the title of Best Animated Series on Netflix. I may have my issues with the platform, but in terms of animated content it's really starting to deliver. As a lifelong animation fanatic, this makes me pretty happy. :-)
 
I've watched the first 3 episodes. I hate the art style but the show is entertaining enough. It's not as juvenile as I expected and has had some funny moments. I almost didn't make it past episode one because of Glimmer. She was an abomination throughout both episodes but has calmed down considerably by episode 3.

Bow is my favourite character so far but I like Adora and Catra almost as much. I do miss Mantenna and Leech. I don't understand why they were excluded and Grizzlor wasn't. Hordak has only appeared very briefly and his voice didn't sound particularly great for the character.

I still don't think it compares to even the first 3 episodes of the classic series but I'm sure kids will love it.
 
Catra and Mermista are my favourite characters in show.

Anyone spot Loo-Kee? Saw him in one episode, well his face..
 
Chill, dude.

You don't like the new She-Ra? Fine.

Let those who do - which includes this OG!She-Ra fan and many others as well - enjoy it in peace.
Really, we are talking about a kids' show, but reading some comments, they seem to be followers of some religion to which they have just burnt their sacred texts. Sometime fandom scares me.
 
I've gotten through the first 9 episodes today -- it's pretty addictive, but I want to save something for tomorrow. There's a lot of rich character writing here, with Catra in particular being quite complex. Adora's journey is pretty interesting too. Though it's hard to understand how all these Horde characters like Adora, Scorpia, and Kyle turned out so basically nice in the midst of this hellish dictatorship.

I loved the way She-Ra manifested in the first two episodes, as this luminous, majestic superbeing that seemed to take over Adora, not unlike Aang or Korra in the Avatar State. I'm a bit disappointed that they dropped that and had it just be Adora in an altered body. It would've been quite interesting to see her trying to come to terms with a power inside her that had a mind of its own and that she had to struggle to come to terms with. I also miss She-Ra having a deeper, more regal-sounding voice than Adora. Although I take back what I said initially about Aimee Carerro's voice; it does have a bit of a grating quality at first, but I've gotten used to it, and she's giving quite a good performance. If anything, I'm somewhat reminded of Janet Varney as Korra.

I'm surprised by how little use they've made of Swift Wind so far; he just disappeared after episode 3, aside from a passing mention at the ball. I figure he'll be back for the climax, though.

I don't get the complaints some people have had about the design style. Of course it's different from the original, but it's pretty normal for a modern animated show and it looks fine. There's some pretty good character animation, though there are one or two moments where the animation is a bit jerky, and the characters' walk cycles aren't very graceful. But for the most part it's well-designed and well-made.
 
I think I'm on episode 8 or 9. I'm quite enjoying it for the most part but I'm surprised by the lack of Hordak and Swift Wind. I can't say I love all the reinterpretations of the characters but they haven't ruined any of them thus far apart from Glimmer and Castaspella. I'm not fond of Frosta but that's nothing against the change. I just don't like the new version as a character in her own right.

My main dislikes are the art style and Glimmer. I just don't get how something from the 80s can look so much better than something from 2018 but I could say that for any number of modern cartoons so it's not a criticism unique to this show. As for Glimmer, her voice is extremely grating and the character is annoying as hell. I wish she could be used less.
 
I just don't get how something from the 80s can look so much better than something from 2018

"Better" is subjective. It looks fine to me; it's simply a different, more cartoony aesthetic. Animated shows in the '70s and '80s tended to have a pretty standardized look; comedy shows could go more for caricature, but straight adventure shows tended to use a consistent, naturalistic style. But that divide went out the window when Batman: The Animated Series embraced cartooniness and caricature and made it work in a very serious, dark, mature show. And animation character designers over the past 30 years have continued to innovate, giving each show its own distinct, individualized design style. Obvious not every single show's style is going to appeal equally to every individual's tastes, but it's hardly valid to say that the vastly greater creativity and experimentation of modern animation designers is "worse" than the rather limited, uniform character design aesthetics of the past.

There's also the fact that this She-Ra is far more of a comedy than the original was, so the more cartoony look is appropriate. It's not that great a departure from the character designs of other Dreamworks Animation shows like Voltron: Legendary Defender and Dreamworks Dragons, shows that also blend comedy and adventure. There's an anime influence too, which fits pretty well with the nuanced character writing and ambiguous villains. (I saw a headline suggesting that the Adora-Catra relationship is very similar to a core character arc in Naruto, though I'm not familiar with that show.) As I've remarked before, what's surprising is how little of Noelle Stevenson's characteristic cartooning style is evident in this show, although I can see a hint of it. It's basically a cross between Stevenson's aesthetic, a Sailor Moon-type anime look, and the Dreamworks "house style."

One way in which the character designs are definitely better is the range of body types. All the women in the original She-Ra had the exact same Barbie-doll figure, a requirement of the toy designers so they could use the same body molds for all the dolls and let them exchange clothing. (Probably made things easier for the animators too, since Filmation liked to trace the same movement sequences for multiple characters.) Here, we've got a much more inclusive world with women and girls of many different body types as well as different ethnicities.
 
The art style of Princesses of Power reminds me very much of the art style used in Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, albeit more 'Westernized'; it's almost as if the designers took the wholly Japanese 'Chibi' art style and "rotoscoped" and blended more traditional Western animation designs onto it.

The 2011 Thundercats series had a similar design style and aesthetic, which is actually one of several similarities I see between it and Princesses of Power.
 
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