She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
- Thread starter dahj
- Start date
I never got why She-Ra even needed a secret identity. Normally a secret ID is to protect your friends and family, but all of Adora's friends were in the rebel army with her, so they were equally in danger by associating with Adora as they were with She-Ra. And the rebels would've had more reason to trust Adora as their leader if it didn't seem to them that she disappeared whenever a fight started.
Out-universe, it is evident that they wanted to replicate in some way the formula of He-Man and the Masters of Universe and I suppose they adhered to the theory that viewers love characters with a secret identities, because in some way they can identify in them (empowerment fantasies and so on). In-universe, yes, it makes no sense. Instead He-Man had every reason to keep his real identity a secret.
...yes?
This is a good reason to have a "powered" alter ego, not to keep it a secret. And they never made an "Adora" toy.
Yes, that much is a given. My point is, they didn't come up with a plausible justification for it in-story.
Well, the original She-Ra figure did have a tiara that could be flipped over to become a cumbersome mask, so there was a sort of a "secret identity" angle to it in a weird way.
In this way the bad guys had to divide their forces to search TWO enemies instead of one..? Or perhaps she believed that if their enemies knew that Adora and She-ra are the same person, they could suspect the same of Adam and He-man? (I vaguely remember that their respective baddies knew each other).
Sorry I have no better ideas...
Really? Well that's just seems like bad business planning, especially for a property specifically created to sell toys.
To be honest, I think everyone back in the day knew She-Ra was a "girl's show" but we watched it anyway.
I did think it was a little funny how he talked about how male superheroes usually wear pants when She-Ra's counterpart He-Man does not. Though watching Superfriends and Cyborg, Robin, Samurai, Apache Chief, Black Vulcan and so on did not either. Maybe we were less uptight and innocent back then.
I don't know about the others, but Robin was bare-legged because his costume was designed in 1940, a time when it was customary for boys to wear short pants and switching to full-length trousers was seen as a rite of passage to adulthood. (As in the old song from the era -- "My momma done tol' me / When I was in knee pants.")
Probably because it was a kid's TV show made under the premise people wouldn't overthink it or ask awkward questions which didn't matter.
And still it did make sense in the He-Man cartoon.
So?
I'm pretty sure you could watch the first five minutes and pick twenty holes in it because it was never meant to hold up an adult's critical analysis.
These things were fun, they have nostalgia value for adults to watch who grew up with them, but attempting to meaningfully critique them is just silly. What's next? Looking at Jack and Jill's motivations or applying a Freudian lens to Zippy and Bungle?
Worrying about that stuff is like complaining about why cartoon rabbits can talk and pass for hot chicks when in drag.
Asking questions is what children do. It's how they learn. Children are very perceptive. They notice things, they wonder about things, they try to figure things out. They're a damn sight better at adults than remembering the difference between imagination and reality, because they use their own imaginations all the time, but that doesn't mean they're too stupid to wonder about the flaws in a work of imagination. On the contrary, it means they're the experts at imagination, so if you want to offer them something creative, they deserve nothing less than your best effort. Just as children always deserve the best we can offer them.
Because in the Looney Toons universe this is a perfect disguise. And it's a universe with laws that aren't totally random. They are so coded that they created a rpg on them.
No. That's an idealization of children bearing little if any resemblance to reality.
Whoosh...Because in the Looney Toons universe this is a perfect disguise. And it's a universe with laws that aren't totally random. They are so coded that they created a rpg on them.
I find that children live up or down to what we expect of them. So it's tragic to expect too little of them.