What Catra does in the show is not right, but her actions makes sense considering her backstory. She has always been abused. She’s always been told she is unimportant and disposable- It’s no wonder she is desperate to want to prove herself. Her insecurity and obsession with becoming more powerful comes from years of living in fear because of this person who keeps threatening her of being KILLED.
She is always the one taking the fall, even when Adora had just as much a hand in their playing and breaking rules. Adora never gets into too much trouble. Because she is the favorite child.
Adora only gets a small pat on the head and is told to “keep Catra under control” and to “not let Catra do things like this again”. Like it’s all Catras fault.
Catra has to watch this happen, just seconds after being threatened to her life for doing the exact same thing Adora did..
This is what Catra has had to grow up with. Being treated like the dirty failure who only accompanies the “perfect, special favorite child”. (Please, understand that I am in no way meaning to bash Adora or anything. I am simply explaining how I think it is seen from Catra’s view)
This alone tells us so much about her mentality, where it all comes from. She is always second best. She is always the black sheep. She is the one who always gets the blame and is so badly mistreated while her friend gets nothing but a slap on the hand, if even that.
Again, while her actions isn’t right, they do make sense. Catra wants to not be that weak, scared child anymore. She wants to prove herself strong.
While seeing Adora as her best friend, she does hold a lot of resentment toward her. For being the favorite. And for not seeming to take into consideration what her own actions can do to Catra (more so in the future than when they were children). When she left to find the sword, she had no thoughts at all what trouble Catra could fall into while covering for her, even when she clearly knows about the abuse Catra resieves from Shadow Weaver.
(Something that’s always bothered me was the coments Adora made in episode 1 about Catra being treated that way because she is “disrespectful”. While Adora probably didn’t mean that Catra deserves the abuse, she still made a coment that sounds awfully like “it’s your own fault”, which is so horrible to say to a victim of abuse. Again, Adora knows about it. She has seen it herself. )
Again, if you’re still reading, I like Adora and I don’t mean to bash her character, but I do understand Catra’s view of it all. She was always the one to take a fall and Adora never seemed to actually stand up for her the way she does for her new friends. Under all these years, Adora has never actually talked back or taking a real stand against Shadow Weaver. Partly because she probably was scared herself, I mean who wouldn’t be? Shadow Weaver was also the one who raised her and it can be hard to stand up to and partly because she still justified the harsh conditions they lived in as being normal in their training for the war.
Adora was also treated badly in the Horde, but not nearly as bad as Catra. Actually, watching the show, Adora seemed to have most things going good for her. She was the favorite. Still is Shadow Weaver’s favorite. She wasn’t treated the same way Catra was.
Catra feels resentment because of that. But she could stand that because they were friends and she cared for Adora. But then Adora left. Just like that. No hesitation. She left to go rebel against the Horde and turn her back on everything she had worked for – after spending a few hours with complete strangers. That made Catra snap.
“You only figured that out NOW?”
Adora never once thought of leaving for Catra’s sake. She would have never turned into a rebel fighter because she saw the abuse Catra went through as bad, no, but because complete strangers got hurt.
And that is the scary thing that Catra had to realize. Adora never saw the Horde as evil until she saw these strangers get attacked. She never saw them as evil when Catra got abused. She never saw them as evil when Catra’s life was threatened.
She had seen all that as normal, excused or even “Because you are rather disrespectful”.
Catra feels worthless to her best friend. She feels abandoned. She feels betrayed.
Does that make what she is doing right? No, it doesn’t.
But it does give an explanation for them.
Catra isn’t just a simple villain who wants to rule everything. She wants power to not be scared and hurt anymore. She wants to prove herself as strong so that she doesn’t have to fear her abusers anymore. She wants to beat the source of her insecurity, which she believes is Adora. She wants revenge for being abandoned by her best friend.
Catra is a really sad character, who I really hope will get a redemption arc.
“Of course I side with the so called good-guys. I want to reverse engineer the secrets of this planet to use them to protect my holdings. You want to cover it in your shoddily constructed architetcture.
“Whether helping or hurting others, everything I do is with self-improvement in mind.”
“Just because I befriended you thinking it would be beneficial to my emotional growth doesn’t make the feelings less real!.”
“It always shocks me that parents with children of unusual power don’t make plans for killing their child if the child proves to be immoral. It just seems irresponsible.”
It’s not just Tumblr, people. This shit is getting ridiculous.
Of course it’s not Tumblr!
They came for Craigslist personals first because that’s the oldest trick in the book: Sneakily taking down the ‘perverts’ under the guise of vague, high morality goals and working slowly up from the bottom, picking off larger and larger targets. Few people cared about CL because of the stereotype of scary unwashed creeps trawling for sex online. That wasn’t so familiar or cute so it was fair game.
Tumblr is biting at the ‘artists’ heels and suddenly there is a bit more noise, because artists aren’t supposed to be treated like shit, are they? However even now the hair-splitting over what’s porn and therefore garbage and not-art shows that attitudes are not so different. It’s still the same divisive, dangerous us v.s. themmentality that is so easily exploited.
This is why when people tell me I shouldn’t worry about this because ‘my art isn’t porn anyway’ it makes me angry. It means so much more than drawings or a silly blog. This is about people being slowly phased out of their freedoms, rights and agency. History has shown time and time again that whenever power wants to make a crushing move backwards, it comes for what it declares ‘obscene’ first. People are raised to be scared and ignorant of sex so it’s an easy gateway. When they come cracking down on sex is when we most need to pay very close attention. They are not protecting us.
catra isn’t a furry because she didn’t make the conscious decision to have ears fuzz and a tail… she didn’t spend 900 dollars on a fursuit or do anything outside of her nature… she’s just a dumb cat girl and she’s already having a hard time let her rest
Monsters and Stuff 