feynites:

So lemme see if I’ve gotten this right about Scorpia:

Based on her little character blurb, she ‘grew up in the Horde’. So we can infer that the Horde crashed in her family’s kingdom while she was fairly young.

Now, the way she describes things to Catra, her family joined up happily with the Horde and gave them their runestone. I think it would be safe to consider, given the Horde’s track record of lying to recruits, that this is not 100% guaranteed to be true. In fact, between the odds of a royal family happily turning one of their daughters over to be a child soldier and giving up their super magical family heirloom and symbol of rule, versus Hordak just overthrowing them and delivering the ultimatum that they willingly support the Horde or die, the latter is wayyy more likely.

Anyone with any understanding of rule would probably be able to determine the same thing. 

So we have little Scorpia, whose family has been overthrown by a bunch of alien invaders, and who has been inducted into said invaders’ child soldier program. Her birthright has been taken by Hordak and given to Shadow Weaver. And she gets an invitation to the Princess Ball.

We don’t have a canonical age (to my knowledge?) for Scorpia, but she looks a little older than Catra and Adora (though it’s actually hard to call, since she’s tall and has strong features – she could just look more mature by virtue of that). But my guess would be that she’s about (edit) 20-ish, compared to Catra and Adora’s late teens, especially since she’s an established Force Captain already.

This would also be in-keeping with her assessment that she doesn’t ‘fit in’ with the other princesses. While Mermista might be older, and Frosta much younger, the implication seems to be that most of the princesses are around the same age as Adora. If they were significantly younger than Scorpia, she’d naturally assume that the difference was that they were little? Like, most teens don’t get bent out of shape if a bunch of kindergarteners don’t gel with them as social peers. Scorpia especially seems like the type to just happily barrel through and win over a pack of kids anyways.

But something more like a really self-conscious fourteen-year-old being rejected by some twelve-year-olds would make more sense?

Scorpia asserts that her family was ‘disliked’ by the other kingdoms even before the Horde came; given that she’s grown up in the Horde, though, this would have to be secondhand information. I’d call it unreliable – the Horde is known for psychologically manipulating its recruits, and as we’ve seen with Catra, they lean into a ‘no one else will have you’ approach fairly often. Wouldn’t want the indentured princess with a rightful claim to ruling their territories to get any ideas about fleeing to one of their enemies and taking any loyal retainers to her family along with her, after all.

But if Scorpia’s spent most of her life being fed Horde propaganda, then she was probably blindsided by showing up to the Princess Ball to find people holding a hostile attitude towards the Horde. The same way Adora was taken aback by Bow’s assertion that she was with ‘The Evil Horde’.

Since the Princess Ball is a politically neutral function, though, most likely, no one saw any point in mentioning that they all hate the aggressive army banging on their doors. All Scorpia knew was that she went to a fancy party, hoping to meet other princesses and probably make some friends, and everyone seemed to hate her. They all acted like she didn’t ‘really’ belong. Thereby reinforcing what she’d been told about her family’s outsider status, and being left with the impression that there really wasn’t any place for her to find acceptance other than with the Horde.

…That’s heartbreaking.

No wonder she’s so excited to make friends with Catra. Another Horde Force Captain probably seems like her only opportunity to have a peer who likes her. (I mean, apart from Catra being a kitty and Scorpia finding it adorable, of course.)