“Don’t get too comfortable with the status quo.”
The foreboding comment from Adora’s voice actor, Aimee Carrero, closed out a solid She-Ra panel. DreamWorks showed clips from the new season at San Diego Comic Con, and I walked away impressed with the show’s content.
Executive producer Noelle Stevenson setup the coming season as different from the others, placing characters in a new setting (the Crimson Wastes), in new situations, and including new foreground characters (Huntara, played by Geena Davis).
Overall, I was impressed by the previews at the show. The dialog between Huntara and the Best Friend Squad (Adora, Glimmer, Bow) was well written, Catra’s fight with the Wastes’ gang leader Tongue-Lasher was well choreographed, the dialog was snappy, and Scorpia’s lines had me laugh out loud at some points (“you should say a cool catch-phrase when you use the whip… how about whip?”).
Questions were taken from Twitter, adding a level of moderation to the DreamWorks panel which I was thankful for. The moderator commented that many of the questions were about Kyle – the somewhat helpless horde soldier (as they should be – Kyle is awesome). Noelle responded, that while in other works of media, Kyle might be the every-man hero who would become the chosen one and be the great hero in the story, this is not that show. “He’s just Kyle”
I was also impressed by Noelle’s answer discussing Bow’s dads. She said that the team’s goal was to develop them to showcase that having two dads is normal in She-Ra’s world, as it should be in the real one. They aren’t a perfect family (in show, Bow complains they don’t really listen, have expectations for him that he doesn’t want), but they’re loving and designed to be realistic, and I was honestly impressed with the depiction in previous season.
On that topic, while She-Ra has been praised for being queer friendly, and markets to LGBT audiences, there haven’t been any primary queer characters so far (Netossa and Spinnerella are background characters that only have their queerness hinted at, while Bow’s dads have appeared in 1 of 19 episodes). While Stevenson’s show does exude queer subtext, I am eager to see them go beyond merely hinting at queerness among the primary characters and have on-screen confirmation of it.
Either way, I’m looking forward to season three.
