Today’s installment of Characters I Connect With is about everyone’s favorite sad, gay cat.
No, the other one.
No, the other one.
Yes, this one!
It’s a bit unnerving saying that I connect with Catra. For most of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, she’s a villain and in such a dark place that she harms everyone around her, physically or mentally. Although I don’t believe I ever got quite as bad as her, one particular moment of her story resonated on a deep, uncomfortable level. It reached into a very common mental state in my past and one I can still fall into today.
Near the end of season 3, Catra gets her greatest wish: the entire world rewritten on her terms, a world where Adora never left her and every other problem she has is conveniently solved. It’s the most perfect scenario Catra can imagine: she and Adora back together in the Horde like nothing changed, both of them poised to rise through the ranks and eventually squash the princess rebellion, taking over Etheria.
The problem with this version of the world is that it’s fake and so is the Adora who inhabits it. Catra has fixated on a version of the person she loves without actually knowing or accepting that person’s reality. Catra cannot accept that Adora has a world outside of her, so she manifests this “perfect” world that she has probably been deeply developing for a long, long time.
Although I’m usually pretty good at keeping my own idealized worlds and people to myself, there have been many times when I’ve done the same thing. My usual pattern is to become infatuated with someone I know distantly and then craft an entire lifetime with them, replaying the same escapist fantasies over and over. I know it for what it is now and don’t get torn up anymore when reality doesn’t match what’s in my head like I did when I was younger. I know that the version of this person that exists in my head isn’t really how they are and now, when I have the chance, I let any natural interactions with a person enter in to take away that glow of false perfection. Because really, the impetus of repeatedly living in these fantasies is a desire for knowing and for connection.
And at the end of the day, that’s all Catra wants with Adora. Connection. But in order to get the connection she wants with the real Adora, she has to let go of the idealized version in her head. It takes her another two seasons and a lot of transformation in other ways to get that connection, but when she does, she’s in a much better place mentally and is therefore able to receive it, if that makes sense.
So I relate to both the unhealthy obsessive side of this and the much better process of letting it go. As comforting and safe as the fantasies feel, knowing the real person not only enables you to take them off a pedestal, but it’s also much better most of the time, especially as you slowly see that the real them has more and more qualities that you want from people in your life.
That entire “perfect” world episode felt like it reached into the worst parts of my thinking, translated it into She-Ra language, and played it back to me. Catra’s state in that moment is a difficult place to be in and we see the catastrophic results. I’m thankful that for the most part I have a good handle on my own similar tendencies. I can deal with them on my own without negatively impacting the other person, and the worst moments are few and far between.