I
WORDS
TARA BENNETT
N THE FIFTH AND FINAL SEASON of DreamWorks’s hit reboot of She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power, it’s literally do or die time for Adora and her Princess Alliance.
In the season four finale, the real villain of the story, Horde Prime, arrived with his fleet to take Etheria. Even without her She-Ra-summoning Sword of Protection, Adora was ready to fight to protect her friends to the end if necessary.
On 15 May, avid fans around the globe got to see how this epic adventure came to a close on Netflix. While some may lament the fact that it’s over, executive producer/showrunner Noelle Stevenson assures the fans that this iteration of She-Ra has ended exactly as she and her creative team envisioned. But emotionally, the finality of it all hasn’t really hit her yet.
“I think sometimes I have trouble getting my head around it,” she admits in a phone call from her quarantine home base in California. “And then sometimes, out of nowhere it’ll just hit me, like, ‘Oh, this is the last season. People are really gonna be able to see the whole show in its entirety. Everything we dreamed of, and came up with, it’s all going to be out there.”
The last 13 episodes pack in a lot of emotional punch, with the ensemble of now beloved characters each getting a time to shine. Quite a few of them also get to redefine their destinies, shaking up the presumptions of many as they race to save their world. That was a specific choice made by Stevenson and her creative team, to remind viewers that your path is never truly set in stone.
“It really was very freeing and gave us so much room to play, because our characters have been kind of trapped in this microcosm,”
Stevenson says of forging an unexpected narrative path. “Even the characters who should have known about this broader conflict and this bigger villain – characters like Hordak and Catra, who were banking on the arrival of Horde
Prime – were not ready for him to actually arrive. The last season was so full of conflict, but it was such personal conflict. It was friendships sort of falling apart. It was almost less about the war at that point and more about the toll that it was taking on all the characters.
“So, suddenly, when Horde Prime shows up, that just no longer matters, none of it,” she continues. “It gave us a really refreshing place to build from in season five. And it is, at its heart, a very classic love-conquers-all kind of story in a way that feels, I hope, really genuine. It forces all of our characters to take stock of the people they’ve become, the places that they’ve ended up in, and what’s important to them in the world.”
ARC LIFE
Stevenson says she always knew that the series would have 52 episodes, so this final season was all about closure. “I wanted the ending to be definitive in terms of the themes that we set up, and in terms of the characters’ individual arcs.”
From the start, a hallmark of the series has been the complicated messiness of every character. From Adora to Catra, and everyone in between, they all revealed a core issue or personal flaw that Stevenson wanted them to grow beyond.
“I think that Adora has had this hero complex where she needs to fix everything, and save everyone, and be this perfect person,” Stevenson muses. “And that destroys her, and often hurts the people that she loves as well.
Catra has been on this struggle to prove herself and become this powerful person, but her idea of what that is ends up hurting people, pushing people away, and causing destruction for herself and for others. Glimmer has this seed of selfishness in her where she’s always a little too wrapped up in her own feelings and her own thoughts to really notice the thoughts and feelings of others.
“Even with someone like Bow, who’s the most well-adjusted of the core characters, he’s so self-sacrificing in some ways. He’s always willing to put his own feelings on hold to help someone else. And there’s betrayal that he feels when he’s not getting that same amount of effort back.”
She continues, “I think all of those characters needed to become evolved characters that incorporated growing past that flaw. We wanted to show the characters achieve that within the story. So, in that way, I do think that [the series] has that definitive ending. But I also wanted it to be open, because these characters can do anything now. They can go anywhere. It’s this world that is suddenly wide open with endless mysteries, endless adventures to have.
“I wanted to leave the audience with their curiosity piqued about what comes next, and leave it open for people to imagine what comes next. There are so many possibilities, and I think that there’s a lot of joy and beauty in an open ending like that, as long as we wrap up the
I wanted to leave the audience with their curiosity piqued about what comes next
threads that we set out to wrap up.”
Stevenson is also candid about wanting to make sure that She-Ra And The Princesses of Power is unapologetically part of the vanguard when it comes to inclusive storytelling. Its stories have treated same-sex relationships and non-binary characters as utterly organic, and that carries through to the finale.
“It’s very personal to me because I have a wife and I am gay,” she says. “I want to see that reflected in the worlds that I love, like Star Wars and The Lord Of The Rings. But there was very little there that I personally saw myself in.
“Like, imagine that at the end of The Lord Of The Rings or anything like that, there could be this canonical, queer relationship that only supported the epic-ness and the themes and the action and the world-building? All of those things that we love about genre and fantasy and sci-fi, and [inclusiveness] becomes just another natural, integral and central part of those stories. What does that look like? So, especially coming into this last season, it’s like, ‘Well, this is it. We’re going all out because it’s the last season. What else are we gonna do? We have to stick this landing, and we have to pay off everything that we’ve set up in this show.’
“It was incredibly important to me to make that canonical, and to make that a part of the show,” she adds. “I think that comes out in a variety of ways in the last season, and I hope that it is, again, meaningful to kids who need to see that, adults who need to see that, anyone who needs to see that, in the stories they love.”
Stevenson is already developing new ideas for stories to tell in animation, but She-Ra’s immediate path is for others to decide… for now. “She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power wrapped up in a way that I’m very satisfied with,” she enthuses. “I’m very proud of the crew and the cast. And I think that it needs to rest for now, for sure. But I also think that if it came to it, if there was a way to tell more stories in this world, in the future, that felt like it was true to the show that’s already come out and true to the characters and didn’t make the world smaller, or go against any of the character development we achieved… I would definitely be interested in exploring that.”
She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power season five is streaming on Netflix now.