Okay, so this is long.

I was thinking about the inherent difference in how the Masters and the Evil Warriors function. With the Masters/Heroic Warriors, they generally have the same goal per episode, and are working together to achieve it. They may have smaller, side-plot goals, but in terms of the main plot they are moving in the same direction: Stop Skeletor. Save the village. Protect Grayskull. Ect, ect.

For the Evil Warriors, this is not the case. Skeletor’s in charge, but they do things on their own. Evil-lyn is the biggest example of this, as she’s always striking out to further her personal goals, but the other Evil Warriors do it too, constantly:

They have their own primary motivations, outside of Skeletor, and preferentially act on them above what Skeletor wants.

This is the main division between how these two teams function.

I think both dynamics are interesting in their own way. But with the Masters, the main conflict usually derives from someone acting in a way that hinders the group. When Ram-man and Buzz-off fight, it’s bad because it distracts from the group’s goal, not because it hinders their own personal goals–As far as the plot is concerned, they don’t have any that they should consider more important than their duties.

The closest any Master comes to striking out on their own is in Mekaneck’s Lament, where he tries to improve his powers. There’s also Buzz-off’s Pride, where he gets a personal vendetta against the giants. However, in both cases, an unspoken moral of these episodes is that they shouldn’t have struck out on their own. They have more important things they should be doing. The Masters take their job seriously, and they’ve decided that there isn’t room for their own desires to come first.

Now, for the Evil Warriors. Skeletor wants them to follow his lead. He’ll punish them if they threaten his power. Simultaneously, he seems to understand that they’re doing their own thing most of the time. The EWs do their own stuff so much that unless they’ve egregiously undermined his authority, he limits himself. In the above examples, Beast Man is only snapped, at and Merman faces no consequences at all, presumably because he willingly gives the cordite back. Trap-jaw is sent to do something he was probably already going to be sent to do.

These team dynamics make sense given the history of the two groups. Keldor originally gathered his team as a diverse set of people who have their own goals, but are allied together because of a common problem–It’s no surprise that they continue to function as such.

The Masters are more formal, with the primary members coming straight from a military group. They’re only part of the team because they think of the kingdom/Grayskull as the most important goal.

(And because the writers were unwilling to have Masters who didn’t have this mindset, Sy-Klone’s valuable cultural artifact was destroyed–To force him to have nothing more important to do. @emperorsfoot​ talked more about the Sy-Klone incident HERE.)

And it’s no coincidence that Orko is kind of an outsider to the main team in this iteration, considering the aforementioned focus on how Grayskull is the most important goal. Orko’s more like an Evil Warrior in how he interacts with the rest of the team. When he does work with the Masters, most of the time it’s somewhat coincidental. He is doing his own thing, which occasionally happens to align with what the Masters are doing. If he’s directly instructed to do something (or, more often, not to do something), he’ll push back because he has his own ideas. Orko highly prefers his own motivations over anyone else’s, to the point of trying to reveal Adam’s secret despite being directly told not to. Why? Because he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t see the point.

This is constant. He can’t help with construction? Too bad, he wants to. Can’t follow Man-at-arms on a mission? Sucks to suck Duncan, he’s coming anyway. Unlike the other Masters, Orko can’t just be told to do something, he has to be convinced. How does this pertain to what Orko cares about?

And on the EW side, Stinkor is the most ‘heroic warrior’ of the Evil warriors. He sees Skeletor as the leader and his main goal is to make sure that what Skeletor wants done, gets done. He doesn’t get why the other Warriors don’t have the same level of loyalty. Skeletor is so important and cool, how could you not want to do what he says?

The next closest EW in terms of 'heroic warrior-ness’ is Clawful, but the difference is that…Clawful doesn’t have any perceivable motivations at all. He just works here, ya’ll.

Incredible analysis. 10/10, thank you for sharing this with us.

I would like to comment that the overall moral of the Masters seems to be that conformity and listening to authority should be more important to the individual. You gave the examples of Mechaneck and Buzz-off, and how the conflict-of-the-week in each episode was caused (at least in part) by them branching off from the group and pursuing their own ends for their own motivations.

Spop and Race

She-Ra and it’s depiction of race would be an interesting case study because the fandom has a very, real-world view of race when discussing the show, when the reality is that race, particularly, whiteness, as it’s known to us, doesn’t exist in Spop AT ALL.

While the main lead is white, her people, the true colonizers, were mostly made up of poc. The current monarchy are descendants of that original settlement. Prime and the clones are not white-coded. They’re aliens, and most human depictions of them are black (they have a black VA)

This is essentially why the argument of “Entrapdak is bad because it’s a colonizer and a woc” doesn’t make sense since colonizers, in Spop, are not white, Hordak’s niether white nor by definition a colonizer, and Entrapta herself is a descendant of the actual colonizers.

Hordak’s first commander, Shadow Weaver, is coded as a poc (and has a black va). The main conquerers of Etheria are coded-poc. No white person on Etheria holds power. The people seen as second-class are reptiles and non-human hybrids. They’re “thieves” and “criminals” and many were exhiled or found refuge in the Crimson Waste, a forgotten, ignore land.

AND most of the Horde is made up of non-human beings, almost as if these people felt safer there then regular Etheria. (There’s also the fact that the Horde is less ableist then Etherian royals but that’s for another day)

Race and prejudice in Spop is very weird to talk about because the show has poc in these high positions of power, which is cool, but then also has them as canonical colonizers, or descendants of one, and are possibly bigoted as well. I don’t know if this was on purpose or not but uhh...yeah that’s what’s up.

Very interesting observations, and things I actually didn't notice.