She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

• 1. Introduction

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  She-Ra and the Princesses of Power arrived on Netflix in 2018 with a question embedded in its premise: what happens when a child soldier discovers that everything she was raised to believe is a lie? Adora, an orphan trained from birth to serve the Horde, finds a magic sword in the woods that transforms her into a legendary hero. That discovery pulls her out of the only life she has known and directly into conflict with Catra, her best friend since childhood. Over 52 episodes and five seasons, the show built one of the most discussed relationships in recent animated television around those two characters. It won a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Kids and Family Programming, earned a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes for both its first and third seasons, and provoked a genuine debate about who children's stories are for. Developed by ND Stevenson and produced by DreamWorks Animation Television, the series ran until 2020, and was removed from Netflix on the 21st of February 2026 when DreamWorks' streaming license expired.

• 2. A Reboot With Its Own Agenda

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  Development began concurrently in April 2016, nearly two years before the December 2017 public announcement. Stevenson initially pitched the project to Netflix on the assumption of creating only one season. By November 2018, he explained that the team had four arcs of 13 episodes already mapped out, a sign of how quickly the scope expanded. The original 1985 Filmation series, She-Ra: Princess of Power, supplied the core premise and even kept Adora's transformation catchphrase, "For the honor of Grayskull!" But Stevenson's version made a pointed departure: He-Man, who in the original series was She-Ra's brother and the one who "awakens her destiny," does not appear. The decision was deliberate. Removing him allowed She-Ra to be a hero entirely on her own terms. The characters were drawn to be diverse in both appearance and personality, ranging across a spectrum that Stevenson described as going from good to "evil but understandable" to "utterly amoral" to "full-blown hippie." Visually, the series took its cues from anime and the works of Hayao Miyazaki and Moebius, a significant aesthetic distance from the original heroines, who were all drawn to the same size and shape to simplify animation and toy production, and were all white, with Netossa as a late exception. Around 45 people worked on the show at DreamWorks' offices in Glendale, with animation provided by the South Korean studio NE4U.

• 3. Catra and Adora

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  Reviewers consistently identified the relationship between Adora and Catra as the emotional engine of the series. The Verge called Catra "the best animated antihero story since Avatar: The Last Airbender's Zuko." Stevenson described the show's thematic core as the full range of human connection, from "wide-eyed love" to "heart-rending jealousy, crushes and infatuations." Catra's arc begins in genuine betrayal: when Adora defects to the Rebellion, Catra experiences it as abandonment, and her wounded loyalty curdles into ambition. She rises to become Hordak's second-in-command. In the fourth season, Adora destroys her own sword to prevent an ancient superweapon from activating, stripping herself of her powers. By the fifth season, Adora rescues a redeemed Catra from the control of Horde Prime, the interplanetary warlord above Hordak. Their love for each other is the mechanism by which She-Ra ultimately destroys both the superweapon and Horde Prime. The series closes with a mutual confession and an on-screen kiss in the final episode. In June 2020, Stevenson confirmed that Catra was a woman of color, saying he discussed her "being a brown Latina" when designing her, though he acknowledged this was not "explicitly, textually present in the show."

• 4. LGBTQ Representation

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  Before the series premiered, the creators signaled that LGBTQ representation would be a deliberate part of the show. Tor.com later wrote that it "reads as utterly queer in just about every aspect," with many characters coded as fluid in gender or sexuality and none as clearly heterosexual. Stevenson recalled that early in the show's run there "had to be plausible deniability" around most queer relationships. That changed once vocal fan support made the subtext legible to executives. By the final season, Stevenson had successfully pitched the queer relationship between Adora and Catra as the intended climax of the entire series. The show's queer characters extended well beyond the two leads. Princesses Spinerella and Netossa are a married couple whose bond becomes a plot point in the fifth season, when Netossa must rescue her wife from Horde Prime's mind control. An episode centered on Bow explores his relationship with his two fathers, Lance and George. The fourth season introduced Double Trouble, referred to with singular they pronouns; the character's voice actor, Jacob Tobia, is also non-binary. Character designer Ray Geiger stated on Tumblr that Jewelstar is a transgender man, as is his voice actor, Alex Blue Davis. Geiger also said that he designed Perfuma while envisioning her as a trans woman but never disclosed this during production, fearing censorship. In June 2021, Stevenson told an interviewer that criticism of Double Trouble as a villain whose "gender nonconformity was conflated with alienness" had blindsided him, and he admitted he "might have done some things differently" had he encountered that perspective earlier.

• 5. Themes and Influences

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  Stevenson described the show as essentially a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, with Adora, Glimmer, and Bow each mapping to "specific classes in D&D." Steven Universe was a named influence; Stevenson said his early conversations about queer relationships in She-Ra were only possible because of that earlier series. He also noted that the crew wanted to include Catra's pink lion Clawdeen from the original series but dropped the idea because the animal's design was "pretty much identical" to Steven Universe's Lion. They created Melog instead, as what Stevenson called a "therapy animal" for Catra. The series drew on anime traditions, particularly magical-girl stories, and on science fiction from the 1970s and 1980s. Its thematic reach was wide: the show addresses abusive relationships, colonization, imperialism, and what the source describes as genocide resulting from Hordak's planetary-scale warfare. Horde Prime's regime in the fifth season contains elements that Stevenson said are reminiscent of fundamentalist Christianity, intended not as a critique of religion but of cult-like leadership structures. Magic in the series is portrayed as fallible, dependent on the wielder's skill and determination. Adora's powers are directly tied to her love for her friends, yet the show gives her a persistent internal conflict: she is told she must suppress personal desires to be the hero Etheria requires. The series' all-female writers' room shaped these threads, and the production had only one man in the regular voice cast.

• 6. Sound and Design Controversy

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  The series' title song, "Warriors," was performed by Aaliyah Rose. The Washington Post named it one of the theme songs so good it "must not be skipped," placing it alongside the opening credits of Daredevil, The Crown, and Narcos. Composer Sunna Wehrmeijer built the score around what she described as a "contemporary '80s synth-sound combined with orchestral adventure," responding to a brief from the creators for music that was both "big and epic" and "sparkly." A soundtrack album was released on the 8th of May 2020, including a cover of the theme by voice actor AJ Michalka. When the first images of the rebooted She-Ra's character design were released in July 2018, a social media dispute broke out. Some users objected that she was not as voluptuous or glamorous as the original. Others argued the redesign deliberately avoided sexualizing a children's character and promoted body positivity. J. Michael Straczynski, the co-creator of the original series, entered the debate by noting that his She-Ra was written as "a warrior, first and foremost," and that viewing the original character as an "ideal woman" reflected "prepubescent interest" rather than creative intent. Fan artists, many of them young women, responded to the controversy with a wave of artwork celebrating the new design.

• 7. Critical Reception and Legacy

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  Rotten Tomatoes recorded a 100% approval rating for the first season, drawn from 25 reviews. The fifth and final season earned the highest average rating of any season, at 9.2 out of 10 across 16 reviews. Vox called it one of the "most LGBTQ-inclusive and diverse shows on television." Scholars engaged with the series seriously: Paul Thomas argued it deploys the monomyth while "queering normative understandings of heroic gender and sexuality." In a New York Times profile from the 21st of July 2020, climate activist Jamie Margolin said she watched all five seasons over three days, saying: "I was like, I hate the real world. I want to live on Etheria." The series was nominated at the 46th Daytime Emmy Awards and tied with First Day in 2021 to win the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Kids and Family Programming. In May 2020, Stevenson said he hoped She-Ra would make it easier for future shows to sustain queer romances across an entire series without sacrificing narrative tension. When Netflix removed the show on the 21st of February 2026, Stevenson said on social media that showrunners have no control over licensing decisions, and that "years of hard work by many talented crews have ended up without a home." He urged fans to watch while they could and to keep records, saying: "Its legacy is in your hands."