#but if you join me you can repend for all your sins. dedicate yourself to me and i’ll make sure you’ll never feel like a bad person again.”

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

what bothers me about horde prime, more than his lazy characterization or his lack of impact on the narrative, is the fact that he is such a bad representation of a cult leader. like,, this is not how cults work. they don’t just insert a chip into you and make you follow their every directive like a robot. real life cults are a lot more terrifying because they use manipulation as a tactic to convince people to join them. it’s not a digital chip that you can remove from your system and suddenly you’re in complete control of yourself. cult survivors have talked about how hard it is to actually unlearn that mindset and start thinking for themselves, how many years it takes to stop feeling guilty for leaving their cult or seeing the toxicity in the leaders they so religiously followed.

sure, hordak and catra have some trauma tied to their experience with horde prime, but most of that is because of the physical torture they went through, rather than their experience of being brainwashed. and it’s fine if horde prime was just some villain and not a genocidal cult leader. but it’s clear that he was written to be a religious authority figure, the execution is just so off.

i know he’s a character in a fantasy world, so he had to use his powers for something. but instead of turning people into robots, he could have shown them a “better world” through his tech, talked them into joining him and forgetting about all their current worries, and then used them as weapons against etheria.

it would have been a lot more impactful and angsty if catra had willingly joined horde prime’s cult so that she could repress her guilt. in fact, it would have been really interesting if horde prime had convinced catra that he would help her repend for all that she did, if she joined his cult. this would have been a lot more comparable to religious guilt and trauma in real life, and it would show that catra actually felt bad for what she did, instead of just looking sad for a while and then continuing to be a shitty person anyway.

#everyday i mourn the character horde prime could have been #he could have actually been representative of toxic religious figures who push unhealthy mindsets #instead of being all “heehee you love adora dont you” he could have been like #“i sense guilt. you’ve done a lot of horrible things and you want to take it all back but you can’t. at least you think you can’t. #but if you join me you can repend for all your sins. dedicate yourself to me and i’ll make sure you’ll never feel like a bad person again.” #and it sounds like escapism because it is #halfway through catra begins to realize this and she has to choose between repressing her guilt #and actually allowing herself to feel guilty so that she can work on being better #and instead of having adora rescue her catra rescues herself by making a hard decision #but alas #spop critical #spop salt #spop #spop discourse #spop criticism #she ra #anti spop #tw religious guilt #tw religious trauma #tw religion #tw cult