The Most Jaw-Dropping Moments on HBO’s “Watchmen” | DIRECTV

“What the f---?!” It’s a line repeated often enough in HBO’s “WATCHMEN” to become a catchphrase for Angela Abar (REGINA KING), the miniseries’ de facto protagonist. It’s also what viewers found themselves asking again and again in the course of the show’s nine dizzying, brilliant episodes. Plenty of TV series can throw you for a loop time and again (see “WATCHMEN” show-runner DAMON LINDELOF’s own “Lost”), but this one is a rare show that can toss you into the whirlwind and ultimately land you on solid ground.

With a plot and themes as carefully engineered as the Millennium Clock, “WATCHMEN” delivered on all the wild moments it threw at us. It built on the world of ALAN MOORE and DAVE GIBBONS’s 1986 comic book masterpiece, and deftly combines profundity and seriousness with dry humor and psychedelic weirdness. It took the themes established in its source material and used them to tell a contemporary story about the long shadow of white supremacy and intergenerational trauma in America.

From the first squid storm to the last unbroken egg, here are the moments in the series that made us gasp. But be warned: This is not for the uninitiated. Massive spoilers abound.

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‘Douglas’ Goes Deep Inside the Mind of Hannah Gadsby | Rolling Stone

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All stand-up is curated confession, a chance for the person behind the mic to spill their guts but still shape their own narrative — to both tell the audience a story but also let us know how we should be thinking about it. We appreciate great comedians for their humor, of course, but also for their mastery. Like mentalists or con artists, stand-ups know how to pull our strings, how to put us at ease or discomfit us.

No one has had more occasion in recent years to think about the structure of stand-up than Hannah Gadsby. The Australian comic made waves in 2018 when Netflix released Nanette, a special in which she publicly processed her trauma about instances of sexism, assault, and homophobia she’d experienced in her life, all while deconstructing and questioning the format of joke-telling as a way to tell stories about ourselves.

Nanette earned Gadsby both admirers and haters in droves, as any thoughtful and provocative piece of media will in this age of instant public reaction. She went from being a comedian mostly familiar in her native Australia to an international household name, known as a woman who either revolutionized or took an ax to the art form. So it’s only natural that she opens her follow-up special, Douglas, by discussing how this new set will inevitably live in the shadow of her last one.

“If you’re here because of Nanette… why?” she asks her Los Angeles audience early on in Douglas. “What the fuck are you expecting from this show? Because, I’m sorry, if it’s more trauma, I am fresh out. Had I known how wildly popular trauma was going to be in the context of comedy, I might have budgeted my shit a bit better.”

Though nothing since (Douglas included) has quite gone to the places Nanette took us, other innovative stand-ups have been messing with the format in interesting ways since 2018. Gary Gulman experimented with documentary as a means of circling the topic of his depression in The Great Depresh; Jenny Slate meta-critically dissected her own fears about public performance in Stage Fright; Julio Torres utilized tiny objects and a mini conveyer belt to discuss his identity in My Favorite Shapes; and Lil Rel Howery related the story of his uncle’s funeral in a high school gym in Live in Crenshaw. As the diversity of comedians whose work makes its way to the TV-watching public broadens and more stand-up specials get released each year, so too does the format stretch and evolve to accommodate a wider range of both stories and tellings.

Douglas is in many ways a more traditional special, what Gadsby jokingly calls “my difficult second album, that is also my tenth.” But like its predecessor, Douglas is interested in pulling back the lid to see the structure of stand-up; the comic spends the first 15 minutes offering an outline of what we should expect, including “a lecture,” “the joke section” and “a gentle and very good-natured needling of the patriarchy.” (It’s not gentle; more on that later.)

But what might appear at first glance as a list of spoilers is actually Gadsby’s roundabout way of offering insight into how her brain works. Because where Nanette was about the comic unpacking old baggage, Douglas is about a more recent revelation in Gadsby’s life: her diagnosis with autism. Douglas is Gadsby’s attempt to acclimate the audience to her own inner weather system, inviting us into her thought processes and teaching us her own language of personal associations. (She memorably describes a time in school when a lesson on prepositions devolved into a young Gadsby very seriously asking her teacher to explain how a penguin could be related to a box.)

If you’re already a Gadsby fan, odds are you’re very much here for her brand of puzzle-box comedy, the kind that laughs at its own deconstruction. As in Nanette, Gadsby takes aspects of herself that are left of perceived center — her queerness, her femaleness, and, in this case, her neurodiversity — and invites viewers to realign their perspectives. “I’m not here to collect your pity,” she says. “I’m here to disrupt your confidence.”

If this all sounds a little heady for a stand-up special, don’t worry — Douglas is also very funny. Named after Gadsby’s dog but also for a pouch located between the rectum and the uterus in the female reproductive system (don’t worry about it), Douglas covers everything from an awkward interaction at the dog park to Renaissance art to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A portion of the set in which she tears antivaxxers a new one — and points out that there are probably a sizable number of them in her audience, overlapping as it does with “rich, white, entitled women” — hits in a powerful way in this time when certain people are refusing to wear masks in public in the middle of a pandemic.

Gadsby also devotes plenty of time to eviscerating that cause of so much collective grief, and the font from which most of her haters spring: the patriarchy. Just like in the real world, toxic masculinity lingers in the wings of Douglas: men telling women to smile, the male gaze in art, men (quite literally) asserting their dominance over women’s uteruses. If your reaction to this topic is that you’re tired of hearing about it, Gadsby would shoot back that she’s tired of living with it.

Gadsby spent much of Nanette questioning her own career-long reliance on self-deprecating humor. In Douglas, she lets us in on the way her mind works not to mock or undermine herself, but to revel in the way she, as an autistic person, experiences the world. “There is beauty in the way I think,” she says near the end of the set.

It’s likely Douglas will earn Gadsby as many hate-tweeting detractors as her last special did, if only for the fact that a woman getting up onstage to talk unapologetically about herself still makes a portion of the population very uncomfortable. But if Nanette was a dirge, Douglas is ultimately a celebration. So, in the words of Gadsby, “If that’s not your thing, leave. I’ve given you plenty of warning. Just go. Off you pop, man-flakes.”

The Art of Growing Up: Life Lessons from the Films of Hayao Miyazaki | DIRECTV

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The poet MAYA ANGELOU once said: “To grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed.”

That’s true in life, but it’s especially true in the FILMS OF HAYAO MIYAZAKI. The legendary Japanese animator, screenwriter, and Studio Ghibli co-founder is responsible for some of the most imaginative, open-hearted films of the last few decades, among them “MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO” (1988), “PRINCESS MONONOKE” (1997), and “HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE” (2004), to name a few. Throughout his work, Miyazaki returns to the same themes and imagery again and again: the persistence of nature, the beauty of flight, the food that nurtures us, and the role of spiritualism and magic in the seemingly mundane.  

But perhaps Miyazaki’s most beloved subject is the art of growing up: how you do it, what it means, and why emotional maturity isn’t a given — even if getting older is. Over and over again, the filmmaker presents stories of heroes who are thrust into responsibility at a very young age and rise to the occasion in spite of overwhelming odds. But unlike many other child protagonists, the kids in Miyazaki films are just that: kids, with all the awkwardness and huge, inarticulate feelings that come with youth.

With almost every Studio Ghibli feature NOW AVAILABLE TO STREAM ON HBO MAX, there’s never been a better time to revisit Miyazaki’s classics. We went back to three of the greats –– “KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE” (1989), “PONYO” (2008), and the Academy Award-winning “SPIRITED AWAY” (2001) — for life lessons on what it costs to grow up in a world in flux, and why it’s worth the effort.

ALWAYS PUT IN THE WORK

As steeped in the supernatural as Miyazaki’s films are, it’s clear that he finds just as much beauty in everyday chores. In “SPIRITED AWAY,” 10-year-old Chihiro (DAVEIGH CHASE) is forced to take a job working at an otherworldly bathhouse after the witch Yubaba (SUZANNE PLESHETTE) turns her parents into pigs. Chihiro balks at the responsibility at first but learns about herself by quite literally getting her hands dirty: carrying coal and purging the rot from a “stink spirit” who comes to the bathhouse. In “KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE,” a young witch (KIRSTEN DUNST) leaves home at the age of 13 to discover her path in life, and winds up overwhelmed in the bustling city of Koriko. Though magic is innate in Kiki, where she ultimately grows is in doing effortful things: helping to stoke a fire, or wash a floor, or deliver an item to its rightful owner.

LOVE AND RESPONSIBILITY GO HAND IN HAND

In Miyazaki’s worldview, love — whether it’s romantic, platonic, or familial — means little without a promise to fight for each other’s wellbeing. When Sosuke (FRANKIE JONAS) rescues a magical fish (Noah Cyrus) from certain doom in “PONYO,” the bond between the two is immediate. “I saved her. She’s my responsibility now,” he tells his mom (TINA FEY), with all the earnest severity that a five-year-old can muster. As the boy from the land and the girl from the sea gravitate toward each other, Miyazaki makes it clear that their mutual affection comes with an obligation: Ponyo can only attain her wish of becoming human if Sosuke promises to always care for her.

GROWING UP MEANS LOSING SOMETHING, BUT GAINING SOMETHING GREATER

At the start of “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” magic comes easily to Kiki. She can soar on her broomstick and talk to her feline familiar, Jiji (PHIL HARTMAN), without any thought. But as she comes of age, doubting her purpose in the world and harboring her first romantic feelings for her friend Tombo (MATTHEW LAWRENCE), she loses her ability to fly, and Jiji’s words become inarticulate meows. What Kiki once could do by grace, she has to relearn through effort and intention. “We each need to find our own inspiration, Kiki. Sometimes it’s not easy,” her friend Ursula (JANEANE GAROFALO) counsels her. Kiki may no longer be able to speak the secret language of cats, but what she gains is far more valuable: self-knowledge, and a sense of her place in the world, which allow her to take flight once more.

CHANGE IS INEVITABLE

Nothing is fixed in Miyazaki’s films; oceans rise, gods transform, and children, inexorably, grow up. In “PONYO,” the underwater wizard Fujimoto (LIAM NEESON) wants nothing more than to keep his daughter Ponyo from growing up and coming into her magical abilities, which he fears will upset the balance of the ocean and send the world into turmoil. He literally traps her in a bubble, demanding that she stop transforming into a human and revert to her fish form. “If you could only remain innocent and pure forever,” he laments. But his daughter’s magic — and her desire to join Sosuke on land — are ultimately too powerful for his efforts to curb her, and Fujimoto learns that the best thing he can do for Ponyo is to let her evolve and leave the nest.

NO ONE IS ALONE

As much as the kids in Miyazaki movies are forced to do on their own, they ultimately learn to rely on the community around them as a safety net. In “SPIRITED AWAY,” Chihiro gets back the love she puts out into the world, from the bathhouse staff who rally to help her escape Yubaba’s clutches and from Haku (JASON MARSDEN), the wayward spirit boy who takes her under his wing. In “KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE,” Kiki is so focused on how she can be useful to her adopted city that she almost doesn’t notice how much the townspeople have come to care for her. But they all rally to help her when she’s down and out; and perhaps the biggest lesson that Kiki (and all of us) have to learn is that it’s more than okay to ask for help sometimes.

Virtual Pride Party: 10 Movies, Shows, Albums, and Games That Celebrate LGBTQ Culture | DIRECTV

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June is Pride Month, commemorating the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots, a galvanizing moment in the history of LGBTQ rights. It’s usually an occasion that is marked by weeks of celebrations — parades, parties, concerts, drag shows, the whole shebang. But, like every other public gathering, Pride demonstrations across the world have been canceled due to the CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC.

Even though the queer community can’t take to the streets right now, there are still ways to celebrate remotely, whether it’s streaming TV shows and MOVIES, getting caught up in a game, or blasting music and dancing around your living room. Here are some of the best recent pieces of media by and about LGBTQ people to share with your friends this June. Because at its core, Pride is about connection — however we can find it.

MOVIES

“RAFIKI”
Wanuri Kahiu’s “Rafiki” made history in 2018 as the first Kenyan movie to ever be screened at the Cannes Film Festival, even as it was banned in its country of origin. Following the love affair between the teen daughters of two rival political leaders in Nairobi (Samantha Mugatsia and Sheila Munyiva), “Rafiki” is a sweet, summery romance, a cinematographic splash of brilliant color and deep feeling. But Kahiu equally doesn’t shy away from portraying the harsh realities that queer people face in Kenya, a country whose laws remain openly hostile to the LGBTQ community.

“HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE”
David France’s 2012 documentary “How to Survive a Plague” is essential viewing for anyone looking to brush up on their history this Pride Month, especially in the wake of the passing of legendary activist LARRY KRAMER in May. The film shadows the members of ACT UP and TAG as they fight for recognition and treatment in the depths of the AIDS epidemic, putting their lives and bodies on the line. There’s an eerie resonance in the way America addressed AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s in relation to how it’s addressing COVID-19 today. Keep an eye out for France’s next doc, “Welcome to Chechnya,” which follows contemporary queer activists in the embattled Russian republic (premiering June 30 on HBO).

“PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE”
CÉLINE SCIAMMA’s historical drama might be one of the most rapturously beautiful films you’ll ever watch. Set in 18th-century France on a remote island off the coast of Brittany, “PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE” is the story of a painter (NOÉMIE MERLANT) and her subject (ADÈLE HAENEL) who fall in love over the course of a dreamy week. It’s a movie about women unfettered from the male gaze, about seeing and being seen, punctuated by the roar of the sea and the sweep of a brush across canvas. If we could pick somewhere to self-isolate, it’d be this mansion full of crackling fires and long looks.

TV

“LOS ESPOOKYS”
Like a vampire bat at twilight, comedy-horror series “LOS ESPOOKYS” flew under the radar when it debuted on HBO last year. This gleefully strange bilingual series follows a group of Latin-American twenty-somethings who start a business dedicated to manufacturing spooky situations. Series co-creator JULIO TORRES stars as the blue-haired heir to a chocolate fortune whose dedication to both ruffle shirts and his dreamy but duplicitous boyfriend (JOSÉ PABLO MINOR) make him an instant icon. If you like high camp and deadpan jokes about owls wearing wigs, this one’s for you.

“FEEL GOOD”
In her semi-autobiographical Channel 4/Netflix series, Canadian comic MAE MARTIN plays a stand-up comedian (also named Mae Martin) who falls fast and hard for a woman she meets at a show (Charlotte Richie). Though “Feel Good” touches on some heavy issues — addiction recovery, self-loathing, and toxic moms (LISA KUDROW), to name a few — it’s also laugh-out-loud funny and has a nervy, brutally honest edge that puts it in company with shows like “Fleabag” and “Lady Dynamite.”

“SHE-RA AND THE PRINCESSES OF POWER”
So much more than a reboot, Netflix’s reimagined “She-Ra” has quietly launched its own revolution. Showrunner Noelle Stevenson has crafted one of the most casually queer shows on TV, featuring characters, talent, and creators from across the LGBTQ spectrum. The final season of this sprawling epic about magical princesses fighting an oppressive regime dropped in May, complete with a storyline about gay love literally saving the world. “She-Ra” is nominally a kids’ show, but it’s got enough depth and wit to appeal to all ages.

MUSIC

CHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS, “LA VITA NUOVA”
CHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS, the nom de musique of French singer-songwriter Héloïse Letissier, has been making synth-pop waves since her first album dropped in 2014. The pansexual performer has been continually reinventing her style and music since then, playing with gender presentation in 2018’s “Chris” and switching back and forth between French and English — often in the course of a single song. Her most recent EP, “La Vita Nuova,” is at once highly danceable and melancholic. Opening track "PEOPLE, I’VE BEEN SAD" is the perfect downbeat bop for a solo shelter-in-place dance party.

MOSES SUMNEY, “GRÆ”
You’d be hard-pressed to pin down the musical genre of Moses Sumney, a Ghanaian-American singer-songwriter who has collaborated with artists ranging from SOLANGE to BECK to SON LUX to novelist MICHAEL CHABON. On his sophomore album, “græ,” Sumney sings in a honeyed falsetto over an orchestra’s worth of instruments, covering topics like isolation and love, polyamory and the ravages of toxic masculinity. Check out the video for debut single "VIRILE," in which he dances sinuously between hanging sides of beef singing: “You wanna slip right in / Amp up the masculine / You’ve got the wrong idea, son.”

VIDEO GAMES

“LIFE IS STRANGE”
If you’re the kind of gamer who favors slow-burn interpersonal drama, the “Life Is Strange” games are pure catnip. Starting with the first, a murder mystery that involves time travel and heaps of teen angst, it’s up to the player to choose whether protagonist Max falls for her estranged best friend Chloe, her school buddy Warren, or neither. Prequel “Before the Storm” and follow-up “Life Is Strange 2,” which follows a new cast of characters, also feature bisexual protagonists. There’s a lot to recommend in “Life Is Strange,” but it’s the casual queerness that makes it remarkable in the largely straight world of gaming.

“IF FOUND…”
Released in late May, Dreamfeel’s “If Found…” isn’t what you might traditionally think of as a video game. A small-scale PC and iOS game, it invites the player to pore over, and then erase, the diary entries of Kaiso, a young transgender woman returning to her rural Irish hometown in the early ’90s and coming face to face with her past. There’s a secondary story involving an astronaut and a black hole that threatens to rend the fabric of space-time, but the allure of “If Found…” in the intimacy of Kaiso’s story as it vanishes from view.

The Strange World of “Kentucky Route Zero” | DIRECTV

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When most people think of video games, they think in terms of accomplishments: princesses rescued, dragons slain, cars stolen, houses upgraded. The vast majority of games provide a quick little pleasure boost for our brains each time we complete a task, whether it’s assassinating a target at close range or stealing the groundskeeper’s rake.

But a new breed of indie games has emerged in which it’s not so much about winning or losing as participating in a story. Inspired by text-based adventure games of the 1970s and 80s, games like these are often dialogue-heavy and atmospheric, lacking the sense of easy victory offered by more traditional video games. But they have their own richer rewards, closer as they are to the messy, strange reality of being a human being living through uncertain times.

At the forefront of the oddball, story-driven genre is "KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO," an adventure game set in and around the highways and backroads of rural Kentucky — both the real, aboveground ones and a secret, hidden one deep in the substrata of Mammoth Cave. Developed by three-person outfit Cardboard Computer, the game was released in five “acts” over the course of seven years, the first in 2013 and the last in January 2020. Initially released on Mac, Windows, and Linux, the game is now also available in its entirety on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox One.

Following down-and-out antiques truck driver Conway and the fellow travelers he meets along the way, “Kentucky Route Zero” tells a dreamy, devastating story of rural America in the grips of the Great Recession. With a stylish design, thoughtfully crafted dialogue, and a score that’s equal parts electronica and back-porch folk, “Kentucky Route Zero” feels like nothing else out there. And the story of how it came to be is as strange and meandering as the game itself.

Co-creators Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and Ben Babbitt first met when they were students at the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 2000s. When the trio decided to collaborate on a video game, it was new territory for all of them. “We had hoped and planned in the beginning that this would be, like, a two-year project,” said Elliott, speaking by phone from his home in Kentucky. “We were pretty inexperienced — this was the first game anywhere near this scope that any of us had worked on.”

“Kentucky Route Zero”’s singular flavor is thanks to the tight collaboration between the three — a very small team for any game, but especially one as ambitious as this one. Elliott was in charge of writing, Kemenczy art and animation, and Babbitt music and sound design. After a few years of work, they decided to release their project as a series of episodes in order to get what they’d already built into the hands of gamers sooner. “These games don’t really exist unless someone is playing them, you know? So it’s nice to get them being played by the audience even while they’re in development,” said Elliott.

Once that decision was made, however, “Kentucky Route Zero” began to balloon into a project much bigger than any of them had anticipated. But the time between each act allowed anticipation to build, and for the game to become a cult sensation among indie-loving players.

Coming from the art world, Elliott said that the reach of video games is something that appeals to him about the form. “There’s a huge audience, which is pretty amazing,” he explained. “When we were making these weird, noisy installations and performances, it was great, and we had a small community of people who were interested in that work. But it wasn’t like hundreds of thousands of players the way it is now.”

Elliott said that the trio drew inspiration from influences as diverse as the Chicago and Louisville music scenes, the theatrical set design of Beowulf Boritt, classic 1970s game “Colossal Cave Adventure,” and magical realist novels like Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” But the seed for “Kentucky Route Zero” initially came from Elliott’s fascination with MAMMOTH CAVE, the longest-known cave system on the planet, and the communities that have sprung up around it.

“I was in Elizabethtown, which is pretty close to Mammoth Cave, and I would drive down to Nashville a lot to visit family,” Elliott recalled. “I’d be traveling on I-65, this massive highway running through lots of beautiful hills. It’s a really interesting landscape, especially at night. Mammoth Cave has been a tourism destination for, like, 200 years. And there’s all these tourist traps around it and a lot of haunted houses. I guess there’s just something spooky about caves.”

The other half of the inspiration for “Kentucky Route Zero” was the 2008 financial crisis, which weighed heavily on the national psyche around the time Cardboard Computer began working on the game in 2010.

“That sense of everything falling apart was in our heads when we started working on the project,” Elliott explained.

“We were watching all the people who had bought into these systems just get totally fucked by this house of cards collapsing. And it wasn’t their fault; they were just being exploited. If you’ve ever been in debt — your debt just gets kicked around like a football between these different companies. It’s like none of the reality of where this debt came from matters anymore. That’s the kind of disempowered, lost experience we were trying to evoke.”

That atmosphere of uncertainty hangs like fog over “Kentucky Route Zero,” as the game’s cast of characters navigates abandoned mines and sprawling bureaucracies, crumbling roadside storefronts and memories they’d sooner forget. But there’s a lot beauty and humor to be found too, like when the ceiling of a tavern floats away to reveal the night sky above, or when one floor of an office building is inexplicably filled with grizzly bears. It’s a game about the devastation of loss and uncertainty, but it’s also about finding hope and friendship in unexpected places — whether that friend is an itinerant punk musician or a 30-foot-tall bald eagle.

Though it was conceived with a different global crisis in mind, “Kentucky Route Zero” resonates with our current climate of unease, isolation, and economic anxiety. There’s something soothing about immersing yourself in a virtual world that’s its own kind of out of control, but that does us the mercy of ending.

“Looking at the disastrous government response [to COVID-19], it’s like we’re really on our own,” Elliott said. “But a lot of the game is about finding and building a family and a community for yourself, especially when you’re in a position where you kind of have to do that, because the system is not meeting your needs. But we have to look to each other. That’s something that I’m really feeling right now.”

Inside the Groundbreaking Queer Reboot of ‘She-Ra’ | Rolling Stone

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We’re all shaped by the myths we grow up with, whether it’s the stories we learn from holy books or Saturday morning cartoons. Kids who see themselves as the hero learn to center themselves in their own life stories. Kids who see their experiences relegated to the sidelines, or not represented at all, come away with a very different lesson — one that can take years to unlearn.

Which is exactly what makes a show like She-Ra and the Princesses of Power so vital. Since its premiere in 2018, Noelle Stevenson’s reboot of the cult Eighties cartoon has joined a revolution in the world of children’s animation, combining classic genre storytelling with diverse representation and a progressive worldview (see also: Nickelodeon’s The Legend of Korra, Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time and Steven Universe). In its fifth and final season, which dropped on Netflix last month, She-Ra rounded out its 52-episode run by centering a queer romance — specifically, between its hero, Adora, and her best frenemy Catra — and positing that such a love can, quite literally, save the world.

“I knew from the start that it wasn’t going to be easy,” says Stevenson, speaking via phone from Los Angeles. “Because this is She-Ra. To have the culmination of her arc be this lesbian love plot is a big deal! And I understood that. But I also felt that it was really important.”

The original She-Ra: Princess of Power was a 1985 Filmation spin-off of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, which itself was based on a line of Mattel action figures. Set on the planet of Etheria, She-Ra follows a band of magical princesses in their rebellion against the Evil Horde, a totalitarian sci-fi regime bent on global domination. Adora is an ex-Horde soldier who joins the rebellion after she gains the ability to transform into She-Ra, a superpowered Chosen One with glowing blue eyes, a mystical sword, and a very cool outfit.

In 2015, when Stevenson, then 23, found out that DreamWorks Animation was looking for someone to pitch a new take on She-Ra, she jumped at the chance. She was already an Eisner Award-winning cartoonist and writer who had made a name for herself with works like her web comic-turned-graphic novel Nimona and the Boom! Studios series Lumberjanes.

“The world [of She-Ra] is so incredibly vibrant, and has so many powerful female characters. It’s this world that has all my interests rolled into one: It’s got the flying ponies and superpowers and all of these things that, immediately, I was like, ‘I want to do this. I want to be the one to do this,’” she says.

While Stevenson’s reimagination of the world of Etheria pays tribute to its predecessor, it includes some key differences. The reboot transforms the musclebound, scantily-clad grownups of the original series into awkward teens in much more practical (but still very sparkly) clothing. In addition to embracing a diversity of races, genders, and body types, the She-Ra reboot fleshes out the characters and their backstories, giving them fully-fledged arcs and complicating the good/evil binary of the original. The princesses of the rebellion aren’t simply heroic, and the soldiers of the Horde aren’t simply villains; everyone’s just a human being (or scorpion person or alien clone or flying horse, as the case may be) trying to make their way in a world that doesn’t offer easy solutions. It’s also, incidentally, really funny.

For Stevenson, it was crucial that the characters felt three-dimensional, and that it was their choices that guided the direction of the storytelling. “The characters all began with a deep personal flaw, and the process of making the show was kind of giving them the room to process those flaws. But we wanted it to feel organic. We wanted the characters to feel like real people that we knew,” she explains.

From the start, She-Ra’s most compelling tension was always between Adora (Aimee Carrero) and Catra (AJ Michalka), Adora’s childhood best friend who becomes her bitterest rival after Adora leaves the Horde to join the rebellion. In the show’s first four seasons, the two continually fight and reconcile and break apart again, their obsession with each other marking them as something more than frenemies.

“It’s a dynamic that I find really interesting: the attraction and the tension between the villain and the hero, especially when they know each other better than anyone. They love each other, but there’s something between them that cannot be overcome,” Stevenson says.

Stevenson always knew that she wanted the relationship between Catra and Adora to be a romantic one; but she had to walk a fine line, because she didn’t know if the studio would give her the go-ahead to put an explicitly lesbian love story front and center. At first, as in Steven Universe, Rebecca Sugar’s radically progressive series that aired its final episodes earlier this year, she steeped the world of the She-Ra reboot in queerness. The show features multiple side characters in same-sex relationships, characters who flout traditional gender roles, and even a nonbinary character (Double Trouble, voiced by transgender writer and activist Jacob Tobia).

Still, Stevenson, herself a gay woman, wanted young viewers to be able to see a queer relationship that wasn’t just incidental, but central to the plot of the entire series. “I’ve loved these stories my entire life, you know? I was a huge Star Wars and Lord of the Rings fan as a kid. But there weren’t a lot of characters that I felt personally represented by,” she says. “We love what makes these stories classic, but we’ve seen them all culminate in the same kind of romance so many times: The hero gets the girl, he gets the kiss, and then he saves the world. And it’s not just [swapping] the man and the woman for two women. You have to actually approach it from a standpoint of: How do you make these stories, at their roots, queer? 

“So that’s what I was trying to do — for little queer kids to see that this is normal, that these are stories that can happen and that exist, and that can center them and make them feel seen and understood.”

Whether or not Adora and Catra’s romance would become canonical was in the hands of the studio, and it was a risk Stevenson couldn’t be sure it would be willing to take. So the show played a long game — hinting at a romantic dynamic between the two without making it explicit, for fear of disappointing fans in the end if they weren’t able to deliver. Fortunately, a groundswell of viewer support for a potential relationship between the characters — a phenomenon known in the fan community as “shipping” — allowed Stevenson to make a case to the studio for supporting the story she wanted to tell with She-Ra.

“Just as I had hoped, people started picking up on this tension and getting really passionate about it,” she says. “It was immediately one of the strongest fandom ships right out of the gate. And that was when I finally showed my hand and was like, ‘Look. We’ve got a bunch of people who, just off Season One, are really, really excited about the gay representation in this show. I have been planning for this. And here’s how it needs to end, and not just because I want a moment that everyone’s gonna talk about. It’s the logical conclusion of both their character arcs. They need each other.’”

Finally, after years of hedging their bets, Stevenson and her collaborators got the go-ahead from DreamWorks. “I really wanted it to be so central to the plot that if at any point they were like, ‘Oh, we changed our minds, we want to take it out again,’ they wouldn’t be able to, because it would be so baked in,” she explains. “The temperature is not always right, and depending on what’s happening in the world, not everyone wants to be the studio that sticks their neck out and makes a statement like this. You will get a flat ‘no’ sometimes. But if you bide your time, or you come at it from another angle, that can change. You just have to keep pushing.”

Feedback for the conclusion of She-Ra has been overwhelmingly positive both from critics and fans. Viewer support has been pouring out in the form of social media posts, YouTube reaction videos, and fan art and fan fiction. Stevenson, who first made a name for herself online with Lord of the Rings and Avengers fan art, has been blown away by the support from She-Ra lovers. “That’s how you know that you’re successful at what you set out to do — if people are getting inspired by the stories that you’re telling. I think that that’s the beauty of fan work, is that it’s an evolution of the genre. We take that inspiration and create something new all the time.”

Unfettered by restrictions, the final season of She-Ra is a tightly plotted, character-driven masterwork, featuring a slow-burn redemption arc, a harrowing villain, and a timely message about the power of love and unity against the forces of repression and tyranny. It’s a show about becoming kinder and more open in the face of unrelenting darkness, about banding together to prepare for the worst, but always hoping for the best in spite of overwhelming odds.

Stevenson says that she and her team began work on She-Ra in the aftermath of the 2016 election. “The veil was ripped off, and we had to reckon with a world that we hadn’t expected. And that theme of relying on each other and being stronger together became so much more relevant,” she recalls. “I remember writing one script after a particularly bad news day where it just felt like nothing was ever going to be OK again. It’s an episode where Adora realizes that there are supposed to be stars in the sky, and there aren’t any more stars. And as Aimee [Carrero] was recording the lines, she was crying, and we were crying, because we were all experiencing this together — the idea that things were changing in maybe irreparable ways.”

The refrain of She-Ra’s catchy-as-hell power-pop theme song is “We must be strong, and we must be brave.” According to Stevenson, that’s easier said than done; but the whole point of the series is that you have to try anyway. It’s a message that rings especially true at this moment in our world when it seems like everything is spinning out of control, and it’s all too easy to feel helpless.

“It always comes back to this — when you realize that there’s a great evil or a great darkness that won’t just go away from one fight,” Stevenson says. “It boils up, and it can be pushed back down, but it’s something that we’ll probably have to be fighting for the rest of our lives. That’s really hard to do, and it makes you really tired sometimes, and it can be really scary. But when you are surrounded by the people that you love, and when you have that love for the people around you, then that strength is possible.”