Main Character Energy: Childhood / "Into the Abyss"
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, season 2, episode 21
In this post, I fully dive into some personal writing I’ve been working on in therapy, a sort of memoir that centers on me learning to tell my own story in a clear-eyed but positive way, with the help of some of the most impactful media in my life. I’ll be posting entries from that work here every so often. I’m sharing because 1) I put a lot of effort into it, 2) it feels like a good thing to do if I’m trying to feel more at home with my own narrative, and 3) it’s important to me to express vulnerability, especially now. Pre-posting edits will be made if it feels appropriate, and identifying information of others will be obscured except where it’s impossible (e.g. “mom” and “dad” — not a lot of room for ambiguity there!). If you want to skip these posts, it’s all gravy, baby!
It’s not irregular for a person of my age and demographics to look back with substantial fondness on the cartoons that aired when I was a kid. What is irregular, perhaps, is the degree to which they actively shaped me, something I’ve carried well into my adult life.
I grew up in a traditionally very WASPy home, which is funny because my parents were Catholic (or at least my mom was. My dad might have been Protestant and did the bare minimum to convert? Very on-brand for him). If there’d been a second child in the house, we would have been the precise nuclear family that Ronald Reagan’s America fetishized. Dad worked a white-collar job that made lots of money, the consequence of which is that he was almost never around, and when he was, he was wildly emotionally inaccessible. Mom took on the unrecognized, all-consuming labor of the home, from cooking to cleaning to childcare, and no one celebrated her for it. Then there was me, and a beautiful, feisty miniature schnauzer named Asta, all living in a two-story Tudor-style home in a town large enough to have a mall next door but small enough that it was chiefly known for its tractors (I grew up in the home city of John Deere, so). This is the stuff Republicans must have been dreaming about while they slashed taxes on the rich and kickstarted their decades-long project of destroying any hope of economic parity in our country.
Speaking of Ronald Reagan, it was his rampant deregulation of the FCC in the early 1980s that gave me the father figures I was desperately lacking in my day-to-day life. Thanks to removing prohibitions that had traditionally kept children’s programming from featuring what were essentially half-hour commercials, I had been gifted the diet of content that would shape my young mind. Who needs a dad that can articulate any feelings besides anger when you have Duke from G.I. Joe and He-Man from He-Man giving you daily morals about not bullying people or telling lies? I didn’t have a father capable of exhibiting leadership or compassion; fortunately, I had Optimus Prime, who could illustrate the value of giving your all for the people you care about even while he was turning into a big rig truck.
Now, if I must empathize with my dad (and I suppose I must, to be a “whole person giving his best” or whatever), I’m sure that he felt he was giving his all for me, and to a lesser extent, my mom (even though he was shamelessly cheating on her during this period). To men like my father, “being there for your kid” meant working absurd hours, making more money than I’m sure I’ll ever see, telling me as early as the age of 3 or 4 that the things I liked were just childish trifles (yeah no shit dad!!), and staring off into the far distance at the dinner table (when he made it to dinner). I’m sure he thought he was setting a good example of “being a man” for me, providing for his family financially and trying to “toughen me up.”
Unfortunately for my dad, tenets of developmental psychology won out, and more than I wanted a dad whose only interests were wine, guns, and other women, I wanted a dad who could show me love, care, and belonging. I recognize my privilege in saying this – in having an upbringing where the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs were guaranteed – but at that age, my capacity for perspective and gratitude had barely developed, while my need to feel some masculine softness was, if you’ll pardon the vocabulary juxtaposition, raging.
I don’t have a lot of distinct memories from this period of my life, but one stands out in particular – one that’s so on-the-nose it almost feels apocryphal, like it couldn’t possibly be true, but rather a story I started telling myself to complete a narrative circuit. Nonetheless, I believe it to be true, and a couple sense memories emanate from it, so I really think I did not make this up.
My first memory perhaps of my whole life is watching an episode of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe with my mom.
Even wilder, I remember what episode it was.
Wilder still, it is an episode that is about a character who wishes she could know her parents, which ends with her distant mother asserting her love for her child from afar, and wishing she could be closer.
This episode is called “Into the Abyss.” It’s my favorite episode from across the entire 130 of the He-Man show (I have indeed seen them all), and a top-5 contender across all iterations of the Masters of the Universe franchise (if it’s weird that I can make that distinction, it’s because I became something of an expert on MOTU in my adult life, which we’ll talk about later).
“Into the Abyss” is singular in the original Masters of the Universe show, and some of those singularities produce some interesting resonances with my personal development. The first script by Robert Lamb, a storyboard artist on the show, “Into the Abyss” was initially born out of a hope Lamb had to try to put something unique and unusual on screen. As Lamb recounts, he was feeling disillusioned with storyboarding some less-than-spectacular scripts in the show’s second season, and he got it in his head that he’d love to see a sequence that got into the nuts and bolts of show protagonist Prince Adam’s magical transformation into the muscular warrior He-Man. As any fan of Masters of the Universe would know, that transformation came from eldritch energy emitted by the abyss around Castle Grayskull, a repository of ancient power on our heroes’ planet of Eternia. Lamb wondered: what did that transformation really look like?
Lamb first pitched a story where show antagonist Skeletor led a direct assault on Castle Grayskull and Prince Adam would be pushed into the abyss, having to transform into He-Man at the very source of his power. Executive producer Art Nadel pushed back on the idea, noting that there were plenty of episodes where Skeletor attacked Castle Grayskull – why not find a new angle to explore why a character might have an abyssal encounter?
And so Lamb ended up crafting what turns out to be probably the most modern-feeling episode of He-Man. What I mean by that is: basically every episode of Masters of the Universe follows a traditional Saturday morning formula of a bad guy doing something wicked, which then the heroes must react to to save the day. In contrast, “Into the Abyss” is compelled fully by character drama. Indeed, outside of a super brief opening sequence showing He-Man winning a status quo-setting battle against Beast Man, there aren’t even any villains in this episode – another uniqueness across the show’s catalog.
“Into the Abyss” gets going like this: Prince Adam has grown weary of having to always be the hero. “He-Man may not get tired,” he tells his beloved pet Cringer, “but Prince Adam does.” Adam just wants to take a day off of his princely duties to lounge around with his pals. But his friend Teela, Captain of the Royal Guard, instead insists Adam spend his otherwise-unscheduled day working on his self-defense skills. A frustrated Adam ends up losing his cool with his friend, going so far as to dismiss her as though she were merely his servant: “That will be all, Captain.” In response, Teela gets some counsel from her father, who suggests that perhaps the way through the Prince’s stubbornness is to arrange a day of play for the two that also teaches Adam important survival skills. So, Teela plots a picnic for herself and Adam in the woods that turns into a tracking session and then a chase – but, while running from Adam, she accidentally falls into the abyss outside Castle Grayskull, landing so deep that only the intercession of the Most Powerful Man in the Universe could save her.
While I do want to acknowledge that it kind of sucks how this episode throws Teela under the bus for “nagging” Prince Adam (as my friend and later podcast cohost Lauren pointed out, it would be way cooler if Adam had to learn a lesson about how to treat people, instead of Teela having to learn how to make the Prince’s duties fun), I think this is a pretty stunning bit of narrative construction for a kids’ television show in 1984. As I stated above, all of the events of this episode unfold from character instead of plot. Instead of having a bad guy do something bad, the episode works because Robert Lamb decided to look at an aspect of Prince Adam’s character that very few writers ever thought to tackle – what it might really mean for our main character’s time to be split between fantastic superheroics and day-to-day duty. What Lamb found, which I think is a very human answer, is that it would likely exhaust Adam – even, in this episode (for really the only time in the series), making him kind of an asshole. And, I have to say, even though I don’t think the episode goes far enough in interrogating what that means for Prince Adam, I love this choice.
There’s a trick or shorthand a lot of older media does – although newer creations are not exempt – where main characters become a sort of cypher or blank slate for the audience to project their qualities onto. I imagine, in children’s entertainment especially, this is largely the point – if the kids in the audience see themselves in Prince Adam, they’ll transpose themselves into He-Man’s adventures, which will make them want to buy all the MOTU toys they can get their hands on as they bring those adventures into their homes. A lot of JRPG video games use this same trick – could you name a single bold character choice about Crono from Chrono Trigger1, or any of the protagonists of the Persona series? The line of thinking is that distinct choices alienate identification, so main characters should be kept as open and accessible as possible.
From the standpoint of narrative construction, I disagree with this. I think decisive character choices encourage more identification, at least with audience members who have similar experiences (or who can empathize with people who have different experiences from themselves). Big, distinguished choices can allow us as an audience to more compellingly project ourselves onto characters, especially during moments when they (and us) are exploring something new or may not be at their best and most whole.
That’s how I feel about Prince Adam in “Into the Abyss.” I really applaud Robert Lamb for allowing the action of his episode to flow out of a lapse in cool from Adam – because I think that’s something a lot of us can relate to. We’ve all likely been frustrated to the point of saying things that have hurt other people, and I’m glad that an episode of He-Man is able to portray Prince Adam’s pressures and duties leading him to such a breakdown, but still show him being the hero his friends need in a time of crisis – because, of course, once Adam deduces what happens to Teela, he calls upon the Power of Grayskull to turn into He-Man and bring her to safety, as any good companion would. He just falters a bit in his journey there.
I honestly don’t remember super well what kind of kid I was. I lived only with my narrow perspective, so, like a cypher in a Saturday morning cartoon or JRPG, I internalized the lessons of my upper middle class Reaganic upbringing and simply assigned myself the web of traits associated with “good” and “normal”. I think a lot of people (maybe even most?) do this – and, unfortunately, I think a fair amount never grow out of it.
Looking back, there are a few things I can say with relative certainty: I did well in school and was quick-witted, and largely I did not use that power for evil, although I could talk back at home. I was gregarious and made friends pretty easily, but I absolutely foisted my niche interests on any other kids I talked with (“the more things change…!”). Not surprising to anyone, I loved stuff – especially stuff from my favorite shows – and voraciously sought out new toys to add to my collection. It probably isn’t a leap to say that the acquisition of things helped to paper over a hole in my heart that was being neglected by other sources, which, in a way, is the whole mechanism on which capitalism depends.
I’m sure I was a brat, honestly – at least sometimes. The combination of “kid who desperately wants stuff” and “kid who can put sharp sentences together” is a deadly one. I guarantee that I silver-tongued and pouted my way into getting what I desired more than once. But, I was a kid, so I’m not going to be too hard on myself for that. Prince Adam could be a brat sometimes, too, and he still had the love of the people around him.
Earlier I mentioned that “Into the Abyss” ends up being about a character who’s distanced from her parents. Here’s how that manifests: as seasoned He-Man viewers might have known, Teela is in fact the daughter of the Sorceress, the keeper of Castle Grayskull, whose destiny has bound her to the Castle. For reasons largely unexplored but related to duty, Teela cannot know of her true parentage, a fact that brings the Sorceress great pain. Nevertheless, when Teela ends up trapped in the abyss outside Grayskull, the Sorceress senses her presence and aids He-Man and his friends in rescuing her. At the end of the episode, as the characters ready themselves to go home, Teela notes to He-Man a bizarre sensation she had while trapped: “In the middle of everything, I had an overwhelming feeling like my mother was protecting me. I felt that she loves me and wants me in her arms.” The camera pans up to the Sorceress, overlooking the scene from above, who can only solemnly whisper “She does, Teela.”
That’s why it feels bizarre to me that I recall watching this episode with my mom. But, I have a distinct memory of her explaining to me what an “abyss” was, and of watching He-Man have to dive into the nearly bottomless pit to save his friend (it makes sense that the visuals for this episode would stand out since it was written by a storyboard artist). I remember, I think, sitting in her lap while this was going on. Maybe I was having a snack? I would have been 2 or 3; He-Man aired on weekday afternoons after school, but I may not even have been in school at this point. I don’t think I remember the lore of the Sorceress being Teela’s mother, or how the episode lingers on this unrealized connection between mother and child, but I still can’t help but strongly associate my own mother-child connection with this story.
I didn’t talk a lot about my mom in this entry. If anything, her role in my childhood was as a more hands-on Sorceress – someone who really looked after me, who wrapped me in her love, who gave me what I truly needed, but who I’m sure wished I also had more. There was a strong imbalance in the parental dynamics of our home, one fueled at least in part by resentment. But because of my cypher status during this period, everything about my family seemed “normal” to me. That was, until it broke, and I finally had a point of comparison.
My friend Ed has an interesting answer to this question of Crono’s characteristics that I might circle back to later. Just to say, I’m open to the idea that giving Crono cypher status is a misread!
Chrono was literally body doubled to avoid obliteration. He is text book blank slate status. I much prefer rpgs with characters that are full of detail or trouble. Cloud is a good example of discovering the character as they learn about themselves.