On the Eternians ("First Ones") in She-Ra, What I like About Their Portrayal:
In the recent reboot series, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, one of the peoples in the show are the Eternians.
Eternians are from the planet Eternia, a sister planet to Etheria in the same star system. They are known throughout the series as "the First Ones" or the "first settlers" of Etheria (despite Indigenous populations of sentient peoples already existing on the planet prior to their arrival).
*SPOILERS if You Read Further*
At first in the series, the First Ones are filled with mystery and reference. They are appreciated and even possibly worshipped by native Etherians as a powerful and good people. As Eternians disappeared a thousand years prior to the start of the series true knowledge on who they were and why they disappeared is all but lost.
The only ones active and alive that were there in the past were the computer program Light Hope and Madame Razz respectively. Light Hope restricts knowledge of the First Ones due to blocks placed in her programming by the Eternians and Madame Razz experiences time in a non-linear fashion making her communication with others cryptic, indirect and sometimes even incomprehensible. Thus immediate knowledge about the Eternians is hard to come by.
The previous incarnation of She-Ra (an avatar of the Planet Etheria and its magic, known as the "Princess of Power") was an Eternian known as Mara. A thousand years prior to the events of the series, Mara used her power as She-Ra to transport the entire planet into an alternate dimension from the rest of the Universe, known as the dimension of Despondos, a shadow dimension. Thus according to Razz and Etherian myth, she "took away the stars".
Light Hope explains to Adora, the current incarnation of She-Ra, that Mara was mentally unstable and that the planet can return to the universe once it is "balanced".
However, as the series progresses it is revealed that the Light Hope was withholding information from Adora. In truth, as revealed through the marvelous time-hopping perspective of Madame Razz and a message left by Mara, Mara transported the planet to foil the plans of her fellow Eternians.
It is revealed that the Eternians being peaceful and good settlers was all a myth and that they were actually colonizers mining the planet's magic for their own gain.
At the time of Mara's rebellion against Eternia, the Eternians were interstellar colonizers that were waging a war against another interstellar colonizer, the Horde.
At the beginning of the series, the main antagonist is the Horde (rather a smaller offshoot.) However, Season 4 inverts the common trope of the "good colonizer". The main antagonist of the fourth season becomes Light Hope, who is revealed to be the operator of a massive galactic superweapon (The concentrated planetary magic of Etheria itself, known as the "Heart of Etheria") that puts both the Starkiller Base and the Death Star to shame.
You see the Eternians were mining magic from multiple planets in their bid to win over the Horde. They developed the Heart of Etheria to be used as a last case scenario to completely annihilate the Horde (and themselves being that Eternia was a sister planet). This mirrors the concept of mutually assured destruction in nuclear warfare.
As the Horde was winning the war against the Eternians, they became desperate and sent Mara to Etheria to activate the Heart. However, after Mara discovered the mass intergalactic genocides that her people were planning to commit she turned against them disgusted by their willingness to kill so many innocent Indigenous peoples throughout the galaxy.
Adora ultimately did too, destroying the sword created as the key to the Heart to save Etheria and the Galaxy.
Here is the reason I love this:
This narrative paints colonization in ANY form as negative and ultimately evil. Even the "lesser evil" of the Eternians vs the Horde. The mass death for the "greater good" is painted as something terrible and disgusting by all of the characters. THIS IS A MESSAGE TO BE SENT TO CHILDREN, NOT "Redeem the Colonizer with little regard to the Colonized". This is what makes She-Ra an ABSOLUTE tier above Steven Universe and even ATLA (considering its racist and problematic origins).
The Eternians were just as bad as the Horde. Not a "lesser evil", not a "benevolent colonizer/ruler", not "peaceful settlers". They were willing to enact mass death at an insane scale all to prevent the Horde from succeeding and all that became of them is dust and ruins. This is what should become of all colonizers.
