#toadcatcher

She next appears in Barrel’s Warhammer where she and Grime go to get the rest of the toads onboard with their coup on Newtopia but to be the leaders of this coup they need to go on a suicide quest for Barrel’s Warhammer (it is literally stated in the show to be a suicide mission). Sasha is more determined than ever to get the warhammer and gain power once she hears that Anne and Marcy are working together to get home without her.

She sees that Percy and Braddock are afraid of this suicide mission and gives them a signal, an out, they can use to let her know they want to stop the mission and go home. She is being genuine in this moment. Her voice softens and she doesn’t use any of her usual tricks. But when the moment of truth comes and she sees them use the signal she puts the mission before them.

She puts her life and the lives of her comrades at risk to prove that she doesn’t need Anne and Marcy and continue her quest for power. In her own words “I am not gonna fail. Not while Anne and Marcy are getting by without me.” She is upset because she believes that Anne and Marcy are doing fine without her, that they don’t need her like she wanted to believe.

I think that this outlook on need is important. She wants them to need her. If they need her they can’t leave her and she’s afraid of this rejection, of this abandonment. And if they don’t need her then she can’t need them. Sasha can’t show this need. It’s vulnerable. It’s a weakness in her mind and she can’t show weakness. She has to be fine on her own.

She pushes her team too far in her mission to reassert control and loses Percy and Braddock because of this. She seems genuinely effected by it. She’s starting to realize her actions have consequences. That she can’t force her wants and desires onto other people and expect them not to push back or leave when it hurts them. Grime’s speech about some people not being willing to pay the necessary price for success rationalizes her actions and prevents her from fully coming to this realization. 

The true cracks in her resolve to follow through with her plans don’t start showing until the Third Temple. She has a moment of doubt about betraying Anne and Marcy after all the faith they showed in her. She starts to question if power is what she really wants if it comes at the cost of her friendship with the two like it did with Percy and Braddock.

There’s the implication that Sasha isn’t faking as much as she would like to believe she is during this reunion and it continues on for the next handful of episodes leading up to True Colors.

Sasha can be a tricky character to pin down because it can be hard to tell when she is being genuine or not and even trickier to tell when she is lying to herself or truly believes what she is saying. Sasha is just as good, maybe even better, at lying to herself as she is at lying to others.

There's the idea that Sasha isn't as sure of herself as she would like others to believe. Doubt about her actions has started to creep in. The anger, spite, and fear that she has been running on for most of this season has started to dissolve.

Her spite towards Anne after Reunion was a major driving factor in her plans for the coup and after their heart to heart in the Third Temple that spite has dulled. She doesn't want to lose her friendship with Anne and Marcy. But she hasn't fully accepted that her actions have consequences and is trying to convince herself that she can have power and keep her friendships too. (This is most obvious in how she acts after her coup/betrayal. She puts her arms around Anne and Marcy and tells them they can help her rule and seems shocked and upset when Anne ends their friendship.)

Interestingly enough Battle of the Bands sums up her complicated relationship with control and how it relates to her friendships really well. She wants Marcy and Anne to succeed and with her in control she thinks she could ensure that would happen. She thinks she knows what’s best for them and tries to force it onto them but Anne has learned to stand her ground and push back when needed.

When Anne won’t let her be in control she decides to take her own path where she has all the power over what happens. She gets into a situation where she has all the control only to learn how empty that is without those she cares about and that having someone who will do everything you say without question isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

She later comes to learn through Toadie that sometimes supporting her friends in their own endeavors can be just as meaningful even if they don’t come out on top. We see her give up that control she so desperately clings to and support her friends.

This is the lesson that Sasha needs to learn. In a way this was showing her what she could have if she could let go of having total control, compromise, and accept change. It makes what happens in True Colors and the consequences of her actions hit her all the harder.

In her mission to force things back to the way they were and resist change she loses everything she could have gained. She gets what she thinks she wants at the cost of everything that actually matters and she is hit with the realization of how empty it is.

She is finally forced to confront her own terrible choices and their consequences when Anne finally severs their friendship. To make matters worse she comes to the realization that her coup was unintentionally a good thing when it’s revealed what Andrias plans to do with the music box.

When she tries to warn Anne she is understandably ignored. Everything bad that happens in True Colors is in part her own fault. She is forced to confront the lies she keeps telling herself and finally realize the lasting consequences of her actions.

I really liked how the culmination of her arc this season is her promising to have Anne’s back in the fight against Andrias and hold him off so Anne can get back home. She finally gives up control to someone else by deciding to have their back and tries to take responsibility for her actions and set things right. (it only took until it was almost too late)

And it’s this moment where we last see Sasha this season, trying to hold Andrias off so Anne, the Plantars, and Marcy can escape, that brings me to a major aspect of Sasha’s character that I haven’t talked about yet because it is best covered as a whole and that is how self-destructive Sasha is. Yes, this can be seen as Sasha’s protectiveness and deep care for her friends shining through, and that is part of what these actions represent, but when her actions are considered across the series there is a clear pattern that can (and is likely meant to) be read as passive suicidal tendencies.

Sasha doesn’t actively try to kill herself but she constantly puts herself in dangerous situations where she knows that she could end up dying. Or she ends up in situations where she accepts death. The biggest examples of this are Reunion, Barrel’s Warhammer, True Colors, Turning Point, and All In.

In Reunion she notices that the tower is collapsing and that she is dragging Anne and the Plantars down and she makes the decision to let go of Anne’s hand. This would have ended in her falling to her death if Grime didn’t catch her and she wasn’t expecting Grime to do that when she let go. She had no way of knowing that would happen.

In Barrel’s Warhammer she is told by Beatrix that going after Barrel’s warhammer is a suicide mission and she doesn’t hesitate to accept. She is told multiple times by Percy, Braddock, and even Grime that she should abort the mission or they will all die but that doesn’t phase her. She’s made the decision in her mind that she will only accept two outcomes: she succeeds in getting Barrel’s Warhammer or she dies trying.

In True Colors Sasha decides to hold off King Andrias while Marcy and Anne go through the portal without her. She was willing to be left behind with a tyrant who just tried to kill Polly and Sprig, two children younger than her, that she knows won’t pull his punches and most likely wouldn’t hesitate to kill her (which is later confirmed in the worst way when he stabs Marcy). She once again tries to sacrifice her life for her friends.

In Turning Point she claims that she will fight until her last breath to defend Wartwood and do the right thing for once. She faces off against Andrias’ robot by herself and accepts that she won’t make it when she’s restrained. She is once again saved by Grime (he really is the only reason she made it through the series) and kept alive by the citizens banding together to help them fight off the robots.

In All In she dares Darcy to do her worst and finish her off after she is beaten on the floor. Darcy would have gone through with it too if it wasn’t for the fact they got distracted by Andrias, giving Sasha the time she needed to drag herself from the ground and make the decisive blow.

It’s these indications of passive suicidal tendencies coupled with the implications of a turbulent/dysfunctional family life, self-hatred and self-esteem issues, anger issues, struggles with showing emotions that can be seen as weak, fear of abandonment, etc. that make it obvious that Sasha struggles with mental health issues.

These struggles are inform a lot of her character and are integral to her arc of learning self-love and forgiveness in season 3. It also sets up the end point of her character in The Hardest Thing- becoming a child psychologist. She does this specifically to help kids work through their baggage so they don’t go down a destructive path like she did.