The Age of Queens is Over: Star vs the Forces of Evil

Last weekend I fractured my elbow, which is not something I recommend doing. It’s no fun! But it meant that I’ve had a lot of time on my hands, which I decided to put to productive use by binge-watching the entirety of the 2015-2019 Disney animated show Star vs the Forces of Evil. Unlike fracturing your elbow, this is very fun, and I really enjoyed it! Star is a wacky, entertaining ride, with enjoyable characters and very funny jokes. It also, like a lot of other cartoons, develops over the course of its runtime from an episodic, gag-a-day series, to one with a deep Lore and ongoing plot. In doing so, Star falls short of some of its contemporaries, in terms of coherency and structure. But it still manages to explore some really interesting themes, and make some choices that I haven’t seen made before.

(SPOILERS FOR EVERYTHING)

1. Star vs the Forces of Evil has a pretty basic premise; it’s an American take on a Magical Girl show, where Star Butterfly is a princess from the realm of Mewni, sent to Earth to learn to control her powers in a safe(r) environment. Here, she meets Marco Diaz, an ordinary kid with a hidden taste for excitement, and together they fight monsters, go on adventures, and learn to navigate adolescence. Like a lot of the cartoons I write about here, it’s a simple idea with a lot of potential. Star needs to master her magic powers, learn about the strange ways of “Earth”, and protect her wand from those who would steal it, all while making friends and going to school. It provides a lot of great hooks to hang plots off of, and the first season especially feels like the kind of show that could run more-or-less indefinitely.

2. Star (the character) has a sort of aggressive naïveté approach to the world that is extremely fun to watch. She’s a good person, she wants to help everyone, she doesn’t really understand anything about Earth, and that’s not gonna stop her. “Matchmaker/School Spirit” (SvtFE, S01, E02), where she misunderstands the nature of football and tries to blow up the opposing team with bombs, is a great example of that. In Daron Nefcy’s original pitch, Star was just an ordinary girl with an overactive imagination, and the show retains a lot of that joyous obliviousness to the rest of the world (though I suspect the original concept would’ve gotten old, fast). Marco, a lot more level-headed, ordinary, and sensible, is a great foil for her, and they have a really fun dynamic and a very sweet relationship, as they go from reluctant roommates to best friends to partners. The supporting cast is great as well, with special shout-outs to Tom, Star’s demon ex-boyfriend with anger management issues (he’s working on it, ok?) and my personal favorite, Janna, the vaguely-criminal, vaguely-paranormal, vaguely-goth girl at the school who manages to weird out a cast that includes demons, monsters, and sentient flying pony heads.
3. There’s a kind of cartoon logic to Star vs the Forces of Evil where having an inter-dimensional magic princess show up at your high school is pretty weird but not that weird. Like, it’s enough to make you the most popular girl in school, but not enough to make the evening news. I found this very amusing.
4. Star vs the Forces of Evil does one of my favorite things in settings and stories like this, where crazy, nonsensical stuff happens all the time, but it all stays around and matters. So, in one of the very first episodes, Star accidentally turns her teacher into a troll–and she stays a troll, all the way to the end of the show. In one episode, Marco goes to another universe and spends sixteen years having amazing adventures and becoming a super-badass warrior, before returning to his own time. That experience informs his character going forward, and makes him a different person. It helps ground the show in–well, not reality, exactly, but a foundation of shared logic. The kind of wacky nonsense of Star could easily result in a kind of dream-state, where you can’t get invested in anything because nothing matters. But instead, there’s always a clear continuity to events, even when they’re completely absurd. It’s also just a really fun way to worldbuild, as the writers toss off ideas and jokes, and then have to actually try and make them make sense.
5. A term I’ve used in the past frequently to describe this sort of story is “conventionally subversive”, by which I mean its upturning traditional plot tropes and conventions, but in a way that has, itself, become relatively standardized. This is not a criticism! If done well, there is no shame in that sort of thing, and at first, Star seems to be going down that path. As the Mary Sue said of the first season, “it’s really cool to see a girl who is into cuteness and rainbows also kick-ass and enjoy it”, and it is, but it’s also something we’re relatively used to now. Star Butterfly as a rebel princess who makes her own rules and rejects conformity is not exactly breaking new ground, and neither is the gentle satire of the American founding mythology, with its suggestion that the Mewman defeat of the monsters and conquest of their homeland may have been just a little bit of a massacre. Whoops! But what I really liked about Star vs the Forces of Evil is that it keeps going down that path, and ends up pushing into some truly untrodden territory. The revelation in Season 03 that Star Butterfly’s family aren’t actually descended from the Long Line of Chosen Queens, but in fact usurpers who seized the throne from a monarch who had the temerity to fall in love with a monster doesn’t so much subvert the tropes of this sort of ✨magical princess✨ story as it does simply detonate them with dynamite, as does Star’s subsequent decision to abdicate the throne and hand it back to Eclipsa. It’s a really bold series of choices, that I really didn’t see coming, and I love how willing this show was to push the envelope of its own premise.
6. Speaking of which………hoo boy, that ending, amirite? In the series finale, Star, now facing a genocidal army of magically-enhanced mewmans accidentally empowered by her mother, decides that this entire magic business is more trouble than its worth, and decides to simply shut it all down, destroying the magic dimension and her own special powers in order to save the people she loves. This is a wild twist, given that the plot of pretty much every single episode has revolved around Star trying to learn how to use her magic wand and control its powers, and it’s basically introduced at the very last minute. But I do kind of love it? Fundamentally, this is a show about a monarch choosing to voluntarily dismantle the entire hierarchical system of control that underlies her power, and that’s great. “The age of magic is over. The age of queens is over.” It’s radical without being didactic, using the structure of the narrative and the universe to to tell a story about revolution and progress instead of just having characters lecture the viewer. It’s by no means executed perfectly, but I’ll forgive a lot of missteps in the service of ambition.
7. The biggest problem with the ending is that the plot only kind of makes sense, at best. Star vs the Forces of Evil was always a pretty slapdash show, in terms of coherency, which was fine when it was purely episodic, but gets a little bit problematic when its trying to do big, overarching season arcs. And the last few episodes are…….messy, to say the least. A lot of ideas get introduced and disposed of without much elaboration, and the actual implications of the ending are not very clear. Like……even before Star destroys the magic dimension it’s already infected by Evil Magic, and I’m not sure why or how? Given that spells are sometimes depicted as being alive and sentient, did Star commit a genocide? Magic is described and shown as essentially an artificial creation, but how and why was it created? What is magic, exactly? We see at the end of the series that demons and flying pony heads and monsters still exist, so it’s not anything supernatural, but the definition is unstated. In earlier seasons, a villain named Toffee tried, and failed, to destroy magic. Does this mean he was right? Well, I’m not sure, because they forgot to give him clear goals or a motivation. I think one or two more backstory episodes and a longer epilogue would have helped clear a lot of this up.
8. All that said, I think it mostly works, because even though the plot is a mess, there’s a level of thematic and emotional continuity running through the whole show. Right from the start, Star is learning valuable lessons about relying too much on magic, even before she decides to blow it up. “I believe strangers are just friends you haven’t met” is part of the show’s theme song, long before the show transitions into a story about Star trying to reconcile mewmans and monsters and end her kingdom’s centuries of racial (speciesist?) discrimination. From the very first episode, Star and her mother, Moon, clash and argue. Initially, this is over Star’s lack of princessly deportment and etiquette, by the end, it’s over Moon’s refusal to accept the new social-political order that Star has helped create. Star is a rebel princess, whether that rebellion takes the form of taming wild warnicorns, punching monsters, or defying centuries of family tradition to try and create a new and better world. One of the closing lines from S01 ends up being the theme of the series finale, with the dimension of magic being cleaved apart, as Earth and Mewni (and Star and Marco) are cleaved together. Star Butterfly, as a character, is defined by her wild, reckless approach to life, and her consistent moral values and outlook, and so it feels rather appropriate that the show as a whole follows the same path.
9. There’s a moment in the first season where Marco, in the process of infiltrating Saint Olga’s Reformatory School for Wayward Princesses, has to adapt the identity of Princess Marco Turdina, during the course of which he accidentally stages a revolution. This becomes a running joke throughout the series, with Princess Marco becoming an internationally-recognized celebrity with her own line of action figures and thousands of acolytes, and it is both very funny and very wholesome how this does not seem to bother Marco or threaten his masculinity in the slightest. He just kind of rolls with it. After all, he gets royalty payments!
10. For most of S04, Star Butterfly is essentially serving as Queen Eclipsa’s Prime Minister, trying to help stabilize her new government and win legitimacy from the nobility and other kingdoms. This is an amazing development, and more TV shows should feature teenage magic princesses who abdicate their thrones and then go into the service of the new regime.
11. Most of the characters in Star vs the Forces of Evil have a level of emotional maturity that is very nice to see, while still feeling like actual teenagers. I’m not sure how to describe it beyond that, but in general, the show does a really good job of showing the characters acting like functional human beings who care about each other while rarely making them feel like saccharine cardboard cutouts reciting trite moral lessons. I thinking particularly here of Marco and Star’s long, winding road to getting together, which featured both of them trying to date other people, with minimal success. Marco’s girlfriend, Jackie, ends up breaking up with him because she’s figured out (long before he has) that he has a crush on Star, but it’s a very sweet, kind moment, as is the scene later where he runs into her and her new French girlfriend. Marco has, typically, worked himself into a panic that she hates him now, and she is just Very Chill, and rooting for him and Star. Likewise, Star ends up dating Tom again, her ex-boyfriend who’s spent most of the show engaged in various zany schemes to try and win her back, but he’s the one who eventually realizes that they have to break things off because it’s just not fair to either of them. People screw up and hurt each other, but they keep trying, and that’s what matters.
12. Why does Star spend so much of the show wearing a lesbian pride flag on her dress? Like, yes, I get the obvious answer, but that doesn’t appear to be true, and it looks similar enough that it really makes me wonder what’s going on there.