Star vs. The Forces of Evil: A Metal-as-Heck Primer
Imagine if Buffy Summers punched a demon into another dimension, and in return got her hands on a star-shaped crystal that plunged her into a funhouse-mirror, Buffy-verse version of Sailor Moon.
That, give or take a few school grades, is Disney XD’s Star vs. the Forces of Evil, which returns this weekend with the first of a full month of new episodes. And it is just as goofy, girly, badass, and morally complex and full of philosophical absurdity as such an extremely wild mash-up would imply.
Look, I get that boldly invoking the name of the OG Chosen Blonde Ones (Buffy especially) is both easy to do and hard to sufficiently back up, but I am not a crackpot: Titular magical teen warrior princess, Star Butterfly (The Middle’s Eden Sher), may not fight vampires, but she does have an off-again, on-again demon boyfriend, Tom Lucitor (Boy Meets World’s Rider Strong), the punk rock Prince of the Underworld who struggles with lethal anger issues. Her magical/martial education isn’t overseen by either a British representative of a patriarchal Watchers’ Council or a feline representative of the Moon, but starting in Season Two she does have the questionable guidance of the her Butterfly Spellbook’s schlubby, immortal, homunculan avatar, Glossaryck (originally Jeffrey Tambor, but easily replaceable for Season Four due to… magical ailments). And while none of the universes she uses her dimensional scissors to travel to seem to contain vampires, she does fight hordes of monsters (led by Alan Tudyck and Michael C. Hall) with her eternally loyal, non-magical best friend, Marco Diaz (Adam McArthur), glued to her side.
Star’s best non-magical female Earth friend, meanwhile, is basically a weird, witchy cross between Willow and Faith, and her best magical Mewni friend, Ponyhead (Jenny Slate), is basically Anya—you know, were Anya a floating unicorn head whose greatest desire was clubbing rather than wreaking vengeance on bad men. Star’s magical wand is a scepter topped with a celestial orb, and her magical transformations into her more powerful Butterfly forms happen in a burst of light and an enveloping of magical ribbons. Like Usagi, she is descended from a long line of powerful queens; like Buffy, she is the descended from a long line of Chosen Ones whose magical provenance is supes shady vis à vis, you know, moral purity. Like both, she has no respect for the constraints of princessly expectations or good manners.
Look, here is Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump singing, at Star’s request, an anti-puff-piece rock anthem about just how great and ferocious Princess Star Butterfly is, and how possibly treasonous her parents’ recent behavior has been:
Ultimately, though, those many pivotal pop culture allusions are just the spoonful of sugar to get the nostalgia crowd in. Star vs. the Forces of Evil is metal as heck on its own merits, operating in the landscape of modern kids’ animation as one of those joints that, like its Disney XD cousin, Gravity Falls, is stealthily about a lot of big moral ideas, all wrapped up in very small, very absurdist ones. The series may revel in the silliness of Star’s signature narwhal blast!! and spider-with-a-top-hat-on!!! battle spells, but since the moment in the pilot that Star’s parents banished her to Earth for a year of wayward princess rehabilitation, the show has made it clear that, while Star is young and goofy and interested in boys and partying and friends and fighting monster hordes as much as any teen girl would be, its true subject is the nature of human decency, and what it means to both participate in and responsibly rule over civil society.
Segregation and the dehumanization the Other; monstrous orientalism; the social constructs of gender roles and race; intergenerational conflict and the role of legacy; the inherency of evil; punishment versus forgiveness and rehabilitation—all are major themes Star vs. the Forces of Evil tackles. In Season Three, Star is on a one-woman mission to re-integrate monsters into Mewnan society, an uphill battle Marco verbatim describes as an effort to counter “centuries of bigotry and social biases.” The series’ long-game “villainess” is a Butterfly queen who defied social convention three hundred years ago and was sentenced to eternal crystal imprisonment for no legitimate reason anyone can make Star understand. Queen Eclipsa fell in love with a monster and had a baby with a tail, and somehow that is morally unconscionable, but one of the members of the magic council is a hothead with literal snakes for hands, and somehow he’s allowed to not only escape being called a monster, but to pass judgment on everyone else who could be? Star can’t be the only one who sees how inconsistent and unjust that is, the show says, and it’s right: The kids in the audience, too, won’t be able to see the hypocrisy as anything but.
So anyway, Star vs. the Forces of Evil comes back on March 3, and if you have any history of loving Buffy or Usagi-chan, you should give it a shot. Seasons One and Two are available on Hulu, and all episodes of Season Three (save for the first three “Battle of Mewni” installments) are available on the Disney Now app.
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