Scorpia

Scorpia is a Force Captain of the Evil Horde who answers, in practice, to Catra and Hordak across the 1985 She-Ra: Princess of Power series. In nearly every episode she is doing the same kind of work: holding a captive, leading a line of troopers, or standing beside Catra and Shadow Weaver while someone else runs the scene. She is there from the first episode, already part of the Horde party watching the newly arrived rebels at Thaymor, and she stays a fixture of the Fright Zone's background cast for most of the season without driving a plot herself.

The one time the writing hands her a story of her own, in "The Anxious Apprentice," it uses her for the lesson the episode is already teaching a teenager two scenes earlier: power taken before anyone has the judgment to use it goes wrong in roughly the way you would expect.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Anxious Apprentice (She-Ra: Princess of Power, 1985), 15:21 to 17:21, 2 minutes. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

In "The Anxious Apprentice," Castaspella's apprentice Ariel slips out of Mystacor with the Book of Spells to prove she is ready for it, and Scorpia is the one who catches her doing it. Stationed in the Forbidden Zone with a line of troopers, she watches Ariel's showy sand-castle spell through binoculars, works out from the gold what book must be in play, and has her troopers recover the abandoned knapsack once She-Ra has already pulled Ariel to safety. She is never shown more capable than here, reading a situation from a distance that several of the Horde's other officers would have missed.

What she does with that read is where the episode turns on her specifically. Scorpia finds a spell inside the book that will release whatever evil the Forbidden Zone was sealed to contain, intends to use the threat to draw out She-Ra, and reads it aloud with Ariel's own confidence, boasting that she could do it with her eyes closed. The spell opens a burning crack in the ground and strands her on a rock surrounded by flames within seconds, and She-Ra and Swift Wind have to pull her out before she can finish being a threat to anyone.

Everywhere else, Scorpia is backup. She holds Adora by the arm during a swamp ambush in "The Red Knight," faces off against She-Ra in a cave in "A Loss for Words," and is paired with Catra often enough that "Small Problems" gets a running gag out of it: sent in disguise as a Horde inspector, Bow talks his way past the real Scorpia at a checkpoint, and the episode's last Horde scene is Scorpia and Catra blaming each other for the damage to the lab. In "Huntara" she is one of the escort who puts the title warrior, She-Ra and Glimmer to sleep with a sting cannon; in "Into the Dark Dimension" and "The Light of the Crystal" she commands troopers.

The pattern holds even where the Horde side gets real material. "Of Shadows and Skulls," "The Rock People" and "Troll's Dream" each give her a moment in a scene someone else is driving, Shadow Weaver in two of them and Catra's Force Squad in the third.

Scorpia also turns up outside the cartoon as part of the Evil Horde's ensemble, named in DC's 2013 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe comic series and in a 1987 UK She-Ra Pop Annual text story. In both she is one name on a Horde roster, much as she is on screen.

The character's biggest life by far came decades later. Noelle Stevenson's 2018 Netflix reboot, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, rebuilt the entire cast and recast Scorpia, voiced by Lauren Ash, as a major supporting character and one of Catra's closest friends.