Teela

Most versions treat Teela's parentage as a mystery with a twist ending. Mattel's Masters of the Universe Classics cardback treats it as two facts side by side, and it opens: "REAL NAME: TEELA. The adoptive daughter of Duncan, the current Man-At-Arms, Teela grew up in the palace of King Randor."

From there the card builds the character in a few lines. She is trained from an early age in the ways of battle and becomes Captain of the Guard at eighteen, leading Randor's troops and acting as a "defacto" member of the Masters of the Universe. She has yet to learn that she is the magically cloned daughter of, and heir to, the Sorceress of Castle Grayskull. And she carries the Staff of Ka, which the card says was once used by the Snake Men against the Horde and against King Grayskull himself during the Great Wars.

Three things there are easy to miss. The card says "adoptive daughter", not "adopted", which settles the relationship as a status rather than an event: Duncan raised her, and that is not in tension with the clone lore two sentences later. Both are true simultaneously. And the Staff of Ka is not a Heroic Warriors artifact at all.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Remedy (1983), 20:20 to 22:15, 1 minute 55 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

Teela's card says only that she is magically cloned. It does not say by whom. Two other Classics cards fill that in, and they do not carry the same weight of horror.

The Sorceress card, whose real name field reads Teela'Na, says she "was cloned herself by Skeletor who desired a magic wielding bride to pass on his legacy," that Man-At-Arms helped her save the cloned child, and that she gave the baby up to him "awaiting the day where her daughter would become the new Sorceress and Guardian of Castle Grayskull's secrets."

Skeletor's own Battle Armor card tells the same event from the other side: his first suit of armor was created so he could get through the Mystic Wall "in order to kidnap Adora and secretly clone the Sorceress of Grayskull."

So on Teela's card she is a magical clone with no perpetrator named. On the Sorceress's card she is the product of Skeletor's attempt to manufacture himself a wife. On Skeletor's card it is a covert operation he built a suit of armor for. All three are Mattel, and only the first is on Teela's own card.

The Battleground Teela card carries the reveal itself: the Sorceress, poisoned by King Hiss's venom and running out of time, takes Teela to the Elders' training citadel in the Polar Ice Cap and tells her, and Teela trains with her mother "until the venom overtook her" before returning to Grayskull as the new guardian.

The 2021 Netflix series Masters of the Universe: Revelation reframed Teela as the show's co-lead, voiced by Sarah Michelle Gellar, and built her arc around the two things the Filmation series never resolved: the truth about her origin and the fact that everyone around her had been lying about Adam. She becomes the Sorceress of Grayskull after her mother's death, and the 2024 follow-up, Revolution, keeps her in the role.

Mattel's Classics line assumes that outcome as well. The Snake Man-At-Arms card, describing Duncan's death in the Second Ultimate Battleground, calls Teela "the new Sorceress of Grayskull" and has her cast the spell that briefly returns her adoptive father's humanity to him before he dies.