given her unemotional response to seeing bow and glimmer in s2, despite my initial predictions to the contrary, i assumed that entrapta simply wasn’t that bothered by her perceived abandonment anymore.
yet, in s3, she tells adora outright that she felt abandoned, after making sure to hide her face from adora’s view. in the alternate universe, once she remembers the true reality, entrapta tells adora that it was nice to be her friend, implying that she understands now that adora hadn’t meant to leave her behind at all. regardless, entrapta had truly felt hurt thinking that adora didn’t care about her all that time.
s3 highlighted entrapta’s desperate desire for connections with others. she’s often been dismissed in fandom as someone who doesn’t care about others/friendship, even though the only reason she was separated from the rest of the princesses was because she refused to leave her friend emily behind. this is an unfortunately common misunderstanding about autistic people. some people, whether allistic or autistic, aren’t interested in forging bonds with other people, but being autistic doesn’t automatically make that the case. just because we struggle to understand the emotions of allistic people and find it easier to connect to animals/robots/etc. doesn’t mean we don’t want to have human friends.
entrapta very, very, very obviously wants friends. she built robot parents and robot friends for herself because she had no one else, not even casual visitors, all this time.
she even admitted to hordak that she struggles to fit in, and by doing so, she revealed that she cared about that. this was something that catra recognized as well, and exploited in order to manipulate entrapta. entrapta “failed” to properly connect with adora or catra, and this made her feel discouraged, but she didn’t give up. she kept trying to make friends.
she even had a program on her computer devoted to logically analyzing her friendships with others. it was her attempt at making sense of allistic people. she used a similar type of logical approach towards friendships during the princess prom in s1.
she was excited that hordak considers her a lab partner and a friend. she was upset about losing her closest friend and tried to make excuses to spend more time with him. in the alternate universe, she created robots, whom she referred to as her friends, modeled after scorpia and hordak.
put simply, entrapta may think differently than most other people, but she cares a lot, and she really would appreciate more friends in her life.
