So why the fuck did I do all that transcription? 

Mara's story was written in such a way that there are irregularities in the subtext/text around what happened to her. Therefore, I'm taking the liberty of assuming that Mara is trapped outside of space and time, not dead in the crash shown in “Hero”. Here's why.

Text/Subtext

Let’s start with a comparison of the message that Mara left for Adora in her ship.

I had someone tell me that they had no idea that the messages were meant to be the same message (no shade intended), so I’ll start by clarifying that, as far as I can tell (I’m like 99.9999% sure), the message Adora finds when she first boards Mara’s ship with Glimmer, Bow, and Huntara (“Once Upon A Time In The Waste”, S03E03) is meant to be the same one shown at the end of “Hero” (S04E09).

But there are differences between the two messages; the S3 message is “damaged”, and it’s only once Adora locates the crystal Mara/Razz left for her in “Hero” that she’s able to view the full message. But there’s also a good chunk of the message in S3 that simply doesn’t show up in the S4 message, and I think the content of that missing chunk has interesting implications.

So in hindsight—many thanks to the kind fan who helped me realize this—it makes complete sense that people might think they were different messages.

The Message

S03E03: "Once Upon A Time In The Waste"

“I don’t have much time, I barely made it out— [glitch] —If you are seeing this, it means you wield the Sword. You are the new She-Ra. It means I failed. I was supposed to be the last. And I am so, so sorry.”

“I don’t know what they told you, but it wasn’t all bad at first. We were the first ones to settle Etheria, to really study this planet’s magic. [glitches] How could it go so wrong? [glitching] Light Hope— Use the— Can’t— Weapon— weapon— weapon— [glitching ends]”

“I opened a portal to a completely empty dimension and pulled Etheria in. I hid us from the rest of the universe to keep everyone safe. This is the one place they’ll never find us. I saw what they would do, the deaths that would follow. I couldn’t stop them before, but I can now. Hiding is our only option— [glitch]”

“—Maybe it’s been a week. Maybe it’s been thousands of years. I never wanted to be a hero. I won’t be remembered as one. [alarms start blaring]”

“You have the sword now. It is the Administrator Key to our planet. With it, you can activate a portal. So I’m begging you, don’t do it. Leave us here. If you open a portal, death and destruction will follow. For the good of the universe, Etheria must stay in Despondos. If not, everyone will—”

S04E09: “Hero”

“Adora?”

“I know you’re there. Razz said you’d be there.”

“I don’t have much time, I barely made it out. If you are seeing this, it means you are the new She-Ra. It means I failed. I don’t know what they told you, but it wasn’t all bad at first. We were the first ones to settle Etheria, to really study this planet’s magic. How could it go so wrong? You can’t trust Light Hope. She’s been reprogrammed to set off the weapon at any cost. The weapon…”

“I didn’t know what they were doing until too late. I knew they were rerouting Etheria’s magic for their own purposes, siphoning it, collecting it in the planet’s core.”

“The Heart of Etheria. It was supposed to be an energy source, capable of so much good. But that’s not what they made. My people turned our planet, all of Etheria, into a weapon. And She-Ra is the key.”

“I opened a portal to a completely empty dimension and pulled Etheria in. I hid us from the rest of the universe, to keep everyone else safe. This is the one place they’ll never find us. The weapon can’t hurt anyone else here. I saw what they would do, the deaths that would follow… I couldn’t stop them before but I can now. Hiding it our only option.”

“Adora, this isn’t over. The Heart of Etheria is still siphoning magic, storing it. It’s unstable. It will tear Etheria apart if it goes off again.”

“Adora. I believe in you. You can save the world we love.”

So What’s the Difference Here And Does It Matter?

• In the “completed” message, it becomes clear that the beginning of Mara’s message was cut off and not shown in “Once Upon A Time In The Waste”. A non-issue.
  
  
• Some of Mara’s statements in the S3 message (”you wield the Sword” and ”I was supposed to be the last. And I am so, so sorry”) were cut as well. I think these could easily have been cut for time reasons, and maybe ambiguity reasons (more on that later)
  
  
• An actual issue is the fact that the entire end of the message seems to have changed—in S3, the message cuts off on Mara’s warning not to open the portal; in S4, the entire section of the message about the portal has been cut, and the “actual” end of the message is a dramatic cutoff meant to convey that Mara’s ship has impacted and she’s ded now
  
  
• This could also be rationalized around via time constraints—they only have so much time in an episode, and there’s really no need to re-hash that part of the message. The portal is no longer relevant. Would I still have liked to see what that led to and how it fit into the S4 content of the full message? Sure. But again, it’s not an issue, except for the fact that—
  
  
• What is an issue is the fact that the remainder of the S3 message takes place after the impact. Let me splice the two messages together for you:

(message text is broken out and notated by which version of the message it appears in. You should be able to read this all the way through to the end and get the whole message.)

S4: “Adora?”

S4: “I know you’re there. Razz said you’d be there.”

Both: “I don’t have much time, I barely made it out. If you are seeing this, it means—“

S3: “—you wield the Sword.”

Both: “—You are the new She-Ra. It means I failed.”

S3: “I was supposed to be the last. And I am so, so sorry.”

Both: “I don’t know what they told you, but it wasn’t all bad at first. We were the first ones to settle Etheria, to really study this planet’s magic. How could it go so wrong?”

S4: “You can’t trust Light Hope. She’s been reprogrammed to set off the weapon at any cost. The weapon…”

S4: “I didn’t know what they were doing until too late. I knew they were rerouting Etheria’s magic for their own purposes, siphoning it, collecting it in the planet’s core.”

S4: “The Heart of Etheria. It was supposed to be an energy source, capable of so much good. But that’s not what they made. My people turned our planet, all of Etheria, into a weapon. And She-Ra is the key.”

Both: “I opened a portal to a completely empty dimension and pulled Etheria in. I hid us from the rest of the universe to keep everyone safe. This is the one place they’ll never find us. I saw what they would do, the deaths that would follow. I couldn’t stop them before, but I can now. Hiding is our only option.”

S4: “Adora, this isn’t over. The Heart of Etheria is still siphoning magic, storing it. It’s unstable. It will tear Etheria apart if it goes off again.”

S4: “Adora. I believe in you. You can save the world we love.”

S3: “Maybe it’s been a week. Maybe it’s been thousands of years. I never wanted to be a hero. I won’t be remembered as one.”

S3: “You have the sword now. It is the Administrator Key to our planet. With it, you can activate a portal. So I’m begging you, don’t do it. Leave us here. If you open a portal, death and destruction will follow. For the good of the universe, Etheria must stay in Despondos. If not, everyone will—”

Yep. The only place the end of Mara’s message in S3 could possibly be spliced in (disregarding another glitch in the message somehow that masks this segment) is after the crash.

The end of the S3 message has to come after the statement “hiding is our only option”. So unless the statement is intended to go between that and “Adora, this isn’t over” (which would mean another glitch of some kind in a supposedly repaired, complete message), the only place it can go is after the end of the S4 message. Which ends, it’s implied, on Mara’s death.

Additionally, in the S3 message, Mara starts her message seated, and her final lines (the ones that were cut) are delivered standing. In the S4 message, the reverse happens. Mara starts her message standing, moves to the pilot’s chair, sits down, and completes her message and crashes while seated. There’s also bridge chatter in the background of the S3 message, implying there are other people, whereas in S4, Mara is shown entirely alone on the bridge of her ship.

Which brings us to the actual content of what she’s saying, especially the first line:

”Maybe it’s been a week. Maybe it’s been thousands of years.”

Hello friends. Unless Mara is recording from beyond the grave (or there’s some IRL production logistical shenanigans, more on that later), she is outside of time and space.

Not only that, she’s saying some things that sound suspiciously time-related in a plot that explicitly plays into time-and-space fuckery.

Friends. Pals. Mara is in the portal she created to pull Etheria into Despondos.

Counterpoint:

There’s a giant hole in all of this, though: If there was a Change In Priorities (as there often is from season to season in TV shows), this is pretty easily explained. It’s literally just one of the vagaries of writing and developing a story. Sometimes you go in a direction only to realize later that there’s another direction you want to go in. You can’t un-write the stuff that’s already out there, though, so instead, you write things ambiguously enough and cut some stuff here and there and tweak a line or two and suddenly you’re on track to convey what you’ve decided you want. It’s a sleight of hand, and obviously a minor inconsistency isn’t necessarily something that will ruin the viewing experience.

In fact, one of the things that I loved about watching She-Ra is how, after watching what feels like an endless parade of stories that repeatedly hint at big reveals and then fail to deliver meaningfully at the reveal (looking at you, Emily Andras), the show manages to walk that line of maintaining the emotional truth or emotional consistency of the story while progressing the plot. That doesn’t require rigid textual consistency; just the opposite, in a way. The consistency that matters is the emotional truthiness of it, not the other way around. The text itself needs to be bendable to meet the emotional requirement. Sure, they need to obey the laws of the universe they set. But every “rule” they break is broken for a reason and none of it takes away from the story.

They’re not bound to produce an absolutely airtight set of texts. Their only real job as storytellers is to tell a story with an emotional truth, and stay faithful to that. And they did.

So my assertion here isn’t so much “the creative team intended to squirrel Mara away in the portal she created for later use” as much as it is, “when they were writing S3, they may have been writing under the assumption that Mara got stuck in the portal, BUT Things Changed and by the time they got to S4, that no longer fit with what they wanted to do”. I think you can find evidence (particularly in S3) that they meant to give the impression that Mara was in the portal, whether they meant that as a red herring, or not.

The strongest evidence we have for that is the content of the message, but that’s not the only piece of evidence. And it’s the surrounding subtext, IMO, that makes the suggestion in the message that much stronger.

Subtext

Entrapta's lab at Dryll (S03E07: “The Portal”)

Entrapta: “Portals are gateways, wormholes that connect one area of space to another. The only way to turn it off is from the inside. BUT whoever shuts the portal down can’t leave. They’ll be trapped between realities, possibly forever. Ohhhhhhhhh imagine the data they could collect.”

Glimmer: “Wait, so, whoever turns it off will be trapped inside it forever?”

Entrapta: “Exactly.”

This exchange is mostly just foreshadowing/setting the stakes. Its function in the episode is to make clear that someone will have to be trapped in the portal (and therefore outside of time and space) forever in order to fix this.

It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Mara per se, but it is interesting that even before we get to this explanation, we hear Mara say “Maybe it’s been a week. Maybe it’s been thousands of years.” After Mara says that, then, when the portal is opened, Entrapta reveals that someone must condemn themselves to be trapped outside of time and space forever in order to close it.

And as Razz appears to state to Adora, the portal malfunction happened before, in Mara’s time. Those three pieces of text are what cement this reading for me.

This supports the idea that Mara being trapped in the portal is something the creative team might’ve played with while they were writing the portal arc, but then dropped after that in favor of the Heart. At minimum.

Adora's meeting with Razz in the forest (S03E06: “Remember”)

Razz: Oh, is that you, Mara? You made it after all.

Adora: Madame Razz!

Razz: It’s been such a long time since we last saw each other, hasn’t it? That, or… it hasn’t happened yet. I always get those two things mixed up.

Adora: I couldn’t save anyone else.

Razz: It’s not too late. You can still bring them back. But you must act quickly.

Adora: How do you know all of this?

Razz: Because this has all happened before! I remember it like it was yesterday. For Madame Razz, it was yesterday.

Adora: … This happened before. With Mara!

Razz: Yes, dearie. When she moved Etheria and took away the stars. It was crazy.

Adora: It’s all my fault. I’ve been so afraid of becoming another Mara, destroying the world the way she did, and now— it’s happening.

Razz: Destroy the world? No. Mara saved the world! And so will you! But you can’t waste any more time. You need to go back to the beginning. You need to find the Sword. That is the only way this will stop.

IMO, this is the strongest bit of evidence (outside of Mara’s original message) that the creative team originally intended the two portal events to be the same. Razz’s statement appears to be that this has all happened before, down to the portal malfunction, Etheria nearly being erased from the universe, and someone having to step in and sacrifice themselves to stop it from happening.

It’s true—Razz might not know about the Heart. But her statement here suggests that the solution to the portal malfunction in Adora’s time is the same solution to what happened when Mara moved Etheria into Despondos. Why else does she know Adora “has to go back to the beginning”? Why does she know Adora can stop it? Her instructions to Adora are how to stop the portal malfunction from erasing Etheria and everyone on it from existence, not prevent the Heart from going off.

Like most of the S1-S3 mentions of Mara and “what she did”, the focus is on Mara moving Etheria into another dimension—the portal event. The “why" isn't explained yet, but the real trauma to the planet, it's implied, is primarily due to the portal.

The fact that, when we’re finally shown the actual moment Mara moves Etheria into Despondos, nothing goes wrong with the portal? Suggests to me that the creative team may have initially focused on the portal event, and then changed things a bit when it came time to flesh out the why.

The notes dropped from the ceiling—“Remember” and “The Portal”

Who is dropping them?

This is probably the easiest to handwave; there’s a number of moments that are kind of just… “don’t overthink it” moments? And this is one of those. As someone who watches a lot of sci-fi/fantasy stuff… there doesn’t need to be an explanation. It really doesn’t matter who is causing them to appear. Hell, the portal could be causing them to appear. Like I said, the important part isn’t whether the text makes a whole lot of sense when you break it down; the important part is the emotional truthiness of it. So it doesn’t really matter if we ever know or suggest “who’s doing it”; the important part is that Adora needs to remember.

But if you want to raise the question, there's a limited list of people it could be:

• She-Ra (timeless magical entity)
• Razz (who canonically isn’t bound by linear time)
• Angella (who as someone outside of time and space could have retroactively dispersed them “before” she’s technically been trapped in the portal)
• Mara (whose body is unaccounted for and who has made ambiguous statements suggesting she could be trapped in some kind of extradimensional/extratemporal space)

Micah and Mara

This one is a stretch, and also pretty easy to handwave—apart from his ”Wait, Angie, I’m not—" statement as Angella is flying away from Bright Moon (which is super ambiguous and could be more dramatic irony than anything), the show doesn’t commit to suggesting he’s alive. And of all the things that could’ve been retconned later, Micah being alive is honestly something they could’ve decided when writing S4, and not something they intended all along.

But it is worth noting that, of all the characters who show up in the portal reality, Micah and Mara are the only two “dead” characters who make an appearance—and Micah turns up alive in the next season.

Some complicating factors

First Activation of the Heart

In “Hero”, when we get the full story of why Mara moved Etheria into Despondos, nothing is actually shown going wrong with the portal—which isn't a contradiction, necessarily, it's arguably more accurately a reversal or reveal. And it shows the shift in emphasis from the portal to the Heart quite clearly: The portal is no longer the true threat to life on Etheria. The Heart is, and it always was.

But the disappearance of any threat at all from the portal does seems to contradict Madame Razz’s statement at the end of S3 (“all of this has happened before”), though the statement could be handwaved—maybe she was referring to the trauma the planet suffered, or something like that. Though, personally, it seems very clear on rewatch that Razz specifically means the portal. Still, the change in emphasis feels very true to the story the show is telling, which is probably why no one’s gotten too caught up on it apart from a one (1) single Mara fan with an ADHD hyperfixation.

That particular detail is why I think that the discrepancies between the S3 and S4 retellings of the portal event are more an artifact of the story’s development (reflecting ideas the creative team was playing with at the time and their focus on the portal) than they are an indication of some intent regarding Mara’s fate.

There’s Other Fragments Cut From Mara’s Message

Both: “I don’t have much time, I barely made it out. If you are seeing this, it means—"

S3: “—you wield the Sword.”

Both: “—You are the new She-Ra. It means I failed.”

S3: “I was supposed to be the last. And I am so, so sorry.”

Both: “I don’t know what they told you, but it wasn’t all bad at first. We were the first ones to settle Etheria, to really study this planet’s magic. How could it go so wrong?”

So there’s clearly stuff that was in the S3 message that did not survive Bow’s tinkering and the replacement of the crystal—which is an odd choice, btw, making the continuity of the message depend on a component that was clearly removed some time before Mara discovered anything about the Heart of Etheria or what it was intended for. Not at all out of the question, computer systems can be weird and finnicky exactly like that—but still, what?

This seems to lend some strength to the theory that parts of the S3 message got trimmed for time, which, “Hero” was pretty packed with info already, so it makes sense to me that they might have decided they didn’t need to have the message in its entirety to convey the important bits.

The big chunk they cut seems to have either been cut for time, because the portal was no longer the focus of the story anymore (the Heart is, now), or because they abandoned the idea that Mara was in the portal while they were writing S4 & S5—along with the statement that Mara makes that she was “supposed to be the last”, which almost makes her sound like the She-Ra line was intended to end with her. Which, btw, I have seen at least one fanfic that takes that approach.

Light Hope

To turn things around a little, the portal arc entirely leaves out Light Hope’s role in the trauma done to Etheria, and it’s suggested from very early on that Light Hope is not telling Adora the whole truth. The version of events presented in “Hero”, on the other hand, clarifies Light Hope’s role, as well as what she’s been hiding this whole time.

It might be stating the obvious that the portal arc, as well as the S3 version of the message, was never meant to answer Adora’s or the audience’s questions—it was meant to raise them. But after arguing that the version of events presented in “Hero” contradicts previous story developments, I feel like I should at least acknowledge that S3’s depiction was not meant to be the whole story, and never was. It was a purposefully incomplete version of events.

Mara’s Ship Has Always Crashed

To add to that—the portal did not come first; we’re shown Mara’s ship crashing in the very first episode of the show. The portal arc was the first time they really started getting into what happened to Mara.

But then when it came time to explain why she opened the portal (which is really more important), it wasn’t as key to the story they wanted to tell. It’s less important that Mara be in the portal, or that she be alive at all. Her ship has always crashed, and she has always been severed from She-Ra enough that Adora could be bonded with the Sword. It seems unlikely that a magical being like She-Ra would be bound by the constraints of normal time and space, even in the dimension of Despondos, so if Mara was alive, I’m not entirely sure how Adora could have become She-Ra in the first place.

But “how does the She-Ra line work” is a worldbuilding question that’s never been fully clarified in-universe. Is She-Ra bound to Etheria? If so, why could Adora transform when she was on Horde Prime’s flagship? Can She-Ra only be bonded with one person at a time? Was any First One who touched the Sword able to use it and turn into She-Ra? What was the key component—the Sword, the supplicant, or the entity? And honestly, those questions are just not that important here. Unless you’re me, ofc.                                     

Conclusion

I think what this could indicate at most is that, at one point, maybe, someone considered having Mara be trapped inside a Portal herself, and then this was changed when the time came to plan/write S4/S5. The portal was the focus of S2 and S3, but once they’d moved on from there, the creative team most likely decided to focus on the Heart for the remainder of the series, because it fit what they wanted to do with Adora, and because the Heart was the real threat anyways.

But, unintentionally, I think this does leave open the implication that Mara is still "alive” (though, I don’t know what her mental or physical state would be like), and trapped outside of time/space inside the portal she opened into Despondos.

It does also seem likely that any effort to find Angella in a post-canon fic or continuation could also end up releasing Mara (though I have my speculation about how portals work) , and if she’s been changed by her time outside of time and space, she could be in a real bad way—and potentially with all the powers of She-Ra. And that would probably be terrifying.