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My wishes abut Steven Universe
🕑 Added 2022-06-02 17:20:22 +0000 UTCThis is a curious kind of commission from the lovable Rodney Talon, that asked me to draw whatever I wanted, so I chose our most recent discussion topic: Steven Universe.
Here imagined in a very fanart-y and fanfiction-y scene where he grows up and becomes a magical space knight, guardian of life in the ex-Gem Empire.
A direction that sadly wasn't taken in the SU Future series. That Steven probably is waiting tables in some greasy diner in the middle of the desert.
Not that I had any hope about the story fully committing to the (ex) Gem Empire plotline. Steven Universe has always been about mixing slice-of-life comedy and space opera, on how the presence of a group of alien superheroes and their trainee could impact the life of a town of… Frankly, very wacky people.
Like, borderline Adventure Time's level of wackiness and cluelessness. Especially early Steven and that eldritch monster called Onion.
That's what kept me from watching the series for a long time, the fact that initially looked like, and was promoted as, Adventure Time in pink. I had to stumble upon this video essay from Pop Culture Detective for giving it a shot, and by then the show was well into season 4.
Yeah, I've binged the show, without experiencing the infamous hiatuses, and that meant having a different opinion about the "Townies" episodes and characters, less to no time to let my impressions marinate on Tumblr. I don't hate Kevin, Ronaldo, not even Lars.
Instead, I loved the hell out of the show: the color schemes, the backgrounds, the music, and the courage they had in displaying their queer themes even if that meant being ineligible to the market of Russia, China… You know, the evil Countries.
Making an episode that contained both the first lesbian marriage in the history of animation, and the arrival of the alien invaders on Earth, and giving to the more masculine spouse the white dress and the more feminine a black suit, so it was impossible to edit it out or make one of them pass as a male in the dub. That was ballsy.
Even for today's standard, where mega-corporation Disney still makes cartoons where the queer scenes are easily editable without damaging the flow of the story.
Also, mixing the magic adventures of the Gems with the Townies episodes gave a pretty novel approach to the character growth of Steven: most of Steven's new abilities are discovered in the Townies episodes and the story is about solving the problem that they cause.
The twist isn't anymore about the protagonist obtaining an unforeseen power-up that saves his ass during a critical battle, it's about the protagonist learning to control a power that we already know. And that's a way more respectful treatment of the viewer.
(Looking at you, last episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender.)
Moreover, grounding the protagonist in a mundane and relatable reality (it gets far less wacky after the first half of season 1) where sometimes a magical and colorful monster comes in, is charming.
It reminds me of Sailor Moon, the original anime, where the abundant filler episodes were essential in establishing how much the heroines liked and loved each other and also the earthlings they were protecting, making the plot-advancing episodes far more dramatic than just an uninterrupted string of power-ups, hentai gazes, abductions, and deaths could have been.
(Looking at you, Sailor Moon Crystal.)
But if I have to point at a flaw of the show, Steven Universe feels more like Sailor Moon didn't hang out with Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus, but with the Outer Senshi.
Because that's how much the Crystal Gems seem isolated and sometimes contemptuous of humans.
Garnet and Pearl don't interact with them if not through Steven, and Amethyst behaves like a mischievous imp that loves watching humans struggle. Or just beating them in unfair wrestling matches.
But I feel like it's more a bug than a feature: the reason we don't see them hanging around Beach City, going groceries and such, it's that there's no time or money.
The 10 minutes mark per episode is a leash that prevents every story from having a B plot about the other characters or even letting any kind of episodic tension brew before an immediate release.
Making full episodes centered around other characters? Well, despite its religious following, Steven Universe never was the show that could afford a gamble like episodes without Steven Universe.
Because it was an outwardly queer show that couldn't sell in the evil Countries and ran on a shoestring budget because of that. That, and maybe Cartoon Network's cowardice.
You can sense the budgetary restrictions in that show, mostly in the small array of voice actors, in a way that also impacts the plot:
Why did Steven wait two seasons before trying to talk Bismuth out of her murderous rage? Because they couldn't pay her voice actress to be around for so long. Heck, they couldn't even pay her for the last appearance of Bismuth in the finale of Future, and they had to rely on a soundalike.
That's sad, especially considering how the show wasn't just about tolerance and solving conflicts through communication, but also about the sense of self-worth discovered through human bonding.
It's a very subtle message, that lies between the two extremes of complete and egocentric self-reliance (your average self-help babble that's still very popular among straight men) and instead outsourcing your entire personality and self-esteem to others (usually to romantic partners that will take advantage of that.)
It's about being open to human contact because you can find one or more people that can remind you're worthy of love and respect. Or also be you the kind of person that reminds that to another person.
It's such a complex moral that most of the detractors got instead one of the extremes, and considered characters like Pearl a fuckup because without Rose Quartz she would still be a handmaiden without agency.
And I mean, guys, that's how life works. You can't rely entirely on yourself or on other people. You have to find the balance.
But yeah, I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say that Pearl is considered a fuckup because of her obsession with the memory of Rose Quartz, that was a very temperamental and opportunistic kind of person, a member of a family of space emperors that colonized and exhausted a lot of planets and maybe wiped out a bunch of civilizations, and should have had a long, honest and painful period of penitence before switching to the side of Good and having everything forgiven.
And to that, I respond… Have you ever heard of a thing called anime? The medium where fucking psychopaths are celebrated, romanticized, and immediately forgiven because they sell figures? Vegeta, Sesshomaru, fucking Gendo Ikari?!
(I've mentioned only dudes. What a coincidence.)
I don't care, I'm tired of applying double standards to cartoons and anime, just because they're from another culture. If the climax of Dragon Ball Super is Goku teaming up with fucking Freezer to defeat some guy from another universe, and the straights get their pants wet at looking at that scene, go ahead.
I will enjoy my alleged genocidal dictators being redeemed in the span of two episodes. They never killed anyone onscreen and that's much more than I can say about any one of the aforementioned characters.
But there's something I genuinely don't like about Steven Universe: the Future series.
(Massive spoilers from now on.)
SU Future is good, up to the episode Volleyball that ties a lot of loose ends, then it starts feeling like a bad fanfiction that was accidentally animated.
Why bad fanfiction? Because it picks contrivances and corks orf the original story, stuff you're expected to suspend your disbelief on, and turns it into plot points.
In this case, SU Future is about Steven realizing he's being left behind by his friends at Beach City, because they have jobs and dreams and education, to follow, while Steven never went to school and never set up his life as an adult human. Missing his friends, the PTSD of his past adventures creeps in and his powers go out of whack.
This premise is like we made an arc in Sailor Moon where her biological mother realizes that she misses several days fighting evil and she has more of a bond with the ghost of her past mother Queen Selene.
Or like if in Harry Potter the protagonist said things like "I really wonder what will be the reason this year for all of my schoolmates to ostracize me" or "Hey, June is approaching, better get ready for another Voldemort's attack!"
It's amusing, but not material for the canon story. People tuned in for watching magical girls chilling together and throwing laser beams at flamboyant monsters, not for their parents freaking out.
Steven didn't go to school for the same reason the monsters in Sailor Moon never attack during the morning of a workday, or because Gravity Falls, Ben Ten, and Phineas & Ferb are all set during endless summers: because the trope of the teenage hero that has to fight evil and attend school is frustrating and overdone. Buffy and Spider-Man have already ground it to a paste.
If a story has such contrivances, it shouldn't acknowledge them in canon like it's the last of the nitpicky fans, but ignore them and focus the attention elsewhere, or write around to fix them.
I can give two examples for both solutions:
Here imagined in a very fanart-y and fanfiction-y scene where he grows up and becomes a magical space knight, guardian of life in the ex-Gem Empire.
A direction that sadly wasn't taken in the SU Future series. That Steven probably is waiting tables in some greasy diner in the middle of the desert.
Not that I had any hope about the story fully committing to the (ex) Gem Empire plotline. Steven Universe has always been about mixing slice-of-life comedy and space opera, on how the presence of a group of alien superheroes and their trainee could impact the life of a town of… Frankly, very wacky people.
Like, borderline Adventure Time's level of wackiness and cluelessness. Especially early Steven and that eldritch monster called Onion.
That's what kept me from watching the series for a long time, the fact that initially looked like, and was promoted as, Adventure Time in pink. I had to stumble upon this video essay from Pop Culture Detective for giving it a shot, and by then the show was well into season 4.
Yeah, I've binged the show, without experiencing the infamous hiatuses, and that meant having a different opinion about the "Townies" episodes and characters, less to no time to let my impressions marinate on Tumblr. I don't hate Kevin, Ronaldo, not even Lars.
Instead, I loved the hell out of the show: the color schemes, the backgrounds, the music, and the courage they had in displaying their queer themes even if that meant being ineligible to the market of Russia, China… You know, the evil Countries.
Making an episode that contained both the first lesbian marriage in the history of animation, and the arrival of the alien invaders on Earth, and giving to the more masculine spouse the white dress and the more feminine a black suit, so it was impossible to edit it out or make one of them pass as a male in the dub. That was ballsy.
Even for today's standard, where mega-corporation Disney still makes cartoons where the queer scenes are easily editable without damaging the flow of the story.
Also, mixing the magic adventures of the Gems with the Townies episodes gave a pretty novel approach to the character growth of Steven: most of Steven's new abilities are discovered in the Townies episodes and the story is about solving the problem that they cause.
The twist isn't anymore about the protagonist obtaining an unforeseen power-up that saves his ass during a critical battle, it's about the protagonist learning to control a power that we already know. And that's a way more respectful treatment of the viewer.
(Looking at you, last episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender.)
Moreover, grounding the protagonist in a mundane and relatable reality (it gets far less wacky after the first half of season 1) where sometimes a magical and colorful monster comes in, is charming.
It reminds me of Sailor Moon, the original anime, where the abundant filler episodes were essential in establishing how much the heroines liked and loved each other and also the earthlings they were protecting, making the plot-advancing episodes far more dramatic than just an uninterrupted string of power-ups, hentai gazes, abductions, and deaths could have been.
(Looking at you, Sailor Moon Crystal.)
But if I have to point at a flaw of the show, Steven Universe feels more like Sailor Moon didn't hang out with Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus, but with the Outer Senshi.
Because that's how much the Crystal Gems seem isolated and sometimes contemptuous of humans.
Garnet and Pearl don't interact with them if not through Steven, and Amethyst behaves like a mischievous imp that loves watching humans struggle. Or just beating them in unfair wrestling matches.
But I feel like it's more a bug than a feature: the reason we don't see them hanging around Beach City, going groceries and such, it's that there's no time or money.
The 10 minutes mark per episode is a leash that prevents every story from having a B plot about the other characters or even letting any kind of episodic tension brew before an immediate release.
Making full episodes centered around other characters? Well, despite its religious following, Steven Universe never was the show that could afford a gamble like episodes without Steven Universe.
Because it was an outwardly queer show that couldn't sell in the evil Countries and ran on a shoestring budget because of that. That, and maybe Cartoon Network's cowardice.
You can sense the budgetary restrictions in that show, mostly in the small array of voice actors, in a way that also impacts the plot:
Why did Steven wait two seasons before trying to talk Bismuth out of her murderous rage? Because they couldn't pay her voice actress to be around for so long. Heck, they couldn't even pay her for the last appearance of Bismuth in the finale of Future, and they had to rely on a soundalike.
That's sad, especially considering how the show wasn't just about tolerance and solving conflicts through communication, but also about the sense of self-worth discovered through human bonding.
It's a very subtle message, that lies between the two extremes of complete and egocentric self-reliance (your average self-help babble that's still very popular among straight men) and instead outsourcing your entire personality and self-esteem to others (usually to romantic partners that will take advantage of that.)
It's about being open to human contact because you can find one or more people that can remind you're worthy of love and respect. Or also be you the kind of person that reminds that to another person.
It's such a complex moral that most of the detractors got instead one of the extremes, and considered characters like Pearl a fuckup because without Rose Quartz she would still be a handmaiden without agency.
And I mean, guys, that's how life works. You can't rely entirely on yourself or on other people. You have to find the balance.
But yeah, I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say that Pearl is considered a fuckup because of her obsession with the memory of Rose Quartz, that was a very temperamental and opportunistic kind of person, a member of a family of space emperors that colonized and exhausted a lot of planets and maybe wiped out a bunch of civilizations, and should have had a long, honest and painful period of penitence before switching to the side of Good and having everything forgiven.
And to that, I respond… Have you ever heard of a thing called anime? The medium where fucking psychopaths are celebrated, romanticized, and immediately forgiven because they sell figures? Vegeta, Sesshomaru, fucking Gendo Ikari?!
(I've mentioned only dudes. What a coincidence.)
I don't care, I'm tired of applying double standards to cartoons and anime, just because they're from another culture. If the climax of Dragon Ball Super is Goku teaming up with fucking Freezer to defeat some guy from another universe, and the straights get their pants wet at looking at that scene, go ahead.
I will enjoy my alleged genocidal dictators being redeemed in the span of two episodes. They never killed anyone onscreen and that's much more than I can say about any one of the aforementioned characters.
But there's something I genuinely don't like about Steven Universe: the Future series.
(Massive spoilers from now on.)
SU Future is good, up to the episode Volleyball that ties a lot of loose ends, then it starts feeling like a bad fanfiction that was accidentally animated.
Why bad fanfiction? Because it picks contrivances and corks orf the original story, stuff you're expected to suspend your disbelief on, and turns it into plot points.
In this case, SU Future is about Steven realizing he's being left behind by his friends at Beach City, because they have jobs and dreams and education, to follow, while Steven never went to school and never set up his life as an adult human. Missing his friends, the PTSD of his past adventures creeps in and his powers go out of whack.
This premise is like we made an arc in Sailor Moon where her biological mother realizes that she misses several days fighting evil and she has more of a bond with the ghost of her past mother Queen Selene.
Or like if in Harry Potter the protagonist said things like "I really wonder what will be the reason this year for all of my schoolmates to ostracize me" or "Hey, June is approaching, better get ready for another Voldemort's attack!"
It's amusing, but not material for the canon story. People tuned in for watching magical girls chilling together and throwing laser beams at flamboyant monsters, not for their parents freaking out.
Steven didn't go to school for the same reason the monsters in Sailor Moon never attack during the morning of a workday, or because Gravity Falls, Ben Ten, and Phineas & Ferb are all set during endless summers: because the trope of the teenage hero that has to fight evil and attend school is frustrating and overdone. Buffy and Spider-Man have already ground it to a paste.
If a story has such contrivances, it shouldn't acknowledge them in canon like it's the last of the nitpicky fans, but ignore them and focus the attention elsewhere, or write around to fix them.
I can give two examples for both solutions:
- Make Steven Universe Future an actual Space Opera where Steven has to travel around the galaxy and maybe face the creators of the apparently artificial Gem kind. Who cares about his friends leaving Beach City in such a scenario.
- The Gem School. Instead of making it a segregated school attended only by gems that "learn" from the Crystal Gems to live with humans (ugh) make it a prestigious mixed school where both humans and gems go to learn space engineering from Pearl and Peridot, people that can build space crafts with the scraps left in a barn. Problem solved: Steven gets both education and interactions with people of his age.
(Such kind of "fix" was even done in the show proper: the analogy between fusion and sex, which made some fusions quite awkward, like Stevonnie and Sardonyx, was fixed by introducing in season 3 Smoky Quartz, a fusion between Steven and Amethyst, two characters that have nothing else but brother and sister, showing us that fusion didn't equal to sex.)
With SU Future, Rebecca Sugar decided to go The Legend of Korra route instead: make our protagonist a victim of PTSD, even if 40% of the story so far ran on Looney Toons' logic.
But the absolute worst was what they did to Pearl, Garnet, and Amethyst in order to further this plot. Completely oblivious, amnesiac, and borderline malicious to Steven's obvious signs of distress.
(TBH it was Jasper the character that was done the dirtiest. She talks like she suffered actual brain damage compared to her former self.)
It's not a plausible kind of carelessness, relatable to real-life situations of parents and friends dismissing your signs of distress: he's Steven Universe, he's half-Diamond when he's distressed he fucking generates shock waves and slows time down.
I guess every parent on planet Earth would notice their child not doing well if they started creaking the walls with their yells of rage.
The finale where they all hug kaiju-Steven got me literally disgusted: those three morons have ignored his loud, literal cries for help. And now they try to fix it with a hug? Oh my god Steven, kill them all and become the best villain in the history of cartoons.
I don't even feel like piling on SU Future more than this, because it is clear that the Crewniverse got a shit deal from CN and they had to make another season with even a lower budget, for contractual obligations, or because it was still better than not working at all.
The lack of money is palpable, mostly in the voice acting, with all the times a gem shows up and doesn't talk, and in the final kaiju battle that doesn't have a specific atmosphere but the default color scheme of every other run of the mill episode.
It had also fewer producers compared to the series proper, and that meant that some bad ideas went freer and that sadly makes me reconsider Rebecca Sugar's competence at writing.
I feel like they did the best they could with ridiculous limitations, budget, timing, feedback in the writer's room, and characters' availability. And the result wasn't good.
Steven Universe is a flawed series, like all the great series that do something that wasn't ever tried before and reshape their genres. Without Steven Universe, queer characters in cartoons would have been still non-existent.
Look, two animated movies this year, Turning Red and The Bad Boys, adopt the same character design of Steven Universe. That's something.
When you do something new you're bound to make mistakes, and fans will point at them. But they will point at them because they're fans.
With SU Future, Rebecca Sugar decided to go The Legend of Korra route instead: make our protagonist a victim of PTSD, even if 40% of the story so far ran on Looney Toons' logic.
But the absolute worst was what they did to Pearl, Garnet, and Amethyst in order to further this plot. Completely oblivious, amnesiac, and borderline malicious to Steven's obvious signs of distress.
(TBH it was Jasper the character that was done the dirtiest. She talks like she suffered actual brain damage compared to her former self.)
It's not a plausible kind of carelessness, relatable to real-life situations of parents and friends dismissing your signs of distress: he's Steven Universe, he's half-Diamond when he's distressed he fucking generates shock waves and slows time down.
I guess every parent on planet Earth would notice their child not doing well if they started creaking the walls with their yells of rage.
The finale where they all hug kaiju-Steven got me literally disgusted: those three morons have ignored his loud, literal cries for help. And now they try to fix it with a hug? Oh my god Steven, kill them all and become the best villain in the history of cartoons.
I don't even feel like piling on SU Future more than this, because it is clear that the Crewniverse got a shit deal from CN and they had to make another season with even a lower budget, for contractual obligations, or because it was still better than not working at all.
The lack of money is palpable, mostly in the voice acting, with all the times a gem shows up and doesn't talk, and in the final kaiju battle that doesn't have a specific atmosphere but the default color scheme of every other run of the mill episode.
It had also fewer producers compared to the series proper, and that meant that some bad ideas went freer and that sadly makes me reconsider Rebecca Sugar's competence at writing.
I feel like they did the best they could with ridiculous limitations, budget, timing, feedback in the writer's room, and characters' availability. And the result wasn't good.
Steven Universe is a flawed series, like all the great series that do something that wasn't ever tried before and reshape their genres. Without Steven Universe, queer characters in cartoons would have been still non-existent.
Look, two animated movies this year, Turning Red and The Bad Boys, adopt the same character design of Steven Universe. That's something.
When you do something new you're bound to make mistakes, and fans will point at them. But they will point at them because they're fans.
