my opinion on steven universe had been "it was really rocky & uneven but they stuck the landing with the last season, movie & epilogue". having fully rewatched it as of last night, not only is it way less rocky than i thought but the stuff i thought was good is even better. steven universe future is a fucking gut punch and i relate very deeply to it and i'm glad they not only told that story but had the confidence to put steven, their protagonist, through that as a character. it's ugly and raw and real. i have also been through that "everyone is leaving me behind and i've got to lock down anything i can" wringer. i've been the person who can't stop self-sacrificing because i don't know who i am otherwise.
also, just. god "mr. universe" is a heartbreaking episode.
i've mentioned this but i think steven universe was a victim of both its toxic fandom and the insane airing schedule. when you watch it now, free of both problems, it really really holds up. if you are like me and my friends and didn't follow through with steven universe or remember it not-so-fondly, i strongly suggest checking it out again. i'm really glad i was able to re-evaluate this show and see it for what it is, and not for what fans wanted it to be. i think sooner or later a lot of people are going to start waking up and realizing steven universe whipped ass all along whether they're taking my word for it or not.
and in the last stevonnie episode, they finally put on shoes!
to this day saying the words "Steven Universe was good actually" makes me feel like someone's going to read them and finally order the sniper outside my window to take the shot but i do think it's time for SU's cultural redemption as people who were put off by the horrible airing schedule and all the Yelling Online and bailed like i did come back around to it, or the (mostly) kids who were doing a lot of the yelling enter their prime Nostalgia Years for it and reapproach it with more mature viewpoints.
the show does not deserve to have a legacy as The Discourse Cartoon and instead we should all be hauving covid for Pearl like normal, civilized humans
Glad people get to appreciate Steven Universe for what it is, outside of the fans who made the experience worse for everyone involved.
Transcript under the cut
I also realized that there were so many things in the show that fulfilled wishes of my own. There really is so much escapism in the show. I had come to associate “escapism” with heteronormative, male fantasies, usually with all-white leads, which I had seen many times in movies and on TV. Now that I understand how rare it is for a marginalized person to create a piece of mainstream media, I understand why I thought that was all escapism could be. These stories were a reflection of the dreams of the people who made them, which is fantastic, of course—I would want nothing less than an honest piece of art from whoever might make it—but I couldn’t necessarily relate to those fantasies. I could never really get into stories where a human being goes to an alien planet and they become more magic, more special, and more powerful than ever before. This Tarzan-style fantasy exists in stark contrast to, say, Superman, which is distinctly Jewish, with nods to the immigrant experience and the story of Moses, where the fantasy is that, somehow, someone will save us, and the alien does his best to blend in with the earthlings. I always thought of Steven as being related to this legacy of secular Jewish-American heroes. Deeper into the show, I began to think more and more often about the difference between these two types of fantasies. I wonder if the former, the John Carters and Avatars, are written by people who are tired of feeling ordinary. But we as marginalized creators have the opposite problem: the feeling of sticking out, the fear of being exposed, and the basic desire to be safe. The fantasy for me is to feel human—I already feel like an alien. I think the “reverse escapism” idea, for all my wild thoughts on it at the beginning, really boils down to that.
