SU is one of my favorite shows and it always bummed me out that its reputation became "it was bad" or "it was cringe." It feels like you cant even bring it up without people's minds going directly to fandom stuff or video essays. It's such a shame.

The internet was actually absurd about this show, it was like people were in a competition to try and read it in the worst faith possible and the stakes kept raising like they were in a Dragonball Z fight.

I made the mistake of reading too much of it and it made me drop it in the middle of season 5 because it was just frustrating to witness constantly. I need to go back to it

I wasn’t even like a huge fan but even i knew the hate it got was unwarranted. It was a good show! I love the animation and the characters are is genuinely all one of a kind.

i completely missed the fandom era and watched the whole thing front to back in one shot in 2021 or so. zero regrets

yea i think while it was airing, around the time stevonnie was introduced i stopped interacting with the fandom too much aside from posting fanart here and there. the reputation it ended up with has always bummed me out cause its a show that helped me a lot as a queer kid still coming around to their identity and following the future series and movie as an adult really was like saying bye to a good friend, it was a great send off. i look forward to more ppl rediscovering it the future!! its a wonderful work of art

I've been saying this about SU for years now. It's a fantastic show with mediocre plot and awful world building (and pacing at times), but the best fucking characters and a protagonist that's so me so hard that you'd think I was writing self insert fanfiction. Future fixes most of the problems I had with the show, honestly my only complaint is that I feel like it physically needed to take place over more time. Give me like 4 more episodes and it probably would've worked out even better.

After watching it for the first time, I remembered the first season as kind of slow and episodic compared to the breakneck density of most of the show, but I re-watched it with my partners during the pandemic and it's astonishing how many of those early episodes are either introducing vital worldbuilding that comes up again in a much later season or doing some staggering foreshadowing ("Cookie Cat! He left his family behind!").

I watched it without having a tumblr account when it was new and I thought it was good. :)

Yeah the fandom was utterly bonkers and CN's schedule was incredibly frustrating. I never even ended up finishing it but what I watched was largely good and I'm glad it existed.

people thought this show was bad? oh, right, the internet

i rewatched SU a couple years ago whilst in the process of a long slow breakup and it was like, genuinely a big help to me in processing my big messy tangle of emotions around a long complicated relationship. because it is a show about relationships and human connection and it handles those things in such a real, mature way. part of me wants to qualify that as "for a kid's show" and obviously it's framed for a young demographic, but at the risk of coming off as "2016 tumblr user who never watches shows made for adults" i think it genuinely handles its themes and relationships in a way that is just Good, Period.

it feels like there was a certain segment of toxic puriteen online fandom culture that latched onto it so hard (and made it a pet dumping ground for Discourse) that it caused a general backlash not just against the fandom but the show itself. we all kinda mentally tied steven universe to "person who sends anon harassment because you're following someone with a pr*blematic ship" and "people stuck in arrested development who won't expose themselves to media that is mature or ugly" and projected that kind of person back onto the show. which in retrospect was just a real fuckin bummer

also Here Comes A Thought is still a banger

I was a fan but without contact to a fandom, so my main thing to keep pointing out is that SU had more breaks that were longer than homestuck's. The work that is famous for having breaks so long that they are named, and have statistics about them.

future was so... poignant. very different tone obviously, but in a way that made a lot of sense for me. you can only be the cool optimist holding the world together for so long. reminded me of the last animorphs book, in a way

I do think it was a triple threat; like you said, the airing schedule and fandom did it no favors, but there absolutely was havoc in the writer room. There was weird hidden agendas, infighting (a crew member legit got fired and started that weird ass hate campaign), and etc.

it definitely is better now, as a Whole Complete Thing, tho. and fucking god yes, future is phenomenal, and will forever have a spot on the podium as some of the best character writing, imo.

I think the only thing, in hindsight, that I don't enjoy about SU/Future is that it wanted to have it both ways. It wants to be a fun adventure cartoon. it wants a magical boy saving the galaxy, it wants lighthearted magic and cool battles. AND it wants the trauma, it wants the 'actually this was so terrible', the deconstruction, the incredible price of war

SU Future was cool but it felt like it went out of its way to recontextualize a lot of what we were shown as Fun Space Adventure to be like 'oh you LIKED that? You had FUN? This kid was a child soldier, not so fun NOW huh? Look how much it fucked him up! Don't you feel bad now?'

like

yes, I do feel bad now, thanks for that

still really liked both shows, I just didn't appreciate that

it really did thread the needle of "you kids want wild and crazy characters that have incredible sci fi adventure' AND have down to earth meaningful relatable problems?" from the Poochie episode of the Simpsons though, that's an incredible achievement

oh and the fandom collectively owe that one writer they drove off the internet for not catering to their fucking stupid ship a billion dollars

i was lucky enough to watch the show as it came out and only really talk about it with friends in-person or in group DMs, it really was a much better experience it seems. hopefully everyone can get to the point of simply thinking Bad Pearl is Good.

I die inside whenever someone mentions 'the fandom' as a criticism of something ☠️

people love to be like "this show had an earnest and heartfelt ending which is cringe actually" and then pretend they always hated it

I love Steven universe
There’s a lot of incredible characters and wholesome messaging
And thoughtful commentary about relationships.
It’s a good show.

Steven Universe was good actually, and I agree with all of the above. I also want to expand on one part of what @evanonline mentioned - 'steven universe was a victim of both its toxic fandom and the insane airing schedule'.

I've talked about this before - most notably in the context of Homestuck on the latest FITP - but it is really significant to look at what happened with the fandom during the "Steven Bombs" and the fallow periods. An experimental way to release the show, that ensured the fanbase would all have something big to look forward to...and then open the floodgates for gushing/ranting in the wake of each 'bomb. Great way to generate hype! Also a great way to make sure the fandom goes completely feral during the gaps between episode releases. I haven't gone back and tracked the timelines of the biggest SU fandom awfulness-spikes to see where they line up to the release schedule, but my suspicion is that there were some intense negative feedback loops driving the worst of it.