there's been some good discourse about "Steven Universe" here lately and it reminds us that we're in the middle of a cautious attempt to re-introduce ourselves to the show. we've generally liked the show despite misgivings, but it's so emotionally bound up with various personal tragedies (or personal farces), just because of when it happened to be airing, that we have been slow to re-engage with "Steven Universe". watching even a few minutes of an episode is usually enough to trigger something.
I think I'm forgiving of the show's faults, in general, because it's a story about something basically without comparison to ordinary human events—it's a show about the collision of humanity with beings who might as well be gods, and the usual rules don't apply. for me, "Steven Universe" is more akin to Aeschylus or Euripides than to conventional TV drama. it's about irreconcilable forces clashing with each other, and achieving resolution only through some unabashed miracle, a divine intervention like Athene stepping in to put a decisive end to the generational trauma of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra and their children.
I confess I feel a little irritated by talk that "Steven Universe" should somehow have functioned as a socially realistic manifesto on how to fight real-life tyrants ("Undertale" has also been afflicted with such talk). on such grounds, the determined pacifism on display in both SU and UT has attracted scorn—the idea that we should all be prepared to do violence against fascısm (I generally agree) and therefore pacifism is a terrible virtue to put into popular fiction in these desperate times. I happen to think that there's a place in fiction for staunch ideals like pacifism; I even suspect that the very existence of an ideal like total pacifism is somehow necessary, in some metaphysical way that I'm honestly not prepared to argue. right now it's just a hunch: pacifism makes sense to me as a kind of asymptotic line to strive towards even if it can never be reached. I point out that Steven Universe, pacifist that he is, still does violence. he just...loathes ever doing it.
I know the feeling.
~Chara

