Finally got the time to watch the last two episodes. That was real great. I wonder how the episode order has been altered to adjust for the Bombs. In season 1 at least the release order for the episodes is not quite the intended “canon” order:
Oh man, I guess there’s just… nothing for a while now then. I gotta find more shows to watch so there’s not just a void left after each new batch.
“Not all Pearls know each other, Steven.”
accidentally watched (peri drill arc) this anime. fuck
3 heroin gems = 3 major eras of animation???
I’m back on the rock
I started watching this again and I’m almost caught up with it but I think I fell out of love with this show. I don’t think it works as children’s entertainment or as adult entertainment. I don’t know, I don’t think I can make clear my frustrations with this show right now, but watching it feels like… the moment where you notice that you can’t remember why you liked something in the first place.
I’m getting similar vibes to what turned me off of Adventure Time years ago but it’s different this time. Adventure Time became too in love with its own checklist-ticking mythology, and nothing sucks the magic out of a fantasy like explaining everything. AT definitely explained too much and Stephen Universe is already over-explaining its setting but not yet to as bad a degree as AT’s. To explain a story or an imaginary place is to rationalize and codify it into a digestible morsel. It doesn’t take up space in my mind, because all the mythopoeia has been rationalized away. There is no intrusion of imaginative force anymore. While worldbuilding in the positive sense can be enriching to a story, making a place mentally real through the gradual accumulation of detail, allowing ultimately for a feeling of Enchantment, in the pejorative sense it can make a place feel flat and cardboard, a constructed maquette of the primary world, it delimits itself. This is what AT did for me and what SU is doing now (in part).
The other frustration comes from the way characters are treated. Besides my utter distaste for Ronaldo (a character like that shouldn’t exist in the world of steven universe, someone with no redeeming qualities and whom the show tacitly deems as an acceptable target for bullying, every episode he appears in is ridiculously mean-spirited and hard for me to watch), all the other characters have gradually become unpleasant to watch. Their flaws have become so exaggerated and magnified over time that there’s nothing left of what made them worth watching in the first place.
What episode are you on?
I’m still pretty rock-hard for this show but I can absolutely see what you mean regarding over-explaining the backstory. The second I was shown the history of the battle for Earth, the larger projects of the gems, the nature of the homeworld gems… it become noticably less interesting than it used to be, when you have no idea how advanced the homeworld was, or what scale the war had been, or what the gems even wanted.
I can understand how the way a show is developing its world/characters might not be to your taste. I can’t really see how this means it isn’t working as entertainment, period.
Re: the characters, i’ll grant that Ronaldo is flat and out of place (though that’s the worst i can muster). Completely don’t understand the rest of your criticism though-- it doesn’t even scan like we’re watching the same show.
i watched the last few episodes of season one tonight. it was intense!
Might as well take your time with season 2 since it is absolutely no fun to be stuck the eternal hiatus we must suffer.
relevent
“Made of Love” is on my list of those media things i wish i could experience afresh. blew my goddamn metaphorical stockings off the first time
i’d heard the song on its own before, but it’s so much better with everything leading up to it and “steven, we already loved you” and the fight with jasper
YUP. the combo of “garnet is fusion confirmed” w/ Estelle doing her first solo w/ a kickass fight montage was a real hat trick.
speaking of which, now you can go back and look for the sneaky hints at Ruby/Sapphire
going all the way back to the pilot
this became the longest hiatus a few days ago i think? anyway log date is now considered the end of “season two,” every season (cartoon network has confirmed five so far) after the first is supposed to have 26 episodes, and…the show’s coming back some time in june.
i would’ve been fine with waiting if a friend hadn’t sent me leaks from a couple of the episodes that haven’t aired yet. i can’t remember being this impatient for something to come out in years
I just finally got caught up with this show, and now I’m stuck at the hype station waiting for the hype train with the rest of y’all.
I’m really interested in the way this show handles emotions, relationships, and maturity. It uses such potent, complex metaphors to talk about these things. The Crystal Gems are empowered and capable, but their alien nature makes them socially and emotionally underdeveloped in certain respects. This kind of breaks the child/adult binary in a way that allows child viewers to identify with them and learn about how to be a person along with them.
And then fusion as a weird almost-but-not-quite metaphor for sex allows the show to tackle issues more relevant to teen/young adult viewers.
And the show’s subtle, nostalgic references to 90’s pop culture and its great writing and art direction hook the adults.
It works on so many levels, it’s amazing!
Yeah, I like this show. I avoided it for a while, because people in my periphery were yelling about it so loudly. But, eventually I searched YouTube to see what the hell it was, and the first thing I turned up was a segment from “Jailbreak”, starting a few moments before Ruby and Sapphire re-fused and continuing through the crash. I had no idea what I was looking at, but… I watched it over and over again. And so… okay then. I started from the start, and I watched the whole thing in about two days, in and around work.
I don’t have any particularly novel observations to add. Just, I appreciate what they’ve done here. It’s unusually empathetic for any TV show, let alone a cartoon ostensibly aimed at kids. I like how even the incidental characters are given enough thought that they seem to have a life that continues off the screen. I like how the show continually seeds details that it will slowly build on before fully explaining dozens of episodes later. I like how the heroes are all heroes because they’re the freaks and the outcasts, which makes it easier for them to understand the plights of others – though even then they have to work at it.
There are so many really cool things about this show. I just wish it would air more regularly.
daaaaang
there was a two-hour block with a focus on fusions, which I assume is to help hype things up for those episodes (the promo appeared repeatedly in commercial breaks)
“Alone Together” is absolutely bonkers stuff, like can’t-believe-this-was-on-kids-TV-except-there-it-is. It is straight up about a perfect hermaphrodite ideal being walking among the mortals who look on in enamored awe, only to encounter the one threat that humans ever pose to the gods: insidious doubt.
The instrumental fight themes are curious.
Yeah, and Alone Together may be my favorite thing the show has done so far. Generally I just like when Connie shows up.
Alone Together was my tipping point for this show, from “i like this a lot” to “this is my favorite television program”
drawn by http://chocodile.tumblr.com/
thought some folk here might get a kick outta these
(the Amethyst is my favorite)
