Well for one peridot is cute and Ronaldo is guy fieri with french fry dreads undercut
But also without looking or thinking too hard, there’s also the fact that peridot comes from a foreign place with a very strict caste system and high tech gear, and is discovering earth and personal freedom
On the other hand Ronaldo is literally a dude running a conspiracy blog. Plus he shows no desire to grow emotionally, whereas peridot does - she opens up and emotionally matures, she’s honest with herself and trying her best
Also unrelated Lapis is like, such a well written character, especially since she’s uh someone with PTSD and depression in a kids cartoon
They’re both basically Lone Gunman character inserts: fourth-wall representatives of the dorkier side of fandom.
But the interest in personal growth – that’s an important point. For someone who starts as a villain, Peridot is curiously intent on learning and improving. She’s genuinely curious even as she imposes her own ideas on everything and considers herself the focal point of every scenario. Ronaldo… it’s a similar archetype, but he’s far more pathetic and self-aggrandizing. Peridot is arrogant as hell and gets things wrong, but it’s adorable because you know ultimately she means well. Ronaldo… it’s all just fodder for his bottomless pit.
Lapis is absolutely the best, yeah. I was grumpy a while ago that I couldn’t find any art of Lapis in a suit, and literally the day after I grumped about that on Twitter I started seeing pictures of Suit Lapis pop up all over Tumblr.
Hmm that’s a fair link. Although when I think of who peridots character is, I don’t really think about her love for camp pining hearts. Certainly there’s fun moments in the show with that and it’s a thing she spends a lot of time with, but it isn’t what makes her peridot.
Ronaldo on the other hand I think absolutely exists purely in the context that you know a Ronaldo. Just like you know a Kevin.
Also wow that is some very good lapis fanart good job internet
I mean, Camp Pining Hearts is the most overt example, but whenever she’s in an episode basically her role is to metatextually narrate the show’s rules from an observer’s perspective. She’s The Fan Character, you know. But the combination of her actual character growth and her awkward engagement with the world around her, as opposed to trying to make the world around her fit with her own internalized vision, I think is the main difference.
Lapidot is, like, the main fanart that I go after. Following Stevonnie, of course.
Seriously, the more that it sinks in the more I think that comic is one of the best things to come out of the show. It’s such a shame this never actually made it to screen. If it had, it would have been one of the best, most mind-blowing episodes.
This is the episode that got the show in trouble. Pearl’s dance with Rose was too racy for Cartoon Network UK, so they snipped out several shots of them… existing in the same frame as each other, replacing them with Greg reaction shots. No editing on shots of Greg being intimate with Rose, of course. Cartoon Network UK then provides the base program for other places in Europe, so the same edit made its rounds elsewhere.
Fans went nuts, because, seriously, why do this. CNUK actually put out a clarifying statement that said, “we need to be sure that our programming is appropriate for the young audiences that will be seeing it,” and that didn’t help much. Cue loud media frenzy.
It’s here that it seems like Rebecca Sugar nearly lost the show. It’s still unclear what the long-term fallout has been, but in the short term CN execs tried to step in and monitor so the show didn’t get any more gay, which she had no time for.
It’s a good episode, anyway.
Greg’s reaction to Stevonnie is one of my favorite things.
Oh. My read-fault. Yeah. You were right about the episode name.
(The song is called “UK Censorship Lesbians.”)
The emotions everyone goes through in this. The look on Greg’s face while he peers at her lips. The tension. The legwarmers.
You know, I think I’ve figured out why the “past” time period in this show seems like the 1980s even though logically that’s a decade too early. It’s because this story is supposed to be a fictionalized version of Reb Sugar’s own childhood with her brother. I think she’s in her late twenties now, so when she was Steven’s age it would have been, what, early 2000s? Ergo the N64 in early episodes, and GameCube later. Ergo fifteen-years-ago Greg living in the 1980s.
It’s explicitly not our world, so I guess that’s how they deal with fudging the details. Things like smartphones and Wi-fi and YouTube exist about five years before they should. But I think we’re basically meant to see this as Y2K Nostalgia World.
Cry for Help, and its media fallout, is what finally got me watching the show.
MLP: FiM was done in Flash until the recent theatrical film, which shifted to ToonBoom, and… yeah, despite the budget and everything else in its favor it’s so obviously Flash. They try to break it up, but the motion is the big tell. Only bits of the models tend to move at a time, and they tend to do so in this odd, smooth, detached geometrical way. The “look” here is also archetypal Flash, with its simple, solid forms and prominent outlines.
It’s fair to say FiM is one of the most prominent and influential modern-day cartoons, even as it’s getting creaky at this point. It sets much of the baseline tone and expectation for more-recent shows, including SU. If it’s wearing Flash so clearly on its sleeve, I guess I can forgive myself for mentally skipping a beat in not realizing a presumably lower-budget post-MLP show like this takes the more laborious and expensive route of hand animation. The character models have a similar kind of boldness and simplicity, and stand out from backgrounds in a similar way. I think my head just went, well, that’s what animation just is now, unless it’s clearly signaled otherwise.
In retrospect, though, no, clearly the keyframing here, the fluidity not just of piecemeal geometry and motion but total form, the variability in the models, it all is clearly hand-drawn. It couldn’t not be. You couldn’t mistake it unless you had checked out and weren’t paying attention. As was my case, apparently.
That it’s drawn on actual physical paper is another step of whoa, but hey.
I will be so frickin 'surprised if we don’t have a new intro by the end of this event, btw. The current one has become untenable. Nearly every element will be outdated, from character models to background objects and details to core cast and premise. For similar reasons this also seems like the only feasible moment before any epilogue they could age-up Steven to catch up with Zach Callison’s increasingly strained voice. Which has been foreshadowed so many times now in-show, cagily hedged around so often by cast and crew, and would be such a startling shift, I’m still convinced has to have been at least considered.
This certainly does seem like a turning point for the character and the show. Draw a line here; nothing can be the same on the other side.
i legitimately think they might do an anime-style time skip at some point, just considering the debt SU owes to shows like One Piece and Gurren Lagann that pulled a similar trick
Also, if Peridot doesn’t re-form with star-shaped hair i will eat my hat
Curious thing is how they conceptually set up doing an effective time-jump for the lead without having to leap the overall timeline and progress everyone else. Like, as soon as Steven rises to occasion and claims control over his own destiny, he’ll probably physically grow up, to match his emotional state.
