Spinel makes it abundantly clear how much lower the budget is for the TV show, as compared to the movie.
So we all accept now that Blue’s “little reason why” is cannabis, right.
Just sat down and caught up with future during this time of quarintine. While I like how most episodes are going the distance to examine what happens after you save the world where most shows tend to end I can’t help but feel it comes of a bit heavy handed. At least when watching a few episodes at a time. The subtle positive life lessons are much farther between here and feels like there’s less progress happening in the moment.
It’s the final cash-in to everything built up over the previous five seasons and a movie. If it’s heavy-handed, it kind of has to force a reframing of the narrative to date for anyone who hadn’t clicked into what the show was really about. This is the last chance to really make sure its message is getting across. And given how even now people seem to be missing the point somewhat, I think that instinct was correct.
…
Anyway. Four and a half hours before the end.
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Pretty fuckin good ending to a pretty fuckin good show!!
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I can’t believe that Pearl’s growing affinity for commercial jingles was an actual setup.
That last episode kept very nearly addressing the audience directly. “Be the Steven you want to see in the world”—yeah, he’s technically talking to Peridot, but.
As someone on Tumblr said, power move by Sugar to write pretty much every character as ND.
I have often talked about the ND tone to the show; its thought patterns, sense of humor, structure, particular relationship to trauma and queerness. And, there it is.
I swear, every time I open Twitter it’s some member of the Crewniverse popping off about Bernie.
what is ND?
Neurodiverse/neurodivergent. Non-neurotypical.
great news!
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i don’t have anything smart to write here but i sure did have Feelings and i’m glad this victory lap season got to exist
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Of the three endings this show has had, this feels the most satisfying. The first one tied up the immediate plot stuff, but then was just abruptly over. The second gave an encore to the show’s themes, without the time to really develop them. This one resolved most of the character stuff that had been building up since the start, and finally completed the discussion—while more than the previous two leaving a sense that, yeah, it’s not over; it’s just moving on. There’s endless potential out there. The future is not yet written. Be the Steven you want to see in the world.
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Steven Universe is a show that was extremely frustrating to watch. I was following it ardently and closely ever since its pilot released, and the state of social justice ideas in the mainstream of culture were still kinda niche back then, and I was begging for a show like this to exist, a show with a variety of women taking center-stage, of different body types and ethinicities, it was incredibly fresh and new at the time. The reveal of Garnet being actually two women (or, I guess women-coded aliens) in a gay relationship was blazing new ground for not just cartoons, but even mainstream entertainment as a whole. The way the show was framed as through the eyes of Steven made all the gem stuff just so mysterious and magical and wondrous early on, it was definitely something.
But then the show just kinda, lost itself. Don’t get me wrong, there are so many outstanding episodes and plot beats after the first season (the episode with Volleyball in Steven Universe Future is incredible and one of my favorites), but how it came together as a whole was disappointing. It feels like a show that definitely knew the general direction of where it was going to go (I don’t doubt that the finale’s script was pretty much written early on), but it didn’t know what moving parts to use in the meantime, and how and where to introduce them. Mysteries and pressing issues would be introduced only to be addressed again many episodes (sometimes whole seasons) later in a hurry. The mystique of all the gem stuff quickly went away as they stopped doing missions to old gem historical sites and the show had no interest anymore in old gem tech or culture, and when the characters of every Crystal Gem were already easily understood and had barely anything to reveal anymore (with the exception of maybe Pearl). Steven Universe is no doubt a complex show to manage, probably one of the most complex, with its different tones, characters, plotlines, mysteries, but, maybe it should’ve been simpler if we were going to get something that juggles so many things in such an awkward way?
There’s just so much that I can go on about that felt lacking (like the insistence on beach citizen episodes long after they felt necessary or welcome) but the thing that’s most shocking in my mind is how dark the show would get and how awkward it would try to shift its tone back to a state of normalcy afterwards. Why does something so dark like the Cluster exists, especially when it was solved by… not solving it at all? Here, a living graveyard of broken destroyed minds mutated into an Akira monstrosity that eats up the entire planet. How are we gonna solve it? I guess we don’t. Steven just tells them to, like, not panic. It’s fine. Oh, also, the one responsible for this is also fine. Yknow, she did several genocides, but it’s fine, she learned that she was being a bad mom and that killing is bad so she still gets to be the emperor of gem society, because she was born a Diamond and I guess only Diamonds can rule, in a show where one of its messages is about how the circumstances of your birth don’t determine who you are or what your place in society should be. What!
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Since it shows there’s an election going on between the two Zircons, i got the sense that the Diamonds aren’t really in power anymore, they basically got converted into social services.
The Cluster is definitely the weakest part of the overall plot and i agree that they struggled to resolve it. It was apparently a really late plot addition, and it shows
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The second act is the weakest, as it is in most stories. (See The Two Towers, etc.) There is a certain amount of flailing in season three in particular, what with the abrupt resolution to the Cluster thread, a long span of… nothing in particular, then the abrupt resolution to the Jasper situation, just in time to shove us over Plot Event Two and into the third act, where things start to get interesting again.
It becomes extremely clear as the show goes on that as much as they’ve carefully structured the whens and hows of the overall story, and as particular as they are about continuity, they really don’t give much of a shit about plot. All their attention is on theme, as presented through character, as developed through scenario. By the third act, engaging with the show becomes a matter of actively reading it as literary metaphor rather than as explicit events.
All of which is fine by me, because I can’t give a quarter of a shit about plot as a story device. It’s just an excuse to get things from point A to point B, where we start to explore the meanings and parallels and consequences of the things we established earlier—which is exactly the spirit the show seems to take as it develops.
Like. Season three is a fucking mess, and I’d have done a lot differently there. But season 1 is good, especially in the second half when it really starts establishing the fuck out of the scenario and the themes; season two tears into developing all of that before season three drops the ball; and then seasons 4-5 zag right back into plumbing the psychology and significance of what came before, with Future the culmination of that thread.
If you watch it straight through, it’s a lot more obvious what a huge shrug season three is. Estelle is nowhere to be found. Connie is in three episodes all season. Peridot and Lapis are basically put on the shelf. The middle is just townie episode after townie episode. Anything that seems important, and that seems like it would have gotten a ton of weight a season earlier or later, is just cut short with a shrug. Then season four quickly scrambles to make up for that dip, and really pulls the show into the meat of what it has to talk about.
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