I guess I didn’t notice it or forgot, my bad. I get it that with the show insisting on being on Steven’s POV always it means that the show deliberately doesn’t go over (or linger on) many things that don’t directly involve him or that he’s not present to. I guess that my issue is that the Cluster shouldn’t exist, as a concept. Don’t think someone can be redeemed/tolerated for doing that to thousands (?) of planets, and that Earth was just another target (though I guess the implication is that Earth might’ve been the only planet they targeted with sentient life, and that gems didn’t know about other forms of life?) It’s awkward to have White be kinda chummy. I dunno about you but if some war criminal tried to get all friendly with me I’d wanna smash her head against a pilla-- oh
Yeah, the last few episodes make it pretty clear Steven hasn’t forgiven the Diamonds, in particular White—even as they seem to be making genuine efforts to atone.
Yellow tossed off in passing that she was meaning to tend to the cluster the way she was doing with Flint and Chert there (thereby priming us to remember that the Cluster exists). What makes me curious is whether the Cluster even wants to be broken up and reassembled into her (I’ll just say her) components, now that she seems to have some sense of self—or whether she’d be better off just getting carved out of the Earth and being unleashed to wander and figure things out.
Be free, dangling plot device! Free to write your own destiny!
EDIT:
The Diamonds were always going to be kind of a tough needle to thread and i have to wonder if the crew regretted making them so evil early on. The weaker parts of Change Your Mind are when they’re trying to emotionally pay off on Yellow and Blue in a way that they had laid the groundwork to potentially earn, but hadn’t actually had the chance to earn.
Also the show being from Steven’s POV is a fascinating idea that results in some cool surprises and moments, but it’s partly to blame for some of the more awkward storytelling bits too. Like, that’s why plot elements get tossed on the back burner for many episodes and brought back seemingly arbitrarily. We can’t check in with Malachite or the Cluster or Jasper etc. unless Steven personally encounters them or does some mind melding shenanigans
Personally i found season 4 to be the weakest one. It feels sorta like they’re trying to fill time and rearrange plot elements in between Steven Bombs, especially before the Zoo arc. The Cluster are an obvious plot device but so is Aquamarine and her ridiculously OP wand, it feels like she shows up to shove the idiot ball into Steven’s hands and force him into going to Homeworld alone. Maybe i’d feel differently about that if the Lars of the Stars stuff got a little more payoff (another example of “we can’t see how these established characters are doing so they’re just lost in space until the finale”)
S4 also has the highest concentration of episodes i don’t care for, like Future Boy Zoltron and Onion Gang. S3 does a lot of fucking around and boardie episodes but i just enjoy those episodes more
Actually, re: the Diamonds and their redemption, i liked the Homeworld Bound episode because if he was in a better headspace, Steven might actually be pleased to see how much they’ve changed for the better — but with his unresolved feelings mingling with his Pink Traumatic Stress Disorder, he’s just frustrated and impatient. I could see OG Steven being genuinely happy during Blue’s song, but it just leaves him feeling empty.
I also like that those feelings, and his feelings about Rose, never get fully resolved. In one of the many cool little interviews Rebecca Sugar gave (might be the one aderack cited above) they state that the end of Future is about taking the weight off him and not making him be a TV show hero anymore — his healing is something that takes place offscreen, it’s not our business. Maybe that sounds silly since he’s a cartoon character, but i really dig that point being made to the viewer, that people are allowed to work on themselves at their own pace and it doesn’t need to be part of your narrative for them
In general a cool thing about Future (and some of the, imo, best episodes in the main series like Joy Ride, Mindful Education, Storm in the Room) is that it exposes feelings that Steven has not only been hiding from his family, but from the viewer as well. He’s easy to read as happy-go-lucky, oblivious kid’s protagonist and it’s always sorta shocking when the show makes it clear “no, he’s actually stifling his trauma for misguided reasons”
Sorry for the lots of sudden words lol but i’ve been slowly unpacking my feelings about the show since the finale. Good damn fuckin cartoon, whatever criticisms i also have of it, i will always be sorta jealous of kids who got to grow up with a series that has this much intentional hidden depth
This is good.
I think a lot of the criticisms about the Diamonds would be tempered if they’d had another maybe four episodes to mess around on Homeworld and chip away at their characters. The crew used the time they were given extraordinarily well, and pretty much nailed every beat so far as I can see, but it doesn’t have the time to breathe and sink in the way the show does during the first two acts. The end of the show is a runaway train of, like, 16 tightly serialized episodes barreling away one status quo after another so it can slide into the station on time.
But I think later events pretty well make up for that. We’ve got basically a whole season of reflection to unpack what the fuck happened and to tie it into the entire show from the start, and it really underlines how Much those events were, and how quickly they were wrapped up, and how much was left unresolved, in a way that’s thematically relevant to what the show serves to talk about anyway. It’s just… I really like how everything ties together ultimately.
One wonders why I get so much into Unresolved Childhood Trauma: The Series.
It’s like there might be some kind of reason.
A mystery for the ages.
the subconscious is a hell of a thing, i tell you what buster
greetings fellow Stevonnie egg-crackee
i watched “Alone Together” and the rest of S1 the same summer i watched Utena the first time and it didnt make me a lesbian but it certainly helped
s/o to Pearl, notorious lesbian but also underratedly trans coded (though i mean she literally has a trans pride flag color scheme)
ah yes, she also is a fairly good grappler
hey, so uh
i basically owe my life to the parent series, and this is the specific spin-off i and many others predicted and asked for five years ago, so uh
…
yeah, this seems good.
unclear how many animated minutes are budgeted for, how it’s broken down, or whether this is meant as a one-off or an ongoing series
As someone watching Steven for the first time and currently at the start of season 3, the news that Lars–whom my co-watcher and I would place solidly in the bottom tier of characters, to the point where eps focused on him and/or Sadie are almost automatic skips–apparently goes through enough shit to become spin-off worthy is…boy, that is a real high bar they’ve unintentionally set up.
the payoffs with both him and Sadie are fuckin great and worth it
they were also deliberately left out of focus in Future so im very extremely hype about this