i love how white people assume that people of color have to overanalyze media to find its racism. “just enjoy it!” they say, like we’re not going to notice a portrayal of our “inferiority” being rubbed in our face. “i miss the good old days when social justice warriors didn’t ruin every movie/tv show ever,” like pointing out racism ruins the media and not the racism itself. it’s the epitome of white privilege.
and then when someone makes a show with positive representation, they claim it’s just “pandering to SJW”
i love how white people assume that people of color have to overanalyze media to find its racism. “just enjoy it!” they say, like we’re not going to notice a portrayal of our “inferiority” being rubbed in our face. “i miss the good old days when social justice warriors didn’t ruin every movie/tv show ever,” like pointing out racism ruins the media and not the racism itself. it’s the epitome of white privilege.
Hey remember that scene from It Could’ve Been Great where there was this ominous flouting sphere and Steven was like “wtf is that” and Garnet was like “that’s not what we came for” and then they focused the camera on it for a few seconds with creepy music and then never fucking addressed it again
this orb represents every single loose plot thread the writers have created and never returned to
I feel like a healthy chunk of the criticisms of Steven Universe’s plot endures are a love for the show mixed with impatience manifested as anger.
In episode 6-SIX-we learn that Garnet has three eyes, one red, one blue, and one purple. The next episode we’re introduce to a two gemed, two eyed fusion named Opal and the concept of fusion.
It’s not until episode 49 that this massive, two gem alien named Garnet is revealed to be a fusion. Did the writers forget for 43 episodes to tell us that Garnet is a fusion and then decided haphazardly to tell us during Jail Break. No, of course not. That’s why we saw Ruby and Sapphire’s silhouette in Fusion Cuisine. That’s why we saw Garnet activate a red and blue gem at the Crystal temple. That helps it not feel like the writers pulled this out of thin air. It’s what makes it feel earned.
Steven Universe is a lightly serialized show. Every single season of Steven Universe has been littered with character driven, individualized episodes, many that could be ordered differently during the given season. Those episodes are about the characters and are crucial to audience investment. Who cares how exciting it is to watch Alexandrite fight Malachite if we aren’t told the danger of this fusion or the weight Malachite has on her component gems (Chilie Tid). Occasionally we get glimpses of we’re the plot is headed before we get plot centric episodes.
Don’t asked this show to sprint to the finish line. Steven Universe has always been a slow boil. I don’t know why fractions of this fandom are pretending like this is brand new or some uniquely bad story telling. I think Cartoon Network understands that serialization builds audiences but when it’s too heavy it stops people from watching because they don’t understand what’s going on. It’d be nice if the fandom did too.
You know… I’m constantly baffled by how scale-blind people are. I’m talking scale as in size, e.g. land mass, population, etc. Americans look at Europe and forget that the largest of those countries is smaller than Texas. They look at Denmark, for example, and don’t grasp that its population is smaller than the combined population of the five boroughs of New York City.
Conversely, Europeans look at the USA and don’t seem to realize that it takes 5 eight-hour days behind the wheel, with 4 overnight stops, to drive from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles. Or that the average US State has 6.3 million residents, ranging from 582 thousand to over 38 million. Or that the total population of the USA 400% - 500% larger than the most populous European nations.
And because no one seems to grasp the discrepancy and the vast differences in scale, they completely overlook the impact scale has on a nation in all spheres, from culture, to economics, to military, to geopolitics. They don’t realize how impossible it is to apply what ‘works’ on one side of the scale to the other. Some things fall apart when scaled up (like a supersized ant collapsing under its own weight), others are crippled when scaled down (similar to medical conditions like dwarfism).
You can’t point to a nation that’s 1/37th the size of yours and say ‘See, it works for them! So just do that here!’ with no consideration for how the change in scale will drastically unhinge the system. Likewise, you can’t point at a nation five timesbigger than you and go, 'Why can’t we just take their system and implement it here?’ because some of those systems need to be a certain minimum size to function as designed.
Ignoring scale will lead to failure. Most systems do not scale well when stretched or squashed beyond a certain deviation, and will fail critically under those stresses. So either some kind of perfectly scalable system needs to be developed for any one sphere of national policy (good luck with that), or maybe it’s time to wake up and realize that a system that’s good for one country is probably not going to be good for another; and instead of trying to copy things from vastly different scales, try instead to develop systems that work domestically for our own respective scales.
You know. Just a thought, from a guy who’s lived on both sides of the pond.
