golvio:

ramblingcj:

faelapis:

i feel some people’s enjoyment of su would increase a lot if they realized that we’re not supposed to agree with steven all the time. he’s not meant to represent how we’re “supposed” to feel.

Been saying this for a while. Hell, one of my oldest post on this site was about the disconnect between what Steven was seeing and what the show was actually telling us. It was around the time Alone At Sea aired, so you can guess what the post was about.

Malachite is the easiest topic to illustrate that point. You have Steven worrying about Lapis, telling Peridot that she’s been fighting Jasper as if she’s doing something noble, telling Lapis that Jasper is terrible and flat out ignoring Lapis herself saying that SHE was the aggressor in Malachite, not Jasper.
Meanwhile the narrative shows us Jasper in chains and drowning while Lapis is on the surface. Then Jasper briefly gets control and Lapis get pulled under. The narrative in Chille Tid made it damn clear who was doing what to whom. But Steven refuses to see it and because Steve refuses to see it, so does most of the fandom.

Another example is him saying that “he tried to help them” during Mindful Education. And we know he didn’t. Besides the necessary gemhealing with Eyeball, he didn’t extend any help to her beyond that. You can argue that there wasn’t time for offer help with Bismuth, but he still included her in the “I tried to help them”. Then there’s Jasper - did he try to help her? Technically, yes. When it was painfully obvious that she needed it. But prior to that, he treated her like nothing more than an enemy.
Basically Steven’s line is contradicting his actions that the narrative have shown us.

There’s other examples, but I don’t wanna make this too long. Basically Steven may be the protagonist, but that doesn’t make him right. You’re seeing things from his perspective, but the show is smart in the sense that it also shows us what’s actually going on.

Which means that the narrative will contradict Steven at times. And that means that we, as an audience, have to pay attention to more than just what Steven sees. Even if that means disagreeing with him at times.

Most importantly, this ain’t a JRPG. Steven’s not some blank proxy for the audience to project themselves onto. He’s his own person, with his own personality, beliefs, and, yes, biases. That’s what affects his perspective, and how he behaves. We’re seeing the events of the series through his eyes, but that doesn’t make him a reliable narrator by any means, especially back before he actually knew anything about what was going on. You’d think that people would start to clue into that now that his feelings of guilt are warping him so much that he’s starting to believe things that obviously (to the audience) aren’t true, like how he thinks he is his mom, that he should be held accountable for her crimes just because he has her Gem, and that letting the Diamonds punish “Rose” will somehow magically solve everyone’s problems and give everyone closure because they’re all better off without him, anyways. Even though it’s obvious that his friends and family were devastated that he left. Even though we’ve had at least two seasons hammering home what a stupid idea sacrificing yourself without understanding the hidden costs to those you leave behind is.

Steven is his own character with a ongoing arc. Right now he’s going through an existential nervous breakdown and is questioning everything he believed up to this point, so why are some people refusing to question him and just dismissing any inconsistencies as “bad storytelling?”