Does anyone else love how SU acknowledges all these things we thought were just flaws? Like we’ve been complaining about the crystal gems dumping their problems on Steven because we thought that the crew didn’t realize how shitty that is. But they DO. It’s a shitty thing for the gems to do, but they’re doing it because that’s just how life works sometimes. People do shitty things without meaning to.
this is why i stress that intent matters. it’s not bad writing to write a flawed relationship, if you know you’re writing a flawed relationship. steven universe is excellent at setting up uncomfortable status quos and challenging them later.
a counter-example: the problem with crap like “fifty shades of grey” isn’t actually that the relationship is toxic. not really. there is plenty of media exploring toxic relationships in interesting ways. christian being abusive, in another story, would not be a flaw - it’d be a feature. it’d be about dealing with that. ideally, it’d end with her leaving, or frame it as a tragedy if she doesn’t.
but it is a problem, because the writer doesn’t know it’s an abusive relationship. they end up “happily ever after”. outright, undebatable abuse is romanticized, or swept under the rug. the meta-conversation about romanticizing abuse ends up more interesting than anything the author wants to convey.
this is why intent matters. it’s the difference between characters being flawed, interesting people, and characters being propaganda of an unjust cause.
^^^