you know what, i am right and im tired of pretending i am not
i posted some thoughts about this on mastodon last month
frankly i just think a lot of the discourse on steven universe was and remains shortsighted and childish. a lot of viewers and critics just stubbornly refuse to take the conditions of a production into consideration whatsoever. which, you know, i can understand that as a casual viewer of media, you don’t have that full context you just have the show. but when you get outlandishly vitriolic, as many online critics love to do, a lot of the time you just end up making villains of creators who most likely agree with you on a lot of the stuff you’re criticizing because *the studio forced them to put that shit in and would sue them to hell and back if they admitted to that fact.* i’ll never forget that like three hour “steven universe sucks” video where the critic in question just straight up personally yelled at rebecca sugar over the network’s release schedule, as if she had any control or input on that whatsoever!
at a certain point this level of projected auteurism transitions seamlessly into abject illiteracy. it’s a mode of criticism which treats art as if it emerges from a vacuum, as if artists working within any mainstream media machine have absolute creative control of what makes it onto the air. this critical mode gives endless, endless cover for exploitative censorious media corporations who force talented artists to work under the most untenable of conditions.
why do we care about this? what is it that we really care about? everyone wants the art to be good, but comes at it from an astonishingly naive perspective that corporations absolutely encourage. because if all responsibility for the work falls on the author’s head regardless of how many suits put themselves between the author and the finished work, then the suits just get to keep on doing what they’re doing. this is how we get marvel movies halfway through production before a script has even been written, how we get exploitative minirooms that refuse young screenwriters the long-term career experience of tv writers rooms past, how we get an environment where queer artists pushing boundaries in indie spaces with no financial or institutional support face infinitely more scrutiny with MUCH higher stakes than anything that actually has a real impact on the world at large.
that steven universe exists at all is a miracle. that it’s as queer as it is, and as nuanced as it is about queer family dynamics, mourning, trauma, forgiveness, is something worth celebrating. that doesn’t mean you have to watch it or like it! as cj the x would say, was it bad? or did you just not like it? increasingly i wish everyone watching things would learn to distinguish between the two, and would learn in general that no amount of criticizing mass media will ever ever ever ever result in Things Actually Changing. you want media to get better? then your enemy is the studios, and your allies are the exploited workers who are just as frustrated as you are! putting all that energy into hating A Director or Actor or Property is, most of the time, a gift to the capitalists.
Also regarding the ending, like.
This is a kid's show. I know you can do a fair amount more nuance than some people expect on a kid's show, but it is, ultimately, a kid's show. A kid's show that is trying to express the idea that compassion and communication are powerful tools of conflict resolution. So of course the show ended with speaking with compassion to the big bad and that opened her eyes and everything got better. (not happy ever after, but notably better.)
