It just makes me sad to see the way it ended and think of the reasons for that.
Like the diamonds aren't even sorry. They stopped their literal genocide because Steven asked them to. They would've continued their genocide otherwise. But nope, a relative doesn't like it!
a relative doesn't like it, and ALSO they didn't LISTEN to that relative and REACT to that relative's dislike UNTIL that relative was MALE CODED and not FEMALE CODED
It went down the most painful lib route possible it was agonizing
It really did. It was ending imperialism by reconciling with your white mother.
It's such a wine mom approach to stopping the bad guys.
Just sit down and talk to your racist aunt. She loves you and you have to see her at Thanksgiving.
If you just sit down and talk to them.
Like if Luke read an intervention letter to Darth Vader to make him stop running the galactic empire.
That is pretty much Luke's plan in return of the jedi though
And I wanted to see the gem war so bad. I wanted to see the ancient world and different gem factions fighting other colonists.
It was one of the most interesting time periods. And it would've shown where earth diverged from ours to this version.
It all went to shit officially the episode A Single Pale Rose. Rose Quartz lost all interesting characterization in that episode.
Bismuth is all kinds of yikes. A black-coded slave character considered just as bad as the slavers. Like wanting the people hurting you to never be able to hurt you again is somehow impossible to understand. I forgot about that episode in relation to the show as a whole.
And then the fact that the show only cares about the colonizer's country instead of the beings they're colonizing.
Like yeah gems have a shitty situation, but what about the literal planets worth of life that were killed off.
I guess the diamonds can un-shatter gems after the movie, but they can't un-shatter extinct fucking planets.
And then the one time you see the heroes interact with alien life besides the gems, they fucking try to eat it. Their lives were not even worth of getting names.
I been wanting to watch steven universe but i half-understand the lore
I'd say it's worth watching to see the way it handles imperialism and oppressive systems. You don't see that often in media and even when it's done badly, you can at least have a conversation critiquing ways of opposing oppression, imperialism, and capitalism.
I'd say check for one of those essential episodes lists. There's a lot of bad filler. But the background art is pretty and there's some interesting ideas. But be prepared for the lib politics.
I'm pretty used to lib politics in media and can overlook it if the content is good. So is Steven Universe more like Avatar with it being a story based adventure?
It's a lot like a sailor moon kinda thing with mostly monsters of the week and the occasional story crumb thrown in. There are seasonal arcs, but a lot of the episodes don't directly interact with the main storyline.
The chiptune/synth BGM's really decent. The background art can be very beautiful. Has some very sweet moments between characters that you don't get to see in shows, especially in such high amounts. The ending politics are lame but it's mostly because it's taking the show's main themes of dealing with feelings and personal relationships and applying it to a big political scale due to the show's scope creep. It goes from the early episodes of a kid playing around town with his like adoptive aunts fighting monsters of the week to a Transformers-esque galactic soap opera still with a lot of side stories with the townsfolk.
I'd also add that if you do pick it up, just let it end at the movie, the episodes in the future arc are just uninteresting rehashes of already treaded thematic ground and uninteresting plot developments that are more frustrating than entertaining.
