fuzzy post-it

purplekecleon:

So, Fusion Cuisine. I tried writing a post about this for a couple of hours, but Firefox crashed and Tumblr sucks, so it didn’t save it.

Let’s try take two.

Note: I am only writing this at all, and only devoting another one or two hours of my time to writing this at all, because I fucking love Steven Universe. If you don’t believe me, search my “Steven Universe” tag for all the fanart I draw in my spare time. I was blessed to be able to actually contribute a comic cover to it, which I think will be out “soon”ish. I love it. This is the only fanart I even make anymore. It’s absolute favorite show. The disappointment that was Fusion Cuisine left a bad taste in my mouth, especially after last week’s amazing Ronaldo episode. I didn’t think we’d get an episode that was worse than House Guest, but here we are, so I’d like to explain it in one spot so I don’t have to keep repeating myself.

To sum it up:

Pros

-Garnet’s entire phone call exchange. Hilarious, one of her best moments.

-Alexandrite’s amazing design, from her strange “eye” markings to the hidden second mouth that’s reminiscent of Sugilite’s mouth… it’s fantastic.

-Amethyst telling Steven he could’ve ended up in prison

Cons

-Literally everything else

Below the read-more for a lengthy explanation on why I feel these things. Hopefully you can understand where I’m coming from, even if you don’t agree with every single point.

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Read More

What gets to me the most is that virtually none of the characters’ actions or reactions make any sense unless you assume all of them are idiots. None of them acted like any of us would act — or like they’ve acted in the past.

Really, if you want to get why I’m bothered: rewatch the episode, pause after every line, and ask yourself “what would I do now? what would this character do now? why would I do that?”. Then unpause and witness a complete non sequitur, almost every time.

I might as well throw in a few other things that came to mind that got lost in your computer woes:

• Remember the phone call between Connie and Steven. Connie says she can’t come over again until her parents meet Steven’s parents. But she only says this as an explanation as to why she can’t come watch Under The Knife with Steven. Why wouldn’t she have told Steven this condition as soon as she heard about it?

• For that matter, after thinking Steven’s mom just told them their child was dead, why wouldn’t Connie’s parents make any attempt to contact Steven’s parents? Or go to their house, which is two blocks away? Or anything? The “playing with swords” gag was hilarious, but seems to have had no bearing on how anyone acts throughout the rest of the episode.

• Why does Steven so adamantly refer to the gems as his family now? In Together Breakfast, he repeatedly says “I thought we could eat together, like best buds” — a line that I always thought would sound more natural as “like a family”. It stuck with me so much that he sounded like he was avoiding the word. But here he used it multiple times, where I don’t think he ever has before.

• Why does Alexandrite hate doctors? That doesn’t seem like something any of the gems would say, so why does their fusion?

• Why are the gems so angry that Steven spent about twenty seconds running away? Garnet admonishes him for risking getting hurt in traffic — after all the critters Steven himself has defeated, Garnet doesn’t trust him to know how to cross the road?

• Why would Garnet think losing dinner is an appropriate punishment, in an episode that stressed multiple times how humans need to eat?

• Nitpickin, but: verb tenses get messed up twice, which jarred me a bit. On the phone, Connie says “if they found out I lied to them, they’ll …”. Also, after Alexandrite unfuses, Garnet admonishes Pearl and Amethyst with “we’re doing this for Steven”, which seems like a strange tense to use (and strange thing to say overall) after the plan has obviously failed catastrophically.