fuzzy post-it

man how is that a comeuppance.  he wasn’t humiliated; no one was paying attention to him.  he didn’t learn a lesson; no one is going to go “man what if this OTHER girl is ALSO two kids in disguise??”.  he looked mildly surprised and walked away.  that is a pretty great outcome for being annoying sleaze.

or maybe better put: how do you think kevin is going to act around the next pretty girl he sees?

as we all know, cis boys cannot blush.  biological impossibility.  the blush organ is located within the ovary

uhhh not once was there any indication that anyone thought the new person loaded up with stereotypically feminine attributes (long hair, small waist, wide hips, belly shirt, short shorts, female VA) was anything but a girl, either

it’s technically true that stevonnie could’ve been a non-girl, and that the entirety of beach city, including kevin, is so gender-sensitive that not a single one of them even had the thought that “this person is a girl”

but it also could’ve all been an illusion or a dream.  nothing in the episode says it wasn’t, right

it doesn’t make sense to design the character like that, introduce a clear Dickhole Straight Dude archetype antagonist, and not intend that at the very least other people assume the character is female

and even if you are 100% right my point STILL STANDS: it would have been more subversive in the real world if stevonnie had been loaded up with stereotypically masculine attributes and lars had still found them stammeringly attractive

you realize they…  are paid for this, right?  like, this is their job.  their job is to make steven universe.

also i would like to remind you that this is PK’s sole contribution to that entire reblog thread, and the only other notable thing she wrote was a long and heartfelt review of the episode, so i’m not sure why she keeps being lumped into this.

i wasn’t even aiming at the writer.  i was replying to PK, which is why i reblogged PK, and not the original ask.  i made one snippy reply because i felt insulted, then elaborated when someone else got mad.

i wrote it for my blog, in response to my partner, because of how i felt about something.

naturally this ended up on the writer’s dashboard anyway because tumblr is garbage and there’s really only the one way to thread responses.  but instead of doing something trivial like putting me on ignore (or just hitting refresh and letting the dozens of likes drown me out) he deleted the post, then made another, then deleted his blog, then locked his twitter, then i guess made some tweets and deleted those and i don’t know.

nothing i ever said was even directed to him.  if that’s still “harassing”, “bullying”, and now “terrorizing”, well, uh, my bad.  it certainly wasn’t my intention for him to vanish from the internet.  but if all it took was one grouchy fan who cares a lot about details, i’m frankly astounded that he was still here.

i’m actually rather dismayed that a penchant for detail is being devalued here — i’ve seen a screenshot of an ask someone sent him, saying that the people talking about “consistency” don’t care as much as they say they do.  well, yes, i do, tyvm.  that shouldn’t be a huge surprise or a bad thing for a show with a main character who exhibits traits of genuine OCD.

meanwhile the vitriol said of me (most of it not by name, granted, which is nice) has been far more mean-spirited than anything i said in the first place.  and has come largely from people who then congratulate themselves for being part of such an otherwise friendly and chill fandom.  weird, the things people say when they feel slighted.

emphasis that the show isn’t made just for me has been a somewhat common theme as well.  but it isn’t made just for you or anyone else, either, so why should anyone care when you like an episode?  it seems like the same reasoning applies.

i don’t feel entitled to anything here, btw.  but it looked like it had been trying to be an amazing series, and i’m deeply alarmed and worried to see the bar suddenly drop so low, twice in not so many weeks.

it’s certainly the staff’s prerogative to make whatever quality product they want.  but they have shown they’re willing to put amazing and brilliant effort into character development and motivation and continuity.  to go from that to last week’s episode was crushing.

fear not; i will channel my frustrations more constructively + coherently in the future.  but i can’t not be frustrated when things aren’t as good as i know they could be.

if it makes you feel any better, that means i’m basically always frustrated with everything.

lapisgemlazuli:

ok actually i am genuinely curious: what other inconsistencies/”tropey” things did you find in the latest episode other than pearl taking issue with eating??

and i do agree that consistency is important and listening to the audience is a must, but the fact that pearl enjoys baking for the scientific aspect of it is stated in the comics as well!!

as for the cookout with the pizzas, that may have been similar but it was still different enough for pearl to not complain. in this case she would be the only gem being forced to act as human as possible in front of connie’s parents. the cookout was intended to introduce everyone and have the pizzas get to know them as gems. there was no pressure to have any lying involved whatsoever in that situation, unlike in fusion cuisine

i highly doubt this is the product of lazy writing, like you seem to be implying here, and will not cause lazy writing in the future. if this truly was a mistake on the writers’ parts, then fine, my bad, it was one mistake. just one inconsistency isn’t going to destroy the entire show.

pk wrote a post, though there is plenty more she didn’t touch on as well

tl;dr: the whole episode felt like a series of one-liners based off of one-dimensional characters who only exist to say their stock jokes. nobody reacted to anyone else sensibly; the motivations were paper-thin; the whole premise of the episode contradicts everything we know about fusions. there are two entire new characters and the most development we get is “mom is a doctor”.

steven universe is usually very clever: it catches me off-guard, it’s full of sprinkles of insight into how the characters think, it refers back and forward to other events so i feel like there’s an actual persistent world here. this episode did none of those things. it turned the characters into clueless silhouettes of themselves so they would fit into someone’s plot idea — rather than letting the characters determine where the plot went.

holopearl:

lexyeevee:

purplekecleon:

So what about the cookout with the pizza family? Where Pearl was around a whole event centered on cooking? And had no issue?

I would really like if there were some consistency enforced instead of explanations that have to be sought elsewhere outside of the cartoon. It is extremely immersion-breaking while watching it.

it’s almost like Fusion Cuisine was a poorly-written episode

watching this account try to resolve problems with bad episodes with even more hamfisted explanations that are outright called retcons is pretty sad, and aggravating

just say “oops, our bad” instead of fucking up the canon

Like can you guys fucking not? You’re being needlessly nitpicky— and quite frankly rude— toward an actual writer who is kind enough to even answer your questions in the first place. He’s answering with a sense of humor and a kind word rather than fighting douchebaggery with douchebaggery. Go outside. Hug a cat for goodness’ sake.

But that original reply isn’t a joke.  It’s cutesy, I guess, but reads to me as mostly dismissive.  Someone is jarred by a glaring inconsistency, and the response is “ha ha uhhh [some bullshit]” instead of, I don’t know, taking the audience seriously.  I find that to be a bit rude.

I’m griping because I like the show, and this was a disappointingly poor episode, and the closest to an official comment is to pretend that it wasn’t.

It wasn’t even just Pearl’s attitude towards eating; the two of us spent hours talking this out, and almost everything about the episode was inconsistent with established canon or just plain tropey.

So the problem I have is this: if everyone is willing to pretend this episode is just as good as all the others, what keeps the show actually as good as it (usually) is?

Also for your consideration, here are some cats.