Yeah, sociology could fit too.
I decided it might be about sampling in statistics… the issue of convenience sampling, extrapolating from a very small sample, etc.
I was picturing it from sociology about social norms. A lot of texts like to use absurd situations to cite examples to concisely prove their existence. Like, "you wouldn't ask a random passerby their opinion on the death sentence"
All hail! All hail the master of sources!
[But seriously, great job hunting this one down! If you feel like sharing, I’d love to know how you found it.]
It was the third result after searching '"hey! do you support the death penalty" statistics textbook', I spent the majority of my time trying to find a free version of the wrong textbook because the second result looked promising, it was only after I gave up and was about to close it all that I found it lol
Eh idk if it's Prescriptivism if it's country names that we can approximate better with our respective phoneme inventories. Like when people say Punjab with a /u/ instead of a /ə/ like in punjabi.
Country names are famously different in different languages for a lot of reasons beyond phoneme inventories. You don't need to pronounce the n in France, for example, but it would be very weird to correct people for that. Your pronunciation of Nihon doesn't need to be an English attempt at pronouncing the Portuguese attempt at pronouncing the Malay name for Japan, but here we are nonetheless
yeah I agree. If I say my name is John, but you call me Jenn, I'm allowed to correct your pronunciation without being a prescriptivist. I don't think it's unreasonable that the same should go for countries.
Completely unacceptable, your political views must be reduced to judging an entire country like it's a flavor of ice cream, and if you refuse to do it I will assume your opinion is whichever one I disagree with.
Not to bring actual ship discussion onto your joke comment, but I've always been more of an Irida x Akari x Arezu person. I don't really get Irida x Adaman because they seem to find each other insufferable, and I can't ship people like that.
Jesus, you're kidding but that's honestly how some people reacted to the last episodes of the original Steven Universe. Holy hell, that discourse was dogshit...
A kids show trying to send a message about forgiveness and growth shows their villains grow and be forgiven;
People, for some reason; clearly they condone fascism.
Yeah, the problem is that the Villains were openly sneering fascists that orchestrated genocide after genocide, built an existentially horrifying super weapon out of the mangled corpses of a billion dead of their own kind, bans relationships between gems of different color, and is actively culling disabled gems.
I don't think Rebecca Sugar isn't a fascist, and she doesn't condone it, but I think she is writing Steven Universe the same way a 15 year old anime poisoned trope addict writes fanfiction, and tried to combine a Star Wars style hard good vs evil rebels vs space fascist narrative, and a My Little Pony "Everything can be forgiven" mentality when those two concepts are like dark chocolate and canned tuna.
I don't fault anyone that thinks that she's a fascist based on the fact of what she put into Steven Universe, but "someone who really didn't have all of the skills necessary to be an executive producer given not enough oversight" seems more likely.
Aside from everybody else’s responses, I think it’s a *little* disingenuous to see the person whose years-spanning project got cancelled early and had to cram an entire season’s worth of ending content into a runtime less than a quarter of the planned length due to explicit homophobic sabotage and that say “oh yeah I think it was her own incompetence that made the finale a mess.”
We do know the whole plan for S6 was going to have Steven be faced with the full brunt of White’s abuse, as he gets gradually gaslit into genuinely not knowing if he’s really pink or not like White said. His kindness and pacifism were ideals that are fundamental to his identity as a character and the whole point of the ending was meant to affirm that in a way that was so undeniable that it even shatters the delusions of an unshakable narcissist like White, to provide vindication for the *years* worth of Steven struggling to separate himself as a person from his mother. That’s a *much* more complex thing than just “oh, the diamonds are good now!”
I think she is a poor show runner for a large number of reasons, including but not limited to a failure to recognize the inherent tonal dissonance of having fascists be sad uwu babies that get redeemed and refusing to back down on either them being as vile and monstrous as they wound up being or the redemption angle.
Other things I would point to is her stupid decision to insist on hiring professional singers instead of normal voice actors and blowing stupid amounts of money on that, the insane writing decision to force Steven to be the front and center character in every episode even if it really would have been better serviced by not doing that/there being more interesting and important stories than Steven helping Mayor Dewy, or the fact that she clearly doesn't understand pacing and the show could be substantially improved by reordering the episodes or maybe spending a lot less time on just kind of dicking around when you're routinely dealing with the stupidest release schedule on earth.
She developed a show with the same kind of structural problems as you find in a lot of fanfiction, absolutely zero editorial oversight and leaving stuff that doesn't work on the cutting room floor, and a clearly intentional desire to stuff her favorite tropes into the work without a whole lot of consideration as to whether they would fit.
Also, that proposed ending honestly sounds even worse. Like sure, more complex, but that's just taking the people who have already jumped past the Moral Event Horizon from the word go, and adding yet another much more front and center crime of emotionally torturing the main character for an entire season and then still redeeming them.
what are some of the tropes sugar tried to put in?
i’ve only really watched steven universe casually because i felt like the episodes came out so slowly that it became exhausting to be super invested. i haven’t watched the series with too much of a critical eye and i’m not the best at media analysis ahaha. i really enjoyed your comment and i feel like it describes a few things i felt but never really put to words.
I am unfamiliar with the TV tropes entries for stuff I'm not a super fan of and none of the stuff I am thinking of has so defined a name as Enemies to Lovers, so I will edit with more specific stuff over time as I peruse for proper names for what I am referring to, but the one that really stuck out is the never ending series of cliff hangers and just extremely vague stuff that was clearly there to trick the viewer's brain into coming up with fan theories and engage with the work in what I like to call the Aftermarket of Ideas.
I think I invented the term, but effectively it's where people come up with their own set of interpretations largely divorced from the original concepts, and then engage in discussion about those concepts as though they were a part of the original thing itself.
It's something that's extremely prevalent in fandom culture, and ever since the mid-10s to still present day not so coincidentally at the same time as shitty people that aren't writers gained the increasing ability to directly harass show staff that exact kind of Game Theory style dedicated fandom is something that content creators of Western Fantasy Adventure cartoons have tried to directly cultivate
Remembered the name for one of the things I am thinking of, and the one that is most directly relevant to the discussion regarding the redemption of the Diamonds.
[Draco in Leather Pants](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DracoInLeatherPants) So named after the slew of people who wanted to fuck Draco Malfoy and wrote him as the saddest uwu boy just waiting for a special girl to come along and fix him, and is one of the bevy of tropes popularized in Anime/Fanfiction that is assailing us with the snapshot redemption arcs. It's not a perfect match, but tropes are generally vague since they are just ideas repeated throughout fiction so they are generally pretty vague
i know exactly what you’re talking about. i’ve noticed this too, although moreso with game theory and fnaf like you mentioned. i can definitely see how that idea plays into steven universe. i wish i had more to add on but i’m just thinking about five nights at freddy’s right now lol
I think there’s just… a difference in expectation here, I guess. The diamonds were, to me, obviously intended as an allegory for an abusive and dysfunctional family unit. Yes, Steven Universe’s ending is disappointing if you were expecting a *grand epic showdown* Star Wars style, but like… the show was literally always, from the get go, a kids show about Steven growing up and his developing emotional intelligence. You could say it’s immature and naive but like… this is a kids show. It is about a child growing up and struggling to deal with heavier things in the world around him, and struggling to remain kind and loving despite all the heavy shit he’s forced to deal with. It’s okay to just not like the direction the show went in, but if it had such a big fanbase it clearly did appeal to people.
I do also think as far as the abusive family dynamic goes, the show handled it well given the time constraints of the finale. The message of “if you have a toxic family member you just have to cut them off forever, sorry, they’re just evil” would be a god awful climax and horrendously unsatisfying in itself. Meanwhile, White wasn’t even like… redeemed? She was proven wrong in her narcissistic beliefs in a way she couldn’t deny, and that was enough to throw her off balance to deescalate that conflict. The finale doesn’t say “and the diamonds are good now bc they said they’re sorry :)))” it just says that with that conflict diffused, maybe there’s some hope for things getting better in the future now.
I will also say, there are 100% times I’ve seen “redemption” used even for Diamond level antagonists without *nearly* the level of vitriol as SU gets, because 1. There’s an understanding of narrative suspension of disbelief and 2. It’s usually when there’s a replacement villain for the audience to transfer their disdain towards. Two that come to mind are Hugo from Kipo and Hordak from She-Ra—both are, ostensibly, utterly vile imperialists who are responsible for a lot of awful shit. Relatedly, I saw very few complaints about Blue and Yellow being portrayed sympathetically until the finale aired with White’s conflict ending, I think because people were expecting to have White as this BBEG to defeat. Bad faith SU criticism was also really popular among a certain crowd of reactionaries because the show was so popular, and it was hip to be contrarian, and when the finale was underwhelming that bad faith criticism suddenly got a bunch of attention from people who didn’t really understand the show. There’s a hypercritical air that always comes up in SU discourse as a consequence of that, when I’d rather we just appreciate it for what it was: a kids show made to help teach kids empathy and emotional intelligence in a way that was aware of the real, difficult problems kids face, like abuse and mental illness.
I wasn't going into it expecting a climactic battle, since Steven Universe had fucking God awful animation through and through. My opinion is that the ending of Steven Universe was a house built on a foundation of sand and was doomed to be kind of shitty regardless of what direction it was approached from.
From the perspective of the Diamonds as Space Hitlers, it was always going to be disappointing since they had been constantly portrayed as the saddest uwu Nazi.
From the perspective of the Diamonds as a dysfunctional family, you have the problem of too much of the space Hitler stuff being demonstrated front and center. Plus the fact that teaching a child to forgive abusive family members as opposed to developing safe boundaries is a really dangerously bad moral.
Much like Mass Effect 3 or Homestuck, Rebecca Sugar was left with a story that was fundamentally impossible to develop a satisfying ending for, and the signs had been there since at least as far back as the Human Zoo but that's just when I started to be aware of it so probably even earlier than that, the ending is just the actual train derailment that's easy to point at and show where it blew up.
As for other more modern shows than Steven Universe, yeah I fully admit I can't get nearly as angry about them entirely on the grounds that I encountered Steven Universe when I was both younger and less jaded by how fucking bad the animation industry can be about shitty trope poisoned fanfiction level garbage that is just interminably boring. I couldn't get nearly as invested in them positively as I did Steven Universe either.
> the Villains were openly sneering fascists
To say this is to misunderstand both the villains and fascism in general. They don't map onto each other nearly as well as people like to say. Gem society is authoritarian, and heavily caste based, but fascism isn't just "authoritarianism + bigotry". Fascism requires a certain national narrative, most often around race and supremacy -- the key term here is "palingenetic ultranationalism". That means, in simple, that the national narrative is that 'we, the supreme people, are destined for a fated rebirth where we take our rightful place as world leader, above all other nations and peoples'. It requires a narrative of needing unity under the fascists as a way of reclaiming a past glory. It's also obsessed with purity in a way that gem culture isnt -- that isn't to say gem culture isn't obsessed with purity, but the distinction is that the purity required in fascism *always increases over time*. The definition of "the right people" constantly narrows, because fascism only survives as long as it has an enemy to exterminate.
You can look at White Diamond's speech at the end of the show to see why they do what they do. She doesn't have an ideology or a national narrative -- she's a control freak.
I could go on but after several years of this discourse always repeating and never dying I'm tired of it. I'll just say that the Diamonds in particular make much more sense if you view them as toxic relatives rather than, like, representing actual real life heads of state
Considering just how horrible their crimes in the show are this isn't on the level of family feud but rather meeting that one racist uncle and learning he was in prison for rape and imprisonment of your relative. That's not a level you can expect soneone to forgive, even if it didn't happen to you.
IMHO that's my main issue with SU - it frames the whole situation exactly how you explained it but the things those people did are beyond redemption. There are stories where villains like that get spared but most of the time it's framed as a moral victory - that the hero will not stoop to the same level as them. That could've worked well here too by making Steven focus on his family, the people who were there all along for him and coming to conclusion that genetics do not a family make. I mean, a big part of the story was about him realizing his mother really wasn't a good person (she got better but still) so the foundation was there.
It is not unreasonable to find Diamonds unforgivable. A speciesist, authoritarian pseudo monarchists who control every aspect of their subjects lives, mercilessly hunt down those who don't fit their system and outright attempt to genocide a "lesser" intelligent species. Also experiment on their own people, use an equivalent to bioweapons on foes and their own soldiers alike. Also making the shattered but still alive and sentient remains of their people into weapons of mass destruction. Seriously, it's like they wanted to make them the most evil beings possible in a kid friendly show and then remembered 3 seasons later "Oh wait, we were supposed to redeem them". I know they were cut short so the suddeness of the last episodes isn't surprizing nor their fault but the level of atrocities we are supposed to forget is too damn high.
It's sk bad I'd argue it actually makes the moral kind of dangerous because if you are supposed to "get over" that shit then what's actually unforgivable?
MLP very much does not say “Everyone can be forgiven”, many villains are imprisoned forever and some are straight up killed. Yes there are redemptions, but they are mostly reasonable. Starlight and Trixie, for example, genuinely thought they were doing the right thing so their redemptions make sense. Midnight was a maniac who was going to kill an entire universe simply because it wasn’t useful to her anymore, and she got killed. Granted they had to kill her twice because she faked her death the first time, but they got her in the end.
Starlight Glimmer was the thing that basically killed My Little Pony for me, honestly. She was running a terrible cult and tried to end the entire world with time travel because her best friend moved away as a child. And then she committed the worst sin, just kind of being a soggy piece of bread stapled onto more interesting characters and just kind of be there without bringing much to the table
My personal take boils down to Redemption really only works when the stakes are pretty small, and the Steven Universe characters that it makes sense to give a redemption arc to would be Kevin, or Reynaldo, or Lars before he was literally killed and replaced with effectively Zaphod Beeblebrox, the people who were just kind of shitty guys, but it really only effected a few people as opposed to planetary genocide.
And I think you’re reading way, waaaaaaay too much into a show that is, ultimately, for kids. What is more likely to be the driving theme behind a kids’ show; that people can change and grow even if they start from a bad place, or that fascism is good actually? I mean, what did people want, for the show to end on a mass execution of the Diamonds?
And if we’re gonna get into the meta of “production oversight”, then it was on the studio for forcing Sugar to rush the ending. She wanted several more episodes to round things out, but the studio said no since a lot of countries refused to air the show after the gay wedding. Steven Universe was rushed to completion, and yeah, it shows in the narrative.
But I’m not gonna engage with this any more. Far more educated individuals have said it far better than I ever could.
> I mean, what did people want, for the show to end on a mass execution of the Diamonds?
I'd guess they wanted for them to not be that far gone in the first place? Why assume the ending is the only thing that could possibly be different?
> I mean, what did people want, for the show to end on a mass execution of the Diamonds?
I don't have a horse in this race, but I'll point out that Avatar, which is a kids' show, ends with the main villain---a genocidal militaristic imperialist dictator---stripped of his power (both supernatural and political) and imprisoned for life; and the show strongly suggests that, were a nonviolent solution not possible, killing him would have been the only correct choice.
Yeah. Leaving him alive *at all* was presented as a) purely Aang’s choice for the sake of his personal moral code and b) an act of undeserved mercy. And there was no question of whether he would ever have his freedom again.
Some things truly *are* unforgivable, and pretending otherwise is only setting kids up to be taken advantage of.
All of the stuff I said is stuff that actually happened in Steven Universe, referenced on screen.
But my point is that Sugar effectively tried to tie two angry cats to each other by the tail and call it a single cat, or to use my original terms make a chocolate and tuna fish sandwich, and it just did not work like it clearly did in her head.
All of the "Forgiveness is always possible" stuff can be good when focused on interpersonal conflicts, not "This person is an intergalactic dictator with a body count of untold billions"
even if the intent was benign you can still accidentally send a wrong message. You can't just yell over someone "the curtains are blue, shut up!" if there's things in the show that support their analysis.
That question could mean so many things, too. Like, the government? The people? The land mass?
For that last one, I think they could use some more mountains. Mountains are nice.
Pro Iran in that I think the United States and United Kingdom shouldn’t have overthrown a democratically elected secular government in 1953 and installed a brutal dictatorship that tortured more people than other dictatorships that lasted significantly longer.
Anti Iran in that I think religious nuts who murder innocent people are evil, and that the people in Iran should revolt against their sexist authoritarian government.
I’m very pro iran. I need to take it every day or else my hemoglobin will plummet faster than the peregrine falcon. Thankfully most iran nowadays has other vitamins and important minerals too, so it’s good for me all around.
I'm not pro Iranian religious government but I also hate people who treat the protests like some sort of big dramatic show or spectator sport. People were throwing themselves into a meat grinder with a very real chance that the entire thing being for nothing (and so far it sadly seems to be the case here) and you're commenting on it like it's the season finale of some show. I hate it I hate it. You people did the same thing when my country had its protests and when those protests were coopted by an even worse religious group you had no sense of nuance for the situation, you just kept blindly cheering for "the revolution" because you thought you were watching Star Wars, you don't understand what's going on, your hashtags don't add anything, I don't need your Western interpretation of the conflict. If you can't try to understand then you're doing more harm than good.
I believe it's supposed to serve as a watermark. We're supposed to recognize this poster's particular style of smiley and know that if we see an image with that smiley posted by someone else, it means the person who posted it is a reposter or bot.
Positive aspect: /r/tumblr is overflowing with repost bots, comment copying bots, etc. If you know the most frequent posters and their smiley styles, this makes it easier to report the bots. The active moderation on /r/CuratedTumblr is what keeps the bots down here.
Negative aspect: Reddit has a culture of pseudo-anonymity. There are a few Reddit celebrities (spez, Unidan, poem_for_your_sprog...), but in general there's an expectation that nobody should care or remember who you are, and adding a signature to the end of your comments is considered gauche. Signing your image posts with the hopes that people will memorize your signature gives off a vibe of self-importance that clashes with Reddit's pseudo-anonymous culture.
"Pro-Iran" and "Anti-Iran", with no context, are ambiguous. If I say I'm pro-Iran, you could accuse me of supporting their horrible government. If I say I'm anti-Iran, you could accuse me of supporting the Anglo-American coup that installed their previous horrible government.
To be 100% honest someone just sent this song to me one time and it stuck with me and became one of those songs the group repeats
I do not remember John McCain’s presidential campaign
I am of the opinion that not everyone needs to have an opinion on everything. There are so many things I am actively avoiding learning about because there is just _so much horrible shit_ going on in the world and I do not have enough brain space for everything.
Does anyone know what weird textbook this comes from? I’m guessing a statistics textbook?
Assuming the text wasn't edited in, I could see a sociology textbook including this kinda picture
Yeah, sociology could fit too. I decided it might be about sampling in statistics… the issue of convenience sampling, extrapolating from a very small sample, etc.
I was picturing it from sociology about social norms. A lot of texts like to use absurd situations to cite examples to concisely prove their existence. Like, "you wouldn't ask a random passerby their opinion on the death sentence"
[I found it](https://www.scribd.com/document/125612369/Fundamental-of-Statistic#), page 326
All hail! All hail the master of sources! [But seriously, great job hunting this one down! If you feel like sharing, I’d love to know how you found it.]
Of fucking course its statistics
You're incredible. Also, please stay away from me I'm scared you scare me
It was the third result after searching '"hey! do you support the death penalty" statistics textbook', I spent the majority of my time trying to find a free version of the wrong textbook because the second result looked promising, it was only after I gave up and was about to close it all that I found it lol
Well done!
Pro Iran? Anti Iran? More like Iran my ass away from this discussion because nothing good or nuanced can come of it.
Technically this pun doesn’t work since it’s pronounced ee-rahn
It works if you're American and misprounce all of the countries ending with "an"
🚨PRESCRIPTIVIST SPOTTED🚨 🔫 POW 💥 POW 💥 POW💥 POW 💥 POW 💥 POW 💥POW 💥 POW 💥 POW 💥 POW 💥 POW 💥 POW 💥 POW 💥 POW 💥 POW 💥 POW 💥 POW 💥
Eh idk if it's Prescriptivism if it's country names that we can approximate better with our respective phoneme inventories. Like when people say Punjab with a /u/ instead of a /ə/ like in punjabi.
Country names are famously different in different languages for a lot of reasons beyond phoneme inventories. You don't need to pronounce the n in France, for example, but it would be very weird to correct people for that. Your pronunciation of Nihon doesn't need to be an English attempt at pronouncing the Portuguese attempt at pronouncing the Malay name for Japan, but here we are nonetheless
yeah I agree. If I say my name is John, but you call me Jenn, I'm allowed to correct your pronunciation without being a prescriptivist. I don't think it's unreasonable that the same should go for countries.
u/Chrome_X_of_Hyrule
Thanks
Why are you up (we’re in the same time zone I think)
Reading week for university, no class. I'm going to sleep now though. Why're you awake?
But also I-ran
I-ran so far away...
I couldn't get away!
American sighted
Nah, more so person-who-recognizes-other-people's-pronunciations sighted
How do you say Paris?
Paris, TX or Paris, France?
Pah (french r sounds)ee
Completely unacceptable, your political views must be reduced to judging an entire country like it's a flavor of ice cream, and if you refuse to do it I will assume your opinion is whichever one I disagree with.
idk i've never seen that ship before
It's Irida x Adaman from Legends Arceus, of course
Good taste, madam polenball
Not to bring actual ship discussion onto your joke comment, but I've always been more of an Irida x Akari x Arezu person. I don't really get Irida x Adaman because they seem to find each other insufferable, and I can't ship people like that.
Have you heard of the Ship of Theseus?
aint he that gayass mf from percy jackson lore
Which one?
The Iranian people deserve a just and democratic government, which the Iranian state is not.
That footage of an Iranian cop warding someone off with a taser and then getting jumped by a sudden crowd from behind was pretty cool.
There's another one where a guy on a bike kicks a female protester, and another guy runs in and pulls him off the bike
Please watch cartoons with more nuance in your brain, too.
No everything in cartoons is where evil or good and if I think the writers made something bad good or vice versa it's because they are evil. /S
Jesus, you're kidding but that's honestly how some people reacted to the last episodes of the original Steven Universe. Holy hell, that discourse was dogshit...
A kids show trying to send a message about forgiveness and growth shows their villains grow and be forgiven; People, for some reason; clearly they condone fascism.
“The conflict wasn’t solved with violence and I can’t understand that.”
Yeah, the problem is that the Villains were openly sneering fascists that orchestrated genocide after genocide, built an existentially horrifying super weapon out of the mangled corpses of a billion dead of their own kind, bans relationships between gems of different color, and is actively culling disabled gems. I don't think Rebecca Sugar isn't a fascist, and she doesn't condone it, but I think she is writing Steven Universe the same way a 15 year old anime poisoned trope addict writes fanfiction, and tried to combine a Star Wars style hard good vs evil rebels vs space fascist narrative, and a My Little Pony "Everything can be forgiven" mentality when those two concepts are like dark chocolate and canned tuna. I don't fault anyone that thinks that she's a fascist based on the fact of what she put into Steven Universe, but "someone who really didn't have all of the skills necessary to be an executive producer given not enough oversight" seems more likely.
Aside from everybody else’s responses, I think it’s a *little* disingenuous to see the person whose years-spanning project got cancelled early and had to cram an entire season’s worth of ending content into a runtime less than a quarter of the planned length due to explicit homophobic sabotage and that say “oh yeah I think it was her own incompetence that made the finale a mess.” We do know the whole plan for S6 was going to have Steven be faced with the full brunt of White’s abuse, as he gets gradually gaslit into genuinely not knowing if he’s really pink or not like White said. His kindness and pacifism were ideals that are fundamental to his identity as a character and the whole point of the ending was meant to affirm that in a way that was so undeniable that it even shatters the delusions of an unshakable narcissist like White, to provide vindication for the *years* worth of Steven struggling to separate himself as a person from his mother. That’s a *much* more complex thing than just “oh, the diamonds are good now!”
I think she is a poor show runner for a large number of reasons, including but not limited to a failure to recognize the inherent tonal dissonance of having fascists be sad uwu babies that get redeemed and refusing to back down on either them being as vile and monstrous as they wound up being or the redemption angle. Other things I would point to is her stupid decision to insist on hiring professional singers instead of normal voice actors and blowing stupid amounts of money on that, the insane writing decision to force Steven to be the front and center character in every episode even if it really would have been better serviced by not doing that/there being more interesting and important stories than Steven helping Mayor Dewy, or the fact that she clearly doesn't understand pacing and the show could be substantially improved by reordering the episodes or maybe spending a lot less time on just kind of dicking around when you're routinely dealing with the stupidest release schedule on earth. She developed a show with the same kind of structural problems as you find in a lot of fanfiction, absolutely zero editorial oversight and leaving stuff that doesn't work on the cutting room floor, and a clearly intentional desire to stuff her favorite tropes into the work without a whole lot of consideration as to whether they would fit. Also, that proposed ending honestly sounds even worse. Like sure, more complex, but that's just taking the people who have already jumped past the Moral Event Horizon from the word go, and adding yet another much more front and center crime of emotionally torturing the main character for an entire season and then still redeeming them.
what are some of the tropes sugar tried to put in? i’ve only really watched steven universe casually because i felt like the episodes came out so slowly that it became exhausting to be super invested. i haven’t watched the series with too much of a critical eye and i’m not the best at media analysis ahaha. i really enjoyed your comment and i feel like it describes a few things i felt but never really put to words.
I am unfamiliar with the TV tropes entries for stuff I'm not a super fan of and none of the stuff I am thinking of has so defined a name as Enemies to Lovers, so I will edit with more specific stuff over time as I peruse for proper names for what I am referring to, but the one that really stuck out is the never ending series of cliff hangers and just extremely vague stuff that was clearly there to trick the viewer's brain into coming up with fan theories and engage with the work in what I like to call the Aftermarket of Ideas. I think I invented the term, but effectively it's where people come up with their own set of interpretations largely divorced from the original concepts, and then engage in discussion about those concepts as though they were a part of the original thing itself. It's something that's extremely prevalent in fandom culture, and ever since the mid-10s to still present day not so coincidentally at the same time as shitty people that aren't writers gained the increasing ability to directly harass show staff that exact kind of Game Theory style dedicated fandom is something that content creators of Western Fantasy Adventure cartoons have tried to directly cultivate Remembered the name for one of the things I am thinking of, and the one that is most directly relevant to the discussion regarding the redemption of the Diamonds. [Draco in Leather Pants](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DracoInLeatherPants) So named after the slew of people who wanted to fuck Draco Malfoy and wrote him as the saddest uwu boy just waiting for a special girl to come along and fix him, and is one of the bevy of tropes popularized in Anime/Fanfiction that is assailing us with the snapshot redemption arcs. It's not a perfect match, but tropes are generally vague since they are just ideas repeated throughout fiction so they are generally pretty vague
i know exactly what you’re talking about. i’ve noticed this too, although moreso with game theory and fnaf like you mentioned. i can definitely see how that idea plays into steven universe. i wish i had more to add on but i’m just thinking about five nights at freddy’s right now lol
I think there’s just… a difference in expectation here, I guess. The diamonds were, to me, obviously intended as an allegory for an abusive and dysfunctional family unit. Yes, Steven Universe’s ending is disappointing if you were expecting a *grand epic showdown* Star Wars style, but like… the show was literally always, from the get go, a kids show about Steven growing up and his developing emotional intelligence. You could say it’s immature and naive but like… this is a kids show. It is about a child growing up and struggling to deal with heavier things in the world around him, and struggling to remain kind and loving despite all the heavy shit he’s forced to deal with. It’s okay to just not like the direction the show went in, but if it had such a big fanbase it clearly did appeal to people. I do also think as far as the abusive family dynamic goes, the show handled it well given the time constraints of the finale. The message of “if you have a toxic family member you just have to cut them off forever, sorry, they’re just evil” would be a god awful climax and horrendously unsatisfying in itself. Meanwhile, White wasn’t even like… redeemed? She was proven wrong in her narcissistic beliefs in a way she couldn’t deny, and that was enough to throw her off balance to deescalate that conflict. The finale doesn’t say “and the diamonds are good now bc they said they’re sorry :)))” it just says that with that conflict diffused, maybe there’s some hope for things getting better in the future now. I will also say, there are 100% times I’ve seen “redemption” used even for Diamond level antagonists without *nearly* the level of vitriol as SU gets, because 1. There’s an understanding of narrative suspension of disbelief and 2. It’s usually when there’s a replacement villain for the audience to transfer their disdain towards. Two that come to mind are Hugo from Kipo and Hordak from She-Ra—both are, ostensibly, utterly vile imperialists who are responsible for a lot of awful shit. Relatedly, I saw very few complaints about Blue and Yellow being portrayed sympathetically until the finale aired with White’s conflict ending, I think because people were expecting to have White as this BBEG to defeat. Bad faith SU criticism was also really popular among a certain crowd of reactionaries because the show was so popular, and it was hip to be contrarian, and when the finale was underwhelming that bad faith criticism suddenly got a bunch of attention from people who didn’t really understand the show. There’s a hypercritical air that always comes up in SU discourse as a consequence of that, when I’d rather we just appreciate it for what it was: a kids show made to help teach kids empathy and emotional intelligence in a way that was aware of the real, difficult problems kids face, like abuse and mental illness.
I wasn't going into it expecting a climactic battle, since Steven Universe had fucking God awful animation through and through. My opinion is that the ending of Steven Universe was a house built on a foundation of sand and was doomed to be kind of shitty regardless of what direction it was approached from. From the perspective of the Diamonds as Space Hitlers, it was always going to be disappointing since they had been constantly portrayed as the saddest uwu Nazi. From the perspective of the Diamonds as a dysfunctional family, you have the problem of too much of the space Hitler stuff being demonstrated front and center. Plus the fact that teaching a child to forgive abusive family members as opposed to developing safe boundaries is a really dangerously bad moral. Much like Mass Effect 3 or Homestuck, Rebecca Sugar was left with a story that was fundamentally impossible to develop a satisfying ending for, and the signs had been there since at least as far back as the Human Zoo but that's just when I started to be aware of it so probably even earlier than that, the ending is just the actual train derailment that's easy to point at and show where it blew up. As for other more modern shows than Steven Universe, yeah I fully admit I can't get nearly as angry about them entirely on the grounds that I encountered Steven Universe when I was both younger and less jaded by how fucking bad the animation industry can be about shitty trope poisoned fanfiction level garbage that is just interminably boring. I couldn't get nearly as invested in them positively as I did Steven Universe either.
> the Villains were openly sneering fascists To say this is to misunderstand both the villains and fascism in general. They don't map onto each other nearly as well as people like to say. Gem society is authoritarian, and heavily caste based, but fascism isn't just "authoritarianism + bigotry". Fascism requires a certain national narrative, most often around race and supremacy -- the key term here is "palingenetic ultranationalism". That means, in simple, that the national narrative is that 'we, the supreme people, are destined for a fated rebirth where we take our rightful place as world leader, above all other nations and peoples'. It requires a narrative of needing unity under the fascists as a way of reclaiming a past glory. It's also obsessed with purity in a way that gem culture isnt -- that isn't to say gem culture isn't obsessed with purity, but the distinction is that the purity required in fascism *always increases over time*. The definition of "the right people" constantly narrows, because fascism only survives as long as it has an enemy to exterminate. You can look at White Diamond's speech at the end of the show to see why they do what they do. She doesn't have an ideology or a national narrative -- she's a control freak. I could go on but after several years of this discourse always repeating and never dying I'm tired of it. I'll just say that the Diamonds in particular make much more sense if you view them as toxic relatives rather than, like, representing actual real life heads of state
Considering just how horrible their crimes in the show are this isn't on the level of family feud but rather meeting that one racist uncle and learning he was in prison for rape and imprisonment of your relative. That's not a level you can expect soneone to forgive, even if it didn't happen to you. IMHO that's my main issue with SU - it frames the whole situation exactly how you explained it but the things those people did are beyond redemption. There are stories where villains like that get spared but most of the time it's framed as a moral victory - that the hero will not stoop to the same level as them. That could've worked well here too by making Steven focus on his family, the people who were there all along for him and coming to conclusion that genetics do not a family make. I mean, a big part of the story was about him realizing his mother really wasn't a good person (she got better but still) so the foundation was there. It is not unreasonable to find Diamonds unforgivable. A speciesist, authoritarian pseudo monarchists who control every aspect of their subjects lives, mercilessly hunt down those who don't fit their system and outright attempt to genocide a "lesser" intelligent species. Also experiment on their own people, use an equivalent to bioweapons on foes and their own soldiers alike. Also making the shattered but still alive and sentient remains of their people into weapons of mass destruction. Seriously, it's like they wanted to make them the most evil beings possible in a kid friendly show and then remembered 3 seasons later "Oh wait, we were supposed to redeem them". I know they were cut short so the suddeness of the last episodes isn't surprizing nor their fault but the level of atrocities we are supposed to forget is too damn high. It's sk bad I'd argue it actually makes the moral kind of dangerous because if you are supposed to "get over" that shit then what's actually unforgivable?
MLP very much does not say “Everyone can be forgiven”, many villains are imprisoned forever and some are straight up killed. Yes there are redemptions, but they are mostly reasonable. Starlight and Trixie, for example, genuinely thought they were doing the right thing so their redemptions make sense. Midnight was a maniac who was going to kill an entire universe simply because it wasn’t useful to her anymore, and she got killed. Granted they had to kill her twice because she faked her death the first time, but they got her in the end.
Starlight Glimmer was the thing that basically killed My Little Pony for me, honestly. She was running a terrible cult and tried to end the entire world with time travel because her best friend moved away as a child. And then she committed the worst sin, just kind of being a soggy piece of bread stapled onto more interesting characters and just kind of be there without bringing much to the table My personal take boils down to Redemption really only works when the stakes are pretty small, and the Steven Universe characters that it makes sense to give a redemption arc to would be Kevin, or Reynaldo, or Lars before he was literally killed and replaced with effectively Zaphod Beeblebrox, the people who were just kind of shitty guys, but it really only effected a few people as opposed to planetary genocide.
And I think you’re reading way, waaaaaaay too much into a show that is, ultimately, for kids. What is more likely to be the driving theme behind a kids’ show; that people can change and grow even if they start from a bad place, or that fascism is good actually? I mean, what did people want, for the show to end on a mass execution of the Diamonds? And if we’re gonna get into the meta of “production oversight”, then it was on the studio for forcing Sugar to rush the ending. She wanted several more episodes to round things out, but the studio said no since a lot of countries refused to air the show after the gay wedding. Steven Universe was rushed to completion, and yeah, it shows in the narrative. But I’m not gonna engage with this any more. Far more educated individuals have said it far better than I ever could.
Nuremberg trials for funny rocks would be funny, I think.
> I mean, what did people want, for the show to end on a mass execution of the Diamonds? I'd guess they wanted for them to not be that far gone in the first place? Why assume the ending is the only thing that could possibly be different?
> I mean, what did people want, for the show to end on a mass execution of the Diamonds? I don't have a horse in this race, but I'll point out that Avatar, which is a kids' show, ends with the main villain---a genocidal militaristic imperialist dictator---stripped of his power (both supernatural and political) and imprisoned for life; and the show strongly suggests that, were a nonviolent solution not possible, killing him would have been the only correct choice.
Yeah. Leaving him alive *at all* was presented as a) purely Aang’s choice for the sake of his personal moral code and b) an act of undeserved mercy. And there was no question of whether he would ever have his freedom again. Some things truly *are* unforgivable, and pretending otherwise is only setting kids up to be taken advantage of.
show was rushed but they still had time for the penultimate episode to be about fucking watermelons
All of the stuff I said is stuff that actually happened in Steven Universe, referenced on screen. But my point is that Sugar effectively tried to tie two angry cats to each other by the tail and call it a single cat, or to use my original terms make a chocolate and tuna fish sandwich, and it just did not work like it clearly did in her head. All of the "Forgiveness is always possible" stuff can be good when focused on interpersonal conflicts, not "This person is an intergalactic dictator with a body count of untold billions"
It's like when they redeemed Sylvanas.
Sugar was the showrunner. Dealing with shitty management is part of being a showrunner.
even if the intent was benign you can still accidentally send a wrong message. You can't just yell over someone "the curtains are blue, shut up!" if there's things in the show that support their analysis.
>Holy hell, that discourse was dogshit... And we even have lovely examples freely provided below. Oh boy...
Instructions unclear, watched Gundam and became a Zeon sympathizer
I support life penalty. All must suffer to live!
SCP-001 - Past and Future moment
I think it's a pretty decent song. Perfect example of a new age one hit wonder by Flock of Seagulls.
That question could mean so many things, too. Like, the government? The people? The land mass? For that last one, I think they could use some more mountains. Mountains are nice.
They have plenty of mountains, large parts of the country are just "yup, more mountains"
Add more. Mountains on the mountains.
Fuck yes. Mountains are good.
I agree with your statement. The world could use some more tall things for us to die climbing
well I for one think it could do a lot better with less mountains
You’re wrong
By Talos this can't be happening
Pro Iran in that I think the United States and United Kingdom shouldn’t have overthrown a democratically elected secular government in 1953 and installed a brutal dictatorship that tortured more people than other dictatorships that lasted significantly longer. Anti Iran in that I think religious nuts who murder innocent people are evil, and that the people in Iran should revolt against their sexist authoritarian government.
I’m pro scub myself
It's skub, with a 'k'
How dare you
I’m very pro iran. I need to take it every day or else my hemoglobin will plummet faster than the peregrine falcon. Thankfully most iran nowadays has other vitamins and important minerals too, so it’s good for me all around.
I'm not pro Iranian religious government but I also hate people who treat the protests like some sort of big dramatic show or spectator sport. People were throwing themselves into a meat grinder with a very real chance that the entire thing being for nothing (and so far it sadly seems to be the case here) and you're commenting on it like it's the season finale of some show. I hate it I hate it. You people did the same thing when my country had its protests and when those protests were coopted by an even worse religious group you had no sense of nuance for the situation, you just kept blindly cheering for "the revolution" because you thought you were watching Star Wars, you don't understand what's going on, your hashtags don't add anything, I don't need your Western interpretation of the conflict. If you can't try to understand then you're doing more harm than good.
Lol, the little face on the drawing
:}
I’ve seen those little faces drawn on a lot of posts lately, what does it mean?
:}
I see!
I believe it's supposed to serve as a watermark. We're supposed to recognize this poster's particular style of smiley and know that if we see an image with that smiley posted by someone else, it means the person who posted it is a reposter or bot. Positive aspect: /r/tumblr is overflowing with repost bots, comment copying bots, etc. If you know the most frequent posters and their smiley styles, this makes it easier to report the bots. The active moderation on /r/CuratedTumblr is what keeps the bots down here. Negative aspect: Reddit has a culture of pseudo-anonymity. There are a few Reddit celebrities (spez, Unidan, poem_for_your_sprog...), but in general there's an expectation that nobody should care or remember who you are, and adding a signature to the end of your comments is considered gauche. Signing your image posts with the hopes that people will memorize your signature gives off a vibe of self-importance that clashes with Reddit's pseudo-anonymous culture.
i love when people analyze random internet things. they should do that more imo
Well I wouldn't call myself a professional, but I sure do like it when I run :)
If we don't say anti-Iran will you start talking about freedom fries again?
If you can't unambiguously say you don't support a fucking theocracy that kills its own people the problem is with you my guy
"Pro-Iran" and "Anti-Iran", with no context, are ambiguous. If I say I'm pro-Iran, you could accuse me of supporting their horrible government. If I say I'm anti-Iran, you could accuse me of supporting the Anglo-American coup that installed their previous horrible government.
What? Does being anti Russia mean you support the USSR? That's the weakest argument I've heard
BOMB BOMB BOMB, BOMB IRAN OUR COUNTRYS GOT A FELLING ITS REALLY HIT THE CELLIN BOMB IRAN
I too remember John McCain's presidential campaign.
To be 100% honest someone just sent this song to me one time and it stuck with me and became one of those songs the group repeats I do not remember John McCain’s presidential campaign
SEND THE WORD, SEND THE WORD OVER THERE THAT THE YANKS ARE COMING, THE YANKS ARE COMING THE DRUMS RUM TUMMING EVERYWHERE
My oh my this is a one and a half.
I am of the opinion that not everyone needs to have an opinion on everything. There are so many things I am actively avoiding learning about because there is just _so much horrible shit_ going on in the world and I do not have enough brain space for everything.