I remember the exact moment I fell in love with Steven Universe and it wasn't after they made the alien invasion plot explicit, the part where everyone says it 'gets good', like you have to wade through the earlier stuff like it's a fucking slog and not some of the best children's television out there. I fell in love with SU in episode 2, at this moment:
"Well done, Steven! You saved most of Beach City!"
Yeah sure, plenty of shows do a silly 'haha things got broke' bit, but this was different. This was bringing home something important that they'd been saying all episode.
This was the episode that introduced the thesis statement of the whole show, and they managed to keep that thesis statement clear throughout the entire thing, all the way to the end: "If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn't have hot dogs." Steven Universe is a show about how things are broken, and that's okay. Steven Universe is a show about how people are fucked up, and that's okay. It's not our job to be perfect or condemn everything that isn't; it's our job to say "okay, we've got this fucking mess here, and wallowing in blame and recrimination and shame and self-hatred isn't going to help. How do we move forward?" I had never, ever seen that message committed to in another children's show before Steven Universe, and it's one of the most important things you can tell any kid -- that the mess of their life is normal! That it's okay! We have stuff that sucks and we can move on with that!
Oh, sure, other shows will have a Very Special Episode every now and again where someone makes a bad mistake and has to be 'forgiven', or is unable to do something and has to live with it, or there's a tragedy or whatever. That's not what Steven Universe did. Steven Universe got comfortable with the mess on every level and kept coming back to it, both subtly and overtly. Steven can't save the moon goddess temple, Greg fakes a broken leg to be with his son and psychologically fucks up his magic powers and the other plot of the episode that's acting as a metaphor for the whole thing involves them literally fixing that problem by duct taping over it, the Gems don't know how to raise Steven and make him a false obstacle course to boost his confidence and he has to Uno Reverse their own trick on them and shoulder the responsibility of parenting them instead of the other way around. There's an entire episode that's just Peridot confirming that her people fucked up an area of the Earth so badly that nothing will ever grow there again and this isn't resolved by fixing it, but by other characters saying, "yeah, it's broken and it sucks and we can't stop that. How about we grow a garden literally anywhere else on the planet."
And this is why it confuses the fuck out of me when people bitch about Steven Universe being 'problematic' because things suck. Yeah! That's the entire fucking point of the show! Things are allowed to suck and be broken. "Ooooh it's nazi apologism because he forgave a warlord and she didn't get murdered onscreen or whatever" he didn't forgive her! He convinced her to stop warlording and has an uneasy alliance with her! She's fixing what she broke as best she can, just like every single other character in the show! Her perfectionism and purity and total inability to live with broken things and messy truths and people who are different, sometimes in harmful ways, was the entire problem that the whole show was about! And Steven beat it! Insistence that the Bad Guys get punished or removed and the Pure Good Guys get a clean ending with no moral quandaries is the audience taking Evil White Diamond's position. It's literally being the villain of the show.
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