So...how much of the bad discourse surrounding Steven Universe is just because people were really hoping that the Gems would beat up Andy DeMayo in "Gem Harvest"?
I was astonished to learn that there was controversy around this episode, because I felt like it was just kind of a normal children's cartoon about getting along with difficult relatives; and then I looked it up and learned that it had the extremely inauspicious timing of airing right after Trump's 2016 victory, and, yeah, okay, I can understand why a children's fantasy about reconciling with your obnoxious conservative relatives and getting them to accept your alternate family structure would play rather poorly at the time.
I think that Rebecca Sugar probably assumed, like most of the world that wasn't my specific flavour of extremely online in 2016, that Clinton would crush Trump and that this episode would maybe help to smooth over divisions; but of course what ended up happening is that an episode about how you should be empathetic towards your bigoted relatives ended up airing just as your bigoted relatives were going around victoriously hate-criming people in the street.
Watching it now, though, it ends up feeling wistful more than anything. Like, yeah, sure, it doesn't work like that, and we all know that now...But wouldn't it be nice if it did? It feels like a pleasant dream.
Steven Universe is fundamentally a power fantasy—but the fantasy is being able to get through to people and heal things. The power is love instead of strength.
"Like, yeah, sure, it doesn't work like that, and we all know that now...But wouldn't it be nice if it did?" Yeah....
That's it exactly. It was a power fantasy for someone whose fantasy is having the power to create a non-zero sum game scenario where everyone can be happy and anyone can be redeemed.
Which, is that naive? *shrug* Maybe. But it would be nice. There are people in this world who actually can't be redeemed, and some problems I'd rather solve with a molotov cocktail. But maybe we can have a little more redemption and a little more healing than we have right now, and is it really a bad thing to get kids to aspire to that?
