#lavi post

[lavistine-arti]

a rabbit hole i have recently dived into

[laviarray]

So Lily Orchard is doing a Steven Universe video...

And I’m dreading it...

Now Ive been following Lily for the past few months on Youtube and I like her take on a lot of subjects, both media and politics. I’ve marathoned all of her Glass of Water videos and found a lot of her points in them to be thoughtful and logical... Except when talks about Steven Universe...

I don’t what it is about this series and her, but it always she short circuits when she tries to talk about the series. Its one thing if we reach different conclusions on certain things about the show but another thing entirely when the evidence fro her points either makes no sense or almost comes from a different series. So as she comes closer to releasing her “Steven Universe sucks and here’s why“ video, I sit disappointed, knowing I'm about to lose a lot of respect for her. 

One of the first weird point she makes in the sneak peak of her video is the release schedule of the series. Now I don’t think anyone who watches the show is thrilled with the releases being so erratic, but Lily takes to another level by no only blaming the crewniverse for the erratic releases, but says they should write the show to cater to that release schedule so they don’t come back from a long hiatus to filler beach city episodes.

(What....?)

Ignoring the fact that the writers have gone on record saying they don’t control that, there is no way to write a show to deal with a weird release scheduling issue like that.  CN usually structures the bombs around the story arcs and then might either tie the filler stuff in that run or they might go on hiatus after the arcs and come back to the filler. There isn’t any way for them to deal with that kind of problem without writing the Beach City episodes out entirely. While I do generally hate Beach city episodes, they are there to give Steven a breather and deal with more laid back issues and function as filler should.

She goes into how the Cluster arc waffles too much as there are only a few episodes that deal with it directly while the others just focus on side stories with the characters. So she ends up recommending that those episodes come first to resolve the Cluster first and then deal with the side stories.

The original order:

Her Order:

Ignoring that the episodes after would make you wonder why are they still at the barn at this point, this would make sense to structure the arc this way, only if you didn’t notice that the arc was about Peridot. The whole reason the cluster is never made a huge thing in those episodes was because the arc is about Peridot going through an arc to value the planet so when goes to deal with the cluster, its out of love for the planet and for the people she had bonded with over the course of time she worked on the drill. Shuffling the episodes around like this would undermine the conclusion of that arc by gem drill. (Plus Super Watermelon Island was probably written in to make them more an event two-parter. ) Granted you could argue you could move the arc this way to just deal with the cluster first, but nothing is really gain besides just dealing with the ticking clock of the cluster faster, which wasn’t the point of the arc in the first place. The only episodes that count as filler there were “The Answer” and “Steven’s Birthday”, both probably there to break up the 7 episodes that are Peridot focused and give the other characters some breathing room.

However it isn’t just this video she is weird about Steven Universe. In her video “ Equestria Daily Community Devolves Into Racist Tantrum “, while talking about the lame criticisms about Applejack’s voice actress black in the next series, she says just because she is black does not mean she will sound like a stereotype, like how Amethyst’s voice actress tries to make her sound like she has a really bad southern drawl. Besides the fact Lily didn’t do the basic research to find that Michaela Dietz, Amethyst’s voice actress, is basically doing her own voice in a higher pitch for Amethyst, Amethyst doesn’t sound black nor southern. (Speaking as a Texan, I know what southern accents sound like).

There are more places she has these problems too

Saying Pink Diamond is a fascist, even though everything that would classify the Diamonds as Fascist, PD/Rose Quartz fights against. Saying Pink Diamond is never challenged by the plot, even though the last run of episodes was about the crystal gems challeging their views of her. Saying PD and Pearl’s relationship is that of a master and slave, even though all of PD and Rose’s dialogue is treating Pearl as an equal. Saying that off-colors are a plot hole while Peridot is able to function, which is a whole bag of worms that can be its own post, but basically they made Peridot knowing she couldn’t change, while the off colors are anomalies that weren’t planned.

I can keep going....

Long story short, Im all for criticising the show on its failures, (I could go nuts ripping the show for Lapis) but Lily is just missing the mark on these points and its really sad to see a reviewer I respect mess up so much on this series.