#svtfoe asks

[mindareadsoots]

Yeah, with Steven Universe, the Diamonds really just don’t know any better, and so all Steven has to do is teach them that they’re wrong, and then they start being good. It’s a fair criticism to say that this is unrealistic, but it works within the internal logic of the show.

With Moon, it’s a much more intractable problem because she is written realistically. Moon knew what she was doing. Moon knew who was going to get hurt when she sided with Mina. So when SvtFoE tries to be like, “Well, she’s sorry so it’s okay now,” it falls much flatter. 

It falls flat in the story and it especially falls flat when you apply it to real life, because with the past five years we’ve had to live through, everybody knows a “Moon Butterfly” by now. You can find them all on Facebook. And odds are a lot of them aren’t sorry.

[mindareadsoots]

Exactly.

That is clearly the metaphor they were going for. Magic is a tool that the royal family - and by extension the humans of mewni at large - use to repress the monsters, so giving it up is a symbolic way of balancing the scales.

The problem is that magic isn’t JUST Star’s favorite toy, it’s a fundamental force in the universe. Star didn’t burn all of her money, she went, “Hey, my smart phone is a sign of privilege. I should shut down the electric grid.”

The message of the show never seemed to be that all magic is bad, just some of the people who used it. If the series had ended with Moon having her magic taken away, that would have made perfect sense, but destroying magic entirely is overkill.

And that’s only the start of the problem, of course. We saw throughout the series that there are numerous magical creatures that can only exist with magic, and Star just killed all of them. The show even acknowledges and glosses over that fact hoping that you don’t think about it too much, but it’s utterly poisons the tone of the series when you stop and think about how much Star just DESTROYED while trying to get a happy ending.

[mindareadsoots]

Magic could exist without the unequal system that gives access only to the elite few, and the system of inequality it supported could exist even after magic is destroyed!

It could, and by all appearances it will!

Something that’s made very clear in the final episode is that Mina’s still around. Anti-monster sentiment is still very much around. Sure, Star stopped Mina and her lot from killing monsters... with magic. But guns still exist. And with the newly Cleaved Earth there are another six billion people - most of whom are gonna be scared of monsters - for Mina to recruit to her side.

That’s one of the more lowkey frustrations with the whole finale. Not only is destroying magic and crushing the multiverse a disproportionate change to the status quo, it doesn’t even change anything! All of the systemic problems that Star was fighting still exist, except now she can’t narwhal blast them in the face!

[mindareadsoots]

Yeah.

What’s really funny is that if you think back, the Star Vs finale came out right around the same time as the final season of Game of Thrones. 2019 was not a good year for finales I guess.

[mindareadsoots]

Yeah.

There was a quote from the writers after the finale aired where they said something about how they wanted Star to make a “hard choice” by destroying magic, which is funny to me because Star herself doesn’t suffer any serious consequences from her decision.

Do any of her close friends die because they can’t survive without magic? No. Tom and Ponyhead are inexplicably fine after magic is destroyed.

Does she lose any status as a Princess? She gave that up long before the finale, so no.

Does she even have to give up being with her boyfriend now that inter-dimensional travel is impossible? No, because the entire multiverse collapses in on itself JUST so those two can be together, which is a whole OTHER fucking problem with the finale!

[mindareadsoots]

Yeah, that’s one of the many many many things that the writers clearly didn’t think through. 

[mindareadsoots]

It is kind of amazing how quickly and how far Star Vs drops the ball in its finale. It’s honestly a little hard to wrap my head around all the ways that it fails.

There are a couple of places where I can see what they were trying to go for, but for a lot of it I genuinely don’t know why they thought this was a good idea.

I’m not going to write a full essay breaking down the finale right here, but that’s what it would take to fully grasp the problems with this finale. It’s a mess.

[mindareadsoots]

There are still two problems with that.

The first problem is that it’s bullshit. Don’t piss on my head and say that it’s raining. Word of God is welcome to say that Tom and Ponyhead aren’t quote-unquote “magic” but come the fuck on.

The second problem is that there are still a lot of magical creatures that unambiguously got destroyed. The Magic High Commission got turned into non-living objects. The unicorns in the magic dimension got fucking disintegrated. And all of Star’s spells presumably just ceased to exist entirely.

I imagine someone is going to say, “Well, Star’s spells weren’t really alive, they were just a symbolic representation of her magic,” but that feels really disingenuous when we had three or four episodes throughout the series dedicated to their interpersonal drama.

So even if you accept the justification that some of the magical people in the show “aren’t magic” Star still has a pretty big body count on her ledger.