#jasper – @whilst-farting-i on Tumblr

whilst-farting-i reblogged

alexandriaellisart

the crystal gems

#steven universe #pearl #lapis lazuli #garnet #jasper #peridot #amethyst

whilst-farting-i reblogged

artbyblastweave

I saw a post a couple of days ago that said one of the most important things about Steven Universe, thematically, is that everybody in the core cast has done at least one completely morally unjustifiable thing, regardless of how likeable or sympathetic they are otherwise, and that this is important to understanding the show thematically. This is true.

But it also reminded me of one other thing I really like about Steven Universe, which is that it’s the emotional-toxicity equivalent of all those posts about how cartoons have to come up with unimaginably worse forms of death and violence in the course of avoiding getting censored for depicting plausible forms of death and violence. All of the ways in which SU characters cross those emotional and interpersonal lines are wrapped up either in their fantastic abilities or their bizarre life circumstances in a way that makes it all esoterically awful and often much more existentially horrifying than any of the real-life dynamics it’s alluding to. You’ve said nasty things to people in the heat of the moment but you’ve never shapeshifted into the guy’s dead wife to twist the knife a little more. No violation of bodily autonomy is ever gonna involve contriving a situation in which the other party will believe that it’s necessary to fuse with you, body and soul in order to do demolition work. The most toxic relationship in the world isn’t gonna involve imprisoning someone at the bottom of the ocean for several months and only emerging to participate in humanoid-sacrifice rituals. Your codependency will never last 8,000 years, be frontloaded with a faked death you’re biomechanically incapable of confessing to, and end with your partner’s suicide-by-childbirth. Your worst roommate situation will never end with one party stealing the apartment and taking it to the moon. Et al. Et al.

I don’t remember where I was going with this, precisely, (and I may have drifted sideways from the original discussion topic of crossed lines per se, but whatever.) I mean part of it’s funny because it exists in a series with tons of mundane, non-metaphorical examinations of interpersonal issues, like everything to do with Lars and Sadie, or Sour Cream and Marty. And there’s an extent to which I’m just describing how cartoons are written. But there’s something special about how Steven Universe does it. Something delightfully fucked up about it all. I think maybe part of it is that it’s a considered and embraced fucked-upedness, none of this is just an ill-considered fridge-logic by-product of something else they were trying to do. Like for every one of these, someone in the writers room probably went, “Man, this has some fucked up implications,” and then everyone would go, “Yeah!” and hi five and put it in specifically because of that. Great Show. Great show

#steven universe #garnet #amethyst #pearl #rose quartz #greg #jasper #lapis lazuli #pretty much #every time someone calls it irredeemable media because of some shit pearl did its like #yep that was pretty fucked up!#it also tracks if you understand codependency #im not saying it didnt have its warts and flaws but overall this show was so damn enjoyable

whilst-farting-i reblogged

artbyblastweave

Steven Universe is interesting to me because it’s got the most extreme dichotomy between ideas that would be better fleshed out in a show for adults, and ideas that are interesting specifically because they’re native to an unironic children’s show.

dandelion-reblogs

Can you elaborate on this? It seems interesting.

artbyblastweave

Sure. This is gonna be a long one.

Here are two things I believe about Steven Universe:

First, Steven Universe has a lot of high-concept science fiction worldbuilding concepts that it is not really interested in engaging with, because it is not what the show is about. These include:

The radical alternate history of the world, including the changed division of the states, the fact world war 2 possibly didn’t happen, the absence of Russia, the cultural fallout of California (somehow!) being flyover the way the Midwest is often treated as in real life. All of these are, like, hugely interesting, and totally ancillary to what the show wants to do, so they’re exclusively used for one of gags.
The presence of “Roadside picnic”- style depots of abandoned alien technology all over the planet, including in places that teens are capable of casually accessing in some cases, as well as the presence of wandering inhuman monsters that have coexisted with humanity for as long as there’s been agriculture. This is the kind of thing that should have a much larger impact on the shape of culture than it was shown to, and the main reason it doesn’t is because the show is thematically about Steven acting as a bridge between the two mostly siloed worlds- but the world is implicitly big enough that stuff should be happening without him and around him! And yet you never get anyone remotely curious about any of it who don’t use Steven as an entry point.
The occurrence of a massive extraterrestrial war in the show’s backstory, with thousands of superpowered aliens fighting an ideological rebellion against their totalitarian homeworld, culminating in a giant not-qute-but-arguably-worse-than-a-massacre, and including ideological infighting among the “heroic” side about how far is too far. All issues famously better unpacked in a show for adults.
The biology and society of the gems themselves. Generally examined in broad strokes as needed to make the story work, but many of my favorite SU fan works are the ones that do deep headcanon dives into the how and why of the gems- what are gems, how did their culture come to be, what does the day-to-day look like, why do they all have weapons by default, what was their militarization for, what are the mechanics of fusion, why do fusions always have a coherent aesthetic concept if cross-gem fusions aren’t supposed to happen, what are the implications of a society where “wall decoration” is a job that a sentient being is custom-engineered to fill, often digging even further into the horrifying implications of their society than the show itself could get away with.

However.

Steven Universe has a number of emotional arcs, character arcs and trope examinations that work so well specifically because Steven Universe is unironically a show aimed at children. One one level, this is because you have to adapt really mature themes and arcs so that kids will get them and so the suits will let you; on another level you have to pull it off with the constraint of 11-minute episodes, you have to work with the strengths and weaknesses of animation, you have to throw in the flashy stuff that kids watch cartoons for. And that leads to some beats that, in terms of pure craft, are interesting in terms of how they’re executed in the specific context of a kids show.

Rose’s arc, particularly the fact that her death is suicide-coded as all-get-out, and her behaviors are allowed to ripple forward, benefit and damage her survivors in a consistent way in a way that I’ve never seen- in a children’s show.
Pearl’s abandonment issues, rampant projection, complicated feelings regarding Steven and Greg, her treatment of Connie, her difficulty forming an independent identity and the ways in which that hurts the people around her- in a children’s show.
Amethyst’s arc, her guilt simply for being born (and what that’s a metaphor for), everything that’s implied about her dynamic with Greg and Rose in Maximum Capacity, her identity problems and lack of cultural context, all unpacked over the course of dozens of episodes of a children’s show.
Lapis’s bumpy, non-linear recovery arc, including her toxic relationship with Jasper and an excellent approximation of an emotionally abusive relationship with Peridot, all- and I cannot beat this drum enough- in a children’s show. Similarly, Sadie and Lars’s whole thing and how that was given space to breathe and play out.
And of course, Steven himself. Steven’s long term arc is normally something you would find in a show like The Venture Brothers, something that’s willing to play off the tropes of the kid hero while being very much aimed at an older audience, with a level of detached parodic irony baked into the execution (since they’re often unpacking specific characters via expies.) Steven Universe is literally the only children’s thing I’ve seen on TV that, even as it does all the unironically fun adventures and misadventures, also does the work to examine how much being an archetypical wholesome Saturday-morning cartoon kid hero would screw you up, and we watch it happen in real time, and there’s a whole season fully highlighting the damage his status as a kid hero has done to his identity. And I can’t stress enough the degree to which the impact would be lost if this arc hadn’t been done “in house;” if Steven Universe Future had been done twenty years from now as a deconstructive parody of a nostalgia property, it would suck. It wouldn’t land.

Steven Universe is a show that taught me to meet a story where it’s at, and judge it’s success and failures in terms of what it chose to prioritize, and not what I would have wanted to prioritize had I been writing it. Because at the end of the day, it’s fine to let the high-concept nerdbait setting elements fall by the wayside in favor of prioritizing the character-driven thematic stuff and genre analysis stuff.

(Indeed, I feel like it was a very pointed choice to have this whole OC-friendly gem-with-weapons-and-powers character-design schema and then have huge chunks of the show where the fighting and custom weapons and monster hunting weren’t relevant to what was going on, they lure you in with the promise of a RWBY-style monster-fighting show and then do mostly slice of life. Very funny trick.)

#steven universe #amethyst #pearl #rose quartz #greg #connie #lapis lazuli #jasper #peridot #sadie #lars

whilst-farting-i reblogged

i dont want peridot to have a redemption arc i want her to continue being a shitty villain but like in the background after theyve moved on to more intense and stronger villains and she shows up at their house every so often like ‘SOOO……….. CRYSTAL NERDS……………….” [starts doing ballet stretches on the counter] and theyre just like “not now peridot”

rebecca sugar pls hire me

swan2swan

I can’t believe the only thing wrong about this is that it’s actually Jasper doing all of this instead of Peridot.

#steven universe #peridot #jasper

whilst-farting-i reblogged

maxbytes

an anonymous suggestion: steven teaches jasper gardening.

#steven universe #jasper

whilst-farting-i reblogged

maxbytes

steven’s not having much luck at cards.

#steven universe #jasper #amethyst

whilst-farting-i reblogged

faelapis

had to take a shot at this meme.

#steven universe #lars #amethyst #greg #peridot #lapis lazuli #jasper #spinel #bismuth

whilst-farting-i reblogged

maxbytes

steven’s gonna have to call connie to teleport over so he can have someone to play chubby bunny with

#steven universe #jasper

whilst-farting-i reblogged

tashiecake

After two years I can finally post this beauty, oh my days did this take bloody FOREVER to finish! I want to say a massively heartfelt thank you to @rhandi-dandy / @thegembeaststemple for taking time off her busy schedule to put the @tigerzine together, and for being an inspiration for this piece ❤️ You’ve done an incredible job and I cannot wait for the hardcopy to make its way into my letterbox!

And bravo to all the contributing artists and writers, you are all blessed with such incredible talent thank you for sharing it with us! And big love to everyone who preordered, thank you for keeping faith, we hope it was worth it for you 🙏😌

#steven universe #jasper #connie