As someone that was there and started blocking the SU Crit tag because of so many bad faith accusations, yeah I think I can say a bit of what happened. Might be a bit disjointed but these are the things that I remember happening.
First thing was the release schedule. The Steven Bombs. Releasing like five episodes in one week and then nothing for months. This was something that CartoonNetwork had control over and might have been something that they tried to use to get Steven Universe to stop being so popular because it was gestures pretty queer.
If Steven Universe was a show that every episode was a stand alone, this wouldn’t have been an issue, but it was a linear story. So major developments could drop; major character reveals/fuck-ups could happen and then the fandom would just sit on those for months. Instead of getting the next part of the story that resolved whatever just happened the fandom could sit there and stew in theories and emotions. So characters messing up would be blown out of proration and the resolution wouldn’t feel like it actually enough effort on the one that messed up end.
One example was Cry for Help. When Pearl tricked Garnet into fusing more often. If I remember right, we didn’t get to Pearl and Garnet actually talking out what happened there until months after the fact. In story not much time had past but for the audience that was plenty of time for people to be offended on Garnet’s behalf and distort what happened.
Anther issue was “Gem Harvest” dropped right around the 2016 election. You know when Trump became president. This was made long before the election, but there were people who took that timing as somehow Rebecca Sugar and the Crew saying stuff that they weren’t. I would also say this was when the discourse really took off. If that episode had aired when the crew thought it would, probably a year or months before then, I don’t think people would have misread it was much as they did. It was about communication and also Uncle Andy is the one that had to realize that the way he acted had caused him to be isolated from his family. This wasn’t Steven had to “make his racist uncle no longer racist all on his own” but “Steven gave him encouragement that it wasn’t too late to change”. But the timing was terrible and the Crew had no control on that. The Steven Bombs made several seasons last for years when they should have been over in some months.
Second, studio interference that fandom blamed on Rebecca Sugar and the Crew. The scheduling, the ending of the show feeling rushed; those were things that parts of the fandom blamed on the crew not the network. There were people that I recall saying that the crew just needed to change how Steven Universe was written to fit with the bomb format better, when the bomb format wasn’t something that the crew ever wanted. That wasn’t the show style that they were telling. The show got axed because Rebecca Sugar and the Crew wouldn’t drop the wedding. They wanted it there because it was important to have in a kid’s show. But because they stuck to their guns the rest of the story had to be speed up, and people thought that the crew should have written the ending better; when that ending was planned to have at least another season, not a week long set of episodes. Steven Universe was set up to be a long term story. One that gave time to each character to unpack their mindset and issues. But they couldn’t do that with the Diamonds.
Third, people not understanding the theme of the show. Steven Universe was about family, emotions, and open communication solving issues. Characters resolved their issues by talking about them. By being open about what the issues were. That was the reason Gem War happened; because open communication because Pink Diamond and the other Diamonds just couldn’t happen. We see that Steven is at his worst when he bottles up his emotions or refuses to talk about an issue that he knows he has. But despite this theme by the time we got to Change Your Mind, people were cheering for the idea of Steven shattering the Diamonds. Which ignores the theme of the show; communication. There were people that wanted Steven to kill the Diamonds when this wasn’t that type of show. Steven always hated when he couldn’t talk to another character and had to bubble them. Why would this kid resort to killing? That goes against the themes of this show.
Fourth, the rushed ending. The events of Change Your Mind, was something that the crew wanted to be its own season. I imagine that if the crew had gotten what they wanted we would have spent more time on Homeworld with Steven getting to know the Diamonds and sorting out their issues. Blue Diamond would have been first since we had set up with her character first. We saw her living with the regrets of losing Pink Diamond and now not doing her duties as a Diamond. But because of how rushed the ending had to be at that point the audience didn’t get that time that they had wanted. Think about how long Lars’s arc was. That was several seasons long. If they had gotten a season with the Diamonds like they wanted people probably wouldn’t have thought that the ending was rushed.
Fifth, bad faith criticism and very toxic fandom. As I said I blocked the SU Crit tag because after a certain point people would take anything and start shoving completely off the rails criticisms at the show and expect everyone to take them in good faith. Like people claiming that Sugar, a Jewish creator, was a Nazi Apologist because Steven didn’t kill the Diamonds. People projected things onto elements of the story that weren’t there. People would take a screen shot and call it lazy animation because a character was off model for a fraction of a second that wouldn’t be noticed without slowing it down. There was a lot of bad faith criticism. Some of it was probably from people that didn’t like how queer Steven Universe was and hid it as saying it wasn’t progressive enough. There were probably people that thought that a kid’s show was actually not progressive enough without looking at everything behind the scenes that the creators were dealing with. There were fans that drove one of the story-boarders/writers off the show because on her own Twitter account she posted shipping art of two of the characters (Lapis Lazuli and Peridot). It was just one member of the crew showing that she liked the dynamic between two characters that was not cannon and people started harassing them. There was a lot of entitlement from the fandom.
All of those things combined just made for a terrible time.
TL;DR: The show schedule being all over the place, studio interference, people not understanding the theme of the show, the rushed ending, and a toxic fandom with bad faith criticisms all led to the show having the worst reputation. I would say that the show schedule and studio interference played the biggest part of it since other parts stemmed issues that those created.
Agreed with all of this, but as a sort of continuation of point three:
The danger of adults watching a children’s show because “It’s so good it could be an adult’s show!” is exactly this. Shows that are literally and explicitly for kids have much simpler messaging. One of my least favourite sentences in the world is when you remind someone who is whining about a piece of children’s media for not doing what they wanted out of the story that it’s aimed at kids and they say “But being for kids doesn’t mean it can’t still be good!”
Bitch it IS good. ‘Good’ doesn’t mean 'Does the stuff adults want so it feels satisfying and fulfilling to adults’. It means 'Does the stuff the target audience wants and successfully conveys to that audience its message.’ Adults are not the target audience. Get a grip and remember you’re a guest. Your enjoyment is not the point. You cannot say “The Animaniacs sucked because there was no character development and they would suddenly sing educational songs - I wanted more world building about what these alien things were and how they got into the water tower and what that means for the fabric of American society” IT WAS A KID’S SHOW THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FUNNY AND EDUCATIONAL. AND IT WAS. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU
In the case of Steven Universe, Rebecca Sugar once said the aim was to 'redefine masculinity’ for children - the point of the show is that Steven is surrounded by powerful women without ever feeling emasculated, and is properly and healthily connected to his emotions. He’s not afraid to cry. He’s open with his fears. He goes through increasing trauma, and the moral of that is 'Dont bottle up, talk to your loved ones.’
And, crucially, his first and primary response to antagonism is “Let’s talk about this” and not “Let’s punch this.”
It was adults who turned that into a “Talk to Nazis uwu” parable, and then got mad about it; children, the target audience, did not. Children are people who are very much still learning how to process their emotions and handle conflict on the playground. Young boys are learning that they aren’t allowed to cry or have feelings other than anger. Young girls are learning that they aren’t allowed power and strength. All children are being told that a family can only look one way, that love can only follow one path. SU provided clear role models to the contrary and was extremely valuable for that.
And then adults projected real world political allegories onto it because that’s how adult fiction works, and decided that meant it was bad and that Rebecca Sugar, a queer Jewish enby, was actually a Nazi apologist. Just a trash fire of a fandom
some time ago i introduced the phrase “food pact” to my friends as a shorthand for “i’ll go make and eat food if you also make and eat food” and ever since then ive just started incorporating more pacts into my life. stay hydrated pact. stretch break pact. stop doomscrolling and go to bed pact. we need to bring this back in vogue more people should be making pacts imo
I’m listening to a podcast while I paint, and like, what do you think the True Crime circuit is like in Gotham? Is that a thing? Or do you think they’re all crimed out like, whoopidooh, an unsolved murder in Gotham. Must be a day ending in Y.
What about Metropolis? Do you think they’re all listening to Gotham True Crime stories like “thank god all we deal with is billionaires with pick-me complexes and the occasional alien invasion.”
Do you think some over-eager Metropolite ever tried to ‘Only Murders in the Building’ their way to podcast fame by trying to follow Batman around, and Superman has to show up like “I am so, so sorry” to take them back from Bruce who’s holding them up on a dark Gotham roof like a scruffed wet cat.
Meanwhile, in Gotham the alien conspiracy theory podcasts are off the charts. T-shirts that say “I want to believe” are everywhere, but instead of “believe,” they say “I want to leave.” At this point they’d welcome an alien abduction. Anything to get out of Gotham for a while.
The most common alien abduction in Gotham is “Superman grabs Robin and takes him to get ice cream in Metropolis.”
Dick vanished for whole weekend once, and when he got back, he told Bruce “I was abducted by aliens.”
And Bruce said, “Are there two of him?”
Dick said, “He had Krypto with him.”
… every Robin after him has used the “alien abduction” excuse at least once.
So what this paint company does is take iron pollution from abandoned mines that are polluting soils and rivers and makes iron based red pigment paints out of it.
Basically they realized hey no one’s cleaning this shit up, it’s polluting the streams, killing all the fish, making the water undrinkable and there’s a huge market for it so why not make money by cleaning it the fuck up?
They remove this stuff by the industrial bucket load from the rivers. The idea is if it’s in a painting, if it’s in your home, it’s not poisoning wildlife.
the BEST THING about America is that one of their timezones is called mountain time. i cannot tell you how funny that is to me. it sure is always time for mountains in one fourth of america
i recommend every history student to play the appropriate assassin’s creed game before starting to learn about a subject bc it makes everything 10000% funnier like. hey. i know this guy. he had an unresolved yet undeniable homoerotic sexual tension with my favorite video game man. what’s he doing here.
“Way too reliable narrator” where the narrator provides documentation and proof for how they know every detail in the narrative and an estimate of how confident they are in it.
truly one of my favorite things is when people take their babies or pets to meet characters that have to stay quiet. you know like the mickey mouse characters or snoopy and stuff. and the baby or pet is being especially cute and you can just TELL the performer wants to scream or cry about it but they Can’t so they just keep putting their hands on their heads and shaking lmao
Every single time I say the phrase “I was classically trained in the art of multiple choice tests” everyone in the room who’s not a millennial laughs at my joke while all the other millennials in the room immediately look like they just walked in on a funeral by accident.
teach me please
Why? It has nothing to do with the real world and I’m mad that the school system taught me how to take multiple choice tests rather than write a report for a job or properly research what issues are important when deciding who to vote for in an election. Or like… accurate history. You know. Actual stuff you need to know to be a person.
im currently stuck in the school system and I want cheat codes
Okay, I completely understand wanting to know the actual stuff, I want to know those things too, and those are things im working on learning. but to be able to get to the information that tells me these things I need to survive this hellhole of a system and im bad at tests, which means i dont survive very well.
Okay fine.
Read the entire question twice to look for tricky wording. If you’re allowed to write on it circle or underline words like NOT or EXCEPT or other things your brain might skip over. This will make it less likely you’ll skip over them.
Read all the answers before answering. Sometimes the wrong answers are so stupid you don’t even have to work out the problem or try to remember the thing.
If the entire test is about the same subject (Colonial America for example) answers might be found in previous questions. Like question #6 might ask who wrote Common Sense. You might remember that back in question one it said “In Common Sense by Thomas Paine” and there’s your answer. This happens a lot more often than you’d think.
If you don’t know the answer cross out the answers you know are incorrect. If there are four answers but you know one of them is wrong your odds of guessing right just went up from 25% to 33%. If you can eliminate two answers then you have a 50/50 chance of getting it right.
If you can’t eliminate any answers at all guess C. The placement of correct answers isn’t completely random and C is the answer slightly more often than other answers. If you guess randomly your odds of getting the answer right actually goes down.
Read study guides and take practice tests. Actually read them. Especially if they’re written by the same person who wrote the test you’ll be taking. You’ll be more likely to pick up on their quirks and what kind of trick questions they write if you use the study material. You’ll also know what to study and what to leave.
For sections where there’s a list of words you have to match to definitions read the words first. You’re probably more likely to know the definition of a word then the word that goes with a definition. (or time period or math method or whatever). Answer the ones you know and leave the ones you don’t until you’re completely done with that section. Then look at your remaining words and definitions and match them to the ones that sound the least ridiculous.
Don’t take a test on an empty stomach unless you’re fasting for religious reasons. I don’t care if you haven’t eaten breakfast in twenty years. You’re gonna eat something before you take that test.
Remember that taking multiple choice tests is a skill that not everyone is naturally good at and it’s a skill that means absolutely nothing in the real world. So however you do on this test doesn’t dictate your worth as a person.
As someone who is also classically trained in the art of multiple choice test, I can confirm
Yeah I learned all this shit too. And like while most things public school teaches you is such fucking bullshit, this is actually true.
The C trick isn’t always useful, especially when it’s a computer-generated test. But I would recommend choosing an option to stick to, if only because it limits the brain energy you use on questions you can’t answer.
Similarly, don’t panic if you’re getting A for five questions in a row: if the teacher has made any attempt to randomize answers, this is entirely possible. I’ve also known teachers who do this on purpose to mess with students (yes, really).
Also, this is very important: As long as your test doesn’t deduct points for wrong answers, you should always answer every question no matter what. Use the last 5 minutes to fill them all in.
