(no subject)

[feotakahari]

An indirect thought on Steven Universe:

There was this thing on TV Tropes a while back where some people kept adding Mr. Krabs from Spongebob Squarepants to the Complete Monster page, and other people kept deleting him. The people who added him cited that he did this and that and the other that were Complete Monster things. The people who deleted him didn’t seem to think an argument was necessary. To them, it was obviously silly to call this character a Complete Monster. I’d stopped watching Spongebob at this point, but it felt strange to me that people didn’t even conside it worth addressing whether the character’s behavior could actually merit the Complete Monster tag.

I’m one of the people who argues that Homeworld in Steven Universe does some spectacularly messed-up things, in ways that go beyond the usual cartoon villainy. The general response to this is “you’re crazy.” I feel like I’d be more satisfied with it if the argument was more “Homeworld really isn’t that different from a lot of other cartoon villains,” and to be fair, I do see that sometimes. But more often, the reaction is that it’s too stupid to bother arguing with, and that just annoys me.

(TBF, I also disagree with the folks who compare the Diamonds to Nazis. The Diamonds are a hybrid of multiple different kinds of terrible government, from kleptocracy to Communist dictatorship, without clearly matching any one real-life society.)

Comments

[lb_lee]

Rogan: I thought the Diamonds and Homeworld was SUPPOSED to be obviously messed up and not okay! Pretty much everyone at my local cartoon night's biggest grievance with the show was how that ending with the Diamonds was handled.

I could sort of understand the argument with Spongebob, since my impression of Spongebob was that it was completely episodic with no real overarching story, and also it's a zany comedy where normal rules of human behavior are harder to apply, but Steven Universe is neither a whacky comedy NOR episodic!

[feotakahari]

Pretty much everyone agrees they’re bad, but there are a lot of baked-in assumptions related to how bad they are and what that means. It would be unfair to give the dumbest examples of what the other “side” of this argument said, so I’ll give the dumbest still-coherent example on my “side” instead: I’ve seen it argued that SU is a setting where nobles are treated as inherently more important than everyone else. Steven is the child of a queen, and he forgives the other queens, so that means anything the queens did to common folks no longer matters, so therefore Steven Universe is classist and bad. I think this is a wild misrepresentation.

The dumbest incoherent argument is that SU will make people vote for fascist political candidates, but I still don’t understand that one.