Rambles on a kids show that Youtube won’t stop recommending to me
I missed most cool cartoons. I never watched things like Adventure Time or Avatar: The Last Air Bender. Most of the reason behind this is that I don’t have Netflix or any other streaming service, aside from Spotify. There was no (decent) terrestrial TV either for most of my teenage and young adult years, so I couldn’t watch it on Cartoon Network or anything either. It all went past me, and I never really got around to looking them up later on as an adult. So I never really got a chance to enjoy or, well, dislike, any of these shows.
Lately though, Youtube has been recommending clips of a TV show to me. My knowledge of Steven Universe is very small, and mostly comes from a handful of retrospectives of the show, one of which my friend Bacxaber wrote. After watching the one Bacxaber created, I was inundated with other retrospectives by other people, so I decided to try and watch some Steven Universe myself. This brought me to the Steven Universe Youtube channel, where I kinda pieced things together and made the mistake of watching more than one video. That caused my Youtube recommendations to completely flood me with Steven Universe videos, one of which was apparently the entirety of season 3, although it was clearly just the main clips and not full episodes like the title implied.
Needless to say, I’ve ended up watching a lot of Steven Universe. It’s been in mostly snippet form, but I’ve watched a lot of it.
I’ll be honest, the premise is cool, but it’s very obviously a kids’ show, but I can see why adults would like it. The background stuff, the lore, the backstory and all that are actually pretty cool. The first season just looks like fighting random monsters, but the whole idea of there being a rebellion and a gem empire ruled by dictator diamond gems sounds pretty awesome. You’ve got things like fusions, where two gems fuse into one and become a bigger and more powerful form. And there’s an overarching villain hiding in the shadows, the ruler of this gem empire that has conquered worlds before, and Earth could be next. Of course, being a kids’ show, the plot doesn’t go deep into any of those things. It’s all about being friends and working together and things like that. Making new friends and being yourself are key points to the show, which is mostly a good message, as long as you don’t rush things.
What surprised me most though was how rushed the ending of the show was. Watching the retrospectives and analysis videos for Steven Universe, I was under the impression that the end of the main series was split over several episodes, building up to the confrontation to White Diamond. But I soon discovered that, well, White Diamond says like a handful of sentences then immediately changes when Steven says “you don’t have to be perfect”.
Nope, turns out, all the cool ending stuff is shoved into a single episode. Which is pretty lame. I can clearly see why all the analysis videos are the way they are. There’s loads of cool stuff in this single episode, like the main characters all fusing into one body, and the big bad guy seeing the error of her ways, but all the cool things last like 30 seconds tops. The episode has no time for these cool things, it’s all just one big rush so they can end the series.
That’s a shame. From all the snippets and sections I watched, I thought the ending would be way more substantial. But then again, I’m not the target audience for this show. None of the people doing the analysis are. The show is aimed at kids and caters to said kids. And most kids have an attention span of about thirty seconds, so they care less that the ending was rushed. Then again, I’m being a bit unfair to kids.
Oh well. I’m glad I didn’t have to sit through four seasons of Steven Universe. Because that means the ending doesn’t quite disappoint me as much. Still, the ending could have been better. Kids deserve good endings to their TV shows.