#but in terms of pure storytelling? yeah it's a pretty conventional good vs evil story

[all-seeing-ifer]

prefacing this by saying that I know that this is truly not a hill worth dying on, it is merely one I am choosing to die on because. idk man I make bad decisions. but I do think it's a crying shame that steven universe got saddled with this negative reputation as being kind of the quintessential example of a piece of media that's very safe and unchallenging and quote unquote wholesome, because like. ok i get that this negative reputation is really more about the fandom than about the show itself (and that's fair. the fandom sucked. i would never deny that. i was there gandalf etc.) but it does still feel a bit unfair bc when you take steven universe For What It Is (namely, a cartoon network show aimed primarily at kids and families) and compare it to other contemporary shows with the same genre/target demographic, it honestly was pretty challenging and complex and ambitious. even leaving aside for a second that it was very ground breaking in terms of children's media acknowledging that gay people exist in a way that left the crew constantly catching shit from the network, I struggle to think of any other children's media that would dare to explore the kind of themes and topic that su explored. things like grief, bereavement, how this kid's relationships with the adults in his life are impacted by the fact that his mum died in childbirth giving birth to him, trauma and mental illness (I know that dealing with mental health has become more common in children's media recently but there's definitely none that have been prepared to address the uglier sides of mental illness in the way that steven universe future did), explaining consent in ways that kids can understand, letting its protagonists be genuinely unlikeable at times, introducing the idea of restorative justice and there not being one singular bad guy that can be killed to save the day. These are topics and themes that you don't see a lot of in kids' media because they're hard to portray in a way that feels honest while still being appropriate and understandable to kids, and I think the show does deserve the credit it got for actually being willing to tackle this stuff and imo doing it very successfully most of the time.

AND to be honest, at the risk of leaning a bit close to talking mad shit about some of su's contemporaries (especially when at the end of the day i do quite like these other shows), it does. kind of grind my gears that other tumblr-popular animated shows like gravity falls and the owl house have managed to completely sidestep getting saddled with the same kind of negative, unchallenging reputation that su has, despite the fact that from a purely storytelling perspective both these shows are WAY safer and more easily digestible than su ever was lmao