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I decided to redo this scorecard from scratch because my initial review of this series, while I do stand by it, it got a bit overly personal and barely scratched the surface of the problems this series suffers from. So we're doing take two, and lol we have a lot of shit to tear into. Although it isn't as bad as my 2nd version of this scorecard made it out to be, it's still a pretty not-good series, but I think this third and potentially final version of the scorecard showcases my thoughts better than anything else. Btw, that entire black slice can be blamed on S4-5.

TTLF'S NOTE ON 9/17/2022: Y'know, at the very, very end of this review, there lies some notes I wrote back in 2020, 2021, and even this year as a way to show what changed in my scorecard, and as a way to show how I went from hating SU with all my heart to being indifferent towards it. I used to think every season sucked, with S4-5 being on an entirely different level, and only half of that is true nowadays. S1-2 were pretty fun, all things considered, and I do have my memories of watching 1A and enjoying it-- it was a fun monster-of-the-week show with quirky and funny characters, and did pulled off its dramatic moments rather well. I was even onboard with the story direction S2 was taking with the addition of Peridot to the cast, and the introduction of the Diamonds.

  However, these brilliant ideas went to waste since a majority of S3-5 are flatout useless. I would estimate that 80% of episodes from S3-5 are ones you can skip over and miss nothing, and this is the same problem I have with Adventure Time in its later seasons-- it's sad and funny at the same time how much SU and AT mirror each other. I want to like them way more than I do, but they waste their time on crap that would be boring to the average viewer and frustrating for people that want the story to pick up the pace. What we're left with instead is S4, a season that had fans drop off the show like flies because it's nothing but filler, with some random short-lived Zoo arc that I constantly forget even happens, and S5, which is a mess of storytelling-- at one point they bring back Bismuth from S3 because the direction her debut episode took was so strange, and this one existed to rectify the decision to bubble her away. I'm trying to say that SU literally had no trajectory in its later seasons whatsoever. I was burnt out by S4-5 in particular because they failed to deliver on expectations that I, and many other SU fans had. Reunited was meant to be the big confrontation, and our protagonists get their asses kicked in like 10 seconds, and the Cluster emerges despite its emergence meaning the end of the world and... I've said this before, but it bares repeating. In short, I will never mellow on S4-5, they are disappointments that aren't worth anyone's time.

  I do have an SUF scorecard out, and all you need to know about it is that it started so well and ended so disappointingly... pretty much an SU lite that sadly reemphasized the problems the original show suffered from... KINDA LIKE HOW DISTANT LANDS REEMPHASIZED ADVENTURE TIME'S PROBLEMS, AND IT WILL NEVER NOT BOTHER ME HOW SU AND AT ARE LITERALLY THE SAME SHOW IN SO MANY WAYS. Rest of the review is below, knock yourself out if you want

ANOTHER NOTE ON 3/5/2023: At this point, my description below is in desperate need of a redo. To say that my opinion on SU has improved would be understating things a little-- I still think that, at its core, it's an extremely flawed show, but not one I carry any hatred towards. Can you believe there was one point where I rated SU "Garbage"? It's funny really... it was initially BAD, then AWFUL by July 2019, then I shot it down to GARBAGE by December, only to slowly take that back as I revisited episodes and watched more and more cartoons, realizing that perhaps I shouldn't have driven all my scorn towards this one, in spite of how trashy S4-5 are. They still suck hard, but the rest? It's pretty good, actually, and my feelings towards SU nowadays are more positive than negative. I even feel more positive towards it than AT personally speaking, despite its lows being a lot worse... well... A Single Pale Rose and Reunited are anyways. Idk what I'm saying anymore, so I'll leave it at: I think SU is pretty decent nowadays, and I can justify the "okay" rating with the fact that S1-2 barely have any episodes I dislike and S3 was still mostly on-track with a few missteps, and in spite of how much 4-5 suck, they were followed with the movie which, if you didn't know, is my favorite movie ever made... and my favorite animated thing in general. SU as a whole is a show with extremely high highs and embarrassingly bad lows. All in all, this is the biggest promotion any cartoon has ever gotten from me, and I'm happy about that.

HISTORY: I do not have a pleasant history with this series. At all. But let's go waaaay back to around early 2014, when this show just started and very few episodes had been made like Cat Fingers and Frybo, I have vivid memories watching these episodes, and basically all of 1A to be honest. I never thought that this series was anything phenomenal, but it was a good way to waste time for 11 minutes if I felt like it, but for some reason I never stuck around for the second half of season 1, also referred to as 1B, and I don't necessarily know why since the Internet was going absolutely wild for it. To be honest, even when I liked 1A, I wasn't completely hooked or invested in this series, I just thought it was enjoyable and nothing else, but in 2015, I did have a trolling side to me (still do, actually) and after hearing about a shitstorm that happened in the fandom in 2015, I thought trolling fans would be a fun thing to do. Little did I know I was wrong for thinking such a thing, because the fandom is just... the absolute worst.

So basically, we're going from my history with this show to my history with its fandom, and good God is the fandom is a mess. I never realized it could be just so awful, they'll get mad at you if you don't consider this series a perfect 10/10 masterpiece, and that statement continues to ring true to this day. In fact, my initial scorecard of this series was so controversial and out-there that it prompted two people (wave hi to the camera and ) to make scorecards on me to ensure that I don't release any more Scary Opinion For Al Childrean Too Sea. Back in 2015 and 2016, I loved getting into flamewars with fans and saying SU was overrated and dumb. I'll never forget the time they bullied a fan of this show to near SUICIDE for drawing Rose a bit thinner than usual and accusing her of fat shaming, or the times they hated Say Uncle because the episode is too wacky and not calm and relaxing like amazing House Guest (In fact, the hate on Say Uncle gave me the idea to investigate the dickfest we call the SU fandom because how can ANYONE hate this episode?)

Where I come into the picture though was when I became friends with a group of people on Discord in September 2016 that apparently were fans of this series, and when I said that it was overrated and stupid just to see their reaction AND that my favorite episode was Say Uncle (no really, it was my favorite episode. It will always be this show's magnum opus.). We did all get along in general, and believe it or not, I actually did enjoy S1-3 of SU back then, but at the same time, there would be constant drama throughout the first half 2017 and it'd be extremely hostile and nasty. I even watched the show up until the episode Bubbled and I kinda hyperexaggerated my thoughts to be on the safe side (One time on Twitter in like May 2017 I put out a scorecard for like 2 days where I called every season 3 episode Amazing for no reason lmao) but even when I did like it, I'd criticize it at every opportunity I got. When I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender in summer of 2017, I realized that I really did dislike this series, but I continued to put on the mask that I enjoyed it anyways. I got into flamewars with the exact same group later that year when I told them I loved Avatar and preferred it to Steven Universe by a long shot, and they accused me of being extremely biased to this series... like... What? After incidences like that, I reviewed Steven Universe's fourth season on Twitter in early 2018 and called it good... for no reason. Like, how the hell did I tolerate Onion Gang? Oh yeah it's because this episode is Overhated. I really suppressed my true thoughts on this series for so long and didn't fully state them for all to hear until this year because I felt like it was about time. As Steven Universe went along, the show saw more and more criticisms of it arise, and I'm no longer alone in saying this series has so many serious problems that prevent it from being something truly great.

Now here's where the review REALLY gets started...

ANIMATION: For a show that's supposedly one of the best of the 2010s, I'm surprised it didn't even meet the bare minimum of having good or competent animation. The animation in this series is... a walking tragedy. To name one huge strength, the background art on this show is absolutely gorgeous, the backgrounds have excellent use of geometric shapes and have really pleasing coloring that sets the tone of any scene perfectly, especially the space backgrounds, but when placed against the actual animation, we're opening a whole other chapter. The animation's biggest problem is that it's almost never consistent, episodes for the most part look like they were animated in one take and nothing more, with character heights never being the same and being extremely off-model for no reason. Off-model animation happens for one of two reasons: It could either be done for the sake of comedy like when a character expresses, or it happens as a simple animation mistake, but this show doesn't fall into either of these categories.

  It's a deliberate choice by the crew to give artistic freedom without ever considering how it may affect the movement in scenes, because holy shit the animation looks so slow and choppy most of the time and never does anything exciting period. This even goes as far as affecting fight scenes where they're way too slow and I rarely ever feel the impact of any hit, and the only time I ever got invested in a fight scene was in Super Watermelon Island, where they got it right thanks to perfect timing and good choreography, and even that episode has a host of other issues. Most of the animation in this series just screams lazy, and I know what some people might say, "You're looking too deep into this, why should off-model characters affect your enjoyment? It personally doesn't bother me!" Well first of all, I'm glad you're able to tolerate what is objectively unprofessionalism, but I can't. Secondly, shouldn't it be a requirement for cartoons to have actual model sheets so you can ensure you somehow don't contort your character designs? Because last time I checked, that was something most shows enforced, guess this show didn't because it wants to be unique.
The true reason for why the animation in this show is as sloppy as it appears is because the storyboards look so messy, nowhere near cohesive at all. Shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender go all-out with their storyboards and look beautiful while shows like Wander Over Yonder and SpongeBob SquarePants have way more cartoony looking storyboards, but this show's looks like a bunch of scribbles. The only times where the series doesn't have shit animation is when they get some guest storyboard artist from either Studio Trigger (they worked on Steven Universe Future's intro and Mindful Education) or someone like James Baxter to do the storyboards. These scenes/episodes look a lot more fluid and look genuinely great because the storyboards are a lot clearer and have more detail put into them. This should be done on a regular basis, not once in a blue moon.
Surprisingly, the movie suffers the opposite problem with its overall animation where the actual movement is competent, but the backgrounds look a lot... flatter. The visual effects, character models, and animation, mostly on Spinel, are spot-on, but the backgrounds aren't anywhere near as pretty to look at that, and looking at SU Future, I fear that's how things will stay, but it's an improvement overall and I don't mind it.

tl;dr version: The animation on this series suffers due to a lack of proper model sheets and clean storyboards, effectively making most episodes look unfinished, choppy, and slow, and this goes as far as affecting the action in this series too where most of it is just so predictable and boring

CHARACTERS: Let's cut right to the chase... I do not like a majority of this show's characters honestly, and some of them are among the most unlikable and revolting creatures that I've ever seen in any cartoon, let alone TV show. This is where Steven Universe suffers the most: its characters. To start off, the protagonist of this series, Steven, is such an inconsistently written character. He starts off as nothing more than an irritating hindrance in Season 1, but with a kind heart, to being tolerable in S2-4 since he's more integral to the gems and has a more mature attitude, and then goes on to be a full-on crybaby pacifist in season 5 that can magically resolve any problem because of course he can, so his character development essentially two steps forward and one hundred steps back by the end. For being a main protagonist, he's so BORING since there's next to nothing I can say about him other than the things above. It really says a lot about the series when the main character himself is someone that has so little to him. As for the three Crystal Gems, Pearl, Amethyst, and Garnet... I personally hate Pearl the most and can't stand it whenever she's on-screen.

  There was a really interesting idea with Pearl in how she's a character that is obsessive and suffers from grief over the loss of Rose, but the problem is that they almost never do anything with it. It's just left there, that's her entire character, especially as the series goes on. This character flaw of Pearl starts off as something interesting but I got fed up with it immediately and it soon became extremely obnoxious, like how the entire second half of Mr. Greg was just an excuse for Pearl to mope over Rose for the one millionth time. Ooh, how about the fact that their attempts to get me to sympathize with this character are completely pathetic thanks to some of the flashback episodes? I really like how in We Need to Talk, she's portrayed as an antagonistic asshole and how in Three Gems in a Baby, she was a complete lunatic for thinking to remove baby Steven's gem. Her relationship with Rose doesn't even feel genuine, it's so much creepier because Pearl and Rose have absolutely no dynamic whatsoever and Pearl seemed a lot more like an obsessive servant than anything else. Even an episode like Rose's Scabbard had Pearl let Steven almost fall to his death and not even going back to check on him, but I guess this is okay because She's Sad. Season 5 only ruined this character further in the masterpiece of animation that is A Single Pale Rose, where as it turns out, that whole shtick of Pearl being "her own Pearl" like she said in Back to the Barn was a complete lie because she still took orders from Rose up until that episode, which was the final nail on the coffin for me absolutely hating this character.

Garnet is a character that I at first found really cool as her line deliveries could sometimes be funny. (A rarity for this show. Also, Estelle isn't the best voice actress in the world, because the moments where Garnet speaks in a more serious voice have me dying at just how bored she sounds when delivering the lines) She also had a really chill vibe to her, but... this only applies to season 1. The twist with her being a fusion honestly caught me off-guard when I first saw it way back then and it was a cool twist, but what it meant to this series and Garnet as a character is a fat Yikes. Beyond Jailbreak, Garnet has absolutely no personality, unless of course being a Fusion with Future Vision counts as one. I can only think of one episode where Garnet had more to her than any of those two things but that's only to a small extent with Pool Hopping, the rest of the time you get episodes like Mindful Education, Keystone Motel, The Answer, and so on that exist to reinforce the idea that Garnet is nothing more than that nowadays since all involve fusion.
  I'd be perfectly okay with this, but the actual fusion that makes up Garnet are two of the most annoying characters on this series. Introducing Ruby and Sapphire, two characters that have no kind of personality to be found or anything interesting to them beyond their designs and never talk about anything else other than fusion and love. They also like to bicker here and there, can't seem to be apart for even two seconds, and can even be used as plot devices like in season 5 where, after the twist in A Single Pale Rose, a completely new conflict about Ruby and Sapphire's relation is at stake. Nothing about their relationship is charming or endearing, it's just cliched and generic at best and obnoxious at worst. The only time I tolerated these two was in Gem Heist since they were given other things to do that didn't involve fucking fusion. Ultimately, all they ever did was ruin a character that I once really liked. Hell, even the movie had Garnet be nothing more than a fusion, and they even give her a song about finding love at first sight, which clearly contradicts the message of Love Letters, where love at first sight doesn't exist, but I guess it does now so lol.

I actually like Amethyst, most of the time anyways. Her jokey and upbeat personality was one I found really charming and being the complete anti-thesis to Garnet and Pearl provided a perfect balance... until On the Run happened. After that episode, Amethyst became a character that I don't even know what to make of. Just like Steven, she became so inconsistently written, being perfectly fine in some episodes yet unstable in others, or in a case like Too Far would constantly go back-and-forth between being Sad and being normal. What I absolutely hate about this is that they kept playing around with Amethyst, a character that was once one of the more optimistic characters on this series, and made her either insufferable or joyous to watch with no transitions whatsoever, and by Steven vs. Amethyst, I had just about enough since that episode literally consisted of two characters maiming each other because They're Sad. This happened for so long up until the opening of That Will Be All, which admittedly is an abysmal episode, but had Amethyst return to form in the opening, which actually put a smile on my face. Even better, I forget which episode this occurred in but my guess is either The Question or What's Your Problem? where Amethyst declares that she won't dump any of her problems on Steven no longer, which was such a great moment for her character. It solidified her as one of the better characters on this show overall, despite having a rough track record in S2-4.

As for characters I despise, well... there's Lapis. Being introduced in the season 1 episode Mirror Gem, Lapis was at first a character I saw as interesting, but after one final appearance in both The Return and Jailbreak, Lapis just... disappeared from the show... until season 3, where Oh my fucking God what did they do this character? I have never seen a more obnoxious, aggravating, pessimistic, angsty piece of trash character before in my life. I regretted having any kind of interest in Lapis because when she was reintroduced, I couldn't stand her at all. I'll admit, Same Old World was... fine, but Barn Mates was an insufferable 11 minutes and used to be on my bottom 10 just because it's 11 minutes of Lapis being a shitty character, and that tape recorder scene always manages to piss me off. Once again, Lapis is yet another character who's nothing more than a ball of negative emotions and does NOTHING to break herself out of this state of misery. She's always so ungrateful and downright cruel to anyone that isn't Steven, and sees absolutely no improvement as the series goes on. If anything, she regresses since she starts off as an asshole mope and then transitions to being a coward by Raising the Barn. The only reason to why Lapis is a complete dickhead and sulk is because she's... Sad i guess, and this somehow excuses her bad behavior and means she shouldn't face any consequences whatsoever, even though that shouldn't be the case at all. Even when it comes to her trauma, there is a deliberate hole in her whole situation with Jasper. She claims to have been tortured for I don't care to remember how long, when SHE was the one torturing Jasper for however long the gap between Jailbreak and Super Watermelon Island is, and she flatout admitted it in Alone at Sea. Everything about this character is absolutely abominable from her characterization to her facial expressions to her "development", I can easily say Lapis is one of my least favorite cartoon characters since I can't even think of anything about her that I like aside from her design, I guess, but that's still the absolute bare minimum.

Peridot, though, is the best character of this show, without question. Between all of the characters, she's actually really funny, optimistic, and is the only one to get proper development besides Amethyst. She's also a good anti-thesis to the angst everywhere else, and made season 2 a lot more tolerable to sit through (Even though the bad episodes in this season are complete trash and weigh it down so much. This season would've been good without the filler lol) and is the funniest on this character by a wide margin. This show really could use less Pearls and more Peridots, because Peridot gets one thing that most characters on this cast fail to even get: development. From the get-go, Peridot was introduced as some kind of silly cartoony antagonist that the Crystal Gems needed to stop, but after being trapped after Catch and Release, becomes a part of the main cast. She starts off having a resentment towards every character besides Steven somewhat, and over the course of numerous episodes, we see her become a lot more open to the main cast and eventually becomes a member of the main cast, even downright disobeying Yellow Diamond in the gloriousness that is Message Received. What's even better is that we get an entire episode that develops Peridot even further with Too Short to Ride, a surprisingly hilarious episode with lots of moments that had me sympathize with Peridot and her struggles of feeling worthless without technology. She comes a long way by the end of it by realizing her self-worth and develops a power that I believe is more than earned. What I'm essentially saying is that Peridot is three-dimensional. She has the absolute most going for her, which is such a shame that after Too Short to Ride, she barely gets any appearances in the show at all. I mean, she sometimes appears to be a comic relief, but it isn't saying much when the best I can remember of her post-Too Short to Ride is Kindergarten Kid.

I'm not willing to talk about the Diamonds right now because the villains will be talked about later, but the last thing I need to cover are the townies, who are probably even more boring and one-note than Steven. Some of them just exist like the pizza place people, Mayor Dewey, Sadie, and Connie, but the others are Good God I hate them. Ronaldo is essentially the best of the bad ones because they actually pulled off an episode with him that was honestly great, but he's still really damn irritating and nothing more than a nuisance in most episodes. Keep Beach City Weird and Rocknaldo decide to give him the focus for some bizarre reason and his crazy conspiracy behavior is so intolerable because they play it so straight, and have no kinds of jokes or stakes to back them up. This guy is still a godsend to Lars, whose episodes are virtually THE. SAME. THING. EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. Lol Lars is an apathetic cunt and learns nothing by the end of the episode, yet Sadie still continues to like him despite him being an oblivious douche. It's like they went out of their way to make this guy the most unlikable character he can be, and guess what? It fucking worked. Even when he finally did something useful in the beginning of season 5, this "development" of Lars comes out of nowhere, and when he initially dies and comes back to life, it's like he's an entirely different character. A better one, yes, but my point is that they did absolutely nothing interesting, new, or creative with this character up until this point and essentially replaced him with someone that has more to him than Lol He's The Worst Please Laugh. Guess what? The same thing can be said about a particular character named Kevin that makes random appearances for no reason and is designed to be the most generic, lame, "cool" character you could possibly imagine. Lastly, there's Onion who's just... let's just say that the less said about episodes such as Onion Gang, the better. His episodes, besides Onion Friend, tend to be really dumb, and infantile... and that's it. Just another flat character that does nothing more than burn runtime.

tl;dr version: This show has a pretty nice line-up of characters that range from just existing to being outright horrendous, with Peridot and potentially Amethyst being outliers for being characters I enjoy. It needs to understand that characters can have struggles and problems, but they actually need to... well... do something about that, instead of sitting there and crying about it, because it can get really fucking obnoxious really quickly.

THE STORY: After watching this whole series, I'm more convinced it's more concerned with trying to be "subversive" than actually trying to tell any kind of cohesive narrative whatsoever. This is more-so applicable to seasons 3-5 than seasons 1-2, because those two seasons set up some interesting ideas that series simply failed to live up to. They introduced villains like Jasper and the Diamonds, characters like Lapis and Peridot, gave us vague ideas about Homeworld, why Steven's mom is particularly infamous, and so on, but the end result of all these aspects were disappointing at best and absolutely horrendous at worst. This show actually has a really fucked up production and hearing about it only gives me the impression that they did the first take on most episodes and nothing more. Did you know Reunited was completed in 2016 and Change Your Mind was completed in April 2017? The final product of both of these episodes feel unfinished more than anything else since they have flaws more noticeable than a neon red sign that I'll tear into later down the line. Oh yeah, there would also be so many hiatuses and whenever they'd come back, they'd usually have a shitton of boring baby filler episodes with the absolute worst example being November 2017 where, after sixth months since Lars' Head, they came back to fucking DEWEY WINS and that filler would continue up until Kevin Party. This sounds like I should be blaming the Cartoon Network scheduling and not the show itself, and you're half right, but what I will absolutely never ever excuse is the god-forsaken Steven perspective.

I have never heard of any cartoon that locks itself to its main character, but I guess this show wants to be unique, so congrats, you're the first series to ever limit any kind of storytelling you want to tackle just because of this awful device. Fucking SpongeBob can change perspectives and some of the best episodes of the show are made whenever they change perspectives like Mall Girl Pearl and Larry's Gym. That show can also have sub-plots, which this series has absolutely none of. Thanks to this perspective, no character is ever able to shine on their own and I can only name two episodes where the perspective decided to shift to others, and coincidentally they come from season 2, with Rising Tides, Crashing Skies and Log Date 7 15 2, and those episodes actually manage to be good because of that. But the absolute worst thing that this perspective does is that it leaves out so much necessary information that are needed to process this show's "story", because sometimes it'll just expect you to just accept whatever is happening without ever questioning it, like how between Dewey Wins and Kevin Party, we NEVER cut back to Lars and the Off Colors in space, where they APPARENTLY infiltrated Homeworld and stole a ship... and we see none of it. How about that whole Cluster(fuck) arc where we barely see the drill ever being constructed, and it just-so-happens to be done off-screen? Malachite, who was formed at the end of Jailbreak is never seen again until Super Watermelon Island with the show only vaguely hinting at what's even going on with them in rare instances like the uselessness that is Chille Tid (the ep's alright though). And when I say "vaguely hinting", I mean it loves to do a lot of "tell, don't show". Even an episode like An Indirect Kiss has Pearl and Garnet entirely disappear mid-way into the episode and show up at the very end of it, which more than jarring to say the least.
  This Steven perspective is also the reason why this show has a ton of filler episodes, and when I say filler, I mean FILLER. Most of them having nothing going on, and given that Steven is a boring protagonist, a lot of the filler episodes tend to be excruciatingly boring, mundane, and sometimes downright infantile. I could feel my IQ dropping watching the entirety of season 4, because that season is entirely filler outside of the Zoo arc and last two episodes. I have no idea why there's so much junk in this series, because the purpose of filler episodes is to let the audience catch their breath for a little after something intense, which this show doesn't even have most of the time, meaning that the amount of storytelling episodes can't even compare to the amount of filler, which is stunning honestly. Now here's the part where I describe SU's actual narrative...

Trying to think of a synopsis for this show overall is extremely difficult, because it meanders so much. With shows such as Avatar, Samurai Jack, and Gravity Falls, I can actually sum up what the show is about from start to finish, but I can't do that with Steven Universe. It initially starts off as this show with some fat boy ruining what could've been interesting adventures with the Crystal Gems, but then it transitions to this heavy lore worldbuilding and the ultimate goal of this series is to... uh... I have no idea. My first problem with this series above all else is that there's never an actually defined villain of this series. At first, we have Jasper, who's introduced at the end of season 1, but never sees the light of day until season 3 and even in that season, they pretty much shoved her into the last 2 minutes of random episodes to get some kind of conflict going (Most episodes are extremely guilty of this), and then ditched her for THREE YEARS until Steven Universe: Future, which literally just came out. Season 2 hinted that the Diamonds must be the ultimate villains of this series, with the debut of Yellow in Message Received, but like Jasper, are ditched for a whole season until they suddenly return in That Will Be All. In fact, now's the time to talk about the Diamonds because they're infinitely worse than Lapis in my eyes.

  The Diamonds are the most disappointing things to ever happen to grace this series. When season 2 revealed Yellow Diamond, her appearance was so shocking and menacing, and looked like the making of an amazing villain, which is EXACTLY why they ditched them for a whole season before That Will Be All, and what they did to the Diamonds in that episode was so awful. If you compare Yellow Diamond's portrayal in this episode to the one in Message Received, they don't match at all. One of them is towering and terrifying, and the other is... a sad sulk... Yay We're Doing This Again. So apparently, our big bad guys of this series are also really sad people that have their own struggles and we should sympathize with them because they're Sad, ignoring the fact that they're responsible for enforcing a hierarchy system, shattering and corrupting gems for no reason, and even destroying planets for no reason, but I guess it's okay because they're Sad. What sucks about this the most is that the Diamonds prior to season 5 have no screentime at all and we're only given vague hints as to who they're supposed to be. I don't even think this series knows who they're supposed to be because Yellow Diamond also had her character changed yet again in the episode The Trial, which returned her character to way it was in Message Received before the ultimate nail-in-the-coffin that is Reunited where they decided that she should be Shallow and Pedantic just like Blue Diamond, who's also an atrocious character because her entire character is just... Sad. That's all there is to her, and we're supposed to sympathize with her because she's crying. This series seriously has a problem with understanding what the hell a sympathetic character is, because being sad doesn't automatically make you a likable, sympathetic, or relatable character in the slightest. In a desperate attempt to make Yellow and Blue look better than they actually are, this series decided to introduce White Diamond... in like the last four episodes, and decided to redeem her too for no reason whatsoever other than She Thinks She's Perfect When She Actually Isn't. This is just beyond horrendous writing because firstly, No, you are not going to make me hate Yellow and Blue any less than I already do, and secondly, White Diamond is just such an infantile and boring villain who does nothing more than T-pose in her little chamber. I'm not kidding about that either, and yet she still gets redeemed anyways? What the hell is wrong with this series?

This show has such a bizarre, cruel morality that I cannot comprehend at all, and every time I try to, I end up getting extremely furious. According to this series, characters like Jasper and Bismuth are the absolute worst, but characters like Lapis and the Diamonds are characters that deserve to be given second chances because they're Sad. I have no idea why this show insists on glorifying the absolute worst characters in any TV show ever, and kicking characters that ACTUALLY DESERVE second chances to the curb, this seriously gives off some really horrible messages about giving those that do nothing more than hurt you a billion chances for no reason whatsoever. It also tells me that those with motivations are always destined to fail because characters like Jasper and Bismuth... do have actual motivations for their actions compared to most of the main cast. The only reason why they never went through with them though is because of fucking Steven. I already mentioned that Steven is nothing more than a boring protagonist, but he's a Mary Sue as well because he determines how the audience is supposed to feel about several situations in this series. What I'm basically saying is: If Steven thinks someone is bad, they deserve to be poofed away and should never see the light of day again, but if Steven likes someone, they deserve to be glorified. I have never seen a moment in this series where a character tells Steven that HE is wrong about something, it's always him telling others that they're wrong, and they'll just conform to his every whim anyways, which is literally what the entire third act of Change Your Mind is. I haven't even mentioned how bad the glorifying can get because I've yet to discuss Rose, and I'm going to be spoiling some things in the following paragraph so avoid reading it if you haven't seen A Single Pale Rose.

    Rose is just another example of how badly written and gross this series truly is. For the first four seasons, she was pretty much ambiguous figure that was supposedly the savior of the Earth, but was revealed in A Single Pale Rose that she was one of the Diamonds I've yet to mention, Pink Diamond. Now, on its own, this twist sounds like something we all should've seen coming, because the show had like.... two instances of foreshadowing for this twist, one in Say Uncle where Uncle Grandpa says Steven should get his gem polished twice a year despite the fact quartz don't need to even have their gems polished at all, and The Trial, which clearly stated that Rose must've been with someone whom she trusted to see the shattering happen right in front of their eyes. This is all fine, but then there's stuff like a Ruby soldier in Bubbled saying she saw Rose get shattered which just makes zero sense, and Steven deliberately asking his dad about Rose's relation to Pink Diamond which was such an obvious giveaway that Rose was in fact Pink because, c'mon, you're gonna ask Greg of all people? Rose being Pink Diamond doesn't sound so bad on paper, but the direction they decided to take with it was incomprehensible. So apparently, Rose was actually a villain this whole time who caused nothing more than distress to her fellow Diamonds and gems and behaved like a spoiled brat. She apparently wanted her own colony, Earth, but then decided to abandon it for no reason, and faked her own death because... she wanted a baby I guess. I like how the episode that follows A Single Pale Rose is nothing more than a retcon, because all it did was confuse who this character is supposed to be. I think they were trying to go for a morally grey villain like the Legend of Korra villains, or they were going for someone like Azula in Avatar: The Last Airbender where you just love to hate her, but I'll be honest, I just hate Pink Diamond, period. And yes, I am using Rose and Pink Diamond interchangeably because they're the exact same person, and they're both what I consider to be objectively the worst character on this show since it seems like they're nothing more than pure concentrated evil, and the show absolutely loves to hammer this down your throat, since even the movie's main problem was started just because of Pink Diamond. I even hear in Steven Universe: Future, Pink Diamond did more horrendous things, which is just brilliant. Do you see the problem here? You spent like 4 whole seasons glorifying someone who in actuality was terrible... and... that's it, they knocked down 4 seasons of developing this character all for a "subversive" twist that caught no one off guard, and they just constantly reinforce this idea over and over again, not realizing that when they destroyed Rose, they also destroyed Pearl, since she was ordered to keep Pink Diamond's shattering a secret, completely shitting on anything about being "her own Pearl" in Back to the Barn.

This twist also made me realize that this show has no sense of catharsis whatsoever. That whole climax in Reunited has the characters get their asses beat and the Diamonds, who were built up to be the absolute worst for so long, getting redeemed, and now, we have the series beating us over the head with the point that Pink Diamond is the worst thing to ever exist without ever giving us a moment of satisfaction or relief. I get that this series is trying its damnedest to be subversive, but at least try to be subversive without either confusing or angering me, thanks. Oh yeah, this show is also downright unfunny most of the time. Early on, in S1-2 and parts of 3, there was a more light-hearted tone with some jokes sprinkled in, but as it went on, the jokes completely dissipated.

tl;dr version: This show's storytelling is lazy and bad, like they did the first take on episodes and nothing more and it leaves so many holes in the overall narrative they're trying to tell. The show is filled with way too many boring baby filler episodes that exist to reduce my life-span, it tries to be "subversive" without ever stopping to think about what the hell they're doing, it has such a cruel and disgusting morality where characters that're the worst get off scot-free and deserve to be glorified, while those with actual motivations deserve to die, all the villains are extremely boring and badly-handled, the Steven perspective ruins so many arcs and limits story potential.

CONCLUSION: That was a long review, and even though I do not like this show, I can at least say that the show is interesting to speculate on since it gives me a lot to tear into. Steven Universe had the potential to be something great as a good number of episodes have tons of brilliant ideas that're badly or weakly executed thanks to many of the aspects that I've mentioned above. This show has problems delivering any kind of messages it wants to tell, and a lot of character development is downright nonexistent or all over the place besides Peridot, the plot seems to be all over-the-place too, and they somehow manage to shoot themselves in the foot several times as this series goes on due to an insistence to be subversive instead of logical. In one way or another, I carry some nostalgia for this show, as it was fun seeing the Internet go wild for it during its early days, I had some fun fucking with the fandom, and I will feel a bit sad after this whole series ends because I don't think there will be any series like it ever again.
    Seasons 1-3 wouldn't even put the show in the bad territory at all, and I actually do like 1A and S2 to some extent, it's just that this show decided to go from being a fun monster of the week show to a jumbled up mess trying desperately to be down-to-earth and deep. The last two seasons (S4-5) really hurt this show's grade, but at least the movie was really good. Maybe I'll review it one day because that movie got down everything the original series failed to do in 5 seasons in a single movie instead.

UPDATE ON 10/30/2020: Maybe I've been a bit too hard on this series. I will forever remember the days when it was most likely my most dreaded cartoon, and it still is a lame show, but not for the same reasons now. I've seen worse shows ever since I finished watching this show, and thus am sparing it from being an awful/garbage show. S1-2 are alright, S1-3 would make the show a mixed bag, maybe even okay, but S4-5 are dreadful, and altogether S1-5 make a poor quality show, like 4/10 tier.

UPDATE ON 3/29/2021: After 1 year of this franchise concluding, hindsight has treated the original show well. Early on, it wasn't that bad, in fact, I would call it a guilty pleasure. 1A is a season I've always enjoyed since it was a fun slice-of-life monster of the week show, but 1B presented itself with more flaws that weighed S1 down, and S2 was a mostly good season just because its main character was my favorite character on the show: Peridot. It has a number of eps I don't like for sure, but the highs are very high and I can put them on whenever I'd like. 3 is a lot more... existent. It has several strings of trashy eps that range from boring to obnoxious, but most of this season is just... there, with a few decent/good eps to be found, though a huge mention has to go out to Too Short to Ride, which is my second favorite episode of the show barring Say Uncle for having a simple story that manages to have so many different layers to its writing and development of Peridot. I loosened up on S4 a bit, but it's still a useless season that can't even entertain toddlers, and S5 is a mess of storytelling. In fact, most of my criticisms for this show are specifically aimed at S5. I'm going to miss this series a lot tbh.

UPDATE ON 9/3/2021: Damn it, I want to call this show at the very least decent, but S4-5 still suck so much. I like S1-2 now though, maybe even really like them given how good 1A is. But even if I can't call this show higher than it is... for now... I actually adore the movie-- now more than ever. I may even call it my favorite movie ever made just because it has everything I can ask for: gorgeous animation, outstanding music numbers, a memorable, fun, sympathetic villain, funny jokes, moments that can legitimately make you cry-- it's such a well-crafted masterpiece. I wish the show ended here tbh, but SUF was okay with me since it means more SU content.

UPDATE ON 7/2/2022: Nothing big, just fixed the proportions and changed a few ratings.

My ratings may say I'm not big on SU, but to be honest... I think there's a fanboy of me deep down. I just have too much of a personal attachment to this series, y'know? They say that a show's biggest hater is also it's biggest fan, and I know way too much about this show's lore to not be considered a fan on some level.

I made an SUF review, by the way-- it was an interesting show: www.deviantart.com/ttlf/art/St…

Description
I decided to redo this scorecard from scratch because my initial review of this series, while I do stand by it, it got a bit overly personal and barely scratched the surface of the problems this series suffers from. So we're doing take two, and lol we have a lot of shit to tear into. Although it isn't as bad as my 2nd version of this scorecard made it out to be, it's still a pretty not-good series, but I think this third and potentially final version of the scorecard showcases my thoughts better than anything else. Btw, that entire black slice can be blamed on S4-5.

TTLF'S NOTE ON 9/17/2022: Y'know, at the very, very end of this review, there lies some notes I wrote back in 2020, 2021, and even this year as a way to show what changed in my scorecard, and as a way to show how I went from hating SU with all my heart to being indifferent towards it. I used to think every season sucked, with S4-5 being on an entirely different level, and only half of that is true nowadays. S1-2 were pretty fun, all things considered, and I do have my memories of watching 1A and enjoying it-- it was a fun monster-of-the-week show with quirky and funny characters, and did pulled off its dramatic moments rather well. I was even onboard with the story direction S2 was taking with the addition of Peridot to the cast, and the introduction of the Diamonds.

  However, these brilliant ideas went to waste since a majority of S3-5 are flatout useless. I would estimate that 80% of episodes from S3-5 are ones you can skip over and miss nothing, and this is the same problem I have with Adventure Time in its later seasons-- it's sad and funny at the same time how much SU and AT mirror each other. I want to like them way more than I do, but they waste their time on crap that would be boring to the average viewer and frustrating for people that want the story to pick up the pace. What we're left with instead is S4, a season that had fans drop off the show like flies because it's nothing but filler, with some random short-lived Zoo arc that I constantly forget even happens, and S5, which is a mess of storytelling-- at one point they bring back Bismuth from S3 because the direction her debut episode took was so strange, and this one existed to rectify the decision to bubble her away. I'm trying to say that SU literally had no trajectory in its later seasons whatsoever. I was burnt out by S4-5 in particular because they failed to deliver on expectations that I, and many other SU fans had. Reunited was meant to be the big confrontation, and our protagonists get their asses kicked in like 10 seconds, and the Cluster emerges despite its emergence meaning the end of the world and... I've said this before, but it bares repeating. In short, I will never mellow on S4-5, they are disappointments that aren't worth anyone's time.

  I do have an SUF scorecard out, and all you need to know about it is that it started so well and ended so disappointingly... pretty much an SU lite that sadly reemphasized the problems the original show suffered from... KINDA LIKE HOW DISTANT LANDS REEMPHASIZED ADVENTURE TIME'S PROBLEMS, AND IT WILL NEVER NOT BOTHER ME HOW SU AND AT ARE LITERALLY THE SAME SHOW IN SO MANY WAYS. Rest of the review is below, knock yourself out if you want

ANOTHER NOTE ON 3/5/2023: At this point, my description below is in desperate need of a redo. To say that my opinion on SU has improved would be understating things a little-- I still think that, at its core, it's an extremely flawed show, but not one I carry any hatred towards. Can you believe there was one point where I rated SU "Garbage"? It's funny really... it was initially BAD, then AWFUL by July 2019, then I shot it down to GARBAGE by December, only to slowly take that back as I revisited episodes and watched more and more cartoons, realizing that perhaps I shouldn't have driven all my scorn towards this one, in spite of how trashy S4-5 are. They still suck hard, but the rest? It's pretty good, actually, and my feelings towards SU nowadays are more positive than negative. I even feel more positive towards it than AT personally speaking, despite its lows being a lot worse... well... A Single Pale Rose and Reunited are anyways. Idk what I'm saying anymore, so I'll leave it at: I think SU is pretty decent nowadays, and I can justify the "okay" rating with the fact that S1-2 barely have any episodes I dislike and S3 was still mostly on-track with a few missteps, and in spite of how much 4-5 suck, they were followed with the movie which, if you didn't know, is my favorite movie ever made... and my favorite animated thing in general. SU as a whole is a show with extremely high highs and embarrassingly bad lows. All in all, this is the biggest promotion any cartoon has ever gotten from me, and I'm happy about that.

HISTORY: I do not have a pleasant history with this series. At all. But let's go waaaay back to around early 2014, when this show just started and very few episodes had been made like Cat Fingers and Frybo, I have vivid memories watching these episodes, and basically all of 1A to be honest. I never thought that this series was anything phenomenal, but it was a good way to waste time for 11 minutes if I felt like it, but for some reason I never stuck around for the second half of season 1, also referred to as 1B, and I don't necessarily know why since the Internet was going absolutely wild for it. To be honest, even when I liked 1A, I wasn't completely hooked or invested in this series, I just thought it was enjoyable and nothing else, but in 2015, I did have a trolling side to me (still do, actually) and after hearing about a shitstorm that happened in the fandom in 2015, I thought trolling fans would be a fun thing to do. Little did I know I was wrong for thinking such a thing, because the fandom is just... the absolute worst.

So basically, we're going from my history with this show to my history with its fandom, and good God is the fandom is a mess. I never realized it could be just so awful, they'll get mad at you if you don't consider this series a perfect 10/10 masterpiece, and that statement continues to ring true to this day. In fact, my initial scorecard of this series was so controversial and out-there that it prompted two people (wave hi to the camera and ) to make scorecards on me to ensure that I don't release any more Scary Opinion For Al Childrean Too Sea. Back in 2015 and 2016, I loved getting into flamewars with fans and saying SU was overrated and dumb. I'll never forget the time they bullied a fan of this show to near SUICIDE for drawing Rose a bit thinner than usual and accusing her of fat shaming, or the times they hated Say Uncle because the episode is too wacky and not calm and relaxing like amazing House Guest (In fact, the hate on Say Uncle gave me the idea to investigate the dickfest we call the SU fandom because how can ANYONE hate this episode?)

Where I come into the picture though was when I became friends with a group of people on Discord in September 2016 that apparently were fans of this series, and when I said that it was overrated and stupid just to see their reaction AND that my favorite episode was Say Uncle (no really, it was my favorite episode. It will always be this show's magnum opus.). We did all get along in general, and believe it or not, I actually did enjoy S1-3 of SU back then, but at the same time, there would be constant drama throughout the first half 2017 and it'd be extremely hostile and nasty. I even watched the show up until the episode Bubbled and I kinda hyperexaggerated my thoughts to be on the safe side (One time on Twitter in like May 2017 I put out a scorecard for like 2 days where I called every season 3 episode Amazing for no reason lmao) but even when I did like it, I'd criticize it at every opportunity I got. When I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender in summer of 2017, I realized that I really did dislike this series, but I continued to put on the mask that I enjoyed it anyways. I got into flamewars with the exact same group later that year when I told them I loved Avatar and preferred it to Steven Universe by a long shot, and they accused me of being extremely biased to this series... like... What? After incidences like that, I reviewed Steven Universe's fourth season on Twitter in early 2018 and called it good... for no reason. Like, how the hell did I tolerate Onion Gang? Oh yeah it's because this episode is Overhated. I really suppressed my true thoughts on this series for so long and didn't fully state them for all to hear until this year because I felt like it was about time. As Steven Universe went along, the show saw more and more criticisms of it arise, and I'm no longer alone in saying this series has so many serious problems that prevent it from being something truly great.

Now here's where the review REALLY gets started...

ANIMATION: For a show that's supposedly one of the best of the 2010s, I'm surprised it didn't even meet the bare minimum of having good or competent animation. The animation in this series is... a walking tragedy. To name one huge strength, the background art on this show is absolutely gorgeous, the backgrounds have excellent use of geometric shapes and have really pleasing coloring that sets the tone of any scene perfectly, especially the space backgrounds, but when placed against the actual animation, we're opening a whole other chapter. The animation's biggest problem is that it's almost never consistent, episodes for the most part look like they were animated in one take and nothing more, with character heights never being the same and being extremely off-model for no reason. Off-model animation happens for one of two reasons: It could either be done for the sake of comedy like when a character expresses, or it happens as a simple animation mistake, but this show doesn't fall into either of these categories.

  It's a deliberate choice by the crew to give artistic freedom without ever considering how it may affect the movement in scenes, because holy shit the animation looks so slow and choppy most of the time and never does anything exciting period. This even goes as far as affecting fight scenes where they're way too slow and I rarely ever feel the impact of any hit, and the only time I ever got invested in a fight scene was in Super Watermelon Island, where they got it right thanks to perfect timing and good choreography, and even that episode has a host of other issues. Most of the animation in this series just screams lazy, and I know what some people might say, "You're looking too deep into this, why should off-model characters affect your enjoyment? It personally doesn't bother me!" Well first of all, I'm glad you're able to tolerate what is objectively unprofessionalism, but I can't. Secondly, shouldn't it be a requirement for cartoons to have actual model sheets so you can ensure you somehow don't contort your character designs? Because last time I checked, that was something most shows enforced, guess this show didn't because it wants to be unique.
The true reason for why the animation in this show is as sloppy as it appears is because the storyboards look so messy, nowhere near cohesive at all. Shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender go all-out with their storyboards and look beautiful while shows like Wander Over Yonder and SpongeBob SquarePants have way more cartoony looking storyboards, but this show's looks like a bunch of scribbles. The only times where the series doesn't have shit animation is when they get some guest storyboard artist from either Studio Trigger (they worked on Steven Universe Future's intro and Mindful Education) or someone like James Baxter to do the storyboards. These scenes/episodes look a lot more fluid and look genuinely great because the storyboards are a lot clearer and have more detail put into them. This should be done on a regular basis, not once in a blue moon.
Surprisingly, the movie suffers the opposite problem with its overall animation where the actual movement is competent, but the backgrounds look a lot... flatter. The visual effects, character models, and animation, mostly on Spinel, are spot-on, but the backgrounds aren't anywhere near as pretty to look at that, and looking at SU Future, I fear that's how things will stay, but it's an improvement overall and I don't mind it.

tl;dr version: The animation on this series suffers due to a lack of proper model sheets and clean storyboards, effectively making most episodes look unfinished, choppy, and slow, and this goes as far as affecting the action in this series too where most of it is just so predictable and boring

CHARACTERS: Let's cut right to the chase... I do not like a majority of this show's characters honestly, and some of them are among the most unlikable and revolting creatures that I've ever seen in any cartoon, let alone TV show. This is where Steven Universe suffers the most: its characters. To start off, the protagonist of this series, Steven, is such an inconsistently written character. He starts off as nothing more than an irritating hindrance in Season 1, but with a kind heart, to being tolerable in S2-4 since he's more integral to the gems and has a more mature attitude, and then goes on to be a full-on crybaby pacifist in season 5 that can magically resolve any problem because of course he can, so his character development essentially two steps forward and one hundred steps back by the end. For being a main protagonist, he's so BORING since there's next to nothing I can say about him other than the things above. It really says a lot about the series when the main character himself is someone that has so little to him. As for the three Crystal Gems, Pearl, Amethyst, and Garnet... I personally hate Pearl the most and can't stand it whenever she's on-screen.

  There was a really interesting idea with Pearl in how she's a character that is obsessive and suffers from grief over the loss of Rose, but the problem is that they almost never do anything with it. It's just left there, that's her entire character, especially as the series goes on. This character flaw of Pearl starts off as something interesting but I got fed up with it immediately and it soon became extremely obnoxious, like how the entire second half of Mr. Greg was just an excuse for Pearl to mope over Rose for the one millionth time. Ooh, how about the fact that their attempts to get me to sympathize with this character are completely pathetic thanks to some of the flashback episodes? I really like how in We Need to Talk, she's portrayed as an antagonistic asshole and how in Three Gems in a Baby, she was a complete lunatic for thinking to remove baby Steven's gem. Her relationship with Rose doesn't even feel genuine, it's so much creepier because Pearl and Rose have absolutely no dynamic whatsoever and Pearl seemed a lot more like an obsessive servant than anything else. Even an episode like Rose's Scabbard had Pearl let Steven almost fall to his death and not even going back to check on him, but I guess this is okay because She's Sad. Season 5 only ruined this character further in the masterpiece of animation that is A Single Pale Rose, where as it turns out, that whole shtick of Pearl being "her own Pearl" like she said in Back to the Barn was a complete lie because she still took orders from Rose up until that episode, which was the final nail on the coffin for me absolutely hating this character.

Garnet is a character that I at first found really cool as her line deliveries could sometimes be funny. (A rarity for this show. Also, Estelle isn't the best voice actress in the world, because the moments where Garnet speaks in a more serious voice have me dying at just how bored she sounds when delivering the lines) She also had a really chill vibe to her, but... this only applies to season 1. The twist with her being a fusion honestly caught me off-guard when I first saw it way back then and it was a cool twist, but what it meant to this series and Garnet as a character is a fat Yikes. Beyond Jailbreak, Garnet has absolutely no personality, unless of course being a Fusion with Future Vision counts as one. I can only think of one episode where Garnet had more to her than any of those two things but that's only to a small extent with Pool Hopping, the rest of the time you get episodes like Mindful Education, Keystone Motel, The Answer, and so on that exist to reinforce the idea that Garnet is nothing more than that nowadays since all involve fusion.
  I'd be perfectly okay with this, but the actual fusion that makes up Garnet are two of the most annoying characters on this series. Introducing Ruby and Sapphire, two characters that have no kind of personality to be found or anything interesting to them beyond their designs and never talk about anything else other than fusion and love. They also like to bicker here and there, can't seem to be apart for even two seconds, and can even be used as plot devices like in season 5 where, after the twist in A Single Pale Rose, a completely new conflict about Ruby and Sapphire's relation is at stake. Nothing about their relationship is charming or endearing, it's just cliched and generic at best and obnoxious at worst. The only time I tolerated these two was in Gem Heist since they were given other things to do that didn't involve fucking fusion. Ultimately, all they ever did was ruin a character that I once really liked. Hell, even the movie had Garnet be nothing more than a fusion, and they even give her a song about finding love at first sight, which clearly contradicts the message of Love Letters, where love at first sight doesn't exist, but I guess it does now so lol.

I actually like Amethyst, most of the time anyways. Her jokey and upbeat personality was one I found really charming and being the complete anti-thesis to Garnet and Pearl provided a perfect balance... until On the Run happened. After that episode, Amethyst became a character that I don't even know what to make of. Just like Steven, she became so inconsistently written, being perfectly fine in some episodes yet unstable in others, or in a case like Too Far would constantly go back-and-forth between being Sad and being normal. What I absolutely hate about this is that they kept playing around with Amethyst, a character that was once one of the more optimistic characters on this series, and made her either insufferable or joyous to watch with no transitions whatsoever, and by Steven vs. Amethyst, I had just about enough since that episode literally consisted of two characters maiming each other because They're Sad. This happened for so long up until the opening of That Will Be All, which admittedly is an abysmal episode, but had Amethyst return to form in the opening, which actually put a smile on my face. Even better, I forget which episode this occurred in but my guess is either The Question or What's Your Problem? where Amethyst declares that she won't dump any of her problems on Steven no longer, which was such a great moment for her character. It solidified her as one of the better characters on this show overall, despite having a rough track record in S2-4.

As for characters I despise, well... there's Lapis. Being introduced in the season 1 episode Mirror Gem, Lapis was at first a character I saw as interesting, but after one final appearance in both The Return and Jailbreak, Lapis just... disappeared from the show... until season 3, where Oh my fucking God what did they do this character? I have never seen a more obnoxious, aggravating, pessimistic, angsty piece of trash character before in my life. I regretted having any kind of interest in Lapis because when she was reintroduced, I couldn't stand her at all. I'll admit, Same Old World was... fine, but Barn Mates was an insufferable 11 minutes and used to be on my bottom 10 just because it's 11 minutes of Lapis being a shitty character, and that tape recorder scene always manages to piss me off. Once again, Lapis is yet another character who's nothing more than a ball of negative emotions and does NOTHING to break herself out of this state of misery. She's always so ungrateful and downright cruel to anyone that isn't Steven, and sees absolutely no improvement as the series goes on. If anything, she regresses since she starts off as an asshole mope and then transitions to being a coward by Raising the Barn. The only reason to why Lapis is a complete dickhead and sulk is because she's... Sad i guess, and this somehow excuses her bad behavior and means she shouldn't face any consequences whatsoever, even though that shouldn't be the case at all. Even when it comes to her trauma, there is a deliberate hole in her whole situation with Jasper. She claims to have been tortured for I don't care to remember how long, when SHE was the one torturing Jasper for however long the gap between Jailbreak and Super Watermelon Island is, and she flatout admitted it in Alone at Sea. Everything about this character is absolutely abominable from her characterization to her facial expressions to her "development", I can easily say Lapis is one of my least favorite cartoon characters since I can't even think of anything about her that I like aside from her design, I guess, but that's still the absolute bare minimum.

Peridot, though, is the best character of this show, without question. Between all of the characters, she's actually really funny, optimistic, and is the only one to get proper development besides Amethyst. She's also a good anti-thesis to the angst everywhere else, and made season 2 a lot more tolerable to sit through (Even though the bad episodes in this season are complete trash and weigh it down so much. This season would've been good without the filler lol) and is the funniest on this character by a wide margin. This show really could use less Pearls and more Peridots, because Peridot gets one thing that most characters on this cast fail to even get: development. From the get-go, Peridot was introduced as some kind of silly cartoony antagonist that the Crystal Gems needed to stop, but after being trapped after Catch and Release, becomes a part of the main cast. She starts off having a resentment towards every character besides Steven somewhat, and over the course of numerous episodes, we see her become a lot more open to the main cast and eventually becomes a member of the main cast, even downright disobeying Yellow Diamond in the gloriousness that is Message Received. What's even better is that we get an entire episode that develops Peridot even further with Too Short to Ride, a surprisingly hilarious episode with lots of moments that had me sympathize with Peridot and her struggles of feeling worthless without technology. She comes a long way by the end of it by realizing her self-worth and develops a power that I believe is more than earned. What I'm essentially saying is that Peridot is three-dimensional. She has the absolute most going for her, which is such a shame that after Too Short to Ride, she barely gets any appearances in the show at all. I mean, she sometimes appears to be a comic relief, but it isn't saying much when the best I can remember of her post-Too Short to Ride is Kindergarten Kid.

I'm not willing to talk about the Diamonds right now because the villains will be talked about later, but the last thing I need to cover are the townies, who are probably even more boring and one-note than Steven. Some of them just exist like the pizza place people, Mayor Dewey, Sadie, and Connie, but the others are Good God I hate them. Ronaldo is essentially the best of the bad ones because they actually pulled off an episode with him that was honestly great, but he's still really damn irritating and nothing more than a nuisance in most episodes. Keep Beach City Weird and Rocknaldo decide to give him the focus for some bizarre reason and his crazy conspiracy behavior is so intolerable because they play it so straight, and have no kinds of jokes or stakes to back them up. This guy is still a godsend to Lars, whose episodes are virtually THE. SAME. THING. EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. Lol Lars is an apathetic cunt and learns nothing by the end of the episode, yet Sadie still continues to like him despite him being an oblivious douche. It's like they went out of their way to make this guy the most unlikable character he can be, and guess what? It fucking worked. Even when he finally did something useful in the beginning of season 5, this "development" of Lars comes out of nowhere, and when he initially dies and comes back to life, it's like he's an entirely different character. A better one, yes, but my point is that they did absolutely nothing interesting, new, or creative with this character up until this point and essentially replaced him with someone that has more to him than Lol He's The Worst Please Laugh. Guess what? The same thing can be said about a particular character named Kevin that makes random appearances for no reason and is designed to be the most generic, lame, "cool" character you could possibly imagine. Lastly, there's Onion who's just... let's just say that the less said about episodes such as Onion Gang, the better. His episodes, besides Onion Friend, tend to be really dumb, and infantile... and that's it. Just another flat character that does nothing more than burn runtime.

tl;dr version: This show has a pretty nice line-up of characters that range from just existing to being outright horrendous, with Peridot and potentially Amethyst being outliers for being characters I enjoy. It needs to understand that characters can have struggles and problems, but they actually need to... well... do something about that, instead of sitting there and crying about it, because it can get really fucking obnoxious really quickly.

THE STORY: After watching this whole series, I'm more convinced it's more concerned with trying to be "subversive" than actually trying to tell any kind of cohesive narrative whatsoever. This is more-so applicable to seasons 3-5 than seasons 1-2, because those two seasons set up some interesting ideas that series simply failed to live up to. They introduced villains like Jasper and the Diamonds, characters like Lapis and Peridot, gave us vague ideas about Homeworld, why Steven's mom is particularly infamous, and so on, but the end result of all these aspects were disappointing at best and absolutely horrendous at worst. This show actually has a really fucked up production and hearing about it only gives me the impression that they did the first take on most episodes and nothing more. Did you know Reunited was completed in 2016 and Change Your Mind was completed in April 2017? The final product of both of these episodes feel unfinished more than anything else since they have flaws more noticeable than a neon red sign that I'll tear into later down the line. Oh yeah, there would also be so many hiatuses and whenever they'd come back, they'd usually have a shitton of boring baby filler episodes with the absolute worst example being November 2017 where, after sixth months since Lars' Head, they came back to fucking DEWEY WINS and that filler would continue up until Kevin Party. This sounds like I should be blaming the Cartoon Network scheduling and not the show itself, and you're half right, but what I will absolutely never ever excuse is the god-forsaken Steven perspective.

I have never heard of any cartoon that locks itself to its main character, but I guess this show wants to be unique, so congrats, you're the first series to ever limit any kind of storytelling you want to tackle just because of this awful device. Fucking SpongeBob can change perspectives and some of the best episodes of the show are made whenever they change perspectives like Mall Girl Pearl and Larry's Gym. That show can also have sub-plots, which this series has absolutely none of. Thanks to this perspective, no character is ever able to shine on their own and I can only name two episodes where the perspective decided to shift to others, and coincidentally they come from season 2, with Rising Tides, Crashing Skies and Log Date 7 15 2, and those episodes actually manage to be good because of that. But the absolute worst thing that this perspective does is that it leaves out so much necessary information that are needed to process this show's "story", because sometimes it'll just expect you to just accept whatever is happening without ever questioning it, like how between Dewey Wins and Kevin Party, we NEVER cut back to Lars and the Off Colors in space, where they APPARENTLY infiltrated Homeworld and stole a ship... and we see none of it. How about that whole Cluster(fuck) arc where we barely see the drill ever being constructed, and it just-so-happens to be done off-screen? Malachite, who was formed at the end of Jailbreak is never seen again until Super Watermelon Island with the show only vaguely hinting at what's even going on with them in rare instances like the uselessness that is Chille Tid (the ep's alright though). And when I say "vaguely hinting", I mean it loves to do a lot of "tell, don't show". Even an episode like An Indirect Kiss has Pearl and Garnet entirely disappear mid-way into the episode and show up at the very end of it, which more than jarring to say the least.
  This Steven perspective is also the reason why this show has a ton of filler episodes, and when I say filler, I mean FILLER. Most of them having nothing going on, and given that Steven is a boring protagonist, a lot of the filler episodes tend to be excruciatingly boring, mundane, and sometimes downright infantile. I could feel my IQ dropping watching the entirety of season 4, because that season is entirely filler outside of the Zoo arc and last two episodes. I have no idea why there's so much junk in this series, because the purpose of filler episodes is to let the audience catch their breath for a little after something intense, which this show doesn't even have most of the time, meaning that the amount of storytelling episodes can't even compare to the amount of filler, which is stunning honestly. Now here's the part where I describe SU's actual narrative...

Trying to think of a synopsis for this show overall is extremely difficult, because it meanders so much. With shows such as Avatar, Samurai Jack, and Gravity Falls, I can actually sum up what the show is about from start to finish, but I can't do that with Steven Universe. It initially starts off as this show with some fat boy ruining what could've been interesting adventures with the Crystal Gems, but then it transitions to this heavy lore worldbuilding and the ultimate goal of this series is to... uh... I have no idea. My first problem with this series above all else is that there's never an actually defined villain of this series. At first, we have Jasper, who's introduced at the end of season 1, but never sees the light of day until season 3 and even in that season, they pretty much shoved her into the last 2 minutes of random episodes to get some kind of conflict going (Most episodes are extremely guilty of this), and then ditched her for THREE YEARS until Steven Universe: Future, which literally just came out. Season 2 hinted that the Diamonds must be the ultimate villains of this series, with the debut of Yellow in Message Received, but like Jasper, are ditched for a whole season until they suddenly return in That Will Be All. In fact, now's the time to talk about the Diamonds because they're infinitely worse than Lapis in my eyes.

  The Diamonds are the most disappointing things to ever happen to grace this series. When season 2 revealed Yellow Diamond, her appearance was so shocking and menacing, and looked like the making of an amazing villain, which is EXACTLY why they ditched them for a whole season before That Will Be All, and what they did to the Diamonds in that episode was so awful. If you compare Yellow Diamond's portrayal in this episode to the one in Message Received, they don't match at all. One of them is towering and terrifying, and the other is... a sad sulk... Yay We're Doing This Again. So apparently, our big bad guys of this series are also really sad people that have their own struggles and we should sympathize with them because they're Sad, ignoring the fact that they're responsible for enforcing a hierarchy system, shattering and corrupting gems for no reason, and even destroying planets for no reason, but I guess it's okay because they're Sad. What sucks about this the most is that the Diamonds prior to season 5 have no screentime at all and we're only given vague hints as to who they're supposed to be. I don't even think this series knows who they're supposed to be because Yellow Diamond also had her character changed yet again in the episode The Trial, which returned her character to way it was in Message Received before the ultimate nail-in-the-coffin that is Reunited where they decided that she should be Shallow and Pedantic just like Blue Diamond, who's also an atrocious character because her entire character is just... Sad. That's all there is to her, and we're supposed to sympathize with her because she's crying. This series seriously has a problem with understanding what the hell a sympathetic character is, because being sad doesn't automatically make you a likable, sympathetic, or relatable character in the slightest. In a desperate attempt to make Yellow and Blue look better than they actually are, this series decided to introduce White Diamond... in like the last four episodes, and decided to redeem her too for no reason whatsoever other than She Thinks She's Perfect When She Actually Isn't. This is just beyond horrendous writing because firstly, No, you are not going to make me hate Yellow and Blue any less than I already do, and secondly, White Diamond is just such an infantile and boring villain who does nothing more than T-pose in her little chamber. I'm not kidding about that either, and yet she still gets redeemed anyways? What the hell is wrong with this series?

This show has such a bizarre, cruel morality that I cannot comprehend at all, and every time I try to, I end up getting extremely furious. According to this series, characters like Jasper and Bismuth are the absolute worst, but characters like Lapis and the Diamonds are characters that deserve to be given second chances because they're Sad. I have no idea why this show insists on glorifying the absolute worst characters in any TV show ever, and kicking characters that ACTUALLY DESERVE second chances to the curb, this seriously gives off some really horrible messages about giving those that do nothing more than hurt you a billion chances for no reason whatsoever. It also tells me that those with motivations are always destined to fail because characters like Jasper and Bismuth... do have actual motivations for their actions compared to most of the main cast. The only reason why they never went through with them though is because of fucking Steven. I already mentioned that Steven is nothing more than a boring protagonist, but he's a Mary Sue as well because he determines how the audience is supposed to feel about several situations in this series. What I'm basically saying is: If Steven thinks someone is bad, they deserve to be poofed away and should never see the light of day again, but if Steven likes someone, they deserve to be glorified. I have never seen a moment in this series where a character tells Steven that HE is wrong about something, it's always him telling others that they're wrong, and they'll just conform to his every whim anyways, which is literally what the entire third act of Change Your Mind is. I haven't even mentioned how bad the glorifying can get because I've yet to discuss Rose, and I'm going to be spoiling some things in the following paragraph so avoid reading it if you haven't seen A Single Pale Rose.

    Rose is just another example of how badly written and gross this series truly is. For the first four seasons, she was pretty much ambiguous figure that was supposedly the savior of the Earth, but was revealed in A Single Pale Rose that she was one of the Diamonds I've yet to mention, Pink Diamond. Now, on its own, this twist sounds like something we all should've seen coming, because the show had like.... two instances of foreshadowing for this twist, one in Say Uncle where Uncle Grandpa says Steven should get his gem polished twice a year despite the fact quartz don't need to even have their gems polished at all, and The Trial, which clearly stated that Rose must've been with someone whom she trusted to see the shattering happen right in front of their eyes. This is all fine, but then there's stuff like a Ruby soldier in Bubbled saying she saw Rose get shattered which just makes zero sense, and Steven deliberately asking his dad about Rose's relation to Pink Diamond which was such an obvious giveaway that Rose was in fact Pink because, c'mon, you're gonna ask Greg of all people? Rose being Pink Diamond doesn't sound so bad on paper, but the direction they decided to take with it was incomprehensible. So apparently, Rose was actually a villain this whole time who caused nothing more than distress to her fellow Diamonds and gems and behaved like a spoiled brat. She apparently wanted her own colony, Earth, but then decided to abandon it for no reason, and faked her own death because... she wanted a baby I guess. I like how the episode that follows A Single Pale Rose is nothing more than a retcon, because all it did was confuse who this character is supposed to be. I think they were trying to go for a morally grey villain like the Legend of Korra villains, or they were going for someone like Azula in Avatar: The Last Airbender where you just love to hate her, but I'll be honest, I just hate Pink Diamond, period. And yes, I am using Rose and Pink Diamond interchangeably because they're the exact same person, and they're both what I consider to be objectively the worst character on this show since it seems like they're nothing more than pure concentrated evil, and the show absolutely loves to hammer this down your throat, since even the movie's main problem was started just because of Pink Diamond. I even hear in Steven Universe: Future, Pink Diamond did more horrendous things, which is just brilliant. Do you see the problem here? You spent like 4 whole seasons glorifying someone who in actuality was terrible... and... that's it, they knocked down 4 seasons of developing this character all for a "subversive" twist that caught no one off guard, and they just constantly reinforce this idea over and over again, not realizing that when they destroyed Rose, they also destroyed Pearl, since she was ordered to keep Pink Diamond's shattering a secret, completely shitting on anything about being "her own Pearl" in Back to the Barn.

This twist also made me realize that this show has no sense of catharsis whatsoever. That whole climax in Reunited has the characters get their asses beat and the Diamonds, who were built up to be the absolute worst for so long, getting redeemed, and now, we have the series beating us over the head with the point that Pink Diamond is the worst thing to ever exist without ever giving us a moment of satisfaction or relief. I get that this series is trying its damnedest to be subversive, but at least try to be subversive without either confusing or angering me, thanks. Oh yeah, this show is also downright unfunny most of the time. Early on, in S1-2 and parts of 3, there was a more light-hearted tone with some jokes sprinkled in, but as it went on, the jokes completely dissipated.

tl;dr version: This show's storytelling is lazy and bad, like they did the first take on episodes and nothing more and it leaves so many holes in the overall narrative they're trying to tell. The show is filled with way too many boring baby filler episodes that exist to reduce my life-span, it tries to be "subversive" without ever stopping to think about what the hell they're doing, it has such a cruel and disgusting morality where characters that're the worst get off scot-free and deserve to be glorified, while those with actual motivations deserve to die, all the villains are extremely boring and badly-handled, the Steven perspective ruins so many arcs and limits story potential.

CONCLUSION: That was a long review, and even though I do not like this show, I can at least say that the show is interesting to speculate on since it gives me a lot to tear into. Steven Universe had the potential to be something great as a good number of episodes have tons of brilliant ideas that're badly or weakly executed thanks to many of the aspects that I've mentioned above. This show has problems delivering any kind of messages it wants to tell, and a lot of character development is downright nonexistent or all over the place besides Peridot, the plot seems to be all over-the-place too, and they somehow manage to shoot themselves in the foot several times as this series goes on due to an insistence to be subversive instead of logical. In one way or another, I carry some nostalgia for this show, as it was fun seeing the Internet go wild for it during its early days, I had some fun fucking with the fandom, and I will feel a bit sad after this whole series ends because I don't think there will be any series like it ever again.
    Seasons 1-3 wouldn't even put the show in the bad territory at all, and I actually do like 1A and S2 to some extent, it's just that this show decided to go from being a fun monster of the week show to a jumbled up mess trying desperately to be down-to-earth and deep. The last two seasons (S4-5) really hurt this show's grade, but at least the movie was really good. Maybe I'll review it one day because that movie got down everything the original series failed to do in 5 seasons in a single movie instead.

UPDATE ON 10/30/2020: Maybe I've been a bit too hard on this series. I will forever remember the days when it was most likely my most dreaded cartoon, and it still is a lame show, but not for the same reasons now. I've seen worse shows ever since I finished watching this show, and thus am sparing it from being an awful/garbage show. S1-2 are alright, S1-3 would make the show a mixed bag, maybe even okay, but S4-5 are dreadful, and altogether S1-5 make a poor quality show, like 4/10 tier.

UPDATE ON 3/29/2021: After 1 year of this franchise concluding, hindsight has treated the original show well. Early on, it wasn't that bad, in fact, I would call it a guilty pleasure. 1A is a season I've always enjoyed since it was a fun slice-of-life monster of the week show, but 1B presented itself with more flaws that weighed S1 down, and S2 was a mostly good season just because its main character was my favorite character on the show: Peridot. It has a number of eps I don't like for sure, but the highs are very high and I can put them on whenever I'd like. 3 is a lot more... existent. It has several strings of trashy eps that range from boring to obnoxious, but most of this season is just... there, with a few decent/good eps to be found, though a huge mention has to go out to Too Short to Ride, which is my second favorite episode of the show barring Say Uncle for having a simple story that manages to have so many different layers to its writing and development of Peridot. I loosened up on S4 a bit, but it's still a useless season that can't even entertain toddlers, and S5 is a mess of storytelling. In fact, most of my criticisms for this show are specifically aimed at S5. I'm going to miss this series a lot tbh.

UPDATE ON 9/3/2021: Damn it, I want to call this show at the very least decent, but S4-5 still suck so much. I like S1-2 now though, maybe even really like them given how good 1A is. But even if I can't call this show higher than it is... for now... I actually adore the movie-- now more than ever. I may even call it my favorite movie ever made just because it has everything I can ask for: gorgeous animation, outstanding music numbers, a memorable, fun, sympathetic villain, funny jokes, moments that can legitimately make you cry-- it's such a well-crafted masterpiece. I wish the show ended here tbh, but SUF was okay with me since it means more SU content.

UPDATE ON 7/2/2022: Nothing big, just fixed the proportions and changed a few ratings.

My ratings may say I'm not big on SU, but to be honest... I think there's a fanboy of me deep down. I just have too much of a personal attachment to this series, y'know? They say that a show's biggest hater is also it's biggest fan, and I know way too much about this show's lore to not be considered a fan on some level.

I made an SUF review, by the way-- it was an interesting show: www.deviantart.com/ttlf/art/St…