clearly not gonna stop focusing on steven universe any time soon so i might as well rewatch it

hey guys? the pilot is still really heckin good

never noticed before that lars seems terrified by the mr universe van barreling down the street in the theme song

"if you miss [cookie cat] so much, why don't you make them"

foreshadowing!

(probably not actually foreshadowing)

questions

thus is the way of things

boy scharpling's greg voice used to be so...deep

real lack of intellectual curiosity from sadie here

"everyone's counting on you to help! you can't just be useless!"

and then he can't lift the cannon alone, everyone has to help him, because that's how life works

foreshadowing

HEY KIDS! IT'S EUGENE CORDERO!

*applause*

okay someone tell me what the fuck happens if you dunk that thing in diamond juice

THE RAFT

okay so what's a moon goddess

HAHAGAHAHAHAHAHA

it's a three hour paddle home

i fucking love the "mighty science theater" effect of the gentle lilting sounds of "love like you" kicking in after an episode of high-octane wackiness

real 50s factory instructinal film vibes coming off the "together breakfast" motif

oh hey rose's room

now it has all the power of a breakfast

oh hey it's steven's whole arc in one episode

HEY KIDS! IT'S JOEL HODGSON!

*applause*

some extremely amy winfrey cat noises

pet not yon hellfinger! tis a fiend...a fiend...UNHOLY

lowkey mad i never got to see the living island

"I'M A MONSTER!" "NO YOU'RE NOT! YOU'RE MY SON!"

au where the solution to wyrm!steven was to put him through the car wash

steven refuses to be traumatized by this

phenomenal

"we will end you if you make ladies smooch. but you can keep this joke about jerkin it"

spikes that fall from the sky only if the target presses the spikes that fall from the sky button is good trap design

first instance of steven having ptsd: the phrase "this is gonna be intense" makes him disassociate

the idea that gem monsters can be buildings doesn't really get...revisited, ever. nor does them having offspring or biological imperatives or, like, anything in these early eps

kinda prefer gem monsters being kinda weird to them just being kaiju, honestly

i guess this could be like the lapis mirror. still though. eventually gem stuff kinda gets reduced to "either this is a gem person, or corruption made it a monster, or shattering made it a frankenstein". more weirdness please

"blood polyp" DEFINITELY doesn't square with gem taxonomy though. where would the blood come from?!

they just left steven like that til nightfall. great parenting!

forget tigers and millionaires. steven's real wrestling gimmick is giant novelty props

lars never thought tigers would eat HIS FACE

"lars, i'm really confused!" yeah wrestling will do that

"probably some kid trying to sell me lava insurance"

please, steven. land mines. everyone knows kids sell land mine insurance

i remember me and my friends once had an hour-long argument over whether computers exist in steven universe

turns out there's one in this very episode!

we never really circle back to there also being sand terraforming gems, either

the initial joke of pearl being a poor fit for a driving game sure circles back in "last one out of beach city", huh

"fighting a giant foot" gets a deliberate callback in "change your mind"

we never see onion with that scooter again, do we?

y'know what, smiley, this is on you for not noticing garnet was here after hours

little beetle bongos

i know i keep harping on this but that giant bird works like literally nothing else we see

it is. very late holy shit

it's weird realizing in steven universe it's entirely possible the country is called "aqua mexico"

and so garnet, amethyst, and pearl save steven by...forcing him to be the adult in this situation

maybe not a great lesson to be sending

teen steven manifests when he's feeling insecure and desperate for attention

again, not a great sign

"pearl, all your nagging has made steven depressed"

RETURN OF THE SCOOTE--oh it blew up

that's why we never see it again

it seems churlish of pearl to quibble over "real" swordfighting when amethyst's weapon is a fucking whip and steven has, like, a captain america shield

rpg world guy?!

QUESTIONS

lonely blade movies become a trigger for steven :(

"who knows where he got that from"

"wow, that's stuck on good. i guess we'll have to chop it off!"

CONNIE

GIANT PENNY

HER

it's very easy to see why nanefua became mayor, she's great

steven sure gets left home alone a lot while his parents go do "important" things without him, huh

\\rose's room has perfectly simulated onion's behavior

rose's room has an appropriately vague and dysfunctional idea of what greg as a dad would be like considering rose was there for none of it

"things can't always go exactly how i want" eventually balloons and swallow's steven's psyche whole

IT'S NICKI MINAJ, A CHOICE THAT WILL NEVER COME BACK TO BITE THE CREWNIVERSE IN THE ASS

i think strong in the real way is the first time it becomes conspicuous nothing happens onscreen without steven seeing it

also it's weird this is the first episode sadie and greg interact

"it's like a dvd shaped like a box"

huh. i just kind of assumed dvds don't exist. i don't think we ever see one

"are all videocassettes that informative?"

so i guess the idea that everyone just still uses vhs came later

what do gems use fire salt for anyway

steven and the stevens https://twitter.com/Wackd/status/1245983512286695425

i think it's definitely true that the gems leave steven alone a lot, but they do also partake in his nonsense a reasonable amount: playing beachapoloza, going minigolfing, having the beach party, doing the birthdays. there's an Effort

we see centipeedle try to be a person when unbubbled. i think the idea of corrupted gems was there from the start, i just think the idea that ALL monster threats are corrupted gems came later

pearl has big edd ededdneddy energy

"you'll never have any real magic powers, and we don't want anything more to do with you"

steven. bud. you have anxiety

connie dramatically popping the lenses out of her glasses is a+

was gonna go to bed but i'm two episodes away from finishing season 1a, so fuck it

okay so "gem powered" does distinctly mean "object with a gem in it", got it

extremely eddy ededdneddy vibes

"what's it like being a mirror?" "you work!"

but you don't get back what the job takes

so i guess the crystal gems just...assumed lapis was on the side of homeworld, and woulda sworn vengeance and whatnot if they let her out

and, y'know, haha, turns out she couldn't give less of a shit about the war, what a wacky misunderstanding

greg volunteering to help out with lapis probably wasn't, like, intended to be the culmination of a character arc, but the fact that he does this does weird things to his continued distance from magic stuff later

(i think the show just realized the rest of them needed the van)

oh okay nope the second shit goes down he's out of there

(granted this is. VERY far out of his weight class, so, like, i get it)

i used to have a very good "REVENGE" gif. should dig it out of my old hard drive

LET ME DRIVE MY VAN INTO YOUR YOU

(back to thinking this kinda borks greg's arc a bit, but then i remember this is prelude to him making an active decision to be more involved. through deceit. i think it all evens out)

(oh yeah also amethyst freaks him out later! greg goes through a lot and his, like. ability to get involved isn't so much linear as it is dependent on how many spoons he has at a given moment. and that unfortunately puts him at a remove from a lot of steven's life)

"your friends! they don't care about other gems! all they care about is the earth!" yeah, okay, this all tracks

i think this is the moment lion decides he's actually super into hanging out with connie

welp, not ready to go to bed yet, so let's pick this back up with

uh

house guest

oh wow everyone's wrong about this one, it's actually pretty good

the real problem, besides the art being kinda eh in places, is that its our first real introduction to the idea that 1. the adults in stevens life are wildly unreliable and 2. steven is extremely forgiving of this

in hindsight the biggest problem is that this is not a shade we see on greg ever again. rather than being insecure with his place in steven's life, his biggest flaw is that he's extremely passive and positive about his dynamic with steven. certainly deceit seems unlike him

if i had to guess, the show is trying to ease us into what will be much, MUCH higher-stakes secrets and lies from steven's parents with a light, jokey sitcom plotline. which is an admirable goal--things kinda snowball from here!

i mean, case in point: this next episode introduces the crying breakfast friends AND the idea that pearl's negligence could get steven brutally killed

man, steven's response to pearl almost getting him killed being "i'm used to it" hits hard because so far, the gems have only endangered steven on missions. which tells us 1. steven is already primed to see filling his parents emotional needs as on-par with world-saving stuff and

2. he is on some level cognizant of how much damage he's taking, even if it's not bothering him yet

considering steven starts the episode thinking "yeah, me and my dad could build a spaceship out of junk", the climax is really instrumental in demonstrating that he is actually smarter than even he realizes at this point

am uncertain what about the gem shards we see convinced anyone that shattering is murder and not, like, creating a whole bunch of horrifying zombies

"This is a beach! WE LIVE ON A BEACH!"

the gag of abruptly revealing that yep, this is still from steven's perspective is something i loved in "letter to lars" and completely forgot happened here

cute little easter egg i caught in "fusion cuisine": susan egan cameos as an "under the knife" character. between that and the split-second ruby and sapphire cameo, this episode really DOES contain steven's all of steven's moms

also: boy season 1b is really drilling down into everyone on this show being capable of some real dumb shit

completely forgot "steven bomb" was, like, an actual piece of dialogue, and not an event name that became fandom terminology for cartoon network's irritating programming philosophy

OH MY GOD ZACH CALLISON'S UNPITCHED VOICE SUDDENLY KICKING IN AT THE END OF "GARNET'S UNIVERSE"

kids love amedeus

steven tells the watermelon stevens not to return until they realize what baby melon did for him

by "escapism" they're still struggling to work it out

"art is a conversation. every choice you make is a statement"
*dogcopter eats a chess piece whole*

:')

seventeen without a purpose or direction
we don't owe anyone a fucking explanation

how the fuck did the "fusion is sex" crowd gain any traction at all when the first people we see steven trying to fuse with are his moms

also, steven fuses with his moms in the order we see him trying the dance with them in "alone together"! such a nice touch

never noticed before how much little mermaid imagery there is in this one

here he is! the worst character!

thus begins steven being horribly repressed and self-sacrificing

"cookie cat! i never considered that you would be evil!"

not another steven's knife episode!

"steven, i see so many things that could hurt you. i should never have let one of them be me" is especially sad now. we know garnet, through minimal fault of her own, doesn't live up to this

but life is messy, and complicated, and garnet does her best, and steven does his best, and ultimately, they're both okay. garnet looks out for steven, and steven eventually learns to look out for himself.

garnet, ultimately, is probably the best mom on the show. she manages to be both authoritative and easygoing and, broadly, has a pretty good grasp on what steven needs from her at any given time. this makes her slipups more heartbreaking, but also easier to recover from.

bindle sacks are one of those things kids know about entirely through parody at this point so it's weird to see a kid in a cartoon make a bindle sack explicitly because he saw one in a book

hahahahaha, greg owns a copy of pug davis!

(feel like "ebbing mind" is probably also an injoke, if anyone wants to parse it for me)

connie is big into his dark materials, huh

"We can't fight these things forever! Well we can, but I really don't want to"

early peridot's voice is so deep

so "open book" is just the crewniverse predicting response to how the diamond stuff resolves, right, that's not just me

(also man why does nothing good ever come out of steven writing fanfiction)

steven spends the episode trying to please an imaginary person, rather than the person he knows

never a great creative impulse

"do you think i'm a bad person for liking the ending?"
"of course not. steven, i--it's just a book!"

i feel like "shirt club" is also about fandom somehow

we never did find out what happened to ocean town

i just realized--there's parts of "stronger than you" that happen before steven is able to see them on the control panel

WHICH IS WHY THE EPISODE ESTABLISHES HE COULD HEAR SAPPHIRE'S SINGING ALL OVER THE SHIP

thus ends season 1

oof

this begins season 2

oof

"pizza rain! no pizza clouds though"

steven's been to at least three doctors

fun fact: there's only about thirty fewer episodes of uncle grandpa as there are steven universe

bad morning

i hope when the next generations of kids watch "love letters" it's weird the possibility of garnet being polyam is never so much as mentioned

eugene cordero should get more roles where he's got jamie energy, he's very good at it

something the show never really circles back to is that connie hadn't had a friend before steven. the fact that pearl's like "you only matter because you can defend steven" and connie is like "yeah that tracks" speaks volumes about how that's effected her

pearl meanwhile is so throughly fucked that even knowing garnet for thousands of years never made her consider maybe relationships don't have to be hierarchical

this is...technically cinema vérité

it is not, however, good

not sure why everyone called bullshit on peridot being so durable in the road runner episode when "keeping it together" shows her falling like thirty feet while being crushed with an injector and not getting poofed

the consciousnesses of shattered gems are in there

somewhere

screaming

there's not anything you can do to a gem that will simply kill them, feels like

i guess dunking the together breakfast gem dust in lava did. something? and garnet mentions p&a not having lava resistance. so maybe that, i dunno. if garnet can survive lava diamonds definitely can

i love the loose nature of the backgrounds but it does mean sometimes closeup shots need a little more tlc than the crew has time to give

of course garnet plays keytar! it's a keyboard and a guitar! like some kind of

hybrid

maybe this is a reach but i think greg being incapable of a form of intimacy rose's culture considers essential, and rose being okay with that and the two having a deeply loving and committed romantic relationship, might be a metaphor for some kinda thing

*cough*ace*cough*

i like that the show is willing to, like, give gems exhaustion seemingly entirely for the purpose of modeling healthy habits for the audience

"just let me do this for you!"

i think joe johnson and/or jeff liu might have my favorite visual take on the cast. everyone's so round!

"another great thing about motels--you can drive right up to your door!"

greg is right, this is pretty heckin great