Steven Universe

If I watched more of it, I'd say it's a fun kid's show. Fanbase is a disgusting fucking nightmare, but the show is good.

 

I watched it for a while, but I got bored with most of it being filler-y.

 

I think it's a good show for kids, but the lesbian stuff really turns me off. I have nothing against lesbians, and some of my favourite anime focuses on lesbians. Steven Universe just tends to be weird about them, I think anyways.

Like, they heavily suggest that the gems are lesbians, but they also throw in the "they're genderless! They're not lesbians, they're genderless aliens who just happen to look, sound and act like human women!" Or the fusion thing "It's not sex, it's a powerful emotional connection that happens between close friends,"

Really, it's a show that alienates certain people by being needlessly esoteric in order to appeal to a niche audience. It appeals to this niche audience so well that we get what we get with a lot of 'cult' fan bases, people going on forums talking about how it's the best thing ever.

 

Now it just sounds like it's written by a self-hating sex pervert who can't bother to just tell a story. Which it probably is.

 

Replace self-hate with self-love and you're probably a little more correct. It was created by Rebecca Sugar, who (as fans like to point out, repeatedly) writes Invader Zim fanfiction.

 

Unfortunately I've been on Tumblr long enough to witness the fandom grow in real-time, from some niche little community into essentially a disease. I'm sure it's a cute and inoffensive show, but after seeing how batshit insane a good chunk of the fanbase is, I have no real interest in watching it.

 

Oddly enough, that kind of parallels the show itself. It started off really cute and decent, then it started to get really dark and weird. It's actually the most censored show on Cartoon Network because it's constantly trying to shoe-in lesbians kissing and other stuff.

I don't watch the show, but I'm constantly told about it because I go to an animation school. One episode that I watched all the way through was Gem Harvest, and that was mostly because of the Dave Willis (Aqua Teen Hunger Force) voice role.

It basically sums up a portion of the show. It's a cute little plot with a nice moral at the end for kids and a number of things for adults (Dave Willis). But, it also is full of fan service and weirdness specifically for the people of Tumblr, such as the "Let's all marry each other part".

 

Like others have said, the fandom is so nightmarish that I went about a year knowing about the show convinced I'd hate it, and only gave it a shot to shut up a friend of mine who just wouldn't let it drop. Well, now I'm hooked. It's got massive problems, even its biggest apologists are driven around the bend by its erratic scheduling and awkward plotting. If you're going to tune in you've just got to square yourself away with the fact that half the episodes are going to be cutesy slices of life with eccentric seaside town characters, and the other half are going to be Jack Kirby style fuckyeah trippy sci fi. I definitely prefer the latter and I really like all the references to nerd shit that I grew up with like Evangelion and Utena, but it's often pretty frustrating and is best consumed in two or three long sickday binges IMO.

 

Personally, I stopped really binge-watching ongoing cartoons a while ago. I came to a conclusion that I personally only find an ongoing story satisfying when it has ended, and I'm much less willing to spend years following a cartoon series with an ongoing plot and no sign of ending the plot for as long as they continue to make money off of the series. I ended up watching Over The Garden Wall simply because it promised an ending after a few episodes, and I watched Gravity Falls after it ended in it's second season.

However, I do like Spongebob, mainly because it doesn't need to have an ending because it doesn't tell a story. It is simply a nice little cartoon about the random adventures of a sponge and his friends, not a sponge saving the world or trying to find his parents in a post-apocalyptic world. Sadly, spongebob cartoons are so much less prevalent in this cartoon renaissance thing. Although, The Loud House and We Bare Bears are pretty good.

On that note, The Loud House was created by a guy who drew a pseudo-porn comic with the same art-style, which I think is hilarious.