Steven Universe Future | Episode 17 & 18
Added 2024-10-03 14:00:02 +0000 UTCSteven....is corrupting himself. My heart was not ready for the turmoil of this series.
Comments
Everything's Fine: This episode is VERY uncomfortable to watch and re-watch for the obvious reason that it is literally eleven minutes of watching the main character you've grown to cherish over whole seasons of this show have a complete manic breakdown, but damn is it well voice acted at the end. I really like that they throw some focus on Steven reacting to his diamond pupils at the beginning- I was definitely hoping that would come back after they briefly showed up at the end of Fragments, when he shattered Jasper. The funny thing is that a bulk of the fandom enjoyed drawing Steven with diamond pupils ever since the PD=Rose reveal, and were kind of clamoring for them to be made canonical at some point... so it was both vindicating for this to happen and also "oh gOD not like this, though-" The music at the ending "intervention" scene is VERY well crafted and unsettling when listened to in isolation. (The track I am musing on is titled "I'm a Fraud...") It's genuinely such an effective composition because you can just HEAR Steven's sense of self slip off the rails as it churns on and the chiptune present gets more and more distorted. Gah, I love the music in this show so much. The other reason I think it's cool is that corruption as a Gem condition back in the main show was always associated with song, like... Nephrite, who Steven partially uncorrupted in season 3, said that she saw that bright light and then heard a song right before losing all awareness. There's a musical cue associated with visuals of the corruption blast that is basically Blue, Yellow, and White's diamond chords all mashed together into discordant soup, and I think this is what the Gems on the planet must've heard-? Well, all that stated, the vibes of the piece of OST mentioned above always read to me as like, Steven's own personal "corruption song." Like, in the internal sense. Obviously his situation here is quite a lot different than the corrupted Gems he and the others spent all the main show gathering up, as he manages to corrupt himself through his own warped perception of self instead of BEING corrupted by an external force, but I digress. I'll ramble more about this on ep 19, corruption meta is one of my favorite topics, lol.
Novantinuum
2024-10-11 04:57:44 +0000 UTCOkay, gah, finally getting around to watching these! Homeworld Bound: One of the common interpretations of this episode is that the Diamonds and their reversed powersets are intended to represent varying ways that someone might cope with their mental distress. Yellow's form alteration is like the equivalent of the "sad? Time to buy some Manic Panic and dye my hair" sort of response, or like... a tattoo, or whatever. Coping through body modification. Blue's power is kinda the equivalent of self medicating with weed. White... is a little more nebulous to me, but I like to joke that she's the equivalent of someone in fandom projecting all their mental woes onto some poor sucker of a fictional character to process their shit. MAYBE some of these tactics will help, but they probably ain't getting to the core of the issue. At the end of the day, it's not the uncontrollable swelling or glowing that was scaring Steven, though- and it's not his mood swings on their own. It's that insidious little thought brewing at the back of his mind that if he's capable of shattering someone and simply bringing them back to life like it's Nothing, what's stopping him from doing this again? Which is why that sequence with White is soooo gut wrenching to me. Here's the thing- what Steven's experiencing here is the textbook definition of an unwanted, intrusive thought. He overtly like, hallucinated an image of himself smashing White's gem right into a pillar. Scary. What his brain was processing here never happened, thankfully, but he sure did Think about it. And he HATES that he did, he's horrified at himself afterwards. The problem here is... that Steven as a character is in the very unfortunate position where all his powers are emotion-regulated. What he thinks is often what his reality becomes. And thus the concept of an "intrusive thought" is one that is probably super hard to comprehend, for him. So of COURSE when he has a nasty Thought about shattering White, he freaks out. It's like he's convincing himself of thought crimes. If he's Thinking about this, he might as well have already Done it. He shattered once, and in his mind it's only a matter of time until he'll shatter again. Thus why he starts to believe that he's nothing more than "a monster." Poor guy, damn. Also thank goodness for Spinel's comedy relief, this episode would've been such a downer without her XD Blue's song is also very beautiful. I am glad that we got a solo piece from her before the show's end.
Novantinuum
2024-10-11 04:41:10 +0000 UTC
