Rewatching Steven Universe

I decided that for my next tv adventure I would rewatch "Steven Universe" which is a children's cartoon from Cartoon Network. It recently ended its run, although when I say that I am definitely including the movie and "Steven Universe Future" which was an epilogue season of sorts.

I've been meaning to rewatch this show for a while actually, when it was on air the episodes came out so sporadically that it was hard to keep track of what was happening sometimes. I was hoping that doing a rewatch all at once would help to connect some of the dots that I might have missed the first time around.

For those who might be unfamiliar with this show, "Steven Universe" is about a young boy, Steven, who's the son of a human and a gem from outer space. Basically the gems are a race of aliens that are humanoid in form, but their essence consists of a gem located somewhere on their body. This gem gives them special powers and abilities that humans don't have. The gems are ancient and historically have gone around and colonized different planets to mine them for more gems. But a rebel group on Earth called the Crystal Gems drove them off. Steven's mom was the leader of these gems, but she gave up her form to bring Steven into this world. The show follows Steven as he navigates these two parts of his identity.

First of all, rewatching it has been a pretty emotional experience for me. This show was my favorite for a while, and I got a lot of my friends into watching it as well. So it was pretty surreal to go back and relive those experiences again. I rarely rewatch tv shows since I don't watch much tv so just going back to the beginning was a time.

I also had forgotten just how weird the beginning was. There's an episode where parts of Steven's body become cats. Like lumps of cat all over his body. I vaguely remember my first time around thinking that was the strangest thing I've ever seen, but I had also forgotten completely about the Frybo episode where the mascot of a local french fry stand (called Frybo) comes to life. That was a time. And there's a crossover episode with "Uncle Grandpa" and I would LOVE to delete that episode from history it's so strange and out of place.

But past the first half of the first season, it actually comes into its own pretty quickly. I forgot how soon characters like Lapis and Peridot are introduced, probably because 10 minute episodes go really fast when you're binge watching.

Beyond that, it's really nice to see how all the relationships work in a more streamlined fashion. Peridot's arc I remember as being super annoying, but I had an appreciation for her the second time around. And the fandom has a tendency to hate on the episodes focusing on the townie human characters, but I liked seeing Lars and Sadie's growth over time. (I still can't stand Lars until the end but that's fine.)

The real highlight is appreciating how far ahead the writers were thinking with plot lines. Details from early episodes frequently pop up later. There's a secret that one of the characters is magically bound to not reveal, and every time it comes up you can see her in the background covering her mouth, starting from the second season or so onwards. Or the scar on Sadie's cheek in all the episodes after she fights a big magic fish that I didn't notice until recently. It's pretty incredible to spot these details once you know what's coming in the show.

I'm pretty grateful for this opportunity to go back to this show, since as I've talked about here, I rarely revisit media. It's something I probably should do more often, but it just takes up so much time. But I'm very glad I was able to do it with this show!