Steven Universe and the IDIC

I stay away from websites like Tumblr.  I have a Tumblr account I don't use, but I won't even go near Tumblr for the same reason I won't go near League of Legends: the hostile "friendly community."  I will grant that a good amount of Tumblr isn't vitriol - what isn't I get the highlights of in screenshots on my Facebook and Twitter feeds and that's good enough for me.

Really?

Tumblr catches my ire in particular because of its focus on fandoms.  That can be such a negative word these days.  Fandom.  To rhyme with lavatory attendant.

I have ranted before about the dark side of fandom.  It didn't have any particular focus.  So I'll grab on something that's recently come to my attention about one of my favorite fandoms.

In a purified vein of the IDIC there is a cartoon show called Steven Universe.  Steven Universe is a member of a team of alien warriors who protect the Earth from hostile aliens of the same species.  But Steven requires that none of his teammates do so by killing.

Steven is a hugely inclusive show, with intentional normativity in its inclusiveness.  The aliens are, with one notable exception, all female.  So when they develop relationships with each other they are not human hetero relationships.

Mind you, they're not human relationships at all.

Human relationships wish they were this good.

The team who works on Steven Universe has been pretty open with sharing their work in the past (within legal constraints) because they're proud of what they do.  They should be, they make a good, compelling product.

My kids can watch a show about a goofy fat kid with magic powers but also learn about how complex interpersonal relationships and communication are.  This show is so powerful it still helps me deal with the emotions I have regarding my divorce.

I'm not crying, there's something in my eye.... oh, who am I kidding?

I cannot pontificate enough about the superiority of this show.  It's witty and deep and it will speak to your inner child and your struggling, confused adult.

Greg is doing his best, but let's be honest it's hard enough raising a kid without magic powers.

Tumblr is full of kids who want everything to be socially equal.  That's a laudable dream, it's even at the core of the IDIC and a good deal of what is actually depicted in Steven Universe.  But these kids, who have come to be known by the now pejorative term "Social Justice Warriors" take things too far.  Especially when it comes to fandom.

A storyboard artist for Steven Universe quit Twitter because of harassment from these fans.  The subject?  The fans didn't like the way the show was developing the relationships between three characters.

Peridot is a recent addition to the Crystal Gems

Fairly new to the show, Peridot has struggled to fit in with her new friends, the Crystal Gems (Steven and his family of alien warriors).  She is outgoing but awkward because Earth culture is new to her.  She made an attachment with one of the primary Crystal Gem characters in order to help her fit in.

Amethyst is the youngest Crystal Gem (besides Steven) and normally the most laid back

Amethyst, unlike the other two Crystal Gems, was able to get along with Peridot because she has a great sense of humor.  She had maybe a couple episodes where Peridot and Amethyst developed their friendship.  Mostly they were concerned with stopping a giant monster from consuming the Earth.

But there's also Lapis Lazuli

Lapis Lazuli is the catalyst for all of the problems the Crystal Gems have been facing in the show.  She has a troubled past, and is constantly brooding.  Because she wanted to leave Earth, she drew attention to the Crystal Gems from their home world (named, incredibly, Homeworld).

Lapis Lazuli couldn't return to Homeworld after preventing an evil gem from completing her mission of destroying the Crystal Gems and allowing the Earth to be destroyed.  With nowhere to go, she shacked up with Peridot.

There are paragraphs to write about Lapis Lazuli and what she means to the show, but they're not relevant to this argument.

All the metaphors for unhealthy relationships

Now, as a pretty open-minded person who doesn't try to read too much into things it seems like all three of these characters have reasonable platonic relationships with each other.  They are close, as friends are.  They all desire companionship, but all of them aren't well-enough adjusted with themselves to seek out romantic relationships.

I italicized the words "storyboard artist" earlier, so I'll get to my point and justify that now.  I'm not going to say that a storyboard artist has no creative input on the way the show goes, but her job is generally input as far as presenting the sequences in the way that best captures the story cinematically.  They don't sit around and decide who's screwing who, especially in a children's television show.

It's goddamn ridiculous that fans would target her as the focus of their anger and vitriol.  These kids are out of control.

But more importantly, Steven wouldn't approve of that kind of behavior at all.

Lauren Zuke, the artist who left Twitter, tweeted that life exists outside of Steven Universe.

Kind of crazy that she would even have to tweet that.

But if you don't believe Lauren for whatever reason then really you need to be asking yourself whether or not Steven would accept you as a Crystal Gem for behaving that way.  Yeah, we're all different.  But that doesn't mean we have to be different kinds of jerks.

The show is about hope, humanity, and love.  It's about love that transcends simple binary relationships and undermines our perception of love as a road to sexual gratification.  It's about real, honest love.

It's about Pearl's unrequited love for Rose Quartz

It's about Ruby's love for Sapphire

It's about connecting across cultural gulfs

It's about finding freedom in your love for each other...

...even though it acknowledges that most love is fleeting.

It's never about who is with whom.  If it was, we wouldn't have met

Sugilite

Opal

Sardonyx

and Alexandrite.

In fact, in every episode where the characters are concerned with who's in love with whom, someone inevitably gets hurt.  It's like the writers of the show are trying to tell us something.  Huh.

As far as Lauren Zuke is concerned, even if she does have any creative control over the relationships of the characters try celebrating her art instead of trying to direct it.

Peridot isn't ready for a real relationship with anyone anyway

Remember that, whatever your fandom, nobody likes a backseat driver.  Feedback is cool.  Hate isn't.

Explorer's Log: Day One

I pre-ordered No Man's Sky.

Five minutes into the game, I was already dead.

It turns out that there's a steep learning curve to No Man's Sky.  Not too steep, but definitely a "here's your game - by the way I think tutorials are for idiots" kind of steep.  I re-named my starting planet Kakrafoon (an homage to Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and set off to figure out just what the hell I was doing and where the hell I was going.

When you start off in No Man's Sky, your rad space ship is mad broken.  It's up to you to fix it.

Fortunately they soon gave me this bad boy, straight from Star Fox's hangar.

You get only a few inventory spaces and some context clues to help you figure out where to go.  Fortunately the actual activity isn't that hard (even if it is time consuming).

And flight leads to cool views like this one.

Your liftoff engines are criminally inefficient for what the game demands.  They only use Plutonium (which is supposed to be uncommon as a resource, but that varies from planet to planet), and they use up 25% of your fuel supply every time you take off.  If there's an upgrade for those puppies to make them more efficient I have yet to find it.

The first planet I was on was a frozen wasteland.  I was happy to leave.

And excited for all the pretty colors in warp travel!

Warp travel was a hassle to get going.  Little did I know it would be my downfall.

You see, you can find crashed ships sometimes while you're exploring.

Like this sad wreck.

While I chose to skip the above pictured derelict, I did find another that was far more appealing than the bonus content Arwing that Happy Games had gifted me.  It was banged up, but then so was my first ship so I didn't think much of spending a little extra time exploring enough to fix it up.

And it was red.  Red means go faster.

My new ship did lack something the Arwing had: fuel in its warp engine.  My only goal from the game at this point was to leave behind the second star system that I had come to and get on with my journey towards the center of the galaxy.

I have spent quite a bit of time looking for the components I need to power my warp drive, but to no avail.

Lots of carbon-based trees, though.

I have bounced from planet to planet in this star system trying to find what I need, but I fear I may have stranded myself.

This communication station didn't have what I needed, even though it was cool as hell.

Resigned somewhat to my fate, I began to explore what I had in earnest.  I am resolute in my belief that the commodities I need to escape this star system will come my way.

I made a friend with this weird praying mantis creature.  She pooped platinum for me.

My travels took me pretty far, and I've already unlocked the silver achievement for walking around on foot in No Man's Sky.

One thing I will say about the game is that it tends to overuse the word "unit."  Everything is measured in units.  Everything.  You walk in units.  Your speed is measured in units.  You get paid in units.  It's all units.  Confusing.

A cozy housing unit only twenty units away from a cave filled with Plutonium!  300 square units!

Knowing that I didn't have a functional warp drive, I opted for a better ship when I found it.  I wasn't really losing anything at that point - the ship that I had found was less aesthetically appealing but it had more cargo capacity and boasted a number of (broken) systems that even my current ship did not have.

Like an R2-D2 built right into the wing!

I didn't just wander around blowing up rocks and scanning animals, though.  I also pursued as much information on the local dominant species as I could, the Gek.  Well, here's what I can tell you about the Gek: their First Spawn are straight up assholes.  Everywhere I go there are death threats and promises of galactic conquest from those First Spawn dick weasels.

But at least they have the common courtesy to teach me their language.

I have collected more than 30 words of the Gek language, but whenever I talk to one of these sardonic unhelpful little lizard people I still get mostly garbled sentences.  I can't wait until I learn the Gek word for "is," or maybe "the."

The trade was also good.

There were always plenty of minerals to grab.  Often, more than it's worth carrying around with you.  Especially when you find duplicate, non-stackable trinkets that sell for a quarter of what a good stack of Elenium will sell for on the Galactic Trade Network.

That is a two-hundred unit tall pillar of pure gold.

I'm still poking about on those four planets (one of which I was so frustrated with that I renamed it Bullshit).  The irony will be when the planet Bullshit is the last one I finish exploring and it has what I need.  Hopefully I didn't break something by taking one of the many awesome ships they provided me in the early game.

Hopefully I'm just stranded until the game decides to actually give me the antimatter I seek.

Hopefully.