I hope you guys have seen this video too because Blumberg Universe is now one of the funniest things to me
Speaking of SU videos, please watch this cute fan animation about Peridot finding a cat, it cleared my skin and watered my crops. <3
I wasn't sure where to put this, but I figured you guys would appreciate it - I went to the National Museum of Scotland last week and found a genuine Gem-sized Amethyst. It's hard to see in the photo but seriously, it was at least the size of Canon!Amethyst, but obviously not cut the same. I hope she's okay in her glass box. I was tired enough that I talked to her. Also I found a big slab of periodite and a massive amethyst geode, but that's slightly more off-topic and idk where to talk about them.
double post, but I found this cool post about Amethyst herself while I was browsing pinterest and had to look up the source :3 (Fair warning, the latter half of the post does rag on Jasper in the name of comparison)
Remember when we had the extreme luxury of an episode every week *ugly-cries while rewatching Summer of Steven*
There was some article somewhere about how the crazy-making episode schedule is key to the show's success, and I didn't really read it beyond the first handful of sentences because I already had a sense of what they meant from the title alone. The adult/YA fandom online wigs out over it and gets so stirred up in anticipation that the theorising, the fanworks, the rewatching, etc. all remains active; people don't lose interest the way they have with other shows because the pacing of the plots is very intuitively determined to keep us going. Each ten-minute episode is extremely content-dense and the long gaps give us all time to ponder said content, going over the plot possibilities in-depth because the storylines are as much about character development as they are about the worldbuilding and political conflicts. Actually, come to think of it, this ties into one of the gendered comments I found myself making early on in my SU following: normally, I don't like action scenes onscreen because they bore me and I lose track of whatever they're illustrating plot-wise. (In big battle scenes, for example, I pretty much tune out and rely on the music and the odd close-up on characters' faces to keep me informed about whether things are going well or badly.) SU's action scenes, on the other hand, have captivating artwork, minimal fight choreography, a focus on the motivations of the battling parties & how this affects their performance in combat, and - most consciously noticeable to me - music that is typically seen as "girly". It's elegant and complex and regularly uses classical instruments such as piano, as opposed to attempting to emphasise physical impact and drama via harsh noise and the kind of sounds you'd expect from a Mitchell and Webb-style "adverts for men versus adverts for women" men's advertisement (except more dramatic). So there's this contrast between the stereotypical masculinity of physical combat, which we're taught to accept implicitly from a very young age, versus the "feminine" structure of the scene: the way each fight is framed as being inextricably linked with the emotions and motivations of the fighting characters. Emphasising social relationships in fiction is gendered as a feminine choice of subject matter; focusing in on the social rather than tactical features of a physical battle is challenging the gendered expectations we have for fiction. I think I've gotten to the point where I'm just repeating the same point in slightly different ways because I feel the need to express every nuance of my thought process, so I'm going to try to practice Not Doing That by ending this post here.
Good news: The official podcast has revealed that season seven is currently in production, so season five will NOT be the last season! Bad news: As far as I know, we still have no fucking clue when the next episodes will air. FUCKING HORRIBLE NEWS: MR. GREG DIDN'T WIN THE EMMY AND I AM SALTY AF.
... huh. well. at least that means there's a lot of new content to look forward to in the future. (still waiting for Save The Light)
silly conjecture Spoiler: S5 spoilers that would go under my "fixing canon" tag on my blog, if i put it on my blog 1. go through Lars' head. 2. explain to Lion what happened, and the current situation. 3. ask if Lion could make a custom warp from Homeworld to home. 4. if he can, then bring Lion through Lars' head to the Off-Color Gems' home, then let Lars go through Lion's mane to Earth, then have the other Off-Colors go through Lion's mane, then Lion can go through his custom warp to get home, and then everyone is home! winninggggggggg
Good fight scenes should be clear on motivations like that, really. They should be neat and tight little pockets that the audience is able to follow visually, sound wise, and thematically. The Rocky films are clear images of this. When you see Rocky up there against Apollo Creed you know what the character's motivations are. You know how Rocky's feeling, why he's up there. If anything the fight is an extended conversation between Rocky and Creed, just it happens to involve their fists. That and a lot of lovely camera and sound work. There are times when fights do need to be purposefully hard to follow or even vague. The fight scene with the Scarecrow in Batman Begins or the first fight between Gon and Hisoka stand out in terms of "It's ok to be hard to follow". In fact the disorientating nature of the Gon and Hisoka fight is what actually got me to view the show as something other than a very well animated but still kind of just ok shonen series. It helps put the viewer in the head of Gon and helps us feel how amazingly outmatched he is and just how upset he is about that fact. It really gives you the feel of "Holy shit. I almost died". This sort of clarity and focus on character motivation and theme isn't necessarily exclusive to a femininely focused show like Steven Universe. Though SU has its own unique way of managing what something like Rocky does. Its approach to the matter is different, as was the approach that Nolan made on Batman Begins. There's a lot of ways in which a fight scene can be done and many ways for them to be great. I feel that I need to give a shit though and motivational clarity and stakes has tended to be a big part of that no matter what the fight is or how we're pulling that off. I need to know who my characters are. What they're fighting for. And I need to learn something new about them or at least "hear" them express a new idea. SU manages this just as well as Rocky does. Just in a different fashion than Rocky does. And now I want to sit down and examine just why the fights work well in terms of expressing character motivation. Sorry about the rambling. Just fight scenes are one of my absolute favorite aspects of any visual media, be it comics or movies.
Spoiler I'm....confused about how this would work. it's been proven that Lars can't go through his own head, so presumably Lion can't either, and we've never seen anyone but Steven go into either of their heads, so it's possible no one else can, and while I can maybe see "Steven poofs the Off-Colors and brings them to Earth via Lars->Lion->Earth and then has Lion warp to Homeworld to grab Lars and warp back", I'm not sure Lion would LISTEN, given that he doesn't really have a big history of going exactly where Steven asks right away with warps, and I'm confused about why, if Lion was on Homeworld, there needs to be any travel through anyone's heads at all, and also about how Lion is supposed to get into Lars's head if Lion's NOT on Homeworld. I mean, Lion can't very well get inside his own mane any more than Lars can get into his own head, and how Lars going through Lion's mane would be remotely helpful then? unless you intend for Lion to make a warp to Lars and the others and have them go through without Lion going through himself, which I can also see working--again assuming that Lion listens about where Steven is asking him to send the warp and actually does that.
