Spoiler: Say Uncle "spoilers" Wow, that was like Andrew Hussie levels of unapologetic fucking with the fandom. Fun ride, though. Also, not the place I expected a Princess Mononoke reference.
maybe the shards, when they are relatively stable, are all together as one gem but when they're not... tons of shards fly everywhere yeah...
Ooooh my god I can't believe MR GUSITE WAS REAL The crewniverse actually made a mister-gus blog in advance of the gemsona week (gemsonahq and gemsonaarchive), submitted it to them GOT REJECTED before being accepted eventually and made A VIG (very important gem) and oh my gosh this episode was already made so they must have been planning it in advance and got lucky when there was a second gemsona week right in time for the gag to even be pulled off and THEY DID IT I still can't get over how happy this makes me. Also watchin the person who runs the gemsona week blog slowly catch on while getting more and way more suspicious has me dying. The foreshadowing. The laughter. The acceptance. The yearbook? I mean seriously could you imagine being this person? The reALIZATION. Okay but in all honesty, that was cute.
D'aww. More random observations: Rose Quartz's past outfit in Pearl's projection in Rose's Scabbard seems to be identical to her outfit seen on the tape in Lion 3, meaning that during the entire war and over the successive five thousand years until Steven's birth, Rose was never injured enough to have to retreat to her gem. Whadda badass.
i don't know why but while watching say uncle, i literally winced a few times. like, physically, not just mentally. perhaps out of visceral sympathy for the crystal gems... i dunno... just... something about the ep made my shoulders go up in an uncomfortable way. so, uh, least fave ep so far, i guess?
i was thoroughly entertained by the episode, at least partially by the blatant exaggerations of the gems' personalities. e.g., "THATS NOT MY BABY" and amethyst eating pizza steve.
while i'm not sure if i entirely agree with this tumblr post, the point it made here, about uncle grandpa's rose dress-up (regarding the emotional investment, not the "transmisogyny"), does seem relevant to what might've been a reason for my wincing:
i was kinda shocked and annoyed at that, if only because her memory is treated so reverently at every other time. i legit expected steven to cry or smth. i don't know about "transmisogynistic" because i dont think "guy dressed as a lady" is an insult to anyone.
basically that i was surprised that steven accepted that it wasn't his mother that easily like, is uncle grandpa really that awesome? that was basically why i put that in scare quotes
Yeah, a friend of mine watched the ep first, and as soon as she mentioned that I knew I'd be skipping it. There's just something viscerally upsetting about it to me.
yeah, like, if uncle grandpa is so nice and benign and shit, why the hell would he practically taunt steven with an illusion of his dead(ish) mother like that? like, i'm seriously amazed by steven's sheer Not Careness about it not being rose. just... stars, get out of his eyes, please!!! you do not belong there!!! steven, be at least a bit upset!!! and how the hell does steven know enough about uncle grandpa to immediately identify and fanboy him, anyway? is he a tv show? are all the kids of the world born with knowledge of uncle grandpa branded into their brains? is he inherently self-explanatory? wtf?
To be honest until I got the end I thought the point was that the Gems were basically in the right? I mean they have just found that an extremely powerful reality warper has no compunction a about pointing deadly weapons at children has SOMEHOW gotten to their house. Given the information they had at the time, 'destroy him for the sake of the world' seems an entirely reasonable response. And while I appreciate the Princess Mononole reference, the Gems weren't attacking just because UG was weird, but because, again, reality warper, deadly weapons at children. Also, the Rose Quartz thing seemed really out of line. If you think about it seriously, then it's horribly mean, and if you think about it as a joke... What's the joke? I am serious, I am not sure what the joke there is other than 'he is in an outfit that looks like someone else's outfit.'
well if it makes you feel better it is canon that none of this is canon and it's just an april fools joke :P personally I thought it was one of the funniest episodes yet, even if I did cringe really hard at UG dressing up as Rose. I think the joke was that it was a bait and switch? Like he was talking about his mom's sheild and needing help and suddenly his mom magically materializes to help him. Only surprise! It's just UG. I mean, you could also take it as "men dressing up as women is funny" but I personally didn't read it that way. The gems keeping their personalities straight and reacting horrified is a deconstruction of UG's "omg I'm so random!" humor that actually made it funny. I've watched a couple of episodes of UG and I always found their "omg so random!" thing to not be funny on it's own and a lot of their actual "jokes" have struck me as kind of mean. In contrast to SU which hasn't made jokes at people's expense. Since the episode seems to basically be "take UG in another setting and watch everyone's reaction to this insanity" it seems to be a blend between the two show's styles. So on the one hand you have the gem's horrified emtional reactions played like any other ep of SU, combined with the over the top silliness (and in a way "meanness") of UG. I think the moral at the end was more or less directed at the audience rather then the gems. Kids/people in general are pretty vicious to who they think is weird. And on a more meta note the SU in general hates UG to the point where many people where flipping out thinking the crossover was going to ruin everything forever. You can say that the gems were in the right anyways... but it's a non-canon april fool's episode anyways so it doesn't really matter in the end. As long as people were entertained. At least since it's non canon people who find the episode really uncomfortable instead of funny can just skip it and it'll have no bearing on anything.
Actually the April Fool's thing doesn't help much. I mean it's good to know it's not canon but a lot of my issues with this episode stem more from it not working (for me at least) on a basic storytelling episode. Doesn't a bait and switch require that there be an actual likelihood of the 'bait' being real? That doesn't make sense here. No one would think Rose was really back, and people already knew it was a crossover. And also, yeah the moral might've been aimed at the audience on a meta level, but on the in-universe level it still has to make sense! If you have an episode of a kid's show that is apparently dealing with cheating and then they say at the end that the moral is 'eat your vegetables, they're good for you' then it won't make any sense in a story sense, even if the audience could use that lesson.
About the Steven immediately recognizing him deal, while I haven't watched much of Uncle Grandpa that seems to be a running joke. Everyone who sees him knows who he is. He is an all powerful reality warper after all. And, supposedly, everyone's Uncle and also Grandpa. And I thought that the moral being all wonked up was a joke? Like, spoofing a bit on the kind of last minute "yes indeed we sure learned a thing" things that sometimes end up happening on these kinds of shows. I know a number of the SU endings have felt a bit rushed to me before, so. I dunno. It definitely wasn't my favorite episode, but it was cute enough and it went by quick and I actually really enjoyed the incredibly upsetting bits, like how the gems were all really skeeved out by the fourth wall breakage and reality warping. I thought that was pretty damn cool. But yeah, I can definitely see why people didn't like it. What I can't see is why people read any instance of a man in a dress as automatically insulting to trans ladies. It was one shot, it went unremarked upon, and nobody cared. If they'd lingered on it or had Steven be all "Oh no, a man in a dress, how weird and embarrassing", then yeah, but it wasn't like that. It was just a dude in a dress, and nobody in universe gave a shit. That's good, isn't it?
It's this thing where the Internet turns "can be used transphobically" to "always automatically evil" because what is context.
