wynx-hates-pedos:

lj-writes:

(Discussions of recent episodes of SU follow)

For me a big turning point was the portrayal of the human zoo and the woobification of Blue Diamond. The human zoo was presented as a fairly good and humane place to live and the human inhabitants as childlike and not suffering too much from their captivity. The one time they were shown to be in pain at the “choosening” their grief was treated as ridiculous and incomprehensible. This leaves an especially bad taste in the mouth given that human zoos actually existed in Earth’s history and were sites of terrible injustice and racism.

Compare this to the treatment of Blue Diamond’s grief over losing Pink Diamond. Her pain, despite the fact that we know she literally owns humans and co-leads an organization that wanted to obliterate all life on Earth, is treated as serious and worthy of empathy, with an actual song and dance about how sad she and Yellow Diamond (the instigator and driver of the plan to destroy Earth itself) are. After the 10,000th time Blue Diamond fan art showed up on my dash with people calling her “space wife” and such, I unfollowed the tag and a bunch of blogs and my SU fandom activity went into indefinite hiatus.

The Blue Diamond arc was the tipping point, but there was also plenty going wrong with SU before that point. The Bismuth arc, for instance, and specifically the confrontation scene where we were asked to identify through Steven with the Diamonds who were her targets, was not well-handled at all. I still like aspects of the show, but I’m too angry at its biases to give it my undivided support.

Also can I just say there’s a really creepy implication behind the Diamonds making human zoos where an unseen gem instructs the humans how they can decide who they can date? I wouldn’t notice the implication if it wasn’t highlighted by the writers and the narrative too. The implication I get is that the humans in the zoo aren’t allowed to say no to this arrangement. ThIs is incredibly nonconsensual and even Greg points this out. He refers to it as the “catch” to this “utopia.”

What makes me heartsick is that the human zoo’s inhabitants having a collective breakdown was a sign of how deeply, deeply broken and fucked up (in many senses) they were by their captivity. Greg first introduced them to the concept of sexual choice and consent. Their mass-“choosening” Greg was the first real agency for them in their lives, in generations even, and I don’t think they literally meant they all wanted to have sex with him. They were reacting to this new-old concept in a way they understood, and their reaction to Greg’s rejection was much deeper than “wah you won’t sleep with me.” I saw it as the painful crack of a shell, the realization that something fundamental was missing from their lives and they had not even known.

So what’s the narrative reaction to this? Inviting us to laugh at these childish, simple peaple (UGH) and using the occasion as an opportunity to tell us how nice their captors are for giving their captives a pat on the head and then keeping them right where they are to have their every move controlled and (possibly, depending on how this choosening crap works) to be raped over and over again. It turned my stomach and I couldn’t enjoy the show like I used to.