skwrk:

people on this website are obsessed with the show steven universe, and it’s associated with adventure time, a show that i love love love, so i decided to check it out.

based on the first episode, i did not enjoy it at all. it kind of superficially resembled adventure time, but without…

Seconding xhxhxhx in saying that it gets better (you will probably hear this repeated a lot).  It took me a long time (weeks or months) to get through the earlier episodes, and then after a certain point I just kept watching them in one huge binge.

Whether or not you like it will depend on what you like about Adventure Time.  I think it’s a lot better but that may just be that I got tired of AT.  I guess I’d say that SU has more of a nice balance between AT’s “trippiness” and “ordinary” plotting/characterization/worldbuilding – startling, sometimes disturbing or psychologically heavy things occur, but they feel more like they’re part of coherent character arcs and a coherent mythos and less like the creators are thinking “oh man, the stoned college kids watching this are gonna love this shit.”  There are reveals that feel like they were planned all along, and intimations of interesting backstory that we haven’t seen yet – it’s much more of a “standard fantasy story with well-defined and persistent themes” than AT’s “goofing around with occasional (often sort of garbled) thematic riffs.”

And yeah it’s for kids but it’s for kids in the way that, I dunno, Narnia is for kids?  There’s the kind of stuff there that I imagine will stick with people.  Puddleglum is still a reference point for plenty of adults when they talk about certain subjects.  That’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about.

(Contrast this to MLP:FIM, which despite its vast popularity – which I still don’t understand TBH – doesn’t have the kind of sticking power I’m talking about.  Bronies aside, I doubt the kids growing up with MLP are going to find its lessons about friendship enduringly resonant as they grow up, the way people hold on to Narnia or Middle-Earth.)

(via xhxhxhx)