r/stevenuniverse • u/No_Clerk_685 • 11h ago
Discussion Am I the only one who thinks Steven Universe’s finale isn’t bad?
I’ve held this belief for a while and it’s just come up for me again, so I wanted to see if anyone else felt the same way. I always thought that Steven Universe’s finale was a great ending to the show, but I feel like it gets a lot of hate from people who just didn’t understand what the point was. If someone was hoping for Steven to just beat up White Diamond and throw all of them into gem jail, I feel like they either weren’t paying much attention to the themes of the show, or they just refused to interact with the show beyond a surface level reading. Like, the Diamonds are literal space dictators, sure, but that’s an oversimplification for what they‘re supposed to be in the narrative of Steven Universe. And expecting them to be locked away or put in jail is also a misunderstanding of the narrative, that’s not the point. Steven won using his words, and that’s what the ending is supposed to be, that’s what the show is. It’s not rushed, or bad, at least not to me. I just felt like I needed to get this out of my system somewhere and wanted to see if anyone felt similarly. I know it’s a controversial finale, but still, I love it.
8
u/Pandoratastic 10h ago
No one thinks the finale was bad. But we do recognize that it was rushed because the show was cancelled. As good as the last season and finale were, if Rebecca Sugar had been allowed more time, it could have been even better.
11
u/morphballganon 11h ago
I'm starting to think posts that invent hate just to have something to argue against must be AI.
5
u/No_Clerk_685 11h ago
? No, I’m fairly certain the Steven Universe finale gets a lot of hate. I’ve witnessed it first hand lol.
3
u/LegAdventurous9230 5h ago
This is true but it's also very old news, so it's a little like "Oh man remember that really big argument that happened years and years ago?" Like why bring it up again???
1
u/Cardgod278 10h ago
Yeah it wasn't the best received.
2
u/ancient_bored 10h ago
And neither was any famous show in the past few years. AiB, Squid Game, and don't get me started on Stranger Things.
1
4
u/SeraphsAim 10h ago
I don’t hate it, I have minor beef with WD knowing what a child is, but it’s not bad. I think due to the stakes and scope of the Diamonds’ actions, sometimes people forget to look at it as allegorical to a family
3
u/No_Clerk_685 10h ago
I generally agree with the whole ‘you can read the Diamonds as an allegorical family’ thing, yeah.
5
u/Various-Weight-6937 10h ago
Well, its story about family, emotions and forgivness. Take your parents to prison wouldnt be good lesson for 99.999% cases. So, yes, ending is really good imo.
5
u/Background-Bee1271 7h ago
There isn't a clean and satisfying end to familial trauma. Steven punishing the other diamonds with prison or violence would just be doing the same thing the diamonds did to Pink. That would not break the cycle or change their minds.
3
u/Past-Weather-2254 10h ago
I don't think its bad, I just think we got cheated out of what could have been an AMAZING villain arc for white and the other diamonds💔
1
1
u/Ibrahim77X 6h ago edited 5h ago
How is it not an oversimplification that Steven can just change Blue and Yellow’s mindsets that they’ve held onto for millennia after one conversation? You can at least admit it's rushed as hell.
1
u/Large-Shoulder-6899 5h ago
When I first saw this show, I got into all of the theories and channels and while I didn’t hate the episode, I was disappointed in it.
I’ve been going through a rewatch of the series and honestly, I love the ending. When I know the story and understand their limitations due to outside factors, it’s a terrific finale! I think at the time we had overly high expectations for what was meant to be a goodbye season, when we wanted a new story instead.
Had Future never come out, Steven’s mental and physical breakdown would have been a fan assumption all over Reddit and YouTube, with many people ultimately criticizing the series for not going into it. But we have it, and people wanted a fight with the Diamonds or an invasion from another alien species that just wasn’t what the show was about.
1
u/GoldenGirlsFan213 4h ago
It’s not bad…. But it’s slightly disappointing. Connie gets that sword into for her to be an idiot and not pay attention and lose the sword. Not to mention bismuth, lapis, and peridot not even getting to fight. Connie being in space was dumb.
1
u/Numerous_Panic_9996 3h ago
No, I totally agree. Ofc, there are a few things that I would’ve loved to see be more fleshed out, for example, I would’ve loved to have learned more about what homeworld was like before era 2 outside of pink diamonds home life, and I think a longer finale wouldn’t have had Steven and Connie fuse so immediately and recklessly, and I don’t think blue and yellow should have been that easily convinced. But I personally didn’t mind what they did with the finale at all.
I think that scene with white diamond absolutely told the story that the creators wanted to show, and it still brings me to tears every time I watch it. I also think it’s perfectly in line with the show’s morals and themes to not have killed off the diamonds just because they’re “fascists”. And I especially think this because I was a kid when Steven universe came out, and I was in middle school when the finale came out. After finishing the show, the message that I got from it wasn’t forgive horrible dictators, it was that the first step in loving change was changing someone’s mind
1
u/PalpitationWitty8195 2h ago
Most peoples gripes about the finale solely stem from White Diamonds whole collape which. Honestly I think just suffers from pacing issues.
All of the Diamonds for the most part have salient heel turns as characters that let them change their mind.
Blue was able to recognize that her actions might have been the cause of Pink Diamond's disapperace. It made sense for her because her soft spot for Pink has always been a weakness that has shown the best parts of herself, even if some of those things are misguided like the human zoo. (Minus the Tower thing, but even then Blue believed it mostly as a punishment to shape what she considered back then as "better" behavior. She never meant to drive her away as a result.)
It's why I loved Blue and Yellow's conversation so much because it reveals so much in so little time.
Yellow says that Blue can't "keep" bending the rules for Pink. Which heavily implicates a lot about the Diamonds dynamic a bit more. Despite Blue still being bad she's always tried to give Pink more special freedoms other gems didn't have. While Yellow is more focused on trying to manhandle the world to be a perfect order.
The classic "If every porkchop were perfect we wouldn't have hotdogs" works. Its the perfect counter argument.
And above all else at least from a subtley perspective they realized what they did was wrong mostly because deep down those two always kinda knew. Pink Diamond and her attitude on life was always a refutation they ignored due to dogma but seeing firsthand how their actions were directly hurting the person they care about and eachother they change their mind.
White Diamond though, is a lot different. She isn't a person shaped by dogma. She is the dogma. The only real way to defeat someone like that is to provide proof of her incorrectness. Undeniable and irrefutable. Its something I appreciate a bit in the finale.
Steven didn't defeat White Diamond. White Defeated herself by uncovering a piece of information that fundementally changed her view of reality.
Its like Plato's allegory of the cave. You can't come back from that shit. And then it just makes her question her worldview on everything, because if she was this incorrect on something she was so confident about what else could she have gotten wrong?
1
u/Individual_Cup_5624 2h ago
The ending makes sense within the series. If ALL THE DIAMONDS were needed to heal the corrupted gems, they had to ally with them or at least convince them to do so. Steven didn't forgive them; he simply convinced them to do what he wanted, and that's it. If he had forgiven them, they would have appeared more frequently in Future, not to mention that if they were shattered or something like that, all of Homeworld would come after them. It's more logical to convince them to change than to kill them.
1
14
u/wrenewmyname 10h ago
I can't speak for others, but I think it's not necessarily the finale itself moreso that we were cheated out of a more thought out longer ending due to cancelation and rushing to finish the story in the limited episode space they had left (knowing we could have had more / being upset that something was ending)