Early Installment Weirdness / Steven Universe

• The original pilot episode had a detailed art style more akin to Rebecca Sugar's comic book work, along with character design differences (Garnet's hair is straight and down and she wears a looser-fitting outfit, Amethyst wears a fanny pack, wears nail polish, and has sleeves, and Pearl looks NOTHING like the final product, more closely resembling David Bowie's character Ziggy Stardust). Pearl and Amethyst have ears. Lars (who is darker skinned and has black hair) and Steven mutually dislike each other, while in the final product Steven is nothing but friendly to a sardonic Lars. Pearl is presented more as an older sister than a maternal figure and neither she nor Garnet are above teasing or calling out Steven. The episode also implies the Gems eat food, while (as mentioned below) only Amethyst normally does.
• The first few episodes had all of the Gems being shown to eat and like food, including Pearl (who outright says she likes pie in one episode). Later on, it is established that their species doesn't require food, with Amethyst's regular eating simply being recreational. Meanwhile, Garnet is willing to eat on rare occasions and Pearl was changed to actually dislike eating intensely. The discrepancy in relation to Pearl was later hand-waved by one of the head writers, saying that Pearl likes the process of making pie after a fan asked about it.
  • On a related note, "So Many Birthdays" (the same episode where Pearl says she likes pie) has Amethyst eating an expired burrito, then getting sick and vomiting it up moments later. Later episodes show Amethyst easily stomaching things that make rotten food seem tame.
• Similarly, the Gems are shown gasping for air when surfacing at the end of "Cheeseburger Backpack", but by "Island Adventure" thirty episodes later, they forbid Steven from coming along on a mission because it's underwater and he's the only one who needs to breathe.
• Connie's introduction in "Bubble Buddies" mentions that her dad's job as a private security guard means her family moves around a lot, and it's implied she'd be moving away again soon. While her father having such a job is brought up again, it isn't brought up as often as Connie's mother being a doctor, a position that would require a consistent residence and presumably be more important to the family's finance than her husband's job. Years later, they're still living in the same house, close enough to Beach City for her to visit regularly.
• Garnet is more enigmatic and less helpful in early episodes, rather than a confident leader that freely gives advice. Meanwhile, Amethyst and Pearl were more self-absorbed before falling into their more sisterly and maternal roles, respectively.
• The mid-point of the first season revealed most of the seemingly-random monsters the Crystal Gems have been fighting are formerly sapient Gems that were corrupted. This leaves a few minor creatures much stranger because this origin clearly does not apply:
  • "Together Breakfast" has Garnet disposing of a living scroll that turned into living smoke when burned. One of the writers would suggest the idea that the scroll was painted with ink made from crushed gem shards, but that doesn't explain the implication that the image was a Brown Note. He eventually deleted said post, rendering it questionably canon anyway.
  • The old Gem ruins in "Cheeseburger Backpack" are overrun with small creatures called Crystal Shrimp, which seem to be an actual species instead of unique organisms like Gem monsters.
  • The same episode has Amethyst and Pearl carry in a giant bird's egg (which a Gem monster would definitely not lay, since Gems are made, not born).
  • In "Lion 2: The Movie", some kind of crystal lizard leaves behind a carcass that Lion eats instead of being reduced to a gem when its body was damaged.
• A couple of early Gem monsters also seem to clash with how Gems are established to work:
  • In the first episode, "Centipeetles" are discussed as if they're a species of vermin, the little ones' presence meaning a "mother" is around. However, again, Gems don't reproduce like organic creatures, and future appearance refer to the "mother" (a corrupted Nephrite) as just "Centipeetle". So it'd be a very strange way to discuss the situation even if we assume that Nephrites have a Self-Duplication ability that just never came up again.
  • "Giant Woman" has a giant bird creature, which split into thousands of what looks like gem shards, each of which formed a smaller version of the bird. Now, each piece of a shattered Gem is a little bit alive, but not nearly enough for the level of sentience it takes to decide "let's make a worm that walks version of our normal self!" (In fact, shattering would be a rather minor inconvenience if they could.) Also, in giant bird form, there is no sign of a gemstone. It's just hard to imagine a Gem, even an insane and mutated one, working that way. On top of that, its innards looked organic.
• In early episodes, Gems were described as "dying" or being "killed" before the terminology was changed to "shatter", due to shattering the gemstone being the closest you'll get to killing a gem (and even then, it's a Fate Worse than Death where the individual shards are aware and forever trying to seek the other shards out): anything less is simply called being "poofed" and just forces them into a regeneration state.
• It's eventually established the Diamond Authority created the other Gems, and are more or less the God Emperors of the Gem empire. Thus, it's a bit strange in hindsight that "Cheeseburger Backpack" prominently features a statue of a "moon goddess", and a Gem site that is implied to be her shrine.
• In general, the first half of Season 1 largely treats the Gems as purely magical, almost faelike beings and the show itself has a bit of an Urban Fantasy vibe to it, with things like wands that magically duplicate items or the aforementioned living scroll. Later episodes lean harder and harder into Science Fiction with chunks of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane, and much of the outright magic either fades into the background or gets retconned away.
• Even when not considered outright magic, some random Gem-created devices featured early on are hard to imagine in the context of the Gem War and the rebellion. Both a Matter Replicator and an hourglass that can actually alter time would be absurdly powerful in the hands of whoever knew how to make them, and not something Homeworld were likely to have left just lying around on an abandoned colony.
• Greg and Rose's photo◊ was introduced in the second episode, and showed Greg just as bald when Rose was alive as he is now. Flashbacks in later episodes show Greg with more hair◊ even after Steven was born.
• In Greg's early appearances, Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl are all heavily dismissive of and barely ever interact with him, as if he only ever had any kind of relationship with Rose. While this still fits in regards to Pearl, who resented Rose choosing him over her, later episodes show that Greg was indeed on good terms with Amethyst and Garnet. Greg and Amethyst in particular had quite a close friendship, and Rose encouraged the Gems to partake in band activities with Greg that Garnet is shown to have enjoyed; a far cry from the fusion jumping out of a moving vehicle just to get away from his music.
• This trope is mentioned In-Universe in "Maximum Capacity", where Amethyst mentions how weird it is that Li'l Butler had a cat in the pilot instead of a dog.

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