From season 4: Know Your Fusion, Last One Out of Beach City, Gem Harvest, Gem Heist, and Rocknaldo. Room for Ruby is upcoming.
edited 8th Mar '17 7:29:06 PM by Bocaj
Forever liveblogging the AvengersYeah, any episodes that are part of an arc I'm not really counting. I'll also admit to liking Last One Out Of Beach City (it's actually one of my favorites), but like... my main issue is how they write Peridot and Lapis. We didn't see how they became so close, or even why. We just know it happened, and that Zuke writes them as a couple (they admitted this on tumblr recently). I also don't like how Zuke seems to ignore the bad stuff Lapis has done, as those are some of my favorite parts of the character.
Ah, that's a criticism I share as well. One of the weirdest things about the character arcs of Lapis and Peridot was how they just kind-sorta randomly became close like that. I mean, it gave us good stuff, don't get me wrong (meep morps, bow ties, Camp Pining Hearts, the pumpkin dog), but at the same time it just feels awkward how we went from Lapis despising Peridot's very presence to them being kind of awkwardly chill with each other in Hit the Diamond to what we see in Beta.
I'm fine with Zuke shipping the characters privately, but it just makes it jarring when they're written by other writers now, as was seen in The New Crystal Gems. Their writing of them just didn't gel as well with the other storyboarders' writing.
edited 8th Mar '17 7:46:48 PM by AdricDePsycho
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?And don't say the "I almost drown a lot of people" line. Lapis's tone was far from regretful, which was what the whole joke was based on.
edited 8th Mar '17 8:48:37 PM by thatother1dude
[moved from an edited post]
@smokeycut: I feel you're simultaneously underestimating and overestimating how much creative control the individual storyboard artists have over writing.
Underestimating because you're denying them ownership of episodes' quality when they're part of a fix story arc. Their contributions, and how they reflect on their abilities, is enormous. For instance, Lamar Abrams's tumblr posts detail that
, by merit of being the board artist for "The Zoo", he had a pretty considerable hand in what the zoo's containment area was like.
Overestimating because you're not accounting for how going off outlines does constrain what they could naturally write about. "Alone at Sea" was about contriving conditions where Lapis would express negative feelings about her own morals that she'd really, really not want to normally. I cannot imagine there being an overt reference to such a trait since then if just the storyboard artist were different. The lack thereof is not because of Zuke, it's because of the writing staff in its totality.
IIRC, Steven Universe is written by storyboard. It's not uncommon in creator-driven animated shows nowadays for prominent artists to have a lot of pull and contribution in terms of plot direction, especially on an episodic basis, and thus for Depending On The Artist to have a similar effect on characterization and plot as Depending on the Writer.
edited 8th Mar '17 9:08:26 PM by KnownUnknown
I actually quite like how Zuke writes Lapis and Peridot, honestly. In fact, I liked almost all of those episodes (I was a little meh on "Beach City Drift"). I feel like if people can smooth over how Pearl was written to not understand what food is for back in season 1, people can smooth over some of the other characterization bumps and gaps - hell, Lapis's characterization has already kind of swung pretty wildly between 'lonely and really wants to get off of Earth, but still able to laugh and have fun sometimes' to, well, Bob. Don't get me wrong, the Bob joke was pretty funny, but the variance in how characters are written even in the show itself means that everyone is going to have favorite and less-favorite ways of seeing them, and that includes shipping variance, in my mind. Just smooth it over like any other weird portrayal, really.
(It's probably also a given that if Zuke had written an episode showing Lapis and Peridot getting closer, it likely would have been derided as overly shippy.)
edited 9th Mar '17 1:26:47 AM by RedSavant
It's been fun.I dunno, I can still reconcile those two sides to her personality. She only really acts the first way around Steven. She acts "Bob" to just about everyone else. I've never really seen her characterization as inconsistent. (shrug)
When we're done, there won't be anything left.Pretty much the same except after spending time making meepmorps with her she's not Bob to Peridot too
Forever liveblogging the AvengersI'm on the same boat (pun not intended) about Lapis. She's Bob to most people, she appears very introverted and likes her space, plus the aforementioned relationship problems and general Broken Bird nature.
Meanwhile Peridot is an extrovert, someone who likes attention and being noticed. Both are reformers from Homeworld, both befriended Steven, both learned to like Earth as a home, and both didn't like the world around them at first and have trouble relating to humans as a whole.
It made perfect sense to me why they took a disliking to Connie because she's a human, just because they like Steven and on speaking terms with the Gems doesn't mean they're nice to everyone.
I don't have any problems with how Peridot is treated, myself - she feels like she's handled much more consistently. Lapis, though, her characterization is all over the place. When she's on, she's by far my favorite character. When she's not, though... oof.
For that DMH tweet... I can see a few ways that could play out, which I'll hide for those who don't want to hear the conjecture - there could be a flashback Rose/Pearl song, there could be a Pearl/S song in the present if they decide that S should have a similar voice to Rose, there could be an old recording of Rose singing that Pearl sings along with. I kinda feel the second is the most likely, personally.
Unrelated to any previous topic on the thread, I've discovered that, on the streaming service I use (Sling), they've pulled Tiger Philanthropist from the list of available episodes. In fact, it's the only Season 4 episode pulled. While it's hardly the biggest loss, I'm a little astounded as to why.
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.Somebody on Reddit showed me a tweet from her Twitter from a month back and you can see in the recording booth some numbers that start with 6. There's some speculation about there being a renewal. I'll link to the tweet in a bit when I get access to my laptop.
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

Going backward: "Gem Heist", "Gem Harvest" (which had two teams), "Last One out of Beach City", "Know Your Fusion", "Beta", "Steven vs. Amethyst", "Beach City Drift", "Too Short to Ride", "Barn Mates", "Log Date 7 15 2", "Too Far", "Catch and Release", "Historical Friction", "Chille Tid"