Megafandom Mess

yeah that shit rules. white being reformed is great. its the ultimate rebuttal to the ideology that only good/useful/perfect people deserve to live- which is exactly the standard white held herself and everyone else to. it mirrors stevens arc of selfless heroism. it mirrors the toxic, insecure selflessness thats plagued everyone from pearl to jasper to rose about what it means to "deserve" to live it ties into "love like you" of how learning self-love is intertwined with loving others. it ties into how steven can't let go of his hero role until he's confronted by *literally* having his own mind in white's body, hating the idea of being like her yet ironically reacting exactly how she would - "this is someone bad for society, they should be shattered, this is what's best for everyone." trying to hurt her only hurting him. trying to help her helping all of gemkind - from the corrupted gems to dismantling a system that was held up by those exact ideals.

"Well done, Steven! You saved most of Beach City!"

Yeah sure, plenty of shows do a silly 'haha things got broke' bit, but this was different. This was bringing home something important that they'd been saying all episode.

This was the episode that introduced the thesis statement of the whole show, and they managed to keep that thesis statement clear throughout the entire thing, all the way to the end: "If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn't have hot dogs." Steven Universe is a show about how things are broken, and that's okay. Steven Universe is a show about how people are fucked up, and that's okay. It's not our job to be perfect or condemn everything that isn't; it's our job to say "okay, we've got this fucking mess here, and wallowing in blame and recrimination and shame and self-hatred isn't going to help. How do we move forward?" I had never, ever seen that message committed to in another children's show before Steven Universe, and it's one of the most important things you can tell any kid -- that the mess of their life is normal! That it's okay! We have stuff that sucks and we can move on with that!

Oh, sure, other shows will have a Very Special Episode every now and again where someone makes a bad mistake and has to be 'forgiven', or is unable to do something and has to live with it, or there's a tragedy or whatever. That's not what Steven Universe did. Steven Universe got comfortable with the mess on every level and kept coming back to it, both subtly and overtly. Steven can't save the moon goddess temple, Greg fakes a broken leg to be with his son and psychologically fucks up his magic powers and the other plot of the episode that's acting as a metaphor for the whole thing involves them literally fixing that problem by duct taping over it, the Gems don't know how to raise Steven and make him a false obstacle course to boost his confidence and he has to Uno Reverse their own trick on them and shoulder the responsibility of parenting them instead of the other way around. There's an entire episode that's just Peridot confirming that her people fucked up an area of the Earth so badly that nothing will ever grow there again and this isn't resolved by fixing it, but by other characters saying, "yeah, it's broken and it sucks and we can't stop that. How about we grow a garden literally anywhere else on the planet."

And this forces you to decide whether your autonomy matters to you more than the approval of the group - while they'll still act like you're on thin ice either way, if you give in at this point they know you're theirs forever, because now they've established a foothold, you've shown a moral weakness, which they will brand you with so it can be used against you in the future ("hey RICE-addict here doesn't want help break into the city records office") to force you to double-down and isolate you further.

2) any vegetable is better than no vegetable

how do you distinguish grey from other colours beyond black and wite?

Distinguishing features of moral beige:

The protagonist is constantly agonising over Hard Choices; however, circumstances always conspire to prevent them from actually having to make those choices, so in practice they're just angsting over stuff they might have done.

The text exhibits a recurring pattern whereby the protagonist seems to to have made a Hard Choice, but new information is reliably revealed shortly thereafter which retroactively establishes that whatever they did was the morally upright course after all.

The protagonist's moral impulses are straightforwardly heroic, except in one specific context which lacks any clear real-world analogue; for example, being prejudiced against telepaths.

The protagonist's actions are consistently reasonable based on the information available to them – they're merely operating on bad information basically all the time due to a bizarre conspiracy and/or a series of increasingly implausible misunderstandings.

direct orders of "you really really need to kill this guy" ignored: 1