Is Gameoverse TOO sexy… or are fans overreacting?

From Kit and Miss Information’s designs to comparisons with The Amazing Digital Circus, we break down the debate surrounding Glitch’s newest indie animation hit.

Look, I’m not too confident in myself to cover all the crap going down with HBOMax or the WB Discovery debacle outside of regurgitating what people better versed in the industry than me have covered. A glance at Twitter will speak volumes alone.

What I do intend to discuss is the common theme of animation always getting the shaft either because it’s too costly compared to whatever live action show they pump out (because VFX may as well be paid in pennies by this point) or because they’re deemed acceptable losses by the wider public.

Much as animation over all has garnered a sizable and vocal following, too many executives are high up to care about how a series is very beloved or hated. What they care is how much its raking it for them and what they should be pushing above all else.

Thus Teen Titans Go can be the most loathe show by animation and DC geeks alike but still chug along if the right amount of kids throw money at it (with their parent’s permission). Whereas a show that has thought put into its story, characters and artstyle will be meddled with to fit the mold of TTG or be cast aside if it doesn’t do gangbusters.

Of course, biased marketing departments don’t help. There’s no telling how well a more ambitious cartoon might’ve done if it had been given half the attention other shows settling for the cheap laughs had. Commercials, billboard, even friggin, YouTube ads (for all their infuriating nature) can make or break a show’s success. Yet some seem to get by in spite of the network being ambivalent towards the title.

You can’t even claim that the internet is hard to work with when Social Media managers exist for a reason. If every cartoon got its fair shake at potential success but failed due to a considerable lack of interest on the audience’s part, maybe a cancellation wouldn’t feel as gutting. It’d still hurt but in a, “Dem’s the brakes, kiddo,” sort of way.

As is, The Legend of Korra practically had Nick’s marketing in a tizzy compared to Spongebob when they could’ve tried... something. Where was all that energy they put into greenlighting three seasons at once before Book 2? Why move it to their website and not a service like Netflix where serialized stories (at the time) were thriving?

Of course, it’s hard to deny how the perception of animation from adults overall are very likely shared with the producers who oversee these cartoons. Despite the medium being profitable to not let go of full stop, too much animation with no so insignificant follows get the axe likely because the mainstream perception of animation being a lesser media seeps into the inmates running the asylum.

1.Many adults see cartoons and animation overall as for kids.

2. The public overall internalizes this idea of it being a lesser medium despite some productions crunching their staff big time.

3. Those of the public go on to work for companies like WB and/or Disney where they may help oversee animation production.

4. The aforementioned attitudes lead to animation being seen as expendable in lew of any money problems (often of their own doings).

I mean... you know it’s bad when Disney granted The Owl House something when it came to shortening Season 3 when it could’ve just had King’s Tide be the end of it. Not to give too much credit but I’d take a shorter season for a show getting the boot to end. At the very least they can have the creators and their team make their cases why they shouldn’t just be written off.

So... what now? It’s easy to say “support indie creators” when forgetting how there can be a lot of uncertainty in a lot of unknown media. It’s not just corporations feeding into the “nothing’s original” phenomenon suffice to say. What I can say is that a “NewDeal4Animation” trends for a reason.

Those working in this industry need to unionize and make it clear as goddamn crystal that they are not okay with how things are as of now. If they’re employed to work on a project for a company, they need to be valued and not be neglected or abused. And we fans can help by stepping up whether or not this might be trending.

I want to go back in time and murder whoever made this image.

This single fucking got damn image is almost singlehandedly responsible for melding the cartoon community into the toxic common decency-shaming dumpster fire it is today. I hope whoever made this image dies sad and alone and spends the rest of eternity burning in Hell.

Well, yeah, i kinda agree on that. Some fans on this website were treating Zami070 like she was a dictator over her drawing style. But that's what happens when you lack zero awareness and don't reflect on your actions. For a show that was trying to teach "love and tolerance", many fans seemed to completely ignore these lessons and used it to push their own agenda:Ships,headcanons,bullying and harassing...

It's not suprising there was so much discourse when the episode "Bismuth" came out because some fans had the same type of mob mentality that Bismuth had. The difference was that at least with Bismuth you could understand why she acted the way she did. These people? There was almost no explanation. So, its no wonder why they missed the point of the episode and got angry when they were proved wrong.

It's not SU's fault or Rebecca Sugar's fault that for a long time this fanbase was considered one of the worst cartoon fandoms. She tried to stop it many times but the infighting and bullying went on and on.

As for the negative perception that Steven universe has: Many people were ready to tear down this show apart before it started airing back in 2013. I don't know if you haven't read Introvertceleste posts about Crewniverse members talking that there were already people complaining about Garnet's design and how she's was "an awful role model" or Steven being a "straight white male" despite being different from your classic stereotype and sometimes acting as a trans metaphor (see Diamond's days arc).

For a few years the series was well- received. Animation fans and reviewers liked Steven universe a lot. Then in 2016-2017, a few videos rants on youtube started to pop up. Some of them would get tons of views. This made other youtubers say "Hey, let's do this thing, it's going to gives us hundred thousands of views" and that's how SU hate train started.

SU youtube rants start getting recommended, each one more spreading false rumors and more missinformation than the last because they were desperate to "destroy" a children cartoon.

Then you have the "Steven universe critical" thing that while they started pointing some issues the show had over time it developed into nitpicking, harassment to other fans and writers over ships and right down making up bullsh*t to make SU or the creators look bad.

They started calling Rebecca Sugar every name under the sun and making look like she was the next Hitler. The funny thing is that Rebecca was actually nicer than most of these so called "SU critical" and probably she didn't have any idea that they existed in first place.

She didn't encouraged harassing, she didn't say that SU was only "for lesbians and women" (in fact she created this show for a boy demographic but those who wanted to gatekeep the show seemed to forget about that).

As why this happened i can think of two reasons:

1)Cartoon Network's horrible schedule: The haituses of SU were ridiculous.We only got 3 or 4 episodes every 6 months. This made fans become more and more frustrated or many just dropped the series.

2) The purity culture that this website has: It's pretty common for cartoon tumblr to put on a pedestal shows that have representation but in the moment it does something wrong,everyone stars hating on the show. It's always the same thing. I think the exception to this rule is Kipo and the Age of wonderbeasts as it didn't get very popular.

I swear, just wait half an year and people are going to start hating on The owl house which is only on its first season And calling the creators horrible things. Right now its happening the same thing that happened with RS and Noelle: She's being treated like a god and the moment she says or does something wrong,bang! She gets cancelled. That's how it works.

The issue is that creators that are LGBT and minorities often get more hate for putting representation on their shows than those who don't. Many are afraid of writing their own stories out of fear of being harassed and acussed of transphobia and homophobia. It's counterproductive and very bigoted.

For those of you who don’t know, I came from a Christian household and while I love my parents, they were strict as hell. When the internet was a thing, there was an app on the computer called SafeEyes. It was supposed to block porn and other harmful adult things.

Newsflash: it didn’t work.

It didn’t always block things right away and even still, I was able to get around it. I never told my parents this because they were already so strict. I had a time limit, I barely went to any concerts, I didn’t see a horror movie until high school and I was forced to go to church for years. If I revealed to my parents I could get around this safe block, that meant no more internet.

The thing is I wasn’t looking for sexual content, I was looking for stuff I enjoyed like Batman. I remember searching for Batman on Google, with Safe eyes and safe search on. But guess what came up?

Inflation art.

It wasn’t sexual but I clicked the link and it led to tons of sexual stuff. Stuff I shouldn’t have been looking at it. Stuff made by adults that 13-year-old me shouldn’t have been looking at it. But again, I said nothing because of my strict parents.