#worm eidolon

Do you know how Steven Universe was a show about a seemingly-prototypical Saturday-morning cartoon kid hero who, under the prototypical conditions of his genre, eventually internalized a deeply unhealthy model of himself as a problem solver and utilitarian object, valuable only in terms of his ability to live up to the expectations of his role? And you know how that show had an entire wind-down season about how the mindset that carried Steven through the first five conventional seasons left him totally adrift and unprepared for “civilian life,” how he’d been inadvertently left without the most basic skill set for existing as his own person independent of a larger heroic goal? Because there was just never time to squeeze it in? Well, if you take away the part where his guardians did that on accident instead of on purpose, as a deliberate lever of control, and if you let that kid age out of his cute, photogenic adolescence into an upper-middle-age to which the audience is much less reflexively sympathetic, and if you take away the part where anything was ever okay again for anyone ever, well. You're sort of getting within swinging distance of the lens through which I view Eidolon