#but yknow its kinda not the same as someone truly engaging in it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

tumblunni · 7 years

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Well that sure was a steven universe episode

NAVY YOU TOTAL BASTARD FUCK I have no idea how this worked but the show actually made me cheer for her being revealed as evil?? And like.. so far she is literally the only member of the rubies that IS evil. Like, i mean, defining evil as someone who understands the whole damn thing and willfully chooses to make the bad choice, out of selfish morals. The other ruby squad members are on homeworld’s side yeah but they never seemed EVIL I really am very invested in this twist that the quiet one who did nothing in every other episode except have funny oneliners is actually a sadistic asshole who (for all we know) could have been lying to her teammates too and wants to backstab them as well. I mean wouldnt that be a good villain?? A member of the lowest ruby caste who’s grown used to putting on this fake agreeable persona but is plotting to backstab literally everyone and find some way to rise above her station. Also it’;d be a way she could still have a sympathetic reveal in the end and potentially be redeemed even after refusing this offer of redemption, its a sympathetic motive to become heartless and cruel because you’re treated like a slave by your species and doomed to a life of ‘dumb muscle’. Also it makes up for how the show was all ‘rubies are dumb’ which always kinda bugged me with all the morals about how you can choose what you want to be. i hope maybe someday everyone gets called out on that, now we can potentially have a very smart and manipulative recurring ruby villain! Also it was good to have a shocking twist and a new villain after a while of not much happening but cute slice of life episodes. Not that I dont love them, but theyre more engaging when there’s an ongoing threat to theorize about at the same time. I just REALLY hope navy does actually rise up into being her own recurring villain, instead of just ‘nah shes totally loyal to the ruby squad and she gets them back and now all of them are evil’. I’d wanna see how cool it could be if the ruby squad got to go against her, like maybe steven is trying to convince them that navy is really a backstabber and theyre just like NO WAY SHES TOTALLY LOYAL and then while theyre distracted fighting each other Navy steals a comm device thing like peridot did and sells everyone out to yellow diamond, making sure to mention that all the other rubies were totes incompetant the whole time. It could be so damn cool if Navy ends up persisting throughout the whole story and becomes like an evil vizier to yellow diamond or something?? Also i’d like it if she got a name other than Navy, now we know she prrrrrobably wasnt exactly happy about steven giving her that one. I dunno if she’d have some moniker of her own that she always wanted to be called after years of being treated as interchangeable, or whether she’d insist that she is the one true Ruby and everyone else can just fuck off. And man it could be so cool if this could be a chance to have a more Ruby-centric episode where she gets to have a rivalry and a plotline separate from Sapphire, like how sapphire mostly handled the homeworld zoo on her own.

Oh and I also liked the plotline of lapis getting really confused and self hating when seeing someone else seemingly recover faster than her, thats quite damn relateable to people who have depression. In this case it seemed more like lapis was projecting though, I think even if navy’s nice persona was real its not like theyre on equal footing. Lapis was depressed and traumatized, navy just simply wasnt. Its not ‘oh navy can get over it faster’, its just that navy was never depressed in the first place. And people have different personalities, so different things can be scarier to them, I felt so bad at lapis feeling like she was weak cos it was scary to her when she got here. And MAN I felt like laughing too at the end! It was a good way to make the ending not 100% sad if we can at least have the consolation of a joke afterwards. Also it helps the audience get even more fuckin mad at navy, jesus christ! And I felt semi proud that I started seeing the twist coming as the episode went on, it was just like Navy’s persona started becoming less ‘actual happy person’ and more ‘asshole Neurotypical with a capital N who thinks that everyone can just choose to stop being depressed’. One of those people who says horrible things and thinks because they’re saying it ‘politely’ its ‘just my opinion’ and anyone who gets offended is the bad guy. Tho I could have also liked this plot equally well if it turned out navy was legit about being reformed, and legitimately was an optimistic person, and her and lapis could have worked out their differences by talking about it. It was just a lot more cathartic this way if lapis’s anxieties had to be resolved in a short runtime, yknow? And seriously it makes Navy so much more hateable when you imagine her as one of those ‘sure, jan’ soccer mom type characters. Fluoride in the water caused my son’s autism, Lapis!

Also I dunno how they managed to make this twist not make me angry?? I mean, I really liked Navy in previous episodes and totally assumed she really was the one nice guy teammate of the rubies rather than the sole truly horrid one. I think I just didnt get as much frothing rage as I did when i thought peridot was betraying the team, cos we didnt really see enough of navy. Like.. we didnt KNOW if she was good or not, it was just a foolish assumption based on superficial evidence about how she acts. It seems more like a moral of not doing that, rather than ‘heres someone you love who is a friend and good and here’s 30 episodes of them being awesome and WHOOPS it was all a lie and that person doesnt even exist’. That’s a hard thing to come back from, a similar plotline ruined my experience of Soul Nomad And The World Eaters cos it seemed like the betrayer character got forgived too easily while not really earning it. A good twist deserves more effort put in if you wanna backpedal it!

#su spoilers

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