- Starring
- Zach Callison, Deedee Magno, Michaela Dietz
- Creator
- Rebecca Sugar
- Rating
- TV-PG
- Genre
- Action, Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy, Sci-Fi
- Release date
- July 27, 2013
- Where to watch
- Cartoon Network
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
Steven Universe is an animated series created by Rebecca Sugar that follows the adventures of Steven, a young, half-human/half-Gem, a race of magical, alien guardians. Alongside the Crystal Gems—Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl—Steven learns to harness his inherited powers while defending Earth from various threats.
Steven Universe REVIEW
Fanciful and bouncy with catchy music and fun characters, Steven Universe is one of the most dangerous programs streaming today. It's actually fun, and kids will dig it.
PARENTAL NOTES
Important Information for Parents
Our Parental Notes flag the material parents may want to know about before pressing play, including profanity, blasphemy, adult content, extreme violence, frightening intensity, hyper-stimulating sequences, and other family-content concerns.
WOKE REPORT
You're Only Getting Half the Picture.
This section is our site's secret sauce, and what truly separates us from the rest. If you don't read it, you haven't read our review.
Help us fight the Woke Mind Virus. Join today.
I’m going to pitch some strong criticism, but my overall opinion is that this is an excellent show despite the objectionable themes.
The main cast prominently features aliens who can morph together into one super-being in a process called fusion that is a thinly veiled parallel to sexual intercourse. It’s not for procreation, but rather for strengthening relationships and physical power. The process is presented as a common way to overcome difficult obstacles, strongly reliant on emotional bonds, deeply personal, and… limited only to how well the characters get along. There are several cases where more than two aliens merge together, and times when humans are involved in the process. Mixing and matching which characters fuse is not a problem for the show, including characters that just met (although there are problems if the character’s relationships are not emotionally stable). Some episodes focus on the idea that fusion is a thrilling experience. To add on to this, all of the aliens are female (by their appearance and characterizations).
Even with all this subtext and a wikipedia page that rants about how landmark it is for LGBTQ+ representation, the show has a stellar music, a complex story, and plenty of themes and adventures to enjoy. I would recommend parents avoid showing this series to their children until they’re confident of their child’s ability to understand and handle the sexual themes maturely. Kids might not pick up exactly what’s going on, but finding out long after enjoying the show could be a significant disappointment.
The show is not apologetic about its themes, but also not shallow about them or exclusively devoted to being a vehicle for propoganda. A viewer who disagrees with the themes can still enjoy it, so long as they’re able to comfortably defend their own views and recognize the show’s creators had different values.
I never watched Steven Universe. I have no intention of ever watching Steven Universe. But I know about it second-hand from people who did watch it. Despite its candy colors and smiling exterior, the show is actually quite disturbing and cynical. However, Steven Universe is not an Adult Swim cartoon that is rated TV-MA and therefore meant for adults. Steven Universe’s target audience is and has always been children.
I’m especially concerned because many of the young people in the target audience are adolescent girls. Specifically, they’re lonely, anxious, emotionally vulnerable girls. These girls become obsessed with cartoons like this one and identify themselves with the pretty and powerful gem characters. The show influences these lonely, emotionally unstable teenage girls, teaching them that forming clingy lesbian relationships with other lonely, emotionally unstable girls will magically make them happy and solve all their problems. I’m worried that shows like this that grossly misrepresent the way such intimate relationships work may have led many of these vulnerable girls to enter relationships where they might feel happy and less lonely at first, but then may have paved the way to bigger problems and abusive behaviors later on in their lives.
I stopped paying attention to what Cartoon Network was doing many years before Steven Universe aired, but I’ve heard a lot of second-hand rumors that much of Cartoon Network’s programming during that time was filled with disturbing and sexualized content, all intended for impressionable children and young adults. Especially when the creators of shows like this had been outed as child sexual predators and were known to directly hire artists from online queer-agenda pools such as Tumblr.
I wish I could reply properly but for some reason that functionality doesn’t exist for me. To Gorky Creator. Literally you described most of it as propaganda and most of it is. The show itself is extremely shallow overall and has no worth in watching. And even used in shorts on the networks to push historical lies and propaganda. it’s just a vehicle for propaganda lol.
No audience reviews yet. Be the first to leave one.