#you dont have to be nice about sj problems in cartoons by any means but like..

[skunkpixels]

Like... im gonna be real here and say that ive been a little irrationally bitter towards at and sv/tfoe purely because at the height of the whole su crit thing, adventure time and star vs were like the leading "thing that is way better in every shape and form that people should pay attention to instead" cartoons. Like people even straight up moved on to claiming that they had better lgbt rep because of non canon relationships or ppl kissing in the background like. That's not me ragging on them if there really are censors in place but dont... act like those two things are somehow better than ruby and sapphire

So im at least? Happy? That everyones immense hateboner for su has died down to this point but at the same time i am very very worried about the existence of crit blogs in general right now. It just doesn't seem like the solution? Not that im claiming to have an answer but like. Yknow

The thing with having an entire community built around picking apart different wrong aspects of a show is that, like the su crit community, it can tend to start off with a good intention in mind, go on with that decently well, and then just keep going after everything useful has been said until it's just a big fucking mess of people clamoring for problems that don't exist.

Like, i used to follow the person who really coined the whole crit thing (i later unfollowed for reasons outside of that, my general contempt for su crit has nothing to do with them) and their blog was just kind of one blog. They made it because people didn't want to see constant crit of su on their dash, but they felt like there was a lot they needed to say. To this day, I still find that a fair goal.

Im not gonna say that problems began the minute people started joining in because honestly there was still a whole lot to talk abt in terms of what su got wrong so it was cool to see other perspectives on it + get some interesting other ideas for what they might have done.

The thing is, though, particularly with the hiatuses su gets, people just kind of ran out of things to talk about. I was noticing some uncomfortable trends before, but the minute people started trying to continue after the fact is when it all just turned to useless complaining.

I fell out of crit stuff a little after the "Steven is a bad person for accidentally giving Connie's eyesight back" discourse happened.

So then, basically, by that point, people really fucking wanted something to be mad about. Su wasn't airing much, we weren't getting much side content, by that point it was time to just. Reach for shit. What was worse is thay they didn't even keep it on their own posts anymore. Random posts made by fans and little pictures from crewniverse would always have like seven blogs in the notes trying to make some epic funney potshot at the show. As much as crits hate to admit it, yes, even innocent little posts enjoying something got overrun with people telling them every reason it's actually not good (thinking back to that animation gifset where op wanted to say how nice they thought the animation was and half the notes were people borderline mocking them).

New episodes came out and somehow mysteriously nothing was ever good about them. Long, obnoxious fucking posts littered my dash which were basically just unfunny thought bubbles pasted over caps from the show (which op put in the main tag and refused to put in a readmore, mind you, because they thought it was progressive or some shit). People littered tags in hate saying "well what im saying is relevant just block me :///" as if it hasnt always been fucking rude to put hate in random tags? Every new episode i saw just had this feeling of "i dont want to see the fandom reaction to this anymore" because i was always on guard for every little wrong thing and dreading the way people would blow it out of proportion. Every character ever became abusive, Lapis and Pearl were suddenly the worst characters in the world, Rose was unlikable, Rosepearl was an unacceptable ship, blue diamond cried too much, nothing could be revealed without a full explanation on it thirty seconds later, it was pure hell where everyone wanted to put their two cents in but none of them had even one to give so they just resorted to tossing in dirt. If you even tried to point that out people would just assume you were too uncomfortable about people hating the show to just grow up and take it.

And, honestly, in my mind, that's something that'll probably just. Inevitably happen to any crit community. Groups of people together whose only connecting trait is "I have a problem with this thing" will always eventually turn into "i passionately hate this one thing and will do anything to prove im right" because thats just the people they always interact with and it's all they want to hear.

I scrolled for a little on the star vs blog and honestly? I didn't find anything I found to be overtly ridiculous. It was mostly just talking about pony head (eugh), body diversity problems, how the show treats girls, etc, which is all things i already saw from the couple of episodes i watched. But, a crit community's a crit community. Also, considering i saw them rbing from su crit blogs as well, im extremely wary about where something like this is headed. Especially since star vs is not something i can put judgement on myself.

I remember what happened to su as soon as one person had a problem with it. All of a sudden all of its representation was bad, all of its storytelling was bad, and it was tossed into the bin of "cringy things to enjoy X3" where nobody even talked about it anymore.

Even though hiatuses had some part in su's decline in relevance, the ball's already rolling and i dont want to see othet cartoons get the same treatment just because people can't be bothered to employ nuance in the ways they address a problem

Just found a star v critical blog and i dont rlly have the energy to check if there are any of those for other cartoons by this point nd i have extremely mixed feelings