What was the point of all that build up just for a massive ass pull like this...

What was the point of all that build up just for a massive ass pull like this? Do People unironically find this to be good writing?

>inb4 peace is the answer not war bullshit. This show teaches tolerance and promotes togetherness of whatever the gays think nowadays.

Yeah,I was disappointed. Only thing I can imagine is Jasper falling into that fissure and maybe interacting with it later on. Or maybe the whole friendship bullshit turning the cluster good and saving them later.

>implying it was ever going to end any other way than Steven making a successful CHA roll
Do you even watch this show? What exactly were you expecting?

I think they planned for it to be longer, but realized it was taking too much time for very little pay off.

well there might be more to the plotline

It wasn't supposed to be a huge deal, CN just blew it out of proportion

It was probably supposed to highlight Steven's empath powers

It's not the crewniverse's fault CN put the show on such a long hiatus before resolving the cluster. And to be fair the way this is resolved really is how 90% of the ways the show deals with these problems

Can you explain what this is to someone who doesn't watch SU?

I was expecting all the previous build up of season two to pay off, not pussy out because of deus ex Steven and the power of Mary Sue. What was literally the point of the writers wasting eleven odd episodes if they didn't have anything greater in mind than

>"Lets have Steven talk to it."

It's shitty writing, and you can't defend that

What would you have had them do?
>Can't have it form, the Earth would be destroyed
>Destroying it with the drill would be both anticlimatic and boring
>Destroying it would go against every message of the show up to this point
It was pretty obvious that something like that was going to happen.

A cluster of shattered gems which retain a partial consciousness fused together to form a huge geoweapon, which upon taking its form would tear the earth apart.

Steven stopped it by feeling its pain and desire to become whole, telling the shards about their situation and eventually working with the shards to place themselves into indefinite stasis by putting the entire cluster in a magic bubble

A giant cluster of broken alien beings forcibly melded together into a horrid mindweb gestalt, that's been buried in the Earth for 6300 years.
If it had managed to form a body for itself the planet would explode.

Long story short, there was a highly anticipated supervillain coming along, and it was talked about and alluded to for like 20 episodes. Tons of buildup, "The Cluster is going to destroy the Earth!" "It'll hatch and kill everything!"

Super empath kid tames it and makes it not, "explode" in just one episode. Super uneventful.

cuck

>implying permanent solution

What about Not making your show in a way that only stupid shit will save the characters?

What message? This show is so mixed on in its tone, character would often waft back in forth from preaching non violence, to violence and simply not giving a damn. The show is inconsistent with this morals but I can't explain this to retarded fanboys because they simply chose to act like they have no clue.

all they needed to do was make it a 2-parter.

First ep is getting there, and discovering it. Steven starts getting visions.

2nd ep is them trying to find a solution, being torn about killing it, yadda yadda, and then steven finishes his vision and bubbles it.

Essentially, it's the problem this show has due to its time format: things feel rushed because we only have like, 13 minutes to get shit done. If SU was a 23 minute show, it could develop things and give better payoffs.

>you can't defend that
Yeah I can, because it's the logical course of events given the themes of the show and the usual methods of problem solving.

This is like watching an episode of Star Trek: TNG and calling bullshit when Picard makes a grand speech.

The only thing was that it was so short, it couldve at least been 2 episodes that it took to deal with. Like having Steven having to adventure through its collective consciousness for what felt like hours, consistently talking to it for more than 3 minutes, rather than just having the weird cutoff that it did.

So you're saying that the cluster shouldn't have existed at all?
Why not just say that in the first place?
Also,
>stupid shit
Why the fuck do you even watch this show? The cluster episode, like, exemplified the damn point of it.

this is of course bad writing, i'm not arguing that

That's a very fair point. I don't think the OP would be happy with that, though, since he's a massive faggot.

23 minute eps would make this show way cooler
I'm ok with how it is, but, 23 mins wouldve been better

I'm sure the cluster will be back in some form

Guess what? It was two episodes and it still was shit. Maybe they would've cut out the watermelon bullshit and devoted the two-parter to you know-- the cluster it wouldn't have felt anticlimactic.

But no we had to have "muh Lapis and Jasper."

It's pretty complicated, but I'll try to explain everything. It involves some pretty major spoilers (seriously, all the spoilers) so if you find any of this interesting then I suggest watching the show for yourself instead of reading onwards.

Okay, the basic premise of Steven Universe is that there's a group called the Crystal Gems who use the power of magical crystals to protect the Earth. They fight monsters who are also gem-powered; each one leaves a gemstone behind when defeated, and will regenerate from its gem if left alone, so the CGs put them in magical bubbles to keep them dormant after defeating them.

Steven is a member of the Crystal Gems, and is slowly learning about his powers throughout the series. These include creating protective shields, making bubbles (which all CGs can do), healing, controlling plants, and linking to the minds of others when he's asleep.

Now, a while into the show we find out about a group of evil Gems who are enemies of the Crystal Gems. In the distant past, theyve been doing some pretty horrific things, like forcibly fusing the shards of dead Gems together to form misshapen monsters, whose minds are so broken that all they can think of is wandering the planet, seeking out other Gems in a desperate attempt to find their missing pieces.

Then there's the thing in the OP. It's called the Cluster. It's a massive forced fusion experiment, made from millions of shattered Crystal Gem shards who have been buried underground for thousands of years. When it's finished maturing, it will attempt to form a physical body, which will crack the planet open like an egg. The CGs, naturally, want to stop this, which they do by building a drill to reach the Cluster before it hatches and hopefully destroy it.

That's the setup. All of that happened in previous episodes. Next post, I'll describe the episode in question, which was the climax of the Cluster's story arc.

I actually meant to respond to this faggot
Hey, hi there. You're a faggot.

The partially conscious nature of fractured Gems has been established.
The fact that bubbling can prevent Gems from forming a body has been established for a long time.
Steven's telepathic powers have been shown.

And, most importantly, we know about Steven's "let's talk it out instead of fighting" personality. That's his MO. It's been a major part of his character forever. Peridot, Centipeetle, Lapis, On the Run, etc. You should have known that he'd do something like this ever since the nature of the Cluster was mentioned. They foreshadowed it in that episode with the forced fusions that he wanted to help.

What happened in that episode was the obvious path for this show. It shouldn't be a surprise.

Maybe if it hadn't been done in less than 10 minutes

There really weren't any better solutions.

It was too big, it's not like they could ever let it form, it would have destroyed everything. So if it can't form that kinda limits the options of what they can do.

Destroying a giant frankenstein of a million different gems would be a bit dark. And not very dramatic since it couldn't barely even defend itself. They never permanently kill their enemies in this show.

So that just leaves the bubble it option. And talking to the Cluster rather than fighting it fits the show more thematically.

True

Couldve saved all that shit for later, and it wouldve made for less filler theyd have to shit out in the future. Which Im still waiting for, because its obviously coming.

Well it's an 11 minute show. I'd rather have what we got than using up a two-parter on a "let's get along" speech. What we got was reasonable for the show.

Well they could have tried removing the Cluster from the center of the Earth and sending it somewhere else.

Cluster Moon when?

...

(cont.)

Okay, here's what happens in the Cluster arc's climactic episode. The Cluster is beginning to form and causing world-wide earthquakes. Most of the Crystal Gems are preoccupied with fighting another dangerous enemy and can't make it back in time, so it's up to Steven and Peridot (a science/tech Gem with no personal combat ability) to use the drill and stop the Cluster on their own. While drilling down, they talk about the history and nature of the forced fusion experiments, with Peridot explaining that the smaller prototype Clusters aren't really malicious and only want to be whole again, but can never achieve this on their own. They drill past some mini-Clusters and Peridot fights them off with the drill vehicle's onboard weaponry, but when the reach the Cluster proper, it proves to be so massive and powerful that the drill can barely scratch its surface. Its cries of pain are overwhelming to Steven, and he passes out.

Steven wakes up in a surreal space which he soon realizes is the Cluster's mind. He is surrounded by the broken pieces of the Crystal Gems who were forced to form it, all chanting about how they want to form a body and become whole again. Steven tells them that forming a body won't help them, and will in fact destroy the Earth in the process. The Cluster's pieces realize that they were about to destoy the planet they once fought to protect, and Steven suggests that they can find peace by connecting with each other, since there are millions of them in there.

This makes the broken Gems happy, but they soon realize that they're still going to form a body against their will and can't hold themselves back. Steven figures out a solution to that as well: he starts making bubbles around the pieces. He gets to around half a dozen before running out of energy and waking up, but he then sees the Cluster bubbling its own shards, ultimately forming a giant bubble around itself to protect the planet.

how could they do that though, its very big

>peace is now a gay thing

> Jasper falling into that fissure and maybe interacting with it
Definitely.
Where else is Jasper supposed to fall?

This was the episode that made me drop the show. Only way I'll start watching again is if they introduce some new villains and have them stay villains

Warp Pads?

If you're delusion faggot sure, you need war in order to make peace. One cannot simply exist without the other, and it's gay to insist otherwise.

but they cannot make them, plus if it did form it would still attack earth

Maybe she'll fuse with it and gain control because of how fragmented the cluster's mind is and become big bad? Or make peace and mellow out because of the bubbling.

how, violence breeds violence, look at WWI and WWII

>being this much of an edgy meme

President Donald Trump will make America guh-reat

So there you have it. That's pretty much the story of the Cluster. There are some other details that I didn't mention, but they aren't relevant to the episode.

It's worth noting that this whole story arc, from the time the Cluster was explained and explained to the climactic point where its plot was resolved, lasted around eight episodes. That's around one tenth of the show's length. However, this eight-episode arc had multiple hiatuses in the middle of it, so in real time it ended up lasting nearly seven and a half months. That's over half a year, almost as many months as episodes. A large part of the disappointment is probably because the arc wasn't supposed to be that hyped up.

Personally, I wasn't disappointed at all. The arc's resolution wasn't an "asspull" as some have derided it; all the necessary elements were already established well in advance, and the way the came together was unexpected but makes perfect sense in-universe. It fits the show's themes perfectly, when the alternative would have made significantly less sense. Also, it still leaves the seeds for further story arcs in the future. The Cluster is no longer an imminent threat that the Crystal Gems have to deal with as soon as possible, but it's still lying there deep inside the Earth, and the evil Gems will most likely want to claim it when they realize it's not going to hatch on its own.

Honestly, the way it was resolved was the best way an arc ~can~ be resolved; I can understand that some people wanted Steven to be forced to kill an enemy that he absolutely can't talk down or safely contain, and that could well be a very good dramatic moment in a later Steven Universe episode, but ~this~ arc was just fine without it.

Bubbling it was fine. It fit with established info, probably won't be the last we see of it, and we all knew they weren't going to blow up the fucking planet.

People were just expecting it to be some huge bombshell event because they had months to dwell on it. If the last thing we saw before that hiatus was the Ruby popping out of the ship, people would go into the baseball episode months later expecting a major serious antagonist and promptly have a fucking meltdown.

Yeah that arc kind of was a let down, but it is generally good.

Not if you just pulverize your enemy

I think it was meant to be a switcheroo kind of thing. You were supposed to predict that Steven would stop Malachite by talking to her and convincing her to unfuse, and that the cluster would have to be obliterated because the gem shards are mindless and can't be communicated with. Instead, Malachite had to be punched to death, and the cluster was stopped with words.

Do you think we'd be in the same place without the threat of nuclear war? I'm not saying that keeping nukes is a good thing, but without the abnormality of nuclear weapons, we'd be in the thick of war today.

THE POWER OF FEELS

The show is wildly inconsistent in general. The animation, the humor, the tone, the general quality of music and episodes, there isn't a single thing about this show that is consistently good. Even the genre changes from episode to episode. It wants to be a comedy, but it also wants to be a slice of life, a drama, an action show, a soap opera, etc. It wants to be a jack of all trades, but it ends up being a master at none.

lavos is going to destroy earth
steven romances lavos
earth is saved

Would have been better if they devoted more than half an episode to the actual resolution, but kept the same end result.

Exploration of twisted and broken memories, fears of not being oneself, etc. Instead just, "You aren't alone!" Was solitude even one of the fears Steven felt during the initial run ins with the mutant fusions?

But the future refused to change.

SK-REEEEEEEEEE

I agree, I'm a SU fan and I thought it was lame as fuck and left me with blue balls

after that buildup, I was disappointed

then friends, family, neighbors, just people who witness it will be the next foes, so no that doesn't work

but once we use them it will breed more violence.

the fact that anyone (none the less the majority) disagree's with you is evidence that doesn't work. You might as well be trying to blow out flames with a bellows.

I liked your bubble Steven
Can i buy your a frybit.

Talk to it and convince it to attack Gem controlled planets and Homeworld instead

You don't ACTUALLY think this is the end of the cluster, do you?
We've still got half a season left