Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!

I used to set this one for second year undergraduate creative writing seminars on writing science fiction on a double bill with Octavia E. Butler's "Bloodchild" and no-one here gets out alive.

Friday Again Garfie Baby

 On occasion you’ll see a Who-would-win matchup where people try to get Steven Universe to Talk-no-jitsu a host of “irredeemable” villains, and it really highlights something that I think gets lost in the weeds in discussions of, and perceptions of, Steven’s character. I’d argue that he’s not actually uniquely good at talking people down, he was just uniquely well suited to talking down the handful of people he did talk down.

He had an in with the Diamonds to start, and honestly coasted a lot on the outcome of actions taken before he was born in order to survive the endgame. He never talked Jasper down. He never talked Aquamarine down. Lapis came around but she wasn’t exactly a decisive victory and the show makes a point of how she has to carry herself over the finish line. He never really convinced Bismuth so much as the material circumstances changed and put the two of them in the same camp on their second meeting. Peridot decisively feels like a feather in his cap- he made a lot of right calls in quick succession with her, and they paid off fairly straightforwardly with no backsliding - but the sucess was still super contextual in that they only worked together at all because of the mutual danger posed by the cluster. He talked down Spinel but lost her almost immediately because she (correctly!) perceived him as only having reached out to her because he needed to in order to stop everyone from dying; he didn’t think far enough ahead to realize this was probably going to happen, and honestly he kinda got lucky the Diamonds showed up when they did because they might have been in that cycle for a while otherwise.

The kid’s not a rhetorical genius- his successes in redeeming his enemies are contextual, dependent on immediate circumstances, a lot of luck, and oftentimes on the person being “redeemed” making a personal decision that has nothing immediately to do with any argument Steven made. What Steven is actually consistently good at is providing support to his friends and family, convincing them to do stuff, managing their neurosis, and this is part of why Future hits him so hard- they don’t really need him to do that anymore. Indeed, one thing I really liked about Future is that it highlighted the ways in which Steven can be genuinely emotionally incompetent in ways that don’t pop as much when he’s a kid. I’m thinking of Guidance, Volleyball, and Together Forever in particular. The show actually has a very reasonable grasp of how far rhetoric and fuzzy feelings alone will get you! 

All of this to say that if you’re treating it as a given in your battleboarding that proximity to Steven is going to result in a character being redeemed, you’re doing it wrong. Being on the television show Steven Universe is what results in a character being redeemed. If you want Steven to be why, you’re gonna have to write an actual story. With context for how they met and got stuck together for the long haul. Maybe a plot, too.

Some really good tags

You cannot kill me

in a way that matters

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@animeshogun8 has stolen this artwork and is claiming it's their own and selling it without my permission/possibly pretending to sell it to get you to click a spam link. Please help me by reporting the post as impersonation/spam. Update: looks like the account was taken down. Thanks everyone!!

I'll have to slap a watermark on this when I'm able. Sorry we can't have nice things because people think it's okay to profit off someone else's work. Thought Tumblr was better than that.

I have been away all weekend and not checking the MD tag here so idk if anyone has pointed this out yet... But I've off-handedly seen a bunch of discussion crossing my path talking about how this ending scene takes place in the pilot, but I don't think it does!

This isn't Uzi's original railgun. Her original railgun has stickers and a keychain, as seen in the pilot:

I think the ending is actually skipping to the present day in the canon, and what is happening is Uzi is approaching the spire and has her weapon on her in case she needs it.

somethin else to sorta add fuel to this, Uzi's expression is WAY different in the special compared to the pilot. The shot in the special seems to be referencing this expression, with Uzi sorta looking around for a second then furrowing her brow before going into the spire. But the pilot has Uzi look genuinely scared, hollow eyes and the lil eye mark things they get when theyre stressed. meanwhile in the special she just looks a bit uncertain, and she does NOT look like she had just seen a dead body for the first time in her life followed by a massive spire of dead bodies like in the pilot.

like these are just not the same expression at all. The latter expression honestly does feel like the expression Uzi would put on before going to talk to J after Everything too. Like she wouldn't be scared, just a bit uncertain of how things are gonna go down

I think you're very correct about the expressions, I thought about that myself while watching it (and one thing MD does so beautifully well is convey emotion). There's no fear on her. She looks kind of pensive, investigative, and determined.

honestly also wouldnt surprise me if Uzi is also going alongside N and V who wanted to check on J and theyre just off camera to better sell the mystery, which would likely also be why her eyes are purple instead of the gradient too (would kinda immediately tell us this was post canon if we could see them), and shed def wanna hide Cyn if she were going to check on J considering everything.

also we technically have seen J once post-finale in the credits, since shes repairing the pod in the spire all by herself to seemingly try to leave but thats all weve seen of her. I really do hope we get another special post-canon involving J, it'd be SO cool

do they know

unlikely duos 🤔