I hate-watched Adventure Time. Hear me out. In the Comet season, it just got so caught up in its own hype, it lost track of what made it great to begin with. I felt like it wasn’t talking to me anymore. Finn became more and more of a jerk. It broke my heart, and even when it changed and got better, I didn’t forgive it. I stuck with it out of obligation, snarked at every episode and never noticed how my snark was getting fonder and fonder as the show found its way back. I didn’t realize I fell in love with it all over again until I was bawling at the final episodes. Adventure Time's finale rencontexualized the show for me. It made me realize I was being too harsh on it, that somewhere along the way it reclaimed a part of my heart. It was a magical feeling, like somehow even its biggest missteps were all part of the same journey. Its sum was bigger than its parts. And its legacy, on a personal level, felt secured. All it took was one amazing finale for the spark I had to be relit.

I can’t say the same of Steven Universe.

Adventure Time's problem was that it could get too heady for its own good, and SU's is the opposite. It thought, often to a fault, too much with its heart. It was a messy show. It seemed to, in the end, settle on the Diamonds as a kind of cycle of abuse thing, and it still doesn't quite work. The more you think about Steven Universe, the less it works. It wants to be both allegory and fairy tale- the Diamonds are a symbol of the system that represses and corrupts and destroys queer lives... but they can be redeemed and they're just traumatized, messy people too. It's both fantasy and true to life- look at all the wacky adventures Steven has! Isn't it fun? The world has 39 states and there's aliens and it's so out there! But also those wacky adventures gave Steven serious trauma that we'll now look through from a more our world lens, like why hasn't this kid seen a doctor and gotten therapy?

It's a balance the show only briefly managed in its early days, and never as consistently as Adventure Time overall, and there's an interestingly fan fic-y feel to Steven Universe Future. It makes sense- Rebecca Sugar and her crew are a generation that grew up on fan fic, on concepts like the post series fic where fans look too deep into how all this cartoon adventures would really affect the protags, and it's fascinating in that way. Those fics are great thought experiments, great as reclamations of stories. The fate of the characters and what happens to them after becomes ours, and it can go a million different ways with new tones and styles without a thought to the original, like storytelling of old. I don’t know if that works as well for an official work. It didn’t quite for me.

But I don’t know if SU could’ve ever ‘won’ with me. As I got older, Steven Universe's idealism didn't resonate with me as much. It felt too easy, it didn't feel real. I didn’t want to be told to understand and emphasize with the Andy DeMayos or the Diamonds of the world and kill them with love like that would change anything. We have proof that it very much does not! The fairy tale of the original show felt less empowering or hopeful and more condescending, on a personal level. It had queer rep galore... but it slowly felt like it didn’t want to show the angry or ugly or bitter side of us. It stopped feeling as relevant to me.

So I should’ve loved Steven Universe Future, right? That gets ugly. That gets _real_. But the strange thing is, even as Steven Universe Future tried to reach me personally with its framing of trauma and a kid trying to find his place after a lifetime of it... I appreciated it more than I felt it. There wasn't quite the plot or character throughline and cohesion to get me to feel it, even though it was always shooting, undeniably, from the heart. The show was feeling so much, but _I_ was feeling less and less. The heart needed a little more brain.

Here’s the thing. Art can be messy. And that messiness means it does not connect with everyone the same way. Steven Universe as a franchise was messy, and in the end wasn’t my type of mess to leave me sobbing at the finale and always caring about its characters. Every goodbye just got a little aww from me. A little mental appreciation of ‘I should be feeling something here’. Where Adventure Time’s finale left me bawling, love for the show bursting stronger than ever before, both finales of SU left me dry eyed. That may be a failure of the show _for me_.

But there is a lot of people who that mess _did_ reach, who felt as reflected or as wrecked by that show as I did with Adventure Time or Moonlight or We Know The Devil. There's people who needed Steven Universe's hope, and there's people who watched Future and felt seen. There's kids who grew up on both, with the franchise as a whole, and it'll be a true companion to them. And there's no discounting the monumental work it put into queer rep, the doors it broke down for other shows on the network and beyond. In a way, it doesn’t matter if in my heart I can’t pinpoint what SU means for me. Steven Universe stands for something just by being Steven Universe. There'll be people who will want to be the Steven they want to see in the world, and that's a great thing.

I fell out of love with Steven Universe, and unlike Adventure Time I never quite fell back in love with it. But I'll never stop appreciating it, and even if it doesn't fully hold a place in my heart, it'll be a cornerstone for both western animation and many people's lives. And that's enough, both for it and for myself. I can have a satisfaction just in seeing that. Sometimes a finale doesn’t need to have made the whole show worth it. It doesn’t need to prove to you that you loved it, it doesn’t need to make you feel it in your soul what it is. It did for other people. Sometimes a thing can just end, and you can be happy for it and everyone else who loved it.

Steven Universe ended. Here we are.