What the fuck was the point of the townies?
What the fuck was the point of the townies?
Damsels in distress.
Filler fodder
They didn’t even help heal Kaiju Steven.
What a waste.
hooked by the magic and mystery, stayed for...the townies? su fags are the worst
They were entertaining, and helped build character? It's a piece of entertainment dude, not everything needs an endgame reason to exist.
you really can't see the forest for the trees can you
>no comfy town party where they all say good bye to Steven
What a waste.
To have someone normal to play off of gems' insanity
To pad out story arcs and prevent the show from evolving past "comfy slice of life". Sugar never wanted her show to be an epic space opera, she just wanted an excuse to put her alien OCs in a show. She needed the townies to justify not exploring the universe more. "Well I can't just abandon all these beloved characters can I?". People will defend it saying it was a way to avoid cancellation since networks are so against serialized story telling, but if you're running six month long hiatuses and all your episodes come in marathon waves, then I don't see the point in limiting yourself unless it's personal.
Why would they? The whole point is that the townies moved on
Show what Steven was fighting for
I wanted to see more of this old man
I enjoyed it when the crystal gems interacted with the townies. There could have been more episodes exploring this dynamic with steven in the background.
Further proof nobody in town truly cared about steven and found him to be that annoying kid no one wants that tags along
Well that falls flat when the show barely had them involved in anything plot related
>There could have been more episodes exploring this dynamic
Preach brother!
>with steven in the background.
TESTIFY!
What do you mean? They were there to give steven ice cream cats and be told to duck and cover when the gemworld invaded earth!
The episode proved connie and greg were the only humans important to steven. He’s so disconnected from everyone else after the timeskip and ptsd it’s really unironically sad
What's funny is that a lot of them haven't had speaking roles in years (admittedly due to hiatuses) and I haven't even really noticed until someone pointed it out.
The Crew preferred slive-of-life animes over shonen
"Representation"
In practice, they were meant to make Beach City feel more alive. Like a home worth defending where you actually recognize everyone living there. The series wasn't an action show at its heart, it was about magical people trying to live in a normal world.
But the obvious consensus is that there was such a disconnect between townie episodes, character development, and gem lore, that people grew to detest them for getting in the way of what people actually wanted to see. Hiatus didn't help.
I still like some of the townie characters, like the cool kids and Vidalia, but I wish they could have done more to interweave the two sides of the story rather than keep them completely separate. Like how Aquamarine kidnapped humans, threatened to kill Jaime and forced Lars into some character development. That was interesting, and had more of an impact because of the recognizable townsfolk involved. But for a lot of the show they're just kind of ignoring magical monster attacks and doing their own thing.
One of the best aspects of Future was that it sidelined the townies to the background, no wasted episodes but it shows the failings of the writers when they are incapable of writing normal people as interesting characters.
The disconnect is a major weakness of the series. Why are only two people, Connie and Ronaldo, actually interested in Gems? (Greg wasn't interested in Rose as a Gem, he was interested in her as a person.) Why isn't there a shadowy government agency or an absent-minded professor character around to give an impression that humans are curious or interested in Gem affairs at all? It's very unrealistic. The townies are NPCs and not even interesting ones.
Filler for teaching lessons or something
Beach city grew up with gems so it’s normal for them
Even the wider world seems to not care. All the gem war stuff are just lying in open fields with nobody picking them up.
I think you have to simply suspend your disbelief for the sake of the premise. Magic/Aliens aren't treated as normal, but they aren't really taken seriously by the setting either. Even people outside of Beach City don't really react to Lapis flying through the sky, or a multi-armed giant coming to dinner.
I think the main reason for that is because it simply would have changed the whole dynamic of the show if the world took any serious interest in the gems. It'd stop being a slice-of-life about a magic kid living in a sleepy beach-side town, and start being about a mutant kid hiding his powers in a place under total military lock-down due to monster attacks. And I don't think that's the tone they were going for.
filler
The same as sawdust in a meatloaf: just filler.
To waste our fucking time. Just like this thread
Based Townies
Garnet and Pearl always looked really annoyed while interacting with humans. The rest of the uncorrupted gems were "rebooted", so they don't mind being friendly with modern humans.
FILLER
And make us hate humans and support gems more.
I don't think the series was meant to be as serialized as it was. The townies were originally meant to be the interesting characters, not Homeworld.
Toddler filler?
I think the major problem is that townies aren’t very interesting personalities in and of themselves with maybe the exception of Onion and/or Dewey. If they were more entertaining like those in even other SOL shows then the disconnect between them and gem stuff wouldn’t even be that much of a complaint. Think about it, the only reason why people are suggesting that they should be more connected to it besides muh theme is because the gems are more interesting characters with plots by a significant margin. If they wanted pure SOL characters viewers have far better options in other shows. If they took all the gem shit out then it’d have the same level of fan interest Craig of the Creek has.
>exception of Onion
Very generic creepy kid that’s there to be memed
Still more memorable than the others.
Onion Gang was memorable alright.
Multicultural woke virtue signalling. You even need to ask?
Just like with diversity grandma here. Such a powerful portrayal of a marginalized poc!. Oh, she also happens to be the most boring character in the show because she's composed entirely of woke stereotypes and that only reason she exists is because of some tiresome diversity agenda.
I always wanted an episode where Interpol visits Beach City to serve an arrest warrant on her for some village she massacred in Ghana 30 years prior. Now that would be interesting!
What the fuck was with their pozzas. Had the most disgusting toppings ever
So SU humans are as retarded as Invader Zim humans
To ground Steven. To give him a safe place to return to and be something worth fighting for. The townie episodes were the human half to Steven's gem warrior persona. Without them he would feel even more disconnected with humanity. Which is why in Future when everyone starts to leave and he starts to lose that human connection he so desperately craves he begins to lose his mind. The town and the townies were his catharsis and without them he's just lonely and stressed.
IZ humans are ignorant and unbelieving of aliens or conspiracies
Humans in SU know they exist and don’t care
Steven never dis any human things except watch one rasslin match and dance
They were all shit apart from Lars
The mayor and onion were amazing and had character
This. We could have at least had some of the townies hug Steven.
The townies were busy running for their lives. They didn’t know it was steven
Garnet and pearl are more familiar with the evil nature of man. They traveled the world. Beach city is exceptionally noce
>They were entertaining
It is understood that the worst episodes of Steven Universe are specifically about townies, furthermore the townies are boring and have little to make the viewer care about them
In the average townie episode there are no jokes and nothing interesting is happening so the end result is boredom and wishing you could be watching more interesting characters
>Steven Universe are specifically about townies, furthermore the townies are boring and have little to make the viewer care about them
Dewey,onion,lars,sadie and the artist would disagreee with you
>not Homeworld.
They were dropping hints about homeworld since the first season
I like to think that the pizza twins were getting /ss/'d by peedee. Pizza and french fries go together like black girls and shotas. I wish there was art of this
They were twins? always saw them as younger and older. The older working at the pizzaria and the younger one having friends
Yes they can’t show any realistic reactions because it would undermine the show’s message about how everyone will accept you for who you are and that you should be comfortable with your identity
I was actually kinda interested in the town of Beach City and the surrounding area, but mostly because I'm from the area and wanted to see what sorts of local Easter Eggs were lying around. Steven apparently shares my area code but hates square pizza like a beta. Also, some of the place names are very much reflective of real life Delmarva.
Like any small town, many of the people move on or move away. That's why small towns are dying, which I think Andrew Yang actually addressed in his campaign
It's not insane to find an immigrant family in a small town, especially for a small East Coast town. Hell, you even find the occasional gay or trans person in these communities. However, I think the most unreal thing about it was how many of them were in Beach City. Even for a tourism town, there usually isn't that many openly gay people except in the cases where there's an explicit gay-friendly bar or community. There's are even less trans and gender-fluid people around. If the show were being honest, you'd find most of these people in Charm City or Empire City (where the show should have given significant episode time to, to broaden the SU world).