MAGA indeed… this doesn't surprise anyone but it's depressing to see nonetheless. A part of me is still expecting democrats to somehow lose in November, in which case I will probably just check out of all American politics forever for my own sanity.

My libtard cuck shill tears aside, the allegations will further empower the left to vote in November, but the whole experience gives Republicans a platform to preach that "liberals can dig up anything that happened in your past and try to defame you, nothing is safe, etc", effectively making this whole thing an "issue of privacy". And there's a good chance that like everything else, the very gullible republican voters will actually believe that.

I think some of you guys are being a bit harsh on the chapter, and that feels wild coming from me. This was frankly the first chapter with a Wano character whose design I genuinely liked. The time travel bit is also the only thing that has genuinely interested me since the Reverie. It doesn't seem far fetched at all that a devil fruit might give someone time manipulation at a seriously great cost. Let's not forget that Law can die to make a person dead ass immortal. I don't expect that Oda will get deeply into the time travel mechanics and luckily will keep it simple enough to avoid spoilers. All the same, when you look at One Piece as a whole, I think it's pretty cool that we encountered something this bizarre.

Basically, I don't have great expectations for how it works in the arc itself, but I do like that One Piece's world is still growing in every which way it wants. That's just neat to me.

@Count:

And Oda might even make an exception to kill him off since he actually wants to die.

Because it's that classic forum medium, I can't tell if this is meant to be tongue in cheek, but it got me thinking. It's seriously unlikely to me that Oda would introduce a suicidal character and then have them successfully kill themselves which does positive things for the narrative. I might be wrong though, because Oda bungled the shit out of parental abuse in the last arc, but suicide might be a rougher topic in Japan specifically. Either way, Oda might want to tread lightly in that shorthand, because kids do read One Piece

If anything, Kaidou being suicidal makes him more likely to survive than someone with telling deathflags like Blackbeard or even Shanks. I don't know enough about Kaidou's personality yet, but that idealogical supplanting is usually core to "defeat" in One Piece. That could potentially foreshadow Kaidou eventually getting a new lease on life, which could be pretty powerful.

I like this chapter a lot. Um, I'm a little late to point this out, but does anyone else think that it's a bit contrived that Zoro happens to be here? I'm wishing they pulled a less transparent and distracting narrative back flip to put Zoro back into the story as soon as possible.

So the expansion is out. It has some really nice zones and music but the story and dialogue are completely abysmal. The class design is simpler than it's ever been and I'm not sure I like the changes - what with the classes just being barely more robust than a Heroes of the Storm or Overwatch character. I'm all for simple gameplay, but usually there are some other mechanics that supplement some kind of long term interest.

At the end of the day, they do a pretty good job at making a 15 year old game not look awful. I'm just not sure what the long term plan is, here.

@Sereques:

I'm beginning to find Sanji's gag very boring.

Lol same. Such a loud asshole.

I appreciate their crash landing in Wano. Ship is like half destroyed and laying sidewise on a coast. Really shows how screwed they'd be without Franky.

I'm kinda bothered by how they glossed over the entire thing with Greg in just one line. I wanted a real reaction from him.

Aside from that, episode was fine. Amethyst MVP yet again, surprising no one.

@Robby:

If Steven was pulling in ratings like that it'd absolutely be renewed without question and we'd be getting constant marathons and new episodes every week.

I do think that the show would have consistently pulled better numbers if it had better scheduling and marketing. I think the SU promos are so off about the nature of the show - like there's this enormous disconnect between the drama of SU and the wacky "it's just a cartoon who fucking cares" vibe of CN marketing. Your post got me thinking about The Last Airbender, a show more similar to Steven Universe than Regular Show or even Adventure Time imo. TLA didn't follow the 11 minute format and it was actually correctly marketed as a family comedy that actually leaned mostly on its dramatic storytelling. Bismuth is still the only 22 minute episode to my knowledge and that's easily in the top 10.

Well, I'm still holding out hope that the crew can wrap things up in a deserving way. Maybe this is just the bitter reality of western animation that I need to swallow.

–- Update From New Post Merge ---

@Cyclone_Baroness:

I hate that it's so hard to even watch an episode. Hulu doesn't have season 5. Daily motion has these site links I don't fully trust. YouTube has annoying people streaming but talking over dialog. Ugh. I just wanna watch episode 20 lol.

If you don't mind associating with 4chan degenerates, I usually download the HQ files off Mega through https://sug.rocks/dl.html.

@Robby:

Adventure Time was the channel's biggest hit and while it was allowed to run 10 seasons, some of them exceptionally long, even it is getting screwed in its final season with random airings of blocks and little to no promotion, and constant hiatuses just to push out a batch of episodes.

And Regular Show we didn't know was ending until about a week before it happened. And though a different channel, Gravity Falls was constantly screwed too and similarly, didn't announce its end until the last minute.
See also how Korra got screwed around with Nick not ordering seasons until after they had finished a year, not advertising, pulling the show and only airing it digitially, pulling an episode's budget at the end of production forcing a clip show…. or when ABC cancelled Reboot and it had to keep going in Canada to get to its amazing thired season and then was cancelled again before finishing season 4...it happens all the time.
See also shows cancelled before they were ready to end and had a cliffhanger finale, like Sonic SatAm or Spectacular Spiderman or Teen Titans, or shows that were straight up only half done like Pirates of Darkwater or new Thundercats... or the way shows like Samurai Jack or Mysteries Inc had their final episodes held and stretched over ridiculously lengthy ammounts of time. Hell, Calamity Jane only ever aired its first three of thirteen episodes.

It's not just a Steven Universe problem, or even just a Cartoon Network problem. Animated shows get treated like crap all the time, because they take so long to produce and get greenlit so far in advance, it's possible for new execs to come along and completely hate them by the time they ever even start airing.

As for the 11 minute format? That format is fine, in theory. It forces you to cut all the fat and get right to it. In theory, the advantage of it is you can take an old 26 episode budget and get 52 episodes out of it, and so air a new episode every week all year. And in theory that's great and it was fantastic when Adventure Time basically did that model.
It's not so great when they instead decided to have multi-month gaps and then just binge 5-8 episodes in a week and then go to another drought, it completely defeats the purpose of the format.

What a huge bummer. SU is the only CN/Disney show that I ever got into but I'm surprised that it's so common.

This might not be an apt comparison, but adult animated shows get wildly different treatment. The Simpsons, Family Guy, Bob's Burgers (feels kinda wrong to lump that one in alongside but whatever) and Rick and Morty keep season contracts and have typical off seasons. The one exception is Rick and Morty which takes a long time to produce but Dan Harmon recently played hardball with the network and got them to agree to an "all or nothing" four season order. I'm not crazy about Rick and Morty on the whole but you gotta respect how Harmon went to bat for the series longevity.

So, even though my understanding of this is narrow, I still see that and then look at the crewniverse and wonder why they seem to let the show suffer as much as it does. Maybe not nowadays, but there really was a time a couple seasons ago that Sugar could have leveraged for a similar deal that fixed the formatting/scheduling issues and then some. I don't get the impression that crewniverse hates working with CN or anything, but they must have been reading the majority of the fanbase that has always been bothered by this and they've never really spoken up or been transparent about it. I'm really just trying to wrap my brain around the whole thing.

@Ubiq:

The Upfront for this year specifically said the show had three story arcs; several other shows either specifically mentioned new seasons being greenlit or airing through 2019 with the other shows not getting such notices being ones that we already knew were cancelled like Clarence.

From what we've seen, Cartoon Network really doesn't want to say that the show has been cancelled because it's critically well-liked and solid for merchandising but has little to no interest in continuing it beyond the previous seasons. That could be wrong and they're just being super secretive for some reason instead of announcing a new episode order but I see no upside for that at all.

God dude. I assumed the crew was still making episodes for the show, which would at least imply there are episodes that go beyond the next 8 or so that we know the titles for.

I'm really exhausted at this point as a SU fan since season 1. The constant hiatuses, leaks, and total lack of legit information. I still can't even buy the seasons on fuckin blu-ray. I really wondered for the longest time if CN secretly hated the show and then assumed that the crew themselves called the shots and wanted to produce it at their own pace. Now I kinda wish whoever was in charge kept a much tighter leash on the whole thing.

I would have rather gotten 5 coherent seasons rather than going months and months not sure if the show is going to end in 2019. I really do like the feeling that there will a new episode to watch tomorrow. While we're on this topic, the 11 minute format is such a insane hindrance. I can't help but imagine a different timeline where the show was canceled but then picked up by Netflix/Hulu/whatever and gave them free reign to make the episodes as long as they needed to be, tell the stories they wanted to tell, and was always giving us a notion of when the show would be coming back.

I know I'm not breaking new ground here, but the whole thing is depressing. If they really have to cut corners to wrap up a clean ending, it's going to bug me forever.