Steven Universe is one of the first shows I’ve seen with nonbinary characters, and you recently came out as a nonbinary woman. And all of them will be stronger both individually and together. They’ll be able to separate and come back together more easily. They’ll definitely be more flexible from now on. I was also thinking a lot about choice - that they could be so much stronger if they chose to be together, and if every moment from then on, they were continuing to choose to do everything they were doing together. And then all of those conflicts become something that can sharpen each individual and test them together. If you can get that solidity in yourself, it will strengthen your relationship, and it will also compel the other person in the relationship to strengthen themselves in order to meet you there. It’s this idea that members of a couple need to be really solid in their individual identities in order to be stronger together, and that if you fuse into each other, you might start to feel like you don’t have the autonomy to make your own decisions. I was learning a lot about differentiation while I was writing this arc. I don’t know if I’ll ever be over how wonderful it feels that we got to this moment in time. It was like reliving in rapid fire succession years and years and years of the challenge to do this story, seeing it all finally tumble out into the world. I was overjoyed! It was fascinating to see from the proposal to the wedding itself, just every moment with everyone watching in real time, going “oh it went here but it can’t go there,” then it does, “oh it went here but it can’t go there,” and then it does. So I became very driven to make sure that we could tell the most wholesome love story you’ve ever seen on television. There is nothing more “adult” about Ruby and Sapphire than any other couple on the show. And there isn’t! These themes were a part of my childhood and they were a part of the childhoods of many people on my staff. I began to realize how quiet I had been about my own story and my own life, because I had internalized this idea that there was something “adult” about these stories. And it really made me realize how critical it was to have LGBTQIA characters in G-rated media. It really goes all the way back to 2011 - when we started the show - and 2014, when we were pitching the episode “Jailbreak.” The more material I would pitch about Ruby and Sapphire and their romantic relationship, the more visible the ceiling of what we could do became. Were you scared to pitch this wedding idea, or was Cartoon Network on board pretty fast? You deserve it! You deserved 20 years ago! You deserve it now, you deserve it 20 years from now! There should be hundreds of these! They said that these were hugely important moments in their lives, but they never thought they’d see that reflected in a show like this. If you're a fan, or used to be one, you'll remember and understand the frustrations of these 15 controversies.So many of my married LGBTQ+ friends told me they sobbed after Steven Universe’s recent proposal and wedding episodes. Sometimes the brand damage is small, sometimes it's massive. While the 15 controversies on this list might not have been able to take down Cartoon Network by themselves, they've all hurt the station over the years. Sometimes the issues are resolved, while others fester and turn fans away. That said, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim have some serious problems obvious to anyone who watches them. Adult Swim, technically a separate network for ratings' purposes but sharing the same airspace, continues to be the most daringly experimental programming block on television and has a major phenomenon on its hands in the form of Rick and Morty. Let's Be Heroes! CN's also made inroads in the online space and in game development. Where Nick only has two legitimate hit cartoons currently running ( SpongeBob SquarePants and The Loud House), Cartoon Network continues to pump out hit shows like Adventure Time, The Amazing World of Gumball, Steven Universe and OK K.O. In many ways, Cartoon Network is in better shape than Nickelodeon is at the present moment.
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