Moments Like These Are The Reason I Love South Park~ ;D

IT SAYS USAGI HAHAHA~ Usagi beer.

Okay…Cartman…can you really be any more obvious?

Tonsil Trouble-

“Oh, you boys are like that huh?”

Kyle- NO!

Cartman- *Says nothing*

Super Phun Time-

“Aww, are you two speacial little buddies?”

Cartman and Butters- NO!

……….

Tonsil Trouble-

Cartman-*Places hand ontop of Kyles* We’re...

THIS ⬆️ 👏👏👏

When someone toxic needs a friend

I just wanna add a little personal reflection to the discussion of Spinel’s treatment in Steven Universe: The Movie.

A few signposts so you know where I’m starting with this:

A criticism I’ve seen: 

Steven was not particularly warm to Spinel. He did not hug her. He did not offer to be her friend. He spoke carelessly and triggered her toward becoming murderous again. He only cared about what she could do for him.

A perspective I’ve seen: 

LOTS of people with borderline personality disorder or strong feelings about abandonment personally relate to Spinel and are critical of Steven from this perspective.

Rebecca Sugar’s commentary on Spinel:

The thing about Spinel is that she’s a really toxic person. 

She’s so toxic that she’s literally trying to poison people. 

In my interactions with friends who have had a history difficult enough to make it hard for them to trust other people and sometimes even actively want to hurt others, it’s just a very difficult situation to navigate. In the case of Spinel and all of these characters, that’s extremely exaggerated because cartoons have the ability to be extreme exaggerations. I wanted to explore what it’s like when you’re trying to help someone who really doesn’t want to help themselves, who wants to embody the negative feelings that they have about themselves. I think that’s something really real. I hadn’t seen that in a cartoon before. 

Spinel, unlike many other characters, actually has the goal of hurting people, which is new territory for the show. She really wants to hurt Steven, and there’s a reason that she does—because she’s in so much pain. I just wanted to explore all the dimensions of that.

I also think Steven has his way of trying to handle and dissolve conflict. It’s not necessarily a good way for him to handle this situation. It really leaves him in a difficult state, and I think what I wanted to show in the way that they interact is that at a certain point, when you can’t help someone, you have to be able to protect yourself. 

Ultimately, he can’t really convince her to change. It’s something she’ll have to want for herself. But what he can do is protect himself from her, making it impossible for her to hurt him. 

It’s sort of up to you if you would like to love her. If you watch this movie and she, you know, frustrates you, that is totally fair. I want that to be a big part of who she is.

[From the AV Club interview]

So here are a few things I want to shed light on.

It’s very interesting that Rebecca intended Spinel to be read as “a toxic person” because so many fans fell in love with her, said they’d be her friend, hated intensely on Pink Diamond because of what she did to abandon the poor Gem, and sympathized with her directly. But Rebecca was looking at Spinel from Steven’s perspective. And that’s also what I did.

I’ve been Steven. I have VERY much been Steven.

When you meet someone who was done dirty, when you recognize the horror they’ve been through, when you see how much pain they are in and agree they have the right to be angry, it’s natural for empathetic people to offer themselves as comfort.

But when you’re Steven, you also know it isn’t YOUR fault either. Before you have the ability and experience to set boundaries, you can get sucked into other people’s stormy waters and think you’re helping if you drown in solidarity with them. What’s really important to preserving yourself is learning that you can stand on the boat and toss a life preserver. That it doesn’t ACTUALLY HELP to jump in the water and sink with them.

Some folks are angry that Steven didn’t jump right into sacrifice himself on the altar of friendship in the service of an intense, literally murderous stranger who tried to poison him and his planet and lash out at his friends, robbing them of their rich pasts and their relationships because all of it hurt HER so much. It is SO easy to understand WHY SPINEL WAS ANGRY. But nothing she was doing to Steven, his friends, or the Earth was going to fix her problems, and furthermore, she FULLY UNDERSTOOD that it was NOT THE FAULT of any of the people she took her anger out on. It was irrational, yes, and that is part of her dysfunction. But also, in these situations, what helps explain it still does not excuse it.

Some have railed at Steven saying he somehow forgave genocidal tyrants like the Diamonds but couldn’t be friends with a damaged Gem like Spinel who just wanted friendship. The big difference there is that Steven got involved with the Diamonds when both parties believed he was a different person. The Diamonds believed he was the lost Pink Diamond, and Steven has also spent much of his superhero life believing he WAS his mother and was therefore obligated to accept punishment for her crimes or to clean up the messes she made. Now that he knows he is not her and that she did some pretty horrible stuff, he also wants the right to stop feeling responsible for every person Pink hurt in the entire region of space.

Steven gave Spinel basically compassionate treatment. He did not abuse her. He did not insult her. He occasionally coddled her when it seemed important (and though some said he was too businesslike while he pursued his mission, he was literally looking at the world ending within two days if he didn’t solve the problem). And most importantly … .

He let her leave the garden.

Spinel stayed in the garden all those millennia because Pink Diamond told her they were playing a game. All that time, she had visions of Pink returning so she could see her smile, hear her laughter. We see a sequence where she tried to follow Pink out of the garden and Pink manipulated her into staying willingly. We watch those feet leaving and one pair of feet staying behind. We see Pink disappear.

When Steven goes to leave the garden, Spinel follows in the same manner. Some have criticized him for letting go of her hands.

But he invited her out of the garden. He didn’t say stay. He said come with me.

As he sang about her deserving someone better, he was sincere. But he did not say the person to make her feel found should be him. He did not want to take on another person with thousands of years of baggage who would require a specific brand of attention and so much tenderness to avoid snapping. He did not allow her to be held by the hand and led out. He recognized that she needed encouragement to leave this place because of what was done to her, but he wanted her to take the steps.

Compassionate people are crushed all the time under the weight of needy people who make it hurt to love. People like Steven can acknowledge that Spinel deserves love and deserves to be happy without accepting that it’s heartless to stop short of personally doing it. Especially when you literally have to take physical, mental, and emotional damage as a general consequence of offering support and counseling. It is sometimes just beyond what you can do.

I made the mistake several times of getting very close to someone who treated me poorly while taking comfort in my presence. I cared that they were hurt and I didn’t know how to say “You deserve love” without stepping in and loving them. In EVERY case I was involved with, the person went from initially grateful to “why don’t you help me more?” shockingly quickly, and two of them deliberately tried to create situations where I would be trapped with them and isolated from others. 

I could get very personal here but I don’t think I need to. Those of us who relate all too well to Steven wanting to help others will have been in this situation. Your heart hurts for people who live with pain that has never touched you, but when they’ve made it clear with one of their first actions that they feel satisfied at the idea of ruining your life, trusting them could mean the end of you. Especially if they demand that you risk life and limb to fix and save them before you’d dare to call it love, and especially if they want to be fixed without feeling responsible for initiating any of it. Some people mistake suffering for working hard toward a goal. Both can hurt but only one is constructive. If I’m expected to spend extensive resources on someone, I need some partnership in the goal, and I can’t accomplish that with someone whose wish for companionship manifests as “I want you to feel as bad as I do, and will take steps to hurt you so I have someone to cry with.”

Steven risked his actual life while he didn’t have powers so he could go talk to Spinel, and he wouldn’t fight her when she wanted to fight. He protected himself while she spent her anger. He STILL put himself in the line of fire far more than a less compassionate person would. He took time and tenderness to listen to her story and sympathize with her, tell her she deserved better, bear witness to what she’d become after being treated like a discarded plaything, and bring her hope with promises of a new future and a way to feel found.

Sadly, Spinel flipped back to being murderous at the first sign that Steven might be about to prioritize someone other than her, reframing his reasonable needs as if he was planning to abandon her, isolate her, discard her. This was a trauma reaction, yes, and she isn’t entirely to blame for being upset because she was worried she was just being used and none of her actions were logically thought through. 

But does someone ever “deserve” the friendship of a specific person who can’t feel warm toward them because of their OWN bad experiences? 

No! 

Steven has a big heart but he has his very own huge storehouse of trauma, and being physically attacked with his family and planet put in danger over the actions of his mother is at the top of the list. Instead of assuming that the person who has trauma the loudest is the most hurt, can’t we just acknowledge that Spinel’s and Steven’s respective traumas make them NOT the best match for friendship?

The ending of the movie, with Spinel going off with the Diamonds, might seem a little disturbing with all the codepencency floating around there, but if you want to talk about compassion, I think this is a good place for Spinel to start. 

She just wanted to make Pink Diamond laugh and enjoy her life. She longed to do that for so long and then it all ended when she found out she would NEVER GET TO DO IT. I think bonding with the other Diamonds and having a familiar, safe place to experience the kind of love she’s used to will be a good FOUNDATION for building herself into a person beyond that. For now, she needs comfort. I hope they treat her well.

As the one time every four years that everyone watches figure skating is finally here, I’ve taken it as my God-given duty to educate you guys about the complete and utter CLOWNERY and the corruption that goes on daily in the Russian figure skating scene. I’m not joking when I say this shit is like bad reality TV. A famous coach has a cult following. Politicians get asked about coaches feuding. Putin, the president of Russia, got mad over unfair scoring and dissed a Canadian skater on live TV. It’s insane.

And there is a LOT of drama going on here, so I’ll try to explain it just in time for Olympics so you guys can understand why you are almost definitely not going to see a single ladies’ medallist over the age of 17 years old this Olympics (or possibly ever again).

If the only time that you tune in to figure skating is once every four years, here’s how things are going to go. You’re going to watch the 2022 Olympics. You’re going to casually watch the ladies’ figure skating segments. And if you’re a little bit observant, you’re going to think: ‘Why is every single medallist under the age of 18 years old? And why are they all Russian?’ And if you do your research, you’ll see that not a single girl over the age of 18 years old who is non-Russian has won gold in ladies’ figure skating for the past two winter Olympics. Why is this?

Well, it all started with Evgenia Medvedeva, one of the most famous figure skaters in the world. (If your last interaction with figure skating was with Yuri!!! On Ice in 2016, she’s that girl who wore a Victuuri shirt on the famously homophobic Russian national television, got illustrated into YOI official art, and did a routine to Sailor Moon. So. She’s really awesome and my favourite.)

Anyway, Evgenia won everything in the 2016 and 2017 seasons. She completed a Grand Slam twice, which is when a skater wins literally every major competition, at the ages of 16 and 17. Those two years were called the Evgenia dominance era, because she just kept winning. It was insane. She was Miss Stability because she literally never fell, she was reliable, she was unbeatable, she was the favourite to win the 2018 Olympics.

And then, just in time for the Olympics, at the old age of 18 years old, she started to fail.

The first time she fell in competition after two long years of straight clean programs, people thought it was a fluke. But then she fell again, and again, and again. And her younger, less injured teammate, 15yo Alina Zagitova, started to take the spotlight. Alina wasn’t struggling with back problems or a broken foot like Evgenia. Alina was born in the right year, at the right time, which made her 15 years old just in time to qualify for the Olympics, and she won the gold medal for ladies’ figure skating. Meanwhile, the favourite to win the Olympics won silver, being pushed aside for her younger and healthier teammate.

Now you might think, wow, that’s really sad. But it was just a one-time thing, right? Alina will surely go on to have the long and fruitful career that Evgenia, by some fluke of the universe, didn’t get to have. Right?

Wrong. Alina retires at the ripe age of 17 years old after peaking at 15 and the figure skating world. Goes. Crazy, because now people are beginning to notice a pattern. It started with Yulia Lipnitskaya, 15 years old at the Sochi Olympics, who skated the best programs of her entire life and retired soon after. It continued with Evgenia, who peaked at 16 and 17 and then developed chronic injuries that make her unable to turn her back to the left (a horrifying statement she revealed in a recent interview), and then with Alina, who skated her best at 15 and ‘took a break’ at 17, which fans have dubbed the ‘expiration date’.

Now, you might be remembering the figure skating greats like Yuna Kim, Michelle Kwan, Mao Asada. They didn’t retire at 17. This is not normal. This was not even close to the norm ten years ago, but now we’re heading into Beijing 2022 and a 15 year old is the favourite to win gold. So what is the the common factor that caused all these skaters to retire at 17, 18, 19?

The answer? Eteri Tutberidze, a famous Russian coach with a monopoly on ladies’ figure skating. Her students, which include Yulia, Evgenia, and Alina, have won literally every single competition under the sun for the past few years. And one by one, without fail, all her students have broken their bodies by the time they reach 17-18. She has never been able to successfully coach a student over 18 years old, but she doesn’t need to, because when one girl gets too old, three will come to replace her. If you’re talking solely about results, then sure, Eteri is a great coach. When her students shine, they shine bright. They’re one-season wonders, winning everything. But they’re one-season wonders, so after a few seasons, they’re replaced by the newest girl, the girl who’s 15 at the right time, younger and less injured. Why is this? Why don’t these skaters have longevity?

Well, it’s because of the body type you need to have to land jumps in figure skating. In skating, there are jumps called triples (where you rotate three times in the air) and quads (where you rotate four times). Quads were practically unheard of in ladies’ figure skating until 2018. That’s how recent they are. A quad in ladies’ fs has never even been landed at the Olympics before. This is because quads are insanely hard to do, and normally they require a lot of muscle, strength and grit to power through the four rotations in the air. Before 2018, the last quad jump had been landed by Miki Ando in 2002. 16 years before the next quad.

Before 2018, the highest technical jumps women did were the triples. Then Alexandra Trusova (aka Quad Queen Sasha Trusova aka the one to root for in the 2022 Olympics) came along and fucked shit up landed a quad toe loop at the age of 13. Sasha is the first female skater to land the quad Lutz, quad flip, and quad toe loop jumps, the second to land the quad Salchow (after Miki Ando), and the first to land two and three ratified quads in a free skate. She started the Quad Revolution and basically ensured that all the girls competing with her had to have quad jumps or a triple axel in order to win over her. And they did. Anna Shcherbakova, Kamila Valieva, Sofia Akatyeva, Adeliia Petrosian, all started landing quads too.

And that’s all well and good and all, yay for technical advancements or whatever, except that the reason quads started booming in the ladies’ was because a certain coach had figured out that you don’t need to be made of muscle, or have years of training, or experience to land a quad.

No. You just need very, very low body weight.

Yeah. Now you see where I’m going.

Girls have started landing quads like never before. At the junior levels (>15yos), it’s become commonplace to see Russian preteen girls train quads as if they’re jumping machines. Teenage girls have the perfect body type to quickly rotate four times in the air- a slender frame, narrow hips and short height. And once they hit puberty, it’s over. Quads rely in pulling in all your body weight as closely as possible to your centre, allowing you to maximise your speed of rotation- but you can’t pull in hips or a chest. That’s why most female figure skaters lose their jumps after puberty, and why so far only teenage girls have managed to land quads. And how do you delay puberty as long as possible so you can keep winning for as long as you possibly can? Well, it’s simple. You just don’t eat.

Even before the Quad Revolution, Tutberidze’s skaters relied on their low body weight to do triple jumps so much that during the 2014 Olympics, 15yo Yulia Lipnitskaya had to subsist on a diet of entirely powdered substances. The girl did not eat a single tangible meal the entire time. And by the time the 2018 Olympics rolled around, Tutberidze had forbidden 18yo Evgenia and 15yo Alina from drinking water for fear that a few grams of water weight might affect their aerodynamics. Alina mentioned in an interview that they could only rinse their mouths out with water and spit it back out.

The thing about quads is that no one really knows the long-term effects they can have on these teenage girls’ health, as the oldest girl to land regular quads turns 18 this year in 2022. However, Evgenia Medvedeva only did triple-triple jumps her entire career, and she ended up with a broken foot and can’t even turn her back to the left. So. Whatever the long-term effects are, they’re going to be bad. 15yo Daria Usacheva was supposed to be a strong contender this year, but a hip fracture during practice at the NHK Trophy made her unexpectedly withdraw. Alena Kanysheva lands a quad at 14 and retires at 16. And still, still even younger girls will come to replace them and drive older skaters who can’t land quads anymore out of the sport. Ladies’ figure skating has turned into a sport where 15 year olds dominate for one or two seasons, and get traded in for newer and less injured skaters.

And it’s not like the girls themselves aren’t painfully aware of this- Sofia Samodelkina barely missed the cutoff age for the Beijing 2022 Olympics at 14 years old, and she revealed in an interview that she prays every night for them to be postponed to 2023 because she knows that when she turns 18yos in 2026, she won’t be able to compete with the younger and stronger 15yos. Evgenia knew that she couldn’t stay with Eteri once she turned 18, because the technique no longer worked, so she left Eteri to be coached by Brian Orser (but forgot to send Eteri flowers for thanking her for being such a great coach so Eteri went on a smear campaign against her and showed Evgenia ghosting her texts on Russian national television). Then judges started underscoring Evgenia just for the crime of training under the ‘wrong’ coach, so she had to return to Eteri.

So if everyone knows that this is going on- if everyone is aware that figure skating is built on the broken bodies of young girls who sacrifice their long-term health for the sport only to be cast aside at 17 years old- is anyone doing anything about Tutberidze’s borderline abusive training methods?

Well. The ISU (international skating union) gave Eteri an award for Best Coach, if that’s what you mean by ‘doing something about it’. Because apparently they don’t give a fuck that these girls are being used like products and discarded just as quickly as they come. They just care that her girls win.

And win they do. Enter: the 3A, the trio of elite Russian figure skaters Anna Shcherbakova, Aliona Kostornaia and Alexandra Trusova (nicknamed the 3A because all their names start with an a but everyone calls Alexandra as Sasha).

The 3A won every. Major. Competition. During the 2020 season. They didn’t let anyone else on that damn podium. They were playing musical chairs with those three podium spots. The main surprise when you watched fs wasn’t ‘omg who will podium’ but ‘omg in which order will 3A podium’. And if you recall, 2020 is the year our reigning Olympic champion Alina Zagitova turned 17, so she was already on her way out. Anna was 15, Sasha was 15 and Aliona was 16- optimal ages in figure skating. Aliona didn’t have quads, but she had a beautiful triple axel and artistry, while Sasha had pure raw athleticism and Anna fell somewhere in the middle. But unfortunately, they weren’t born in the right year. By the time the qualifiers for the Beijing Olympics rolled around, Anna and Sasha were 17 and Aliona was 18, and a new face entered and broke nine world records in her debut season alone- Kamila Valieva.

Kamila is, supposedly, better than all the girls who came before her. (Even though I still like Aliona better.) She has the artistry and consistency that Sasha lacked and the quads that Aliona lacked. She’s the full package of everything a skater should be, and she’s 15 years old in an Olympic year. She has it all, and tbh doesn’t really have any other competition. Anna and Sasha are still leagues ahead of everyone else but if they’re as unreachable as kings, Kamila is as unbeatable as a god. Kamila, Sasha and Anna are the three skaters representing Russia at Beijing (Aliona withdrew from this season due to a hand fracture she’s ‘not allowed to talk about’.). Anna is almost definitely injured nine ways to hell, Sasha is probably injured too, so Kamila is probably the only one who’s like. Even moderately healthy out of the Russian girls, if you discount the fact that she’s like severely underweight. Idk if she’ll be the one to break the cycle, but hopefully this monopoly on ladies’ fs ends soon and new rules are put in place to stop girls giving themselves chronic injuries by the time they turn 16.

Anyway, that’s the summary on the figure skating drama. Please cheer for Sasha and Anna! I want Sasha to be the first person to land a quad at Olys because she was the one who started this whole quad revolution so it’s only right that she should finish it. Wow this took me a long time to write and we only covered the tip of the iceberg. Hope you guys enjoy the Beijing Olympics btw happy cny 祝大家新年快樂, 身體健康 (god knows they need it) 心想事成 etc etc

Edit: Hi, it’s op here! I regret my poor choice of words in calling this as ‘drama’, I meant to refer to the ‘drama’ as all the issues I mentioned in the first paragraph like Putin dissing a Canadian skater unfair judging scores home bias etc etc, but I guess it was misread as the fact that I was calling this institutionalised child abuse ‘drama’. I wrote this post to bring attention to the child abuse happening because I think it’s wrong and unfair that no one is doing anything about it and I do NOT mean to trivialise it as drama. Sorry this was such a poor choice of words cuz I was fr gonna talk about those whole other stories but then I got sidetracked with this whole thing and I forgot to change the words ‘drama’ 😭😭😭 Thank you so much for understanding 😭😭😭

When the gang "follow their hearts" to Sora in Scala ad Caelum, Riku is the only one who makes a beeline directly to him. He is last to emerge, but the first to reach him.