Shocking to me that there's such a fandom for Breaking Bad here on this website, full of people who found the moral nuance of Steven Universe to be unmanageable.
not to take this post too seriously but if i had to hazard a guess, its because, at least according to my understanding, breaking bad is full of characters who suck as people, and the show wants its audience to think they suck, and when they go through a lot of bad shit you're generally supposed to think they deserve it because they caused it to themselves, making bad decisions chasing patriarchal ideals and fantasies. When you don't think a character deserves their fate, its usually because those characters are presented as victims to the decisions of the ones that suck.
while SU presents you with characters who suck, and who want you to look at that and examine "okay, but why do they suck. what happened in their lives that made them that way. can we help them not be that way and heal from that damage, while not simply excusing their behavior." It also takes characters that you love and peels them apart and shows you their most damaged and fucked up parts, and asks you to still love them even through their flaws, because everyone in the world has nastiness inside them that they are trying to get past or hide, and still deserve love and a chance to improve themselves anyways.
both these shows are great and i think they do what they set out to do well. And you would think that the more adult out of these shows would be the more challenging of the two. But nobody goes into breaking bad expecting there to be only love and light, because its an adults show with adult themes
Basically nobody went into SU expecting challenging topics. "Everyone should be given compassion" is a common lesson given to children through cartoons, but its rarely given in conjunction with characters that are as realistically fucked up, traumatized, bigoted, and neglectful as some characters in SU are. And at the end of the day, the very unfortunate reality is that people in this world are much quicker to accept the idea of "there are some people who have been inherently broken by our society, who become assholes and ruin everything around them" than they are willing to accept the idea that those people could be healed and stop being an asshole under the right circumstances, with the right help, and that it might (god forbid) be our responsibility sometimes to be that help.
Suffice to say, this was simply not what people realized they were signing up for when they started watching a show about a little boy and his magical gay family. People just assumed that the show asking you to empathize with some very fucked up characters, was asking you to forgive them and let them continue hurting people scotch free, because they weren't killed off or punished for eternity or made to suffer in some way before they got their healing. Ignoring that this was the very idea the show was challenging. And instead of adjusting their expectations by realizing what the show was aiming for, or just not watching if the show was not what they wanted it to be, they just decided to argue that the show was so problematic that it couldn't possibly be ethically enjoyed.
teamgayotix