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Description
lol i'm not changing this description since it's 100% correct and this show's fucking assdick garbage that no one should subject themselves (besides me, because I love torturing myself) to watching or defending

TTLF'S NOTE ON 9/17/2022: I hope you liked what I wrote above as an opening to this extremely primitive "review" of mine. I still don't think I'm ever going to change my description, but that's because it barely counts as a review in the first place and is one that I wrote as a joke compared to actually tearing into Star vs.'s critical flaws-- I consider my old review of this show a "classic" in that sense, a description that I like to look back on, especially with the context of the "drama" scorecards like this and my really old SU scorecard caused in the DeviantArt community 3 years ago. If you want a brief re-review of what I think of Star vs., I think it's a terrible show, one that I can say I never liked-- I saw the first two episodes on June 15th, 2017, and I found them annoying. Season 1 in general was hyperactive and obnoxious, Season 2 was boring, Season 3 was both at the same time and had a hint of frustrating in it, and Season 4 is soul-sucking to watch, one that I refuse to watch any episode of (besides one of them) ever again-- it's legitimately up there as one of the most miserable and mean-spirited seasons I've ever seen, and is my 2nd least favorite season of all time, with my least favorite episode of all time. Words cannot describe how shattered, violated, and pissed off I felt after watching Cleaved.

  I may have not been a fan of S1-3, but they still had the occasional tolerable or serviceable episode, S4 is almost entirely devoid of that and only amplified without a doubt the part of the show that had me fuming most of the time: the shipping. No show that has romance be a crux of it has ever handled it properly (except ATLA), and Star vs. went the extra mile with the shipping because that's what the fandom was hyperobsessive over back then, so the writers decided to integrate it in the story, and it ends up being a complete mess-- characters can break up off-screen for all I know and no one besides the fans will be able to catch onto that, it could literally interfere with important story events too. I don't care to remember the details of where and why and how I came to these conclusions since it's been well over 2 years since I last watched a Star vs. episode, so all I can ask is that you take my word for it.

So with that overview done, why is it that I decided to promote this show from "Garbage" to "Awful"? In short, the shipping was obnoxious, the animation became trashy by the end of season 1, and season 4 is pain manifested in the form of 36 episodes... but that doesn't mean the whole show is irredeemable... I was at least able to make a top 10, and seasons 1 and 3 only got Awfuls by a hair or two-- not all of their elements were complete failures, but they were weighed down by the horrendous romance. On top of that, while I do hate most of the characters, particularly our main leads, there is one character that lies on the opposite spectrum: Ludo. After rewatching ATLA this year, I can say that the way they transformed Ludo from a run-of-the-mill Saturday morning cartoon villain to a sympathetic character that, over the course of the show, gives up his ambition of stealing the wand after extreme turmoil to instead look out for his brother... it's honestly the runner-up for the best reformation of any antagonist I've ever seen after Zuko. He gets surprisingly complex development and it was the one glimmer of light in the wretched filth that is season 4. I can't bring myself to call a series "Garbage" when it pulled off something that well. In fact, S1-3 would be a "bad" show, one that I don't like at all but can't say I carry any vitriol for, but S4 is genuinely atrocious, like an actual 0/10 season, that pushes this show into "awful" territory.

  Oh, and by the way, there does exist another show where I'm not a fan of their first three seasons, but then their season 4 is... something. You'll know what it is in due time. Everything after these last 3 paragraphs is my older review-- read it with a grain of salt if you so choose to have a look.

  In my last scorecard, I touched upon a peculiar series known as Steven Jewniverse, a series I called out for being really sloppy in terms of serialization, and it's not like I'm done ragging on shows from this decade from being miserable failures at storytelling. I present to you Star vs. The Forces of Evil, a show that took me fucking forever to get through because watching every episode felt a total chore. I promise this is the last shitty example of bad serialization from this decade, since it took me over a month to get through this fuckfest, and lemme tell you there is a reason for that. I know it may seem like I'm super cynical when it comes to serialized shows that aren't named Avatar: The Last Airbender, but let me tell you that is not true. At all. And lemme tell you why.

HISTORY: I don't really have a big history with this show. I've always been aware of its existence, but it's not something that ever interested me. It never once grabbed my attention except for this one time where a friend of mine in ninth grade (specifically a day before our last day of school) told me to watch this show because he was a big fan of it. That night, I DID watch this show's first two episodes, and hated them. I didn't tell him about them the next day because I don't think he wants to hear that the first two episodes kinda sucked. It wouldn't be until this show's fourth season where my attention was drawn because the fandom reacted to season four in a way I didn't expect. Many people were calling out the fourth season for being hastily made, annoying, and incomplete (they ain't wrong), so that's when I decided to go after two shows of this decade that I thought were total garbage at telling stories: Steven Universe, and now: Star vs. The Forces of Evil.

ANIMATION: Let's get the... positives? out of the way first. Star's animation is perfectly passable and has nothing noteworthy. Really, I have nothing else to say about it. I like the colors, but the actual animation is something that never popped in my eyes. A lot of people claimed that the first season was super bouncy and expressive and the later seasons had downgrades, but it's not like the series did anything crazy with its animation in the first place. On second thought, I'm just stating things that typical animation should normally have (acceptable color schemes and fine movements) so I'm basically giving credit to this series for doing absolutely nothing with its animation. It's really boring to look at and feels restricted as all shit, like, SpongeBob's sixth season was more visually interesting. They never play with their animation style or have any extremely fluid/animated scenes, it's so safe and bland as shit. Even Star's powers do nothing to stand out against whatever background or setting they're against. Nothing in this series is allowed to pop as a result of this and I feel so fucking bored just watching this plain, standard, and generic animation. I retract what I said about this show's animation being passable, it looks like fucking horseshit lol.

tl;dr version: this animation is so boring and safe and visually unimpressive. character movements are stiff, and even things I expect to wow me with their visuals like Star's powers failed to even have me lift an eyebrow.

Now here's where we hit some major snags...

CHARACTERS: Star Vs's characters are... really bad. Not in the same way as SU's, but all of them are just so BORING to me. Not a single character aside from Buffrog actually sticks out in my mind all that much. I have so little to say about any of the show's main characters or even side characters, they're all super uninteresting and bland, so much so that the side characters were basically ditched by season 3 and only get one appearance in season 4. Hell, even those two fucking idiot friends Marco had in the first season were completely ditched after-- both Ferguson and Alfonzo felt like they were pulled straight out of a bad Canadian flash show from the designs to the voices to the personalities.

  But as for the main characters, Star is an incompetent idiot who seems to show not a single ounce of progression as the series goes on in terms of maturity or even POWERS (because her powers don't have any established rules and the show pridefully says this to the audience's face), in fact, as the show goes on, she actually regresses because of a stupid aspect of this show I'm going to rip to pieces in a bit, her hyperactivity has little to no charm whatsoever and she's mostly portrayed as an incompetent idiot that has no idea what she's doing. This would be an interesting character flaw to explore, but again, the show doesn't even bother having her get better as the show goes on, and it doesn't even attempt to make any jokes about it.
  Marco is just... uhhhhhhhhhhhh, yeah this guy literally has no personality at all. The best quality of his personality is that he's.... casual? But casual barely qualifies as a personality trait, he's just there most of the time and is, at best, an idiotic plot device to fuel one of this show's worst qualities which I will dedicate an entire paragraph to. No one in this show has an actual personality, it's so hard to think of just one word to even describe them. This is especially egregious since he's constantly hogging screentime, and barely contributes to anything going on. Episodes that surround him usually tend to be such a chore because I have no reason to invest in him. The show directly characterizes him as "safe" in the first episode, but that trait is immediately discarded the moment he meets Star, so what personality does this guy have? It's not like any of their character designs say anything about this show's main characters either (did I mention how much I hate the character design philosophy on this show?
  The character designs on this show typically look hideous besides Star, the eyes are weirdly drawn and the heads are usually fat. One of the beauties of animation is that you can tell everything about a character just from a simple glance. When I look at a majority of the cast, I literally can't name a single trait they carry) Glossaryc is a fucking nutjob I hate being around, but admittedly gets better as the show goes along, but the running joke of him being a goofball who loves pudding wears thin extremely fast and even hinders episodes like Mewberty, also his design is hideous as all fuck.
  I also really hate characters such as Moon and River Butterfly. Moon, for the most part, was a standard character with a lame af backstory in Moon the Undaunted, but they really fucked her over in season 4, where they pull this extremely idiotic twist where she was apparently the cause for everything bad happening in that season. This is so much more of an egregious twist than the one in SU where Rose was Pink Diamond because in this show, Moon was one of the main PROTAGONISTS that actually ruled her kingdom with love and care, but then it's suddenly revealed that Hyuck Hyuck, She Evil. I believe the intention of this was to be """""""""'subversive"""""""", but could you do that without fucking ruining a character I bet the fandom actually connected with, because it actually comes off as being incredibly insulting than being clever, and it even turned her into a complete fucking retard because she thought that Mina would actually COMPLY with her in returning her god-like powers.
  River is irritating as all piss, he's the Haha Idiot Husband that does nothing more than be the gateway to a bunch of unfunny jokes. Some episodes take this idea wholesale and we get garbage like The Bogbeast of Boggabah, where the whole joke of the episode is Get It? River is Stupid??? There's also other abominations like Royal Pain, where he's nothing more than a hindrance for 11 minutes. I'll admit that he wasn't that bad initially but as the episode progressed, he just got more and more aggravating. This show literally just took the concept of a "Stupid Husband" and did nothing with it, I'd be fine if River only had an appearance once in a blue moon, but seriously this terrible character has several episodes dedicated to him and soon found his way to being a main character, meaning I legitimately can't stand it whenever this guy is on screen.

The villains in this show are also extremely lame. Ludo is supposed to be this comedic over the top villain who has his "plans" foiled through stupid shenanigans, but the reason why he sucks is because he's always SHOVED IN AT THE LAST MINUTE in episodes where he's playing this role. He's basically ditched by season 3 in favor of trying to give him more depth, which is virtually the only consistently good thing about this show, as Ludo goes through an incredible character development even if he only had 3 entire episodes to show it, but I love how this character went from being a lame-ass Saturday morning cartoon villain, to a three-dimensional character who deeply cares about his family, and this all culminates in the episode Princess Quasar Caterpillar and the Magic Bell, which is also my favorite episode of the show. However, once Ludo was done being a villain by the end of season 1, they shifted towards Toffee being the villain.
  Toffee is actually a really good villain... in theory. In execution, Jesus fuck was he underwhelming as hell. He rarely ever gets any screentime and as a result, wasn't able to be expanded on, and the show only vaguely implies that he's behind everything that happens in the second season. I completely forgot he was a thing until the episode Toffee, it's not really like he did anything threatening either besides slightly setting up the events for the show's fourth season (Somehow? What the fuck did Tavern mean in saying HE WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG? Man fuck this show's attempts at telling a story). He has a really cool design and could've been this show's best villain, but was a disappointment since he was basically ditched after Storm the Castle and didn't do anything until it was time for the boss fight with him in Toffee, but even that episode comes with a retarded deus ex machina. Then there's Mina and good fucking God, I hate this character, not only does her voice rupture my eardrums, but she's shoved in at the very last minute of this show's fourth season in a desperate attempt to get any kind of conflict going. Her backstory is incredibly cookie-cutter and cliche, I'm more annoyed by her than threatened, and none of the characters even attempt to put up a fight with her, because that'd actually be something interesting, now would it? I don't want to talk about these fucking bollocks characters anymore.

tl;dr version: The characters fail on a fundamental level where I have such a hard time even describing any of their traits beyond characters like Star or Buffrog, they're all just super forgettable and barely develop throughout the series, so much so that a majority of the side cast got kicked to the curb by season 3, and the ONLY exception to any of this is Ludo, as he did have a cohesive and natural arc.

THE STORY: lmao, if you think this pathetic show has any kind of story whatsoever, you're sorely mistaken. So instead, let's discuss the general problems that plague nearly every single fucking episode of this show. First of all, the pacing in this series is absolutely abysmal. Episodes can either go extremely fast, and end up being slow, or being incredibly slow and losing my attention. Episodes can even have nonexistent pacing and do fuck-all until it's time for a villain to come bursting through the door. Getting through this series was a complete slog because most episodes have almost nothing going on. I could feel every fucking second scrape by, meaning that on a fundamental level, this series fails as a cartoon since it's not entertaining. There are no jokes, interesting characters, plot, there's NOTHING, but let's talk about this show's most egregious aspect:

T H E S H I P P I N G. We can't ignore this, because this is something the show doesn't even try to hide. It's been in-your-face as far back as the episode Sleepover and this aspect annoys me to death. Not only is it obvious and lazy pandering, but more often than not, this becomes the crux for conflicts in most episodes. You get garbage like Bon Bon the Birthday Clown and Sophomore Slump because of this. I've already mentioned that none of the characters on this show have any kind of personality, development, or anything, so not only does this bore me, it frustrates me to no end since the show treats it as some serious shit, when in actuality, it's fucking stupid. Kudos goes to the finale where Star literally gives up everything just so she can screw Marco, and Just Friends where they try desperately to pull a WHUH??? STAR LIKES MARCO???. This is the definition of lazy, cheap drama that exists to satisfy a part of the cancerous Star vs. fandom, where they ship numerous characters with each other. this show even goes as far as shipping Marco with some random other character named Kelly, a character that was NEVER given a proper introduction, just to be a plot device for the romance and good fucking god why???? Thought this show was called Star vs. The Forces of Evil, why the fuck should I care about who fucks who at night? This is a fucking baby show, the last thing I'd ever want to see is characters standing around with 0 budget animation doing nothing other than argue about who should screw who in bed, I wanna see someone get kicked in the ass, but Lord knows the show couldn't even do that because its finale was instead doing EVERYTHING but fighting. I could go into more detail, but all that needs to be said is that the shipping is fucking pathetic, obvious pandering, and downright lazily written. I don't even know why episodes like Lava Lake Beach, Booth Buddies, and Kelly's World exist, watching both of them was like watching someone die right in front of my eyes, and not only that but it's clear this series isn't appropriate for children either because it's a fucking teen drama. It was a downright unprofessional decision to make this show a shipping hell, because it's more than guaranteed to alienate those that are interested in the on-going "plot" than anything else... but OH WAIT, THE PLOT IS ALL ABOUT THE SHIPPING. Fuck this

tl;dr version: We Stand at the Door

CONCLUSION: Star vs. is a genius show, probably the best thing you want to put on if you want to shut your kids up for 11 minutes. Like dangling keys in front of a baby. It's not funny, boring, has no pacing or story, accomplishes nothing, has bland as hell characters... it's just Nitwitting: The Show. Things just happen, nothing is established, worldbuilding is nonexistent. Basically any kind of writing in this show is nonexistent since they have like 6 writers per episode and none of them have any kind of communication, producing a mishmash of incoherence. Both this and Steven Universe are two prime examples of how NOT to do serialization, but which show do I think is worse? This one. Steven Universe at least had the advantage of producing episodes I actually liked, or even loved, while Star vs. BARELY ever did that. Steven Universe personally pisses me off, but this show not only bores me to tears, but it also contains some of the worst cartoon episodes I've ever seen, yet has so little enjoyable episodes to counteract that. I don't care, this show is absolute GARBAGE because it fails on a basic level of being a cartoon since the last thing I'd ever want is to be bored out of my mind watching something. I don't even think there are any aspects of this series I liked outside of Ludo's character development, and even that is regulated to like 3 episodes in total. Please watch literally anything else and avoid this empty garbage show, since even its finale was considered a middle finger by the fanbase, and basically the fourth season as a whole really. Even beyond that, if I somehow watched every single piece of media ever made on this planet, this cancerous series would still find its way into my bottom 5 or 10. It's that bad.

Description
lol i'm not changing this description since it's 100% correct and this show's fucking assdick garbage that no one should subject themselves (besides me, because I love torturing myself) to watching or defending

TTLF'S NOTE ON 9/17/2022: I hope you liked what I wrote above as an opening to this extremely primitive "review" of mine. I still don't think I'm ever going to change my description, but that's because it barely counts as a review in the first place and is one that I wrote as a joke compared to actually tearing into Star vs.'s critical flaws-- I consider my old review of this show a "classic" in that sense, a description that I like to look back on, especially with the context of the "drama" scorecards like this and my really old SU scorecard caused in the DeviantArt community 3 years ago. If you want a brief re-review of what I think of Star vs., I think it's a terrible show, one that I can say I never liked-- I saw the first two episodes on June 15th, 2017, and I found them annoying. Season 1 in general was hyperactive and obnoxious, Season 2 was boring, Season 3 was both at the same time and had a hint of frustrating in it, and Season 4 is soul-sucking to watch, one that I refuse to watch any episode of (besides one of them) ever again-- it's legitimately up there as one of the most miserable and mean-spirited seasons I've ever seen, and is my 2nd least favorite season of all time, with my least favorite episode of all time. Words cannot describe how shattered, violated, and pissed off I felt after watching Cleaved.

  I may have not been a fan of S1-3, but they still had the occasional tolerable or serviceable episode, S4 is almost entirely devoid of that and only amplified without a doubt the part of the show that had me fuming most of the time: the shipping. No show that has romance be a crux of it has ever handled it properly (except ATLA), and Star vs. went the extra mile with the shipping because that's what the fandom was hyperobsessive over back then, so the writers decided to integrate it in the story, and it ends up being a complete mess-- characters can break up off-screen for all I know and no one besides the fans will be able to catch onto that, it could literally interfere with important story events too. I don't care to remember the details of where and why and how I came to these conclusions since it's been well over 2 years since I last watched a Star vs. episode, so all I can ask is that you take my word for it.

So with that overview done, why is it that I decided to promote this show from "Garbage" to "Awful"? In short, the shipping was obnoxious, the animation became trashy by the end of season 1, and season 4 is pain manifested in the form of 36 episodes... but that doesn't mean the whole show is irredeemable... I was at least able to make a top 10, and seasons 1 and 3 only got Awfuls by a hair or two-- not all of their elements were complete failures, but they were weighed down by the horrendous romance. On top of that, while I do hate most of the characters, particularly our main leads, there is one character that lies on the opposite spectrum: Ludo. After rewatching ATLA this year, I can say that the way they transformed Ludo from a run-of-the-mill Saturday morning cartoon villain to a sympathetic character that, over the course of the show, gives up his ambition of stealing the wand after extreme turmoil to instead look out for his brother... it's honestly the runner-up for the best reformation of any antagonist I've ever seen after Zuko. He gets surprisingly complex development and it was the one glimmer of light in the wretched filth that is season 4. I can't bring myself to call a series "Garbage" when it pulled off something that well. In fact, S1-3 would be a "bad" show, one that I don't like at all but can't say I carry any vitriol for, but S4 is genuinely atrocious, like an actual 0/10 season, that pushes this show into "awful" territory.

  Oh, and by the way, there does exist another show where I'm not a fan of their first three seasons, but then their season 4 is... something. You'll know what it is in due time. Everything after these last 3 paragraphs is my older review-- read it with a grain of salt if you so choose to have a look.

  In my last scorecard, I touched upon a peculiar series known as Steven Jewniverse, a series I called out for being really sloppy in terms of serialization, and it's not like I'm done ragging on shows from this decade from being miserable failures at storytelling. I present to you Star vs. The Forces of Evil, a show that took me fucking forever to get through because watching every episode felt a total chore. I promise this is the last shitty example of bad serialization from this decade, since it took me over a month to get through this fuckfest, and lemme tell you there is a reason for that. I know it may seem like I'm super cynical when it comes to serialized shows that aren't named Avatar: The Last Airbender, but let me tell you that is not true. At all. And lemme tell you why.

HISTORY: I don't really have a big history with this show. I've always been aware of its existence, but it's not something that ever interested me. It never once grabbed my attention except for this one time where a friend of mine in ninth grade (specifically a day before our last day of school) told me to watch this show because he was a big fan of it. That night, I DID watch this show's first two episodes, and hated them. I didn't tell him about them the next day because I don't think he wants to hear that the first two episodes kinda sucked. It wouldn't be until this show's fourth season where my attention was drawn because the fandom reacted to season four in a way I didn't expect. Many people were calling out the fourth season for being hastily made, annoying, and incomplete (they ain't wrong), so that's when I decided to go after two shows of this decade that I thought were total garbage at telling stories: Steven Universe, and now: Star vs. The Forces of Evil.

ANIMATION: Let's get the... positives? out of the way first. Star's animation is perfectly passable and has nothing noteworthy. Really, I have nothing else to say about it. I like the colors, but the actual animation is something that never popped in my eyes. A lot of people claimed that the first season was super bouncy and expressive and the later seasons had downgrades, but it's not like the series did anything crazy with its animation in the first place. On second thought, I'm just stating things that typical animation should normally have (acceptable color schemes and fine movements) so I'm basically giving credit to this series for doing absolutely nothing with its animation. It's really boring to look at and feels restricted as all shit, like, SpongeBob's sixth season was more visually interesting. They never play with their animation style or have any extremely fluid/animated scenes, it's so safe and bland as shit. Even Star's powers do nothing to stand out against whatever background or setting they're against. Nothing in this series is allowed to pop as a result of this and I feel so fucking bored just watching this plain, standard, and generic animation. I retract what I said about this show's animation being passable, it looks like fucking horseshit lol.

tl;dr version: this animation is so boring and safe and visually unimpressive. character movements are stiff, and even things I expect to wow me with their visuals like Star's powers failed to even have me lift an eyebrow.

Now here's where we hit some major snags...

CHARACTERS: Star Vs's characters are... really bad. Not in the same way as SU's, but all of them are just so BORING to me. Not a single character aside from Buffrog actually sticks out in my mind all that much. I have so little to say about any of the show's main characters or even side characters, they're all super uninteresting and bland, so much so that the side characters were basically ditched by season 3 and only get one appearance in season 4. Hell, even those two fucking idiot friends Marco had in the first season were completely ditched after-- both Ferguson and Alfonzo felt like they were pulled straight out of a bad Canadian flash show from the designs to the voices to the personalities.

  But as for the main characters, Star is an incompetent idiot who seems to show not a single ounce of progression as the series goes on in terms of maturity or even POWERS (because her powers don't have any established rules and the show pridefully says this to the audience's face), in fact, as the show goes on, she actually regresses because of a stupid aspect of this show I'm going to rip to pieces in a bit, her hyperactivity has little to no charm whatsoever and she's mostly portrayed as an incompetent idiot that has no idea what she's doing. This would be an interesting character flaw to explore, but again, the show doesn't even bother having her get better as the show goes on, and it doesn't even attempt to make any jokes about it.
  Marco is just... uhhhhhhhhhhhh, yeah this guy literally has no personality at all. The best quality of his personality is that he's.... casual? But casual barely qualifies as a personality trait, he's just there most of the time and is, at best, an idiotic plot device to fuel one of this show's worst qualities which I will dedicate an entire paragraph to. No one in this show has an actual personality, it's so hard to think of just one word to even describe them. This is especially egregious since he's constantly hogging screentime, and barely contributes to anything going on. Episodes that surround him usually tend to be such a chore because I have no reason to invest in him. The show directly characterizes him as "safe" in the first episode, but that trait is immediately discarded the moment he meets Star, so what personality does this guy have? It's not like any of their character designs say anything about this show's main characters either (did I mention how much I hate the character design philosophy on this show?
  The character designs on this show typically look hideous besides Star, the eyes are weirdly drawn and the heads are usually fat. One of the beauties of animation is that you can tell everything about a character just from a simple glance. When I look at a majority of the cast, I literally can't name a single trait they carry) Glossaryc is a fucking nutjob I hate being around, but admittedly gets better as the show goes along, but the running joke of him being a goofball who loves pudding wears thin extremely fast and even hinders episodes like Mewberty, also his design is hideous as all fuck.
  I also really hate characters such as Moon and River Butterfly. Moon, for the most part, was a standard character with a lame af backstory in Moon the Undaunted, but they really fucked her over in season 4, where they pull this extremely idiotic twist where she was apparently the cause for everything bad happening in that season. This is so much more of an egregious twist than the one in SU where Rose was Pink Diamond because in this show, Moon was one of the main PROTAGONISTS that actually ruled her kingdom with love and care, but then it's suddenly revealed that Hyuck Hyuck, She Evil. I believe the intention of this was to be """""""""'subversive"""""""", but could you do that without fucking ruining a character I bet the fandom actually connected with, because it actually comes off as being incredibly insulting than being clever, and it even turned her into a complete fucking retard because she thought that Mina would actually COMPLY with her in returning her god-like powers.
  River is irritating as all piss, he's the Haha Idiot Husband that does nothing more than be the gateway to a bunch of unfunny jokes. Some episodes take this idea wholesale and we get garbage like The Bogbeast of Boggabah, where the whole joke of the episode is Get It? River is Stupid??? There's also other abominations like Royal Pain, where he's nothing more than a hindrance for 11 minutes. I'll admit that he wasn't that bad initially but as the episode progressed, he just got more and more aggravating. This show literally just took the concept of a "Stupid Husband" and did nothing with it, I'd be fine if River only had an appearance once in a blue moon, but seriously this terrible character has several episodes dedicated to him and soon found his way to being a main character, meaning I legitimately can't stand it whenever this guy is on screen.

The villains in this show are also extremely lame. Ludo is supposed to be this comedic over the top villain who has his "plans" foiled through stupid shenanigans, but the reason why he sucks is because he's always SHOVED IN AT THE LAST MINUTE in episodes where he's playing this role. He's basically ditched by season 3 in favor of trying to give him more depth, which is virtually the only consistently good thing about this show, as Ludo goes through an incredible character development even if he only had 3 entire episodes to show it, but I love how this character went from being a lame-ass Saturday morning cartoon villain, to a three-dimensional character who deeply cares about his family, and this all culminates in the episode Princess Quasar Caterpillar and the Magic Bell, which is also my favorite episode of the show. However, once Ludo was done being a villain by the end of season 1, they shifted towards Toffee being the villain.
  Toffee is actually a really good villain... in theory. In execution, Jesus fuck was he underwhelming as hell. He rarely ever gets any screentime and as a result, wasn't able to be expanded on, and the show only vaguely implies that he's behind everything that happens in the second season. I completely forgot he was a thing until the episode Toffee, it's not really like he did anything threatening either besides slightly setting up the events for the show's fourth season (Somehow? What the fuck did Tavern mean in saying HE WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG? Man fuck this show's attempts at telling a story). He has a really cool design and could've been this show's best villain, but was a disappointment since he was basically ditched after Storm the Castle and didn't do anything until it was time for the boss fight with him in Toffee, but even that episode comes with a retarded deus ex machina. Then there's Mina and good fucking God, I hate this character, not only does her voice rupture my eardrums, but she's shoved in at the very last minute of this show's fourth season in a desperate attempt to get any kind of conflict going. Her backstory is incredibly cookie-cutter and cliche, I'm more annoyed by her than threatened, and none of the characters even attempt to put up a fight with her, because that'd actually be something interesting, now would it? I don't want to talk about these fucking bollocks characters anymore.

tl;dr version: The characters fail on a fundamental level where I have such a hard time even describing any of their traits beyond characters like Star or Buffrog, they're all just super forgettable and barely develop throughout the series, so much so that a majority of the side cast got kicked to the curb by season 3, and the ONLY exception to any of this is Ludo, as he did have a cohesive and natural arc.

THE STORY: lmao, if you think this pathetic show has any kind of story whatsoever, you're sorely mistaken. So instead, let's discuss the general problems that plague nearly every single fucking episode of this show. First of all, the pacing in this series is absolutely abysmal. Episodes can either go extremely fast, and end up being slow, or being incredibly slow and losing my attention. Episodes can even have nonexistent pacing and do fuck-all until it's time for a villain to come bursting through the door. Getting through this series was a complete slog because most episodes have almost nothing going on. I could feel every fucking second scrape by, meaning that on a fundamental level, this series fails as a cartoon since it's not entertaining. There are no jokes, interesting characters, plot, there's NOTHING, but let's talk about this show's most egregious aspect:

T H E S H I P P I N G. We can't ignore this, because this is something the show doesn't even try to hide. It's been in-your-face as far back as the episode Sleepover and this aspect annoys me to death. Not only is it obvious and lazy pandering, but more often than not, this becomes the crux for conflicts in most episodes. You get garbage like Bon Bon the Birthday Clown and Sophomore Slump because of this. I've already mentioned that none of the characters on this show have any kind of personality, development, or anything, so not only does this bore me, it frustrates me to no end since the show treats it as some serious shit, when in actuality, it's fucking stupid. Kudos goes to the finale where Star literally gives up everything just so she can screw Marco, and Just Friends where they try desperately to pull a WHUH??? STAR LIKES MARCO???. This is the definition of lazy, cheap drama that exists to satisfy a part of the cancerous Star vs. fandom, where they ship numerous characters with each other. this show even goes as far as shipping Marco with some random other character named Kelly, a character that was NEVER given a proper introduction, just to be a plot device for the romance and good fucking god why???? Thought this show was called Star vs. The Forces of Evil, why the fuck should I care about who fucks who at night? This is a fucking baby show, the last thing I'd ever want to see is characters standing around with 0 budget animation doing nothing other than argue about who should screw who in bed, I wanna see someone get kicked in the ass, but Lord knows the show couldn't even do that because its finale was instead doing EVERYTHING but fighting. I could go into more detail, but all that needs to be said is that the shipping is fucking pathetic, obvious pandering, and downright lazily written. I don't even know why episodes like Lava Lake Beach, Booth Buddies, and Kelly's World exist, watching both of them was like watching someone die right in front of my eyes, and not only that but it's clear this series isn't appropriate for children either because it's a fucking teen drama. It was a downright unprofessional decision to make this show a shipping hell, because it's more than guaranteed to alienate those that are interested in the on-going "plot" than anything else... but OH WAIT, THE PLOT IS ALL ABOUT THE SHIPPING. Fuck this

tl;dr version: We Stand at the Door

CONCLUSION: Star vs. is a genius show, probably the best thing you want to put on if you want to shut your kids up for 11 minutes. Like dangling keys in front of a baby. It's not funny, boring, has no pacing or story, accomplishes nothing, has bland as hell characters... it's just Nitwitting: The Show. Things just happen, nothing is established, worldbuilding is nonexistent. Basically any kind of writing in this show is nonexistent since they have like 6 writers per episode and none of them have any kind of communication, producing a mishmash of incoherence. Both this and Steven Universe are two prime examples of how NOT to do serialization, but which show do I think is worse? This one. Steven Universe at least had the advantage of producing episodes I actually liked, or even loved, while Star vs. BARELY ever did that. Steven Universe personally pisses me off, but this show not only bores me to tears, but it also contains some of the worst cartoon episodes I've ever seen, yet has so little enjoyable episodes to counteract that. I don't care, this show is absolute GARBAGE because it fails on a basic level of being a cartoon since the last thing I'd ever want is to be bored out of my mind watching something. I don't even think there are any aspects of this series I liked outside of Ludo's character development, and even that is regulated to like 3 episodes in total. Please watch literally anything else and avoid this empty garbage show, since even its finale was considered a middle finger by the fanbase, and basically the fourth season as a whole really. Even beyond that, if I somehow watched every single piece of media ever made on this planet, this cancerous series would still find its way into my bottom 5 or 10. It's that bad.