“Take it down a notch.”

I don’t dislike Horror Club because it focuses on Lars and Ronaldo, two of my least favorite characters on this show at this point. Lars and Ronaldo are two of my least favorite characters on this show at this point because of episodes like Horror Club.

I would’ve loved to love this episode. Expanding the backstories of the show’s two most grating characters could’ve given us actual insight beyond “they were lousy kids and now they’re lousy teenagers whose lousiness made them drift apart.” We could’ve gotten concrete character development instead of waiting around for these two to start growing for a couple more seasons (a wait that will only pay off for Lars). And in terms of the episode’s specific subject: the end of a childhood friendship is heavy stuff, but something I thought this show would handle better than this.

Instead, crammed into Season 1′s otherwise incredible final stretch is an episode about a cruel bully and a victim that honestly isn’t much better. We’re asked to empathize with them, and I vaguely do, but only when each has to deal with the other. Their consistent awfulness in the present and the past is so at odds with the rest of the lovable-but-flawed denizens of Beach City that I always skip this one on rewatch.

After following Sadie to Ronaldo’s horror movie marathon, Lars spends the whole night mercilessly mocking Ronaldo at every opportunity. What a jerk! Then we then learn that as children, Lars was ashamed of his friendship with Ronaldo and abandoned him. What a jerk! Considering this, and Lars’s general behavior towards Steven, the show seems to want us to sympathize with Ronaldo. But when Ronaldo thinks a poltergeist that swallowed Sadie is haunting Lars, he tries to murder Lars and would have succeeded if Steven wasn’t around.

And when they were kids, and Lars got smacked in the face by a plank, Ronaldo didn’t pay any attention to Lars’s physical well-being; ignoring the obvious humiliation of publishing the photo is bad, but ignoring an injured friend’s pain is way worse.

Who in their right mind wouldn’t try to get away from this guy? Even looking beyond his obnoxious personality, his impulse to put his desires over the needs of others seems to be a lifelong issue.

Lars and Ronaldo are both awful here, but Ronaldo gets no comeuppance for his often dangerous selfishness. We may empathize with a bullied character, but bullied kids really shouldn’t be taught that the solution is attacking their tormentors with potentially lethal force. Like the profoundly misguided Island Adventure, the lesson here is that if somebody hurts you, it’s okay to hurt them more. It’s the total opposite of what this show stands for.

Calling Ronaldo out on his actions in the same manner as Lars would’ve gone a long way towards improving this episode, as it would not only provide a better lesson, but could lead to positive character growth; instead, Ronaldo remains stuck in an immature and frankly violent rut (but it’s okay, he’s kooky!). At the very least we could’ve made one or the other more sympathetic by the episode’s end, but their mutual awfulness ruins even that. Ronaldo’s fun reversal of the header quote on Lars in the final scene, playing off the fact that both teens are a bit much, deserves a better episode than this.



Sadie and Steven get the shaft here, which is a real shame considering this is the first Lars and Sadie episode since the aforementioned Island Adventure and it’d be nice to have some redemption. Sadie’s only real role is to move the plot: Lars only goes to the lighthouse to hang out with her, then he and Ronaldo compete over her attention, then she gets damsel-in-distressed to make the boys fight more. Is this the right show? I thought this was Steven Universe, the one where sexist gender roles are thrown out the window.

But at least we get some new peeks into Sadie’s personality, showcasing her enthusiasm for horror and exploring her headlong approach to danger. Steven’s only real role is to be our window, because we need him to see what’s happening; otherwise, Horror Club presents a foggy view of our lead. He stands up to Lars’s bullying, but this doesn’t faze his naive assumption that everyone is friends with Lars. He’s too scared to watch a grisly horror movies despite maintaining his nerves during actual monster fights on a regular basis, including the likes of Frybo. Despite having experienced Keep Beach City Weird, an entire episode about how all the magical stuff in Beach City is Gem-related, he freaks out and thinks that a magical event isn’t Gem-related.

And when he’s not inconsistent, he’s just dull. Maybe the crew didn’t want to take the focus from Lars and Ronaldo, but despite its flaws, compare this to how well Island Adventure splits the focus between side character Steven and the non-Steven leads. Lars and Sadie were still front and center there, but Steven got tons to do in the background. Here he’s just going through the motions.

The most damning problem of Horror Club is that Lars and Ronaldo both manage to leave it worse characters than when they entered. Lars gets to morph from standard jerk to relentless bully, and on top of the aforementioned Ronaldo issues, our conspiracy buff is shown to be a complete idiot: why does he not immediately suspect Steven as a part of the Diamond Authority (y’know, that conspiracy that he himself thought of) after witnessing him magically whisk away a Gem firsthand? Ronaldo’s whole identity is clinging to every shred of evidence that agrees with his preexisting worldview, and Keep Beach City Weird established that his preexisting worldview is that polymorphic sentient rocks are pulling the strings. And we can’t even get that right?

This episode is overwhelmingly unpleasant, from Ronaldo’s cringey freakout about the original Evil Bear II to Lars’s repugnant stream of toxicity. Even the horror itself is lame compared to the likes of Frybo and Rose’s Room and anything with Cluster Gems. Still, there’s one good thing about it: nothing comes of the hinted Ronaldo/Sadie/Lars love triangle, so unlike plot-important misses like House Guest and Fusion Cuisine, Horror Club can be skipped without any consequences. I’m thrilled that this review is done so I can go back to never watching this one again.

Future Vision!

While it’s not necessary to watch Horror Club, I should note that it introduces Sadie’s love of horror, which serves as a pillar of her transformation into Sadie Killer. But we get that elsewhere, so all is well if this episode is ignored.



We’re the one, we’re the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!



While I obviously didn’t like this one, at least its lead characters didn’t suddenly lose their core values to advance a single episode’s plot, which puts it ahead of Fusion Cuisine and House Guest. And while its message’s tainted execution is similar to Island Adventure’s, trivializing abuse is far worse than poorly portraying a failed friendship.

Still, it’s never good when I spend this section considering just how low I want an episode to go. For now, it’s the “best” of my least favorites.

Top Ten

Love ‘em



Like ‘em

Enh

No Thanks!

4. Horror Club

3. Fusion Cuisine

2. House Guest

1. Island Adventure