Yeah, I think all those "Greg's overreacting and Steven's legit in lashing out at his dad" comments are similarly in a bad vein.
My grandparents disowned my brother for YEARS all because he came out as my brother. He wasn't gonna be put in a box just so they could show him around at Christmas parties and say "yup, I'm so proud of so-and-so." Pictures of what he looked like before he came out are a dime-a-dozen around the house - there's little to no photos of what he looks like now. Hell, my brother had to force himself back into my grandfather's life largely because my sister and I were getting really fed up with how gramps was dragging his feet in accepting my brother. And even though he's started calling my brother by his legal name - as in, his preferred name - pap'll still use she/her pronouns when referring to my brother in regular conversation. He'll insult what my brother does - he's one of the lead managers at the Humane Society - because it doesn't pay health insurance. He'll insult the smell of their house - it doesn't smell all that great because my brother raises rats for pets and snake food to earn a little extra on the side, but my grandfather will state that the house is exactly like the one my brother, my sister, and I were raised in.
Which, yeah, I guess my grandfather has a point - my brother should probably get new carpet put in - but my brother expressed his own displeasure with the carpet too.
When I watched "Mr. Universe," I saw a bit of my brother in Greg. Yes, that includes the "I rebelled because my parents made me eat way too much meatloaf" bits where you can tell just from the way Greg insinuates things that there is much more to the situation than Greg having to eat a crappy rendition of comfort food. My brother, at Christmas parties over at his place, will talk about how our grandma would get the absolute worst Christmas presents - like really tacky jumpsuits or LCD handheld games or shovelware - but my sister and I know all the shit he's insinuating. Every time he'd make a point to our grandparents about how they just guessed what we wanted, they'd call us ungrateful and remind us that not everybody gets presents. And we didn't even ask for much - maybe a video game or two. If we didn't act the right away around Christmas parties, grandma would say that we were acting spoiled and ungrateful. If we deviated from the norm in any way, we were ungrateful.
That kind of shit gets to you after a while. You start to think that you're the problem. You're doing everything your folks want you to be that you burn out - that you don't know who you are. I'm glad I discovered music - like Greg - because it allowed me to express myself in ways that I could not before. I'm glad I discovered screenwriting. I'm glad I discovered media review, film, computers, etc. And I'm glad that my grandparents got out of their "I'm disappointed" phase and entered their "I respect your hustle" phase - for me. They're still disappointed in all of us to an extent - with me and my brother, in particular. And I'm still disappointed in them for handling my brother in the worst way possible.
So no, Greg's not acting immature. He's not acting like a child. He's a victim of trauma. And like Rose, he's been conditioned to confront this trauma in a wrong way. Greg thinks it's cool that Steven wrecked the van - because Steven, at that moment, is what Greg desperately wanted to be 22 years prior (assuming he's 42). Greg is held back so much by what his parents did to him - and trust me, there's a lot he's not telling for the sake of not wanting to exacerbate Steven's PTSD, that's the beauty of the script and Tom Scharpling's line delivery - that when Steven starts to head down this dark path of becoming exactly like Greg's parents (that everybody has to like him in a specific and non-problematic way). Greg can't see what's really going on. He just sees Steven becoming Greg's power fantasy of finally telling his dad to buzz off for good.
And it's disturbingly similar to how Rose approached coping with trauma. Yes, Rose is the trans analogy for the entire show - she never really felt much like a Diamond, much less Pink Diamond, and she only found herself when she began to play-pretend a Quartz soldier on Earth - but she still hurt a lot of people on her way to Earth. You've seen those cracks on Volley. You've seen how utterly broken a person Spinel is. You've seen how Yellow and Blue have become shells of themselves because of Rose faking her own shattering. You've heard "Let Us Adore You" and saw exactly WHY Spinel was chosen to be the Dollar Tree equivalent of Pink Diamond. Rose hurt a lot of people. We have to agree on that.
But Rose is a victim too. Rose was raised in a similar way to Greg. She didn't have meatloaf every Thursday night for 3000 years, but she was emotionally manipulated by Blue, she was sternly lectured over her nature (read as immaturity) by Yellow, and White considered her a mistake to begin with (i.e. White created Pink to get rid of that part of her in her quest for total perfection). She was locked in rooms she couldn't get out of for thousands of years. She was forced into crying. She was forced to do this, that, and the other. After thousands of years of this, is it any surprise she did the things she did - where abandonment and physical and psychological abuse to her friends was considered normal? The Diamonds said they did all they did to Rose out of love and concern, so to Rose before she had her big realization, what she did to Volley and Spinel was just out of love and concern. And from the Gem War onwards, we're not given a lot of Rose's narrative - if she felt anything for Spinel, or if the trauma was so deep inside of her that she still normalized abandoning Spinel for 5000 more years (similar to how Greg justified Steven wrecking the van as "yeah, I wish I did that to my dad"). Trauma doesn't just make you a better and more mature person. More often than not, you're held back by trauma because that's what it does. Trauma is so affecting that it can prevent you from growing in other areas.
Greg is traumatized.
And Rose Quartz/Pink Diamond is traumatized.
But before anybody comes in with the "Rose was a monster, worse than the Diamonds" arguments, remember how Steven's been coping with the revelation that his mom was a Diamond.
Steven quickly went from "my mom may have been imperfect, but she tried to do the right thing most of the time" to "my mom never did anything good for anybody." He's missed the messages of what Pearl, Garnet (and by extension, Ruby and Sapphire), Volley, Greg, the Diamonds, Spinel, the corrupted Gems, etc. have all imparted upon him because they conflict with the new opinion he has of his mom. He cannot believe his mom is capable of maturation - is capable of self-reflection - is capable of any painful realizations about what she did to Volley, Spinel, and the Diamonds because HE'S DETERMINED THAT HIS MOM IS BAD.
Steven has the morality of a child. Or rather, he has the morality of a severely-traumatized person who wants nothing more than for the trauma to stop. He'll do anything for it to stop. He's exactly like his parents. And sadly, that means he waters down people to a very shallow understanding of what they truly encompass.
Trauma is generational.
But that doesn't mean he has to be their negative qualities. That doesn't mean he has to focus on the negatives. He doesn't have to be his monster. His mom doesn't have to be. Greg doesn't have to be. He can be like Pearl and Volley, who are the most at peace right now. Pearl knows that Rose acted horribly in the past - and Volley knows that Rose became a much better person because she realized the way society told her to deal with her trauma was leading her down a very, very dark path. They know that Rose was a complicated person. Neither a saint nor a devil.
All humans are like that.
So, no, Steven's not in the right here for blowing up on his dad like that. He can make some good points - Greg didn't push for Pearl to enroll Steven with the government or go to the doctor or go to school (but how much of that was Greg being so despised by Pearl that Pearl basically ran everything regarding Steven's lack of proper education and ignored Greg's concerns; and how much of that was Greg associating his time in public school with the intense psychological abuse his parents imparted upon him and how he's so afraid of becoming like them?) - but everything else is Steven comparing Greg to Rose. And at this point, when Steven invokes Rose, he means "she's a monster."
He's calling his dad a monster because his dad was traumatized.
