Listen. We all do things we don’t want other people to see. We have a right to get our freak on in private, whatever and however that manifests, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. In the case of an artist named Kay, this meant creating a piece of fan art that dared to bend the laws of sanity and scripture:
Steven Hill. Bobby Universe. Two timelines that are well and truly cursed. Of course, that’s part of the fun, leaning into the cursedness, so Kay understandably didn’t think that this unsettling duo would ever leave their corner of Twitter.
However, the thing is, both Steven Universe and King of the Hill are incredibly memeable franchises for massively different reasons. With the former, people are still retroactively annoyed with the often hostile and overzealous fan culture that surrounded the show, which has resulted in a new sort of meme: a “must bully the character Steven Universe at all costs as retribution” kind of meme, which even fans of the show take part in. Regarding the latter, King of the Hill is also undergoing a sort of retroactive reaction, but in the opposite direction. While some shows from the ’90s lost steam over the years, King of the Hill’s humor continues to hold up, both stylistically and topically.
So, when you combine the two, it’s like aiming a flamethrower at some propane and propane accessories. It was only inevitable that this Tweet would take off—and, much to Kay’s horror, it reached perhaps the highest of heights in doing so:
I could not imagine. It’s mortifying enough to go viral for literally any reason, but to do so over art you were just casually sharing, only to get picked up by the very network that distributes the source material? Literally unimaginable. And yet, this is also well-deserved, in only the most positive of ways. The art is really good and the concept is hilarious, so of course Adult Swim was eventually going to find this and repost it. King of the Hill has always been their baby, and there’s a fun sort of irony in the juxtaposition between that, and Steven Universe being Cartoon Network’s baby.
Ultimately, if their most “embarrassing” piece of art is something that’s actually pretty funny, then I’d say they’re doing pretty well! Steven Hill is forever burned into my retinas and I am okay with this. Bobby Universe, on the other hand, will continue to unsettle me to unfathomable degrees. So it goes.
(featured image: Fox/Cartoon Network)
