Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25539649-20150620190612/@comment-26472528-20150701010739

EthanGreen4 wrote: Steven Universe is Suffering from TMG  Which Stands For Too Many Gems,So A New Gem Might Make it Worse. ... eh, no, it really isn't. Steven Universe has far fewer characters of a specific type than a good deal of other successful shows.

For example, Sailor Moon has 10 Sailor Senshi for the Solar System (including Chibimoon), three extrasolar Senshi protagonists, and 5 Senshi antagonists. That's 18 Sailor Senshi total in one of the most popular shows ever, and there are even more in the manga. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has literally dozens of pony characters, and I know this without having ever sat through an entire episode. Don't even get me started on superhero shows, where they can have a hundred heros/villains or so over the course of 5 seasons.

"Too many characters" isn't a problem as long as the writers aren't trying to cram all of them into every single episode. I mean, we've only ever seen all the gems introduced to us in a single episode twice (The Return and Jailbreak). Jasper has only been in three episodes thusfar, and poor Ruby and Sapphire had less than 3.5 minutes of screentime altogether.