I’m not the first to mention this, but one bit that I thought was really clever in Steven Universe is the ways in which the show subtly justifies the cartoonism of the principle cast always wearing the same outfit for ease-of-animation purposes. The gems are a gimme in that they’re all hardlight-projections, and even before that’s solidified as a plot point they’re otherworldly and superheroic enough that you don’t really think to question it. But Steven canonically just owns hundreds and hundreds of those star shirts, which are leftover merchandise from his father’s fizzled-out career as a rock star. Into which you can read a whole bunch of other stuff if you really want to, right? And I do want to. It’s reflective of Greg’s misplaced optimism that he got hundreds of those made in the first place, and it’s a benign but visible example of how Steven’s life is shaped by the knock-on effects of decisions his parents made before he was even alive. He’s got his mother’s superpowers and he’s wearing his father’s shirts.
Taking this afterthought I had out of the tags- I actually checked the wiki to make sure I wasn’t imagining this, and yeah, most of the other human characters have at least subtle changes to their character models in each episode, but special attention to Connie, who’s got a different outfit basically every time she shows up, and moreover actually has a notable shift in the kind of outfit she prefers as the series progresses. She’s got room to evolve and explore aesthetically in a way that Steven doesn’t, because as much as she’s “part of his universe,” she has somewhere to go home to. She can clock out. She has other stuff going on in her life. And Steven literally isn’t visibly aging for the first two seasons and change because he doesn’t know that he’s supposed to.