One of the more transgressive messages in Steven Universe is… not obvious in its transgression, and it takes a little setup to explain what’s so important about it. But it’s the notion that got me watching the show in the first place, back when I read about a recent episode.

A thing that people who skirt the surface sometimes criticize about the show is its notion of redemption, and how dangerously simplistic it seems at a glance. But, it’s not actually as simple as all of that. And it’s part of a more complicated discussion.

The more obvious half of the discussion is the one embodied in the redemption narratives that the show often explores. Basically, a big part of the show’s philosophy is that there are no Bad Guys; there are people who think and do destructive things. Usually for a reason.

But the quieter side of that is that likewise, there are no Good Guys. Rather, there are people who you like and trust to behave in ways that help, or at least take effort to avoid hurting, others. This isn’t moral relativism; it’s a pragmatic stance that no one is a monolith.

We are what we feel and we think and we do, and we’re all a bundle of contradictions. Even if we try our best, we’re going to do awful things sometimes, either unintentionally or just because we can’t help ourselves, due to how we’re wired. So, judging people on that is dicey. And people who have a history of harmful actions, that pattern isn’t necessarily set in stone; our actions depend on our pattern of thinking, which is based to a large extent in how we feel and what we expect. It’s all very muddy, and the best we can do is the best we can do.

Most “crime,” if you subscribe to that as a broad social phenomenon, isn’t a matter of bogeymen, of Bad People With A Gun or whatever, out there, waiting to get you. It’s people who you know and generally trust, who feel a destructive impulse and so take advantage of that trust. This nonsense that politicians and pundits always go on about, talking about individual or whole categories of human beings like cartoon villains or saints, talking about “black-on-black” crime as if it meant anything other than everyone nearly always hurts those closest to them—whatever group one might belong to, the statistics are roughly the same, in that all they reflect is the people one tends to know. There are no Good Men with a Gun. Nobody is born with a facial tattoo like that. Every Bad Man with a Gun is a Good Man until he does something Bad.

You can look at patterns of behavior, sure! Gun violence nearly always has precedent. It’s nearly always people (men) who feel wronged by those close to them (women) and decide to get them back, and anyone else who stands in their way while they’re at it. It’s all the same phenomenon. But, the point is, life isn’t so simple that you can put people into these boxes. The best you can do is look at past behavior and its causes, and figure out the wisest form of engagement and the likelihood it may be predictive of future behavior or might be mutable to some extent.

The redemption narratives are the easy part. There’s lots of precedent for stories like that. Every facile action hero extends their (his) hand to the cackling villain at the end of the movie who has never shown an ounce of mercy, to illustrate their superior moral grounding. So many stories are filled with face-turn antiheroes, and rivals turned allies, and all of that. This is familiar ground, even if Steven Universe takes it to an extreme in terms of how committed it can be to the idea. What’s trickier and more upsetting is the opposite of this.

Again, nearly all violence, nearly all abuse, it is going to come from people you know. People you trust. Which the show plows right into, in the middle of season two. I’ve talked before about how, with media analysis of “Cry for Help,” you don’t need to glance at the byline to know the gender of the writer. Somehow, and beyond the obvious I can’t fathom how, cishet men just… don’t get what’s happening here:

I don’t know how you can overlook a line like “those weren’t victories,” or just see the nature of the relationship here and remain so totally oblivious to what this conflict is about. But, there you go, I guess. There are no good guys. There are no bad guys. There’s only what you do. And the people you choose to trust.

I don’t know that I’ve seen another long-form narrative really get in this deep, commit this strongly, to undermining our internal narratives about the Kind of People who hurt or help each other. It’s all of us. It’s every decision we make. And it’s not this gray-moral thing. Abusers are your spouse, your uncle, your babysitter, your sibling, your neighbor, that family friend. They’re the people you let into your life, and so have the opportunity to do damage and feel like they can get away with it. Not everyone, but anyone. Any single decision.

This isn’t a point of paranoia. It’s just, it’s puncturing the myth and the assumptions about who Bad People are; what abuse and violence actually look like, and where it nearly always really comes from—which goes so counter to our entire cultural narrative, and most of our personal expectations, wired as we are to contrast bubbles of in-groups and out-groups, that it’s hard to know where to begin.

It’s this very upsetting truth that drew me into the show, and made me think, basically: holy fuck. There’s a TV show actively talking about this as an ongoing thing. And, it’s a fantasy adventure aimed at kids? This is the thing people have been yammering about on my timeline, all these months?

We tell ourselves these simple fairy tales and we think we live in them. And so much of our cultural discourse is based around these dynamics, that don’t actually map to human reality. It’s revolutionary to stand opposed to such a fundamental and uncorrected error.

Though she developed some nuance and rethought a few assumptions as she went along, Rebecca Sugar originally planned the show as an exercise in reverse escapism: pitch a fantastical premise, but play it for mundane and instead spend all your energy talking about reality—which is basically what the series does: it uses its framework (and its glorious web of metaphor) as an excuse to explore social and psychological and interpersonal dynamics that are very hard to talk about judiciously, and that many shows would go to great lengths to avoid.

In a world built on wish and fantasy like our own, the truth is always a transgressive thing. And what it most often serves to violate is an order of injustice. This is what art can do. This is the goal in life. This is what makes a thing important. And this is what got me.

(Note that all of this also applies to one’s relationship with one’s self. Which is an angle the show also explores in extraordinary detail.)