Monthly Archives: June 2019

Audible Dissonance

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Many alt-periodical grafs have gone toward the five seasons of trans subtext that the “Diamond Days”/Homeworld arc brings to the fore and nails down as Kinda The Point Of This Whole Deal. What I’ve not seen discussed is how “Legs from Here to Homeworld” states its thesis on that.

Maybe because the episode was posted online several months before broadcast, so most of the commenting class didn’t first it in the specific context of the 90 minutes of theme-dump that it served to introduce. Maybe because since the bulk is set on Earth, it feels less connected.

What gets me about the episode more than anything, though, is its first scene. We have a few seconds of dialog that summarizes what happened in the last episode, to catch people up. And then, Yellow stomps up to drag us into the story.

“How could you do this to us, Pink? Why did you let us think you were shattered? Why the strange disguise? Why are you doing a voice? Why didn’t you say something at the trial?”

Yes, it’s expository. Yes, it’s functional. But take another look. I’m talking about the weird part.

“Why are you doing a voice?” she asks.

…

Yikes.

That’s not a throwaway line.

There are all these in-jokes that aren’t really jokes, right, about what people actually want from a transition versus what everyone assumes and even tells them they really want. Usually (not always) the highest priorities have to do with immediacy: simple everyday signifiers.

Things like one’s face, one’s voice, hair, that from moment to moment help affirm a person’s identity, to one’s self and others. Voice is a subtle yet major one; you can do a lot of things with your face or your hair or your wardrobe. Your voice, though, that’s more difficult.

It’s harder technically, and it’s more existential. To a significant extent, we all associate our voice with who we are. We talk about our sense of identity as our inner monologue. You often can tell more about a person from their voice than from their face. I know I tend to.

So, it’s kind of a big question mark for someone in the middle of a transition. Like, what do we do about this, then? On the FtM end, hormones can have some effect. MtF, not really. If there’s a solution, it tends to be voice training, which is fine, but it brings its own issues.

The most obvious problem is that it’s hard. It takes a ton of practice; a ton of time; a ton of investment. It’s exhausting, stressful. It’s hard to keep up all the time, to get to the point where it clicks and starts to feel sometimes right, sometimes natural, and then a habit.

The bigger problem goes back to the existential thing, which goes back to the basic anxiety at the core of so much of the trans experience. It’s that basically what it comes down to is a performance. Which makes it a big pressure point for the whole delicate cognitive lattice.

The nature of coming to grips with one’s gender identity, it’s about a search for truth, right. Realigning one’s self-concept with what’s actually going on neurologically, emotionally; with the way one’s brain is in fact wired, regardless of what others have always insisted.

But like any search for truth, there’s always this sense of, well, but what if I’m wrong? What if what everyone’s been telling me my whole life is right, and I’m just having this episode, deluding myself? What am I even doing? That doubt, it’s often, usually not that far away.

Which is the button that White Diamond serves to hammer on like a maniac some 75 minutes later. But for the moment we’ve got Yellow Diamond, confronting Steven about why he’s “doing a voice.” Which sets the scene for eight episode-slots of pointed existential invalidation.

Like. Most of the things that go into a transition, they’re nouns that one wears. A voice is a verb, that one acts. Your voice is your voice. It’s the key to everything in a way. And to enunciate one’s truth necessitates a performance. Granted we’re all a story, but. Well.

To single out Steven’s voice in particular as a signifier of “Pink” just pretending, playing a little game, it’s such an easy blow, and in the context of what the show is talking about during this arc, there’s no way that line is in there by accident. Few lines in this show are.

I mean, yes, surface level it’s a non sequitur, or nearly so; a gag of the rambling train-of-thought mode that the show often employs. On a metatextual level there’s the fact that actually, Zach Callison has been affecting Steven’s voice since halfway through the first season.

But more to the point, it’s there to sting, on a thematic level. That outright dismissal of something that, in a real world context, would have taken so much work, be such an easy pressure point to all of one’s existential doubts… it’s really nailing down where this is going.

I just, I felt like drawing out that sequence of words. They struck me the first time I heard them, even though my head wasn’t completely in a place to interpret them at the time, and they’ve stayed with me since. They stand out more than anything else in that first chapter.

Let’s Talk About Social Media

  • Reading time:6 mins read

So most of the response to this PSA has been thunderously positive, of course, with people who feel like they’ve never had any kind of formal representation now having it spelled out in unambiguous terms, and declaring that they feel seen and validated for the first time by pop culture. But of course, it also has attracted its share of gatekeepers, with their folded arms and upturned noses—who to the last seem to intentionally misconstrue the spot in order to launch their rants about why this representation is Bad, Actually.

The first, and weirdest, thing they all focus on is that being intersex doesn’t always mean being a perfect 50/50 blend of male and female—true enough, though of debatable relevance for this discussion—which they then immediately transition into a discussion of what may or may not be between Stevonnie’s legs, thereby to fume about how irresponsible it is to talk about this subject.

Now. The thing about this conversation is, uh, they’re the only ones talking about it. All the ad specifies is the obvious fact that Stevonnie is intersex. It doesn’t get into what that signifies here, nor should it need to. Presumably the character is gonna have a whole soup of chromosomes and hormones and neurology. People are making the leap to anatomy—but, er, why, in good faith? That says more about the person doing the assuming than anything that’s been stated.

When I read the text on the screen, my brain doesn’t go straight to Stevonnie’s genitals, because holy shit, why? It goes to their wide hips and higher vocal register, yet their coarse facial hair. It goes to the more abstract issue of their being an independent person with a physical body that’s not gonna conform to a definition of binary sex.

This is of course how Internet Discourse works: manufacturing a problem, and then attacking your own projections as if they were something inherent in the surface that you’re flailing toward, rather than engaging with what’s there on paper or the spirit of the work, its metaphors, and what it serves to talk about. It’s not about a conversation—which is unfortunate, as this show is so eager to hold one in earnest.

Steven Universe is a sci-fi fantasy, that communicates complicated ideas extensively through metaphor. Any given story element serves to talk about a bunch of things at once. The character of Stevonnie is about puberty, consent, first relationships, gender identity, the duality of self, self-love, self-doubt, feelings of objectification. As I’ve been saying forever, in a sense they’re the stealth main character, with the story treating their components Steven and Connie as two halves of one person even when apart—and in Stevonnie, embodied as a person struggling with anxiety over their own self-definition. Stevonnie is easily the most complex character in the show; when they manifest, it ratchets everything up a level, allowing the story access to much trickier themes.

Nothing depicted in this soap commercial is in any way new, except in that we’ve now seen Stevonnie’s sex and gender written out in so many words, and focused on them slightly. By definition, of course they were always intersex; and the show has always used an unambiguous singular they/them for the character. None of this was was ever unclear, as written and performed. But words are important, and here we finally have them.

The second and more bizarre criticism comes out of a previous point, in which people keep insisting that, well, the character’s identity shouldn’t come down to sci-fi alien symbolic whatever, because all that does is suggest that non-binary and intersex people are somehow fictional. Which just forces me to wonder, Christ, you know. Have you ever read a story before? Do you know how stories work? How metaphors function? (“Spoiler culture” has raised some concerns about literacy, of late.) And even more to the point, do you understand the limits of TV production? Particularly of a children’s cartoon, in the United States?

Sometimes to talk about complex things, or things that it’s unclear one can get away with, one speaks in coded or abstract terms. This is how art works. This is how people tell stories. Stories tend to be About Things, not clinical lists of details to showcase. Metaphors and subtext are a matter of verbs, rather than nouns, allowing conversation to happen and a story to functionally talk about things that matter. Artistic coding is all the more important when the things one wants to talk about aren’t necessarily easy to broach in the environment where the stories are being spun.

Prior to Steven Universe, has there ever been a children’s cartoon with an explicitly non-binary or intersex character before? With a foregrounded gay wedding? Has there ever been a children’s cartoon that basically serves in its entirety as one big honking trans allegory? No, because it’s hard to do. These are things that nobody was allowed to talk about, even around the time that Steven Universe began its run. The rules changed over the course of the show, in part because the show changed the rules, for itself and for everyone else, as to what was acceptable to talk about and how.

It’s so peculiar to me that for the one instance of positive representation that has ever existed, people who don’t have the active context for what it’s talking about or how it’s doing it will tend to sidle in and sniff, and say, well, it’s better that they not have bothered, because of XYZ preconditions I just thought up on the spot.

You know. I’m autistic. I’m genderqueer, I’m ace. I want to sympathize. Like, I recognize that there are tons of misconceptions out there, and for someone on the margins of society it’s easy to get nervous and defensive over things that come off as ambiguous. But nothing’s ever gonna be exactly whatever you’ve got in your head unless you write it yourself. Which, thanks to the exact thing you’re dismissing, may be easier now.

At any rate, when we choose to engage with a piece of media, how about we actually engage? Just, as a general rule of criticism, let’s go with what’s actually in the text, and what it serves to talk about, and how and why. When you project your own expectations, that’s not criticism, because you’re not engaging. What you’re doing is getting ahead of what you assume will be bad will by manifesting your own. And then you get to stand proud while jousting at yourself, allowing your shadow to affirm everything you expect to see in the world.

There’s more in the world than any of us knows. A lot of it is in fact sincere, and constructive, and serves to do good. If you’re gonna suggest ways to do even better, then that’s splendid. But to do that you’re gonna have to actually listen, and then make a commitment to build something new.

Audible Twilight 2: The Answer

  • Reading time:6 mins read

The barn at night has a soundscape all its own: the crickets, the night birds, and, interestingly, the creak and groan of wood as the frame gently sways in the wind. Much of this is muffled through the walls, but a bit creeps in fresh like a breeze through the open door.

When the two of them talk, we get an unusually stark shift to the mix, with their voices foregrounded and the backing atmosphere drawn way down to make room for music to strum in around the vague cinema stage.

We pan up to a black screen, on our way to a stylized flashback, and Garnet’s narration zorps right to the front, gaining presence and depth. It sounds exactly like Cate Blanchett’s narration at the start of Fellowship of the Ring.

Curiously for such a stylized depiction
(Hi, Lapis.), the foley continues strong as ever here. Sapphire’s hair rustles as she moves. The Rubies’ feet clomp solidly along. Don’t know what to make of the reverb situation. It suits an open air arena.

As Ruby stumbles into Sapphire and hems and haws in apology, an atmospheric whirring enters the mix. It’s not music. It doesn’t seem to be wind. Maybe an engine of some sort? A power source? It adds tension anyway, without ever clearly announcing itself.

As Sapphire enters Blue’s palanquin, her voice becomes muffled. Lisa Hannigan isn’t present, though; Blue hasn’t officially been introduced yet. So all we get is Garnet playing her part—in deep foreground, narrator-space, separated from the zone occupied by the story she’s telling.

There are some deep, skronking bowed bass notes here as Ruby clocks the nature of what’s happening and makes up her mind whether to react or not, and rescue this nice Sapphire who had been the opposite of awful to her just before.

And yeah, when they fuse it swoops out and saturates the entire stage, in all phases and channels and spectra. I hadn’t noticed either the deep bass thrumming or the light sparkling noises when just listening through speakers.

As the crowd closes in, we get the sound of jackboots in unison. Then this tactile “slam,” like someone punching a metal wall, as (through Garnet’s narration) the spectators chime in with their opinions. Followed by a scraping, swooshing, mechanical sound as the palanquin rises.

I hadn’t noticed that as they land the clouds break. I mean, yeah, there’s the fire scene, but it just happens so quietly… unless you’re wearing headphones, at which point suddenly they’re in a very real, tactile environment compared to the abstraction of the sky arena.

Footfalls are all authentic soggy foot on wet grass noise, as they would be. Everything sounds freshly, moistly recorded. And yeah, the cave has its own atmospherics, changing the sound of the rain outside and providing its own close yet sustained reverb.

As they flash back to their fusion and ponder what the hell just happened to them both, the soundtrack keeps abruptly shifting with each cut, from this warm, slightly reverbed crackling fire to stabs of swooshing musical score and sparkle effects. It’s intentionally jarring,
but as the cuts go on, the reverb on the effects and some of the notes of the score sustain a bit longer each time it cuts back. It’s like when you dip your toe into hot bath water then jerk it out, then dip it in again more slowly, then tentatively insert your foot, etc.

I hadn’t caught Ruby pondering the gem on her palm, then eyeing Sapphire’s corresponding palm.

A Gem’s relationship with her gemstone must be pretty strange. She literally is that rock, and her body is just an illusion, but the gem itself has no awareness; only her projected body.

I really dig when the show dips into what fusion feels like, experientially; the implication, they never quite state outright, that it’s this transcendent high that one never wants to come down from.

There’s so much work on the expressions in this scene.

Oh God, I’d definitely not heard this song in headphones before. With the deep bass drum; the sounds of wet, waking nature as a backdrop. And also just the right space between Ruby’s and Sapphire’s voices that their harmony works: a bit awkward and stumbling but in sync for that.

The cut to crickets and general night atmosphere, and the way their vocals fall out of the soundstage back to diegesis, for the “Oh, um, I just can’t stop thinking…” sequence, it really sells the sense of budding romance, and the idea that they’ve been stewing on this a while.

The tangibility of the environment, and the way the characters are cemented in it even as they continue the song, lends weight to every word they speak.

“So, um. Did you say I was different?”

“And you hadn’t before?”

“Of course not… When would I have ever?”

Again the subtle things; this small yet tangible pat of foley when she touches Ruby’s hand:

“Well, you’re here too. We’re here together…”

As Sapphire begins to hum “Stronger Than You” against all the night sounds, they step into a more-stylized glen, away from the reality of Earth back into the world of myth, and her voice begins to echo. After nearly bumping gems, nervously, Ruby joins in, their voices blending. And the moment their harmony perfectly syncs up…

Again the foley. The hard two-handed smack against the tree, selling the weight and clumsiness. And I think her feet actually make different noises on the grass; one bare, one shod.

Where there’s a Pearl, there’s a piano. Then Rose brings the strings, allowing for a sparse take of “Stronger Than You,” sketched with the instruments of the Crystal Gems, as they… basically conduct their first job interview.

I like how pretty much immediately Garnet shifts any reference to Ruby or Sapphire to the third person. It’s confusing at first, but she’s not them. But if she’s not them, then who is she?

Their gems don’t even look the same anymore. They’re her gems now.

Nice reversal, by the way, panning down from that shot back into the present (which sounds so much more… present), now with Garnet sitting where Rose was and Steven lying where Garnet had been.

Apropos of nothing, a really nice Garnet face in the second-to-last shot:

Anyway. Yeah. The sound design really adds a ton to this episode in particular. Even more than usual, and the usual standard for this show is pretty high.

“Why Can’t I Move On?”

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I know that “It’s Over, Isn’t It” is everyone’s go-to song (once they get past “Stronger Than You”), but with its familiar Broadway melody and orchestration it took me a while to warm to, beside some of its more outre neighbors. The key things that sell it for me are subtler than its reputation; more contextual.

One is the obvious, yet somehow not fully obvious, point that she’s singing to Greg. Yes, semantically it’s clear enough—but think about the significance there; the intimacy of a song, and how she waits until he’s asleep to confess to him. This, to be clear, is just shortly after she refuses his dance. (Then just following this exorcism, they mutually accept.)

She’s not singing to herself (not entirely, not formally, at least), and not really to Rose. She’s directing her song, her bleeding musical wound, to the object of a couple of decades of her scorn. Which as a fact says so much more than the specific contents of that heart-dump.

And then there’s the structure of the song, which is a subtle thing, but its skipping, repetitive nature reflects the swirl of obsessive, intrusive thought patterns. Musically the song reflects Pearl’s attempt at poise even as structurally she’s scrambling for a throughline. “Why can’t I move on?” asks the scratched record.

It’s a significant song, and its meaning is expressed through its music and structure at least as much as its lyrics. Even the stiff, formal familiarity of the melody and instrumentation have something to say about the person and her thoughts and emotions.

As with most aspects of this show, the more you pick away, the more layers you realize you’ve been missing.

Thorns of a Rose

  • Reading time:3 mins read

The situation with Rose Quartz—it’s complicated, right? She’s a flawed person from a messed-up background who did a lot of awful things, then tried to do better things. Some of her actions were kinda good, but for messed-up reasons. Some were really messed-up, but with the best of intentions. And in the end I think she knew how much she’d fucked things up, how much suffering she’d caused, and she wasn’t entirely sure if it was worth it.

She’d made room to live as she wanted, for her and a handful of other Gems who survived, but at what cost? How many thousands had been shattered? How many more had been warped into self-fearing monsters? I don’t think she ever really forgave herself for that.

The one objectively good thing that came out of Pink’s interventions, Rose’s rebellion, was that she’d saved the Earth and its native life. Even that, though, she had trouble seeing as more than a menagerie—until she met Greg. Through him, learning to appreciate the humans she’d saved as actual people every bit as worthwhile as a Gem, connected to this world through their wants and needs and mortality in a way she never truly could be, I think Rose in the end came as close as she could to achieving what she wanted in life.

Rose was a sad person, who came from the greatest possible privilege and piece by piece realized how fucked-up everything about the life she was given truly was, first in regard to her own wants and needs, then in terms of the effect she had on the world around her, then just structurally in terms of the society. And she tried to change things, partially for selfish reasons; partially not. And she had no idea what she was doing, and made some really bad decisions along the way.

Again, it’s complicated. The show isn’t big on judging people, right? You judge the things that people do, the decisions they make. And Rose mostly did the best she could with what she was given, with who she was as a person. Possibly the best thing she ever did was the thing that made her the happiest: letting go, and allowing Steven to live a mortal life, the kind she never could.

Steven is in a sense the final stage of her metamorphosis, or transition if we want to hang onto the trans metaphor that the show uses—but as an independent person, who functions as a bridge between human and Gem life, he’s more than that. Though he never asked for it, he’s kind of the key not only to make up for Rose’s actions but to fulfill her ambitions by making peace across two worlds.

Rose stumbled onto the right path, and did what she could, but she was still a Diamond. There were always going to be some hard limits to her character, no mater her enthusiasm for a cause.

The Heart of the Crystal Gems

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Somehow it took me until today to piece together what’s going on with the Crystal Temple. Granted, this is a topic the show has studiously avoided returning to since it was introduced way back in episode four. We get some of its effects—its “metaphysical constructs,” as the Gems describe them—but no more mention of the Heart itself. I’d always felt like this was a big, weird loose end; it’s a concept someone had put a bunch of time into early on, then dropped.

Only now, it strikes me. Explicitly, the Heart is portrayed as advanced Gem technology. And Gem technology, morbidly, tends to run on actual living Gems. Obviously the shifting interior, it’s all light constructs, generated by the Crystal Heart—a powerful Gem, that’s been harnessed to do this massive projection task. This would follow the same horrific logic where Gems are integrated into objects and buildings on Homeworld, and how the CGs didn’t think twice about the cracked Gem-powered mirror they found by the Galaxy Warp all those thousands of years ago.

Heck, the job that the Crystal Heart does, it’s basically the same as Lapis’ mirror—both in regard to materializing images of things that had or might exist (albeit three-dimensional ones, compared to Lapis’ flat lens), and in responding to voice command. It’s just that it’s a huge, elaborate installation piece, compared to Lapis’ more modest, portable portal.

That latter bit, about the commands, is especially unnerving as far as what it suggests about a lingering consciousness.

Who did the Temple use to be, I wonder.

The Temple interior… it’s physically safe for the most part—as presumably it’s all, or mostly, light projection in there—but psychologically, it’s always been “off.” Rose’s room in particular, it’s never been a place where you really want to spend more time than you need to.

Requesting things from it, configuring new constructs, it’s like making wishes on a magic lamp. The genie does what it wants to, no matter how carefully you phrase your command, and it’s not going to go well in the end. The Crystal Heart, it’s willful. Full of seeming resentment. It’s not altogether malicious, but it’s not happy, and it seems to lash out passive aggressively every opportunity that it can.

A Gem powerful enough to project a glitch-terror version of all of Beach City at once, it’s… gotta be pretty high up the hierarchy. And if Lapis has had problems adjusting over the course of five seasons, I imagine a Gem that powerful, if set free, would be… trouble.

Lapis is powerful. She’s almost certainly the strongest Gem we’ve seen outside of a Diamond, and she may even rival them if she stops holding back out of fear of herself. Whoever the Crystal Heart used to be, assuming I’m reading this right, must be like a minor god.

Someone who could harness the reality-shifting powers of the Crystal Temple, and focus them outward—I can see how it might take all four Diamonds to control it, and them not even really being enough. This is a person you’d really rather have on your side than not, ideally.

It—I’m not saying it is, but I wonder if… you know… the expanding team, needing its own space… they try to reconfigure the Temple interior, and…

Just shoving a pin in this. It’s… well, it feels like something I would do at this point. Especially given what it would mean, dismantling the Crystal Gems’ sanctuary. If you want to spell the end of an era, that’s not a bad route to go.

The Terror of the Present

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Despite its long, complex story and rich themes and character development, Steven Universe can sometimes come off as childish—particularly to those who dwell on plot progression. Often this comes in the same breath as critique of the show’s themes as inappropriate for such a childish piece of media. There’s a cognitive dissonance here to be sure, but it doesn’t come from within the show.

The issue may be that the work it does is largely internal: emotional labor, if you will. The maturity in Steven Universe is comes from personal development: dealing with mental illness, trauma, the complications of relating to others; learning to judge actions, not people. People do awful things sometimes, for reasons based in the pain they carry. Separating the two is one of the first steps toward empathy, justice, and healing.

The show isn’t a grim-dark melodrama; as it unfolds, it becomes a complicated, sober discussion of how experiences affect a person’s emotions; how emotions drive people’s thoughts and behavior; and how this expresses itself internally, externally—individually, interpersonally, systemically. All this can result in generational cycles or systems of violence and abuse—unless it’s addressed at its root.

At the start of the show, the main cast has mostly been frozen in place, unable to grow or move on, for thousands of years. Nearly every character carries some trauma; serves to represent a particular kind of mental illness. The show’s vision of maturity involves learning how to do better. There are no easy answers, relapse is the biggest part of recovery, and mental illness is forever. But, there are ways to learn to respond better—and to break the cycle.

The show’s major conflict lies in the attitudes and circumstances that reinforce these patterns: in the oppression of the status quo. For all its chirpiness, Steven Universe is underlaid with an existential horror, derived from invalidation: the fear of one’s fundamental wrongness, as dictated by others. This comes home in the final arc of season five, which through its strengthened language and focus on themes like conversion therapy nudges the show’s window just enough to lay bare the trans allegory that has in hindsight been woven into the show from day one.

Progression in the show largely deals with breaking down assumptions: about one’s self, about others, about the world that we live in. A big part of that involves learning about and de-mythologizing the past: trying to really understand how things came to be the utter shit that they are today, so you can start to find a way to avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over—and just maybe, build a better future.

Plot—this idea that there’s a driving, correct order of events that we’re supposed to take in our lives—is one of those major assumptions. Steven Universe is never really about Things that Happen; in the show as in reality, little that happens happens without cause or consequence, because of fate or some higher demand. The plot is there—structured meticulously to provide a constant pull on the action without calling much attention to itself—but it does its best to keep out of the way. Instead the story comes from the moment-to-moment interactions between characters and how they explore the show’s underlying themes—themes that get messier and messier as the show goes on.

Even the plot-bomb episodes, like “A Single Pale Rose,” what makes them interesting tends to be less the Things that Happen than, well, the mess: all the surrounding implications, and how they feed into what we know of everyone’s psychology; how it clarifies their behaviors, and might show them a route forward.

This kind of development, it’s difficult to showcase in a reel of Mature Goings-On. Reduced to action and individual moments, it’ll just look like a bunch of crying and longing glances and people looking apprehensive. It’s a novelistic form of storytelling, that rewards and relies on engagement. Meet it halfway, and the show unfurls, revealing a difficult kind of a conversation that most television actively chooses to avoid.

The maturity comes in working through all the crap put on a person by society, by prior generations, by relationships—all the expectations and judgments and every reason why one should be ashamed of who one is—and finding the start of an inner peace.

Disruption

  • Reading time:9 mins read

I think I touched on this before, but in kinda the way that our first encounter with Uncle Andy presages Steven’s later attempt to change the mind of a bigoted relative on the other side of the family, “Kevin Party” sets up just how shocking White’s behavior is in that encounter.

It’s a subtle thing, maybe; the show paints Kevin as the most irredeemable character in Beach City. Even the worst of the Homeworld Gems, their destructive behavior comes out of their training and biases and assumptions, which can be challenged and changed. Kevin is just a sociopath—but even Kevin, with his weird raging hard-on for himself, wouldn’t stoop as low as knowingly misgendering someone. Like, seriously, who would do that?

You can excuse most Homeworld Gems, who don’t have a sense of gender. But, White? She knows. And she makes a point of it.

That whole encounter with White, that’s the first (and thus far only) time the show depicts behavior like this. Outside of again just not parsing the concept of gender, it was simply off the table for even the grossest, angriest, or most otherwise bigoted characters. As usual, the broadcast schedule makes things weird; just on an episodic basis, it isn’t all that long between the two encounters, first showing what in real-world terms feels like startling magnanimity from Kevin, then shortly later cashing in the contrast. Kevin’s attitude, it helps to establish the stakes and the nature of the threat at the show’s climax.

The show saves it for the climax, because this is the big, existential fear at the heart of the show; the thing it spends five seasons avoiding, dancing around, not wanting to vocalize—yet that drives all of its thoughts and actions, much as Pearl’s or Amethyst’s or, yes, Pink Diamond’s inner traumas define the characters that we come to know.

Backtracking a little: we do get a bit of a preview of White’s behavior a couple of episodes earlier with one of the lesser Diamonds. Though even here you can see the terror in her face. Like all the other Gems, she’s playing the role she’s been handed as well as she can.

Before this episode, the show had never quite underlined the trans subtext to fusion. I mean, yes, it emerges with Stevonnie as a non-binary figure—but it turns out their human terms are exemplary of the general case, not an exception. Every fusion is a Stevonnie of sorts. It’s just that Gem society doesn’t have sex or gender; it has type, which fills those roles, plus race and class.

A ruby and a sapphire fusing into a new being, who calls herself a garnet—there are assigned-at-emergence garnets on Homeworld. It’s, you could maybe piece some of this together before “Together Alone,” but here the show just comes out and says it: in the terms of the show’s mythology and metaphor, Garnet is basically trans.Yes, we’d seen some lower-ranked Gems respond to her with confusion, disdain, or worse—but this episode, as the centerpiece of the Homeworld arc, really serves to nail down the trans overtone of that arc, which in turn serves to consciously shift the narrative window of the entire show.

This business with the more abstracted misgendering toward Garnet, it then serves as a direct setup to the thitherto unprecedented transgressions of White, toward Steven, another 40 or so minutes on.

I’ve said before how much I enjoy the nightmare structure of this episode, which actually starts on a literal nightmare and then progresses exactly as you know it has to based on the title and premise. Unavoidably, like watching a car crash in slow motion, being helpless to stop. A while ago I mused on the show’s relationship with horror, and that’s what this whole episode is. But, it’s a Lynchian form of horror that the show hadn’t really gone into very deeply before. “Together Alone” is like Eraserhead with a PG rating.

It’s easy to dismiss “Together Alone” as a slow nine minutes, then a final two minutes of discomfort at a character acting in the only way they ever would, which their entire character arc led toward, but which armchair writers love to call dumb and out-of-character, then shock. But, again, it… you know. Let’s ignore the people who don’t know story structure and don’t know how to engage with television. And let’s even ignore the episode’s role as a fragment of a larger serial narrative. Just taken on its own, “Together Alone” is pretty remarkable.

As it wears in, it’s coming to fit as one of the strongest, strangest episodes of the show; one of a special circle that has the most to say. It’s very possibly one of the best episodes since its namesake, “Alone Together,” some 120 chapters earlier—though it’s a bit of a sleeper to get to that point. Like Blade Runner, it takes a lot of post-processing to work out the significance of what you’ve seen.

It chips at the subconscious. It’s all just so very distressing, on levels far beyond the linear story events, which are quite dramatic on their own—though in a show like this you’ve a sense of the stakes and structure and what must, or is at least extremely likely to, happen as a result, and what won’t. So it’s not clear why you feel so upset, and the knee-jerk impulse is to blame something: the plot, the characters. You lash out, because the story is working as it’s meant to. You’re uncomfortable.

And that’s kinda what Steven Universe is. The actual plot beats are the least of it, here as always. For 160 episodes, plot is incidental to what the show has to say or takes the slightest interest in exploring. It’s there, and it’s meticulously structured, but it’s obligatory. For an episode like “Together Alone,” focusing on plot is like obsessing over the big picture to Lost Highway. I mean, you can do that. But, you’re kinda… you’re not engaging with the story on the level that it’s working, you know?

The events that happen at the end of the episode have to happen by the sheer existence of the episode. You anticipate them, if not beat-by-beat then something close, from the moment you see that the episode exists. And that’s built into the structure, into the horrible anticipation throughout. So for most of those eleven minutes of a lifetime, it draws out every ounce of that discomfort and twists it, makes it a little bit weirder, a little more alien, puts you into an even less certain place than you thought you were, while you watch the horror play out to script.

At a point you think, seriously, what is this shit? This is all so unnecessary.

Which is exactly the point.

It’s not just us. Ruby, Sapphire, Amethyst, Pearl, they all see what’s happening. They all stand, helpless, and watch, knowing what’s coming—hoping it doesn’t, but unable to change things. We’re all part of the party, all in concert with our foreknowledge of the awful inevitable—while the show’s two effective leads wander off into the distance, the same way you-as-audience watch you-as-character in your own worst nightmares, knowing as their orchestrator exactly what’s coming, screaming at yourself to stop—but you can’t hear you, and you just keep going.

There’s another thing here. Because the moment of horror, the thing that must not happen, it’s the purest thing. It’s the embodiment of love, joy, self-discovery. Stevonnie’s always used to explore this duality: the euphoria, paired with the often-existential anxiety. “Together Alone” takes that to another level, and translates it into the show’s most raw concept of threat.

This is the trouble of metamorphosis. There’s the liberation in finding and accepting yourself, and exploring what that means, and all is fine in theory—but then, you run into the way the world responds to you. And the terror sets in. Whether that’s a million peering eyes and Kevin, or an entire bigoted society. To this point, Stevonnie’s anxieties have been internal, psychological. They’ve been developmental hurdles for them to transcend. Here, the show’s whole world crashes in. The vague danger posed by their identity, always overcome by the positives to the point we’ve nearly forgotten the threat, it becomes manifest.

Music that long ago, in a more innocent time, represented everything pure in the world, now plays for menace, much like the chopped-up, mangled version of “Stronger Than You” that plays when Garnet meets the forced fusion experiments, or Rose’s corrupted theme during Greg’s info dump about the war, and what the Gems had been doing on Earth all that time.

And we’re not even at White, yet. And the basic problem of Steven himself.

Anyway. Steven Universe is just such a marvel of storytelling. Most things, you know, the more you pick at them, the more they fall apart. It takes a certain level of literature for the opposite to be true, where the more scrutiny you give it, the stronger it gives back.

I just adore this show to bits. If you’ve been putting off watching it, seriously, just do. Especially if you’re a liberal arts lit nerd, or whatever, and you know how to read a text on the level it intends. It’s the very best thing, and just so different from other stories.

If you haven’t seen it, this is the best possible time to do so. The show as originally conceived has wrapped; that story is done, and can be taken as a whole. There’s a movie coming, and what looks like a sequel show, maybe-kinda, which will begin a new story. For now, though, you’ve got a whole summer to catch up. And then watch it all another four times, in your disbelief.

(Of course, the network makes it as hard as possible to watch complete, uncut, in order. Streaming is a mess; the DVD situation is worse than useless. If you want to watch it, it’s better to follow less-licit routes, where things tend to be better curated, in higher quality.

How long this‘ll stay up, who can say, but everything here is of a high bitrate, and organized in correct story order.)

Social Alarms

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So the shit is, with the emotional defenses I’ve leaned on most of my life, the only people who tend to get through the barriers I’ve set up are those:

  • With superficial charm
  • With no sense of boundaries
  • Who refuse to take “no” for an answer

Kind of a big failure there. One of my big projects this year, I think I’m going to have to map out a re-wire of my whole social alarm system.

End effect of my current setup, the people who’ve gotten close enough to have a controlling influence on my life have tended to be aspirational boomers. Like, they see everything as an acquisition and the world as a game to be won. Life is theirs to claim on a whim, and whatever may stand in the way of a want is the cruelest form of oppression.

I’m not really into acquiring things (aside from irregularly adding to media libraries, but I don’t see ideas as things so much), or winning… much of anything. And I don’t understand most burning desires. So I guess this makes me a perfect foil, until they start to feel foiled.

Since I’m not a person in their eyes as much as a erroneous order in this service industry we call life, this leads to a constant state of “I want to speak to the manager,” and this cycle of abuse while I scramble and fail to do what apparently is expected of me in situations like this. They tend to assume everyone thinks like them, so I could only be messing up so badly on purpose to fuck with them, as part of my own twisted agenda. And, how dare I.

Anybody with an ounce of sense or sensitivity tends to, you know, leave me alone. But maybe, the sensible and sensitive are the people I’d less mind if they didn’t. Because most of my idea of relating to others, it’s been shaped by people in that first category, which is what’s made me so paranoid about others.

Not everybody is that awful. Heck, most people aren’t. It’s only the people who I can’t chase away so easily.

There’s also the detail about trusting myself and not giving in where it feels wrong, not compromising my own values to whoever has the stronger personality. Which has always been a problem. But, you know. If you’re gonna build safety filters, might as well make sure to calibrate them right.

The Sex Dungeon

  • Reading time:4 mins read

As ever, don’t take this as me dictating the One Right Experience—I’m just talking about me here—but for me the one big story that for decades shielded me from recognizing my gender issues (blinding as they may be) is our collective obsession with sexuality. We sexualize the concept of gender. We sexualize—or at least romanticize—all relationships, all emotions that connect us to others. It becomes this minefield of expectation; of these models of behavior, of feeling, of thinking, of existing, that you’re expected to fall into—and if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you.

Tied into all this are problems with representation, where unless you look for it, anything outside the gender binary might as well not exist except as a fetish. I know this is also a problem for other marginalized identities—objectification as the only recognition. You’re only valid to the extent you serve a purpose. I am terrified of being objectified; I have been for as long as I can remember. As long as I’ve been aware of sex, I’ve felt this vulnerability that I only recently have come to understand.

I don’t experience sexual or romantic attraction, but for most of my life I’ve been led to confuse empathy with a guilty sort of desire; for all that I’ve been told my affinity must be sexual, I recognize something isn’t quite right with that story. That uncertainty, that intangible sense of wrongness, it festers, leading me to feel just awful about the whole thing. There’s this anxiety that builds up about ever identifying with anyone, despite this strong relational draw to, in particular, gender non-conforming women (and active repulsion from identifying with men).

Getting through that, to nail down and embrace my sexuality, that was the first step—and it took me ages. Once I had drawn that division, I was free to unpick all the severed threads, to see where they led; what was going on with my attitudes. It’s only then I was able to recognize what I had so clearly been feeling the last four decades and why; how strongly I responded to seeing myself reflected in others, despite failing to grasp what I saw or how it affected me.

The notion that it was possible to be a gender non-conforming woman regardless of one’s assignment at birth, and not in the context of some fetish for someone else’s benefit, but just as a person, as an identity—it’s not a story one tends to encounter too often, culturally.

To exist for one’s own sake and not for the sake of someone else—this is such a long road. For that, I blame our culture’s obsession with sex and sexuality, none of which applies to me or the way I look at the world or myself. You know, I’m just me. I’m not here for any purpose except to be who I am. And through all this noise, I couldn’t see me at all.

As I say, other people are wired in their own particular ways, and take comfort and interest in things that bore me or make me want to cry. They’re not wrong for being who they are. It’s just that this one narrative, about how we’re meant to think and feel and relate to each other—it’s not The One. It’s not correct. It’s just a million slight variations of a single narrow story. Other stories are available.

The concept of sex, it was a shackle to me. To others it’s the key. The story is only wrong when it’s forced on you. And that’s the real point here.

Your story, it comes from inside. In this month of bricks and riots, and at any other time of the year, don’t let anyone else tell you who you are. Don’t buy into this notion that your script is sitting there, waiting for you to act out. Everyone around you, they’re all working through their own garbage, looking for validation of their own. But their stories, they have nothing to do with you. Yours is for you to tell yourself.

Love starts with you. Be kind to yourself, listen to what you’re saying—and let that make the whole world a better place to be.