A thing about this show is that it tends to be kind of half-hearted with action and fight sequences, because that’s not something it cares about all that much. It’s more this inevitability. But, horror? It’s so on top of it. This is an important subject.
And again with the sound design. The music that plays as Garnet struggles with the forced fusion, it’s a chopped-up, corrupted version of… well, this.
Nearly all the horror is existential, because of course it is. When it’s embodied in a tangible threat, the threat is a threat generally less for its immediate ability to harm than for its implication. For its threat to the very essence of a person, and everything they hold dear. Invalidating one’s existence is pretty much Horror Embodied, here.
You’re not a real person. You are a perversion. Nothing you care about matters. It must be cleansed.
Horror is a function of the core drama and themes that the show serves to discuss. It’s a natural consequence of friction within those concepts. Action, rather less so.
Every bit of adversity is underlined, and made awful, less by its physical threat (no matter how large that may be) than by its psychological, emotional weight—again, usually in the form of invalidation.
All the more reason why season four is so crucial in this show, it being about Steven’s downward spiral, basically causing him to give up on himself—and why people who dismiss it as lacking story because it’s relatively slim on action setpieces are just, um. Well, silly.
Different sort of horror going on here. It’s all central to the show’s sense of conflict. All basically the same, in different hues.
As I say, soon I want to go in deep on Rose’s portrait how it’s used in the show. From the very first episodes it’s this uncertain, ambivalent presence. If pressed, Steven will say it’s inspiring, but… of what exactly? As the show goes on, it looms more ominously.
Most of the monsters in the show, they were turned into monsters by despair. Their minds were broken, and they devolved along with their concept of who they were. Which is kind of an unspoken threat to all the major characters, if they sink low enough.
Later in the same season as the above clip, there was a moment with Amethyst when it really looked like she might be in danger of losing grip on who she was. That’s not the direction the show went. As it happened, Jasper was the one who lost herself. But, it seemed like a real possibility for a time.
The ideas at the core of Steven Universe are deeply existential. They’re about identity and lived experience and expectation and abuse and obligation. It’s a show about misfits—people who’ve been told they’re wrong, and broken, and perverse, for even existing—slowly trying to find a way to cope, through mutual unconditional love. That’s not a scenario that a fist or a beast can really threaten all that much. But words, and doubt? They can be the end of everything.