We All Fall Down

Bogey Town

  • Reading time:6 mins read

So much of my abuse experience has been guilt over thinking about it, labeling it, bringing it up at all—comparing it to worst-case scenarios and thinking it wasn’t as bad as that, beating myself up for being so weak as to be affected like this, point to anyone other than myself. Then I actually recount what happened, and I see how alarmed people become, and I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. And I read others’ accounts, and I read long articles and manuals about abuse, and they’re like a glossary of my experience. I’m told it’s a textbook case. Then I look for any little crack. Surely I must be exaggerating. There must be an extenuating factor. It has to be my fault somehow. I know I didn’t always act perfectly either. Sometimes things just happen and they’re messy. Then I look at the damage I’m still working through.

It’s, like. The self-doubt. This is what keeps people down. This is why people don’t speak out. The mind games. Abusers seek out people with low confidence, and they write the story. They make it clear that any contradiction is a betrayal, and in fact an attack on them.

It’s so hard to resolve the imbalance. The mind, it keeps dancing to make things equal. Yes, they did this, but… either it’s not as heavy as it looks or it must offset something on my end. One is so trained toward fairness. A sense of reason. I must have deserved it somehow. Approached as a closed system, you keep adjusting the scale, trying to make it even out. It has to make sense. The person you rely on for everything, that you invest everything in, you adore so deeply, it must have taken something huge on your end for them to treat you like this.

I have breathing problems. It’s not a physical thing; it’s that I keep forgetting to breathe. Even when I remember, stress constricts my airways. For close to a decade I had this mysterious chronic cough and lightheadedness, that went away as soon as I was on my own again.

I used to be a singer, technically. I at least had years of singing lessons. The thing that came hardest to me was breath control. The slightest anxiety, and my body cinched up. My lung capacity shriveled. I didn’t have the tools to work against it, or even communicate my trouble.

My voice lesson the other day, I brought this up. They suggested a few ways to break the tension—applying some outside pressure, some other frame of reference. Pressing on the diaphragm with the heel of one’s hand, for instance. And it’s tough, but it sort of works. So far.

And that’s why they isolate you. That’s why they try to strip you of your friends, your tools, your resources. Why they insist that talking about even neutral internal business is considered a betrayal of trust. Because their control is predicated entirely on a closed system. The moment you start to talk about what’s been happening, the moment people can give you feedback, that you can start to compare notes, the system begins to break down. They no longer control the scale. And that’s the moment they live in terror of. Because, what comes next?

This is the moment that it feels like we are entering as a society. Hundreds of years of abuse, it’s all starting to come out. Everyone the world over, to an extent regardless of ideology, is starting to recognize it for what it is—while the powerful scramble, and scream. In the way that they will.

  • There’s a reason we don’t have healthcare.
  • There’s a reason we don’t have food.
  • There’s a reason we don’t have guaranteed housing.
  • There’s a reason we’re poor.
  • There’s a reason we’re punished so heavily, for minor offenses.
  • There’s a reason we’re triangulated against each other.

None of this is natural. None of it has to be like this. We deserve better. We deserve to have our own lives. To be allowed to care about each other. This is all done to us. And just the littlest resistance, it scares them this much.

Their hold is so tenuous. It’s all a story. It’s the story written in these statues that we’re tearing down. It’s a story that weaves and wraps through every unnatural system we’re taught to rely on for our basic survival. Wall Street. Banks. Corporations. This notion of a 9-to-5 job. Productivity. Real estate. Copyright. It’s all just a story.

We can write a new one. A just one. We have everything we need to take care of each other. What if we just… did it?

To every oppressor, and to those who benefit from abuse, the abused are internalized as the bogeyman. They have to keep up the abuse, because what if one day the victims activate and turn against them? If the victims are ostensibly freed, then what if they come back for revenge?

This is in particular the white narrative in this country, and in every other colonial society. It’s the basis for every horror story we tell. There’s a reason zombies are based on Haitian culture. Haiti, the free Black nation that famously overthrew white rule, that we have punished ever since out of fear the ideas might spread. What if They turned on us? What if They came back, and we were called to pay for our sins?

This is the fear on an individual level. This is the fear on a structural level. It’s the fear the in-some-way privileged are coached to repeat to ourselves in our deepest metaphors. It becomes justification for every abuse. It’s necessary, because it’s too late now.

To which my brain responds with… say, for instance, CHAZ. Weeks of police violence; then out of terror of retribution, they left the station to the masses… who occupied that fraught space, and started a farmer’s market.

I’m not talking forgiveness, because what good is that and what does it even mean, really. I just mean, like. Who gives a shit about them. All their power is illusory. We don’t have to grant it. What if we just ignored them, and checked on each other instead. That whole thing where you see someone in danger—a woman, BIPOC, Muslim, queer—and you step between them. You ignore the attacker and you just check in with your old friend whom you’ve never met before. Demonstrate solidarity in the face of irrelevance. Often that’s all it takes.

What they fear more than anything is a loss of power, of irrelevance. Of our realizing we don’t need them, we don’t have to fear them. That we can take care of each other. That against every story we’re told, kindness and compassion and support are what make a functioning world.

I am still very ill, and fraught, and stretched too thin to clearly see, and I don’t know what I have to give at the moment, either materially or emotionally. It’s all theoretical. But. Maybe it’s time to trust a bit in compassion, and a recognition that we are in this together.

Full Spectrum Broadcast

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Whoa, fucking yikes. Social overload. Just spent two hours talking to people I don’t know over video conference. I feel so tense right now. Presumably this will get easier? But, the grad student I have been paired with for one-on-one is cool. Aside from voice, she asked about my interest in other kinds of communication and signalling, like body language. And. Yo.

Autistic, right. Nobody ever taught me this for any gender, so I never picked it up. I’ve always felt very strange in face-to-face interaction, and people often feel weird talking to me, because I Do Not Signal in a way that makes sense to neurotypical people. Which sometimes is awkward. Sometimes is absurd. And sometimes it’s dangerous. (E.g., cops, security.)

But, on top of working on the voice: posture, body language, gestures. This is beyond a gender thing. This is a Being-A-Person tutorial that I’ve never had.

She also framed makeup as an element of non-verbal language, that she could help with. And. I’m going to have to steep on this some more, but. Yeah, okay. I hadn’t internalized presentation as communication, with its own grammar and symbology, but of course that’s what it is.

So… we’ll see how this goes.

Punitive Narrative Justice

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Redemption is a reductive kind of moralism. 

Zuko doesn’t really have a redemption arc, because he was never “bad.” The Diamonds don’t really have a redemption arc, because they never become “good.” Redemption is a weird external moralistic concept that has nothing to do with individual character development or lack thereof.

To put it another way: The Last Airbender never condemns Zuko, so forgiveness isn’t the point of the story; and Steven Universe never forgives the Diamonds, because nothing could ever make up for what they did.

This isn’t to say that the characters don’t change their behavior for the better. What I’m criticizing is a binary and extrinsic reading of morality in relation to narrative function, as opposed to an intrinsic reading of situational character motivation. 

Redemption is an externally imposed concept that doesn’t allow for agency or intention, but rather describes a functional narrative approach to character. It suggests: 

  1. an innate change of a character’s essence, 
  2. to serve the demands of another’s morality…

… which is a simplistic understanding of psychology, social dynamics, and… just, judgment. Really, redemption is all about judgment, which lies in the perspective of the narrative voice. It’s an external thing, where the story passes sentence on characters and demands that they change who they are in order to suit its morality and make up for their past sins, and to thereby be forgiven by the story. Which is a super basic concept of humanity that doesn’t apply in either case above.

Zuko is shown from pretty close to the start as a victim; he’s not a Bad Guy who Turns Good. His arc is a matter of self-realization and emergence from an abuse narrative, and its resolution involves reaching a common understanding, not repaying moral debt.

And the Diamonds, they are never forgiven. They change their behavior out of argument for how it’s not helping them achieve their own individual intentions. Even at the end, they are shown to be extremely self-centered characters who have difficulty understanding anything outside of how it affects them directly. Steven tolerates them at a stretch, once they change their behavior enough that they no longer pose a threat to others. But what they did will never be okay, no matter what they do, and the story makes no pretense of balancing the scales. 

Compare to, say, something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the characters of Angel or Spike. In the case of Spike the protagonists stick a microchip in him, taking away his agency, until he gets used to behaving the way they want him to. With Angel, the change mostly happens before we meet him. But the notion is that they’re Bad characters who become Good, and then feel sorry and try to make amends for what they’ve done. Similarly Missy, in the Peter Capaldi era of Doctor Who, undergoes a redemption after serving penitence for years in solitary confinement and out of a desire to please the Doctor and try to play out his concept of morality. 

In all cases, there’s this notion of penitence and turning from Evil. With Spike the change comes after the microchip, which changes his behavior until he becomes accustomed to the new way of being, even after it’s removed. It’s a punitive, judgmental, carceral sort of a moralism. The idea is to show people how Bad they are until they are ashamed of themselves and they want to stop being Bad—”Go to your room and think about what you did”—all of which ignores the complexities of how and why people do things based on their understanding and their systemic context, and treats others as lacking a degree of agency independent of those passing judgment on them and their own individual interests.

You are not a person, the redemption narrative asserts; you are a story function within my life. 

Refusal

  • Reading time:5 mins read

So Maya Petersen recently tweeted out the obvious yet previously unvoiced behind-the-scenes intention for Peridot to be Steven Universe’s aroace representation. This shouldn’t be a surprise, particularly given Peri’s role in Rebecca Sugar’s “all about fusion” children’s book a while back. (“And if you don’t want to fuse… that’s cool, too.”) But, of course, this admission has led to discourse.

There are now a hundred and twelve long and angry rants in all the usual places about why making Peridot aroace is somehow a bad thing. One of the more creative is the notion that because we’re using fusion as a way to illustrate this, it suggests that autistic people are incapable of forming meaningful relationships of any sort. Which, just…

Yikes.

I feel like people push back way too hard against the reductive reading of fusion-as-sex, to the point where it’s functionally meaningless. “It’s not sex,” people assert, “it’s just any kind of relationship at all!” And, no. That overcorrects to the point where if anything it would be more accurate to just shrug and say, okay, they’re all fucking.

Fusion is about intimacy. It’s about being so in-harmony with another person that the boundaries disappear and you might as well be one. Ergo, the dancing. In our touch-starved culture it’s super hard to draw the line between intimacy and sex, to the point that intimacy is often used as a synonym for sex. People often don’t seem to understand there are other kinds of intimacy.

To say that fusion is just any old relationship reduces the metaphor to the point where it might as well not even exist, all out of a fear of coming anywhere near a discussion of fucking or an inability to separate fucking from intimacy.

Not every relationship is going to be an intimate one. That would be nuts. Not every intimate relationship is going to be a sexual one. That would be unfortunate.

As a highly sex-averse (and even touch-averse) aroace person myself, I see zero functional problem with the use of fusion as a metaphor when discussing a lack of sexual or romantic attraction. A person can have lots of kinds of relationships without a desire for intimacy—be it romantic or sexual or anything else in nature. And likewise in the show, people can have relationships without fusing. Peridot and Steven have a relationship, a close and special one, and they are unlikely to fuse on purpose. There are boundaries, that Peridot is unlikely to feel motivated to cross.

With an understanding of Peridot’s intended representation, the metaphor continues to work exactly as deigned.

There’s also a popular thread where people like to leap on Peri’s obvious autistic coding as basis for why any little thing under the moon is problematic when applied to her in particular, but. Again, speaking as an autistic person, this all seems… correct?

Yeah, an inherent problem with representation is that everyone is different so no single representative is going to completely map with an individual’s experience. But, they shouldn’t have to. That’s absurd. Not everything is about me, or about you, or about the next person in particular.

I’m reminded of how Wikipedia editors seem to think it’s impossible to summarize Doctor Who without diving deep into the character’s allergy to aspirin. It’s crucially important to understanding who the character is, they will insist.

Ideally there wouldn’t just be one aroace-coded character in the show, and they wouldn’t also be an autistic-coded character, and so on and so on. But, let’s take a step back and consider: there is an aroace-coded character, and there is a positively portrayed autistic-coded character. Both of which are vanishingly unusual. And the way they’re depicted is broadly accurate and sympathetic, both within the show’s language and in terms of what’s being represented. Not in every way for every autistic person, or every aroace person, but I am also not every autistic person or every aroace person, and though I shouldn’t expect my experience to mirror anyone else’s completely I think I have a few relevant things to say about my own.

Like Stevonnie or Garnet, Peridot isn’t perfect, idealized representation. She’s just roughly accurate, literary-coded representation in a field where even that is difficult to find. There’s nothing wrong with her depiction, with her coding, or the continued use of the endlessly complicated metaphor of fusion to explain something almost never explained in mainstream contemporary fiction. I’m aroace, and her aversion to intimacy is accurate to my experience. I’m autistic, and her collection of obsessions and blind spots is cartoonish but also accurate. The intersection of the two is something that I can easily identify with.

Not everyone will, and not everyone has to. And that’s okay. That doesn’t mean they’re doing it wrong. It doesn’t mean ill intent. It just means that everyone is different.

And that we really need to understand what intimacy is, in this culture.

The Norm, and Conquest

  • Reading time:3 mins read

It bothers me when pundits talk about “destroying norms” like it’s a bad thing. We should constantly be examining and dismantling norms as a matter of procedure. This is how, e.g., science works. What is a problem is when we replace them with much worse, more damaging norms.

That is what freaks people out about Bernie and causes them to equate him with Trump. They’re both out to destroy our norms! It’s the Norman Conquest!

Our norms fucking suck. This is why Trump got elected. People wanted rid of them so much they didn’t care what came next.

Neoliberalism is a lattice of norms that serve to complicate and hide and rationalize the garbage that people have to go through every day, explaining why they should never hope for anything better. It puts people in categories and places while claiming enlightenment.

Norms suck. They only make sense as temporary placeholders, that you check every fucking time you access them to see if they’re still applicable and relevant. And if not, you replace them with something better. This is how life and knowledge and empathy all work.

As an autistic, this point especially rankles. I get a PTSD trigger out of this sense that we need to adhere to unspoken structures just because they exist, never question them. No, dammit. Always ask, why are we doing this? What does it assume? Who does it serve?

Can we be doing this better? Or is this just to protect the power structure?

Because that’s always what it is, right.

Norms are politesse. Politesse is power gaming.

This is what allows the powerful to set people against each other, by saying, “Hey, that vulnerable group is saying it’s impolite for you to behave like this! The snobs! Are you gonna just take that from them?!”

When you’re all wound up, just being asked to be kind to another person can be confused for more bureaucracy meant to put you in your place. Neoliberalism and fascism both depend on this bafflement, which is what makes them such close allies.

Fascism is all about smashing norms as a gesture of progress, only to replace them with even more restrictive norms, over and over, putting people in even smaller boxes. So it’s exasperating, but for the neoliberal, HEY AT LEAST THEY ARE BUILDING NEW NORMS. AND WE’RE STILL SAFE.

“We” of course meaning the business and pundit class. Not the people who need to live (or not) in this society.

Socialism threatens to take away that whole power infrastructure and give nothing in return, because that structure that demands never to be questioned is itself the problem.

Like, new structures will appear! But they will be built to purpose, and reexamined as that purpose shifts.

I can’t deal with invisible power structures. Which is a big reason I am such a mess. Why I have historically gotten in so much trouble. Sometimes for, like, having the wrong expression on my face. Nobody likes them except those they serve. But I in particular cannot manage.

I have zero sympathy for rounding the wagons and protecting the precious norms. The white settlers. Clutching their pearls.

Dismantle it all. Carefully. Like an archeologist, removing a relic from its crust. Pack it away to a museum somewhere appropriate to show how things were.

Life goes on. Work with those who exist here and now, and those we can reasonably expect to come. Meet the needs that exist in the world.

For the norms that are really trenched in good, well.

Lizard Toes

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Though I have no expectations for HRT, and am already getting some of what I hoped in terms of mood stability and energy, I’ve a sense my body as it has developed will put up very little resistance. While I’m starving for estrogen, there is trace evidence of testosterone either.

  • My growth spurt, and voice change, didn’t hit until my late teens.
  • I barely had facial hair until my mid-30s, and it was still patchy until recently.
  • The only body hair I have is on my limbs, and even that’s mostly thin and vellus.
  • I’ve got no upper-body muscle mass at all.
  • My scalp hair has only in the last couple years begun to recede a little above the temples, into that M shape.
  • I’ve never had anything like a libido.

It’s just super clear that any masculine influence in my system has been weak, and slow, and unassertive. It arrives with a shrug. It is clear, based on a laundry list of factors I both have and haven’t mentioned, my biology is not… entirely standard-issue. I’m wondering just how hard it will hit me when my body realizes I finally do have some working hormones to work with.

What i can say is—I have notoriously poor circulation, which makes sense with my historically low heart rate and weak pulse. I’m like a lizard. And my feet are so very far away from my heart, they’re always frozen. I have long found that wearing thick socks can warm my entire body. Now, moments after taking my pill, I start to glow. I can feel my blood. My feet raise to a normal body temperature.

This is one of a million little examples of how I suddenly feel normal and complete and human and confusingly not-like-shit. I have never felt so consistently not-awful as I have since last Tuesday. For maybe an hour after every dose I just feel warm and fuzzy and high, then proceed to feel high-functioning (to my standard) awake for the next eight hours.

I have things to do in the morning, and I feel like at this rate I may just have it in me to keep it together.

Gender Power

  • Reading time:2 mins read

So everything works differently for everyone and placebo sure is a thing, but two pills into this regime I can definitely say they have an immediate mood effect. What I get from estrogen is what it seems like caffeine does to other people. I’m instantly more alert, able to cope. Due presumably to my neurology, caffeine helps me to focus and calms me down. It actually makes me a little tired. It’s like a warn brain shower.

But, I’m… one of my basic daily troubles is feeling capable of… like, anything. It takes me hours to get out of bed, even awake. Doing anything at all, having the energy to get started, feeling like it’s possible for me to engage, is such a struggle. I’m always so drained and discouraged. Halfway through walking home from the supermarket I’ll think, I could just sit down and die here.

And, like. The sudden energy and meed stability I’m getting now with the proper hormones in my system, I don’t have it within me to make this up. I don’t think this is placebo. I think this is correcting a real imbalance. And… I must wonder, do other people feel like this always?

And the effect, it hits so fast. Like my system was starving. I am no longer on my last thread, weak and tired and helpless, where it all could end at any moment.

I could have been doing this the last 25 years, and not been suffering.

Now if I can just medicate this ADHD, we’ll be onto something.

As it is, I’ve had my morning coffee and I am yawning. I was alert until then. But better than going uncaffeinated.

A curious thing is, everyone I interacted with the other day about my medication, from the nurse to the pharmacist, they asked if I had taken it before—and when I said no, they perked up. “Really?! Congratulations!” Like, they genuinely seemed to think it was the coolest thing ever.

One curious effect: blushing. I have not tended to blush, much at all. It’s not a thing that happens to happen. Until now. Every little thing, the last couple days seems to elicit this heat from my cheeks, my temples. It feels pretty weird, let me tell you.

Righting the Balance

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I rarely to never judge others to the extent I judge myself. Things that are completely unacceptable about me, I wouldn’t think of criticizing in another. This is a hard thing for me to get past; just being kind and treating myself with the same compassion as any other person.

With that in mind, getting on HRT has really clicked my transness into reality. It’s obviously not a precondition, but, my head; my own issues, right. All this self-doubt. But this isn’t a phase; I’m not confused or playing around. It’s who I am, and I’m finally acting on it. It’s—I feel this sense of gratitude toward myself, and of relief. Like, finally I’m actually listening. And so much of this reticence, it’s just melted away. I’m not pretending; I’m doing, I’m being. Like, there’s this missing part of me I’m just now finding and unwrapping.

In my case also the HRT was actually a necessary intervention. Beyond any other effects, it’s clear I’ve been working under a chemical imbalance for most of my life that’s been playing havoc with my mood, energy, and cognition. It’s hard to express how fundamentally awful I have always felt. Like, what the baseline normal has been. I’d like to just… hand that to someone chipper for a day, and see how they function.

But, you know. Everyone has different needs. I’m just talking me.

I’ve still got my litany of problems, but. I feel like there’s a major existential issue resolved, pretty much. Fuck doubt! I’m so pleased with myself it’s hard to know what to say. When have I ever taken real care of me? Now I need to just keep listening. But the door is open.

Obedientia Fortuna

  • Reading time:3 mins read

There’s this sense among the privileged that those who do not share their privilege are just going out of their way to get attention. As if the fuss they cause about accommodations or safety is all in fun. Any experience other than their own is some kind of Hollywood myth. If somehow the disadvantaged are not faking it for the lulz, then the Lutheran devil kicks in and, clearly they’re just not trying hard enough or otherwise are of poor moral character, because why else would they be in such an absurd condition?

“Well,” grunts Joe America, “obviously you brought it on yourself, or else the universe in its wisdom has judged against you, so why should I respond with anything other than contempt? (But clearly you must be pretending. For reasons that I can’t articulate at the moment. It’s got to be a scheme. And I’ll show you.)”

I feel like “I Won’t Let You Win” should be the national motto.

This mentality also more or less defines hard Internet culture. The worst thing a person can do, by Internet Law, is suggest they have something different or remarkable to contribute.

We could double up by printing “You Think You’re Better Than Me?!” on back of the dollar bill.

And that’s the thing. A disability, or a marginalized identity, sets people apart, therefore drawing attention, therefore making the less privileged seem in some small way remarkable, which draws suspicion and anger from those who feel a regular need to demonstrate a worth that they’re paranoid they can’t perform.

We’ve got these strong markers as to what makes a person a success. What makes a real man, a proper woman. A true adult. You gotta win, gotta earn more, do better. Gotta collect all the pieces on the board and earn the praise. Maybe get famous? A winner deserves fame, after all.

Our whole culture is competition—and a competition has standard rules. So what are these people doing on the margins, if not cheating by setting themselves apart? That’s not even a real lane! How does this fit into the game I’ve been taught? Well, got to police that. Just because I don’t understand the grift doesn’t mean I can’t see when someone is playing by different rules. And in the unlikely event they’re not faking it… well. They lost. That’s how a game works. Why are we wasting time here?

In sum, ha, ha, the driving myth of our society is garbage.

Horatio Alger can go hang himself with his bootlaces.

Garnet is Trans

  • Reading time:6 mins read

This being the Internet, I’ve been getting some pushback in the wake of Unleash the Light, and my reference to Demantoid and Pyrope as cis-Garnets, much like Hessonite. 

I mean. Look. I get it, cisters. You’re not used to looking at anything except through a binary cishet lens. But this is a show substantially by non-straight, trans, or gender-diverse creators—from the top on down. It’s got layers and layers of metaphor that it can use in different situations to talk about different things. And one of the things it’s always gone out of its way to talk about is diverse identities. 

Fusion is there to talk about a million and six subjects; some of them broad and universal, some extremely specific and delicate. From a human perspective Stevonnie really should be anyone’s first hint that a fusion of two different people is going to create some existential issues around identity and presentation, but it goes much deeper than them.

Gems don’t have sex or gender the way humans do; they have type. For the purpose of storytelling, Gem type stands in for all manner of social structures: class, race, sex, gender. The dynamics are different—due to different biology (if that term even applies to a Gem) and systems of power—yet familiar. How the metaphor applies, to talk about real-life issues, depends on what the story wants to address at the time.

Cross-Gem fusion is undeniably queer; Ruby and Sapphire’s relationship makes that as clear as possible. They’re queer in human terms because to us they both present female; they’re queer in Gem terms because they’re crossing type boundaries. To be homogeneous is to be straight—following the plan of society and their created intention—and to be heterogenous is to stray from the path. 

There’s way more to unpack just in that parallel, but again the metaphor is multifaceted. When two Gems fuse cross-type, they create a new person—a person who is not defined by a designation or role on emergence, but who finds their own name and identity. As it happens, Gem names and identities are hard to extract from types. So, they pick a new type. We see the thought process in action when Steven and Amethyst first fuse, and the Gem who would be Smoky first comes into being. 

When Ruby and Sapphire chose to permanently fuse, they decided they were a Garnet. Which is totally their choice, and is great and all. The thing is, there are other Garnets. More to the point, there are assigned-at-emergence Garnets, like Hessonites, Pyropes, Demantoids: Garnets who were made to be Garnets from the start. As it happens, our Garnet—CG Garnet—looks a heck of a lot like a “natural” Garnet. She has a similar build, the same general hair. Garnet is a Garnet because she has decided that’s what and who she is, not because she was told that’s what she was. Which is to say, Garnet is trans. 

Up until the Homeworld appendix to season five, the point is fairly subtle. Unless the question of â€œnatural” Garnets leaps into your mind, or you dwell really hard on the implications of Stevonnie, you may not think too hard about what it means to create a whole new gender-of-sorts. You may not even clock different Gem types as partially a matter of gender. You may overlook the color scheme of Cotton Candy Garnet, which in hindsight is… potentially the least subtle symbolism in the entire goddamned show. But I really don’t know how it’s possible to watch â€œTogether Alone” and miss this point.

By the end of the show, it’s not even subtext anymore. It’s just text. It’s just the show, explicitly telling you, Garnet is trans and that makes Homeworld Gems uncomfortable. The point is so on-the-nose that it would be hilarious if it weren’t horrific. 

Yet, in that, it’s also amazing. After five seasons of general tolerance on Earth, our first official visit to Homeworld comes wrapped in scoffing at Garnet’s identity and consistently misgendering Steven. It comes with a story of conversion therapy, centering around Pink Diamond’s original Pearl with whom she so inappropriately dabbled. Even the most irredeemable human, Kevin, stopped short of misgendering Stevonnie, because come on, what kind of a monster would do that? Well, a monster like a Diamond, as it happens.

That is the threat of Homeworld. The “She’s Gone!” segment is, like everything in the show, a complicated and imperfect metaphor, but the surface-level trans allegory is clear enough to have launched a thousand articles, in the mainstream as well as the queer press.

Dialing back, though, we have Garnet.

In a broader sense it is important that Garnet be trans inasmuch as her transness seems to have inspired Rose Quartz to fully accept and commit to her own transness. Except for Rose, it wasn’t even a matter of fusion. Her becoming was a matter of sheer personal will and desire. 

Even if Steven didn’t exist, the â€œShe’s GONE!” scene would still apply. Rose is Rose; she’s not Pink Diamond. Gem types, again, are as much a metaphor for sex and gender as they are race and class. Rose has lived for millennia as a Quartz. Everyone accepts her as a Quartz. As even Blue begins to cotton to around the first act of “Change Your Mind,” Pink was never really a Diamond at all, and every effort to make her behave like one only ever made her miserable.

Low-key, the entire story of Steven Universe is about Rose’s fight to live as the person who she chose to be, not the person she was created to be—and about the unresolved issues she left behind from that struggle, that were beyond her ability to cope with. For all her intentions and all the change she went through, there was still something she lacked—and until she met Greg, she could never quite put a finger on what that was.

To fix all her problems would take an even greater metamorphosis. One that slightly waters down the allegory at the climax of â€œChange Your Mind,” but that contains within it layers of transformation and resolution that can apply to many more aspects of life than any 1:1 representation could achieve.

There are lots of kinds of change we go through. And lots of kinds of change we can make in the world. 

The first brick at Stonewall came from a trans woman, Marsha P. Johnson. As it happens, Garnet was also [to dubious canonicity] there. The same way she was at the moment that Rose’s whole universe changed—the day she realized what she could be.

Mitigation

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I remember when I lived in Oakland, people would invite me out, and I couldn’t go. Part of it was masking exhaustion or poverty or any number of other things. But just as often, I’d have, say, a pimple on my neck, or my hair looked weird, or there was some other minor problem. I’d sit there for days and days, sometimes weeks, until I felt presentable enough that I could tolerate someone looking at me. But I had so many other anxieties I didn’t really know how to process this one in isolation.

Part of it’s a more general problem, but I’m seeing how many of the standards I’ve applied to myself have been gender-related. Like, the things that freaked me out about myself tended to be more masculine. I’m never been very masculine, which maybe makes them stand out more.

The pressure to present masculine was both largely impossible and unwanted. Yet I didn’t feel like I really had another option. I tried to carve out this curated semi-androgynous space that was just me. But it was fragile, and it wasn’t quite right either. On top of that were all the more general repulsive bodily things that nobody is fond of, and that there are so many industries devoted to making an even big deal out of, but that weighed so much harder considering the shaky balance I was treading.

And you know the killer? Almost none of this was entirely conscious, to the extent that I only now pieced together what was going on. It was just some low-level voice whispering in my brain in a code without words: you are gross. If you can’t mitigate, you can’t go out like that.

I did not have a good childhood. My parents were absent and neglectful on a good day, on a day I could relax and enjoy the silence. But the way they had about them when they chose to compliment my appearance, the things they chose to focus on, it skeeved me. Made me feel worse. Like, I don’t know how many times I was sent to tears when they tried to comment on me, only for them to turn to a rage as a result of my response.

I know I’ve talked about how I’ve wound up sort of cloning my early abuse scenario in later life situations. My ex-spouse was hugely controlling, over every aspect of how I presented myself. I got so much shit if I refused to change for them a fourth time before leaving the house. Now that I’m developing a better handle on my gender issues, that dysphoria has moved up through the layers of consciousness so I can get a better grip on it. But it’s not necessarily any quieter just because it’s out in the open, and applying to something I can easily point at.

It’s better to be able to say, okay, I don’t feel in control of the way I’m presenting today and it’s freaking me out than to be crushed by this overwhelming wordless swirl of oh god I am gross everything is wrong what is happening that sends me back under the blankets. But by also coming out of stealth mode, it’s almost scarier in a way. Like, I have this specific daunting thing relating to a much more obvious and visible-to-anyone issue. I can’t mask this like I can mask my autism. Neither of which I should be masking, ideally. But it’s scary.

It’s all masking—the unhealthy side of queerness, of neurodiversity. All about presenting in a way as to make other people comfortable, to avoid standing out, even as it kills you. And once you learn that survival skill, it’s hard to force yourself to stop trying to survive.

It’s a long road to find the courage to simply be and assert who I am, and stop trying to fawn and appease people who either don’t care about me or don’t care about being appeased. I’m… safer, now. In so many ways. I need to get that into my head. I’m gonna be okay. I can let go.

(Now as to how all of this interacts with my aroaceness… cripes, that’s a whole thing. I’m almost reluctant to spell it out, given the nuances that would entail and how easy it is to write off asexuality as a real, valid thing. But, it surely gee-whiz does factor in!)

One Specific Forever

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Amongst its twined majesties, I think paramount for me about “Alone Together” is the tone and atmosphere that it sets, pairing its heady thematic material with the heightened hues of an eternal twilight. You can almost hear the air, and smell the light. It’s such a specific feel.

It’s a heartbeat, stretched into hours then compressed to 11 minutes. It’s one of those fleeting moments where time nevertheless stops, that stay with you for the rest of your life. The kind of formative experience that you wish you could go back and live in forever.

Katie Mitroff’s frequent point-of-view and reversal shots work overtime to pull you into this headspace, and hold you there until the ride is over—making you a part of the fusion, as it were. They’re so emotionally specific, and intense. That specificity is important.

The episode plays out like a memory. It’s specific in its emotion, vague on the detail; it skips around and rambles and devolves. All of that hinges on the impossible sensory detail. There’s no way it could be twilight for that long, or all those events could fit into that time—and there’s almost too much that happens, like it can’t all be memory of the same evening. It’s such a disorienting rush to watch and process, much as it would have been to live through. And yet, it’s beautiful. Every breath of it haunts our senses, competing with the last. After eleven minutes you feel like you’ve watched a breakout independent film, or relived a pivotal experience you can’t believe you’d forgotten—one drenched in a very particular shade of purple, that hums in the near darkness.

As ever, Steven Universe paints in sound as much as in digital wash, and there are long periods in this episode without dialogue. Even when characters speak, they hesitate, allowing the scenery into their pauses. That endless purgatory growl of the ocean, eerily present in every episode, rarely claims more space than it does here.

Around these beats, aivi & surasshu somehow fit six and a half minutes of original music. Each track blocks out a different step in the spiraling mood of the piece, that works together with the intervening silence and ambiance. The whole third act is overlaid with this increasingly oppressive dance music, as the experience spins out of control and anything like a desirable range of stimulation. There’s no silence here. No room for reflection or joy. And somehow it all sounds just as purple as the sky.

“Alone Together” is some kind of temporal anomaly. I feel like I could live a life in that episode—and that I sort of do, each time that I see it. It’s as subjective as the show gets, which is some achievement for a show as steeped in metaphor as Steven Universe. Its closest runner-up may be its own nightmare reflection of “Together Alone.” Both episodes are irrational, but involve very different experiences; the latter nightmare twists and corrupts the fond memory, turning a moment of euphoria and self-discovery into one of shame and fear. Which, as a piece of storytelling, sure is something.

In an earlier pass on this topic I incorrectly guessed that Rebecca Sugar herself—who receives a rare co-boarding credit on this episode—was responsible for the point-of-view shots and their reversals, due to the specificity and intimacy of those moments. On reflection, though, Katie Mitroff makes total sense, considering her work on “We Need to Talk” and “The Test,” which contain very similar held shots.

As it happens, Sugar’s main contribution is toward the center of the episode, with the Crystal Gems’ responses to Stevonnie and the now-iconic “twilight run” sequence, an animation that further involved the show’s most dynamic regular boarder, Jeff Liu. Add in a moshing animation from Ian Jones-Quarty, whose direct involvement with the show seems minimal after the first few episodes, and it really feels like they pulled in every hand they could to massage this episode into form.

With four years of hindsight it should be clear how pivotal “Alone Together” is for the show as a whole, but it’s becoming just as clear they were aiming for posterity at the time. If there’s one moment of the show that was to last forever, it would be this one.

And in the long run, it very well may be.

Galaxy Mind

  • Reading time:6 mins read

People who feel very certain about the world feel very uncomfortable about nuance. And whatever they feel uncomfortable about quickly becomes the enemy.

One of the main things that Steven Universe serves to talk about is toxic behavior: where it comes from on an individual and structural level, and what to do about it. Every character on the show is carrying some grief or trauma, that affects their behavior. The show threads the needle of sympathy for the person and confronting the behavior, over and over. It’s delicate. So of course, people looking for black-and white, either-or answers to the questions that they specifically ask are going to have difficulty.

Take “Cry for Help,” the episode that first drew me in. This whole discussion that opens up here, and lasts for a while, it’s heavy as all hell. Consent is a constant theme with the show, and here Pearl coerced Garnet into fusion. It’s, you know—there are no good or bad people. There are good and bad actions. And, there’s trust. Most violence and abuse comes not from some evil bogeyman but from people close to you, who you generally trust—which is what this episodes serves to dive into.

Another way to put it is that Steven Universe focuses in on systemic violence and the way that it manifests in behavior, placing culpability for one’s actions as a part of that system rather than a value judgment on the individual—which we’re still having a bunch of trouble talking about as a society, and which seems to confuse the fuck out of people when you bring it up.) You want real change, the show argues, vilifying the individual won’t get you there. Hold them to account, but to truly fix anything you need to trace back and smash the system that led to the behavior in the first place.

A mind-blowing topic for a kids’ show, right? Even adult-targeted TV would prefer to avoid this discussion. So of course, the response from the Discourse Web more or less amounts to accusations that Rebecca Sugar somehow condones rape. Because discussing a subject in any shape or form means that you’re encouraging it, apparently.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6v7eyj

The character of Stevonnie—a non-binary, intersex character formed from the (basically) platonic relationship between two teenagers—is one of the most nuanced and radical elements of the show, representing puberty, first loves, gender discovery, consent—so of course they’re the target of a million bad-faith hot takes, that make them an example of everything depraved going on in our society today.

Of particular focus is how every character in Stevonnie’s debut episode episode objectifies them, as if this is evidence of the show’s awfulness rather than part of the actual point of the episode, that it serves to talk about. Part of the whole deal here, that the show continues to talk about long-term, is the dark turn the story takes halfway through, when what had been an innocent exploration of self and new love and so on gets weird when they realize the new way other people are responding to them. (In real life, find a girl who hasn’t had to deal with this shit starting around… roughly the age that Connie actually is at this point in the story.) This leads them into an anxiety attack—a moment of weakness that in turn a skeevy douchebag uses as an invitation to intrude on their space, making them even more uncomfortable. The episode demonstrates this as a Bad Thing; a violation. An example of What Not To Do, Ever. And, what can happen.

“Alone Together” is a thematically dense, complicated piece of television. It fits so much into eleven minutes, covers so many important topics so effortlessly, all at the same time, it’s hard to know where to begin. Of course some people feel weird; this is revolutionary storytelling. It’s bold and confident in saying things that nobody else is saying, that dearly need to be said. Revolutions make people uncomfortable.

It’s frankly astonishing how well Steven Universe handles the uncomfortable topics it raises, and it’s so important for doing so. Thematically and structurally it works more like literature than typical television. But, people who are eager to react don’t have that patience.

“It’s not helpful to pin all evil on some external bogeyman,” the show says. “Anyone can be hurtful, and we all are responsible for our own behavior.”

The reactionary seethes in reply. “Only a bogeyman would say such a monstrous thing!”

When you ask people to look at their own behavior, a divide will open up and half of the audience will flip its shit. People who assume bad faith will erupt in their own geysers of bad faith and intone like a banshee, rejecting the idea that maybe they missed a beat somewhere. It’s this bottled reactionary impulse, just waiting for the right excuse. This is the highway that people use to accuse the show, and by extension its creators, of all manner of bizarre, extreme things, not limited to but including actual fascism.

(This is in response to a queer Jewish woman and majority non-white cast and crew. One… suspects there may be other, unspoken motives at play here.)

Some of the most galaxy-brain takes on the show involve expressions of rage that its story takes the angle of trying to carefully dismantle a complex, violent system from its roots rather than barging in and selectively killing people, expecting that will solve all the problems. That, combined with the notion that no one is good or bad—people do good things, bad things, bad things for good reasons, good things for bad reasons, and none of this needs to be morally gray—so that you can’t point to any one person and say, “they’re the villain,” causes great Online Anger.

People don’t like to hear that they’re asking the wrong question, that they’re looking at the world all wrong, and that’s the only answer the show has to give. About pretty much everything. As I say, its whole attitude is revolutionary. Which is why it freaks people out so much.

The Weight of Masks

  • Reading time:5 mins read

The first season of Steven Universe is twice as long as most, and constitutes the whole of the show’s first act. It’s complicated a bit in that the second half of the season was a pickup, tacked onto the ongoing production of the first half. So in episodes 25-26, we have what amounts to a season finale—but instead it serves as a transition and swerve into a rather different back half, that serves to deconstruct the naivete of the first 26 episodes and set up everything else to come.

In particular, season 1b (as people call it) is about Steven’s slow realization that each and every adult in his life is unreliable in a different way, to a different extent. More than unreliable; they’re more screwed-up and scared than he is, and none has a clue what they’re doing. So, this developmentally delayed thirteen-year-old takes it unto himself to quietly parent them; put their needs before his own—which sets his ball rolling on emotional problems that will develop over the rest of the show.

That developing martyr complex combines with Steven’s impression that everyone he loves would be happier if his mom were still around instead of him, a view that he makes explicit early in the next season. He learns to keep these thoughts close, so it’s hard to know what he’s thinking until he states it.

Steven feels he has no one he can talk to, because anyone close to him, he’s afraid to burden them any further. Even Connie, his best friend and for most of the show the only person he feels close enough to fuse with, he’s half terrified at this point of saying the wrong thing and disappointing her.

He feels this need to constantly be on. The cheery, goofy Steven, who everyone expects—that becomes an act; a front he drops when he’s alone, which, once you see it, becomes distressing to witness. It’s in these rare unguarded moments by himself, or around people he doesn’t know too well, that it becomes clear just how much weight the kid is carrying and just never expressing, that he has no clue how to manage.

The one thing that may fuck him up more than anything is the last line on this, the tape his mom left him under mysterious circumstances:

As the show develops, so does his sense of betrayal around Rose. There are big triggers later that amp it up and give specific things to point at, but it’s more complicated, cuts way deeper, on levels he may not fully understand. All this sublimating himself for everyone’s benefit, this masking, it’s a thing he does largely on faith—faith that at least this one mythical person, who in his mind everyone wishes were alive instead of him, knew what she was doing, had an answer or an idea for him to work with. But of course, as becomes very clear, Rose had less of a clue than anyone.

“Take care of them, Steven,” Rose says— but what Steven hears is, “You are responsible for them, now. Your needs aren’t important.” And boy does he take that to heart.

Some 107 episodes later, in the middle of a severe identity crisis, Steven literally trips over an alternate tape, discarded even more carelessly than his own. It’s the same in all respects, except this time addressed to a certain Nora—as clarified, a potential name if Steven had been deemed a girl at birth. Neither tape was stored with care, entrusted with anyone; they both were just left in random corners of Rose’s realm, as if she’d grown distracted and forgotten them.

I think a disturbing aspect of the Nora tape, given Steven’s unraveling psychological state at that point, is its revelation of the act that Rose had put on in his tape. Until this point it had seemed so intimate, like she was speaking to him through time and magnetic decay, but, no. He… wasn’t that special. Now here she is, giving his rousing personal mission statement to… someone else. Someone who doesn’t even exist. It’s hard to process. After everything else he’s been through, this swerve is kind of like one football too many.

It’s the last straw for Steven. From here we go straight into martyrdom. He’s just… had it at this point. Nothing matters anymore, nothing has any meaning except maybe protecting the people he cares about. Realizing that he’s personally responsible for this latest mess, due to spiraling chaos from, yes, way back in season 1b, just clinches it: they’re all better without him.

It’s fine.

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.