Right-intentioned as it is, you can tell that an over-enthusiastic cis dude wrote the gender stuff in the star beast. I don’t begrudge it, he’s trying, but in particular a trans person would not have written that “binary” business the way that Davies did. It feels… a bit much.
There’s a shade of this positive othering going on. An exoticizing of the trans experience, in effort to elevate it and say, “Actually aren’t the transes ever so magical and unconstrained compared to us? Isn’t it lovely when you think about it?”
I see what he’s doing, but—😅
It reminds me of how, in escaping overtly malevolent cultural stereotypes, other marginalized peoples are often cast as these mystical seers, portals to a hidden world or another level of consciousness, for the “normal” characters to consult and regard with deference.
I mean. Davies’ heart is in the right place, and this is clearly his attempt at positive propaganda (as he has stated he fully intends to produce), to counter the toxic cultural and political forces that are making him so righteously angry. I appreciate that. It’s important work.
Normalization, this ain’t quite, though.
Trans people are just people, yo. “Transness” is something imposed on us by a society that insists on controlling everyone’s lives and bodies. I’m just a girl, one who’s a little fucked-up from decades of being forced to pretend I wasn’t.
I am of course special and mystical and wonderful in other ways, but those are individual to azurelore. They’ve nothing to do with any circumstances outside of my control that led people to project a lifetime of nonsense onto me because of what my genitals happened to look like.
I am all about the positive propaganda, Russell. I’m here for whatever raging anarchist screeds you have in store. Glad to see the show weird and progressive and passionate and curious again.
Just, maybe consider letting a trans writer handle trans characters and themes for you?
So now New Who has been around for about as long as Doctor Who was when Sue Malden first did an audit and realized that the BBC no longer retained big hunks of the first eleven years of the show (many of which have since been filled in; many famously will likely never be). To get an idea of the insanity here, what would this look like if transposed to the modern era? Well, it wouldn’t be precise because of all the differences in production, episode length, episode count. We’ve got all these gap years as well. But, we can make a stab at it!
“Heaven Sent” (Doctor Who series 9, episode 11; 2015)
On first tally, much of the material from 2005-2016 would just be gone; no copies known to exist. That would be up through Peter Capaldi’s second series as the Doctor. After freaking out a little, we would later be able to fill the gaps from copies sold abroad or misfiled somewhere, albeit often in the wrong aspect, resolution, framerate—and for reasons, lots of episodes from 2011-2016 would now only exist in black-and-white, so we’d have to find a way to deal with that.
After pulling in all the favors and scouring the globe, we’d be able to lock down everything from series 6 (2011) on in some form or other, though much of it would need heavy restoration work. we’d have most of series 1, 2, and 5, but 3 and 4 would basically just be gone, the odd episode or fragment aside, and we’d only have half the 2009 specials. We would, however, have plenty of screenshots—and, curiously, complete audio for every episode, carefully reassembled from fan reaction videos on YouTube.
From series 1 (2005) we’d really only be missing the renowned early Slitheen story which all the kids remember being excited about at the time, and a middle segment of the finale, “Parting of the Ways.” From series 2, just half of “The Satan Pit” two-parter.
“Aliens of London” (Doctor Who series 1, episode 4; 2005)
Series five (2010), we’d have in entirety except for this one dull-sounding story where the doctor shares a room with someone, that based on the synopsis and the available screenshots regularly comes in at the bottom of episode polls.
Perhaps the most frustrating loss is of 2009’s epic “The End of Time,” which fan circles generally recognize as the best Doctor Who serial ever on the basis of the pivotal material it covers and the fact that the description just sounds really cool you know—as well as the classic favorite “Planet of the Dead.”
Anyway, you see how insane it was when Ms. Malden bothered to look and realized, oh. you know. we just… threw all that away, huh. We wiped every copy, because by 21st-century standards we needed the hard drive space for ongoing episodes of Graham Norton.
See, you get all these apologists waxing about, well, they didn’t know any better back then; it was a different time. Yes they did, though! Other shows—look, the producer of Blue Peter put in an order that every single episode of her show be retained, in consideration of its long-term cultural value. We didn’t just invent basic foresight and reasoning capability in 1980. (Though we may yet find it someday!) Like any kind of garbage. in any given time period there are always people who knew better. When they did The Fucking Talons of Weng-Chiang, it was 1977. There were many people in 1977 who would have been capable of seeing the racial depictions in that serial and noticing that they were in fact Not Okay.
It’s complicated, right. as things will be. The purge was just this comedy of miscommunication, with some people assuming that of course someone would hang onto things in some other department, other people assuming of course they wouldn’t; people forgetting to put in orders of retention; other people misfiling, losing stuff. What we’ve managed to get back is this patchwork: some from the BBC Film Library, which asserted it wasn’t their responsibility to hold onto the show and that they very much shouldn’t have any copies at all actually; some from the Engineering Department, which only held onto tapes until they were needed for something else, which could be a matter of weeks after first broadcast (in the case of some late Jon Pertwee serials).
Most of what survives is a film prints made for foreign broadcast. Most of those were retained briefly by BBC Enterprises before getting burned to clear shelf space—since hey, they were just copies, right? Other prints made their way accidentally back to the Film Library or the National Film Archive, neither of which was supposed to hang onto them, but they were so disorganized that they didn’t bother to sort them out for disposal. Other prints were found abroad or in church basements or rummage sales, years later.
So yeah, the assertion that, nobody knew any better, nobody thought like this back then—that’s… not true. In the same way that it never is. Some people didn’t! Some very much did! The problem is that nobody talked to anyone, everyone just assuming their map of the world was the correct one.
And that problem, that’s… not one that’s gonna go away soon, huh.
Lady Cassandra O’Brien feels like she should bother me more than she does. On principle she’s… not great, right, but in practice it’s hard to even frown that hard. The trans element is misjudged, probably. but I don’t see it as malicious. I know Davies has readily evolved as he’s learned, and admitted his past limitations.
There’s also this thing with progressive transgressive humor, right. You start by making a joke about something, someone unmentionable. The transgression isn’t in demeaning the unmentionable; it’s for acknowledging it. admitting to an uncomfortable world that it exists. Making it a joke gets it in the door at all. When later that existence is normalized such that we’re not discussing validity and rights and compassion, the initial jokes can come off as cruel and insensitive—the sort of thing the regressive sort will latch onto, to try tear down what legitimacy has been built.
If you keep moving long enough, any landmark that once was a step forward becomes a step back. But that marker, its inherent value isn’t gonna always sit in relation to where things are now.
Doctor Who came back 15 years ago. Davies is an angry, militant anarcho-humanist. The offhanded trans joke with Cassandra was probably tasteless then as it would be now, but all things considered to me it doesn’t read as mean-spirited. Kind of the opposite, weirdly; it’s in the spirit of, can we get away with pushing the window here? If we make it a dumb joke, just maybe! This is in contrast to some other things one could cite, like the dialogue in any given Toby Whithouse episode—or, you know, Gareth Roberts. As a person. I know how Davies’ mind works, at least in creative terms, and so try as I might to disassemble this, it’s… fine?
That angry queerness is what connects 2005 Doctor Who to the last time the show was regularly broadcast, and in some ways back to its anarchist, marginalized roots. If we’re gonna get prescriptive, this is to my mind the mode that the show should be working in.
With the Cartmel era, Ace of course is meant to be… bi at least, if not finding her feet as a lesbian. And then serials like The Happiness Patrol, well. For those outside UK queer circles, section 28 may possibly not mean much in 2020, but it’s no accident that this tale of the state suppression of public displays of melancholy—everyone is compelled to be happy all the time, right—hits at the exact moment as legislation banning public displays of, depiction of, discussion of, homosexuality. Under the terms of that very law we can’t talk about how it’s illegal to be gay—but illegal to be sad? Just reverse the polarity and the censors will never notice. Then we can paint the TARDIS pink, and fill the story with glitter and candy—
Or… by 2018 standards, I guess we can rescue Amazon from the evil labor organizers so that society doesn’t collapse without its cheap merchandise.
The McCoy era of course deeply informed Davies. The 2005 episode, “The Long Game,” is based on an old spec script he wrote at the time for the Seventh Doctor and Ace. If you reach back, there is sort of a long predecessor to The Happiness Patrol in The Macra Terror—my sometimes-vote for maybe the best story of the Troughton era—which itself is a story Davies referenced at his best and most bonkers, in “Gridlock.”
Which, speaking of trans jokes, is a word that… I just… misread as another word entirely.
Basically, Doctor Who should be batshit and earnest, and it needs to have something to say. My mind so often reels when people assert the opposite, as with the popular fan response to Ghost Light, In that story, Ace gives a haunted monologue about a formative memory of a hate crime she witnessed against her friend. Apparently that whole scene, and by extension the serial and the era in general, is prime cringe because Ace references “the white kids” when she herself is white. “The white kids firebombed it!” the fans will chuckle at each other.
The same fans who think the one flaw in Talons is a shitty giant rat puppet.
(Which is, incidentally, the very best part of the serial. It’s so charming!)
It was such a good thing for this fandom when all the teenage girls began to rush in about 15 years ago, terrifying the aging-out middle-class white cis dudes. And that’s who Davies brought to the game. That’s who he wanted. That’s who he knew would make a difference.
Davies was right. For its own health, the fandom needed a massive change in its gender makeup. It was a Big Trans plot the whole time. His long game, if you will.
In hindsight it says a lot I think that the thing to first draw me in to Steven Universe was “Cry for Help.” There were lots of feelings I had no clue how to process. The scenario, it spoke to me—in a way I had trouble identifying.
Steven Universe s02e10: “Cry for Help” (2015)
It’s not direct, 1:1. But, like. I needed to see that.
It’s so hard to validate sometimes when a thing feels wrong and everyone you turn to is saying to you, what, you signed up for this; what are you complaining about; actually you owe this to the person making you feel this way, for putting up with you all this time.
The whole nature of my arrangement, it was like a big switcheroo, and I was trapped.
My body no longer belonged to me. I was no longer a person. I was just… an acquisition. For someone else’s use, at someone else’s whim. I was a prop for their benefit, and I had no more say.
Again, “Cry for Help,” it’s not exactly the same scenario. (Pearl is the one doing the coercion, for a start.) But, like. The point of the story is, our problems, the dangers we face, they aren’t really about bogeymen most of the time. People are people, and everyone is capable of great or terrible things, sometimes in the same breath. For practical reasons if nothing else, nearly all meaningful violence comes from people close to you. It’s hard to abuse a person without a foundation of trust.
Steven Universe Future s01e04: “Volleyball” (2019)
On some level, I knew things were wrong. I knew I was in a bad situation, and I didn’t know how to get away. But I just couldn’t address it. Not directly. Any problems I faced, I told myself they were my own fault; I just wasn’t strong enough. I needed to bear with it, try harder to prove my use to someone who didn’t even see me as human. I didn’t have the words or the resources to admit what I was facing, how wrong it was. And there was always some new emergency that was somehow mine to clear up.
I had ignored the show before that episode. Then I saw the response online. I looked up some reviews and saw what it was about. I dug up a copy and I watched it, repeatedly.
And just, seeing that coercion.
And, knowing, in some raw piece of what was left of me: oh.
There are so many abusive relationship dynamics in this show. It’s really something else—for any TV series, let alone a show aimed at twelve-year-olds. So many moments, it feels like the show is checking in on the viewer, saying, you see this? This isn’t okay. If it looks in any way familiar, go and chew that over for a minute.Maybe talk to someone.
Steven Universe s03e15: “Alone at Sea” (2016)
…
One of the reasons I like Lapis so much is, not only is her story just one big mound of whoomph identification over here; she’s also… not very likable. Lapis is a major fuckup. She’s prickly, and nasty, and inconsiderate. Not on purpose; just because, that’s what trauma often does to a person.
She knows how awful she can be. She knows how much she can hurt others without meaning to. It’s just, she just doesn’t know how to manage her pain and fear and depression well enough not to. The worse she responds, the worse she feels, because she doesn’t want to be like that. Every time she lashes out, all it does is affirm her own self-image that little bit more.
It’s not cute. It’s not cozy and sad and pathetic. Lapis is bitter and broken, and she has zero faith in herself. But, she also is so full of love and care and gratitude, that she wishes she knew how, had the basic fucking energy, to express.
It would be so easy to paint a character like Lapis as, oh, that poor little waif. Pity the mirror girl.
But no, Lapis is an asshole.
And it’s amazing.
And just, so… real.
Steven Universe Future s01e08: “Why So Blue” (2019)
90% of the time, Lapis is Extremely Not Helping. Because in the event she does anything, she doesn’t trust herself not to fuck it up or hurt someone or just lose control. But when she can keep it together? There’s no stopping her.
…
All that trauma, leading to all that bad behavior, all that conflict, all that grief and self-loathing, that’s the bulk of the show, just seeing how this plays out. Seeing people bounce off each other, bite each other’s heads off, weather each other’s abuse in the wake of things way bigger than them, that we never get to see clearly. Because they’re just the world Steven was thrown into. Much like us.
With Steven Universe, the real story happens long before the show begins. The show is about the fallout and the consequences of decisions ages in the past. What do we do now? What does this mean for us? How do we fix this? Can it even be fixed? Why is this on us? How is this fair?
Steven Universe: The Movie (2019)
This is in part why “Change Your Mind” has to happen as it does, why the trans allegory plays out in its slightly occluded way. Rose isn’t there anymore. She can’t end her story. She can’t fix things. She will never know closure. But we can still find a way to address her problems and move on.
We can give her a proper elegy, make sure the reasons behind her decisions are as clear as we can make them, and try our best to accept the present for what it is, and make the best of it that we can. Like Lapis, like Pearl—like Steven, like Amethyst—Rose was a fuckup, and she was in pain. That pain set all of this in motion. We can try to address the causes. Then for our part we can do better, we can be better. We can make a better life than we were handed.
That’s what it’s all about. That’s what everything is always about.
The throughline of Steven Universe is about working through the crap that has been left for you by forces outside your control and finding a way to live your life again.
And yet people remain baffled that Future plays out the way it does. As if it’s not the only possible resolution. As if the whole reason for this reckoning was for any other purpose than to come out the other side and find a way to be human.
Flaw is character. Flaws are what make us actual people, and not just cartoons. Flaws are what allow for beauty and growth and potential. Without flaw there is no hope. Stories often pay lip service to or structurally apply this ideal. It’s fun to root for the underdog, the misfit, so long as you know they’re in the right all along and they’ll show everyone in the end.
The best thing about Steven Universe is how deeply flawed every character is, how much they hurt themselves and each other as a result, and how committed the show is to showing them compassion anyway, without excusing their behavior, until they can learn to do better.
The thing people hate about Steven Universe is how deeply flawed the characters are, how much that drives the story, and the show’s refusal to pass judgment on them as people no matter how much it emphasizes the damage they do.
Because in our culture compassion is endorsement. To address a thing means to legitimize it.
So when Pearl… does what she does to Garnet, and for all the appropriate horror and weight, the show doesn’t write Pearl off entirely and rather spends this whole arc exploring the fallout of her decision, the peanut gallery chimes in about the show’s problematic attitudes toward rape.
So when, in desperation and to mixed success, Steven attempts to talk down the Diamonds—convince them to use their power to help people instead of hurting them—rather than look for a way to kill them outright, we get two-hour-long screeds on how a bisexual nonbinary Jewish woman is a Nazi apologist.
What makes the show magical is that it will not draw hard lines about people; only about the damage and the growth they cause and experience. It shows that anyone is capable of positive or negative change. It shows how attitudes and behavior are systemic, and how they cause a chain reaction that manifests in cycles far outside one’s control or direct understanding.
It’s a show about unconditional love and hope for change in a world that sucks where people repeat the garbage they’ve learned and don’t know how to do better even if they understand and accept the harm they do. Where the first step often is just accepting the pain and moving on.
And fuck if that isn’t the most relevant message in the world.
But we’re a culture that roars for blood and righteous retribution, where the only people who do bad things are people who are innately bad, and where some people are just more human, more deserving, than others.
Maybe if we had a few more positive philosophical models like this show, our cultural narrative would shift a bit. As it is, it’s a moral outlier. As anything that prioritizes kindness over righteous obedience will be. Because that’s what an unkind oligarchy has taught us is trouble.
Steven Universe is the best TV show ever, seriously, and if you haven’t yet you need to watch it until you understand it.
Which may take a while, as it’s fucking strange, and queer, and neurodiverse, and doesn’t signify or indicate or move or talk or think like any other show out there. But it’ll change your mind, change your life, if you allow it.
When I think of my childhood it’s basically just flat melancholy. So to engage with the pastel melancholy nostalgia of Steven Universe, it just—whoof. That wasn’t my life exactly, but in several emotional dynamics it feels so familiar—a past I recognize, yet with an optimism; a version where things can get better. The loneliness, the neglect, the emotionally unstable adults who act like needy little siblings to the children; the knowledge that you’re always doing everything wrong; the vague unprocessed dysphoria; very little sense of what’s normal or how to connect with others—it’s all part of the radiation.
So many episodes of the show, at least tonally, emotionally, they paint this picture of scenarios that could have been that way. They weren’t, and probably wouldn’t have been, but I understand them, almost remember them, in a way that I just don’t get from other stories.
I’ve talked about this before: I don’t emotionally engage with stories. I approach media with this satellite view, where I study how the pieces fit together to communicate meaning and I think about the way it’s done, how clearly it says its thing and whether that’s interesting. I think a big part of that is, I don’t feel like most things that people have to say are really meant for me. I engage with them like an alien, appreciating them on the basis of all the other abstract patterns I’ve seen in the last 40 years.
This show, for once something actually speaks my language. It communicates the way I communicate, prioritizes the things I find important, thinks and feels about things in a way I find intuitive, notices the details I notice, ignores the things I don’t care about, is queer and neurodiverse in ways that I never fully appreciated I was until decades after the harm was done. So many of the emotional consequences it shows to the scenarios it depicts, not only do I not see those, shown in that way, in other stories; they’re some of the truest, realist shit to my experience, often beyond what I’ve been able to process or communicate on my own.
To be able to reframe a neurodiverse, queer childhood and see it for what it is, and know that for all the universality of some experience it didn’t have to be as bad as it was… that’s a lot. The amount of healing it provides, just to see an alternate possible past, where for all the unavoidable problems one faces, unconditional love and acceptance are possible and reasonable to expect from others.
I get why people might not understand this series. It’s fucking weird. And it’s the only story I’ve met that more or less reflects my own perspective on the world. So, like. Other people, you get every other story that’s ever been told by anyone. I get this one.
The thing about that passing revelation in “Growing Pains” is, one can’t help but think of Lars. For the entire show we’ve seen Steven just take these extreme cartoonish injuries and thought little of it, so it came as such a shock when Lars banged his head, and that was it.
There was this tangible confusion. We’re watching this silly cartoon. He’s got to be fine, right. Steven lives through this all the time. Why get realistic now? The Off-Colors kind of echo our instincts, if not for the astonishingly brutal signifiers. They don’t quite get it.
But, like. Steven wasn’t any different. Episode after episode, his own bones were getting shattered over and over again. The only reason he’s still alive is the magic holding him together, knitting his pieces in real-time.
He was just used to it; he always seemed fine, no one showed him any particular concern, so he just dealt with the pain and kept going. So he didn’t really have that much reason to think other humans would be all that different. Yeah, they’d probably be a little more fragile but…
Lars’s death is the first moment the real implications of mixing this fantastical and the mundane really land. Like, you’re mixing normal people with relatively normal physics into this cartoon nonsense—and they’re going to break. They can’t play by the same heightened reality.
And it turns out Steven literally embodies that. Since the beginning the show has involved him staggering that line between the worlds, not treating either with the appropriate gravity, not quite understanding the separation or the consequences. Even after he sees the way this stuff affects the people he cares about, this danger and disregard that surrounds them every moment that he’s never taken all that seriously, it remains unclear how much he himself is affected. He seems fine.
But he’s not. He’s just being kept alive.
Which in turn brings back that sort of chilling line from the movie, not that much earlier.
It’s like. Steven, you’re disregarding your own pain that much, your own body’s signals, you’re getting that much neglect, that you don’t even realize you’re basically dead a hundred times over already. That’s your normal. Even after seeing your friend die, you don’t get it.
Life is fragile. None of what you’re doing is normal or healthy. You’re just as breakable as Lars, you deserve the same level of care. You’re only still here by virtue of a miracle, and you can’t even rely on that always saving you. Priyanka has some serious asses to kick.
The amount of neglect in Steven’s life that would lead for this revelation in episode 174 out of 180 to be any sort of a surprise… like, we saw it. We saw how reality works in this world. All it took was one knock, and Lars was gone. And yet, Steven just keeps eating the abuse.
Aside from some passing contextual alarm out of Greg, Priyanka of all people is the first adult in Steven’s life to show him an appropriate response, to treat him as a human child with his own physical and emotional needs. And he just has no fucking clue what to do with this.
This is how things get normalized. Our attitudes toward ourselves and others. Our assumptions about how the world works. How we build up unrealistic expectations. If there had just been one adult in Steven’s life showing him appropriate care, he would know what it looked like.
Just so we’re clear, the Bow business was not great. Not malicious, it would seem, but just so very Dumbass White^TM, in a way that can only go unchecked if there are no Black people in the room. Everyone concerned seems aghast in hindsight, and so on. Fine. But that’s a legitimate grievance. Everything else about the livestream, though, and the online firestorm in response? It’s in such intense bad faith, and in such a specific familiar way, that I can’t help but wonder.
There are a few things that precede these events, you see. Not long before this livestream, Noelle came out as non-binary—in some puttering, early, confused capacity, as one does. (Speaking from personal experience.) They also began to express they may be neurodiverse. And then they had a long, long interview with Rebecca Sugar, where the two of them compared notes. As it turns out, Double Trouble was… sort of, in part, a self-insert character. Stevenson had been thinking about this character for years and years, and using them as a way to work through some things before they really understood why.
Up until all of this, Stevenson was held up as some bastion of progressive showrunning. But after this series of revelations, we see baseless accusations of lesbophobia (?!?!), of ableism, and of creepy attitudes toward non-binary people.
You see how this works, right. It’s all great to talk about marginalized identities until marginalized people start doing the talking, at which point everything they say comes under the most intense scrutiny. When Noelle came off as a normal white lesbian girl, they were largely free to talk about whatever. But now that they’re exploring their gender identity and neurology, and revealing how much of this stuff was actually personal—and that they’re on good terms with, comparing their own work to, the last person to take this dark turn toward the margins of society? Oh, ew, throw them to the wolves.
The specific way that passing statements were twisted out of context with the worst possible interpretation, it’s like 2018 SU Crit territory all over again. Or just the TERf/alt-right playbook. Not that there’s any real ideological difference. Once you nail a plausible accusation, it doesn’t matter if it gets refuted; the impression remains: there’s something off with this person; it’s best to approach with caution.
Of the scurrilous accusations, lesbophobia is especially pointed and significant. Where it comes from: the host of the stream, when introducing a participant, read off the name of her podcast, which includes the word “dyke†because it’s a podcast by a queer woman about queer stuff. Right? So this gets abstracted out to, THE PRODUCTION TEAM USED THE D-SLUR. Which by metonymy gets translated into Noelle Stevenson in particular. Which is… not what happened, and just, you know, fucking hell, come on. There’s no good-faith way you could come to this reading.
What’s important is why we see this bizarre frame. It’s important because Stevenson just came out as non-binary. To emphasize this, there’s a similar kind of misrepresentation to suggest that the production team was intentionally creepy about Double Trouble, casting them as sort of a predator. Again: Double Trouble is Noelle. (Sort of, partially.) Similar story for the purported ableism, in regard to Entrapta’s neurology, etc., when Stevenson is also apparently neurodiverse.
What this framing is trying to assert without saying it directly is, okay, Noelle is creepy, deviant, and lesbophobic. And the Bow thing, which sucks and is real, comes as a convenient wedge issue so that people don’t examine the other claims too deeply. It’s a perfect storm to try to take down a gender traitor, basically.
Of the three main Gems, Garnet’s story has always seemed the most muted and hazily defined. If you go back with the understanding that she is trans (as one of many dimensions to the metaphor she embodies), her whole character arc of learning to be honest and open about who she is, embracing her inner complexity and allowing herself to be vulnerable, it takes on a lot more color. It all starts to open up and make sense in a similar way to Amethyst’s and Pearl’s inner journeys.
From the start it’s just taken as read that Garnet is who she says she is. But she asserts this so strongly as to be rigid in her attitudes toward herself and her potential, and as to not let anyone in. She has to learn how to be a verb, and not just a noun. A person, not just an identity.
There’s this sort of fear that letting people know her too closely, or performing outside of this narrow definition she’s made for herself, will negate her identity, cause them to respect her less on her own terms. Which is not an entirely unwarranted fear, as we see in the show.
So her journey is about learning that essential trust in the truth of who she is, so that she doesn’t have to be defensive about it, protect it all the time. So that she can feel free to just live.
So how many times has Greg seen Pearl poofed? He seems to know exactly how it works—using language that suggests first-hand sensory experience that he struggles to articulate—and to know that Pearl’s reboot is unusual for her.
If we take Pearl’s memory as accurate, both when Steven enters her gemstone and in the later context of musical theater, then she seems to have remained intact from the night she met Greg up until she learned about Rose’s plans for the future.
Then she seems to have regenerated at least once sometime between her initial meltdown over Rose’s pregnancy and what seems to be quite late in the process.
From there, Pearl keeps the same form through Steven’s childhood (God, her body language in “Three Gems and a Baby”), into season 1a.
If Greg saw her regenerate—likely more than once, given his familiarity with the process—that would have been somewhere in the few months before Steven was born. That must have been a, uh, rough period for her, huh.
Dare I say, her regenerated form—after she realized Rose was going to be leaving her—to my eyes it’s coded as markedly less independent than her prior, somewhat with-the-times style. She becomes more, well, Pearlish. More delicate, reverting more to type. So her mental state…
For millennia, Pearl just sort of expected she and Rose would be together forever. Then in just a few blinks of her lifetime, she’s pushed to the periphery and Rose is about to die. And with that, suddenly Pearl takes on more of the appearance of a traditional Pearl: devoted, subservient.
A Gem’s physical form is a manifestation of how they see themself—so it’s as if Pearl is asking, what did she do wrong? She must have strayed too far from her purpose. She dropped her guard, let a threat in, due to her lack of devotion.
It’s like her very body is pleading by way of her subconscious, please, don’t go; I’ll be who I was supposed to be, see. I’ll always be here for you.
But it wasn’t enough, because it was never really about Pearl.
I appreciate that in Steven Universe violence is always a tragedy. Sometimes it’s necessary, even justified, but that doesn’t make it good. And there will always be consequences. Those who glorify it do so out of damage or ignorance, and it will eat them. The discussion is about cycles of abuse—in families, relationships, the broader social structure—but the show uses its ostensible format as an action-adventure series to subvert all the things we’re told are glorious and righteous, to assert that, no, actually, violence is just violence.
Take the “Stronger Than You” battle between Garnet and Jasper. On the surface it’s triumphant, an early high note for the show. And indeed Garnet was left without many other options. It was an act of self-defense. Jasper was never going to be reasoned with. Something like it had to happen, to prevent other violence. But that doesn’t make it innately virtuous. It still passed along trauma in unpredictable ways. It was necessary, and that’s the tragedy—because violence doesn’t cancel violence; it only mutates its form, maybe puts it out of sight and mind for a while. And boy, that keeps happening in this show—from thousands of years before its start, all the way to the end.
To an extent the Gem War was necessary. It redistributed trauma away from some of the most vulnerable, even as it ravaged all that survived. And the show only ever plays that with ambivalence, except through the eyes of characters who were clearly warped from the violence beyond the ability to cope. It’s a tragedy that it was necessary, and the consequences are endless.
Then all those themes that have been building up since 2013, they culminate in Future. Where would all the violence land, but in the lap of our central character? Including the fallout of Jasper’s history of war and insecurity, heightened to the point of mania by her battle with Garnet. All those millennia of hard-won victory and juggled, mutated trauma come home again, to be absorbed by a single target.
In other shows, the Perfect Steven reveal would be a cathartic triumph, a symbol of growth and success. Here it’s tragedy. It’s clearly wrong even before what happens. This is what violence has done to our boy; this is how it’s warped him. It’s the show’s message from the start, but now it’s personified so you can’t ignore it, much as the trans issues were brought to the forefront at the end of season five.
Abuse and neglect, they don’t just go away. They don’t evaporate when you stop looking at them. It’s like conservation of energy; all they do is transfer and change forms. They linger and fester until they manifest in some new unexpected form. The only way to stop the cycle is to acknowledge it, take a step, back, and show unconditional love.
Which is easy to say, of course. But all we can do is forge ahead, day by day, step by step, and try to show care where we can. And maybe one day it will be enough to make a change.
The thing about this song, for me, is its dissociative quality. It’s basically about tuning out when you’re in a bad situation over which you have no control—abuse, neglect—and going to your happy (or less-unhappy) place. And Michalka sounds so numb here.
It’s a simple song. It’s short; there’s not much to it. The lyrics are direct, almost facile in their understatement. It’s hard to find something profound between the lines. All the pieces—there’s nothing here, practically. But combine that surrender with the exhaustion in the performance and the literal dissociation with Stevonnie splitting to harmonize with themself, and it comes off, of course this would be simple. When you’re in this kind of situation, there’s no room to try to be pretty or clever. You don’t expect to be heard at all. Just voicing the simplest of an idea is a struggle, as you mourn for a better life you don’t ever expect to see.
You tell yourself, I’m not supposed to feel anything. That’s not for me to do. Never betray anything of myself. Be good. Maybe they’ll leave me alone. But, I can’t help just… tuning out. Escaping to this part of me where they can’t follow. I can’t always force myself to be present in the face of all of this.
“Together Alone” is a strange episode, necessarily rushed by the time constraints of this final block of the original show and how much story the team needs to cover, yet laden with the bulk of the outsized thematic elements this last appendage brings forward into the show’s text as never before.
This is an odd episode in an odd story arc in one of television’s oddest shows. The pace and the structure, we can agree the show’s handled better—and the storyboards sure are rougher than anything else toward the end of the show (but then, every storyboarder has their strength…), and in that, there are some real angles of critical breakdown one could pursue. In some ways it’s easy to argue that “Together Alone” wastes its opportunity, but the ways in which that’s true are more subtle than I see people address. Likewise the parts where it hits the target are magnificent and crucial to the message of the whole 160-episode original series, yet largely unheralded. I’d have done much differently, yet where the episode works I’d have never thought of doing things the way they play out here. It impresses and frustrates me, and keeps making me want to think about it further
These eleven minutes are work of suspense. The savvy viewer knows exactly what’s going to happen from the title card, and so enters with a sense of doom and dismay. With this understanding, the unfolding enterprise is a matter of one damned thing after another, watching the pieces clunk inevitably into place, hoping against reason that someone, something somehow intervenes.
For long spans you’re just… waiting, as events play out, and so much of the takeaway is in how the episode passes that time with its Abrams-style awkward small talk, peeling away and compiling tiny observations of how things work here, how people think within this system where everyone is always just standing around, waiting for the inevitable.
We wait, and we steep in this empire of lies and denial and repression, where everyone furtively pretends they don’t know what “ffffun” is—they would never do anything improper—all the while haunted by a vision of Pink’s Pearl, bleached by conversion therapy for improper relations with her mistress. We see the overt transphobia against Garnet. The racism of a colonial society. This is where the full decadence of the empire—and how untenable and barely maintained it is as a system, all comes into play. The more denial that’s going on, the more that happens in the shadows that they pretend doesn’t exist. There are no homosexuals in Russia.
All this fear and propriety and this cycle of abuse, it doesn’t actually stamp out what it tries and claims to, because people remain people. What it manages is to maintain a certain paper-thin image, that everyone knows it’s a lie, but no one dares contradict. Like that central moment—subtle enough that I often see people glaze over it—where Yelp nervously glances at Bloop before she asserts that people don’t do… that sort of thing here, only a few minutes before Lemon Jade pulls her surprise focus.
We know Yellow Pearl is obstructive and difficult and nervous and vain, and lies constantly to keep order. Why do we imagine this key moment is different from anything else that has come out of her mouth ever? Especially with that delivery and body language? The way the two of them immediately look at each other—Yelp in a panic, Bloop like “You know.” Are they onto us? Nope, not gonna talk about that here. Doesn’t happen. Haha, what do you mean. That beat serves to establish the fragility of the society, how false all this imposed structure is—allowing the accidental moment of revolution at the ball to hit all the harder. Like, this is it. Everything is different now, there’s no maintaining the lies anymore.
Then the way Lemon Jade leaps to support, it’s played as a joke—but it’s really anything but. It’s the whole point. It’s our main indicator of this whole thing that we never quite see, this knowledge that our heroes aren’t alone, that this system doesn’t work, that revolutions can happen.
We don’t really see the consequence on-screen. People comment on how curious it is the Diamond mech smashes up all these buildings and bridges and stomps through the streets in CYM, and the only background Gem who seems aware is that one astonished Topaz outside Yellow’s chamber. Like, where is everyone? This is world-shattering stuff going on outside.
By the end of season five, the show was quite literally running on borrowed time (The final six episodes seem to be appropriated from the order of what would soon become Steven Universe Future.), so it does what it can, hits the vital moments and whittles down everything else. With just 88 minutes to sell a season’s worth of story, they consolidate and breeze by any larger issues and implications outside of the core cast.
Against all odds, the show more or less nails the landing, albeit at a breakneck speed. It’s really miraculous they got it to work at all, let alone as well as it does. Ideally, though, it needed a few more episodes to breathe, set up further context and meaning and character work; cement its themes, ground them in tangible emotions and character development, and manage the tension leading into the final moments.
“Legs from Here to Homeworld” is nuts, and could have developed better as two or more chunks, establishing the fragile nature of the CGs’ truce with the Diamonds and exploring Steven’s deep sense of responsibility and determination in the face of now more-latent bigotry. We needed at least one more episode before the ball to add to the build-up and to further establish the people living in this society and what they’re dealing with, and how they pretend that they don’t really feel about it.
A huge missing beat is a further bottle episode in Stevonnie’s holding cell. This is the perfect moment to pause and compile our lead characters as they roll toward the end. What the story calls for is deep personal discussion juxtaposed against rising society breakdown. Eleven roiling minutes of Stevonnie talking to themself in the dark as word spreads of the events at the ball and they start to hear at first vague signs then riots and confusion break out around them. They sit helpless, locked up for who knows how long on this alien world, unsure how to balance introspection with personal survival with worry for everything outside of their grasp. Talking through self-blame, settling on confidence in who they are and their right to exist. As the world breaks through even into their tiny cell, the despair and anxiety of failure turn to a growing realization they may have kicked off something big and the uncertainty over whether or not that’s a good thing.
This is the discussion we’re missing, because there just isn’t time for that kind of build-up. The one place where all of that really breaks through to the screen is in “Together Alone.” And of course Stevonnie’s presence here as the inciting element of this revolution—just by virtue of their unashamed existence—is kind of the centerpiece that the show has been building toward since episode seven. They anchor all the trans elements, the repression. They are the ideal, largely innocent version of the experience Rose wishes she could have had. The thesis statement of what could be. They’re not exactly what Steven asked for way back in season 1a, but they are a femme-presenting giant enby. Of course they would bring down tyranny by example in the moment that everyone else gets to see what they’re missing in life, and that it’s actually possible.
“Together Alone” is a clumsy episode, burdened with more than it can handle. But gosh is it ever crucial. Just take a step away from plot for a moment, and appreciate the sheer cosmic audacity of this revolution, overlaid with the creeping horror and tragedy of the personal story. It couldn’t happen any other way. The truth was going to come out, and it was always going to change everything.
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.Â
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:Â
an innate change of a character’s essence,
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.Â
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—â€Go to your room and think about what you didâ€â€”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.
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 “natural†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 “Together 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 “She’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 “Change 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.
