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.
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.
So most of the response to this PSA has been thunderously positive, of course, with people who feel like they’ve never had any kind of formal representation now having it spelled out in unambiguous terms, and declaring that they feel seen and validated for the first time by pop culture. But of course, it also has attracted its share of gatekeepers, with their folded arms and upturned noses—who to the last seem to intentionally misconstrue the spot in order to launch their rants about why this representation is Bad, Actually.
The first, and weirdest, thing they all focus on is that being intersex doesn’t always mean being a perfect 50/50 blend of male and female—true enough, though of debatable relevance for this discussion—which they then immediately transition into a discussion of what may or may not be between Stevonnie’s legs, thereby to fume about how irresponsible it is to talk about this subject.
Now. The thing about this conversation is, uh, they’re the only ones talking about it. All the ad specifies is the obvious fact that Stevonnie is intersex. It doesn’t get into what that signifies here, nor should it need to. Presumably the character is gonna have a whole soup of chromosomes and hormones and neurology. People are making the leap to anatomy—but, er, why, in good faith? That says more about the person doing the assuming than anything that’s been stated.
When I read the text on the screen, my brain doesn’t go straight to Stevonnie’s genitals, because holy shit, why? It goes to their wide hips and higher vocal register, yet their coarse facial hair. It goes to the more abstract issue of their being an independent person with a physical body that’s not gonna conform to a definition of binary sex.
This is of course how Internet Discourse works: manufacturing a problem, and then attacking your own projections as if they were something inherent in the surface that you’re flailing toward, rather than engaging with what’s there on paper or the spirit of the work, its metaphors, and what it serves to talk about. It’s not about a conversation—which is unfortunate, as this show is so eager to hold one in earnest.
Steven Universe is a sci-fi fantasy, that communicates complicated ideas extensively through metaphor. Any given story element serves to talk about a bunch of things at once. The character of Stevonnie is about puberty, consent, first relationships, gender identity, the duality of self, self-love, self-doubt, feelings of objectification. As I’ve been saying forever, in a sense they’re the stealth main character, with the story treating their components Steven and Connie as two halves of one person even when apart—and in Stevonnie, embodied as a person struggling with anxiety over their own self-definition. Stevonnie is easily the most complex character in the show; when they manifest, it ratchets everything up a level, allowing the story access to much trickier themes.
Nothing depicted in this soap commercial is in any way new, except in that we’ve now seen Stevonnie’s sex and gender written out in so many words, and focused on them slightly. By definition, of course they were always intersex; and the show has always used an unambiguous singular they/them for the character. None of this was was ever unclear, as written and performed. But words are important, and here we finally have them.
The second and more bizarre criticism comes out of a previous point, in which people keep insisting that, well, the character’s identity shouldn’t come down to sci-fi alien symbolic whatever, because all that does is suggest that non-binary and intersex people are somehow fictional. Which just forces me to wonder, Christ, you know. Have you ever read a story before? Do you know how stories work? How metaphors function? (“Spoiler culture” has raised some concerns about literacy, of late.) And even more to the point, do you understand the limits of TV production? Particularly of a children’s cartoon, in the United States?
Sometimes to talk about complex things, or things that it’s unclear one can get away with, one speaks in coded or abstract terms. This is how art works. This is how people tell stories. Stories tend to be About Things, not clinical lists of details to showcase. Metaphors and subtext are a matter of verbs, rather than nouns, allowing conversation to happen and a story to functionally talk about things that matter. Artistic coding is all the more important when the things one wants to talk about aren’t necessarily easy to broach in the environment where the stories are being spun.
Prior to Steven Universe, has there ever been a children’s cartoon with an explicitly non-binary or intersex character before? With a foregrounded gay wedding? Has there ever been a children’s cartoon that basically serves in its entirety as one big honking trans allegory? No, because it’s hard to do. These are things that nobody was allowed to talk about, even around the time that Steven Universe began its run. The rules changed over the course of the show, in part because the show changed the rules, for itself and for everyone else, as to what was acceptable to talk about and how.
It’s so peculiar to me that for the one instance of positive representation that has ever existed, people who don’t have the active context for what it’s talking about or how it’s doing it will tend to sidle in and sniff, and say, well, it’s better that they not have bothered, because of XYZ preconditions I just thought up on the spot.
You know. I’m autistic. I’m genderqueer, I’m ace. I want to sympathize. Like, I recognize that there are tons of misconceptions out there, and for someone on the margins of society it’s easy to get nervous and defensive over things that come off as ambiguous. But nothing’s ever gonna be exactly whatever you’ve got in your head unless you write it yourself. Which, thanks to the exact thing you’re dismissing, may be easier now.
At any rate, when we choose to engage with a piece of media, how about we actually engage? Just, as a general rule of criticism, let’s go with what’s actually in the text, and what it serves to talk about, and how and why. When you project your own expectations, that’s not criticism, because you’re not engaging. What you’re doing is getting ahead of what you assume will be bad will by manifesting your own. And then you get to stand proud while jousting at yourself, allowing your shadow to affirm everything you expect to see in the world.
There’s more in the world than any of us knows. A lot of it is in fact sincere, and constructive, and serves to do good. If you’re gonna suggest ways to do even better, then that’s splendid. But to do that you’re gonna have to actually listen, and then make a commitment to build something new.
The barn at night has a soundscape all its own: the crickets, the night birds, and, interestingly, the creak and groan of wood as the frame gently sways in the wind. Much of this is muffled through the walls, but a bit creeps in fresh like a breeze through the open door.
When the two of them talk, we get an unusually stark shift to the mix, with their voices foregrounded and the backing atmosphere drawn way down to make room for music to strum in around the vague cinema stage.
We pan up to a black screen, on our way to a stylized flashback, and Garnet’s narration zorps right to the front, gaining presence and depth. It sounds exactly like Cate Blanchett’s narration at the start of Fellowship of the Ring.
Curiously for such a stylized depiction (Hi, Lapis.), the foley continues strong as ever here. Sapphire’s hair rustles as she moves. The Rubies’ feet clomp solidly along. Don’t know what to make of the reverb situation. It suits an open air arena.
As Ruby stumbles into Sapphire and hems and haws in apology, an atmospheric whirring enters the mix. It’s not music. It doesn’t seem to be wind. Maybe an engine of some sort? A power source? It adds tension anyway, without ever clearly announcing itself.
As Sapphire enters Blue’s palanquin, her voice becomes muffled. Lisa Hannigan isn’t present, though; Blue hasn’t officially been introduced yet. So all we get is Garnet playing her part—in deep foreground, narrator-space, separated from the zone occupied by the story she’s telling.
There are some deep, skronking bowed bass notes here as Ruby clocks the nature of what’s happening and makes up her mind whether to react or not, and rescue this nice Sapphire who had been the opposite of awful to her just before.
And yeah, when they fuse it swoops out and saturates the entire stage, in all phases and channels and spectra. I hadn’t noticed either the deep bass thrumming or the light sparkling noises when just listening through speakers.
As the crowd closes in, we get the sound of jackboots in unison. Then this tactile “slam,” like someone punching a metal wall, as (through Garnet’s narration) the spectators chime in with their opinions. Followed by a scraping, swooshing, mechanical sound as the palanquin rises.
I hadn’t noticed that as they land the clouds break. I mean, yeah, there’s the fire scene, but it just happens so quietly… unless you’re wearing headphones, at which point suddenly they’re in a very real, tactile environment compared to the abstraction of the sky arena.
Footfalls are all authentic soggy foot on wet grass noise, as they would be. Everything sounds freshly, moistly recorded. And yeah, the cave has its own atmospherics, changing the sound of the rain outside and providing its own close yet sustained reverb.
As they flash back to their fusion and ponder what the hell just happened to them both, the soundtrack keeps abruptly shifting with each cut, from this warm, slightly reverbed crackling fire to stabs of swooshing musical score and sparkle effects. It’s intentionally jarring, but as the cuts go on, the reverb on the effects and some of the notes of the score sustain a bit longer each time it cuts back. It’s like when you dip your toe into hot bath water then jerk it out, then dip it in again more slowly, then tentatively insert your foot, etc.
I hadn’t caught Ruby pondering the gem on her palm, then eyeing Sapphire’s corresponding palm.
A Gem’s relationship with her gemstone must be pretty strange. She literally is that rock, and her body is just an illusion, but the gem itself has no awareness; only her projected body.
I really dig when the show dips into what fusion feels like, experientially; the implication, they never quite state outright, that it’s this transcendent high that one never wants to come down from.
There’s so much work on the expressions in this scene.
Oh God, I’d definitely not heard this song in headphones before. With the deep bass drum; the sounds of wet, waking nature as a backdrop. And also just the right space between Ruby’s and Sapphire’s voices that their harmony works: a bit awkward and stumbling but in sync for that.
The cut to crickets and general night atmosphere, and the way their vocals fall out of the soundstage back to diegesis, for the “Oh, um, I just can’t stop thinking…” sequence, it really sells the sense of budding romance, and the idea that they’ve been stewing on this a while.
The tangibility of the environment, and the way the characters are cemented in it even as they continue the song, lends weight to every word they speak.
“So, um. Did you say I was different?”
“And you hadn’t before?”
“Of course not… When would I have ever?”
Again the subtle things; this small yet tangible pat of foley when she touches Ruby’s hand:
“Well, you’re here too. We’re here together…”
As Sapphire begins to hum “Stronger Than You” against all the night sounds, they step into a more-stylized glen, away from the reality of Earth back into the world of myth, and her voice begins to echo. After nearly bumping gems, nervously, Ruby joins in, their voices blending. And the moment their harmony perfectly syncs up…
Again the foley. The hard two-handed smack against the tree, selling the weight and clumsiness. And I think her feet actually make different noises on the grass; one bare, one shod.
Where there’s a Pearl, there’s a piano. Then Rose brings the strings, allowing for a sparse take of “Stronger Than You,” sketched with the instruments of the Crystal Gems, as they… basically conduct their first job interview.
I like how pretty much immediately Garnet shifts any reference to Ruby or Sapphire to the third person. It’s confusing at first, but she’s not them. But if she’s not them, then who is she?
Their gems don’t even look the same anymore. They’re her gems now.
Nice reversal, by the way, panning down from that shot back into the present (which sounds so much more… present), now with Garnet sitting where Rose was and Steven lying where Garnet had been.
Apropos of nothing, a really nice Garnet face in the second-to-last shot:
Anyway. Yeah. The sound design really adds a ton to this episode in particular. Even more than usual, and the usual standard for this show is pretty high.
I know that “It’s Over, Isn’t It” is everyone’s go-to song (once they get past “Stronger Than You”), but with its familiar Broadway melody and orchestration it took me a while to warm to, beside some of its more outre neighbors. The key things that sell it for me are subtler than its reputation; more contextual.
One is the obvious, yet somehow not fully obvious, point that she’s singing to Greg. Yes, semantically it’s clear enough—but think about the significance there; the intimacy of a song, and how she waits until he’s asleep to confess to him. This, to be clear, is just shortly after she refuses his dance. (Then just following this exorcism, they mutually accept.)
She’s not singing to herself (not entirely, not formally, at least), and not really to Rose. She’s directing her song, her bleeding musical wound, to the object of a couple of decades of her scorn. Which as a fact says so much more than the specific contents of that heart-dump.
And then there’s the structure of the song, which is a subtle thing, but its skipping, repetitive nature reflects the swirl of obsessive, intrusive thought patterns. Musically the song reflects Pearl’s attempt at poise even as structurally she’s scrambling for a throughline. “Why can’t I move on?” asks the scratched record.
It’s a significant song, and its meaning is expressed through its music and structure at least as much as its lyrics. Even the stiff, formal familiarity of the melody and instrumentation have something to say about the person and her thoughts and emotions.
As with most aspects of this show, the more you pick away, the more layers you realize you’ve been missing.
The situation with Rose Quartz—it’s complicated, right? She’s a flawed person from a messed-up background who did a lot of awful things, then tried to do better things. Some of her actions were kinda good, but for messed-up reasons. Some were really messed-up, but with the best of intentions. And in the end I think she knew how much she’d fucked things up, how much suffering she’d caused, and she wasn’t entirely sure if it was worth it.
She’d made room to live as she wanted, for her and a handful of other Gems who survived, but at what cost? How many thousands had been shattered? How many more had been warped into self-fearing monsters? I don’t think she ever really forgave herself for that.
The one objectively good thing that came out of Pink’s interventions, Rose’s rebellion, was that she’d saved the Earth and its native life. Even that, though, she had trouble seeing as more than a menagerie—until she met Greg. Through him, learning to appreciate the humans she’d saved as actual people every bit as worthwhile as a Gem, connected to this world through their wants and needs and mortality in a way she never truly could be, I think Rose in the end came as close as she could to achieving what she wanted in life.
Rose was a sad person, who came from the greatest possible privilege and piece by piece realized how fucked-up everything about the life she was given truly was, first in regard to her own wants and needs, then in terms of the effect she had on the world around her, then just structurally in terms of the society. And she tried to change things, partially for selfish reasons; partially not. And she had no idea what she was doing, and made some really bad decisions along the way.
Again, it’s complicated. The show isn’t big on judging people, right? You judge the things that people do, the decisions they make. And Rose mostly did the best she could with what she was given, with who she was as a person. Possibly the best thing she ever did was the thing that made her the happiest: letting go, and allowing Steven to live a mortal life, the kind she never could.
Steven is in a sense the final stage of her metamorphosis, or transition if we want to hang onto the trans metaphor that the show uses—but as an independent person, who functions as a bridge between human and Gem life, he’s more than that. Though he never asked for it, he’s kind of the key not only to make up for Rose’s actions but to fulfill her ambitions by making peace across two worlds.
Rose stumbled onto the right path, and did what she could, but she was still a Diamond. There were always going to be some hard limits to her character, no mater her enthusiasm for a cause.
Somehow it took me until today to piece together what’s going on with the Crystal Temple. Granted, this is a topic the show has studiously avoided returning to since it was introduced way back in episode four. We get some of its effects—its “metaphysical constructs,” as the Gems describe them—but no more mention of the Heart itself. I’d always felt like this was a big, weird loose end; it’s a concept someone had put a bunch of time into early on, then dropped.
Only now, it strikes me. Explicitly, the Heart is portrayed as advanced Gem technology. And Gem technology, morbidly, tends to run on actual living Gems. Obviously the shifting interior, it’s all light constructs, generated by the Crystal Heart—a powerful Gem, that’s been harnessed to do this massive projection task. This would follow the same horrific logic where Gems are integrated into objects and buildings on Homeworld, and how the CGs didn’t think twice about the cracked Gem-powered mirror they found by the Galaxy Warp all those thousands of years ago.
Heck, the job that the Crystal Heart does, it’s basically the same as Lapis’ mirror—both in regard to materializing images of things that had or might exist (albeit three-dimensional ones, compared to Lapis’ flat lens), and in responding to voice command. It’s just that it’s a huge, elaborate installation piece, compared to Lapis’ more modest, portable portal.
That latter bit, about the commands, is especially unnerving as far as what it suggests about a lingering consciousness.
Who did the Temple use to be, I wonder.
The Temple interior… it’s physically safe for the most part—as presumably it’s all, or mostly, light projection in there—but psychologically, it’s always been “off.” Rose’s room in particular, it’s never been a place where you really want to spend more time than you need to.
Requesting things from it, configuring new constructs, it’s like making wishes on a magic lamp. The genie does what it wants to, no matter how carefully you phrase your command, and it’s not going to go well in the end. The Crystal Heart, it’s willful. Full of seeming resentment. It’s not altogether malicious, but it’s not happy, and it seems to lash out passive aggressively every opportunity that it can.
A Gem powerful enough to project a glitch-terror version of all of Beach City at once, it’s… gotta be pretty high up the hierarchy. And if Lapis has had problems adjusting over the course of five seasons, I imagine a Gem that powerful, if set free, would be… trouble.
Lapis is powerful. She’s almost certainly the strongest Gem we’ve seen outside of a Diamond, and she may even rival them if she stops holding back out of fear of herself. Whoever the Crystal Heart used to be, assuming I’m reading this right, must be like a minor god.
Someone who could harness the reality-shifting powers of the Crystal Temple, and focus them outward—I can see how it might take all four Diamonds to control it, and them not even really being enough. This is a person you’d really rather have on your side than not, ideally.
It—I’m not saying it is, but I wonder if… you know… the expanding team, needing its own space… they try to reconfigure the Temple interior, and…
Just shoving a pin in this. It’s… well, it feels like something I would do at this point. Especially given what it would mean, dismantling the Crystal Gems’ sanctuary. If you want to spell the end of an era, that’s not a bad route to go.
Despite its long, complex story and rich themes and character development, Steven Universe can sometimes come off as childish—particularly to those who dwell on plot progression. Often this comes in the same breath as critique of the show’s themes as inappropriate for such a childish piece of media. There’s a cognitive dissonance here to be sure, but it doesn’t come from within the show.
The issue may be that the work it does is largely internal: emotional labor, if you will. The maturity in Steven Universe is comes from personal development: dealing with mental illness, trauma, the complications of relating to others; learning to judge actions, not people. People do awful things sometimes, for reasons based in the pain they carry. Separating the two is one of the first steps toward empathy, justice, and healing.
The show isn’t a grim-dark melodrama; as it unfolds, it becomes a complicated, sober discussion of how experiences affect a person’s emotions; how emotions drive people’s thoughts and behavior; and how this expresses itself internally, externally—individually, interpersonally, systemically. All this can result in generational cycles or systems of violence and abuse—unless it’s addressed at its root.
At the start of the show, the main cast has mostly been frozen in place, unable to grow or move on, for thousands of years. Nearly every character carries some trauma; serves to represent a particular kind of mental illness. The show’s vision of maturity involves learning how to do better. There are no easy answers, relapse is the biggest part of recovery, and mental illness is forever. But, there are ways to learn to respond better—and to break the cycle.
The show’s major conflict lies in the attitudes and circumstances that reinforce these patterns: in the oppression of the status quo. For all its chirpiness, Steven Universe is underlaid with an existential horror, derived from invalidation: the fear of one’s fundamental wrongness, as dictated by others. This comes home in the final arc of season five, which through its strengthened language and focus on themes like conversion therapy nudges the show’s window just enough to lay bare the trans allegory that has in hindsight been woven into the show from day one.
Progression in the show largely deals with breaking down assumptions: about one’s self, about others, about the world that we live in. A big part of that involves learning about and de-mythologizing the past: trying to really understand how things came to be the utter shit that they are today, so you can start to find a way to avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over—and just maybe, build a better future.
Plot—this idea that there’s a driving, correct order of events that we’re supposed to take in our lives—is one of those major assumptions. Steven Universe is never really about Things that Happen; in the show as in reality, little that happens happens without cause or consequence, because of fate or some higher demand. The plot is there—structured meticulously to provide a constant pull on the action without calling much attention to itself—but it does its best to keep out of the way. Instead the story comes from the moment-to-moment interactions between characters and how they explore the show’s underlying themes—themes that get messier and messier as the show goes on.
Even the plot-bomb episodes, like “A Single Pale Rose,” what makes them interesting tends to be less the Things that Happen than, well, the mess: all the surrounding implications, and how they feed into what we know of everyone’s psychology; how it clarifies their behaviors, and might show them a route forward.
This kind of development, it’s difficult to showcase in a reel of Mature Goings-On. Reduced to action and individual moments, it’ll just look like a bunch of crying and longing glances and people looking apprehensive. It’s a novelistic form of storytelling, that rewards and relies on engagement. Meet it halfway, and the show unfurls, revealing a difficult kind of a conversation that most television actively chooses to avoid.
The maturity comes in working through all the crap put on a person by society, by prior generations, by relationships—all the expectations and judgments and every reason why one should be ashamed of who one is—and finding the start of an inner peace.
I think I touched on this before, but in kinda the way that our first encounter with Uncle Andy presages Steven’s later attempt to change the mind of a bigoted relative on the other side of the family, “Kevin Party” sets up just how shocking White’s behavior is in that encounter.
It’s a subtle thing, maybe; the show paints Kevin as the most irredeemable character in Beach City. Even the worst of the Homeworld Gems, their destructive behavior comes out of their training and biases and assumptions, which can be challenged and changed. Kevin is just a sociopath—but even Kevin, with his weird raging hard-on for himself, wouldn’t stoop as low as knowingly misgendering someone. Like, seriously, who would do that?
You can excuse most Homeworld Gems, who don’t have a sense of gender. But, White? She knows. And she makes a point of it.
That whole encounter with White, that’s the first (and thus far only) time the show depicts behavior like this. Outside of again just not parsing the concept of gender, it was simply off the table for even the grossest, angriest, or most otherwise bigoted characters. As usual, the broadcast schedule makes things weird; just on an episodic basis, it isn’t all that long between the two encounters, first showing what in real-world terms feels like startling magnanimity from Kevin, then shortly later cashing in the contrast. Kevin’s attitude, it helps to establish the stakes and the nature of the threat at the show’s climax.
The show saves it for the climax, because this is the big, existential fear at the heart of the show; the thing it spends five seasons avoiding, dancing around, not wanting to vocalize—yet that drives all of its thoughts and actions, much as Pearl’s or Amethyst’s or, yes, Pink Diamond’s inner traumas define the characters that we come to know.
Backtracking a little: we do get a bit of a preview of White’s behavior a couple of episodes earlier with one of the lesser Diamonds. Though even here you can see the terror in her face. Like all the other Gems, she’s playing the role she’s been handed as well as she can.
Before this episode, the show had never quite underlined the trans subtext to fusion. I mean, yes, it emerges with Stevonnie as a non-binary figure—but it turns out their human terms are exemplary of the general case, not an exception. Every fusion is a Stevonnie of sorts. It’s just that Gem society doesn’t have sex or gender; it has type, which fills those roles, plus race and class.
A ruby and a sapphire fusing into a new being, who calls herself a garnet—there are assigned-at-emergence garnets on Homeworld. It’s, you could maybe piece some of this together before “Together Alone,” but here the show just comes out and says it: in the terms of the show’s mythology and metaphor, Garnet is basically trans.Yes, we’d seen some lower-ranked Gems respond to her with confusion, disdain, or worse—but this episode, as the centerpiece of the Homeworld arc, really serves to nail down the trans overtone of that arc, which in turn serves to consciously shift the narrative window of the entire show.
This business with the more abstracted misgendering toward Garnet, it then serves as a direct setup to the thitherto unprecedented transgressions of White, toward Steven, another 40 or so minutes on.
I’ve said before how much I enjoy the nightmare structure of this episode, which actually starts on a literal nightmare and then progresses exactly as you know it has to based on the title and premise. Unavoidably, like watching a car crash in slow motion, being helpless to stop. A while ago I mused on the show’s relationship with horror, and that’s what this whole episode is. But, it’s a Lynchian form of horror that the show hadn’t really gone into very deeply before. “Together Alone” is like Eraserhead with a PG rating.
It’s easy to dismiss “Together Alone” as a slow nine minutes, then a final two minutes of discomfort at a character acting in the only way they ever would, which their entire character arc led toward, but which armchair writers love to call dumb and out-of-character, then shock. But, again, it… you know. Let’s ignore the people who don’t know story structure and don’t know how to engage with television. And let’s even ignore the episode’s role as a fragment of a larger serial narrative. Just taken on its own, “Together Alone” is pretty remarkable.
As it wears in, it’s coming to fit as one of the strongest, strangest episodes of the show; one of a special circle that has the most to say. It’s very possibly one of the best episodes since its namesake, “Alone Together,” some 120 chapters earlier—though it’s a bit of a sleeper to get to that point. Like Blade Runner, it takes a lot of post-processing to work out the significance of what you’ve seen.
It chips at the subconscious. It’s all just so very distressing, on levels far beyond the linear story events, which are quite dramatic on their own—though in a show like this you’ve a sense of the stakes and structure and what must, or is at least extremely likely to, happen as a result, and what won’t. So it’s not clear why you feel so upset, and the knee-jerk impulse is to blame something: the plot, the characters. You lash out, because the story is working as it’s meant to. You’re uncomfortable.
And that’s kinda what Steven Universe is. The actual plot beats are the least of it, here as always. For 160 episodes, plot is incidental to what the show has to say or takes the slightest interest in exploring. It’s there, and it’s meticulously structured, but it’s obligatory. For an episode like “Together Alone,” focusing on plot is like obsessing over the big picture to Lost Highway. I mean, you can do that. But, you’re kinda… you’re not engaging with the story on the level that it’s working, you know?
The events that happen at the end of the episode have to happen by the sheer existence of the episode. You anticipate them, if not beat-by-beat then something close, from the moment you see that the episode exists. And that’s built into the structure, into the horrible anticipation throughout. So for most of those eleven minutes of a lifetime, it draws out every ounce of that discomfort and twists it, makes it a little bit weirder, a little more alien, puts you into an even less certain place than you thought you were, while you watch the horror play out to script.
At a point you think, seriously, what is this shit? This is all so unnecessary.
Which is exactly the point.
It’s not just us. Ruby, Sapphire, Amethyst, Pearl, they all see what’s happening. They all stand, helpless, and watch, knowing what’s coming—hoping it doesn’t, but unable to change things. We’re all part of the party, all in concert with our foreknowledge of the awful inevitable—while the show’s two effective leads wander off into the distance, the same way you-as-audience watch you-as-character in your own worst nightmares, knowing as their orchestrator exactly what’s coming, screaming at yourself to stop—but you can’t hear you, and you just keep going.
There’s another thing here. Because the moment of horror, the thing that must not happen, it’s the purest thing. It’s the embodiment of love, joy, self-discovery. Stevonnie’s always used to explore this duality: the euphoria, paired with the often-existential anxiety. “Together Alone” takes that to another level, and translates it into the show’s most raw concept of threat.
This is the trouble of metamorphosis. There’s the liberation in finding and accepting yourself, and exploring what that means, and all is fine in theory—but then, you run into the way the world responds to you. And the terror sets in. Whether that’s a million peering eyes and Kevin, or an entire bigoted society. To this point, Stevonnie’s anxieties have been internal, psychological. They’ve been developmental hurdles for them to transcend. Here, the show’s whole world crashes in. The vague danger posed by their identity, always overcome by the positives to the point we’ve nearly forgotten the threat, it becomes manifest.
Music that long ago, in a more innocent time, represented everything pure in the world, now plays for menace, much like the chopped-up, mangled version of “Stronger Than You” that plays when Garnet meets the forced fusion experiments, or Rose’s corrupted theme during Greg’s info dump about the war, and what the Gems had been doing on Earth all that time.
And we’re not even at White, yet. And the basic problem of Steven himself.
Anyway. Steven Universe is just such a marvel of storytelling. Most things, you know, the more you pick at them, the more they fall apart. It takes a certain level of literature for the opposite to be true, where the more scrutiny you give it, the stronger it gives back.
I just adore this show to bits. If you’ve been putting off watching it, seriously, just do. Especially if you’re a liberal arts lit nerd, or whatever, and you know how to read a text on the level it intends. It’s the very best thing, and just so different from other stories.
If you haven’t seen it, this is the best possible time to do so. The show as originally conceived has wrapped; that story is done, and can be taken as a whole. There’s a movie coming, and what looks like a sequel show, maybe-kinda, which will begin a new story. For now, though, you’ve got a whole summer to catch up. And then watch it all another four times, in your disbelief.
(Of course, the network makes it as hard as possible to watch complete, uncut, in order. Streaming is a mess; the DVD situation is worse than useless. If you want to watch it, it’s better to follow less-licit routes, where things tend to be better curated, in higher quality.
How long this‘ll stay up, who can say, but everything here is of a high bitrate, and organized in correct story order.)
There’s so much speculation about the next era of Steven Universe, and what it will involve. “Change Your Mind” wrapped up so many of the surface conflicts, it’s hard to see a way forward—which is because there is no way forward. The show’s gonna tell a different story from here, as they’ve said. And like the first time around, it’s not going to be a story about villains and monsters and intergalactic conflict. The plot, the melodrama, all the objective things that happen—none of that matters, really. They could be anything. What matters—in all things, but particular in the case of this show—is what all those details serve to discuss.
There’s some stuff that—really, the crux of this question lies in some things on the show that haven’t come out yet, that really bring the arc of my relationship with Steven full-circle? […] Steven and I have had a very similar arc in life, and very similar trials in life of having a much larger allocation of responsibility than normal placed on our shoulders at a young age—and, rising to the challenge of that, and what kind of mental things come from that. It’s been pretty eye-opening. Just, like, recently, like in the past few weeks, some of the revelations I’ve had, about that.
The comments that Callison has made lately, they fit my expectations and hopes for the next stage of the story. Which is to say, the show’s original coming-of-age story has reached its end point—so what’s the next natural story to tell after that? The difficult transition to adulthood. Things only ever get more complicated and harder to manage, as you grow up. In most things you do, there are no right choices; just less awful ones—and personal growth, it kind of tends to flatline while one spends all one’s time on things that have nothing to do with one’s own concerns. It becomes unsustainable after a while, but since you’re an adult now people just expect you to get on with it.
On the basis of Callison’s statements as to how his life and Steven’s have become one and the same, and the things that are going on in the recording right now are surprising him with how precisely they parallel his own life situation, it sounds like this is indeed where we’re going. Which is kinda where the show has to go, if it’s gonna be honest. Callison has talked about the amount of responsibility Steven had to carry from a young age, and the… effects that can have on a person. And we know Callison’s been dealing with some health issues lately.
So basically, I expect a scenario where Steven has been accepted as not just the de facto leader of the Crystal Gems, or the reincarnation of Pink Diamond, but the architect of a new era for Gems and humans alike—and everyone expects him to know what to do all the time. Assuming some time has passed, Steven’s relationship with Connie would likely also have developed, which would have its comforts but also its own, different kind of responsibility.
Potentially, it’s been around five years, allowing sort of a reboot from a series perspective, letting new viewers jump into this scenario and figure it out just as established ones are doing so (like the Time War business in Doctor Who). (Added benefit: this should allow Callison to relax and use his natural voice in the role.) Everything has become strange and alienating; everything Steven has known is changing in front of him, and no one’s really watching out for him anymore. And then, something snaps. And he can’t take it. And the story comes from there.
This also gives the story a circularity, if you consider Pink’s actions. So much of Steven Universe is about trying to break the cycles, avoid repeating past mistakes and abuses, trying to do better than the last generation was able. But also, so much of the show is about failure and relapse and getting things wrong.
How often do people say with some horror, when they start to grow up, “Oh my God, I’m behaving exactly like my mom”? There may be a little more horror to that realization in some scenarios than in others.
I’ve mentioned this in passing, but I think it’s worth establishing that Steven seems to have stopped developing normally when he moved in with the Gems—all-but immortal beings who never themselves change without outside influence and have little understanding of humanity.
We can see this in the extended introduction:
At the start, he’s visibly younger: smaller, higher voice. His clothes are ill-fitting. There are gaps from his baby teeth. It’s implied he’s only begun to learn the uke, though he’s picked it up quickly.
(Mind you, it’s on record that he stopped aging at about eight, which in typical human terms, for what that may matter, lines up with the adult teeth growing in.)
The house is still being built, but it’s pretty far along. Fast forward through a building montage; next we see Steven, which it’s reasonable to count in months rather than multiple years, he’s moving into the newly-completed house. Here, he looks the same as he does in the show.
After he leaves the care of Greg, the Gems don’t engage with Steven. They hide everything. Garnet waits for his back to turn, to retrieve and bubble gemstones. Until he forces their hand (mostly after meeting Connie!), they continue to treat him as he was when he moved in.
And so due to his strange hybrid physiology, where like a Gem his physical form corresponds to his self-concept, Steven never progresses past the mentality of an eight-year-old—ergo, for something like four years (again, until meeting Connie!) he never grows up.
Without her, Steven may never have started questioning the miraculous life around him that never quite adds up, never pushed back against the Gems and started to claim his own agency… and the Earth would very probably have been destroyed about a year and a half from “Gem Glow.”
People clown on season 1a, mostly with better-than-usual reason, but even the very earliest episodes are something, more often than not.
From “Frybo,” S01E05
Sometimes it seems to me that people who regularly watch television really, really hate writing. Especially without a clearly signaled end goal.
From “Lars and the Cool Kids,” S01E14
The thing is, even if the show were nothing but Steven wandering around town and talking to people, it would still be an extraordinarily well-written series. That all of this just serves as context and connecting tissue for bigger topics and events should be a point of amazement.
From “Steven’s Lion,” S01E10
That it’s written to this standard without a script is, I think, worth mulling over a bit. It’s just storyboards. People tell the story as they draw.
I’m not super jazzed about Jamie, and this whole episode is pretty strange, it being the first one they animated and… uh, not really matching the tone or stylization of anything to follow—but it’s these little conversations, showing the characters’ inner- and off-screen lives…
From “Cheeseburger Backpack,” S01E03
The way the show goes out of its way to avoid linear, A-B, obligatory transactions—if people are gonna talk, it’s going to be organic, tell us something about who they are, take some weird turns that aren’t strictly necessary because not everyone is on the story’s schedule. Even the walk-on characters—Jamie doesn’t turn up again for something like 50 episodes—are the main characters of their own lives, and aren’t necessarily invested in the priorities of whatever nonsense is going on with the people we’re following at the moment. As they wouldn’t.
Most of the drollery is in observing everyone’s strange habits and hang-ups and limitations, and how they define their bubbles and perspectives and way of thinking and way of responding to everything. There’s an unusual level of psychology to this show.
From “Joking Victim,” S01E21
It’s interesting to view this sequence in the context of that conversation with Peedie, a few episodes earlier.
There’s a whole hell of a lot of Charlie Brown in Steven Universe. As the show openly acknowledges a few times.
From “So Many Birthdays,” S01E13
I’ve mentioned this before, but I love the cautious way Sadie steps between Lars and this strange, potentially unhinged man who walked in. These are the little beats that make the show what it is.
There’s this level of melancholy behind everything the show does, no matter how gentle or light-hearted or weird. This yawning existential pit, that the show just barely manages to dance around.
From “Onion Trade,” S01E15
Just barely.
From “Steven and the Stevens,” S01E22
Which fits with this discussion of the show’s relationship with horror. And, yeah; the horror sets in pretty early with this show.
From “Rose’s Room,” S01E19
I suppose repressed anxiety is one of the main driving factors here.
I keep talking about how messed-up every character is in this show. And that’s one of the things that the show both regards with love and refuses to treat delicately. Though it gets more nuanced as it goes along (even by the back half of season 1).
From “Tiger Millionaire,” S01E10
And it’s interesting the unspoken context the show sets out for everything—that it just lets you soak in until it reaches a saturation point, and is ready to squeeze. Like, from exactly one episode after the previous clip:
From “Steven’s Lion” again
That’s what the show does. It drops things in, and lets you digest them as passing gags or non sequiturs, and you laugh them off, but they keep building up—and then when you go back, sometimes something clicks. And you think, oh. You know, there’s something going on here, huh. Season 1a, all the time it’s dinking around with food and toys and idiosyncratic street vendors, it sets up much of the festering that becomes unavoidable later. Even when it (very eventually) gets around to exposition, the show lets you add up most of the implications yourself.
From “On the Run,” S01E40—midway through season 1b
Again, season one is frickin’ long. The back half is in practical terms the show’s sophomore season, and a sequel to or redo of season 1a, more clearly developing the notions it just sort of plants the first time around (ergo that previous clip, compared to the earlier ones)—all of which just makes the earlier episodes seem all the more messed-up, by the things they choose not to address quite yet.
Like, this stuff above—it explains what’s going on, but in the moment is never really addressed, with Amethyst’s general not-so passive aggression, and in this entire episode. Which at the time is just handled on the level that Steven approaches it. He doesn’t ask the questions. Not the right ones, anyway.
From “Giant Woman,” S01E12
This show does so many things at once; at any given time eight of them are in deep background, one is just starting to breach subtext, and usually the least important possible one is being actively explored in dialogue and action, leaving you to wonder what the hell the point is. Until it reaches up through the layers and grabs you.
And even then you don’t quite know why, because you still don’t have the full picture. It registers, it means something. It all fits. But things are the way they are for reasons that take a long time to even start to explain.
From “Coach Steven,” S01E20
Or, as early season 1b would have it,
From “Keep Beach City Weird,” S01E31—five episodes into season 1b
Jesus Christ, this show just dances circles around everything else ever made for television. Even just this early material, if it were produced as live-action, with the exact same dialogue and design and shot framing, it would be heralded as a revolution in TV writing, several degrees above Arrested Development (with which it shares some structural similarities). Animation, though, it kind of makes something turn off in people’s brains. Which, to be fair, is part of why Steven Universe gets away with a fraction of what it does.
After an analysis I read a while ago, that lifted out some things I didn’t see on my own, I can’t watch “Steven the Sword Fighter” again except as the allegory it’s intended, the uncertainty of living under an unreliable parent, suffering from depression or other mental illness.
From “Steven the Sword Fighter,” S01E16
And, God. I mean. I’ve been… on all sides of this. It’s hard to see, but at the same time cathartic and necessary.
If it weren’t for Lapis, Pearl would easily be the most relatable character in the show for me.
From “Mirror Gem,” S01E25
In retrospect one of the things I appreciate the most about the mid-season finale is the way it opens up, partially, about the long game the show has been playing from the start (and will continue to, on levels only hinted at this point). Owning up here lets it keep on piling on.
From “Ocean Gem,” S01E26
The overt romantic elements between Connie and Steven sort of go on the back-burner after season one, as so much else starts to happen that they both have to prioritize before they figure all that mess out. But, early on the show is so raw about what an earnest mess it is.
From “An Indirect Kiss,” S01E24
I like the level here of, love is not minding how gross someone is, and not being afraid to be gross with them. Which is… kind of one of the show’s core messages, if not phrased always in those specific words.
The fact that it’s durian juice, of all incomprehensible things, that’s the catalytic element here, kind of… it goes with the theme, right?
There’s a level of judgment in my choice of vocabulary that the show wouldn’t go near, but it gets the point across.
Well, usually wouldn’t.
From “Lion 3: Straight to Video,” S01E35—in the first half of season 1b
Where the show depicts bias or disgust, it’s framed as an arbitrary personal evaluation, based in factors that are close to incomprehensible from an outside view. It’s always a silly way to look at things, that demonstrates the foibles of a character.
From “Gem Glow,” S01E01
(I’m regularly astounded at how often the background artists redo the exact same scenes from scratch with a slightly different angle or level of detail. I haven’t checked, but wouldn’t be surprised if they actually didn’t reuse much background art at all, even of “standing sets.”)
Anyway. I’m very fond of the brand of humor that goes, “Ho, ho, what you say makes no sense at all—but being human, I am familiar with the mode in which it makes no sense! Yes, those foibles are relatable from my own experience of being flawed and arbitrary.” To wit:
From “Sulfur,” Look Around You S01E04 (2002)
This observational silliness—what are you even doing, and why—is the sort of humor the show revels in.
From “Arcade Mania,” S01E11
There’s a philosophy here, in which we’re all these little imperfect bubbles biased by our experiences in what we’re able to see and understand in the present, and none of what we think and do actually makes much sense, so why not just accept this from ourselves and each other? It’s a view the show expresses in its humor just as it does through the drama and action and horror and tragedy and long story arcs built on carefully seeded mythology. And it’s there from the very first episode, and in every episode since.
From “Change Your Mind,” S05 E29-32
I guess a better spin on the take from a few paragraphs up is, love is seeing beauty—not despite but because of all of the strangeness and complications and imperfections. The things that might put a person off, you’re not blind to them. But they’re facets of something far bigger.
Or, I guess,
From “Laser Light Cannon,” S01E02
As messed-up as everyone is in this show, and as the whole situation may be, that love is such a constant that it makes everything possible. It haunts me, this alternate vision of what a childhood could have been like. Of what in principle any close relationship could be like.
One of the more transgressive messages in Steven Universe is… not obvious in its transgression, and it takes a little setup to explain what’s so important about it. But it’s the notion that got me watching the show in the first place, back when I read about a recent episode.
A thing that people who skirt the surface sometimes criticize about the show is its notion of redemption, and how dangerously simplistic it seems at a glance. But, it’s not actually as simple as all of that. And it’s part of a more complicated discussion.
The more obvious half of the discussion is the one embodied in the redemption narratives that the show often explores. Basically, a big part of the show’s philosophy is that there are no Bad Guys; there are people who think and do destructive things. Usually for a reason.
But the quieter side of that is that likewise, there are no Good Guys. Rather, there are people who you like and trust to behave in ways that help, or at least take effort to avoid hurting, others. This isn’t moral relativism; it’s a pragmatic stance that no one is a monolith.
We are what we feel and we think and we do, and we’re all a bundle of contradictions. Even if we try our best, we’re going to do awful things sometimes, either unintentionally or just because we can’t help ourselves, due to how we’re wired. So, judging people on that is dicey. And people who have a history of harmful actions, that pattern isn’t necessarily set in stone; our actions depend on our pattern of thinking, which is based to a large extent in how we feel and what we expect. It’s all very muddy, and the best we can do is the best we can do.
Most “crime,” if you subscribe to that as a broad social phenomenon, isn’t a matter of bogeymen, of Bad People With A Gun or whatever, out there, waiting to get you. It’s people who you know and generally trust, who feel a destructive impulse and so take advantage of that trust. This nonsense that politicians and pundits always go on about, talking about individual or whole categories of human beings like cartoon villains or saints, talking about “black-on-black” crime as if it meant anything other than everyone nearly always hurts those closest to them—whatever group one might belong to, the statistics are roughly the same, in that all they reflect is the people one tends to know. There are no Good Men with a Gun. Nobody is born with a facial tattoo like that. Every Bad Man with a Gun is a Good Man until he does something Bad.
You can look at patterns of behavior, sure! Gun violence nearly always has precedent. It’s nearly always people (men) who feel wronged by those close to them (women) and decide to get them back, and anyone else who stands in their way while they’re at it. It’s all the same phenomenon. But, the point is, life isn’t so simple that you can put people into these boxes. The best you can do is look at past behavior and its causes, and figure out the wisest form of engagement and the likelihood it may be predictive of future behavior or might be mutable to some extent.
The redemption narratives are the easy part. There’s lots of precedent for stories like that. Every facile action hero extends their (his) hand to the cackling villain at the end of the movie who has never shown an ounce of mercy, to illustrate their superior moral grounding. So many stories are filled with face-turn antiheroes, and rivals turned allies, and all of that. This is familiar ground, even if Steven Universe takes it to an extreme in terms of how committed it can be to the idea. What’s trickier and more upsetting is the opposite of this.
Again, nearly all violence, nearly all abuse, it is going to come from people you know. People you trust. Which the show plows right into, in the middle of season two. I’ve talked before about how, with media analysis of “Cry for Help,” you don’t need to glance at the byline to know the gender of the writer. Somehow, and beyond the obvious I can’t fathom how, cishet men just… don’t get what’s happening here:
I don’t know how you can overlook a line like “those weren’t victories,” or just see the nature of the relationship here and remain so totally oblivious to what this conflict is about. But, there you go, I guess. There are no good guys. There are no bad guys. There’s only what you do. And the people you choose to trust.
I don’t know that I’ve seen another long-form narrative really get in this deep, commit this strongly, to undermining our internal narratives about the Kind of People who hurt or help each other. It’s all of us. It’s every decision we make. And it’s not this gray-moral thing. Abusers are your spouse, your uncle, your babysitter, your sibling, your neighbor, that family friend. They’re the people you let into your life, and so have the opportunity to do damage and feel like they can get away with it. Not everyone, but anyone. Any single decision.
This isn’t a point of paranoia. It’s just, it’s puncturing the myth and the assumptions about who Bad People are; what abuse and violence actually look like, and where it nearly always really comes from—which goes so counter to our entire cultural narrative, and most of our personal expectations, wired as we are to contrast bubbles of in-groups and out-groups, that it’s hard to know where to begin.
It’s this very upsetting truth that drew me into the show, and made me think, basically: holy fuck. There’s a TV show actively talking about this as an ongoing thing. And, it’s a fantasy adventure aimed at kids? This is the thing people have been yammering about on my timeline, all these months?
We tell ourselves these simple fairy tales and we think we live in them. And so much of our cultural discourse is based around these dynamics, that don’t actually map to human reality. It’s revolutionary to stand opposed to such a fundamental and uncorrected error.
Though she developed some nuance and rethought a few assumptions as she went along, Rebecca Sugar originally planned the show as an exercise in reverse escapism: pitch a fantastical premise, but play it for mundane and instead spend all your energy talking about reality—which is basically what the series does: it uses its framework (and its glorious web of metaphor) as an excuse to explore social and psychological and interpersonal dynamics that are very hard to talk about judiciously, and that many shows would go to great lengths to avoid.
In a world built on wish and fantasy like our own, the truth is always a transgressive thing. And what it most often serves to violate is an order of injustice. This is what art can do. This is the goal in life. This is what makes a thing important. And this is what got me.
(Note that all of this also applies to one’s relationship with one’s self. Which is an angle the show also explores in extraordinary detail.)
A thing about this show is that it tends to be kind of half-hearted with action and fight sequences, because that’s not something it cares about all that much. It’s more this inevitability. But, horror? It’s so on top of it. This is an important subject.
The corruption
And again with the sound design. The music that plays as Garnet struggles with the forced fusion, it’s a chopped-up, corrupted version of… well, this.
The Purity
Nearly all the horror is existential, because of course it is. When it’s embodied in a tangible threat, the threat is a threat generally less for its immediate ability to harm than for its implication. For its threat to the very essence of a person, and everything they hold dear. Invalidating one’s existence is pretty much Horror Embodied, here.
The Mother, the Son, the Holy Light
You’re not a real person. You are a perversion. Nothing you care about matters. It must be cleansed.
Horror is a function of the core drama and themes that the show serves to discuss. It’s a natural consequence of friction within those concepts. Action, rather less so.
Every bit of adversity is underlined, and made awful, less by its physical threat (no matter how large that may be) than by its psychological, emotional weight—again, usually in the form of invalidation.
Not the last time they’ll be defined like this.
All the more reason why season four is so crucial in this show, it being about Steven’s downward spiral, basically causing him to give up on himself—and why people who dismiss it as lacking story because it’s relatively slim on action setpieces are just, um. Well, silly.
Different sort of horror going on here. It’s all central to the show’s sense of conflict. All basically the same, in different hues.
Everything is so off here, even before the clouds go dark.
As I say, soon I want to go in deep on Rose’s portrait how it’s used in the show. From the very first episodes it’s this uncertain, ambivalent presence. If pressed, Steven will say it’s inspiring, but… of what exactly? As the show goes on, it looms more ominously.
Most of the monsters in the show, they were turned into monsters by despair. Their minds were broken, and they devolved along with their concept of who they were. Which is kind of an unspoken threat to all the major characters, if they sink low enough.
Tonal whiplash is the standard here.
Later in the same season as the above clip, there was a moment with Amethyst when it really looked like she might be in danger of losing grip on who she was. That’s not the direction the show went. As it happened, Jasper was the one who lost herself. But, it seemed like a real possibility for a time.
The ideas at the core of Steven Universe are deeply existential. They’re about identity and lived experience and expectation and abuse and obligation. It’s a show about misfits—people who’ve been told they’re wrong, and broken, and perverse, for even existing—slowly trying to find a way to cope, through mutual unconditional love. That’s not a scenario that a fist or a beast can really threaten all that much. But words, and doubt? They can be the end of everything.
“Tiger Philanthropist” is a weird one, in that it’s a direct sequel to “Tiger Millionaire”—an episode that everyone seems to adore yet leaves me cold outside some early character stuff for Amethyst. This one is basically the same episode, but With Meaning, and everybody hates it.
The idea here is, well, yet another part of Steven’s life is falling apart. Yet another relationship is sort of collapsing, another piece of what he considered stable just isn’t there anymore. As has been happening all season. It’s yet another window into his inability to cope.
I know many of the random characters who show up around town are based on production team members, but I wonder about Fanny Pack Grandpa down there in the corner. I mused about him elsewhere, but he’s in the show as early as “Bubble Buddies” and as late as “Change Your Mind.”
Part of the subtext of this episode is basically, yeah, the show has moved on now. The daft little things that used to merit whole episodes in the early seasons, they seem inconsequential compared to what’s been happening—yet for exactly that reason, Steven still clings to them.
He’s still a kid. He shouldn’t be dealing with the shit he’s going through. All he wants is to hang onto these little things to give him joy and a sense of purpose and normality. It’s not just that he’s growing up, losing innocence. It’s that, he wants things to still matter.
He feels like everything is slipping through his fingers and leaving him behind, grasping at air. Barely acknowledging him. Everyone’s moving on. This is going to continue for some while to come. It’s going to get really bad at the start of the next season.
The specific way that Amethyst gives up their shared thing, without consulting him, just typifies this. Just moments before he was soaking in the escapism of their little role play routine, forgetting all the garbage that’s been going on. Then she just quit on him, like that.
“What a sad and anticlimactic end to one of the greatest tag-team careers to ever grace the squared circle.”
“Ahhh! Got my Saturday nights back!” To do what, exactly, Amethyst? What defines Saturday for you? How do you even know what day it is?
And then we get into all this messiness, complicating Steven’s own ambivalence with his outsized sense of responsibility. This is just one little thing, that maybe he can kind of control, that maybe he can keep from going completely to shit and ruining things for everyone else?
He’s just, so desperate to make this work. To save this one dumb little thing, to make a few people happy. He does a face turn and just starts giving things away. Which only further irritates Lars (at least, and as proxy for the rest of Tiger Millionaire’s fans).
“It’s like… the sequel no one asked for.”
“What?! It’s the sequel YOU asked for!”
“You want him to lose, and… keep his money, right?” “No, I don’t want him to *lose*. It’s just…” “What do you want him to do?! Just tell me!”
“I don’t know! I don’t even know what I want for breakfast half the time!”
And, you know what Tiger Philanthropist does, right? He just… gives up. He doesn’t care anymore. He gives away the title belt to whoever can reach it first. Amethyst leaps in at the last minute to give some emotional closure, but. Yeah.
How can this be happening?! It was just getting good! You can’t quit now! Tiger!”
