Amongst its twined majesties, I think paramount for me about “Alone Together” is the tone and atmosphere that it sets, pairing its heady thematic material with the heightened hues of an eternal twilight. You can almost hear the air, and smell the light. It’s such a specific feel.
It’s a heartbeat, stretched into hours then compressed to 11 minutes. It’s one of those fleeting moments where time nevertheless stops, that stay with you for the rest of your life. The kind of formative experience that you wish you could go back and live in forever.
Katie Mitroff’s frequent point-of-view and reversal shots work overtime to pull you into this headspace, and hold you there until the ride is over—making you a part of the fusion, as it were. They’re so emotionally specific, and intense. That specificity is important.
The episode plays out like a memory. It’s specific in its emotion, vague on the detail; it skips around and rambles and devolves. All of that hinges on the impossible sensory detail. There’s no way it could be twilight for that long, or all those events could fit into that time—and there’s almost too much that happens, like it can’t all be memory of the same evening. It’s such a disorienting rush to watch and process, much as it would have been to live through. And yet, it’s beautiful. Every breath of it haunts our senses, competing with the last. After eleven minutes you feel like you’ve watched a breakout independent film, or relived a pivotal experience you can’t believe you’d forgotten—one drenched in a very particular shade of purple, that hums in the near darkness.
As ever, Steven Universepaints in sound as much as in digital wash, and there are long periods in this episode without dialogue. Even when characters speak, they hesitate, allowing the scenery into their pauses. That endless purgatory growl of the ocean, eerily present in every episode, rarely claims more space than it does here.
Around these beats, aivi & surasshu somehow fit six and a half minutes of original music. Each track blocks out a different step in the spiraling mood of the piece, that works together with the intervening silence and ambiance. The whole third act is overlaid with this increasingly oppressive dance music, as the experience spins out of control and anything like a desirable range of stimulation. There’s no silence here. No room for reflection or joy. And somehow it all sounds just as purple as the sky.
“Alone Together” is some kind of temporal anomaly. I feel like I could live a life in that episode—and that I sort of do, each time that I see it. It’s as subjective as the show gets, which is some achievement for a show as steeped in metaphor as Steven Universe. Its closest runner-up may be its own nightmare reflection of “Together Alone.” Both episodes are irrational, but involve very different experiences; the latter nightmare twists and corrupts the fond memory, turning a moment of euphoria and self-discovery into one of shame and fear. Which, as a piece of storytelling, sure is something.
In an earlier pass on this topic I incorrectly guessed that Rebecca Sugar herself—who receives a rare co-boarding credit on this episode—was responsible for the point-of-view shots and their reversals, due to the specificity and intimacy of those moments. On reflection, though, Katie Mitroff makes total sense, considering her work on “We Need to Talk” and “The Test,” which contain very similar held shots.
As it happens, Sugar’s main contribution is toward the center of the episode, with the Crystal Gems’ responses to Stevonnie and the now-iconic “twilight run” sequence, an animation that further involved the show’s most dynamic regular boarder, Jeff Liu. Add in a moshing animation from Ian Jones-Quarty, whose direct involvement with the show seems minimal after the first few episodes, and it really feels like they pulled in every hand they could to massage this episode into form.
With four years of hindsight it should be clear how pivotal “Alone Together” is for the show as a whole, but it’s becoming just as clear they were aiming for posterity at the time. If there’s one moment of the show that was to last forever, it would be this one.
People who feel very certain about the world feel very uncomfortable about nuance. And whatever they feel uncomfortable about quickly becomes the enemy.
One of the main things that Steven Universe serves to talk about is toxic behavior: where it comes from on an individual and structural level, and what to do about it. Every character on the show is carrying some grief or trauma, that affects their behavior. The show threads the needle of sympathy for the person and confronting the behavior, over and over. It’s delicate. So of course, people looking for black-and white, either-or answers to the questions that they specifically ask are going to have difficulty.
Take “Cry for Help,” the episode that first drew me in. This whole discussion that opens up here, and lasts for a while, it’s heavy as all hell. Consent is a constant theme with the show, and here Pearl coerced Garnet into fusion. It’s, you know—there are no good or bad people. There are good and bad actions. And, there’s trust. Most violence and abuse comes not from some evil bogeyman but from people close to you, who you generally trust—which is what this episodes serves to dive into.
Another way to put it is that Steven Universe focuses in on systemic violence and the way that it manifests in behavior, placing culpability for one’s actions as a part of that system rather than a value judgment on the individual—which we’re still having a bunch of trouble talking about as a society, and which seems to confuse the fuck out of people when you bring it up.) You want real change, the show argues, vilifying the individual won’t get you there. Hold them to account, but to truly fix anything you need to trace back and smash the system that led to the behavior in the first place.
A mind-blowing topic for a kids’ show, right? Even adult-targeted TV would prefer to avoid this discussion. So of course, the response from the Discourse Web more or less amounts to accusations that Rebecca Sugar somehow condones rape. Because discussing a subject in any shape or form means that you’re encouraging it, apparently.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6v7eyj
The character of Stevonnie—a non-binary, intersex character formed from the (basically) platonic relationship between two teenagers—is one of the most nuanced and radical elements of the show, representing puberty, first loves, gender discovery, consent—so of course they’re the target of a million bad-faith hot takes, that make them an example of everything depraved going on in our society today.
Of particular focus is how every character in Stevonnie’s debut episode episode objectifies them, as if this is evidence of the show’s awfulness rather than part of the actual point of the episode, that it serves to talk about. Part of the whole deal here, that the show continues to talk about long-term, is the dark turn the story takes halfway through, when what had been an innocent exploration of self and new love and so on gets weird when they realize the new way other people are responding to them. (In real life, find a girl who hasn’t had to deal with this shit starting around… roughly the age that Connie actually is at this point in the story.) This leads them into an anxiety attack—a moment of weakness that in turn a skeevy douchebag uses as an invitation to intrude on their space, making them even more uncomfortable. The episode demonstrates this as a Bad Thing; a violation. An example of What Not To Do, Ever. And, what can happen.
“Alone Together” is a thematically dense, complicated piece of television. It fits so much into eleven minutes, covers so many important topics so effortlessly, all at the same time, it’s hard to know where to begin. Of course some people feel weird; this is revolutionary storytelling. It’s bold and confident in saying things that nobody else is saying, that dearly need to be said. Revolutions make people uncomfortable.
It’s frankly astonishing how well Steven Universe handles the uncomfortable topics it raises, and it’s so important for doing so. Thematically and structurally it works more like literature than typical television. But, people who are eager to react don’t have that patience.
“It’s not helpful to pin all evil on some external bogeyman,” the show says. “Anyone can be hurtful, and we all are responsible for our own behavior.”
The reactionary seethes in reply. “Only a bogeyman would say such a monstrous thing!”
When you ask people to look at their own behavior, a divide will open up and half of the audience will flip its shit. People who assume bad faith will erupt in their own geysers of bad faith and intone like a banshee, rejecting the idea that maybe they missed a beat somewhere. It’s this bottled reactionary impulse, just waiting for the right excuse. This is the highway that people use to accuse the show, and by extension its creators, of all manner of bizarre, extreme things, not limited to but including actual fascism.
(This is in response to a queer Jewish woman and majority non-white cast and crew. One… suspects there may be other, unspoken motives at play here.)
Some of the most galaxy-brain takes on the show involve expressions of rage that its story takes the angle of trying to carefully dismantle a complex, violent system from its roots rather than barging in and selectively killing people, expecting that will solve all the problems. That, combined with the notion that no one is good or bad—people do good things, bad things, bad things for good reasons, good things for bad reasons, and none of this needs to be morally gray—so that you can’t point to any one person and say, “they’re the villain,” causes great Online Anger.
People don’t like to hear that they’re asking the wrong question, that they’re looking at the world all wrong, and that’s the only answer the show has to give. About pretty much everything. As I say, its whole attitude is revolutionary. Which is why it freaks people out so much.
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.
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.)
Listening to Steven Universe in headphones, you really appreciate all the work that goes into the overall sound design. The light environmental sounds —crash of the surf, wind—the tangible Foley, how sounds get muffled or reflected. Tinnitus ring. All about Steven’s bubble.
I get confused about the geography sometimes, though, especially during season one. Where is this, for instance?
It’s not the cliff with the Crystal Temple. Is it on the other side of the bay, by Brooding Hill and the warehouse? If so, Stevonnie seems to drift pretty far…
It’s interesting also that for the expressive purposes of this episode, twilight seems to last for hours on end.
One of many things that makes this story so heightened and uncanny.
I think the twilight palette here also affects my idea of Stevonnie’s coloring. Considering Connie’s and Steven’s relative skin tones, their medium tone here seems about right. But in other episodes, in the daylight, they’re way more pink than it feels like they should be.
But seriously, yikes: the sound design. Every little thing a character touches, there’s Foley, appropriate to the material and the properties of the room or environment. Everything is directional. There’s always appropriate spatial resonance. So present. And the music floats above.
And, here: when Stevonnie exits the shop, the sound of external crickets and surf, cut off by the slamming door…
I’m not understanding the level of detail here. What’s the process for mapping out how this works, and doing it?
(By the way, if we’re going to focus on deliberate expressive choices like Stevonnie proffering a $3 bill (ahem), their selection of doughnuts seems… potentially significant. Particularly in the context of the moment they’re having. )
(You can pick apart their anatomy yourself. )
(Come to it, there are an awful lot of deep, blank stare reaction shots in this show. Prime example, from another episode by this storyboard team.)
It’s easy to assume Beach City is just those few blocks on the peninsula, between the temple mount and the mainland, but there’s stuff all over the area. The warehouse is part of this industrial zone, across the bay by Brooding Hill.
And it’s clearly still in Beach City.
Stevonnie should pull out the sparkle powers more often.
Okay, right. So, sound design. Bopping on back to the next season’s first Florido/Mitroff/Sugar jam—here when the two of them spin in their little world, the Philosophy Majors recording goes from crackly record on tinny diegetic open-air speakers to full-on direct-line soundtrack, filling the stage…
… and when we pull out, it’s back to the tinny speakers.
The “What Can I Do For You” sequence (referenced previously, in the open-eyed gawp tangent) isn’t mixed like an album recording; it’s mixed like a slightly off live performance, with people not-close enough to mikes, the guitar too prominent, weird environmental acoustics, and so on. The reverb to the temple entrance, before the house is there to soak up sound…
I feel like I’ve been missing out on a whole dimension, here. There’s such a tangible sense of place, simply from the sound mix. I could close my eyes and know exactly what was going on, where, in relation to what or whom, at all times.
Same goes for the rinky-dink record Greg puts on for Rose. As they dance, it swells from diegetic crackle tin to full-stage direct-line cinema swoop mix, reflecting the emotional focus of the moment. And tying in the story with Connie and Steven’s moment at the start.
And again it pulls back out to the record player, after Greg disengages and realizes things didn’t quite go as he hoped.
I don’t think the parallel is lost on the two of them.
Retreating into Connie’s less-spectacular world, the Maheswarans’ house is quiet to the point it dulls all sound—as a wooden house full of furniture would, one supposes—but there’s still a barely perceptible fizz of street noise, as if heard through the windows.
As one might expect at this point, the soundscape of the hospital is every bit as uncomfortable as if one were there: hard surfaces; gross, persistent fluorescent hum.
I love how the sound completely changes inside the bubble, versus outside.
It’s stark, in headphones. Barely perceptible on speakers.
This effect isn’t unique to “Nightmare Hospital;” it’s been there since the bubble’s first appearance alongside Connie.
Again, inside, outside the bubble. When we go to an interior shot, all the subtle sounds of the shore, they’re distorted—not just muffled, but the curvature seems to phase the sound as much as the material blocks certain frequencies. It all depends on “camera” placement.
The audio impression is significant in this case, with Steven and Connie trapped in their protective bubble. The whole audio environment is different in there. Resonance. Presence. Which adds to the separation between the literal bubble the two of them are in, relative to world.
Also nothing new here, but that’s our first glimpse of Obsidian’s sword.
And the incidental music — when the headphones pull it out in the mix, and cinematically wrap it around the reality of the scene, it stands out all the more how beautiful it all is. And there’s so goddamned much of it in this show.
Connie has lived in a bubble her whole life. In meeting her, Steven’s first impulse was to literally put her in another protective bubble. It’s not until they reach an understanding, she stops being so scared, and he stops trying to be so cool, that the bubble pops. Both bubbles.
(On the topic of protective bubbles, in the early days every time Garnet bubbles a gem it’s when Steven is distracted or has his back turned. He literally has no idea what’s going on most of the time, and nobody takes the time to explain it to him or the audience.)
The bubble typifies the best environmental effect in the show: transitional atmospherics. A subtler example is when Steven and Connie are up by the laundry, and all the wind and surf are around them—then the scene cuts to the beach house, and the same sound is muffled by the thin walls.
(So many of the backgrounds contain things like this. A STORE or A GAME.)
The musical number that follows demonstrates a thing the show does more regularly than is obvious. Here, Pearl’s part is diegetic—which is to say it sounds like she’s in the place, just singing there alongside Connie—but the piano is… there needs to be another term, but it’s floaty. It’s superimposed in that ethereal way.
So Pearl’s really there, singing, for whatever reason, in the reality of the show, but the accompaniment is clearly there just for our benefit, like any other soundtrack element.
Another good example comes a season on, with “Mr. Greg.” Get past a bunch of really nice lobby sounds, and when Pearl’s song comes in, just as in “Sworn to the Sword” she’s mixed so that her singing is contextual, in real-space as far as the narrative, but the overlaid piano is coming from that phantom soundtrack zone.
To contrast, this piano is mixed in differently, because it physically exists in the scene.
Though predictably, if we’re studying the way the show handles these things, when we get to the Expressive Zone, it expands out and becomes full, all-absorbing soundtrack material.
This tendency dates back to the show’s earliest song cues. In the case of “Giant Woman,” Steven starts off singing diegetically, with the ukulele strumming in on the cinema stage. Through this first shot the atmospheric wind continues, albeit higher and lower in the mix according to music volume. But then it expands, as it becomes a montage.
For just a beat here until the singing comes in and it’s clear that it’s an overdub rather than happening in the minute, we continue to hear the Andes wind whirl through the frame. But then it quickly pulls out, and we’re on full OST mode…
… until Steven Junior chimes in at the end.
(Or, I should say, until that shot, which is where we transition back to Steven’s diegesis, and so start to hear a few subtle environmental noises buried in the mix—insects and birds, mostly.)
Back at the beach house, one notes that the ocean becomes an almost constant presence in the show once you can hear all the sound design. It gives the whole show this undercurrent (if you will) of melancholy, grounding every scene in and around Steven’s home in a sort of baseline of unsteadiness.
And it’s not just Beach City. Everywhere they go (e.g., the sky arena), there’s some kind of mournful environmental noise, just low enough that maybe you pick it up in your muscles, but you don’t quite hear it without headphones. Combine that with the complexity and detail of the incidental and contact sounds, and the environments practically become characters.
Cute incidental, on the topic of sound design: the three words Connie speaks through her hands, someone muffled in the mix. You can tell Rolek didn’t record the lines that way, but whoever’s doing this apparently thought this was an important detail.
And whoa, fusion-space has… interesting acoustical properties. Like a closet made of Plexiglas.
Also I don’t think I’d clocked just how much bass there is in this song. Which there would be, considering Garnet’s role. It’s just so low, it doesn’t come across in the white-people speakers I have.
Seriously, though, the atmosphere in the beach house is one of my new favorite things about the show. It’s like some quiet purgatory, technically safe but not quite… secure.
That turmoil of the constant surf and wind, it accentuates the way Rose looms over everything, her eyes often as not dramatically blocked by the rafters, depending on what’s happening in the story.
Here we’re right about to see Steven’s freak-out in which he envisions Rose’s face glaring down at him from the sky—and look how we’re introduced to that sequence.
I need to document how that portrait is used through the course of the show. It’s some Hitchcockian shit, I tell you. Every time it comes into frame, it’s… there’s a reason for it. Even for all my tangents, this topic is way outside the remit of our discourse here—but worth a deep spelunk at another time.
Anyway, the grinding, phasing bass tones here…
Golly, I’ve never had a 5.1 sound system. But I guess this show would be something with one of those, huh.
Speaking of which, “Storm in the Room” is certainly a go-to episode for unsettling beach house atmosphere.
In the room, it’s another level of purgatory: all distant wind, and the rustle of Rose’s dress.
Even as they play the weird Lonely Blade arm wrestling foreshadowing simulator, the wind continues to roil, preventing anything from feeling quite secure.
Then when this happens, there’s this deep grinding noise, similar to Stevonnie’s panic attack zone in the Sky Arena.
Curiously, the atmospherics on the jungle moon aren’t… quite as alien as one might expect. It sounds like a plausible Earth rainforest, including what sounds suspiciously like Earth crickets. It’s not even all that all-encompassing.
The hum and thrum of the failing radio is something, though.
Though the outside surprises me with how underwhelming it sounds, considering how engrossing it looks, the interior of the overgrown moonbase is another story. Here’s where the sound design finally wakes up.
Thing that always gets me about this picture, the way it’s re-staged with Stevonnie, it almost makes Priyanka and Doug look like an older Connie and Steven. I don’t think it’s an accident they gave Doug Steven’s nose and hair type, or general head shape. Because, Freud and all.
Actually, to build on the whole Doug/Steven parallel (I guess as parallel to the Pearl/Connie parallel):
“I’m a member of the Crystal Gems! We fight monsters and protect humanity and stuff.”
“Oh! That’s kinda like my dad. He’s a cop. W-well, more like a private security guard.”
I think I mentioned this before, but the Pearl/Connie thing is extra complicated in that—uh. So, okay. Steven’s the reincarnation of Rose, right. So it makes sense on that level he’d find his own “Pearl.” But also, Pearl’s as close to an actual mother figure as Steven’s known.
So, there are a couple of levels of “Hm” to his immediate fixation with her, depending on how you want to come at the situation.
Another aspect to the Connie/Pearl thing is their role as catalyst to their respective Diamonds’ (well, technically the same Diamond) stories. Rose would never have been Rose without Pearl’s imaginings and motivating influence. Until he met Connie, Steven had no in to his world.
It’s largely through Connie’s enthusiasm for his whole situation and his motivation to (at first) impress her, then just spend time with her, that he was shaken out of… what, four years of taking things for granted, doing what exactly, and began to question and learn and grow.
Without Connie to push him and take an active interest, Steven might never have gotten much further than Cookie Cats until the Cluster emerged and the Earth exploded.
Also on the topic of portraits, in that same episode (“Jungle Moon”)—I, uh.
I don’t know that there’s a deeper reading here exactly, but this can’t be an accident.
Back on topic, though—best piece of sound design in the episode: when our friend climbs up on the dome. Every click-thunk of its claws resonates convincingly through the structure. It’s really satisfying.
Continuing this Stevonnie theme, because why wouldn’t we—the thrum from Kevin’s speakers is overwhelming. He’s one of those people, where you can feel the bass down the block before you even see the car coming.
Kevin’s and Stevonnie’s cars have very different idle sounds. The Dondai is… uh, let’s say rickety by comparison.
Panic attacks are a good excuse for the sound design to go nuts. Here it more goes for a deranged detachment. Which fits well.
Toodling right along to wrap up the pre-Homeworld Stevonnie material, weirdly there’s next to zero environmental noise in “Crack the Whip,” once you get past the point where Amethyst refuses to actively watch them train.
Well, a little really low-in-the-mix white noise at the very end, but. Actually, the mix seems really weird in season 3.
Though I’ve covered the episodes I most wanted to discuss, I’ve got lots more to say on this topic. Hang tight. There shall be more.
It’s also a small thing, but I think it helps “Mindful Education” that we just saw Connie in the previous episode, in reasonably good spirits, getting ready for school. (Everything in seasons 2-3 happens in, like, a few weeks at most. It’s nuts.) Now, suddenly, this.
I’ve talked before about how I often consider Steven and Connie the two aspects of Stevonnie more than I do Stevonnie a merger of Steven and Connie. One of the reasons is the way “Mindful Education” uses fusion to discuss a duality of self, in a way that reflects other episodes.
Stevonnie is the most complex and challenging character in the show, the one who most clearly defines the show’s themes and arc and boundaries and interests. The one who would be unimaginable in any other show, who in their conception is both the most revolutionary and relatable.
When Stevonnie is there, the show has a chance to cover things it otherwise wouldn’t. We wouldn’t have an episode like “Mindful Education” without them. We wouldn’t have the framework for such nuanced discussions of consent and puberty and anxiety and gender identity.
They’re the most complete character on the show, and the most advanced canvas for ideas. You can pick out and identify the Steven and Connie parts of their personality, and study how that duality informs their sense of self, but they’re more than that. They’re a culmination.
Even in story terms, clearly it had to be Stevonnie who would kick off the revolution. It has to be Steven and Connie’s mixed memories, the fact of their comfort being one person, that offers a vehicle to understanding the past with Pink and Rose, and thereby the future.
Most of Steven’s powers, most of his discoveries, they all come to him when he’s with Connie. She’s learning about his world at just about the same rate that he is, and nearly as responsible as he is. As Stevonnie, they’re literal co-owners of that growth. Like sword and shield.
That right there is pretty much all you need, for symbolism. Connie and Steven, each only has half the puzzle. It’s telling, they’re the only fusion in the show with no extra parts. Even Garnet has that third eye. And when they’re not freaking out, they’re in no hurry to split.
Anyway. If low-key Greg is the real hero of the show, I think I can say that secretly Stevonnie is the real protagonist. Even if they’re only in it every now and then. Heck, they’re the only character other than Steven to carry a whole episode.
We know that, newly unfused, characters can get a little disoriented. The first time we meet Ruby, she’s fretting over being unable to use Garnet’s future vision. Given the slow growth that Stevonnie has, resolving their two personalities into one, one wonders about lingering effects.
Like, how often does Connie expect to be able to float or lift something huge, or summon something from her gemstone? Which… she doesn’t happen to have on her, as herself.
It’s hard to say anything new or interesting about “Mindful Education” as it’s such a pivotal, showcase episode for the show. But, God, seriously. What other TV show has done this?
In this case Garnet’s not saying “your fusion” to refer to the two of them. She’s referring to the individual. Which is to say, Stevonnie. Who is the stand-in for the viewer, because they’re the clearest vessel for a discussion of complex psychological and emotional issues.
That’s the thing about this whole fusion metaphor. It’s about relationships, right. Often that makes it a clear analog for sex. People who deny that aspect are kind of hilarious to me, because, you know.
But it’s such a broad and powerful metaphor that it can apply to damn near anything. “Mindful Education” is where the show double-underlines for you in case you missed it how the metaphor also works for one’s relationship with one’s self. Which is what Stevonnie is usually for.
Another thing that stands out about Stevonnie episodes is that they tend to be more experiential, environmental, focused on the internalized feeling of being in a moment regardless of any objective concerns. These are the moments the whole coming-of-age narrative becomes tangible
To wit:
Got to say, though, the circumstances around that Sugilite fusion sure cast a weird shadow on some later events.
I can never not cackle at this. “Magic stuff” indeed.
Cue a thousand pages of DeviantArt.
So, all right. Here’s an obvious thing that I don’t know I’ve seen anyone state outright, maybe because it is so obvious. After a few episodes of build-up, “Mindful Education” also serves to establish the tone and themes and announce the basic story of season four.
This is what season four is about, more or less. In particular, Steven’s own freak-out in the second half, running through all his trauma and guilt before settling on the glowering image of his mother, this is what carries us through to his… attempt at martyrdom, shall we say.
It may be putting too fine a point on it to say that this is the season that Steven becomes suicidal, but that’s basically where this is going.
And the episode that officially kicks off Steven’s downward spiral, particularly in relation to Rose, is “Mindful Education.” What happens at the climax here? In backing away from a looming spectre of Rose, Stevonnie loses footing and plummets into space.
One more example of the show being super duper literal with its narrative.
From here the season just keeps piling on, causing Steven’s actions to result in more and larger unintended consequences, warping his sense of identity, refusing to give him any kind of stability or catharsis. The season of doubt. Never far from the next stage of the breakdown.
