hystericempress
@hystericempress

✨ If you were in Steven Universe fandom around the period when the episode "Bismuth" dropped, you were at ground zero for one of the ugliest fandom meltdowns I've ever seen in my life. If you're wondering what the genesis of so much of the noxious rhetoric that got us people like Lily Orchard composing multi-hour bad-faith screeds against the show was, "Bismuth" is very much the flashpoint for it. It was where a lot of people, many of whom had specific motives for wanting to see the show fail or who made careers off of peddling outrage to fandoms for both clout and financial gain, found their chosen wedge issue. And in some ways, it was the perfect spike to drive into the fandom. However, it didn't actually divide people along political lines, or at least I don't believe it did, since pretty much the entire fandom skews pretty hard left, but rather divided the fandom into two camps: those who appreciated an attempt at nuanced emotional storytelling, and those who felt that giving emotional nuance in a situation they felt was clearly a black-and-white moral conflict was disingenuous.

I'd like to actually discuss this. We're about 7 years out from this episode now, and I think largely, fandom reactions to it and the series as a whole have cooled-off enough that it's possible to have an actual conversation about it without it devolving into immediate hair-pulling. I want to tackle this from a couple different angles, and I want to give voice to both the complaints against it, and provide my own counterarguments. It's my intention to try and be fair to the discussion, but I also want to articulate why I think a lot of the controversy surrounding it was, to be blunt, wildly-overstated.

So let's get down to Bismuth. (Sorry, sorry. I'm allowed ONE of those.)


✨ To briefly summarize the episode, and I'm giving the very short version here: Steven accidentally unbubbles a Gem hidden inside the pocket dimension in Lion's mane that was used by Rose as a secret hiding place only she could access. This Gem is Bismuth, who during the war was a major figure in the Crystal Gems and served as their chief weaponsmith, producing most of the non-summoned weapons for the Gems during the war. Bismuth went missing after a major battle, and even at the start we see some tension when this topic comes up. When the group confirms the war is over and that it was a pyrrhic victory wherein almost all the other Crystal Gems were corrupted, Bismuth gets intensely upset but immediately buries it with anger when she finds out Homeworld is still attacking, and insists that she's ready to fight.

Bismuth is almost-immediately reaccepted by the group, with the exception of Amethyst, who doesn't have the existing friendship with her that Pearl and Garnet do. Amethyst points out that it's sort of suspicious how quick she's being accepted back given she was stored somewhere Rose kept a secret from everyone, and while Amethyst is quickly bribed by Bismuth improving her whip with some upgrades, now Steven, who had initially been welcoming, is starting to have doubts. It's clear that Bismuth's degree of casual aggression and the intensity of her anti-Homeworld rhetoric bothers Steven a fair bit. He's having to reconcile his emotional reality, that the Crystal Gems are his weird found family unit, with actual reality, that the Crystal Gems were violent, enthusiastic revolutionaries whose primary goal was, y'know, toppling a socially-oppressive colonial state.

As Bismuth integrates more strongly back into the group, Steven gradually puts these suspicions aside once it becomes obvious that Bismuth isn't only that, that she is willing to be part of the family and indulge in all of the stuff he does with the Crystal Gems. And when Steven shows off Rose's sword to her late at night, Bismuth starts to open up. Bismuth describes Rose as having 'changed everything,' that she opened Bismuth's eyes to the idea of a world where Gems could be anything they wanted, free of Homeworld's oppressive surveillance state of rigid social order. Rose was her hero, her idol, but she tells Steven he can follow in her footsteps by choosing to be his own Gem instead of just trying to be her. She then tells Steven she thinks he should have a weapon that's just his, instead of something he inherited from Rose.

They go to her forge, and Bismuth explains that Rose's sword was something she designed as a specifically anti-Gem weapon, that it can disrupt a Gem's physical form with a single blow. Bismuth, however, has something different in mind for Steven, and presents him with the Breaking Point, a pile bunker-like weapon designed to shatter a Gem in a single blow. It's a weapon specifically designed to have a 100% kill rate on its targets, and which has no other purpose than to shatter Gems. This, however, is too far for Steven. He explains that he doesn't think it's right to fight this way, that while he's fine with fighting in self-defense, actively seeking to shatter their enemies as a first-resort isn't what he wants.

Bismuth at this point gets agitated, and starts to believe that Steven is really still Rose, noting 'that's exactly what she said.' She reveals that her 'disappearance' wasn't in battle; it happened here, when Rose cut her down and then bubbled her and made her just vanish after Bismuth showed her the Breaking Point and indicated her intention to mass-produce them and execute a counter-invasion of Homeworld. This provides an interesting conflict with events we know about Rose from later, but ultimately, Steven is forced to stab Bismuth with Rose's sword in self-defense, and Bismuth tearfully states that she wishes Rose had just shattered her during the war so she wouldn't have to know 'how little she mattered ' to her. Steven confirms, however, that he won't hide this from the other Crystal Gems, to which Bismuth tearfully states that he really is better than Rose, and the episode ends with her bubble being placed with the corrupted Crystal Gems, Bismuth's old comrades, in the Temple.

So, okay, that's the broad strokes of the episode. Let's actually talk about what the complaints about it were, and examine whether or not those complaints have any merit.

✨ A key point of contention hinges on the Breaking Point itself. A large contingent of the fandom, bluntly... kind of did want the show to move into an interstellar war plotline that would involve Steven and the Crystal Gems openly going on the offensive and leveling Homeworld. The argument here is, more or less, 'Homeworld are fascists, so you can't reasonably object to the Breaking Point as a tactical option.' This is reminscient of a lot of arguments that literally any act is acceptable in a war against fascists, and that any violent action in the pursuit of liberation is justified by-default. The Breaking Point, this argument contends, as a sure-fire kill against any enemy target, regardless of their power or authority, is 'a logical weapon' for the numerically-inferior Crystal Gems to deploy against their opponents and any attempt to claim otherwise is disingenuous. This is, taken as a whole, part of a stripe of criticism where no amount of progressivism in social terms is ever enough, that metaphor is only ever a rhetorical dodge, and that you can't be pro-queer or pro-minority in a genuine way if your narrative doesn't overtly advocate for open conflict against oppressive forces in direct engagement. This viewpoint, more or less, takes as a point of faith that if the show didn't progress to outright warfare, it was being Not Leftist Enough and therefore deserved the full force of the fandom's scorn.

And... hoo. Okay, let's dive into this. I'm not going to spend quite as much time on this because it's getting into extremely grognardy minutiae, but it was an argument that was extensively used by the show's more aggressive critics, and we have to discuss it.

So, first off, straight-up, we have to get this out of the way. Steven Universe is not a depiction of a literal, actual war. It is a children's show where people sing about ice cream sandwiches and cry about their family relationships. Interstellar war is a component factor in the narrative, but if you actually expected a children's television program intended for an audience of 8 to 14 year olds to openly advocate for the wholesale slaughter of your ideological opponents, I think you might need to recalibrate your expectations. But for the sake of argument, let's entertain the idea that this is a strategic and tactical issue, that it is a 'real' war. Does the argument that the Breaking Point is a 'perfect weapon' for a guerrilla movement to utilize hold up?

Let's consider a hypothetical scenario. There is a war on. One side is strictly numerically-inferior and fighting to defend an occupied homeland, and is up against an enemy with far more manpower and industrial production, whose overall command structure is kept fairly remote from the engagement. Thus far, the smaller side of this conflict has kept up with its enemy by means of avoiding direct, open engagement and instead conducting small-scale incursions intended at sapping the enemy's will to maintain their grip on the region, to make it too obnoxious to be worth hanging onto the region as an investment. Into this scenario, someone invents a weapon whose primary function is direct, single-target removal of individual opponents. It requires time to load, and can only really be used in direct offensive engagement, but if launched is a guaranteed kill on any single target. If a weapon like this is introduced to this conflict, do you think that weapon favors the underdog, or the overdog?

Considering this strictly literally, weapons have to be evaluated not just for their capacity for destruction, but for their capacity to be used against you, the same way laws have to be evaluated for their ability to oppress as much as their capacity to create more equitable treatment. A weapon that has a totally-guaranteed destructive cost in manpower, every single time it's deployed, is going to inherently favor the side with more total manpower to spend. The Breaking Point is an utterly illogical weapon for a guerrilla force, because of the simple cost equation that their opponents can make more of them than they can, carried by more troops than they can field. Far from leveling the playing field, it turns conflict into a simple numbers equation: once you uncork the specter of effectively-automatic deathdealing, the mathematics of conflict become pure subtraction. The Breaking Point is an effective tactical weapon for single engagements, that immediately becomes strategic suicide at-scale.

The idea that more efficient weaponry is going to favor the side with less industrial capacity and resources is not just a complete misunderstanding of logistics, it openly flies in the face of most of recorded military history. Open depletion of enemy manpower is not how guerrillas win wars. Trying to argue that it's a good idea is missing the point on several levels, and betrays a very clear lack of awareness of the history of war while attempting to use the logic of war as a talking point. Weapons that can inflict guaranteed casualty rates have not historically worked out well for their inventors if their opponents have the ability to deploy more than they can; "don't call up anything you can't put back down" is a lesson a lot of militaries have learned the very, very hard way.

✨ The largest point of contention, however, was over fandom perception that Bismuth is a stereotype of an 'angry black woman.' Her voice actress, Uzo Aduba, is the child of Nigerian immigrants and earned a lot of fame and critical praise for portraying Crazy Eyes in Orange Is The New Black. Bismuth's actual physical design is tall, broad-shouldered, with dark skin, dreadlocks, and tattoos, and a large contingent of the fandom felt that Bismuth is heavily black-coded as a result. The complaint in part stems from the idea that Bismuth's anger and rhetoric is stereotypical of portrayals of black characters in mass media as unjustifiably hotheaded, disruptive, and aggressive, that her blackness is used to negatively-characterize her, and that this stereotype is then set up to be easily-dispatched by a more 'reasonable' coded-white character in the form of Steven.

So. Let's actually examine that. It would be easy to play the Thermian Argument here, and say 'well obviously she's not black, she's an alien and her resemblance to blackness is entirely coincidental.' However, I don't feel that defense holds water. Whatever else the show is saying with the Gems, we are still viewing them through the context of the audience being people who live on Actually Earth in Actually Reality. The Gems being aliens is itself rooted in metaphor for queer and immigrant culture, and that is the lens through which the show portrays them. That the Crystal Gems are aliens is lore, not the allegorical truth of the narrative; the allegorical truth is they're standins for any outsider community fleeing oppression. So I don't actually think you can convincingly make this argument on in-universe terms. In-universe, literal-minded appeals are compelling to certain types of lorehounds, but I don't think that they can be used as a convincing argument against it because what's being discussed isn't the literal text, but the way we interpret the text as people who bring all our real world baggage with us, as a text written by actual people who had similar baggage they were also bringing to the table.

Do I feel that Bismuth is a character who is being coded as black? Well... yes. That's intentional, it's clearly intentional. And she is, overtly, hotheaded, disruptive, and aggressive. If you are viewing this information in a complete vacuum of both real-world and in-universe context, it would be easy to say 'yes, this makes Bismuth an angry black woman stereotype.' But I think there's another point worth considering: is Bismuth's anger justified?

And I think the show provides a very compelling argument that yes, it absolutely is.

Bismuth's anger isn't only over being rejected, and it isn't only over her contempt for Homeworld in abstract. It's all rooted in a different cause; her perception that Rose betrayed her, that Bismuth came to Rose in confidence and rather than have a real discussion about the goals of the rebellion, Rose effectively assassinated her and then concealed it from all of her friends. What sets Bismuth off in the final confrontation of the episode isn't just Steven's refusal to use the Breaking Point, it's that he rejects it on the same grounds Rose did, leading her to believe 'Rose' is just lying to her again. Her attack comes from her perception that she is about to be discarded for a second time, and she decides she won't be caught flat-footed this time. It is a tragedy of misunderstanding, but it isn't unjustifiable.

We see throughout the whole episode evidence of the war's toll, a toll Bismuth feels could have been avoided if Rose had given the go-ahead for mass-production of the Breaking Point. Rose, she feels, threw away her army, the actual people she was fighting for, in pursuit of an abstract ideal that would only be cold comfort to the survivors. She chafed at Rose's idea of playing 'high road soldier' in an existential conflict with an aggressive, interstellar empire, and feels a deep sense of guilt that she wasn't able to protect her friends during the final conflict because Rose discarded her on ideological grounds instead of respecting her as a person even if she disagreed on her methods and ideals. Her criticism of Rose is that Rose lied about everything to play at being a revolutionary, and made everyone else pay the cost for her.

And you know what? That is... a valid criticism of Rose Quartz. It's a criticism so valid, in fact, that it serves as the backbone for the entire back half of the show.

✨ This is where I break from the idea that Bismuth's anger is stereotypical. Bismuth is angry, yes, but her anger is rooted in a very emotionally real, non-abstract betrayal. She was, very concretely, thrown under the bus by Rose in what amounted to an internal ideological purge, an ideological conflict we later find out was conducted on false pretenses in its own right.

Let's just get the elephant in the room out of the way; this show has been over for a while. Rose Quartz is Pink Diamond. When Bismuth suggests using the Breaking Point to shatter the Diamonds, Bismuth is not only asking her to execute her own direct family, but it also puts Rose in an even more precarious position, because it threatens to expose her hidden identity. This would expose Rose's privileged position and her unwillingness to truly let go of the reins of power; it threatens Rose's perception that she's really changed, that she's not still an authority figure. And so, in a very Rose kind of move, Rose exerts unilateral authority and disposes of Bismuth in order to preserve the illusion that she isn't the kind of person who'd exert unilateral authority.

It is very easy to imagine a world where Rose didn't let this go this far. It is very easy to imagine Rose taking this moment to come clean, revealing to the Crystal Gems that she's Pink Diamond, that all of this got way out of hand. She could have explained that while her aims in starting the rebellion were sincere, she's in over her head. But... that isn't who Rose was. Far from characterizing Bismuth negatively, this incident is used to further reinforce that Rose's default response to any situation that was even remotely emotionally-difficult was to conceal, deflect, and outright lie about it. Rose's unwillingness to directly confront this matter and do so honestly is the source of this pain, as it is for most of the show's ongoing problems. Remember, the stereotype of the angry black person hinges on the idea that the work itself believes their anger to be incorrect.

And here, it's flatly not. She's right to be angry and ultimately, the show sides with Bismuth's emotions even if it doesn't side with her methods of conducting a war. When Bismuth is revived later, it's now Steven who has become utterly-disillusioned with his mother, and is frankly even more condemnatory of her. Again, I want to be clear: if you think Steven Universe, as a series, is a work that lionizes or makes excuses for Rose, I do not think we were watching the same show.

✨ So what conclusions can we draw here? For one thing, I understand where the anger about this episode came from in the abstract. 2016 was a year where, for a lot of reasons, a lot of people were really, really tired of the idea that you can reconcile with ideological opposition when one side of the equation is openly-advocating for the annihilation of queer people. But I think the scorn that ended up heaped at the feet of "Bismuth" as an episode and Bismuth as a character is a little misplaced. Television and media are not... reality. They are reflections of our reality, and means to cope with and process our reality, but they don't strictly depict that reality in a literalistic manner. Ignoring the emotional core of a story about a coded-black character who feels personally-betrayed by their ideological leadership because it didn't end with a 14-year-old enthusiastically embracing murder isn't just missing the forest for the trees, it's misunderstanding that a painting of a forest is not an actual forest.

I don't actually begrudge people for being disgruntled, however. It is entirely reasonable to feel frustrated that something didn't go in a direction you were hoping for. That's just... garden-variety disappointment, that's fine. My actual scorn is reserved for the people who used Bismuth's characterization as a bad-faith argument about abstract ideology to tear down one of the first shows of its era that was actively trying to provide queer kids with positive messaging. My anger rests with the kind of people who tried to accuse Rebecca Sugar and Ian Jones-Quartey, a non-binary Jewish woman and their African-American spouse, of being anti-semitic Nazi sympathizers. My contempt lies with people who accused a children's show that depicts an onscreen genderqueer lesbian wedding of 'queerbating' simply because nobody used the word 'wife.'

Again, we cannot disconnect from the reality that the media we enjoy is made by people, who live in the same world as us. Whatever your position might be on whether or not a children's show executes effectively on its themes, whether or not it bites off more than it can chew, it's not an excuse to make personal attacks against the very real queer and minority creators developing it. That's not abstract, and the sheer hostility towards that nuance displayed by the harshest critics of the show did, in my opinion, cross a pretty significant line. There ARE compelling arguments you can make about aspects of the show, but time and again they have continually been shelved for apocalyptically-noxious takes that refuse to actually engage with the thematics of the work.

I like Bismuth a lot as a character. I think she's rad. I like that the show trusted the intelligence of its viewers enough to permit for a slow-burn build on using her to reveal more of the flaws of a mythologized savior figure. But I do understand where people are coming from in being critical; my objection is not with the critics themselves, but with the conclusions. And honestly? It's fine if you don't agree with me. That's none of my Bismuth.

(Okay, so I let myself have two.)


@Cliomancer shared with:

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @hystericempress's post:

Wow, I'm kind of blown away that this was the reaction to that episode. I thought surely the controversy would be "You teased a cool new character and even created scene transitions with her in it to make it look like she was here to stay and then rugpulled us." Which like, I could actually see a little bit. But all this? Sheesh. People really expected Steven Universe to turn into Mobile Suit Gundam.

I appreciate whenever people point out that the war isn't literal. There's a whole song where Steven realizes it also stands in for familial abuse. I can't fault everyone for whom mixing those metaphors rubbed them the wrong way, but trying to pigeonhole it into a single literal reading gives an incomplete picture and shouldn't be the most widespread analysis. Alas, now people have it in their heads that the Diamonds' so-called "redemption" was anything more than Steven tactically dismantling the apocalypse in a way that only makes sense in this specific fictional context

"Thermian Argument" will definitely have to enter my vocabulary. Using that concept in the other direction, though… i'm honestly surprised that more of the show's concept didn't spark debates around that? Like, we have the race- and gender-coding debate, we have the debate over the authorial intent behind the Diamonds. I think those fit into this concept?

It's also canon that, say, most Gems are literally programmed with prejudice and authoritarianism. One of the movie's subplots was an extended joke(?) about Pearl insisting on re-enslaving herself the moment she lost her memories. I couldn't help but react a bit a-Thermianly to that, even though i knew the creators weren't trying to say "People Become Slaves Willingly Because It's In Their Nature" through what they encoded into a dystopia's magic system. After all, the show says plenty elsewhere that even if we do naturally tend toward the Homeworld playbook, that wouldn't make it correct and we're capable of growing beyond it.

But, just, knowing how discussions around the series got, i'm in disbelief that people only ever jumped on the uncharitable reading when debating the power dynamic of Pearl and Rose's relationship?? Blasting to the logical extreme feels like a fan war that would've happened. I guess we should be thankful it didn't

✨I think with regards to Pearl, it's making a point about deprogramming from the kind of behavior where one uncritically accepts their place under not just a dystopian system but also is conditioned to accept neglectful behavior, and the fact that doing so is really hard, particularly when you're In Love with someone who A) doesn't fully-reciprocate in the way you want, and B) isn't fully-conscious of the disparity in power. A major theme throughout the show is that Gems just... do not change on their own. Gems only change when forced to by outside circumstances. The Crystal Gems let themselves get into a multi-thousand year rut post-war, and so did the Diamond Authority, and basically nobody actually moved the needle until Mere Mortals compelled them, mostly Greg. It's implied that the reason Rose ultimately 'chose' Greg was that he stood up to her and demanded equal treatment, in a way that... Pearl never even asked for, because what Pearl wanted was the safety of a relationship whose terms would never need to be renegotiated. Her unwillingness to do so is her tragedy, but ultimately it's why Greg is the only one who really understands her despite her being the most 'human-skeptical' of the Crystal Gems.

Have I mentioned I love this series?

Oh yeah, i think i remember Alex bringing up that first part in your first SU essay. Yeah that makes sense and i like your analysis of it. Although i'm still not entirely convinced that the rejuvenation is a solid metaphor for Pearl finally deprogramming from the remnants of that conditioning… Couldn't she just be set back to that state again? Like, "Volleyball" didn't quite confirm it, but i'm pretty sure the dramatic tension that resolved as Mega Pearl was still explicitly relying on me believing as much

Also, would that i could love this series in quite the same depth as you! Unfortunately we dropped off of Watching Television just before Season 1B started, ended up experiencing the original show completely out of order through YouTube clips, and weren't really satisfied by the movie or Future. I really appreciate your insights because as much as i already love all that the show did (the characters, the mystery, the representation, the exploration of the magic system until everything clicks into place, eventually the applicability of fusion mechanics to our system), i experienced it out of context and don't quite have the same level of nuance yet. so i guess that is to say, Please Don't Ever Stop

✨ That's what I mean. From personal experience you never get over it all the way. Like Pink Pearl, like Spinel, the scars remain even if the wound heals. I think that's the significance of the show never actually showing us if Pink Pearl's cracks vanish, or Spinel's cry lines never disappearing. Healing doesn't make damage go away; it just lets you function again.

The Rejuvenator does run into some weird spaces in the fiction, admittedly, but I chalk it up to the Gems being metaphorical for totalitarianism and not literal, actual fascists. When they get reset, it's Factory Default. They're made, not born; remember how confused the Crystal Gems initially were about childbirth. Sugar herself described them as 'magical solar-powered robots" at one point in terms of function. This is a point where fiction and specificity overrides pure allegory.

This was a really good read. I've only seen the first half of SU so I DID manage to catch this episode. I've never really put myself in any fandom spaces so I wasn't aware of how it eventually went down... but I do remember thinking at the time that, "The internet is going to argue about this one." XD And from what you've said the reaction was, it looks like that was the case. I think your points are well thought out and I pretty much agree with what you've said. I DO think audiences and the writers of fiction in general need to have a real conversation about the "Three's Company Effect" on characters. Y'know, the thing that means #1: No one will take the time to communicate to defuse any situation and #2: if there IS a misunderstanding that can happen it WILL definitely happen? There never seems to be any characters in popular fiction that are cooler headed and take a moment to communicate and talk things out or make sure they're not having a misunderstanding about something crucial before automatically believing the worst about another character. Not saying Bismuth or Rose would've been that sort of character... Just that there NEVER seems to be a character like that in basically anything. Not a critique about SU so much as a critique about fiction in general. ^u^ I really need to watch the rest of SU at some point, including the movie... 🤔

I think a factor that played into the fandom reaction was the pre-Bismuth episode where Steven learns (to his great distress) that Rose was willing to shatter gems when necessary. Because there was a faction of the fandom that really liked that revelation and were like "yea!! killing evil people is justified!!" and overall interpreted it within the framework of preexisting Leftist Discourse About Political Violence. And those people felt very betrayed when it turned out that wasn't actually what the show wanted to talk about.

Anyway thank you for the post, I love the show and I'm still sad that the online fandom got so weird that it wasn't safe to just like. Have conversations about it while it was actually airing.

I think another issue that got left out of this discussion at the time is that many Homeworld Gems are coerced victims of a fascist state. There's a conversation to be had about whether (outside of a children's cartoon) assassinating the Diamonds is a correct act. But all of the Gems that have appeared on screen at this point, with the exception of Jasper, either have defected from Homeworld society or been abandoned by it. Lapis was an enslaved person, Peridot was an enthusiastic and patriotic technician, the Crystal Gems (except Amethyst) were members of Homeworld society who became rebels, and every corrupted Gem on Earth was a victim of Homeworld war tactics.

The Shattering Point is a bad guerilla weapon for all the reasons you mention, and also because the people it would be used against are demonstrably potential recruits. The vast majority of them aren't devout fascist party members, but people indoctrinated into a generationally-fascist and -imperialist society who, as far as we can tell at this point in the series, are all extremely ripe for recruitment. Bismuth could have designed a weapon that would effectively poof gems en masse, allowing them to be captured and deprogrammed, but instead she makes one that can permanently kill people just like herself, Peridot, or Lapis.

If the Shattering Point had been used against Peridot in "Catch and Release," a season before "Bismuth," she couldn't have explained the Cluster to the Crystal Gems, and it would have already destroyed the Earth.