ketra

i personally don't think steven universe is anywhere near as difficult to talk about as homestuck, but i was never part of the su fandom and find most people's opinions on the subject rather boring. remember that one really long video essay that was all about how steven universe is bad and the creator got mad at rebecca sugar for the show's disjointed broadcast schedule? that's about the caliber of grounded and relevant criticism i tend to see and i just don't think it's worth engaging with. homestuck has a lot more baggage from a lot of different directions, some of which is very personal for me, so in my book there's no comparison on that front lmao

i really like steven universe! i've been itching to rewatch it, actually. has the culture turned in such a way that "we" have decided it was bad? i feel like i keep seeing people "defend" steven universe in a conspicuously, uh, well, defensive way, against a bunch of haters i rarely see, and i just can't tell if that's because people actually hate the show now or what. maybe it's just that folks had issues with the ending, issues with the movie, then issues with su future, and since that was the most recent canonical conversation it's the one that dominates our collective memory. doesn't help that people have an annoying tendency to assume that their kneejerk reaction to a thing they watched once six years ago & never thought about again counts as a legitimate and respectable opinion. kind of like how the only thing anyone remembers about the tv series LOST is that everyone was dead the whole time, despite the inconvenient fact that the show goes out of its way to disprove that notion multiple times in its final season. but i digress

personally i find most criticism of steven universe grating. it's a great cartoon!

i almost just wrote the line "sure it's not perfect, but" and want to pause for a second to reflect on that. "it's not perfect, but" is media criticism echolalia. you throw it in the mix somewhere any time you have nice things to say about literally any movie or show or book or album, because god forbid the audience think you have only nice things to say. i wish we could all just sit down and agree that "perfect" is anathema to art when it's applied objectively. perfection is inherently subjective-- a show like station eleven is perfect for me because it does the kinds of things that i like better than anything else that i've watched. perfect is impossible. perfect is poison. nothing perfect was ever made through the pursuit of perfection; it emerges only as an accidental byproduct of artists working REALLY FUCKING HARD, and only in the minds of those in the audience attuned to the specific threads of personal expression preferred by the artist in question.

so yeah, steven universe isn't perfect. i could pick some nits. some plotlines resolve too fast. the show rushes its ending a bit much. future is a bit of a mess. "talk to your racist grandma" isn't a solution to space colonialism. i actually don't care about these flaws though and i don't think it's fair to linger on them for any length of time without spending at least an equal amount of time discussing the abjectly impossible position rebecca sugar found themself in running a show for cartoon network. this nonbinary queer who used to do nsfw ed edd n eddy comics on tumblr was tasked with making an unabashedly gay high-concept genre story for children on a network run by explicitly homophobic conservatives who seemed to resent the show's popularity at every turn. it was, from very early on, an atmosphere of deliberate sabotage from the higher-ups, whether that's through a painfully inconsistent release schedule, constant studio notes and demands for toning down the gay, or yes, simply threatening to cancel the show constantly. yeah, the ending was rushed and in some ways unsatisfying-- tell that to the executives who canceled the show early, then greenlit the movie, then renewed the show for a surprise final season.

that the show exists at all in the form that it does is nothing short of a miracle. there is a gay wedding with a gay kiss between a masc-leaning gem in a dress and a fem-leaning gem in a suit!! there are so many songs about gay heartbreak and childhood trauma and just... man. what other show has explored relationships the way steven universe did? steven and connie, pearl and rose, rose and greg, rose and spinel, lapis and jasper, lapis and peridot, lars and sadie, ruby and sapphire, amethyst and greg, pearl and all the women in her phone, god i KNOW i've gotta be leaving some out too!!! few of these are unambiguously positive relationships, in fact most are deeply melancholy and some are outright abusive. that's good!!! i love how willing su was to explore complicated adult relationships from the eyes of a kid who's just trying to make sense of it all. it's a show i dearly, dearly wish had been on the air when i was a kid. for whatever else people like to say it gets wrong, there isn't a single flaw so big it even comes close to outweighing the large-scale queer normalization it helped to steward in.

to more specifically address the "talking your racist grandma out of space colonialism" point: i want to slap every single commentator who said even a single word more about white diamond's redemption arc than "yeah, not exactly an applicable real-life solution to empire." it's the same shit people said about avatar the last airbender's ending five years before steven universe started airing. "aang should have killed the firelord" oh yeah??? okay, let's go knock on some doors at nickelodeon hq and see how they feel about the child protagonist of their children's show for kids point blank murdering a man on screen in cold blood. like come on! i don't even disagree, man. like yes, politically speaking, if you've got the fascist dictator of a war-crazed empire at gunpoint in real life, you're probably best off pulling the trigger! now keep that knowledge in your back pocket for the next time you find yourself in that position, because that's the full extent of its relevance in discussions of either text.

you can only earnestly, militantly hold white diamond's redemption arc against the show if you maintain deliberate ignorance of the material conditions of the show's production. which unfortunately has been the expected norm of most popular criticism throughout the 2000s if not far longer, at least that i've seen. there's an infuriating boundary between art-making and art-criticizing that consistently leads otherwise keen observers of cultural phenomena to say just the most backward-ass unhinged nonsense you've ever heard. the tormented production history of steven universe isn't trivia, IT IS THE UNAVOIDABLE SHADOW OF THE TEXT ITSELF!!! i understand the argument that art ought to be judged on the basis of its quality and nothing more; that the work should speak for itself and everything else is window dressing. i understand that argument, okay? i just think it's stupid and wrong, especially in the case of a queer-focused show produced in a deeply homophobic country for a genuinely fascistic corporate network like this one. if you don't talk about the choices rebecca sugar made without also talking about the choices she wasn't allowed to make, then what are you even doing? you're blaming sugar for something that was entirely out of her hands! if they read your argument they'd probably say "i agree with you and i fought for exactly that!!!" quite frankly, when it comes to children's animation, that is probably true for most of the criticisms people levy against what makes it on the air.

anyway, to actually talk about what i'm supposedly talking about: i cry so much every time i watch the last couple episodes of steven universe. the separation and eventual reunification of steven from his gem is SO potent for me as a trans woman, as i'm sure it was for quite a lot of queer folks. i cannot tell you how many times i've found myself thinking, if only i could rip my heart out and show people who i am, if only i could get them to see me, then they'd never be able to deny my personhood ever again. life just doesn't work that way, unfortunately... but wouldn't it be nice if it did? the ending of steven universe is the good end that so many queer people imagine-- asserting yourself in the face of repressive family until finally, finally, finally they see you, and suddenly realize the magnitude of their fuck-up. it's a beautiful dream rendered with such clear emotional honesty. it's devastating poetry that resolves into an impassioned embrace and a true apology.

is that a satisfying way to resolve the many on-camera crimes of the homeworld empire? not particularly, i guess. but so what? almost every other villain in the show gets a redemption arc. it's just not in this show's nature (certainly not in steven's nature) to say that anyone is so far beyond redemption that death is the only solution. there are characters who definitely believe that, and the show flirts with agreeing with them from time to time. but ultimately that's not what this story is about. this is a story about living in a disappointing world, living with pain and disappointment and heartbreak, reckoning with it, and learning how not to kill yourself about it. the core lesson is frequently that no matter how right you are in wanting to inflict violence on someone else, doing so only further entrenches them from achieving actual change. the real work of being in a world full of other people is in not killing everybody you disagree with, actually! and while there are very firm limits on what and who can be forgiven in real life (and certainly instances when people are deserving of violence), steven universe is a children's cartoon show about gay talking rocks. yes, steven talking his homophobic grandma out of doing genocide is naive wish-fulfillment. more specifically, it is queer wish-fulfillment. please point me in the direction of any other show as honest about the dark and painful complexities of being a traumatized queer person among other traumatized queer people in a deeply traumatizing and queerphobic world, that also ends on such a profound note of empowering, celebratory wish-fulfillment. who cares if it's not "realistic," it's a show about gay talking space rocks!

and isn't there a measure of triumph in a show that suggests, maybe your homophobic grandma can come back from the brink? it's so easy to say "well that doesn't happen in real life" but like... it does. it does happen, actually. my conservative christian uncle was real transphobic to me when i first came out, but when i told him that i had no problem cutting him out of my life if he kept treating me that way... he changed. i asked him to take my coming out as an opportunity to educate himself, and he did! yes, it's important to represent how difficult it can be to exist as a queer person in a cishet world, but it's equally important to represent the genuine possibility that cishets can learn to be tolerant (in point of fact, a pretty significant chunk of the queer population would have sworn to being unquestioningly cishet under oath at some point in their lives-- including me!). steven universe does both excellently, in my opinion. rebecca sugar and her team earned that ending, and i'm grateful that such a hopeful dream of familial absolution for queer people exists.

okay, one final tangent before calling it a day. here's where it gets heavy.

steven's evolving relationship with his mom was really important to me in my 20s. my mom died when i was 19, which is certainly a very different situation to steven's since i did get to have her as a parent through my childhood and adolescence. but also... everyone loved my mom. she was someone who made people feel special and listened to and cared for. she was the only adult who ever treated me like an adult growing up (which i'm convinced is what made me that cantankerous creature i am today). everyone who ever knew her remembers her, and her death for them is still as present now as it was 14 years ago.

and yet somehow, i've always felt alone in my grief. because unlike everyone else who knew her, even my own brother and sister, i'm the only one who never got to know her as an adult. she was someone i loved, who i aspired to be like, who taught me how to be who i am. but i never had her around to ask questions about college, finding apartments, dating, cooking on your own, moving across states, finding jobs, finding partners, living in an unjust world, becoming disillusioned with the dreams that motivated you when you were younger... not to mention the gender! i'll never know what she would have said to me when i came out as transfem. i'll never know how shitty or judgmental she could have been about the stupidest shit, i'll never know what hangups she had that i'd only encounter after moving out. my brother and sister, both ten years older than me, had plenty of gripes with her! she was a bullheaded bitch who couldn't hold her tongue! that's where i get it from and i KNOW people want to get MY ass for it! at the same time, my siblings got to have her there when their kids were born, they got to have her there for their divorces, and family deaths, and just like... normal shit. normal shit that you talk to your parents about when you aren't living with them.

everyone else knew her as a human being, with flaws and skills and infinite contradictions. i only ever knew her as my mom. at the wake, more than a few people said to me, "you were always her baby." a third kid she didn't intend to have, with a man i'm not entirely sure she wanted to be with, in a state a thousand miles away from the place she used to call home, that she decided to raise with patience and love and conviction. i was her baby, and when she died i had nowhere else to go, found the act of driving a car impossibly stressful, hadn't ever had a job, barely graduated high school, no interest in college, and worst of all i wanted to be a writer. nobody knew what to do with me. nobody knew how to help me, or talk to me, or give me advice. when i asked them to tell me things about my mom that i never experienced, they clammed up. i guess because they didn't want to break my illusion of her? i had to beg my sister not to burn her journals. she told me, "mom wanted them burned, she never wanted anyone to see what she wrote." to which i replied, "but she's dead, and i'm not, and no one wants to tell me anything about her that i don't already know."

i'm 34 now and this hasn't really changed. she died and nothing about their lives was substantially altered, besides losing a loved one they infrequently talked to. but she died and my entire life blew up. i was six months out of high school! then suddenly i had to pack up everything we owned, throw away a bunch of sentimental shit we didn't have a place for, transfer her car's title and associated five-figure debt to my name, move across the country to live with a family of ten i'd largely never met before, get a job working night shift at wal mart, and decide what the fuck to do with the rest of my life. i don't just mourn her. i mourn the stability of a home base, of a childhood bedroom where a bunch of your stuff lives. i mourn the experience of getting to know your parents as adults, realizing how flawed they are, how much like you they are, how much the control you thought they had was always an illusion. i mourn never getting to talk to her about motherhood. i mourn the normalcy of having parents around in my thirties. with every passing year this grief only deepens, because i know so many people for whom this is an essential experience. i don't have the bitter closure of being disowned, or the the euphoria of being accepted. it's all just... longing.

if you've seen steven universe, you can probably imagine at this point why steven's relationship with his mom resonated with me. i feel weird saying this, because i think some critics have a tendency to really overstate the extent to which a children's show is actually depicting the thing they say it depicts, but: no other work of art has so consistently nailed the complexity of this grief dynamic the way su does. it's not just that rose is dead, it's that she exists to steven only as a story that deep down he knows is simply too good to be true. her family tries to protect him from the difficult realities of who rose was, and only make steven that much more desperate for answers in the process. they think they're protecting him, but really they're protecting themselves. often the people who knew her project who she was onto him, and get mad when he fails to live up to those expectations. he feels pressure to be as good as everyone says rose was, just as i did, and it royally fucks with his head just like it did for me! with each new revelation about rose over the course of the series, steven's relationship to her deepens in complexity and ambiguity. he loves her, he loves the people who loved her, but he doesn't always know how to feel about her or them. at times, he comes to hate her-- especially when the debts of her poor choices fall on his head near the end. but ultimately he comes to accept that she is an essential part of him, and that he can still love her while also learning from her mistakes. that being his own person without her isn't the same thing as failing to live up to her example.

it's nuanced. it's difficult. rose was a great person at her best, and a terrible one at her worst-- someone who earned the praise from her peers, but who made many mistakes and acted not infrequently out of petty, cruel self-interest. she's neither villainized nor deified, because that's not what a dead parent is to a young person, or at least not for me. what they are is a question you'll be asking for the rest of your life, that you'll never run out of answers to, that you'll never answer definitively. you're as chained to them as you are free of them. this is something that cannot be satisfactorily explored outside of a longform narrative. you can't get at this peculiar pain and absence in a movie unless it's the only thing you're doing. steven universe does it and a hundred other things, and that's why it works. grief lives in the unoccupied spaces between everything else you do for the rest of your life. grief can be felt when you're sobbing on the bed, but it can just as easily be felt when you're going on fun donut adventures with your pals. it's not siloed, it's not separate; grief becomes your shadow. at first it casts a pall over everything you see. eventually it numbs, until someday it is as mundane as your actual shadow. but it's never so far away, so numb, that it can't roar back into the present tense and shake you to your knees.

you can't get over it. you can't move on from it. you have to live with it. you just have to live with it. some days it's harder than others, but you do it anyway because you have to. your world ends and the big world keeps on spinning and you just have to fucking live with it. that's what steven universe is about, for me, and there's nothing else that comes close. despite being a children's show, it treats these subjects with tremendous maturity and empathy, and with great respect for the emotional intelligence of the audience. perhaps controversially, i don't think a show "for adults" could do anything close to what su does here. steven universe isn't good in spite of being a children's cartoon (as was often said of avatar the last airbender). it's good precisely because it takes as granted the notion that children are just adults who haven't grown up yet. they're not different from us. they're not secretly, specially insulated from worrying about death or genocide or religious fanaticism. steven universe treats children the way no adult except my mom ever treated me, and that's so precious. so fucking rare. it's miraculous that this thing exists. there is simply no flaw in the text that even comes close to outweighing all the things it gets right.

also i like steven universe future and i don't really get the haters. it's the steven universe epilogues and while it's shorter & more rushed than it ought to be, it's an essential teenage intervention on the ideas su had about childhood. i've only watched it once though... hmm.

i think i've just talked myself into doing that rewatch...

as a reward for making it to the end of this post, i want to share a short little comic by art spiegelman and maurice sendak that lives rent-free in my brain. it says, with extraordinary brevity, everything i believe about childhood and children's media:

(forgive the weird quality of these pictures, i couldn't find a satisfying version online and of course the original new yorker page for it is paywalled. this is published in metamaus, art spiegelman's in-depth making-of companion piece to his graphic novel maus)

maybe consider throwing a couple bucks my way on ko-fi?

like a week ago I joked that I should make a counterpart to this post about Spinel as a wish fulfilment character for sad gothic bitches who just want to go apeshit. anyway Sarah and I just rewatched the movie and honestly? yeah. which is interesting because Spinel essential experiences in microcosm what Steven is going to go through over the course of Future, right?

Spinel gets treated dreadfully, simply because her needs don't fit into Rose's Mental Health Needs and her Aspirations. She's the wish fulfilment of saying, ok, everyone ELSE has gotten to be a little shit, now it's MY turn to have an apocalyptic meltdown that THEY have to all graciously forgive! Spinel is an absolute freakshow of a character, genuinely unsettling, gleefully destructive because destruction is so satisfying, eager to drag to the surface every uncomfortable or uncharitable thought (like "you were easier to deal with when you were more gullible") that a Perfect Good Boy like Steven has from the subtext into the text... she's weird and out of place and really entertaining for as long as people can squeeze some amusement out of her, and easily and quickly discarded when her antics grate on their nerves. and the best way she has of expressing how she feels about this is by trying to destroy everything around her, just to force someone, basically anyone, to acknowledge her.

there's this bit (that I want to talk about in a future article patreon plug patreon plug) in Selma G. Lanes's book of children's literature criticism Down Rabbit Holes where she describes Dr Seuss books as expressing childhood anxiety. the chaotic antics oozing out of Seuss's art are able to explore the kind of madcap desires a child has in a safe context free of the punishment they'd receive in real life, and help ameliorate the anxiety children feel trying to conform to rules of Good Behavior that seem constant, oppressive, and sometimes incomprehensible. I think Spinel offers some similar catharsis even for adult viewers. have you ever found yourself looking at people around you who managed to Get Their Shit Together and seem to have bumbled their way into a happy ending and just wanted to sock them in the jaw? and then make them say "you know what buddy you have a point, don't worry about it, it's fine"? boy it's especially a potent fantasy if you've been the repeat target of other people's spectacular meltdowns, which is sort of the trajectory Steven is on at the end of the film and which he'll go hurtling down by the end of Future. Spinel looks at the plot of Steven Universe and goes you know what, actually if I can't be the hero here I at least deserve to be the villain everyone else has to pay attention to for a while. I love that for her.

of course in real life this is terrifying because even if you've internalized ideas about forgiveness and non-carceral conflict resolution and so on, do you really anticipate that anyone will treat you the way you want to be treated? "That's easy for you to say," Spinel declares while rebuffing Steven's Epic Friendship And Self Improvement Song. "When you change, you change for the better! When I change, I change for the WORSE!" that line is tied for me as my favorite Spinel line with "I used to be just not good enough... but now I'm not good at all!" and the delightful "Who am I? Who am I? What are you even saying?/I'm the loser of the game you didn't know you were playing!" and the sense of narrative abandonment in these lines isn't uncalled for: after all, the minute Steven seems to resolve the central conflict, he... does kind of discard her and indicate openly that he'd rather just continue the story as it was going, without her. and she gets to have another great big meltdown about it!! I love that for her!! you go girl, give the planet terraforming poison! and in the context of this cartoon, she can be that, and do that, and look Like That, and in the end not be subjected to the social death we've decided is the just punishment for Doing Bad Things TM in queer spaces. she can express this hurt and the injustice of having to swallow that hurt for the sake of someone else's "happily ever after", for us, in the safe context of a children's cartoon.

and boy, I sure do hope the children are paying attention.

Change Your Mind is sort of a fantasy about getting to forgive your racist grandma and build a healthier relationship. Spinel's character is sort of the opposite fantasy: of getting to fuck up and still be worthy of forgiveness and love.