🎙️ So like, there's an amazing bit in Patricia Taxxon's video about Don't Hug Me I'm Scared where she describes the single most famous bit from the series. In the first episode, the entire frame is about 'creativity' and using your imagination, being taught to a bunch of puppety dudes by a singing, talking notepad. Anyway, there's this one bit where the notepad tells them to 'make their favorite colors out of leaves and sticks' and Dennis(Yellow Guy) assembles them to say 'green.' And then the notepad tells him 'green is not a creative color.'
This dovetails into a discussion of the way neurodivergent and especially aut-spectrum(including ADHD) people are treated by people in positions of authority, and how this is part of the horror of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. Tools that are supposed to help you are used instead as prods. Instructions are given in ways you can't understand and nobody explains anything. And if by some, like, miracle you actually manage to follow the rules? The rules will change just to fuck with you, and stomp you into the ground for daring to believe you might actually succeed by the metrics of the people you're trying to please. You are always surrounded by these vast clouds of invisible rules that are not just selectively enforced, they're only enforced for you. So why am I talking about this? Well, I told you that story to tell you this one, to set the mood. Let's talk about my single favorite character in any piece of media ever made.
Let's talk about Spinel.
Part 1: Spinel, and Steven Universe: The Movie, in Aggregate
🎙️ Spinel is the protagonist of Steven Universe: The Movie. You could make the argument that Steven is the protagonist, but... you're wrong! Sorry you had to find out this way. Steven is structurally the hero and Spinel is structually the villain, yes. But the story, fundamentally, isn't really about Steven. In fact that's actually kinda the whole-ass point; it's about Spinel. It's like, easy to get tripped up by this by the frame story and its position as the interquel between the original series and Future, but while Steven's driving the action for a lot of this film, Spinel is the actual focus.
To sum up Spinel's background and role in the film: Spinel was essentially a living toy produced by the Diamonds for Pink Diamond(Rose Quartz; sorry if this is a spoiler but the series has been wrapped for a WHILE) to satisfy her need for others to take care of. Her existence was one of slave-like subservience, but because the Diamonds used to be assholes, that system of subservience is baked into Spinel's head. She can't not be devoted to the person she was made for, same as the Pearls can't. I'm saying this to clarify the emotional situation: 'just don't care that much about her' wasn't, like, an option for her. That was Rule Zero: "love and obey Pink Diamond." Except there's a catch; Rose/Pink didn't love her back. In point of fact, like, Rose found her incredibly annoying, couldn't stand her presence, found her earnest, guileless devotion creepy, and ultimately, in the most Rose-ass move of all Rose-ass moves, Rose both literally and figuratively confined this innocent, harmless being to Hell because she couldn't handle the emotional awkwardness of acknowledging and validating a being whose literal existence is her own fault and her responsibility. This is a whole theme with Rose.
We don't find out the full context of this until later, until the movie hits us with Drift Away, a song that will... ALWAYS make our entire system cry like infants, but Rose gave Spinel the command to play a game by standing still in her private garden. There were... no other instructions, no described win condition, no actual overt rules beyond what Spinel was supposed to do. So that's what Spinel did. For thousands and thousands and thousands of years, constantly paranoid that she isn't doing it right, wondering when the authority figure in her life is gonna come back and tell her she did a good job, but maintaining a sense of exhausted good cheer because that's what she has to do. Spinel's backstory is one where her 'crime' was 'being slightly clingy' and for that, via a series of invisible rules instituted by an indifferent elite to avoid mild discomfort at dealing with her, she is punished with a Sisyphean nightmare that actually makes me feel kind of sick to my stomach thinking about the scope and breadth of time involved in it.
When she finally hears back word of what's been going on, she finds out Rose is dead. And she has a son! Who... completely uprooted the entire system of rules in the universe as Spinel understood them. Everything is Good Now, except for the part where Spinel will fundamentally never receive the validation she psychologically needs from the one person she was structurally-permitted to accept it from. Her last remaining link to like, any form of restraining logic or sense is completely severed, and in a moment of pure grief, outrage, and panicked confusion, she regenerates into her more familiar 'modern' form, grabs a bunch of leftover Gem superweapons Pink just had like, lying around, and makes for Earth to lay waste to it in vengeance for her obliterated childhood and dreams.
I do wanna be clear on this point because some people get this twisted: even if she's the main focus character, yes, Spinel is still the villain here. Whatever her causes 'annihilating a biosphere' ranks somewhere pretty high on the 'unethical' axis of the Neurodivergent Tantrum Matrix. She doesn't go to Earth looking for clarifications, she goes there looking to destroy it and isn't really inclined to accept anyone's explanations for why she shouldn't at this stage. This isn't some 'secretly justified' arc where the stuff we find out about Rose is exculpatory, it's just explanatory. I can feel immeasurable sympathy for Spinel('favorite character in any piece of media ever made,' remember) without having to contort my thoughts into some kind of bizarre nonsense logic where it's actually fine for her to destroy Earth because she wasn't hugged enough, even though she did need more hugs. We can settle into 'destroying planets is bad' as a guiding principle here, right?
Spinel proceeds to utterly manhandle the Crystal Gems, which is covered in the outstanding Other Friends sequence, while laying out her grievances. This adds the extra little knife-twist that probably made this situation like, utterly unresolvable, when Spinel realizes not only did Rose never tell anybody about her, Pearl did know and also didn't tell anyone. She wasn't just forgotten by Rose, she was forgotten by the one person in the universe who had been in the exact same position as her, ultimately abandoned by an emotionally-selfish, immature disaster for reasons she barely explained. That Pearl remembers her and still never thought to bring her up or even check on her is such a cutting moment of heartbreak.
So Spinel hits all three Gems with her weapon, the Rejuvenator, a kind of weaponized reset-button used to restore non-compliant Gems to an earlier state in their development. The implications of this existing are, in fact, deeply existentially-horrifying, but let's be real, it's more there to be the plot device that enables the rest of the narrative even if it IS a chilling commentary on Homeworld society. The remainder of the film is largely about Steven wrangling the Muppet Babies versions of his queer family group, restoring their confidence, repairing their internal emotional realities, and ultimately resolving a lot of the lingering trauma Rose left behind in them, tugging out the last bits of shrapnel from her obnoxiously self-centered behavior. In a fucked-up kinda way, Spinel almost did the Gems a favor.
Spinel is in the background of all this because during the struggle, Steven actually hit her with the Rejuvenator, restoring her to her original form and mindset. This is where my supposition that Steven is the story's antagonist, despite being the hero, actually kinda comes from. Steven exploits Spinel's gullibility and devotion to Pink Diamond(which she now basically perceives Steven AS, since he kinda-sorta is) to get her to help, and actually starts to like her a little during this process, even if he's also put off by her clinginess and confusion about a lot of seemingly-basic concepts. He ultimately takes her back to Rose's garden to like, jog her memory and walk her back through her trauma, which is where Drift Away comes in in the film's narrative. It's around this point that Steven makes the mistake that makes him the antagonist of the story.
He pushes away.
Once Steven feels like his real friends and family are back, and that the planet will be safe once they disarm the giant toxic superweapon, he just straight-up tells Spinel he'd like for everything to go back to the way it was. He, in short, Roses at her. She's done her job, she's had her moment, now she can go back to the toybox to be forgotten. He doesn't really want her in his life as she is now, and the fact that he's still hanging onto the Rejuvenator gives Spinel a very paranoid read on the situation. When she loses it, the Crystal Gems trash her, and it all culminates in Steven's final, desperate attempt to undo the mistake he already made, the beautiful-but-misguided Change. You know what I like best about Change?
It doesn't work.
Like, it gets part of the way there, but ultimately, the only thing that actually resolves the situation is... enduring her meltdown, letting her get it out of her system, and acquiescing to Spinel's need for validation. It doesn't fully-resolve until, like, Steven both literally and metaphorically lowers his shield and lets her in. With Spinel now fully-defused, she apologizes for everything she did, in a panic about all the destruction she wrought trying to ruin Steven's 'happily-ever-after.' And then, in the moment where Steven proves he's the hero even if he's not the main character, he patiently explains, while offering her a hand up, 'there's no such thing as happily-ever-after.'
And then as the comedic coda to this, Spinel kinda gets one anyway because like, the Diamonds show up and are as devoted to her as she was to Rose, because she's now their last tie to her except Steven(who understandably doesn't want them around). It's actually kind of adorable, and I sort of love the tone of Steven being IMMEDIATELY proven wrong after his most dramatic, painful personal acknowledgement yet. But anyway that's the movie. END OF SECTION, MOVING ON
Part 2: Coding Neurodivergence
🎙️ So, we can all agree that Spinel is neurodivergent as fuck, right?
I've seen a lot of arguments that Spinel is coded as having Borderline Personality Disorder, and while a lot of those arguments have a lot of credibility and weight, I'm going to kind of skip over them because, bluntly, our system... doesn't, like, have BPD, and I'm basically using Spinel as a vehicle to talk about us. So I want to tackle the topic of Spinel from a more broad neurodivergent spectrum, instead of narrowing in to make an argument that she 'is' or 'isn't' some particular kind. If YOU see yourself and your mental junk in Spinel, Godspeed, more power to you, but I'm more interested in like, discussing neurodivergence and the treatment it gets people and how Spinel makes me feel.
Because oh my gawd does Spinel make me feel things.
Spinel is a beautiful exercise in intentional style-clash. Look at her, folks. The mascara cry-lines, the pink hair and gigantic fluffy pigtails, the big scythe, this girl got in line twice at the mall-goth boutique opening. All THAT is perfectly in-tone with Steven Universe's design sensibilities, the whole show is constantly referencing the visual aesthetics of the late 80s, 90s, and early Oughts, and frankly I'm surprised it like, took them this LONG to get to the perky goth vibe? But there's something off about her. It's actually sort of the core of why I was initially so fascinated with her as a character. It's her body. Because while Steven Universe is a thoroughly modern animated series, Spinel isn't.
Spinel is a toon. Specifically, she's a rubberhose character.
Hi there. If you don't know me, I'm Alex! Inside our system, I'm the one who represents our neurodivergence most strongly; I'm basically the voice of our ADHD and type-2 bipolar. I am also, incidentally a stretchy, inflatable, hyperelastic raccoon who is explicitly a living cartoon, because that is the internal metaphor I use for how it feels to be neurodivergent in a world that wasn't designed for you. Hell, one of my headmates is a Spinel(just not this specific Spinel). Old cartoons, particularly the Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies-era, Mickey Mouse, the Disney Rennaissance, and the works of Chuck Jones in general, are a MAJOR ADHD hyperfixation for us. I bring this up because it's gonna be important to understand my perspective on a lot of this, because I don't think like, I'd have spotted this element of Spinel if I didn't also severely vibe with her aesthetically.
Rubberhose cartoons are a style of animation common to the dawn of animation as a medium, named for the frequently noodly, stretchy limbs and bodies of the characters; I'd honestly like, argue they're the precursor to literally everything else that came after them in the field. Even Steven Universe pulls from this shared lineage, despite its more anime-styled aesthetic, through the works of Osamu Tezuka(particularly Princess Knight, an obvious style influence on SU as a whole), who was himself inspired by the early works of Disney. Every cartoon, even anime, and sometimes especially anime(sup, Monkey D. Luffy, we see you), has some amount of rubberhose in its creative DNA. But rubberhose fell out of fashion because rubberhose animation was designed when just the idea of images moving was still a novelty. Rubberhose cartoons move in a fashion that is hyperexagerrated, wildly-transform their bodies to suit the comedic needs of a scene, are constantly moving with only brief halts and pauses for anticipation frames, and generally just kinda fell out of favor as tastes got more refined. I feel like probably the actual death-knell was the introduction of smear frames and much lengthier anticipation pauses, best demonstrated by Chuck Jones' now heavily-memefied The Dover Boys At Pimento University, which reduced the actual workloads of animators by not requiring every single detail of a character to, like, be rendered correctly to the style-sheet in every single frame of movement. The 'squash-and-stretch' methodology of having characters deform slightly as they moved, to give them a 'bouncier' feeling, stuck around though, and is still visible even in Steven Universe despite its slightly more stiff modern style.
So like, what are they doing with Spinel that they gave her this style of movement and animation? What does it mean that she flops around like an accordion and stretches taut like a rubber band? Well, this is neurodivergent coding. On so many levels, y'all.
First off there's the style mismatch. Spinel isn't just old by the standards of animation in terms of her aesthetics of movement, she's prehistoric. She's like, an unfrozen caveman next to the more conventional movement of Steven Universe's main cast. Everything about her being around these people feels off as a result; she is Not Like You. She is goofy and silly and weird even when she's being threatening and that only really serves to make her more eerie and unsettling, because some part of the mind rebels at her even being here, at a character who looks the way she does moving the way she does. This discomfort is completely intentional, like, Spinel is supposed to make you feel fucking weirded-out at her presence.
Secondly... okay, look, I'm gonna get a little bit personal here, so like, yeah. One of the more common issues I have with ADHD is the way I stim, mostly, by moving around a lot. I twitch my leg, flutter and drum my fingers, slap my thighs, bob my head side to side, roll my shoulders, click my tongue, hum to myself, I'm constantly moving and making noise. If I have to stop, I get so uncomfortable it makes me anxious. And you know, gosh, what would be a good emotional metaphor for THAT, huh? Maybe, I don't know, hearkening-back to an animation style defined by constant, unrestrained, logic-defying motion and sound.
Thirdly, and this is where I might like, lose a couple of you... okay look we have to talk about Spinel from the angle of her naked, open appeal to neurodivergent sense-pleasure, some of which you might think of as 'kink.' One of the more common things you're gonna see in a lot of neurodivergent communities is... people being really on-the-nose and explicit about their kinks in the way they present themselves, about the things that give them joy to feel and be and do. And often, that creates friction with outsiders who want them to knock it off so they're not made uncomfortable by the idea that engaging with a person like that means on some level validating their self-expression when that self-expression involves openly acknowledging those kinks. Yes, I know, 'it's a kid's movie,' but I also just don't fucking care because in Spinel I see so much of myself and specifically my inability to function if I am denied the capacity to express the things that are emotionally-meaningful to me. The fact that it's also my specific kinks on display is just, like, the cherry on top. Spinel is a fucking carnival of sense-pleasure elements. She's unrestrained in her movements, she's bouncy, she makes squeaky noises when she walks, there is a frankly lewd groan of rubber stretching and straining whenever she flexes a limb. She can contort herself into any shape she needs for the moment, she's unrestrainedly physical in her affection, often coiling people's whole bodies up in an exultant tangle of limbs when she goes in for a hug. Spinel's design puts me in mind of, like, so many people who just cannot hide what they are and still be who they are, people who just want to be accepted and loved as they are and choose to present themselves.
She puts me in mind of myself.
I am a cartoon. I'm also a raccoon and a balloon, which like, gawd I love those all end in the same sound, that's so satisfying. Those things matter to me in a way that's even more meaningful to me than being a girl(although I'm like, definitely also that). If you want to interact with me... sorry! That shit is not negotiable. I'm going to talk about this stuff! If I pose out hugging you or being affectionate while we're talking online I'm gonna have me being stretchy and bouncy come up. I'm going to make offhanded references to my paws and tail and ears and fur. I'm going to talk in terms that track with my experience of feeling 'animated' as opposed to strictly flesh-and-blood. This is who I am. 'What' and 'who' are inseparable concepts, they are like, the same fucking picture. Not acknowledging that I am all of this is misgendering me. If you have a problem with that, go directly to my ass, I don't care.
Spinel speaks to me on this topic in a way no character ever has. Her existence and physical nature is inescapable; she can only love, or be loved, in a way that acknowledges the bizarreness of her. You can't love her, or show affection for her in any way, without in some way engaging with the fact that she's basically made of fucking rubber and moves like an extremely uncool old person kind of toon.
And most people in her life responded to that by simply failing to love her at all.
Part 3: Green Is Not A Creative Color
🎙️ I'm going to make a confession here on behalf of our whole system: we used to have fucking awful taste in people. We are, like the exact kind of sucker Spinel is in her devotion to Rose, and we've only recently recovered from it. Most of our teens and twenties were spent in a long string of failed relationships with emotionally-unavailable romantic partners. I'm not gonna say we didn't make mistakes, God knows we fucked up a lot, but nobody made it easy on us to actually get anything right.
The pattern was like, pretty fucking classic: we'd bounce into their lives as this energetic, cheerful, exuberant ball of overbearing friendliness, and they'd be briefly-infatuated with our antics and expressiveness before inevitably and quickly becoming irritated with our requests for validation and attention. Around this point, they'd start setting guidelines for what we 'needed to do' to actually earn their devotion in turn, and we'd then actually try to meet those guidelines. Inevitably, though, the rug was pulled and we were told point-blank, after multiple months of us trying maddeningly hard, there was no actual way to succeed. The rules we'd been given were a lie. It had just been a Herculean task put before us in the hopes we'd fail and give up and go away without them having to actually have this awkward conversation.
Here in the garden, stand very still.
Life as a neurodivergent person is, like, all about two kinds of rules: the rules you're told, and the rules that actually exist, the invisible rules, the rules nobody explains until you've already violated them and can be safely and summarily disqualified. You're at a 5 and I need you to be a 1. You're moving too much. You're talking too much. You're fidgeting too much. You're too much.
That's the real message, right? Like, under all of it, what neurotypical social systems demand of you isn't that you function well for your own needs or in the way that makes you happy or content. What they demand of you is that you hack pieces of your personality off until you can push yourself into the mold they've made for personhood. They don't want you. They never want you. They want somebody that doesn't make the conveyor belt throw a gear, that doesn't require special considerations, that doesn't need acknowledgement in any non-standard way. The rules don't exist to help you, the rules exist to exclude you, to give people an excuse to treat you badly and feel comfortable doing so. And you will never, ever, EVER understand them enough to avoid breaking them before it's too late to fix it because you weren't SUPPOSED to avoid it. They were put there to trip you up, for you to step on the rake, to fall into the hole, to get smashed by the anvil as it falls out of the sky.
Green is not a creative color.
My weird, messy, squeaky, cartoony heart weeps for Spinel. It weeps for every single neurodivergent person who has ever tried to please people who are fundamentally unpleasable. It weeps for the bygone generations of our people who lived in a world that didn't even have WORDS for what they were, that cared even LESS than ours does now, who went unloved and unmourned because they were too awkward for people to let down their guards around. I weep for the ocean of tears already shed by thousands, millions, billions of people across all our history who said, in a thousand different tongues, "Why am I not good enough for them? Why don't they care? What am I doing wrong?" before they were callously discarded by people who were just too fucking uncomfortable being open and vulnerable, to expose themselves to the secondhand embarrassment of having to talk to somebody weird. To talk to people like me.
Spinel DOES get her happily-ever-after. And you know what? She fucking deserves it. She deserves a family that will devote themselves to her the way she tried, fruitlessly, to devote herself to someone else who never actually loved her. She deserves validation and love and attention. She deserves to be forgiven for trying to destroy the planet; like, half the characters in the series did that, is she any different just because HER tantrum showed up late to the party? Spinel's tragedy is that all of this was completely avoidable. If Rose hadn't been so head up her own ass about how she'd come across to her new besties, nobody would need to clean up this mess at all. All she needed, really, was like... someone to talk to her like she was an adult or include her in things. All she needed was for the one person in her life to not act embarrassed about her neurodivergent toon buddy.
Neurodivergent people aren't, like, emotionless or emotionally-unintelligent. That shit is a fucking myth and I'm sick of it. We do feel these things, we feel the same feelings neurotypical people do, but we don't express them the same way. Calling us emotionally-unintelligent because we have different needs is like calling a fish stupid for not being able to breathe outside water. It didn't choose to get taken out of the ocean, asshole. Like, we spend so much of our time adapting to the needs of the world around us, and it almost NEVER bends around the other way to adapt to us. And that inaction, like, that unwillingness to just... accept us as we are, to ask how we can meet in the middle on our needs? It kills us. It kills our hearts before it kills our bodies.
If you're neurotypical and take, like, anything away from this increasingly-bloated, overwrought essay on a pink space rock? I want it to be this: validate your neurodivergent friends. Treat them the way they ask to be treated. Don't give them tasks you didn't explain and never intended them to succeed at just to avoid the unbearable mortification of 'having to take their goofy-ass interests seriously.' Treat them the way they're always trying to treat you.
And maybe, just maybe? Like, love the parts of them that don't make any sense to you. I guarantee you make even less sense to us, and we don't give up on that either.
