Steven Wars

, or: Talking about Steven Universe discourse but not because the spinoff show was announced. I started writing this before that happened.

The other day myself and two friends were rambling to two other friends who had never heard of Steven Universe about said show, talking a lot about the overall plot and setting. If you don’t know the general plot of Steven Universe and don’t mind spoilers I will go through the relevant parts of the plot for what I want to talk about: The protagonist Steven is half-human and half gem. Gems are magic space rock people and most of them live in an authoritarian, colonial, caste society ruled by the diamonds and Steven is being raised by a small group of survivors of a failed rebellion.

Among the magic powers that gems posses multiple gems can fuse into a bigger, stronger gem. Fusion gets used as a very general and multilayered allegory for relationships in general and can work a bit different for different gems depending on the needs of a given story. A lot of what the show is doing with its world and plots is heavily allegorical. One of the big taboos that the rebellion breaks is different types of gems fusing together. I said it’s a caste society but it’s a little weirder than that. A given gem is defined by what type of gem they are and expected to be basically completely interchangeable with them.

All rubies are bodyguards and all rubies are named Ruby (and also in the show all have the same voice actor). Ruby is a name, job, gender and role in society and straying from that role means you are fundamentally broken and wrong and fusing with a different type of gem is a complete perversion. The roles gems are defined as is a metaphor the story uses but it’s a flexible one. It maps onto things like gender roles (and if read a certain way amusingly means that for gem society homosocial relationships are the only acceptable kind) but also for societal expectations and pressures in general. It also ends up, for the title character, being very much about the pressures that a shitty, unaccepting family puts on someone.

The diamonds are the rulers of gem society. They are authoritarian dictators who see other life as beneath them. That is the facts of the setting. But in terms of how they are actually portrayed and used in the show, especially as it goes on, they are a dysfunctional family who (without going into the specifics of why they think this) see Steven as a brat who has thrown a tantrum and run away. Judged in absolute terms they don’t see humans as real people, just amusing pets at best, but that is not in service to a story about how they are space Hitlers, it is in service to a story where they are dismissive of Steven as a person and see his life on Earth as someone playing pretend who is going to grow up and move on with his life, go back to “real” name and pronouns, and stop making such a fuss.

And, if you are unaware, when the show aired there was considerable controversy about the fact that these the terms on which the story is resolved. Many people were invested in the lore of the evil gem society and would only think of it morally on those terms and were furious that this children’s cartoon did not end with the diamonds being brought before the space Hague for their space warcrimes, that the story that was being told was one about family trauma and healing and that the space opera trappings were in aid of that and not the point in and of themselves.

So I had this in mind while explaining the show to my friends and, perhaps overly defensively, emphasised how the resolution of it was on the family drama allegory level and not about killing space Hitler. And his response surprised me: “Oh, like Star Wars!”

And it struck me how apt a comparison that was. I think it is genuinely astute and cuts straight to how this is a normal part of storytelling and not some morally repugnant aberration like so many people high on the discourse treated it. Someone who I related this story to said it reminded them of this video from Man Carrying Thing talking about bad faith deliberate media illiteracy.

And I have just been ruminating on that for a few days. On how so much discourse is fuelled by refusing to meet things on their own terms at all and it’s bad! That’s all, really.

Sorry for dragging up Steven Universe discourse.

Bye.