Representation in Steven Universe 303031880X, 9783030318802

Citation preview

Representation in Steven Universe Edited by John R. Ziegler · Leah Richards

Representation in Steven Universe

John R. Ziegler · Leah Richards Editors

Representation in Steven Universe

Editors John R. Ziegler English Department Bronx Community College, CUNY Bronx, NY, USA

Leah Richards English Department LaGuardia Community College, CUNY Long Island City, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-31880-2 ISBN 978-3-030-31881-9  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Nikki Zalewski/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

In the summer of 2018, the editors of this volume were passing the time until a train to London with some overpriced breakfast in Cardiff Central station in Wales, when a young (late teens or early twenties) mixed-gender Welsh couple sat down at the next table and continued their conversation about Stevonnie and the Garnet figurine attached to the young woman’s backpack—just another small testament to the boundary-crossing appeal of Steven Universe. Created by Rebecca Sugar, Steven Universe debuted in 2013, and today, with an extensive community of fans extending well beyond the children at whom it is ostensibly aimed, it arguably occupies the position of Cartoon Network’s flagship original animated program, especially with the similarly acclaimed Adventure Time (2010–2018) having concluded. Over the course of its run so far, the science-fiction/fantasyand anime-influenced Steven, which follows the adventures and emotional growth of a half-human, half-alien boy, and the aliens and humans who surround him, has amassed popularity and accolades not only for its progressive portrayals of queer desire and ways of being, including queer-coded relationships, fluid embodiments, and non-traditional family structures, but also for its representation of and engagement with issues including sexual consent, domestic abuse, trauma, racial or ethnic discrimination, caste systems, and imperialism. These thematic engagements, and the nuance and inclusivity of their implementation, are especially significant and unusual in an American animated children’s television show, and its achievements have garnered multiple GLAAD Media Award and Primetime Emmy nominations (and one Emmy win to date), among other honors. v

vi  

PREFACE

The politics of representation enacted in Steven Universe make it almost unique among comparable animated television programs, and it, along with Sugar herself, who publicly identifies as a bisexual and gender non-binary woman, has consequently taken a prominent place in the current cultural conversation, with media attention from an array of blogs, magazines, newspapers, and Web sites. However, in contrast with this widespread media coverage, the body of academic work on Sugar’s creation remains in its early stages, and an extremely small amount of scholarship has so far been published. This project, Representation in Steven Universe, aims to remedy this lack by providing something like a collection of jumping-off points for advancing the scholarly conversation about this important work of contemporary television. Steven Universe offers fertile ground for academic analysis that invites a wide range of interpretive approaches, and this volume assembles what we intend to be a usefully suggestive rather than comprehensive or exhaustive selection of such approaches. Contributors employ lenses from fan, decolonial, and gender studies, race and queer theories, and ecocriticism, among others, in order to outline and explore some major avenues of analysis regarding Steven Universe in a manner that will ideally hold interest for students, fans, and scholars. This collection considers the television series through the end of season 5, which concluded with the multi-episode “Diamond Days” arc. It bears noting, however, that we have been using “Steven Universe” in this preface to refer to the television series, but the series itself constitutes merely one element of a larger media ecology encompassing comics, books, video games, fan-fiction, social media activity by both fans and creators, participation in the “Dove Self-Esteem Project,” merchandising, and so on. While this book does not examine most of these additional elements, we look forward to future work that extends and develops the critical conversation around both the rich ur-text of the television series and its paratexts and paratextual objects. In the meantime, the work of the contributors in the chapters that follow not only helps us to think about fandom, (children’s) animation, and (representations of) queerness, power, and identity within the context of the Steven Universe television series, but also, in doing so, contributes to larger conversations in cultural and media studies as a whole. Bronx, USA Long Island City, USA

John R. Ziegler Leah Richards

PREFACE  

vii

Acknowledgements  Our sincere thanks to everyone at Palgrave, including the anonymous readers, and especially Shaun Vigil and Glenn Ramirez; audiences at the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association Annual Conference; Jennifer Gilchrist for her perceptive feedback, the contributors to this volume for their patience and dedication to the project; Joe Meiers for helping us to commemorate the volume; Perdita, Renfield, Trey, and Benny, our feline assistants; and, finally, Rebecca Sugar and the Crewniverse for creating such a rich, exceptional show.

Contents

1 Introduction 1 John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards 2

Queer Transformation, Contested Authorship, and Fluid Fandom 19 Jake Pitre

3

Drawing Queerness Forward: Fusion, Futurity, and Steven Universe 45 Kevin Cooley

4

“I Am a Conversation”: Gem Fusion, Privilege, and Intersectionality 69 Olivia Zolciak

5

Globalizing Fandoms: Envisioning Queer Futures from Kunihiko Ikuhara to Rebecca Sugar 89 Jacqueline Ristola

6

“Truth Is a Feeling in Your Gut”: Ronaldo Fryman, Conspiracy Theories, and Media Satire 113 John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

ix

x 

CONTENTS

7

Pungent Silence: Encounters with Onion 137 Justin Saret

8

Contact Zone Earth: Power and Consent in Steven Universe and Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood 153 Emrys Donaldson

9

Growing up in the Crystallocene: How Steven Universe Teaches Compassion for Broken Worlds 171 Evelyn Ramiel

10 Off-Color, Off-Center: Decolonizing (in) Steven Universe 197 Mandy Elizabeth Moore 11 Change Your Mind: Cultural Memory and Reconciliation 219 Ellery Thomas Index 239

Notes

on

Contributors

Kevin Cooley  (University of Florida, USA) is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department, where he studies animation, comics, and queer theory. He received his M.A. from St. Bonaventure University. He is the editor of ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, a guest editor for Synoptique’s special issue “Animating LGBTQ+ Representations: Queering the Production of Movement,” and a conference coordinator for the University of Florida Graduate Comics Organization. His academic work is featured or forthcoming in Modernism/Modernity, Horror Studies, Studies in Comics, and The Lion and The Unicorn. Emrys Donaldson (University of Alabama, USA) is a writer and instructor. Their short work has previously appeared in Fairy Tale Review and Necessary Fiction. More information is available at www.emrysdonaldson.wordpress.com. Mandy Elizabeth Moore (University of Florida, USA) is currently a Ph.D. student in English. She received her M.A. in children’s literature from Kansas State University. Her research focuses on issues of representation and empowerment in children’s and young adult media, particularly television. She has also authored an article on the intersections of fandom studies and children’s literature for Brock Education. Jake Pitre  (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada) is a Ph.D. ­candidate in Film & Moving Image Studies. He has been published in the journals Transformative Works and Cultures and Red Feather Journal: An xi

xii  

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

International Journal of Children in Popular Culture. He has presented at many academic conferences, including twice at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference, and he remains hard at work in his graduate studies on social media, fandom, queerness, and culture. He has also written for The Globe and Mail, JSTOR Daily, Pitchfork, and Columbia Journalism Review. Evelyn Ramiel  (York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a Ph.D. candidate studying the environmental history of Japan. Xeir research focuses on anime studies, media embodiment of and in the environment, and the influence of nonhuman entities on human bodies. Currently, xey are pursuing research of magnetic tape media and its status as both technological object and means of reproducing animated images. Leah Richards (LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, USA) is an Associate Professor of English and co-editor of the academic journal Supernatural Studies. She has published articles on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead and co-authors theater reviews for Thinking Theater NYC and Culture Catch. Her current research is on the science of vampirism in popular culture as an embodiment of racist, misogynist, and homophobic anxieties about infection and contamination. Jacqueline Ristola  (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada) is a Ph.D. student in Film and Moving Image Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. Her proposed dissertation examines the proliferation of animated series made North America and Europe that take inspiration from anime, how they incorporate (or appropriate) Japanese animation aesthetics and techniques, and how these series often rely on Asian animation labor to underpin these aesthetic appropriations. Her work can be read in Animation Studies Online Journal, where she won the inaugural Maureen Furniss Essay Award in 2017. Justin Saret (USA) is an independent scholar with degrees in Geography and English who has previously worked as a teacher and writing consultant. His research interests include the fantastic, the ironic, the ethical, and the planning of infrastructure. This is his first published project.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS  

xiii

Ellery Thomas (Yale University, USA) is an archaeologist and historian from New England. Their other research focuses on archaeological ethics, antiquities trafficking, and art crime; their non-academic pursuits include blacksmithing, embroidery, and natural history illustration. John R. Ziegler (Bronx Community College, CUNY, USA) is an Assistant Professor of English. He has published on early modern English literature, including Shakespeare, as well as on ghosts, video games, and zombies, including Queering the Family in The Walking Dead (2018). He also co-writes theater reviews for Thinking Theater NYC and Culture Catch and co-edits the journal Supernatural Studies. Olivia Zolciak (University of Toledo, USA) is the Writing Center Coordinator and a first-year composition instructor at The University of Toledo. Alongside her passion for first-year writing and writing center pedagogy, Olivia’s research interests include intersectional feminism and anxiety within the supernatural and apocalyptic genres.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

Meme (creator unknown) implying SpongeBob and Patrick’s homosexuality 24 Steven’s gender-nonconforming performance in “Sadie’s Song” 28 Pearl embraces Rose in “We Need to Talk” 35 Homeworld Gems expressing disgust at Garnet’s first fusion 51 Pearl and Rose dancing sensually to perform a fusion 58 Pearl struggles to make sense of Stevonnie’s radically queer and structurally fluid body 61 Lars and Sadie react to Stevonnie 62 Utena’s uniform (right) differs from both the male and female school uniforms (episode 2 of Revolutionary Girl Utena) 96 Top: Steven pulls Rose’s sword from Lion’s head in “Lion 2: The Movie”; bottom: Utena pulls the Sword of Dios from Anthy’s body in episode 2 of Revolutionary Girl Utena 98 From left to right, top to bottom: Onion sinking a boat after rebounding a harpoon off of Steven’s bubble (“Bubble Buddies”); Onion being asked “How are ya?” (“Onion Trade”); Onion moments before revealing a mouse, thought by Steven to be dead, in his mouth (“Onion Friend”); three panels of Onion walking towards Steven over the course of several seconds (“Onion Trade”) 140 Onion’s friend in “Onion Friend” 149

xv

xvi  

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3

Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2

A Kindergarten in “Keeping It Together” 186 Steven and the Cluster in “Gem Drill, Pt. 2” 188 Top: Steven and Blue and Yellow Diamonds temporarily healing a corrupted Gem named Centipeetle in “Legs from Here to Homeworld”; Bottom: The corrupted Gem scene pixelated 190 Amethyst and Steven at the Kindergarten 204 Rose stares disapprovingly at Stevonnie 212

CHAPTER 1

Introduction John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

On July 6, 2018, two female-presenting aliens, one wearing a wedding dress and one a tuxedo, who had been in a committed relationship for 5750 years (and 8 months) that involved living as one body with two consciousnesses, married one another on a beach in what has been widely discussed as the first same-sex wedding in an American animated children’s television show.1 This unique union occurred in Cartoon Network’s series Steven Universe (2013–), and whatever one’s position in debates over same-sex marriage and homonormativity, these particular nuptials undeniably mark a milestone for queer representation. Created by Rebecca Sugar, an alum of Adventure Time (2010–2018), another Cartoon Network series that pushes the boundaries both formally and politically of what American animated television for children can be, Steven Universe holds the distinction of being the first Cartoon Network property created

J. R. Ziegler (B) English Department, Bronx Community College, CUNY, Bronx, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] L. Richards English Department, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, Long Island City, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. R. Ziegler and L. Richards (eds.), Representation in Steven Universe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9_1

1

2

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

solely by a woman, and an openly queer woman at that: Sugar has publicly acknowledged her bisexuality and, more recently, her identification as gender non-binary.2 The show, set in fictional east-coast Beach City, Delmarva (a combination of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia), centers on the title character, Steven Universe, a fourteen-year-old boy who physically appears to be more like eight (“Steven’s Birthday”) and whose father is aging rocker and car-wash owner Greg Universe, né DeMayo. Accounting for the disjunction between his appearance and age is the fact that his mother, Rose Quartz, was one of a species of aliens called Gems, who sacrificed her physical form to create Steven. Thousands of years in the past, Rose also led a rebellion against the genocidal colonization of Earth by her own species, and Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl, a trio of her fellow alien rebels, known collectively as the Crystal Gems, now serve as surrogate parents to Steven (Greg participates in Steven’s life but does not cohabitate with Steven and the Gems) as he negotiates not only his personal life but also remaining and future threats from the Gem Homeworld. Key to the conception of the Gem species is that their bodies, and therefore their race, gender, and sex, are merely projections of the gemstones from which the individual characters take their names, which are simultaneously the names of all other individuals in that class of Gem (i.e., the Pearl who lives with Steven is one of the innumerable Pearls). Sugar has underlined in an interview the representational significance of this conception for denaturalizing dominant ideas of gender and for providing points of identification for those who exist outside of those ideas: One of the things that’s really important to me about the show is that the gems are all non-binary women…[and are] coming from a world where they don’t really have the frame of reference. They’re coded female, which is very important, and them being coded female, I was really excited because I felt like I had not seen this. … They wouldn’t think of themselves as women, um, but they’re fine with being interpreted that way amongst humans. Um, and I am also a non-binary woman, which is, it’s been really great to express myself through these characters because it’s very much how I have felt throughout my life. (Sugar 2018)

The gems’ projected bodies, including but not only their apparent gender, are malleable, a quality that they share with animated bodies more

1

INTRODUCTION

3

broadly, and can be temporarily destroyed or “poofed” without damaging the gems in which the individual self appears to reside, but the gems themselves can be corrupted, rendering the individual monstrous, or shattered, killing the individual permanently.3 This mode of embodiment allows for a narratively and thematically central mechanic called fusion, in which two or more bodies can physically merge into a new, single being. Fusion usually occurs between or among Gems, but Gem–human hybrid Steven has at different times fused with Amethyst and with the human Connie Maheswaran; additionally, it is seen by the majority of Gem society as acceptable only for work or battle, but a minority, including the Crystal Gems, also employ it for affective purposes. Fusion thus functions as a libidinal act in the series, and it is often achieved through dance, itself long a site for the expression of desire. Ruby and Sapphire, for example, the two Crystal Gems who marry, live their lives as a fusion named Garnet, and Steven, the officiant, describes Garnet during the wedding as “their love, given form” (“Reunited”). Gem embodiment, and fusion in particular, unsettles boundaries of self (an individual self and body are not coterminous), biological sex (the Gems have none), gender (male Steven and female Connie fuse into Stevonnie, who is either both genders or neither, or both and neither), and even species (Gems and humans can fuse or, as Steven’s existence suggests, seemingly produce hybrid offspring). Given such undermining of normative categories, queerness unsurprisingly figures prominently in the attention paid to Steven Universe by professional and academic writers and by fans.4 Eli Dunn (2016) writes, “Not only is Steven Universe [sic] perhaps the queerest children’s show, it may be the most gender-progressive show on television” (55), and this assessment dovetails with supervising director Joe Johnston’s description of one of Sugar’s goals for the series: “Something that Rebecca has said time and time again is that we want the show to be ‘subversive in a positive way’” (McDonnell 2017, 224). Ruby and Sapphire’s marriage, for instance, can be read as subversive in the unapologetic queerness not only of its subject matter but of its presentation: The scene includes a passionate kiss between the female-presenting partners; the more traditionally feminine Sapphire, wearing male-coded clothing, literally sweeping the more traditionally masculine Ruby, wearing female-coded clothing, off of her feet; their fusion into Garnet; and then a shot of two flowers, each colored like one of the brides, washing up on the beach and sparkling with drops of moisture in what can be seen as overtly vaginal imagery.

4

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

The refrain of the song that Steven sings while preparing for the wedding—“There’s an awful lot of awful things we could be thinking of / But for just one day, let’s only think about love”—could function as a kind of mission statement for the show. However, while the representations of gender and sexuality are important foci of that mission (Christian Ravela [2017], in fact, notes that the “many musical segments…, like in musicals, break the narrative and become a vehicle for expression of desire, especially queer desire” [390]), the “love” invoked is not restricted to those areas but often functions to resolve a variety of conflicts, and those awful things that Steven references also point us toward the nuanced and progressive handling of interpersonal relationships and sociopolitical issues that are as significant to the show as its sporadic musical interludes. As Steven Universe writer Matt Burnett puts it, “[I]t can’t hurt to shade the world a little grayer for kids” (McDonnell 2017, 225), and Steven here is using the song and the wedding itself, in part, to avoid thinking about, among other disturbing concerns, the recent revelation of his mother and Pearl’s long-standing deception regarding Rose’s identity: Pearl, who both acts as a surrogate parent and was also in love with Rose, concealed for millennia that Rose Quartz was actually Pink Diamond, one of the quartet of diamonds who ruled the Gem Homeworld and who had been given Earth as her own colony, faking her death and adopting a new identity in order to lead her rebellion. The episode thus “shades[s] the world a little grayer” in a manner representative of the series as a whole, by mixing the joyousness of the occasion with multiple instances of parental betrayal and connecting all of it to further sociopolitical questions. Ravela, who sees Steven as embodying “non-toxic masculinity” (392), usefully summarizes this approach: Importantly, this celebration and thoughtful exploration of queer intimacy and masculinity is embedded in the series’s larger postcolonial narrative. This placement is not incidental but actually central to fusion’s other valence, specifically its narrative role in contrasting the Crystal Gem home world to the human world of Earth. As the series develops through its first three seasons, we learn that the Crystal Gem home world is a static, hierarchically stratified and instrumentally organized totalitarian society. Each Gem is born into a specific labouring class under the Diamond Authority and must forever live within this caste system. (392)

1

INTRODUCTION

5

Under the umbrella of this postcolonial or, as Mandy Elizabeth Moore argues in Chapter 10, decolonial narrative arise considerations including but not limited to class, race, and the environment. The recent episode “Together Alone” handily demonstrates this confluence of concerns. Rather than a wedding, “Together Alone” finds Steven, dressed like his mother and waited on by sentient pebbles, planning a ball on the Gem Homeworld in an attempt to gain a further audience with White Diamond, the uppermost Gem in the hierarchy. He soon finds that a ball on Homeworld is less a party than a rigidly controlled public display of deference to authority in which “everyone stays where they belong.” In addition, the Crystal Gems are allowed to attend only if Amethyst, considered defective by Homeworld Gems, wears “limb enhancers,” and if Garnet, whose wedding band is glimpsed in a close-up, un-fuses (Connie, meanwhile, is viewed as Steven’s “pet” and Pearl as his property). The ball itself features the first appearance of Homeworld Gems whose lower halves, suggestive of full skirts, are, in an obvious metaphor, shaped like cogs that interlock as they dance, while other Gems dance in uniform motions within rows of their own kind. When Connie convinces Steven to ignore the prohibition against his dancing and they inadvertently fuse, they, Garnet, and Opal (a fusion of Pearl and Amethyst) inspire two Jades in the crowd to fuse. After exclaiming, significantly, “I knew it! I knew I couldn’t be the only one!,” the symbolically newly out Jade fusion is immediately “poofed” by a furious Yellow Diamond, but as Pearl has told Steven earlier in the episode, he is “already changing the world.” In her wedding vows, Sapphire speaks of how her relationship with Ruby allows her to see infinite possible futures that can be altered with the “smallest force of will” (“Reunited”). To be fair, she does possess “future vision,” but for the rest of us, Steven Universe still importantly helps audiences to themselves imagine other possible futures and ways of being, as well as their own ability to influence such alternatives. Steven Universe supervising director Kat Morris comments on this transgressive function: “We’re really lucky to be living in a time when people are able to tell stories that challenge society as it is now on a platform that can be seen by millions around the world” (McDonnell 2017, 224). The challenges proffered by representations of the fantastic, such as the portrayal of the rigid, decidedly un-queer/anti-queer, caste-bound, and hierarchical Homeworld, to existing society and its dominant ideologies fit comfortably within the tradition of science fiction media. With its alien beings

6

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

and worlds, Steven clearly draws on this tradition, the first of two media traditions within which this introduction will contextualize the series (the second being anime).

Steven Universe and the Science Fiction Tradition Some scholars, it should be acknowledged, might object to categorizing Steven Universe as sci-fi. Donald Palumbo (1999), for instance, writes of comic books that their “science fiction components are usually only a superficial guise for fantasy, as comic book narratives generally exhibit no interest in extrapolating from—or basing their worlds’ divergences from reality upon—any sound, organized body of scientific knowledge or principles; rather, they use ‘science,’ not to explain, but to explain away” (loc. 2565).5 His claims here might justifiably be applied to Steven Universe, in which the explanation of Gem bodies seems less than scientifically sound and the fusion of Steven with Connie conveniently ignores the rules of human biology. Palumbo’s further claim that some “characters possess abilities and wield artifacts that can most accurately be described as magical, despite the ostensibly ‘scientific’ origins of many of them” (loc. 2575) could equally be talking about the Crystal Gems’ ability to materialize weapons from their gems or Steven’s ability to project his consciousness across interstellar distances into a sentient anthropomorphic watermelon. Darko Suvin (1979) similarly complains of “gobbledygook” that “mimic[s]” science fiction but treats science “as a metaphysical…activity” (23). Other scholars, however, argue for a more capacious understanding of science fiction. Citing David Seed, Sandy Rankin and R.C. Neighbors (2011) assert “that sf is, and has been a ‘multigeneric field,’ inclusive of, or at least often containing moments of fairytales, horror, myth, bildungsroman, the Western, mystery-crime, realism, surrealism, poetry, etc., and fantasy” (loc. 65). Ultimately, while it may be more accurate according to some definitions to categorize Steven Universe as science fantasy, science fiction studies nevertheless provides a productive framework for examining the series. Rankin and Neighbors sketch the intersection of children’s television, science fiction, and ideology: Children’s film and television, like any media or cultural artifacts, represent certain beliefs, ideas, and practices as natural, and conversely represent certain beliefs, ideas, and practices as unnatural, as questionable, impossible, or

1

INTRODUCTION

7

unthinkable, by their absence if not by their circumscribed or negated presence. Indeed, presence and absence, affirmation and negation, can delight, fascinate, instruct, interpellate (children or adults as subjects), irritate, alienate, and shock. These are ideological and anti-ideological functions that science fiction (sf), perhaps better than any other genre, serves. (loc. 25)

As a result, science fiction can be conceptualized as “a living and popular art form of identity, which is to say that the alternative worlds of science fiction are continuous with our world,” and such imagining of alternatives “engages with contemporary language and culture, historical materiality, social and scientific processes, philosophy, religion, psychology, [and] anthropology” (loc. 79). Within such alternative imaginings, the “aliens,” a spectrum ranging from “monsters” to “simply differing strangers,” operate as “a mirror to man,” and “not only a reflecting one” but “also a transforming one…: the mirror is a crucible” (Suvin 1979, 5). A primary mechanism by which science fiction’s engagement with and transformative mirroring of the world occurs is termed by Suvin, in his seminal work on literary sci-fi, the novum, “a strange newness” or “domestication of the amazing” (4). Sandy Rankin (2011) glosses the novum as “the central imaginary novelty in a science-fiction text” (loc. 2110) and Farah Mendlesohn (2009) as “the idea or object that creates the rupture within the world as we understand it” (10). The novum may, Mendlesohn continues, be “a robot, a new vaccine or disease, or a change in the social structure,” and its “role…is to be ‘tackled,’ either defeated or encompassed within the world order” (10). It is “so central and significant that it determines the whole narrative logic—or at least the overriding narrative logic” (Suvin 1979, 70). Steven Universe contains a number of ruptures with our contemporary world—aliens, Star Trek-esque transporter pads, a living pumpkin dog—but the novum, we would argue, the point of rupture toward which the series as a whole is oriented, is fusion. According to Rankin, a true novum “has as its directive not art for the sake of art but art for the sake of hope, which is to say that a true novum has radical real-world ethical-political potential” (loc. 2110), and fusion evinces such potential. Fusion lends interpersonal relationships, romantic and otherwise, additional sociopolitical resonance and, since it can involve humans as well as Gems and human-Gem hybrids, “encompasse[s]” the modes of difference that it makes possible subvert a range of dominant contemporary heteronormative and neoliberal ideologies.6

8

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

While the notion of the novum aids in consideration of the series overall, the discussion by Michael M. Levy (1999) of young adult science fiction novels helps to further contextualize its title character within the science fiction and associated genres. Levy positions these sci-fi novels as belonging to the lineage of the bildungsroman, a coming-of-age narrative in the “traditional male version” of which “the hero, as a young man, struggles to achieve a position of independence from which he may decide the terms on which he will accept engagement with the world” (loc. 1877). The young hero’s father is “entirely or largely absent,” and the hero partly resembles those of folklore and romance (loc. 1574). Greg, supportive but not a primary caregiver, would seem to meet the requirement of being “largely absent,” and Steven’s struggle certainly features elements, as discussed above, that would be at home in fantasy or romance under the canopy of science fiction. “Science fiction,” Levy argues, “with its emphasis on change, the discovery of new knowledge, and the conquest of new worlds, is a logical medium for the bildungsroman. Together the two forms create a powerful vehicle for the symbolic portrayal of many young readers’ most cherished hopes for the future” (loc. 1889). Steven, of course, grows more independent over the course of the series, both in his actions (one can compare the Crystal Gems’ reluctance early in the series to involve Steven in anything dangerous to his initiating and insisting on traveling to Homeworld in the most recent episodes) and in his personal and moral identity. Levy notes that the bildungsroman hero’s increased mastery most commonly results from increases in practical knowledge “of how the world works” and moral knowledge, or “understanding of the implications of his own actions,” which, in science fiction, in turn result from movement to a more technologically advanced community (loc. 1846). For Steven, these changes occur within the context of his proximity to more advanced alien culture, whether on or beyond Earth, and of his shifting knowledge of his family, particularly his mother, and the Gems more broadly. His eventual discoveries, for example, that the corrupted Gems are victims of Homeworld retaliation for Rose’s rebellion and that they might potentially be curable motivate his insistence on traveling to Homeworld to appeal to White Diamond; the evolution of his identity and ethics involves defining himself in relation to Rose, both the positive and negative aspects, and the others around him, his father, surrogate mothers, friends, and enemies.

1

INTRODUCTION

9

Steven Universe and the Anime Tradition In addition to and overlapping with science fiction, anime, a style of animated media that originated in Japan, represents the other tradition with the most direct and pervasive influence on Steven Universe and therefore the most useful in relation to which to situate the series.7 Aside from some aesthetic touches, such as the way that pupils can become enlarged stars to show extreme happiness or that characters cry oversized tears, and aside from direct references to specific moments in anime and manga (comics created in Japan), Steven shows the influence of anime in how it presents both its protagonists and antagonists. It can be viewed as a spin on the magical girl and the much less prevalent magical boy subgenres, in which protagonists employ some sort of magical power to combat evil forces. Characters often have signature weapons, as we see with Steven and the Crystal Gems, and the hero is not uncommonly an average person who gains powers by various means, much as Steven discovers different powers as the series progresses and maintains something of a separate “normal” public identity, especially earlier in the series. Transformation sequences are another staple of the subgenre that finds echoes in Steven Universe. Anime more broadly has also historically been more willing to depict genderqueerness and queer desire (170). “North American TV,” in contrast, “has worked hard to avoid the unexpected appearances of gay, crossdressing, or otherwise wildly gender-bending characters” in imported anime, through cuts or changes via dubbing, if necessary (Levi 2009, 171).8 In the same way that Steven Universe works against this tendency, it also eschews the black-and-white division common to animated American children’s television between its heroes and villains or monsters. Anime is populated to a greater extent than American television animation with monsters whose “power does not automatically make them ‘bad’” (West 2009, 21).9 Fred Patten (2009) calls such “‘friendly monsters’” one of the “nuances of Japanese culture” evident in anime series such as Pokémon and adds that the word monster in Japan “signifies any imaginary or fantasy creature” (51), a definition under which the Crystal Gems themselves would fall. Western monsters are often powerful but evil or powerful but “untamed creatures that need to be domesticated” (West 2009, 21), whereas in Steven Universe they are just as likely merely misunderstood or in need of empathy. While there are battle scenes and violence, almost all enemies—corrupted Gems, Gem enemies from Homeworld, even the potentially-world-destroying “Cluster” of Gem shards—can be

10

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

understood and reasoned with or appealed to, frequently even joining or aiding Steven and the Crystal Gems in the end. Part of what allows for empathetic engagement as the primary solution to the conflicts in Steven Universe is another attribute that it shares with a great deal of anime: serialization. Especially in a series with episodes that run approximately 11 minutes each, serialization permits character and narrative development to take place over multiple episodes or even seasons. Peridot’s conversion to the side of the Crystal Gems, for instance, and her subsequent relationships, particularly her living with Lapis Lazuli, gain weight and impact from her having spent more than half of a season as a committed antagonist. Nicoloe Farrell (2009) contrasts the episodic nature of most animated American series with the serialization of an anime such as Inu Yasha, which, beyond “violence and action,” has “a plot that focuses on relationships, both romantic and otherwise, and a story that links all episodes together, not to mention intense characterization” (240). An effect of this difference in structure is that anime “characters are seldom static” and “American characters usually are” (241). Steven, again, with its emphasis on character and relationships and its overarching, unifying narrative, displays its divergence from much of American television animation for children and its indebtedness to the anime tradition. To date, American animated children’s series Adventure Time, laterstage Regular Show (2009–2017), Gravity Falls (2012–2016), and Summer Camp Island (2018–) have embraced serialization to varying degrees, making Steven Universe a member of a very exclusive group; all except Steven and Summer Camp Island—created by Julia Pott, another Adventure Time alum—have ended their runs. While serialization is one of the defining characteristics of what critics have termed the “Golden Age” of American live-action adult programming beginning in 1999 and overlapping with but distinct from the “peak TV” era ushered in by the rise of streaming services such as Netflix (Brennan 2018), most animated children’s television fare continues to resemble the Cartoon Network series Teen Titans Go (2013–), which, while it can be smartly satiric, hews to a traditional episodic structure in which changes, including to character, do not carry over from one episode to another. Anime series can be very long running, and they can use this length to create very detailed, complex narratives and diegetic mythology. The serialized Dragon Ball Z (1989– 1996) television series, for instance, comprises 291 half-hour episodes. In a claim that brings together some of the threads of this discussion, Dennis concludes that more detail, in “biographies, kinship networks, spatial

1

INTRODUCTION

11

structures,” results in a greater degree of heterosexualization, but this is most certainly not the case in Steven Universe, and perhaps part of that difference from the main body of American children’s animated television stems from the influence of anime.

“Serious Steven”: Steven Universe Scholarship Herein and Looking Forward Steven Universe, then, occupies productive intersections of science fiction, children’s television, and anime, a nexus within which the show develops a rich, progressive, even subversive tapestry of theme and character that is ripe for scholarly analysis. The contributors to this volume trace various threads in that tapestry. In doing so, they sometimes offer differing interpretations of elements of the show such as fusion or racial coding, but while we have aimed for a certain level of cohesion among the chapters, we also believe that such differences productively speak to the textual richness of the series and the corresponding richness of the discussions that may take place going forward. In Chapter 2, Jake Pitre probes the interaction between Steven Universe and expressions of queer identity by its fandom, particularly on Tumblr. Lincoln Geraghty (2015) reminds us that “technologies of interaction shared by producers and audiences must also be considered as valuable” (7) to the study of media franchises, and that “fan commentaries online are paratexts in and of themselves” and “another level of meaning-making” (8). As Pitre discusses, Steven has built an extensive and demographically diverse audience with an active online presence, and he looks at both the toxicity and the construction of individual and collective (queer) identities enabled by online fandom. In doing so, Pitre follows Jonathan Gray’s (2015) reasoning that “the paratext is always part of the text” (231) and that the “text’s interaction with its environment” (230) is vital to the study of the text itself. In Chapter 3, Kevin Cooley approaches the queer force of Steven Universe through the political potential of the specific qualities of the animated body to materialize a queer future. Through his analysis, Cooley suggests that through fusion and futurity, the series theorizes a world beyond its own narrative dimensions that is also beyond the dominant heteronormative paradigm of reproductive futurity outlined by scholars such as Lee Edelman. In Chapter 4, Olivia Zolciak extends the consideration of queer identities and Steven Universe, focusing on the ways in which the intersections of gender, sexual, and ethnic coding in the series confer unequal

12

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

privilege upon different female characters. “Throughout its history, …the sf genre as a whole has been exclusively white” (Olson 2011, loc. 995), and while Steven includes a number of characters who are or are coded as people of color, Zolciak finds that it simultaneously reinforces and complicates racially inflected gender stereotypes. In Chapter 5, Jacqueline Ristola highlights a different intersection in Steven Universe: that of queerness and anime. Ravela identifies fusion as “a standard Japanese anime trope” (390), and Ristola traces in detail the impactful influence on Steven of the oeuvre of anime director Kunihiko Ikuhara as it manifests in queer representation, embodiment, and fandom. Chapter 6 shifts the focus away from queerness, as John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards argue that Ronaldo Fryman, in his appearances on the television series as well as in the paratexts of “his” blog and book, both titled Keep Beach City Weird, provides a site for satirizing multiple forms of media content. The satire of Ronaldo as a conspiracy theorist, they conclude, serves to underline the commonalities among conspiracy theories, tabloid celebrity media, and online fan paratexts. In Chapter 7, Justin Saret focuses on another secondary character, the enigmatic Onion. Saret examines Onion as a surrealist trickster figure whose silence and blankness place him in ambiguous opposition to the series’ ideology of empathetic connection. In Chapter 8, Emrys Donaldson considers crossspecies hybridity, empathy, and consent by putting Steven Universe in dialogue with Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy of novels, in which the alien species includes male, female, and non-binary genders, all of whom can manipulate humans on genetic and cellular levels and interbreed with them. Donaldson demonstrates how this juxtaposition helps to develop and evaluate models of equitable cross-species interaction. In Chapter 9, Evelyn Ramiel concentrates on the background art of Steven Universe, observing that this significant element of animation receives less scholarly attention than it merits. Ramiel uses this analysis of the series’ background art to excavate the layers of how Steven engages ecological and geological narratives, both within and outside the show, as part of an ethic of care that extends to a damaged planet. In Chapter 10, Mandy E. Moore adopts a decolonial perspective to explore the show’s portrayal of the Gems’ colonial legacy. She observes that while Steven Universe is clearly anti-colonial, it nonetheless focuses on the long-term effects of that legacy on other Gems rather than on the Earth’s human inhabitants. Finally, in Chapter 11, Ellery Thomas closes out this collection with an inquiry into the ways in which memory is multidirectional

1

INTRODUCTION

13

in Steven Universe, constantly being created and recreated by the tension between personal and cultural narratives. In portraying the synthesis of official and vernacular memories, Thomas concludes, the show offers a model for healing cultural trauma. As the contributors to this volume make clear, in Steven Universe, not only is the personal the political but also the domestic is the intergalactic. Rebecca Sugar’s creation stands out from and pushes back against “the reassuring conservatism often characteristic of children’s literature and film” (Kennefick 2011, loc. 1398), engaging in counternormative representational practices that find reflection in the communities and paratexts of its fans. It is with a comment about these paratexts that we will conclude this introduction. The chapters in this book concentrate on the television show itself and, to a lesser extent, its online fandom. However, the television series can be regarded as the “source” in what Thomas Lamarre (2018) designates a “media mix,” in which the source “imparts a distinctive tone” and “trajectory” to the mix but each “media instance is supposed to be equivalent to other instances as a point of entry into the series” (loc. 6393). Future directions for the study of Steven Universe, then, in addition to moving forward the types of conversations represented in this volume, might include scrutiny of a wide range of paratexts such as comics, multi-platform video games, advertising for or using the show, official or fan-created social media and other web content, and even merchandise or para/textual production and distribution.10 Meanwhile, our contributors have placed a few more blocks in the foundation of what we expect to be an ongoing and fruitful scholarly appraisal of Steven Universe and its media ecology.11

Notes 1. See, for example, Rude (2018). 2. Adventure Time executive producer Adam Muto told interviewers that the evolution of the relationship between female characters Marceline and Princess Bubblegum, who shared a romantic kiss in the series finale, owed much to Sugar fighting for a more complex relationship during her time on the show (Pulliam-Moore 2018). 3. Jeffery P. Dennis (2003) writes of the malleability of animated bodies that “animated beings move between, merge, and ultimately deconstruct the divisions of human/animal, naked/clothed, child/adult, and male/female,” and that “fluidity allows” for “transgressive readings of

14

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

gender roles” and “implicit or explicit articulations of same-sex identity, behavior, and desire.” Relatedly, this volume does not treat use of the singular they as a grammatical error, viewing the usage as a political expression of identity. All references to unpaginated Kindle editions are to location markers. For instance, Wendy Pearson (1999) points to the “particular aptness of sf, as a non-mimetic form of writing, to produce stories in which sexuality does not need to be understood in ways ‘vouched for by human senses and common sense’ and to interrogate the ways in which sexual subjectivities are created as effects of the system that sustains them” (18). Fusion and Gem embodiment function in just this way. See Ruh (2009, 214–220) for a brief summary of the close relation between American and Japanese television from the postwar period through the 1960s. Mendlesohn notes that children’s science-fiction literature offers little challenge to “compulsory” heterosexuality (131), an observation that applies to sci-fi television directed to children as well. Dennis examines American animation as a whole from the pre-code era until the early 2000s, finding varying degrees of queer subtext but crediting Pinky and the Brain (1993– 1999) as the first children’s cartoon to feature an implied same-sex couple and Rocko’s Modern Life (1993–1997) and Spongebob Squarepants (1999– ) as featuring positive albeit coded depictions of same-sex desire. Other than that, the children’s animation produced in the United States remains overwhelmingly heteronormative. Adult animated television produced in the United States, beginning with The Simpsons (1989–) and expanded with the advent of streaming services, boasts more diverse explicit representation. West posits that Japanese monsters model control of the id for children, rather than repression (23). Regarding merchandise, for example, Suzanne Scott (2017) underscores that “toys and action figures remain perilously under-theorized as paratextual agents” (139). Lamarre defines his concept of “media ecology” as “a complex assembling of infrastructural tendencies relative to a distributive force” (loc. 691) and asserts that “[w]ithin the transmedia ecology, the anime [or, for our purposes, animated] character not only switches between codes but also between media platforms” (loc. 4523).

1

INTRODUCTION

15

References Brennan, Matt. 2018. “The Golden Age of Television Is Officially over.” Paste. Last modified May 31. https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/05/ the-golden-age-of-television-is-officially-over.html. Dennis, Jeffrey P. 2003. “Queertoons: The Dynamics of Same-Sex Desire in the Animated Cartoon.” Soundscapes 6. http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/ VOLUME06/Queertoons.shtml. Dunn, Eli. 2016. Steven Universe, Fusion Magic, and the Queer Cartoon Carnivalesque. Gender Forum 56: 44–57. Farrell, Nicoloe. (2009). “Inu Yasha: The Search for the Jewel of Four Souls in America.” In The Japanification of Children’s Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki, edited by Mark I. West, 227–247. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Geraghty, Lincoln. 2015. “Introduction: Fans and Paratexts.” In Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, edited by Lincoln Geraghty, 1–16. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gray, Jonathan. 2015. “Afterword: Studying Media with and Without Paratexts.” In Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, edited by Lincoln Geraghty, 230–237. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kennefick, Daniel. 2011. “A Few Beasts Hissed: Buzz Lightyear and the Refusal to Believe.” In The Galaxy Is Rated G: Essays on Children’s Science Fiction Film and Television, edited by R.C. Neighbors and Sandy Rankin, loc. 1245– 1453. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Kindle edition. Lamarre, Thomas. 2018. The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kindle edition. Levi, Antonia. 2009. “North American Reactions to Yaoi.” In The Japanification of Children’s Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki, edited by Mark I. West, 147–173. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Levy, Michael M. 1999. “The Young Adult Science Fiction Novel as Bildungsroman.” In Young Adult Science Fiction, edited by C.W. Sullivan III, loc. 1554– 1899. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Kindle edition. McDonnell, Chris. 2017. Steven Universe: Art & Origins. New York: Abrams. Mendlesohn, Farah. 2009. The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Olson, Debbie C. 2011. “Last in Space: The ‘Black’ Hold in Children’s Science Fiction Film.” In The Galaxy Is Rated G: Essays on Children’s Science Fiction Film and Television, edited by R.C. Neighbors and Sandy Rankin, loc. 953– 1242. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Kindle edition. Palumbo, Donald. 1999. “Science Fiction in Comic Books: Science Fiction Colonizes a Fantasy Medium.” In Young Adult Science Fiction, edited by C.W.

16

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

Sullivan III, loc. 2558–2753. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Kindle edition. Patten, Fred. 2009. “The Allure of Anthropomorphism in Animé and Manga.” In The Japanification of Children’s Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki, ed. Mark I. West, 41–52. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Pearson, Wendy. 1999. “Alien Cryptographies: The View from the Queer.” Science Fiction Studies 26 (1): 1–22. www.jstor.org/stable/4240748. Pulliam-Moore, Charles. 2018. “Adventure Time’s Producer Was Concerned Queer Representation Might Draw ‘Too Much Attention.’” io9. Last modified September 4. https://io9.gizmodo.com/adventure-times-producer-wasconcerned-queer-representa-1828807397. Rankin, Sandy. 2011. “‘Population: Us’: Nostalgia for a Future That Never Was (Not Yet) in The Iron Giant.” In The Galaxy Is Rated G: Essays on Children’s Science Fiction Film and Television, edited by R.C. Neighbors and Sandy Rankin, loc. 2084–2441. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Kindle edition. Rankin, Sandy, and R.C. Neighbors. 2011. “Horizons of Possibility: What We Point to When We Say Science Fiction for Children.” In The Galaxy Is Rated G: Essays on Children’s Science Fiction Film and Television, edited by R.C. Neighbors and Sandy Rankin, loc. 25–209. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Kindle edition. Ravela, Christian. 2017. “Steven Universe, Created by Rebecca Sugar (2013– Present).” Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture 2 (3): 389–394. Rude, Mey. 2018. “How This Nonbinary Woman Created the Queerest Cartoon on Television.” them. Last modified August 2. https://www.them.us/story/ rebecca-sugar-steven-universe-interview/amp. Ruh, Brian. 2009. “Early Japanese Animation in the United States: Changing Tetsuwan Atomu to Astro Boy.” In The Japanification of Children’s Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki, edited by Mark I. West, 209–226. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Scott, Suzanne. 2017. “#Wheresrey?: Toys, Spoilers, and the Gender Politics of Franchise Paratexts.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34 (2): 138– 147. Sugar, Rebecca. 2018. Interview with Joshua Johnson. “The Mind Behind America’s Most Empathetic Cartoon.” 1A. Podcast audio. July 9. https://the1a.org/audio/#/shows/2018-07-09/the-mind-behindamericas-most-empathetic-cartoon/114886/. Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. West, Mark I. 2009. “Invasion of the Japanese Monsters: A Homefront Report.” In The Japanification of Children’s Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki, edited by Mark I. West, 17–23. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

1

Episodes Referenced “Reunited” (season 5, episode 23, 2018) “Steven’s Birthday” (season 2, episode 23, 2016) “Together Alone” (season 5, episode 26, 2018)

INTRODUCTION

17

CHAPTER 2

Queer Transformation, Contested Authorship, and Fluid Fandom Jake Pitre

A Different World In the world of Steven Universe, redemption is always possible. Antagonists do exist, but they are never beyond the potential arc of empathetic atonement. In the real world, it can be difficult to maintain that kind of optimism and positivity, which is what makes the Cartoon Network series named for this boy, who looks for the best in everyone he meets, all the more singular. Throughout its run, Steven Universe has received much praise (and some criticism) for its depiction of gender and sexuality, particularly as a show ostensibly intended for children. The physical Gems are, in fact, projections emanating from their gemstones. They have human feminine physical characteristics but no concept of gender (they reproduce through a process of artificial creation in facilities called Kindergartens).1 There are different types of Gems (Pearls, Rubies, Sapphires, etc.) with their own specific attributes, and they have the special ability to “fuse” with each other in moments of need or passion, wherein they transform into another being altogether. Garnet, for example, is a fusion of a Ruby and

J. Pitre (B) Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 J. R. Ziegler and L. Richards (eds.), Representation in Steven Universe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9_2

19

20

J. PITRE

a Sapphire who fell in love and have chosen to remain permanently fused, which is very uncommon. These aliens have been the site of explicit queer relationships and identities in a manner that is wholly unconventional and yet exists within a notable historical tradition of queer children’s entertainment, and a vocal fandom has developed online as a result, negotiating the authorship of the series itself, who gets to define what and who it’s for, and their own individual identities. To understand the massive fandom around Steven Universe, we must first understand the series itself, and more importantly, the interventions that it has made culturally, socially, and politically. What has it actually accomplished for its queer fandom? In this chapter, I begin by outlining the various ways in which this is a queer series, analyzing the queer and anti-normative elements of its aesthetics, its authors, its narrative, and its politics. From there, some implications begin to take shape. My overall argument relies on an acknowledgment of Steven Universe’s unique queer appeal. As such, this chapter makes the argument that its conflux of queerness is unprecedented so that we can move forward to its larger cultural reverberations. As a child, series creator Rebecca Sugar was inundated with the full range of animation’s possibilities, thanks in large part to her father, who showed Sugar and her brother everything from Looney Tunes to the unfinished version of Beauty and the Beast with storyboards and rough animatics. It was never a mystery to them how these cartoons were put together and who was pulling the strings. Sugar explains in Steven Universe: Art & Origins : “I suppose a big thing we learned from Dad was that cartoons aren’t necessarily for kids. … I felt like that was part of becoming an adult—understanding and appreciating a very well-made cartoon” (McDonnell 2017, 14). Unsurprisingly, Steven Universe has been unafraid to tackle adult themes and unconventional storylines for a children’s cartoon. The most significant example of this is the show’s expansive embrace of queerness. As Sugar said in an interview, “I think that by excluding LGBT content from children’s media, a clear statement is being made that this is something that should be ignored, and that people who are feeling this, their feelings should be ignored, they should be ignored. And I think that that is wrong” (Segal 2016). Personally, I am moved by and interested in theories of queerness that interrogate the confrontation between identity and politics to which Sugar alludes. My approach to queerness and queer theory is not simply as it relates to sexuality or as a theoretical framework

2

QUEER TRANSFORMATION, CONTESTED AUTHORSHIP …

21

to work from. For me, it is a form of cultural politics, and I am using it as a way of articulating and investigating Steven Universe’s queer identities with its queer politics. I intend to position myself by using queerness as a methodology and as a politics. Queerness, for me, is about potentiality and fluidity, which I hope to manifest through the theoretical and political contexts of this show and its fandom. Queer is an elastic term that can mean many different things, but its essence is the general upending of normativity. Beyond demarking same-sex behavior, it is sometimes used as an umbrella term for the LGBTQ+ community, as a way to describe unconventional expressions of gender, anything that vaguely alludes to some kind of non-normative expression, and as Alex Doty (2000) puts it, “to describe those aspects of spectatorship, cultural readership, production, and textual coding that seem to establish spaces not described by, or contained within, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, or transgendered understandings and categorizations of gender and sexuality” (7). As a series as singular and singularly interested in this confluence of queer elements, Steven Universe is the ideal vehicle for this discussion. The potential of queerness has always been to create alternative ways of being. Queer theorist Sara Ahmed (2010) writes, “As a structure of feeling, alienation is an intense burning presence; it is a feeling that takes place before others, from whom one is alienated, and can feel like a weight that both holds you down and keeps you apart” (168). I understand Ahmed’s approach to queerness as a force that transforms this feeling of alienation, in whatever form it may take, into a revolutionary consciousness intent on change and alternative ways of living. This feels liberating and constructive. It also seems to sharply inform Steven Universe’s queer ethos: an insistent optimism in the face of alienation. With this in mind, the show’s fandom starts to become more understandable. The eruptive passion of modern fandom, combined with its online expression, results in a variety of new identity formations and transformative methods of self-narrativization. Moreover, the way these dynamics play out, particularly in the online ecosystems of social networks like Tumblr—a rather unique and potent example—reveals much about the construction of the self, and the range of ardent and impassioned audiences for what is ostensibly youth media. Though social policing occurs in other fandoms and on other platforms, this chapter is focused on determining Steven Universe’s queerness to help in rethinking how we have come to understand fandom, most pointedly in a Tumblr landscape

22

J. PITRE

that seems to offer greater freedom for young people to express themselves in often unfamiliar ways.2 Later in this chapter, by looking closely at precisely what Steven Universe’s fans are up to on Tumblr, we’ll come to see how this platform and this fandom have helped to shape the identities of many queer youth.

Queer Authorship and Aesthetics Rebecca Sugar has made it clear that Steven Universe’s queerness is not subtext—it is unambiguously text. This assertive queer authorship is the first indication that this series is sui generis in its queerness. At San Diego Comic-Con in 2016 (where Sugar also came out as bisexual), Sugar explained the show’s dedication to queer themes: These things have so much to do with who you are, and there’s this idea that these are themes that should not be shared with kids, but everyone shares stories about love and attraction with kids. So many stories for kids are about love, and it really makes a difference to hear stories about how someone like you can be loved and if you don’t hear those stories it will change who you are. It’s very important to me that we speak to kids about consent and we speak to kids about identity and that we speak to kids about so much. I want to feel like I exist and I want everyone else who wants to feel that way to feel that way, too. (Rude 2016)

Reading through fan content for the series, it is clear that the show has had Sugar’s desired effect. People, young and old, write on blogs and social media of feeling seen in ways they have never been before, especially within an artistic space (animation) that tends to be heteronormative and conventional. But has children’s animation really been so traditional in the past? While it is undoubtedly true that some groups (parents, religious groups, businesses, etc.) hold children’s entertainment under tighter scrutiny in order to facilitate perceived moral growth in developing minds, it is also contradictorily true that animation intended for children has long been a space for queerness, sexuality, and difference to exist. Think of Bugs Bunny’s frequent drag performances, playing with the fluidity of gender, or Pinky and the Brain’s sexually charged tit-for-tat dialogue. Roland Barthes argued that every image is capable of limitless meanings and that authors work to fix the signifiers as closely as they’re able to. Jeffrey P. Dennis (2003) builds on this general concept by applying it to animation: “Signs

2

QUEER TRANSFORMATION, CONTESTED AUTHORSHIP …

23

are necessarily unfixed, especially in cartoons, which build on inference. … In sophisticated eras, animators can introject, and audiences can decode, overt signs of same-sex desire, and even specifically gay-identified characters” (132–133). Naturally, these animators are working under constraints and limits on what they can get away with, but the medium of animation seems especially attuned to handling these signifiers (see also Cooley, Chapter 3). Animation is inherently artificial, wholly diegetic worlds that are only as representative as the artists choose them to be. Animation is therefore unfixed and endlessly malleable. Even in an age of highly detailed computer-generated images, these animated characters must lack a certain subtlety to serve the rapidity of the story (to some extent surely due to children’s desire for excitement and disinterest in exposition). In a way that seems heightened for cartoons, they put forward what Dennis calls “likely meanings,” vague contexts of presentation that are imprecise by design. As he writes, “the very fluidity of the cartoon form allows the medium a unique place for the subversion of not only gender but friendship, love, desire, and identity itself” (133). Think of how often, for example, animated characters contort themselves in ways that living creatures never could. Eyes bulge out of faces to express interest. Hearts burst from torsos to signify desire, stress, or fear. The Gems in Steven Universe can fuse together to form a new entity altogether, matter mixing and creating and becoming. Moreover, and further pushing the anti-normativity of animation, cartoon characters of the same sex have often historically been placed into situations that welcome queer readings, from sharing a living space or bed to participating in events as a couple. Think of Yogi Bear and Boo Boo on The Yogi Bear Show (1961–1962), always together and housemates, or Rocky and Bullwinkle (1959–1964), best friends and stable partners. Dennis notes that Western cartoons in the 1970s and 1980s became “aggressively heterosexual” (134), reflecting a conflicted cultural moment during the Reagan era in which it was in the interest of producers to defuse any possible queer readings (He-Man and the Masters of the Universe [1983–1985], for example). By the 1990s, this began to change, with subtexts both friendly (Pinky and the Brain, legitimately coded with queer erotic desire) and not (Ren and Stimpy, who parody homosexuality for laughs). We ultimately reach the era of SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick Star, long the basis of queer readings and internet memes (see Fig. 2.1). Like many pairs before them, SpongeBob and Patrick are

24

J. PITRE

Fig. 2.1 Meme (creator unknown) implying SpongeBob and Patrick’s homosexuality

never explicitly queer in the show, but have been at the center of a small but vocal queer fandom. Heather Hendershot (2004) has said that the show “parodies masculinity and features the most ‘out’ gay character on children’s television,” at least at the time, referring to SpongeBob (197). Interpretation and representation are always fluid to some degree, but cartoons have been a fertile site for such malleability. Within this historical tradition comes Steven Universe, a series predicated on inclusivity, liberation, and understanding. Since debuting in 2013, the show has grown bolder in its depiction of various identities and their instability. In an interview for Steven Universe: Art & Origins, Sugar explains, “The point of the simpler [character] models is that they allow for flexibility and inconsistency, which is what we want. We want the artists to be able to push the characters in different directions freely without being distracted by tracking the superfluous details of an overcomplex design” (McDonnell, 81). Without putting too fine a point on it, the fluidity of the cartoon as a medium is the perfect territory for exploring the fluidity of identity, sexuality, and gender.

2

QUEER TRANSFORMATION, CONTESTED AUTHORSHIP …

25

Queer Narrative and Politics Steven Universe’s narrative is a strong resource for queer analysis, with evolving characters and relationships meeting thematic concerns that all push for both familiar and unfamiliar queer changes. Recalling the formative work of scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Lee Edelman, Claudia Castañeda (2002) notes that “it is not simply that ‘the child’ is a sign, category, or representation that can be read in multiple ways. What is distinctive about the child is that it has the capacity for transformation” (2). I find this to be at the center of Steven Universe’s mission, having no use for Edelman’s defeatist death drive, which holds onto reproduction as the only harbinger of futurity. Steven himself acts as the clearest steward of this more utopian perspective. He is optimistic not only about life in general, but about everyone he encounters—even apparent villains. One of the show’s driving forces and themes is this belief in redemption, rehabilitation, and goodness. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Sugar explained, “It’s a fantasy show. I think it’s a fantasy that no one is truly evil. I don’t know if that’s true in reality, but it’s certainly true in my fantasy. Why wouldn’t it be?” (Thurm 2017). In an interview with Paste, she explained how this point of view has evolved: “We’re writing a story about how love conquers all, and how the support is necessary, but you can’t tell that story without showing what is coming up against that. … It’s scary to start to explore where hate comes from in a show about love. It’s a challenge to stay positive while exploring that. But that’s a challenge I experience in life” (Blumenfeld 2017). Most initial antagonists on the series go through an arc of redemption, often encountering Steven’s insistent kindness and tolerance (and the love of his family and friends) and evolving from their evil ways into more complex, encouraging characters. Not every villain is “redeemed” in this way, because the show also emphasizes the significance of consequences, but Steven’s worldview is unshakeable. The figure of the (queer) child, whether embodied by Steven himself or by his reformed enemies or imagined in the show’s audience, is available for identification but also for metamorphosis and remaking. This theme of transformation is central to the mythos of the series with the concept of “fusion.” Usually initiated by a dance or a moment of profound emotional harmony (unless the fusion is not consensual), a fusion is the result of two Gems transforming into an entirely new entity. The new entity is not two minds sharing one body, but instead a single body and mind that is the expression and physical manifestation of the love and

26

J. PITRE

mutual understanding between the two original Gems. However, when a fusion is forced or is built on a foundation of hate, it is unstable and prone to being destructive. Notably, there is a long history in horror cinema and elsewhere of queer desire itself being coded as monstrous, and some fusions perform what Stacy Holman Jones and Anne Harris (2016) describe as making “the monstrous intelligible in creatively queer expressions of genders and sexualities and continue the project of disrupting the heteronormative centre in productively monstrous ways” (519). Interestingly, coerced fusion Malachite is introduced in “Jail Break,” the same episode wherein Garnet is revealed to be a fusion of Ruby and Sapphire, perhaps intentionally offering comparative examples of a strong, trusting queer relationship and a non-consensual, toxic one through the fusion of these queer alien bodies. Sugar says, “It’s exciting to be able to show kids the compelling, kinetic power of a really positive relationship. … The series also portrays a variety of LGBTQIA+ identities, body shapes, and hues of skin in a colorful, sci-fi-magic display of diversity” (McConnell, 128). Animator and writer Lauren Zuke adds: When discussing gender expression and identity as it relates to fusion, the metaphor I’m going for is that for some people—not all, of course—finding and accepting their gender is not a transformation with a defined end point, but an experience and a journey. That’s what fusion is to me, at least. Personally, I’m happy to not have to think, “I’m writing a character based on my queer experiences.” [Laughs.] That would be so hard! I’m just writing from my perspective, and I happen to be queer. I think that’s what makes the show feel natural when it comes to that. (128)

Zuke and Sugar acknowledge that the themes that they are intent on exploring are informed by their own identities, so the show’s characters and situations feel intuitive. Moreover, much of the show’s queer politics and playfulness gets expressed through fusion and its representation of relationships, as a deliberate strategy to explore LGBTQ+ themes in content for kids. In an interview with PBS NewsHour, Sugar said, “I’m glad that we’ve found a new way to talk about relationships that’s letting us talk about those [LGBTQ+] relationships. … What you learn as a kid when you don’t see any of those stories or relate to any of those stories, is that you are denied the dream of love” (Segal). Fusion, in other words, is a science-fiction creation that acts as a narrative tool for investigating

2

QUEER TRANSFORMATION, CONTESTED AUTHORSHIP …

27

queer relationships, or relationships of all types. For example, the importance of consent is made clear, particularly through the aforementioned story of Malachite, underlining how queer relationships, too, can be abusive and built on mistrust and aggression (Jasper begs Lapis: “I’ve changed!”). Fusion is also about open communication and taking the time to always understand what the other person in a relationship is feeling. Sugar adds, “Our bond could be stronger, or weaker, depending on whether or not I care about what’s going on and respect what’s going on with my partner” (Segal). In the early episode “Giant Woman,” Steven sings a song by the same name (written by Sugar). As Eli Dunn (2016) notes about this song, “This is the world of Steven Universe, a Cartoon Network show in which bodies are changeable and combinable, and a young boy sings matter-offactly about wanting to be a giant woman” (44). For Dunn, fusions represent how trans or (more specifically in this case) agender or genderqueer identities can thrive within the boundaries of a fantastical cartoon, laying the groundwork for a more universal understanding outside those confines. This queer project is completed through the complete separation of gender from sexual orientation and gender presentation through the Gems, as their physical bodies are not only able to shapeshift at will but are ultimately “only an illusion,” according to Garnet (“Fusion Cuisine”). As Dunn argues, Steven Universe takes advantage of the fact that viewers expect some amount of malleability in cartoon bodies in order to undermine any possible relation between gender identity and sexuality and presentation. A viewer is taught not to make assumptions about any of these things, as each body has the potential to transform and become something new. It’s worth noting that on Gem Homeworld, fusions are seen as abominations, an inappropriate misuse of Gems’ non-corporeal essence. Or it may be a metaphor for deviant behavior in general, helpfully coding fusion itself as queer, as a manifestation of “unnatural” relationships, further positioning the Crystal Gems as beings wholly independent from normative structures of gender and sex and central to the series’ queer utopia.

Ebullient Youth: On Gender Norms There is much to admire about Steven Universe, the boy. Positive, flamboyant, eager, excitable. These characteristics have been consistent, while

28

J. PITRE

others, such as his naïveté and self-consciousness, have evolved throughout the show’s run. He often struggles with feelings of inferiority as he confronts the complicated legacy of his Crystal Gem mother, Rose Quartz. Rose was a formidable force of charisma and kindness, but she was also a warrior who led the Gems in their rebellion against Gem Homeworld and made some fateful decisions. After Rose and the other Crystal Gems escaped Homeworld and arrived on Earth, Rose became fascinated with humans, and with their natural individuality. On Homeworld, Gems do not value individuality and have little control over their own identities, forced into certain roles to support the collective whole; this is all in service of a quasi-authoritarian quartet of Diamond Gems, and as we later learn, Rose was one of those Diamonds until she became enamored with humans’ ability to be fluid, expressive, and constantly free to redefine themselves and Pearl agreed to help her fake her death. Her half-human son, Steven, is an expression of this fluidity. He embodies this in many ways (Rose literally lives through him, as he inherited her pink gem), but perhaps chief among them is his gendernonconforming behavior and appearance (see Fig. 2.2). Sugar has noted that children’s television is traditionally (give or take a Bugs Bunny) extremely gendered. Certain shows are aimed at only one gender, and even those that aren’t tend to follow the same prescribed norms for

Fig. 2.2 Steven’s gender-nonconforming performance in “Sadie’s Song”

2

QUEER TRANSFORMATION, CONTESTED AUTHORSHIP …

29

characters and storylines. Sugar outlines the deliberate nature of her counter-approach: One of the things I really wanted to do as I went into this show was address how intensely gendered shows for children are and dissolve that. That was my first goal. And I think it came in large part because as a little kid, I always gravitated toward boys’ shows and I felt extremely guilty about that. And I don’t feel like my child self should’ve had to feel bad, but I understood that this is not really for me. And so when we went into this, I wanted no one to have to feel that feeling. I wanted everyone to feel like if they wanted to feel it, then this was for them. Especially in terms of it being gender-nonconforming as a show. (Blumenfeld)

Steven both embraces femininity and subverts traditional masculinity, blurring the binary lines of gender norms. Steven is an example to young and old audience members alike that the project of the self is never complete and always in flux, and that his masculinity does not need to be normative. Steven blurs the supposedly rigid distinction between presentation and physicality through his performance of masculinity and femininity, while the Crystal Gems themselves are defiant rejections of this distinction. They present feminine characteristics but are sexless beings. As a species, they lack sexual dimorphism, with Steven as the only exception due to his humanity. As Sugar (2014) said during a Reddit AMA, “Technically, there are no female Gems! There are only Gems!” I would argue that this frees the Gems not only to subvert gender expectations but also to explore their feelings more seriously than most children’s entertainment allows. For example, their queer relationships are not necessarily beholden to prescriptions of gender, meaning they have an uncannily unique ability to “question, problematise, or even disclaim the very idea of a fixed, abiding notion of identity,” as Samuel A. Chambers (2009) describes the aims of his own queer theory (13). The fact of the Gems having no relationship to a “naturalness” of gender or sexuality affords them a greater queer meaning, the extreme outliers that exist outside of the binary norms we are accustomed to and radically disturb them. Indeed, if one looks critically at gay series such as Will & Grace (NBC, 1998–2006, 2017–) or Queer as Folk (Showtime, 2000–2005), one would find that they are far less “queer” in this sense

30

J. PITRE

than one might expect. These series exist counter to a culture of heteronormativity yet help to sustain it with their assimilation into societal norms. While there is something to be said about undermining cultural phenomena “from within,” these series are not interested in truly upending traditional notions of representation or engaging in transformative cultural politics. Steven Universe, on the other hand, is explicitly about rethinking hegemonic concepts of inherent qualities, particularly identities, and presenting them as unconditionally natural.

Queer Implications It’s important to contextualize all of this by remembering that Steven Universe is a children’s cartoon, and not only nominally. Originally developed by Cartoon Network as part of their core 8-to-12 demographic (within a timeslot in the evening that routinely ranks as #1 on television for kids and specifically for boys aged 2–12), it is, however, abundantly clear that it has a massive following that falls well outside of that marketing strategy, and this is likely by design. It is also hardly a new phenomenon, as Karen Lury (2002) explains: ‘Children’s’ programs may never have been formally restricted to the child audience, but it is clear that niche channels have been part of the process by which certain programmes openly attract late teen and adult audiences. Thus, the most popular characters are increasingly available to diverse audiences. … This previously covert audience and market has become more visible, unabashed and acknowledged. … This can be seen in many of the programmes’ ‘knowing’ or dual address. (17)

This dual address, at least when Lury was writing, tended to consist of guest stars or references that would go over kids’ heads (she mentions a Donny Osmond reference on Johnny Bravo as an example) without taking them out of the experience or confusing them. What Lury was noticing at the dawn of the twenty-first century, particularly with the emergence and growing popularity of niche children’s channels like Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, was what she describes as “the erosion of temporal and aesthetic boundaries between children’s ‘television culture’ and adult or teen viewing pleasure” (15). Fast forward by more than a decade and these boundaries seem to no longer exist, at least in practice, with greater choice and convenience,

2

QUEER TRANSFORMATION, CONTESTED AUTHORSHIP …

31

in addition to the blurring of video content divisions generally. For the most part, Lury was describing content and jokes in children’s television that were supposedly intended to reach out to adults who may be watching along with children. Now, though, this dual address has evolved to include older teenagers and adults who are watching for their own enjoyment. These viewers have surely always existed, but what has changed is the address from both creators and marketers, along with greater opportunity for these viewers to voice and express their admiration, largely online. As Jacqueline Ristola (2015) notes, Cartoon Network is unique in its aims as a network, as its “focus is on the specific art form of animation, a direction that has expanded its audience reach from just one demographic due to the elimination of the ‘just for kids’ mentality in regards to animation.” Particularly through the night-time programming block known as Adult Swim, which began in 2001 and targets teenagers and young adults, Cartoon Network has played a crucial role in expanding the appeal of animation to all demographics. As the network (and others) helps to blur these lines, it becomes less clear which series is “intended” for whom. According to a fan poll with over 1000 respondents conducted in 2015 on Reddit, the average age of a Steven Universe fan was 22, while the youngest (again, out of Reddit users) was 13 and the oldest around 50.3 Nearly 60% (57.5%) of respondents identified as male, and more than half identified as something other than heterosexual. And in press releases, Cartoon Network has regularly claimed that Steven Universe ranks at #1 in its time slot among targeted kids and boys (TV By The Numbers 2015). Shows like Steven Universe, which is not an Adult Swim series, seem to exist as liminal texts in terms of its audience and reception. However, its political and social content must have something to do with its wideranging, demographically agnostic success. According to Lauren Maier (2015), an animation and gender scholar, “Many communities, feminist and queer communities in particular, embrace the show [Steven Universe] partly because this is the kind of media they wish they’d had as children.” This observation suggests that it may serve some kind of reparative function, as a corrective to the sexist, heteronormative cartoons that they grew up with instead. While this function certainly may play an important role in the show’s popularity, it still suggests that these audiences view the series in the subject position of a child, but teenagers and adults need not de-age themselves in order to find value or perform identity work through

32

J. PITRE

a series like Steven Universe. Maier admits: “Steven Universe does not talk down to kids or assume that any subject is ‘too much’ for them to handle. Sugar and her team trust that kids can deal with heavy, adult themes and write accordingly, empowering younger audiences to engage with their society and offering fresh, new perspectives to adults” (emphasis mine). As Steven Universe animator Lamar Abrams explains, “People let their guard down when they watch cartoons. … So maybe they’re put in a place to be a bit more receptive to what goes on on-screen. If a cartoon can challenge your perceptions or the way you think about anything, then that’s a good cartoon” (McConnell, 85). Ben Levin, a writer with the show, says that keeping everything within Steven’s perspective helps to ground everything for them and the imagined audience. Many of the other (older) characters are dealing with complex issues and emotions, from abusive partners to post-trauma stress, so “by funneling everything through Steven’s perspective, we can talk about those complexities in a way that makes sense to kids” (McConnell, 115). Steven, like many kids, treats every situation like it is the most important thing in the world. He takes everyone at face value and accepts them, almost as if he exists as the utopian ideal of human interaction. Moreover, the way that the series treats gender and other topics is intentionally aspirational. The writers talk often about the show’s idealized atmosphere, how it presents the world as it should be. Capturing the kind and gentle spirit of, say, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Steven Universe immerses child viewers in Steven’s positive perspective at all times, engaging them imaginatively with his paradisal universe. Taking this notion further, consider the recent history of queer and anti-normative sexualities in children’s animation. “What Was Missing,” an episode from the third season of Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, was co-written by Rebecca Sugar shortly before she left to create Steven Universe. The episode stirred some controversy by strongly implying a past lesbian relationship between two of the main characters, Marceline and Princess Bubblegum. The resulting minefield of debate highlighted how children’s entertainment is still held to a different cultural standard. Eventually, Marceline’s voice actor, Olivia Olson, said that because the series airs in some regions where homosexuality is illegal, they were not able to officially confirm the relationship within the series—at least until the series finale in 2018 (Bradley 2014). Even if American writers want to engage with more identities on their shows, they are faced with the excuse from their networks that their content must appease all markets.

2

QUEER TRANSFORMATION, CONTESTED AUTHORSHIP …

33

The Hub Network/Discovery Family series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is another contemporary example, as a series more clearly and straightforwardly intended for (primarily female) children having developed a remarkably intense older (male) and sometimes queer fandom. Many older male fans, for example, identify as “bronies,” a group that at times appears to be ironic and at others to be entirely sincere, grappling with traditional understandings of masculinity and heteronormativity. It’s a project that is queer in its rejection of these normative structures, but one that has been deeply pathologized and subsequently demarcated. Bronies have been the subject of mainstream cultural coverage in a way that no other fandom normally is. In the same way that some people only know of Steven Universe or Rick and Morty through the negative mainstream coverage of its fandom and their activities, far more people know of My Little Pony purely through their knowledge of bronies rather than anything about the show itself. Bronies capture public interest because it’s easy to characterize them not only as social misfits, but as potential sexual predators (with some counter-coverage focusing instead on their genuine interest and love of the show). There must be something wrong with them, right? As Anne Gilbert (2015) explains: [H]ow bronies are framed in mainstream news coverage indicates that popular appreciation for fandom is constrained in ways that limit fans’ value as cultural producers to a narrow range of normative identities. Outsider coverage of bronies provides a case study of how implicit preconceptions of media consumption, sexuality, masculinity, and children’s media contribute to privileging particular fan identities and containing any subversive potential of alternate modes of cultural participation. (para. 1.2)

These fans, pathologized by the media, are divided into two groups, normal or deviant. Gilbert notes that deeply feminized fandoms are usually ignored, and despite the many adult female fans of My Little Pony, the adult male bronies are the only reason that the media pays attention. Undoubtedly, bronies challenge normative gender and sexual conventions, and their participatory community contributes to their sense of identity, but it seems problematic that adult male fans, those used to being afforded power and capital in their cultural choices, are the only ones to engender this kind of phenomenon. It seems regressive, in any case, for this kind of social response to remain attached to stories about fandom. Reading critiques of bronies

34

J. PITRE

reveals less about specifics of their fandom than about broader biases against fan practices generally. Gilbert clarifies, “Bronies are, in effect, simply the latest case study of fan pathology” (para. 6.6). Fans and their practices have long been treated in the mainstream as intrinsically deviant (read: queer). Gilbert points to Joli Jenson (1992), who argued that fans are pathologized so as to compensate “for a perceived personal lack of autonomy, absence of community, incomplete identity, lack of power and lack of recognition” (17), and that it is commonly assumed that there is a “thin line between ‘normal’ and excessive fandom” (18). Bronies surely represent a rather unusual fannish situation, but they also help to understand how fans are typically understood and how cross-generational fandom is routinely pathologized. Steven Universe, which has been far more explicit with its queer relationships than Adventure Time or other cartoons, has also been at the center of several controversies of its own, including in early 2016, when Cartoon Network UK chose to censor one of the show’s more explicitly queer moments in the episode “We Need to Talk” (which was also fully banned in Turkey). Pearl brazenly embraces Rose Quartz, playing up their closeness by appearing to be nearly kissing, in a clear attempt to make Greg jealous (see Fig. 2.3). After the censorship caused some of the show’s fandom to criticize the decision and start a petition against the choice, the network said in a statement: “In the UK, we have to ensure everything on air is suitable for kids of any age at any time. We do feel that the slightly edited version is more comfortable for local kids and their parents” (Duffy 2016). Considering Cartoon Network’s general commitment to the series, this reasoning struck many fans as insufficient, an example of the capitalist underpinnings of even progressive media, if not outright bizarre. Steven Universe, or certain episodes of it, has been banned in Kenya, Russia, Sweden, Malaysia, and other markets entirely due to its LGBTQ+ themes, and there are numerous other examples of edited versions airing in various countries around the world documented on the Steven Universe Wiki. Although the show has never been censored in North America, groups like Focus on the Family and Parents Television Council (PTC) routinely rail against LGBTQ+ representation in children’s entertainment. In a 2011 study on cartoons, PTC gave Cartoon Network a failing grade and wrote that cartoons “can potentially trivialize and bring humor to adult themes and contribute to an atmosphere in which children view these depictions as normative and acceptable.” This sentiment

2

QUEER TRANSFORMATION, CONTESTED AUTHORSHIP …

35

Fig. 2.3 Pearl embraces Rose in “We Need to Talk”

might sound wonderful to some, but it terrifies conservative critics. Children’s animation remains a contested moral space throughout the world, and I would argue that Steven Universe is the most explicitly queer children’s series in North American history, profoundly rewriting not only the ambitions of representational progressivism on television but also the political reverberations of cultural texts and routine pathologization of queer fandoms.

How Should a Fan Be? Online fandom is a world of disparate desires and intense emotions that can be difficult to fathom. Steven Universe, with its large and volatile fandom, offers a valuable text for analyzing how these (queer) fan networks negotiate identity and sociality. These are such dramatic spaces precisely because of how intimately fans associate themselves and their identities with their fan objects. They feel a sense of ownership over the text and their own interpretations of and relationship with it. Steven Universe is a text dedicated to inclusivity, and the fandom seems to occasionally struggle to match that pursuit, even when taking actions ostensibly under that banner. Beyond that, however, communities built online grapple with the

36

J. PITRE

blurring between criticism and abuse, self and other, self and collective, creator and fan. One of the dominant theories of fandom to this point is, perhaps unexpectedly, psychoanalysis, especially through the work of Matt Hills. Hills (2018) reworked Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theories to help explain fan attachments as multivalent and to lead toward a more affective psychosocial understanding of what it means to be a fan. He uses this tactic to push against fan pathologization: “Psychoanalysis, in its Winnicottian and object-relations guise, has thus offered a way of taking seriously the emotional intensities of fandom without pathologizing them or, indeed, explaining them away as if they are the side effects of something else, e.g. identification, resistance, familiarity or pleasures of genre” (19). Hills argues that the process of Othering between different groups, and therefore different fan communities, has intensified in the digital age and, so, “fandom’s affective relations of love, hate and ambivalence - frequently dramatically performed via social media - offer one window on these psychosocial processes” (19). This has a striking implication for the collective affect felt on social media and specifically on Tumblr. According to Hills, the expressions of fandom found online communicate one’s sense of self-identity, as well as shared constructions of fan identity. It is simultaneously a personal and collective affect in archived digital form. He explains, “Fandom is both felt within the self and encountered, projected or imagined as a (communal/massified) audience for one’s own affective relationships with specific media texts. As such, fandom can be compliant - a way of fitting in with prevailing cultural moods and trends - as well as strenuously resistant, not necessarily of mainstream media, but of other fans’ voices” (21). The harassment and bullying that take place within these fan communities may seem absurd from the outside looking in, but keeping in mind the shared intimacy that routinely takes place, it makes sense that intense emotion is valued for its supposed authority within the fandom. For Hills, fandom infighting occurs when one feels that an Other is attacking their “beloved, internalized fan object - attacking, that is, the good, internal object of fandom introjected within the self” (21). Though I do not completely agree with this psychosocial framework,4 it is common within fan studies to focus on the process of becoming a fan, with a clear distinction between before and after, an utter change/transformation of one’s sense of self (Cavicchi 1998, 41ff.).

2

QUEER TRANSFORMATION, CONTESTED AUTHORSHIP …

37

Valerie Wee (2017) argues that social media platforms foreground intimacy and encourage media self-production, and so “young people are using social media not merely to consume entertainment but also as a vehicle for action, political engagement, and identity formation. These digital innovations have supported and encouraged content users or consumers to develop increasing expectations of playing a greater role in determining not just their entertainment experience but also their sense of self and their place in and view of the world at large” (136). The sense of ownership that a fan feels over their fan object is a way of taking ownership over themselves and the world around them. In practice, we can see how this has manifested through Steven Universe’s reputation of possessing a “toxic” fandom (see also Ziegler and Richards, Chapter 6). The series is explicitly dedicated to marginalized communities, representing queerness and various forms of Otherness as central, natural, and compelling. It is a truly political work that welcomes the transformational possibilities of fannish production. It also maintains one of the largest fandoms on Tumblr, a social platform that historically encourages and cultivates social consciousness, identity formation, and freedom for young people, which tends to attract queer youth and youth of color in large numbers, and yet it falls victim to the same harmful discourse as any other fandom on any other platform. What is happening here? While there is something persuasive about the power of ontological security through fandom, connected to the self-transformation of becoming a fan, it seems unlikely that the explanation is quite so simple. A fandom, even within the confines of a single platform, is not monolithic or any one thing, and it would be foolish to think critically about it in that way. However, it is worth taking seriously these feelings shared by some that something specific happens on Tumblr. Notably, the lack of rules and moderation that have allowed Tumblr users so much apparent freedom compared with other social media may be the same structural mechanism by which this harassment and infighting is able to fester and spread. As theorist Louisa Ellen Stein (2018) has said, “Each interface used by fans develops and maintains its own community norms, expectations, and limits of code and culture” (86). While a heteronormative understanding of user experience may exist on Facebook, the same is not true on Tumblr. Alex Cho (2017) explains how Tumblr works differently than other social media:

38

J. PITRE

It evades indexing; it privileges affective and evocative exchange of imagery and the cultivation of a sensibility rather than giving primacy to literal interaction (though it allows for that too); it did not for most of its history allow for one-to-one direct messaging between users; it does not assume or require connections to extant offline networks and does not insist on a singular, permanent, ‘authentic’ user identity; it is seemingly OK with porn and flouts copyright, among other interrelated design and policy choices. (3186)

In other words, it has been a freer space, where users aren’t encouraged to use their actual identities, nor share as much information about themselves as possible (largely for the benefit of advertisers), maintain a SFW (‘safe for work’) personality,5 or connect with other platforms and services. The idea that a fan’s actions do not reflect the spirit of the show or the morality that its characters encourage is a particularly powerful argument for Steven Universe fans. Tumblr user agray06 wrote, in response to harassment that occurred after a crossover episode between Universe and Uncle Grandpa: “Do you really think these are things Steven would do? You’re all a bunch of selfish, entitled, elitist little shits. Steven Universe does not belong to you. … But you all insist on claiming it as yours alone, and you’ve made the fandom a hostile and unwelcoming place.” Later, in response to another user’s question, agray06 continues: “The message Steven Universe teaches about embracing imperfection and accepting the differences of others means nothing to these people. It’s ironic that they want to claim the show for themselves, but they don’t understand the message it embodies.” Among other things, this posturing serves to use the series in several ways, to support one’s own interpretation or to respond to criticism, but most importantly, to assert one’s moral superiority. Within most social media systems, there is little incentive to speak to each other, learn from each other, or forge meaningful bonds. Many platforms might appear to encourage these things at the surface level, but if any of that actually happens, it’s just a bonus. The design of these platforms tends to hyper-individuate so that it can learn each user’s preferences to direct their attention to third-party advertisements or to sell this information itself to the same advertisers (or, in Facebook’s case, give the information freely to its partners). The social nature of these networks is not their focus, but their lure. We are encouraged to like, comment, share,

2

QUEER TRANSFORMATION, CONTESTED AUTHORSHIP …

39

retweet, and generally communicate, to be sure, but all in the service of developing marketable data that can be measured, archived, disseminated, and sold. Tumblr, for most of its history, has been something a little bit different, as a space that not only largely avoids ads (putting aside some brief interventions made by Yahoo) but also blurs the individual with the collective. As such, it is somewhat strange that Tumblr seems to have functioned as a self-making destination for young people that is inextricably caught up in moral/political/social jockeying. Part of what may seem “strange” at first, though, is that we so often forget that teenagers and even children have acute political consciousnesses, so it may not be so strange after all that these issues become such strong parts of their identities or that these assertions of moral and emotional intelligence and affect are intended to reverberate into the community. Of course, this enterprise develops bad actors, trolls (for lack of a better word) who can be found in any fandom on any platform, people debating in bad faith and intending only to harm or obfuscate. I have grave concerns over giving them more attention, which not only may “legitimize” their behavior but also could make it seem like they are the majority, or that we should spend time pathologizing them, or that fandom is bad in general. Instead, I seek only to better understand how this fandom operates and processes itself, in ways good and bad. For example, some of the more popular fan artists on Tumblr are often commissioned by other users (sometimes for money, sometimes not) to draw themselves or their friend group as Gems, in what can be seen as an act of community-building and identity expression through art and media (anushbanush). Some fan art gives the alien Gems human bodies, which might tell us something about how closely fans are internalizing these transmogrified, fluid bodies (though they do so, interestingly, by reverting them to human form). A popular piece of fan art, with over 133,000 notes, depicts Greg, Steven’s heavy-set and masculine father, with flowing locks of hair resembling Rose, Steven’s mother (caption: “Both Rose and Greg had luscious locks, Steven cannot escape his destiny of fabulous hair”) (winters-shade). One of the most popular pieces of fan fiction (hosted on a fanfic Web site but often shared or referenced on Tumblr), entitled “How to Turn an Angry Space Alien Into Your New Aunt With the Power of Friendship or Whatever by Steven Universe,” is, though often silly like the series itself, about how difficult friendship can be to successfully maintain and the struggles for people (or Gems) with difficult personalities or diverse identities to do so (Mattecat 2016). At 45,688

40

J. PITRE

words and written over a 20-month period in 2015 and 2016, it is a monumental effort of fan work, dedicated to transforming familiar characters to play within the moral and thematic space of the series. Many users also use Steven Universe as a way to help articulate their identities, particularly within their “About” pages (where users typically tell visitors something about themselves). For example, when I typed “steven universe” into Tumblr (in late 2017), one of the first accounts to show up belonged to mametchi, who owns the URL stevenuniverse.me. In a typical formulation (providing their name, location, age, pronouns, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexuality), their About page reads like this: hello i’m myles florida | 18 | they/them nonbinary, cuban, & gay as fuck (myles)

Myles says that this used to be a Steven Universe fan blog but now encompasses many other interests, as though the blog is changing along with themself. Another user, jasker, is an artist. Her About page looks like this: ~| she/her | 24 | scorpio | Very Lesbian | PST i am currently not accepting commissions or art trades

She does normally take art commissions, however, and she has a long FAQ section devoted to what she will and will not draw (e.g., she doesn’t draw “gemlings”—children of two adult Gems). She also provides links to her “gemsona” (herself as a Gem) and a Steven Universe fan comic that she drew. Another user says “‘Sup, my name is Bee and I LOVE Steven Universe. I’m 17, and I’m nonbinary. she/her or they/them pronouns are cool with me,” and there are posts underneath that show their favorite character (Lapis) and their primary ship (Rupphire—Ruby and Sapphire) (crystalgemjammin). To be clear, this isn’t a curated sampling of Steven Universe fan accounts on Tumblr. These are the first three that came up when I searched “steven universe.” There are countless others who use the series to help explain their identities and who also happen to be very queer. These are startlingly positive and community-based efforts of passion and devotion that are intrinsically (whether consciously or not) part of a socially minded project of political, queer, and affective knowledge. This

2

QUEER TRANSFORMATION, CONTESTED AUTHORSHIP …

41

is not simply an exercise of juxtaposing positive and negative examples of Steven Universe’s fandom. Instead, I am arguing that the positive and negative are all, together, part of this project. These young people have found ways to push a community-based social/political sensibility and alertness through the digital prisms of fan investment and identity formation. It can turn ugly—of course it can—and it can be used as an excuse for other agendas and operations, but as danah boyd (2014) says, “teens have grown sophisticated with how they manage contexts and present themselves in order to be read by their intended audience. They don’t always succeed, but their efforts are phenomenal” (43). The transformational self-narrative is queered on Tumblr as the platform’s emphasis on affect and social consciousness makes it a semi-private space for expression that builds the self but also contributes to a collective experience. As such, these young fans are part of a complicated, overlapping, sticky web of cultural/social/political engagement, mediation, and emotion. This process is constituted within the very architecture of Tumblr itself. This analysis is productive not only in shedding light on how fandom operates in the digital age but for revealing the peculiarities of the Steven Universe fandom in particular. The affective morality of this platform and this fandom has potentially significant implications for the young people that populate them, providing the opportunity for political and cultural action in way that is intimately tied to one’s own (always forming, always fluid) identity.

Notes 1. They do also use she/her pronouns, though the show has not explained that choice. 2. It’s worth noting that Tumblr’s recent decision to ban all “adult content” on the platform may have a negative impact on the participation and engagement of fandoms in general on Tumblr, including that of Steven Universe. The consequences of that decision remain to be seen. 3. Reddit fan poll. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BK5i-rLPDyZsYejyWG2jfUFMzuzMOB8A6DhAwdHDQY/edit#gid= 1768959730. 4. Using the tactics of psychoanalysis to delegitimize pathologization is clever, but I’m not sure it’s entirely convincing, since it seems to accept the playing field levied by psychoanalysis and simply reverse it. At any rate, I’m interested here not in the efficacy of the psychosocial framework but rather

42

J. PITRE

in the ways that it can help us understand the fan affect I’m identifying as existing online, the internalized object. 5. Again, until Tumblr’s recent changes have banned all adult content.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press. agray06. Tumblr, “To the Steven Universe Fandom”, April 5, 2015. https:// agray06.tumblr.com/post/115621643257/to-the-steven-universe-fandom. anushbanush. Tumblr, “I was commissioned…”, 2017. http://anushbanush. tumblr.com/post/161218100679/i-was-commissioned-by-cllevergiirl-todraw-her. Blumenfeld, Zach. 2017. “Comic-Con: Rebecca Sugar on Steven Universe’s Emmy Nomination and Rejecting Gendered TV for Kids.” Paste. Last modified July 25. https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/07/comiccon-rebecca-sugar-on-steven-universes-emmy-n.html. Bradley, Bill. 2014. “‘Adventure Time’ Actress Confirms That Big Rumor We All Suspected.” The Huffington Post. Last modified August 15. http://www. huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/15/adventure-time-rumor_n_5681894.html. boyd, danah. 2014. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Castañeda, Claudia. 2002. Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Cavicchi, Daniel. 1998. Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans. New York: Oxford University Press. Chambers, Samuel A. 2009. The Queer Politics of Television. New York: I.B. Tauris. Cho, Alex. 2017. “Default Publicness: Queer Youth of Color, Social Media, and Being Outed by the Machine.” New Media & Society 20 (9): 3183–3200. crystalgemjammin. Tumblr, “About Me.” http://crystalgemjammin.tumblr. com/aboutme. Dennis, Jeffery P. 2003. “‘The Same Thing We Do Every Night’: Signifying Same-Sex Desire in Television Cartoons.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 31 (3): 132–133. Doty, Alex. 2000. Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon. New York: Routledge. Duffy, Nick. 2016. “Cartoon Network ‘Censored’ Intimate Lesbian Dance from Steven Universe UK Broadcast.” Pink News. Last modified January 5. http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/01/05/cartoon-network-censoredintimate-lesbian-dance-for-uk-broadcast/. Dunn, Eli. 2016. “Steven Universe, Fusion Magic, and the Queer Cartoon Carnivalesque.” Gender Forum 56: 44–57.

2

QUEER TRANSFORMATION, CONTESTED AUTHORSHIP …

43

Gilbert, Anne. 2015. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Bronies.” Transformative Works and Cultures 20. https://journal.transformativeworks. org/index.php/twc/article/view/666/549. Hendershot, Heather. 2004. “Nickelodeon’s Nautical Nonsense: The Intergenerational Appeal of SpongeBob SquarePants.” In Nickelodeon Nation: The History, Politics, and Economics of America’s Only TV Channel for Kids, edited by Heather Hendershot, 182–208. New York: New York University Press. Hills, Matt. 2018. “Always on Fandom, Waiting and Bingeing: Psychoanalysis as an Engagement with Fan’s ‘Infra-Ordinary’ Experiences.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, edited by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott, 18–26. New York: Routledge. Holman Jones, Stacy, and Anne Harris. 2016. “Monsters, Desire and the Creative Queer Body.” Continuum 30 (5): 518–530. jasker. Tumblr, “Hi I’m Jasker (Yah-Skur), Welcome to My Art Blog!” http:// jasker.tumblr.com/post/133942207121. Jenson, Joli. 1992. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 9–29. London: Routledge. Lury, Karen. 2002. “A Time and Place for Everything: Children’s Channels.” In Small Screens: Television For Children, edited by David Buckingham, 15–37. London and New York: Leicester University Press. Maier, Lauren. “The Adult Appeal of ‘Steven Universe.’” Animation Studies 2.0. Last modified December 2. https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=1325. Mattecat. 2016. “How to Turn an Angry Space Alien into Your New Aunt With the Power of Friendship or Whatever by Steven Universe.” Archive of Our Own. Last modified November 4. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 3542825?view_full_work=true. McDonnell, Chris. 2017. Steven Universe: Art & Origins. New York: Abrams. myles. Stevenuniverse.me. http://stevenuniverse.me/about. Parents Television Council. 2011. “Cartoons Are No Laughing Matter: Sex, Drugs and Profanity on Primetime Animated Programs.” http://w2. parentstv.org/main/MediaFiles/PDF/Studies/Final_AnimationStudy.pdf. Ristola, Jacqueline. 2015. “Maturing Animation on Cartoon Network.” Animation Studies 2.0. Last modified November 27. https://blog.animationstudies. org/?p=1318. Rude, Mey. 2016. “Rebecca Sugar is Bisexual: ‘Steven Universe’ Creator Comes Out at Comic-Con.” Autostraddle. Last modified July 22. https://www.autostraddle.com/rebecca-sugar-is-bisexual-steven-universecreator-comes-out-at-comic-con-346094/. Segal, Corinne Segal. 2016, “Rebecca Sugar, Cartoon Network’s First Female Creator, on Writing LGBTQ Stories for Kids.” PBS NewsHour. Last

44

J. PITRE

modified September 4. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/rebecca-sugarsteven-universe-lgtbq. Stein, Louisa Ellen. 2018. “Tumblr Fan Aesthetics.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, edited by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott, 86–97. New York: Routledge. Steven Universe Wiki. “Censorship in Foreign Countries.” http://stevenuniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Censorship_in_Foreign_Countries#cite_note-0. Sugar, Rebecca. 2014. “I am Rebecca Sugar, Creator of Steven Universe, and Former Adventure Time Storyboarder, AMA!” Reddit. Last modified August 21. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2e4gmx/i_ am_rebecca_sugar_creator_of_steven_universe_and/cjw8e1p/. Thurm, Eric. 2017. “‘Steven Universe’: How Rebecca Sugar Turned TV’s Most Empathetic Cartoon into an Empire.” Rolling Stone. Last modified June 7. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rebecca-sugars-steven-universe-is-acartoon-empire-w485887. TV By The Numbers. 2015. “‘Adventure Time’, ‘Regular Show’, ‘Uncle Grandpa’, ‘Steven Universe’ & ‘Clarence’ Renewed by Cartoon Network.” TV By The Numbers. Last modified July 7. http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/ press-releases/adventure-time-regular-show-uncle-grandpa-steven-universeclarence-renewed-by-cartoon-network/. Wee, Valerie. 2017. “Youth Audiences and the Media in the Digital Era: The Intensification of Multimedia Engagement and Interaction.” Cinema Journal 57 (1): 133–139. “What Was Missing.” 2011. Adventure Time. season 3, episode 10. Written by Adam Muto and Rebecca Sugar. Cartoon Network. winters-shade. Tumblr, “My name Is Khan…”. 2015. http://winters-shade. tumblr.com/post/116573915427/both-rose-and-greg-had-luscious-lockssteven.

Episodes Referenced “Fusion Cuisine” (season 1, episode 32, 2014) “Giant Woman” (season 1, episode 12, 2014) “Sadie’s Song” (season 2, episode 17, 2015) “We Need to Talk” (season 2, episode 9, 2015)

CHAPTER 3

Drawing Queerness Forward: Fusion, Futurity, and Steven Universe Kevin Cooley

Steven Universe is delightfully off-model. Series creator Rebecca Sugar explains in Chris McDonnell’s Steven Universe: Art & Origins (2017) that the show’s choice to eschew rigorous adherence to character model sheets is a deliberate and pointed one, noting that “Steven Universe follows in the footsteps of classic theatrical shorts (especially from Fleischer, Terrytoons, and Warner Bros), by allowing each storyboard artist the flexibility to push individual takes on the characters to wild or personal extremes, rather than requiring that all drawings should remain strictly ‘on-model’” (84). And even though so many of Steven Universe’s characters possess bodies “that can turn into light,” a good portion of the show’s fans aren’t happy about this technical approach (“We Need to Talk”). “I feel like if this is supposed to be [sic] show with more serious topics, they should stay on model as well,” laments one DeviantArt user,1 while another complains “this IS a professional project. And at the very least, character sizes and coloring should remain consistent.”2 One host of the Steven Universe podcast Gem Talk summarizes the claims of

K. Cooley (B) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. R. Ziegler and L. Richards (eds.), Representation in Steven Universe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9_3

45

46

K. COOLEY

off-model detractors by claiming that “people appreciate when their characters are regularly recognizable … meddling with that, or changing that is in some way changing the character or making them wrong, somehow” (“The Off-Model Controversy” 2017). Out of a pedantic devotion to an imagined set of technical ideals for animation, these naysayers have done more than miss the trees for the forest—they’ve fundamentally undersold the political potential of animated art, particularly in relation to bodies and identity. The malleability of the animated body is a powerful tool to materialize a world where bodies, genders, and sexualities are free to resist the policing of language and authority. In this essay, I contend that the cartooned body is able to materialize what we might call a queer future in that: (1) it is always in flux, (2) it only masquerades as having a grounding in material reality, (3) it is an abstract and arbitrary thing with only a fuzzy resemblance (if that) to that which it seems to depict, and (4) its cartoonish re-rendering of the real mirrors the socially constructed nature of all bodies and all sexual orientations. Unbound by our current present in these ways, animation generates modes of being that the current language of sexual identity categories is doomed to overlook and to under-think, allowing it to generate the figurative blueprints of a queer future. In a relaxed state of existence that is not bound by a set of consistent rules like those our current present is bound to—the very same rules that “off-model” detractors would have the show rigorously adhere to as a sign of quality—Steven Universe works as a generative system for illustrating categories of being that the current language around sexual identity categories is doomed to foreclose. Bodies are not fixed in Steven Universe. They cannot be “wrong.” They are free to morph, grow, shrink, fuse, fight, and flow. They are free to exist as humans, they are free to assume any shape or form, they are free to fuse forever or never fuse, and they are free to thrive as massive, intersubjective conglomerates left to their own devices in the center of the earth. Steven Universe’s bodies are not bound by the laws of photorealistic physics, and this malleability allows the show’s heroic bodies to resist bodies of authority (i.e., to say, both real-world and in-show oppressive governments) who would try to force those heroic bodies into cookie-cutter molds. I argue, then, that Steven Universe activates the formal malleabilities of the cartoon body that I’ve outlined here as a generative methodology toward queerness. This infinite trek toward queerness through the fluid formal properties of the cartoon is helped along by a repurposing of “fusion,” a trope most commonly associated with shonen manga and anime aimed at

3

DRAWING QUEERNESS FORWARD …

47

male teens (see also Ristola, Chapter 5). During the fusion, two beings combine into one composite being. Usually, this gives the fused beings the edge in some kind of combat situation. Steven Universe reimagines the trope, however, as a less militaristic and decidedly queer sexual mode of being that literally shatters the self through the molding, melding, and morphing of drawn (and unashamedly off-model) bodies.

No (One) Future These futural, cartoonish, and off-model bodies are the epicenter of the always-arriving queerness that Steven Universe visualizes. Both animation and queer theory, after all, share a fascination with amorphous abstractions of the future. Cartoons frequently imagine abstract worlds made possible by bizarre technologies and materially untethered bodies, whereas queer theorists are of many minds about the future, but they always seem to be thinking (and writing) about it. Judith Butler (1993) advocates for queer nomenclature with loose parameters that will not shut out sexual possibilities which our current time, place, and set of ideologies render unthinkable. She acknowledges that “there is a political necessity to use some sign now,” and she asks “[but] how to use it in such a way that its futural significations are not closed[?]” (311–312). José Esteban Muñoz shares Butler’s concerns. He follows Lee Edelman (2004) in condemning reproductive futurity, or sexual reproduction’s role as a state apparatus of compulsory heterosexuality, but he refuses to write off the future, like Edelman does, as “kid stuff” (1). Muñoz posits a queer futurity that can exist outside of reproductive futurity and can work toward queer hope. Muñoz claims “queerness is not yet here,” and, like the animated body in all of its off-model glory, Muñoz’s queerness is at all times an “ideality” that is perpetually on the horizon (1). His future-minded queerness is something that “we have never been,” a queerness that “exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (1). The cartooned image, like Muñoz’s description of queerness, has also “never been” and never can be without surrendering its claim to being a cartoon. Cartooning draws on a visual language which relies on iconic, indexical, and symbolic modes to communicate through learned graphic schemas. In spite of the differences among these modes of signification, they are all alike in cartooned media in that they flaunt their artificiality, never permitting us to forget about the illusion intrinsic to their consumption: that they are abstract amalgamations of lines and colors posing as

48

K. COOLEY

agents in a diegetically real universe. Drawn visual signs that signify iconically can perhaps signify what they intend to, but in cartooning, this is always accomplished because of what is obliterated in abstraction to form an icon. When drawn visual signs signify indexically (i.e., enacting a selfevident spatial–temporal relationship with a given signified, like pointing a finger), they also index the hands and machines that created them. When drawn visual signs signify arbitrarily (e.g., the gushing nosebleeds of lustful characters in Japanese cartooning), the illusory nature of arbitrary signification is made diegetically physical, as if it were innate to begin with. All of these often intertwined modes of signifying in cartooning, in other words, parade their non-reality, their bizarre physics, their flimsy verisimilitude. Roland Barthes (1977) weighs in on this whimsically backhanded verisimilitude of the drawn image, calling it a “coded message” that can be formed “by means of discontinuous signs and rules of transformation” (43). These discontinuous signs, especially when they are animated into motion as bodies, are a discontinuity playacting as continuity. The discontinuities of the animated drawn image are very much unlike the manner in which the photograph, as Barthes puts it, “establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing … but an awareness of its havingbeen-there” (43). Perhaps we could say, then, that the cartoon brings to life that which never-has-been, what Sartre (2004) calls “an intention directed at an absent object,” or, more specifically, since our cartoons are not only locally absent but globally nonexistent, “an act that aims in its corporeality at an absent or nonexistent object … that is given not as itself but in the capacity of ‘analogical representative’ of the object aimed at” (20). And yet it is through this unreality, this perpetually figurative bodily existence, this failure to directly communicate, that the cartoon, I suggest, becomes a wildly effective methodology for approaching the queer utopia that relational queer theorists are concerned with: the queer utopia that never exists but is always coming into existence. J. Jack Halberstam’s work on animated films in The Queer Art of Failure (2011) is a crucial step in putting cartooning into conversation with queer theory. He argues that animated films “do not make us better people or liberate us from the culture industry” but “might offer strange and anticapitalist logics of being and acting and low theory knowing” (21). Whether or not the caveat that Halberstam offers on animation’s inability to escape the culture industry was at some point necessary, it certainly is not necessary now. Surely, we could turn to the multifarious

3

DRAWING QUEERNESS FORWARD …

49

history of animation for examples of cartoons that challenge both the idea of the culture industry and the culture industry itself. But contemporary animation offers instances within much closer reach. Texts like Steven Universe do not perform the “smuggling of radical narratives” that Halberstam identifies in animated CGI films of the Pixar variety: their messages are transmitted out in the open. The Adventure Time episode “What Was Missing,” which aired on September 26, 2011, just over a month after The Queer Art of Failure was released, raised explosive controversy over its allusion to a failed romantic relationship between its primary female characters Marceline and Princess Bubblegum. “What was Missing” teased the concreteness of the relationship with affectively loaded musical pieces: then-Adventure Time writer and storyboard artist Rebecca Sugar’s lyrics have Marceline crooning “I’m gonna bury you with my sound / I’m gonna drink the red from your pretty pink face” to Bubblegum. Up until this point, Marceline and Bubblegum were reciprocally and inexplicably curt in the rare instances when they appeared together. The episode’s (only somewhat subtle) allusions to the pain of a queer breakup seized the weapon of compulsory silence back from the censors and repurposed that kind of silence as a potential sign of queer potentiality in other children’s cartoons. This kind of abstract queer potentiality is by no means shackled to abstraction and can (and often does) germinate into tangible results. The charged reception of Marceline and Bubblegum’s subliminal situation ultimately snowballs into the two sharing a long on-screen kiss in the series finale, “Come Along with Me,” in 2018. If Adventure Time teased what forward motion might look like in the queering of children’s cartoons, then Steven Universe (borrowing from and giving back to its predecessor just as the projected future can enrich and draw from the lived present) directs that forward motion into form-ward motion.

Fusing into the Future Sugar’s own show shapes its premise around the malleability of the cartoon body and the polysemy of the drawn image; it is an overt gesture toward the power of the cartoon to blueprint a queer future. While Steven, the first hybrid Gem-human, seems to manifest as male, fullblooded Gems (like Steven’s surrogate family: Garnet, Pearl, and Amethyst) are beings made from the minerals of their namesakes, and they consciously create and re-create their bodies. Their bodily performances

50

K. COOLEY

usually land somewhere on a broad spectrum of modes of feminine performance, though they sometimes adopt male pronouns and masculine clothing. Their female-ish bodies are acknowledged as entirely illusory (in what is perhaps an equal reference to the show’s magical diegetic rules, to its non-diegetic cartoon bodies, and to real bodies of flesh understood through discourse) and can be reshaped and reformed as needed in their artificiality. The “true” being of the Gem is instilled into their gemstone, from which the illusory humanoid form that they occupy for some degree of legibility emanates. Like their sh¯ onen analogues, the Crystal Gems’ cartoon bodies can perform a fusion technique with one another that improves their combat abilities. But the purpose of the technique is expanded from its bulky, hypermasculine origins into the realms of emotional intimacy, sexual desire, and the creation of unique amalgams that operate with the knowledge of simultaneously distinct and conjoined persons. Fusion is, in simpler terms, a manifestation of sexuality that exists outside of standard conventions—so unthinkable in our world that it cannot yet be called taboo. Representation of fusion is rarely consistent from case to case, but, as a state of being unprecedented in the real world, it is loaded with the logic of queerness. This magically queer mode of being registers as unsanctified, however, in the logic of politically dominant factions within the narrative world. The “Homeworld” Gems, the larger political and planetary body from which Garnet and the Crystal Gems have defected, are repulsed by Garnet’s chosen mode of existence, often expressing disdain, disgust, and confusion toward her with the pejorative term “permafusion.” The only acceptable fusions between Homeworld Gems are homogem fusions (between Gems of the same gemstone such as multiple Rubies instead of a Ruby and a Sapphire). The taboo seems to be a mixture of sexual and class-based mores. When Garnet is accidentally created for the first time between a terrified Ruby, a common Homeworld soldier, and Sapphire, a member of Gem nobility, court members cry out “disgusting!” and “this is unheard of!” The top-tier Homeworld leader Blue Diamond proclaims, “How dare you fuse with a member of my court?” (“The Answer”; see Fig. 3.1). While heterogem fusions are rendered unspeakable outside of the template of acceptable behavior, homogem fusions are painted as instinctual (by Homeworlders), neareffortless to perform, always labor-oriented, and useful only insofar as they further the Imperial and economic agenda of Homeworld. The conversation around the show has at times (with only the best intentions) stumbled closer to the classification-oriented logic of Homeworld than we might hope for. Eli Dunn (2016) argues that Steven Universe “offers us a glimpse into how we can move beyond the magic

3

DRAWING QUEERNESS FORWARD …

51

Fig. 3.1 Homeworld Gems expressing disgust at Garnet’s first fusion

realm that lends such power to Steven Universe’s gender nonconforming characters, and into a more ubiquitous media representation of a variety of trans identities” (45). Their argument is a much-needed first academic foray into the potential of this text. And yet, it instrumentalizes Steven Universe’s animated theorizing for the purpose of real-world representation alone. In “moving beyond” the “magic realm” rather than moving within it, Dunn sacrifices the work that drawn media can perform for queer futurity. For Dunn, the show is a kind of soft-ball version of what representation might look like outside of “the safe space of fantasy,” a world that should make us ask, “what would it mean for children’s media to begin to represent these identities without the aid of magic or the fantastic?” (56). Accordingly, Dunn’s essay offers a concluding call to “encourage media makers to represent trans characters outside fantasy’s comforting bubble” (56). By no means unique to Dunn’s work, the limits of identity-driven classification of Steven Universe’s narrative schemas also manifest in the popular discourse around the show. After Steven Universe’s revolutionary wedding between Ruby and Sapphire, an article by Shamus Kelley (2018) from Den of Geek, for example, claimed “we’re going to be getting an actual lesbian marriage on Steven Universe between Ruby and Sapphire. Yeah, yeah, they’re technically genderless stones WHATEVER they’ve been using female pronouns for them so

52

K. COOLEY

it’s a women/women [sic] wedding.” The identitarian impulse manifests in Kelley’s writing in a way that pits queer behaviors manifested under specific signs against one another—a wildly unhelpful delineation that dismisses queer sexualities not easily denoted with commonly understood signs. There is no doubt about it: visual narratives that represent and normalize LGBT identities are crucial—especially for young viewers. We can certainly read the gems in light of these identities. But the identitarian imperative to definitively label, classify, and identify the more complicated states of being that Steven Universe animates into being (manifested most prominently here in the removal of “the fantastic” from the equation) stunts the work that the show performs toward a “not-yet-conscious” queerness (to use Muñoz’s borrowed term). Queer futural work (in both theory and narrative) must do justice to the queer of the here and now. And yet, it cannot sacrifice a critical methodology of potentiality in the process. The fantastic operates as much more than a low-profile channel or safe space for the kind of “smuggling” that Halberstam identifies in some cartoons and that Dunn seems to see happening here. If any move needs to be made in regard to magic, it is to push the topic further, into conversations that have been asking for its intervention for some time. With the magic of fusion, Steven Universe’s visual grammar brings a placeholder substance to the queer modes of being that our present cannot yet articulate. Consequently, it models a vision of queer futurity without compromising its own queerness through the hetero-cultural imperative to definitively identify and classify. Comics theorist Thierry Groensteen (2007) fleshes out a kind of “typification” that drawn media performs and which fusion preys on and repurposes to make its gestures toward a queer future possible, a “simplification as it applies to characters,” which results in “the abbreviation of a character to several pertinent lines [that] assures their characterization and their immediate identification” (162). The idea seems to stem from Barthes’ work, which claims that “to reproduce an object or a scene in a drawing requires a set of rulegoverned transpositions” (43). In line with their thoughts, the cartooned character or object can stabilize as an entity with a concrete symbol recognized time and time again by viewers and other characters as themself in spite of their malleable and abstract body—the reason, I would say, that so many cartooned characters have the odd habit of keeping closets stuffed with identical outfits. As Groensteen puts it, “once the same motif is represented several times it transports all of its attributes (its predicates) along with it” (124). Gem fusion functions as a way to co-opt this last remnant of stable identity within the typical cartoon’s usual engagement

3

DRAWING QUEERNESS FORWARD …

53

with form, othering the seemingly stable “pertinent lines” that are constitutive of identity for a cartoon by contaminating them with the pertinent lines (along with color schemes and vocal traits) that identify seemingly separate cartoon beings. When Pearl and Amethyst, for example, fuse for the first time in “A Giant Woman,” their trademark features are spliced into a composite being called Opal. Opal, the titular “Giant Woman,” is significantly taller than Pearl and inherits Amethyst’s curves and lips with Pearl’s nose. Her skin is tinged with a periwinkle somewhere in between the colors demanded by the Gems’ names, and she remains perpetually on the tips of her toes, as if always in the midst of an ongoing kinesthetic performance. The most obvious sign of the mixed manifestation of Amethyst and Pearl, though, comes in the co-presence of their gemstones. Opal’s fused body, like all fused bodies in the show, flaunts both of the gemstones that house the individual essences of Amethyst and Pearl in their respective positions (on the sternum and forehead), reveling in its simultaneous homogeneity and heterogeneity. The playful polysemy of the fused body is ever-changing and infinitely restarting, like all cartoon bodies, but the fused body still allows recognition of the repeated components associated with the characters that are its ingredients. Garnet openly examines this homo-and-heterogeneity in a comical bit that operates as a display of semiotic cheekiness. She shows Steven and his friend Connie a literal sign that she has created to cheerlead their training for fusing into “Stevonnie.” One side of Garnet’s sign reads “Go Steven + Connie,” and its other side “Go Stevonnie!” “I made a sign,” Garnet says, adding with a wry smile that “this side is for both of you, and this side is for Stevonnie. It’s two signs in one. A fusion sign” (“Mindful Education”). Simultaneously separate and together, directly communicating two opposite modes of being, the wood-and-paper sign playfully enacts the function of the cartoon body and its status as a post-structural sign, all within the framework of positive communal affirmation that the less semiotic meaning of the word “sign” embodies. Garnet’s sign, after all, is also the unabashedly affirmative sign held by the spectator, or sports fan. Here, deconstruction is not anything like a pessimistic position: it is the source of sincere and unbridled joy. Groensteen elaborates on his ideas of stabilization of character by repeated iconic traits, claiming that “we must therefore admit that it is a description that is infinitely restarted, to which we cannot assign a particular site” (124). The “infinitely restarted” nature of the cartooned object,

54

K. COOLEY

then, is more of an ongoing process than it is a finished product: an evershifting icon recognizable only in the concessions to stability that it makes in the form of visual signifiers of a concrete self (which are, of course, problematized by fusion). While Garnet is in combat with Jasper, a militant Homeworld agent, Garnet declares “I am a conversation,” and she strikes the victory blow (“Jail Break”). Garnet bypasses the classificationobsessed politics that Michel Foucault (1978) pinpoints at the beginning of his analysis of the surge of discourses created in the nineteenth century when he claims “whether in the form of a subtle confession in confidence or an authoritarian interrogation, sex—be it refined or rustic—had to be put into words” (33). She does not emphasize any identity label that discourse produces as constitutive of her identity here. Instead, Garnet claims multiple senses of “discourse” as an amorphous substitute for an identity label. She too had to be “put into words,” but the words that she consists of are an ongoing activity performed between Ruby, Sapphire, and Garnet—an activity that, like queer futurity, need not aspire to an endpoint. With the assumption of Garnet, Ruby/Sapphire becomes an ongoing, ever-fluid experience. She complicates compulsory sexual normativity not only through her super-powered resistance, but also by her decidedly queer visual and diegetic existence.

Kindergarten Lessons Unlearned Positive, relational, and exploratory fusion marks the quasi-reproductive practices and the animation of the Crystal Gems. But Homeworld Gem reproduction aspires to much more violent intentions through different reproductive mechanisms. While fusion operates as a site of reproduction that can be contested by the Crystal Gems’ queering of it, the primary means by which Homeworld Gems create new life is much more like human reproduction under the imperative of reproductive futurity, and it is much more resistant to co-option. Homeworld Gems are reproduced in external birthing machines called “kindergartens.” These kindergartens appear in mineral-rich areas and drain the ecological resources of a colonized planet (see also Ramiel, Chapter 9). They harness these raw materials and use them to create more Gem soldiers who, in turn, conquer more planets and produce more soldiers, ad infinitum. Depending on your understanding of the relationship between queerness and public education, Gem kindergartens function as either a dark parody of an actual kindergarten or an accurate embodiment of one. Homeworld Gem kindergartens operate under the imperative of “the administration

3

DRAWING QUEERNESS FORWARD …

55

of bodies and the calculated management of life” that Foucault associates with the beginning of an era of “biopower,” a kind of nation-state imperative “whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through” (139). This assembly-line style of reproduction is an inherently militaristic pursuit fixed within a stubborn and hierarchical semiotics. But its execution involves, like Foucault’s notion of biopower, an active effort toward its ultimate goal of reproduction at the cost of the passive consequences of the deaths of others (in the destruction of the source planet) (140). Kindergartens breed soldiers, servants, and skilled and unskilled laborers classified as such by the category of their gemstone. The lives that these Gems will lead are so thoroughly scripted and prescripted that it is common to treat lower and mid-tier Gems as valueless. Aware of her status as a mass-produced foot soldier, Ruby, for example, proclaims “Who cares!? There’s tons of me!” to a Sapphire who is fearful that Ruby will be executed for fusing with her (“The Answer”). But resistance to these dominant logics is not cast as impossible. The queer future that Crystal Gem fusion points toward maneuvers its way through the cracks in these logics. The former Crystal Gem Bismuth was born into the Bismuth class of Gem, which, as she recounts, was designated from birth as having the exclusive purpose “to erect spires and temples for the Gem elites to enjoy” (“Bismuth”). Bismuth recounts how the presence of a logic (in the form of Rose Quartz, Steven’s mother) other than compulsory reproduction allowed her to begin to think outside of dominant prescriptive paradigms: Rose Quartz changed my life. I came to Earth thinking this was just another colony. Build another arena for important fighters to fight in, build another spire for important thinkers to think in, and then, I met her. Just another Quartz soldier, made right here in the dirt, but she was different. And she was different because she decided to be. And she asked me what I wanted to build, and I’d never heard that before. And Gems never hear they can be anything other than what they are, but Rose opened our eyes. (“Bismuth”)

In “being different because she decided to be,” Rose’s character offers an alternative to the “born this way” mentality that is so easily subsumed by identitarian politics and by hetero/homonormative appeals to ontological anchoring for certain sexualities in biology. By decentering the body and body classification of the Gem as the script for its predetermined future,

56

K. COOLEY

Rose’s contagious conception of new modes of being undermines the privileged role of those bodies and beings most able to succeed within a nation-state that runs on biopower. In “A Single Pale Rose,” when Rose is revealed to be a conflicted Pink Diamond who recreated her physical body in the form of a common Quartz, Rose models what it would look like to seize the script back from its authors. This rhetorical narrative move is intrinsically fused into the form of cartooning itself, as the transition from Diamond to Quartz is made possible by the same mechanisms that enable fusion: the malleability of the cartooned body and the long history of its freedom from the laws of both physics and limiting discourses. Not every Gem enjoys the same mobility within the socially stratified system, however, as Rose Quartz. Amethyst is something of a botched reproduction conceived in one of these birthing factories; she is an embodiment of the kind of queer failure that Halberstam follows closely in children’s cartoons. Amethyst is a less combat-capable version of the ideal Quartz soldier Jasper, who is described as “the ultimate Quartz” based on the marks inside her birth tunnel, where she was extracted from a mineral-womb in the kindergarten’s wall (“Beta”). By Homeworld logic, Jasper succeeds where Amethyst fails, rising to the highest manifestation of her caste by performing that caste’s pre-defined purpose: the perpetuation of the military-industrial complex that it supports by conquering planets, harvesting resources, and creating soldiers. While she lacks Rose’s access to mobility, Amethyst finds her own methods to exit the stratification scheme. For the purpose of resistance, failure to comply becomes a new form of victory: a suggestion that imperialism is not something worth succeeding at and a suggestion that other modes of being are possible. “Us worse Gems stick together,” Amethyst says to Steven as they fight Jasper, to which Steven replies, just before fusing with her, “That’s why we’re the best” (“Earthlings”). Steven and Amethyst fuse, forming the first fusion between a Gem and a half-Gem, and Jasper is defeated. Knowing that she is facing defeat from another fusion (Jasper has been defeated in combat only by fused Gems), Jasper falls back on the logic of her superiors and seeks out the familiar. She performs the hypermasculine fusion of Gems of the same gemstone that Steven Universe reinvents from Dragon Ball Z —the fusion that feels, as Ruby describes it, like “it’s always just been me, but bigger.” This homogem fusion lacks the self-shattering feeling of the heterogem fusion, which Sapphire is shocked to discover makes you feel “that you’d disappear like that” (“The Answer”). Jasper then attempts to perform a nonconsensual homogem fusion with a corrupted “monster” Gem

3

DRAWING QUEERNESS FORWARD …

57

(which maintains limited sentience), and Jasper is herself permanently corrupted: the consequence of failing to recognize the value of failure. In instrumentalizing the being that she fuses with, Jasper refuses to let go of herself in the naturally self-shattering act of fusion. Jasper fails to understand that the fusion dance that triggers consensual fusion naturally begets its product. Dancing complicates the individual and blurs them with the collective. The queer dance ritual of Steven Universe is in part cultivated from a small narrative kernel in Dragon Ball Z (among many other anime sources, which Jaqueline Ristola covers in detail in Chapter 5). In Dragon Ball Z, fusion is an overblown celebration of the additive nature of heroic masculinity preceded, oddly enough, by a short dance. Steven Universe’s mechanism for fusing bodies grounds this strange nuance into a queer kinesthetic tradition of dance. In this new context, the fusion dance becomes an elaborate intertextual ritual that is magnetized toward a queer future. Gems primarily perform fusion through an emotional syncing associated with dance, quite like Jonathan Bollen (1999)’s description of queer dance floors as “an occasional community danced into existence” (i). Similarly, Muñoz calls the dance floor a space in which “a certain queer communal logic overwhelms practices of individual identity” and in which “we become, in a sense, less like ourselves and more like each other” (66). Well before Rose Quartz transformed into Steven, she was Pearl’s lover and frequent fusion dance partner. The Gem lovers dance together in a flashback scene that exemplifies the kind of self-shattering that fusion performs magically and psychically (“We Need to Talk”). Pearl’s eyelids slim into a smoldering gaze and her lips part slightly. She swoons and dips; her expression melts into an orgasmic moan so blatant that UK censors prohibited the scene. She tucks forward to curl and melt into the new being, Rainbow Quartz, who is animated into existence with eyes closed, lips pursed, and neck arched in something like joy (see Fig. 3.2). Garnet explains the qualifications to perform this act to Steven’s father, Greg, who is a witness to the fusion and who wants to take part in this sexual Gem ritual which Pearl calls “the ultimate connection between Gems.” Garnet lists the three criteria necessary for one’s body to be able to sustain and perform a fusion: “First you need a gem at the core of your being. Then you need a body that can turn into light. Then you need a partner you can trust with that light.” These qualifications describe the narrative rules of fusion as well as they describe the formal properties of animation that make fusion possible: the mixing of the lines that constitute cartoon identity, the malleability of shifting light spectrums that enables cartoon bodies to move and shift and fuse, and

58

K. COOLEY

Fig. 3.2 Pearl and Rose dancing sensually to perform a fusion

the existence of a second set of lines (another cartoon identity) to complicate oneself and one’s self with. In the kinesthetic performance of lines read as cartooned bodies, Pearl and Rose’s dance functions as a dramatization of the more abstract dance that would have to occur anyway to fuse their cartooned bodies and beings. This blueprint for the composite being and, perhaps, the queer of the future and a future for queers, is much less of a metaphor than the merging that Bollen and Muñoz see in the dance club scene. Though the fusion dance’s participants are fictional icons, their merging is one that props open the gate to a queerness that is not yet here for our world.

Tracing, Effacing, and the Futural Power of Absence This merging occurs on the level of narrative content, of course, but only to the extent to which that content is in communication with the cartoon form. Comics theorists like Groensteen and McCloud (1994) offer helpful thoughts on what Groensteen calls the “synecdochic simplification” of the drawn image: a kind of tendency for drawn images to “privilege the elements” of a cartooned image “that have an immediately informative character” (162). But these thinkers assume that this simplification is a

3

DRAWING QUEERNESS FORWARD …

59

universal conduit for emphasizing the pre-eminency of traits that are preserved through visual amplification in the cartooned image (162). Consequently, they damn those elements that are not preserved to an irrelevancy through invisibility. As McCloud describes it, cartooning is “a form of amplification through simplification” in which “by stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning,’ an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t” (30). On similar notes, Tamaki Sait¯o claims there is an “impoverishment of visual information in anime-style images,” while Groensteen claims “the reduction of the utterable to a statement mobilizes, in the image, only the elements directly concerned with the narrative process” and that the cartooned image “requires nothing but a global and synthetic perception of the elements that it retains” (150, 121). In a rush to outline the amplifying properties of the cartooned image, McCloud, Groensteen, and Sait¯o neglect that which is obscured from visual depiction in the abstraction of the cartoon—that which bears rhetorical weight in its non-presence. Rendering human body parts which have been simplified into non-depiction as “not necessary to the intelligibility of the represented situation,” as Groensteen does, overlooks that which is effaced in cartooning. This effaced material is assumed, unfairly, I think, to fail to contribute to our understanding of the representation. Steven Universe’s Gem bodies definitely do make use of this synecdochic simplification to track the queer possibility of fusion, but the key to the show’s methodology of queer futurity lies in its use of “amplification through simplification” and through that invisible but very present absence that remains in those simplified images as a semiotic trace. If “amplification through simplification” focuses on the accent given to what is present on the page or screen of drawn media, then this negative sort of amplification is concerned with all that is excised, and how the presence of what is amplified will always be constructed through the meaningmaking limited to the imaginary that is différance, in communication with all that the cartoon abstracts into oblivion. Any cartooned image that practices amplification through simplification also practices, as I will call it, tracing by effacing. When a cartooned image traces by effacing, it visualizes Jacques Derrida (1997)’s claim that “signification is formed only within the hollow of difference … of the diversion and the reserve of what does not appear” (67). McCloud’s “gutter” may be concerned with the spaces between panels and the work that they perform, but the images which form those gutters in their juxtaposition create less obvious absences which also warrant interrogation. But Groensteen and McCloud

60

K. COOLEY

make no room for “what does not appear” in their terminology. They only nominate what immediately appears on the screen or surface with privileged importance, excluding from meaning-making what is made absent. Examining how the cartooned image practices tracing by effacing just as it practices amplification through simplification allows us to consider the political power of illegibility alongside intelligibility. What then, does it look like for what has been effaced by cartooning to hold significance, to gesture beyond what is explicitly depicted, and to make meaning? In Steven Universe, the weight of what is amplified in visual obscurity becomes most evident in the example of fusion that operates under the most obscure and peripheral logic. When Steven and Connie accidentally perform the first fusion between a half-Gem (Steven) and a human (Connie), a move made possible by Steven’s hybrid identity, Garnet is ecstatic, but Pearl is disturbed (“Alone Together”). “This is unprecedented,” declares Pearl, sizing up the Gem-human hybrid’s body like an object for sale. “A Gem fusing … with a human being? It’s impossible!” She turns to the side and mutters, “or at the very least inappropriate.” The aside is perhaps something like a magical analogue for homonormativity in that it is a standpoint which accepts certain queer sexualities but shuts out less established ones. Garnet does not even acknowledge Pearl’s normative hesitancy. “Listen to me,” Garnet says as she cups the newly christened “Stevonnie’s” face in her hands. “You are not two people. And you are not one person. You … are an experience! Make sure you’re a good experience. Now … Go! … Have! … Fun!” And Stevonnie is an “experience” as well as a “conversation,” two of the most potent terms by which Garnet defines fusions. They (Stevonnie) find a sexually charged joy in their transgressive body, refuting the advances of a male pursuer and dancing wildly by themself. Through the tracing by effacing performed in the drawing of cartooned bodies, the presence for any sense of genitally determined gender identity is vanquished. Stevonnie is a reminder through fusion that genital identity is always, in some sense, eradicated in the never-having-been of the cartoon. Their body spans extraterrestrial species, race, gender, and sexual identity, in large part through what it is left behind in tracing by effacing. Their usually flat chest leaves it ambiguous whether the always-figurative cartoon has abstracted this typically feminine feature or not. Should we read this abstraction as non-literal? Some cartoon characters, after all, may only have three or four fingers, and we are not expected to think of them as referring to an actual being with four fingers. Then again, maybe this is exactly how we are meant to read that character’s

3

DRAWING QUEERNESS FORWARD …

61

body? Or perhaps this is the wrong question altogether: maybe the move is a general gesture toward Stevonnie’s complicated sexual identity when put into conversation with their slight, but nonetheless curving, hips. Masculine-coded signifiers manifest within Stevonnie’s body just as frequently, though; when Stevonnie is shipwrecked on a tropical alien moon, they begin to grow stubble and shave with their sword (“Jungle Moon”). But even these observations that I offer here are only as accurate as the specific frames that they are located in. In the malleability of animation, at times, Stevonnie’s chest gives way to a flat line, and during others, they exhibit a slightly more pronounced bust and curves. All of these depictions are contradictory, true and false (see Fig. 3.3). Dunn draws attention to how the people with whom Stevonnie interacts “point out the perceived non-normalcy of such a genderqueer presentation,” noting the awe that local donut shop employees Lars and Sadie express in their first encounter with Stevonnie (53). I would add that the malleability of Stevonnie’s body acts in a vampiric manner toward the donut crew’s gender-conforming bodies by consuming degrees of their detail; as Lars remains in awe of Stevonnie’s presence, his own features simplify in a manner reminiscent of Japanese chibi

Fig. 3.3 Pearl struggles to make sense of Stevonnie’s radically queer and structurally fluid body

62

K. COOLEY

figures while Stevonnie’s become temporarily hyperdetailed, stressing their fluctuating and contingent existence (see Fig. 3.4). Afterward, delighted with their performance, Stevonnie fumbles into awareness of the emergent identity that their revolutionary body brings into existence, stumbling through grammatical and literal landscapes, and mumbling “why am I-? Why is … your sandal too small for my—your feet?”. While Stevonnie’s character offers a particularly prominent example of tracing by effacing with obvious in-narrative stakes, every cartooned body traces by effacing to some extent. The butch Crystal Gem Bismuth, for example, has a baby-blue brick of a torso that is usually exposed. Her upper body bears no distinguishing visible characteristics that traditionally index reproduction (she lacks breasts and nipples) or that signify that Bismuth is a product of traditional reproduction (she lacks a navel). Bismuth’s and Stevonnie’s bodies prompt us to re-evaluate the cartoon bodies that inspired them. When the absurd muscles of Goku from Dragon Ball Z are sketched in hyperdetail, which embodied traits are consequently under-accented, and what kind of posthuman does this create? If Bugs Bunny’s gendered disguises are exposed by the presence of his tail poking out from a skirt, then what is the absence left over when the tail steps into the traditional role of the genitals?

Fig. 3.4 Lars and Sadie react to Stevonnie

3

DRAWING QUEERNESS FORWARD …

63

What Does It Mean to Believe in Steven? As these examples show, the infinitely restarting and always immaterial bodies of Steven Universe are inclined toward an ever-arriving queerness. But can the show’s narrative content remain as fluid as its form? Within the complexity of fusion and its various rules, is there not a potential to perpetuate the work of heteronormativity or homonormativity—even in a world as weird and wild as that which Steven, Garnet, and their friends occupy? Edelman expresses a similar and fair concern (not, of course, about Steven Universe itself) when he worries that “any attempt to totalize, to construct a universalized, idealized or closed political system will always exclude something, and that exclusion will be then the locus of queerness” (“Interview with Prof Lee Edelman” 2016). Sugar’s show accommodates the precaution that Edelman provides about queer utopianism by staging the very abjection over which Edelman frets. Steven Universe is able to frame the narrative of abjection and illustrate the harmful consequences that abjection can have within the unpredictable animated systems of being that it has built for itself. This thread begins to present itself in Pearl’s dismissing of Stevonnie as a legitimate mode of being: a dismissal which explores how a queer being can work against the openness of queer identity labels with the effect of extending the logic of that queer being’s oppressors. But the challenging of a closed-minded queerness occurs perhaps most blatantly in the divvying up of sexual rituals (and their purposes) between the Homeworld and the Crystal Gems. This distribution of rites does not always translate into a neat binary in which Homeworld embodies compulsory heterosexuality and the Crystal Gems embody queerness. The compulsory norms of Homeworld reproduction are certainly hegemonic and often resemble the normative power structures of our real world. But their practices occasionally perform a strange bleeding into territory more often associated with nonfictional queerness. Jasper, for instance, may be fighting for a reproductive future with strictly policed sexualities, but she is still a butch female-pronounusing being who participates in fusion with other female-pronoun-using beings. Her path throughout the show runs parallel to the social effects of normative non-straightness: when the power of Garnet’s fusion becomes undeniable after Jasper’s multiple defeats, Jasper finds herself stumbling through a kind of abusive relationship with the femme Gem Lapis Lazuli. Jasper recognizes the militaristic potential that the pair has when they fuse into the powerful Malachite, but only through a lens not unlike Jasbir K. Puar (2017)’s idea of “homonationalism,” an ideology Puar describes as

64

K. COOLEY

“a form of sexual exceptionalism—the emergence of national homosexuality” that “corresponds with the coming out of the exceptionalism of American empire” (10). Malachite taps into queerness in that she is a heterogem fusion, but hers is a hypermasculine queerness animated by the logic of state-sanctioned violence, the identitarian, and the hegemonic. Garnet performs a similar complication of clear boundaries between what is queer and what is not. Her relationship, like that of the only permissible sexual relationships within real-life reproductive futurity, is a stable and committed relationship that results in the creation of a new being. But the flexible rules of fusion find ways to make even monogamy queer. In “Reunited,” Garnet (as Ruby and Sapphire) undergoes an emotionally loaded human-style marriage ceremony—even though, as Ruby points out, “I know this is all kind of silly, I mean, we’ve been together for 5,750 years.” The narrative spectacle finds ways to bolster the noble drives of identity politics just as it looks past those same goals toward a more abstract queer future. One could say that the wedding was the first on-screen marriage ceremony (and lip-to-lip kiss) between two women in children’s animation, and one could say that the wedding featured genderqueer sentient gemstones remixing their way through the most hegemonically laden of common rites—both are equally grounded summaries of the situation. And yet, even within these reverent explorations of something like monogamy, Garnet’s relationship still operates under something like polyamory: Garnet performs affectively loaded fusion with Pearl and Amethyst regularly, and the Crystal Gems team up with fused Gems like Fluorite, who is a fusion of six Gems, barring the possibility of adding another, or, as she puts it “maybe more if we meet the right gem” (“Off Colors”). Even as a fused and quasi-monogamous being, Garnet can be embedded in further fusions, such as Sugilite (with Amethyst), Sardonyx (with Pearl), and Alexandrite (with both Amethyst and Pearl). And in a speculative society where non-destructive biological reproduction is combinative rather than additive and best guaranteed by temporary partnership (homogem fusion) rather than lifelong partnership (real-world marriage), more monogamous and permanent modes of being such as that which Garnet performs take on a kind of queerness unto themselves. The complications that Jasper and Garnet’s characters embody offer visual venues through fusion for queering the unqueer and unqueering the queer, stressing, staging, and performing the slipperiness that queerness needs to have if it is to remain elastically illegible enough to be welcoming to all queers—and, consequently, resistant to limiting discourses.

3

DRAWING QUEERNESS FORWARD …

65

And yet, some thinkers—thinkers who are unlikely to pick up this volume—would certainly tell us to stop kidding ourselves. Is there any point in theorizing about how animated characters in cartoons marketed to children might achieve states of being embodied only by language as lofty “resistant to limiting discourses,” like the phrase I use in the previous paragraph? There is a chance that I am placing too much faith in the political potential of cartoons. Even so, I maintain here that Steven Universe isn’t just a step ahead of the question of the praxis of visual narratives—I would say it’s more like a step outside of it. Reflecting on its own praxis, the show features a conversation between Steven and Pearl that grapples with this exact doubt about the political potential of narrative. Steven is bummed out that he has inadvertently crushed the dreams of a friend of his. This friend, the eager young conspiracy theorist Ronaldo, is devastated when Steven explains away his wild speculations with knowledge gained from adventures with the Gems (see also Ziegler and Richards, Chapter 6). Pearl’s reply is not very comforting. “Humans just lead short, boring, insignificant lives, so they make up stories to feel like they’re a part of something bigger,” she says, sounding like a delightfully readable Nietzsche or Foucault. “They want to blame all the world’s problems on some single enemy they can fight, instead of a complex network of interrelated forces beyond anyone’s control” (“Keep Beach City Weird”). And yet, these made-up stories that make humans feel a sense of cosmic purpose—a category to which Steven Universe itself belongs—can navigate that very real complex network of tangled power structures, even if it cannot and will not control them. Eventually, Ronaldo’s pain is alleviated by the adoption of a new conspiracy theory about “polymorphic sentient rocks” who can “take on any form.” Ronaldo’s gesture toward the polymorphism of the Gems’ bodies is an example of these “stories” that humans make up to explore the complex power relations that Pearl lays out. These are stories like the one that Steven Universe tells, stories that approach, but never pin down (by nature of their cartoonish epistemology), an always-elusive truth. It’s not enough, however, for this cartoon to recognize the value of its own visual ambiguities. What is at stake is not a matter of losing or preserving the insights of one particularly creative and powerful narrative text. The stakes are higher than that. The question here is whether or not we seize an opportunity that animation presents us with and that Steven Universe draws to its own narrative forefront. In the animation of Steven Universe, we may find the opportunity to estimate, animate, and envision the abjections that our language categories make

66

K. COOLEY

before we cast those categories. At the moment, we don’t know Steven, the half-Gem, half-human, and occasionally fused cartoon child who may or may not be his mother. But, through an insatiable and animated drive toward the decidedly queer future and without even the ghost of a wink, we believe in Steven.

Notes 1. HMS-ArtHound, December 22, 2017, “comment on” Skeleion, “The Off-Model SU Debate,” DeviantArt, March 27, 2018, https://skeleion. deviantart.com/journal/The-Off-model-SU-debate-721106863. 2. RabbitBatThing, December 21, 2017, “comment on” Skeleion, “The Off-Model SU Debate,” DeviantArt, March 27, 2018, https://skeleion. deviantart.com/journal/The-Off-model-SU-debate-721106863.

References Barthes, Roland. 1977. “Rhetoric of the Image.” In Image-Music-Text, edited and translated by Stephen Heath, 32–51. London: Fontana Press. Bollen, Jonathan. 1999. “Queer Kinaesthesia: On the Dance Floor at Gay and Lesbian Dance Parties Sydney, 1994–1998.” PhD diss., University of Western Sydney, Nepean. Butler, Judith. 1993. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, 307–320. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Ghayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dunn, Eli. 2016. “Steven Universe, Fusion Magic, and the Queer Cartoon Carnivalesque.” Gender Forum 56: 44–57. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press. “Interview with Prof Lee Edelman.” 2016. YouTube Video. Posted by IPAK Centar, September 21. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjTDLyKP2p0. Kelley, Shamus. 2018. “Steven Universe Season 5 Episode 22 Review: Made of Honor.” Den of Geek. Last modified July 15. http://www.denofgeek.com/ us/tv/steven-universe/274704/steven-universe-season-5-episode-22-reviewmade-of-honor.

3

DRAWING QUEERNESS FORWARD …

67

McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Perennial. McDonnell, Chris. 2017. Steven Universe: Art & Origins. New York: Abrams. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. “The Off-Model Controversy.” 2017. Narrated by Ken and Shane. Gem Talk. Soundcloud, March 21. https://soundcloud.com/gemtalk/episode-37-theoff-model-controversy. “The Off-Model SU Debate.” 2018. DeviantArt. https://skeleion.deviantart. com/journal/The-Off-model-SU-debate-721106863. Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. Terrorist Assemblages. Durham: Duke University Press. Sait¯ o, Tamaki. 2011. Beautiful Fighting Girl. Translated by J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Larson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sartre, Jean Paul. 2004. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. New York: Routledge. “What Was Missing.” 2011. Adventure Time. Season 3, Episode 10. Written by Adam Muto and Rebecca Sugar. Cartoon Network.

Episodes Referenced “Alone Together” (season 1, episode 37, 2015) “Beta” (season 3, episode 22, 2016) “Bismuth” (season 3, episodes 20 and 21, 2016) “Earthlings” (season 3, episode 26, 2016) “A Giant Woman” (season 1, episode 12, 2014) “Jail Break” (season 1, episode 52, 2015) “Jungle Moon” (season 5, episode 12, 2018) “Keep Beach City Weird” (season 1, episode 31, 2014) “Mindful Education” (season 4, episode 4, 2016) “Off Colors” (season 5, episode 3, 2018) “Reunited” (season 5, episodes 23 and 24, 2018) “A Single Pale Rose” (season 5, episode 18, 2018) “The Answer” (season 2, episode 22, 2016) “We Need to Talk” (season 2, episode 9, 2015)

CHAPTER 4

“I Am a Conversation”: Gem Fusion, Privilege, and Intersectionality Olivia Zolciak

The discourse surrounding Steven Universe explores the positive representation of various identities, and its queer feminism is praised across social media platforms, but the show’s intersectional representation tends to favor privileged groups, ultimately reinforcing and complicating stereotypes of Black women. Although not much scholarship is as yet dedicated to this specific show, Jack Halberstam (2011) notes the importance of animation in escaping the trap of heteronormativity and the ultimate idea of “success” in The Queer Art of Failure: “In the new animation films[,] certain topics that would never appear in adult-themed films are central to the success and emotional impact of these narratives” (29). “Pixarvolt,” a term coined by Halberstam, refers to when recent film technologies meet themes of Marxist revolt and queer embodiment. Steven Universe dabbles in the art of Pixarvolt, as it includes individuals who do not neatly fit into the hegemonic system, and this exposure is crucial for children at the formative age of the show’s ostensible target audience (see also Cooley,

O. Zolciak (B) University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. R. Ziegler and L. Richards (eds.), Representation in Steven Universe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9_4

69

70

O. ZOLCIAK

Chapter 3).1 Children’s television in the recent past includes representation of queer characters, but traditionally they tend to stay confined to lesbian or gay characters. However, even “these relationships [are] often downplayed or unconfirmed,” Eli Dunn (2016) argues: “Steven Universe is radically breaking that tradition apart by being willing to give voice to other, less often represented queer identities. It provides us with a framework to investigate how trans (…[and] agender and genderqueer) identities and experiences can not only function but also thrive within the genre boundaries of the fantasy cartoon” (44). Although the show is named after the main White male character, he is anything but normative. Steven and his family, the Crystal Gems, embody queerness, and the discourse surrounding the series engages in revolt against heteronormativity while reinforcing the representation of intersectional identities. As Steven is a coming-of-age half-Gem, much of the series’ premise involves him navigating his powers, going on adventures with the Gems, and helping them save the world. Given the title, the show is meant to surround the development of Steven, yet female collaboration is undoubtedly important to the show’s progression. This is evident in episode twelve, “Giant Woman,” where Steven encourages Amethyst and Pearl to fuse into a more powerful Gem, Opal. During a mission, Steven sings to them: “All I want to be is a person who gets to see a giant woman” (“Giant Woman”). Promoting what these women can do if they work together, Steven embodies more than just a mere aid in their transformation. As he continues the rest of his anthem to them, he sings: “But if it were me, I’d really want to be a giant woman” (“Giant Woman”). As Steven is raised by three powerful women, it is no wonder that he wants to embody them both physically and mentally, and his expression of wanting to become a Giant Woman signifies more than just a young boy’s fascination. The desire to become a Giant Woman also exposes the queer subtext within the show while simultaneously rejecting gender norms. Near the end of the episode, the two Gems finally fuse in order to save Steven, who has been eaten by a giant bird on the mission. However, both the events leading up to the fusion and the physical/emotional form of Opal herself epitomize a predominantly White representation and power. The representation of intersecting and interlocking identities in Steven Universe is striking, particularly gender, ethnic, and sexual identities. Because of its content and characters, the show has received a great deal of positive critical attention; but what is missing is a consideration of how the show both reinforces and complicates stereotypes of women and different facets of their identities.

4

“I AM A CONVERSATION”: GEM FUSION, PRIVILEGE …

71

Defining the Intersections Collins and Bilge (2016) explain that “[i]ntersectionality is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences. … When it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped … by many axes that work together and influence each other” (2). The Gems, although they are aliens, give viewers a glimpse of the true complexity of individuals and the world. The Gems have no innate biological sex and fall outside the gender binary, yet it’s significant that every Gem presents herself as female, offering vivid examples of female heroic agency while simultaneously subverting gender norms. Characters who do not fit the binary are uniquely positioned to critique the patriarchal and hierarchical organization of society and gender stereotypes. However, Pearl, as the White Gem, is able to comment on the system in addition to both promoting and disregarding the systemic oppression of Garnet and Amethyst. Aside from Pearl’s physical characteristics, including her pale skin, light pink/blonde hair, and piercing blue eyes, her character development and behavior are rooted in the history of White privilege and power. Contrary to what her demanding personality might suggest, Pearl came from the servant class on Homeworld, and the strict caste system on Homeworld ultimately impacts Pearl’s relationships with other Gems on Earth. In addition to class, social inequality in Steven Universe functions at the site of race, where pervasive stereotypes and discrimination toward Gems who are queer and Black, such as Garnet, promote White privilege. Intersectionality’s “framework for explaining how social divisions of race, gender, age, and citizenship status, among others, position people differently in the world, especially in relation to global social inequality” (Collins and Bilge, 15) provides a means by which to both praise and critique the spectrum of representation in Steven Universe. Although Steven Universe is titled after the main male character, much of the show’s storyline is generated by the female-identified Gems, challenging familiar motifs in film and television that depict the male character as the active participant in the progression of the story while female characters remain passive. The Crystal Gems are agender, yet purposefully identify as female and use female pronouns. Opposing common representations of women in the superhero genre, the Gems do not abandon their femininity to be heroic, nor are they hypersexualized. The series subverts

72

O. ZOLCIAK

gendered tropes of the hero that identify certain acts with women and others with men. In fact, much of the show demonstrates Steven’s admiration toward these female-identified figures who help him navigate his powers. Their impact on him is so significant that he even sings about wanting to be a “giant woman,” referencing the Gems’ ability to fuse together into a completely different and more powerful Gem. Steven’s character further promotes the Gems and their female heroic agency. In general, not only does Steven admire his influences, but he also embraces female power and femininity. More specifically, Steven’s character completely challenges gender roles and stereotypes through his associations with the color pink, his willful display of emotion, and even his appearance in drag.2 His personality is never seen as a flaw by the characters in the show, and thus provides viewers with a healthy view of masculinity that is not hegemonic or toxic. And, most importantly, many of Steven’s powers involve shielding and healing, which typically fall under the category of defensive, feminine powers. As Rebecca Demarest (2010) points out in “Superheroes, Superpowers, and Sexuality,” “This separation of the kinds of powers implies that the women should defend, the men attack. The place for the female is behind the male with the super strength and such, and watching his back with a force field. Together they make a complete team, separately they are only offense or defense.” In Steven Universe, the physical violence of battle is usually performed by the female Gems; however, Steven is a vital contributor to the team, and he is not viewed as in any way inferior.

Fusion, Power, and Representation This section will close read two episodes and two fusion subtexts that demonstrate the show’s failure of intersectionality. Fusion occurs at the site of synchronized dance, and “[e]ach Fusion dance is slightly modified to take into account the specific personalities of those participating in it. In ‘Giant Woman’ we learn that not only must Gems be in physical synchronicity during their dance, but they must also be mentally synced in order to perform Fusion successfully” (Dunn, 49). As Dunn claims, fusion signifies the carnivalesque, and, in this space, the carnival allows “‘free and familiar contact between people’ who would usually be separated hierarchically,’ for ‘unusual combinations’ and also for a bringing down to ‘the level of the body.’ Fusion operates within exactly this kind of time and space” (48). As Pearl and Amethyst don’t always see eye to eye, their first

4

“I AM A CONVERSATION”: GEM FUSION, PRIVILEGE …

73

attempt at fusing is unsuccessful, and they instantly fall apart. Because Pearl and Amethyst have vastly different personalities, it seems legitimate that their fusion is difficult to maintain. Not only is the failed attempt to fuse attributed to their failure to get along, but Pearl demonstrates an aversion to Amethyst and how she expresses herself. Jane Desmond explores how “[m]ovement serves as a marker for the production of gender, racial, ethnic, class, and national identities” (36). Pearl is irritated by Amethyst’s dance, which doesn’t neatly align with her impeccable and delicate ballet, “the most highly codified, highly funded, and perhaps most elite symbol of European derived theatrical dance in the United States” (Desmond 1994, 44). In this scene, Pearl says that Amethyst’s moves are “erratic and formless” (“Giant Woman”), alluding to the way that “[d]ance, as a discourse of the body, may in fact be especially vulnerable to interpretations in terms of essentialized identities associated with biological difference” (Desmond 42). On one level, dance can be associated with gender; the sexualized association attached to the movement of the body can be marked racially, nationally, and ethnically. Emulating hip-hop style, Amethyst’s dancing is rooted in Black culture, and Pearl’s reaction to this style is a representation of how the movement of the body corresponds to perceived notions of race. Amethyst’s life was predetermined due to the decisions made by higher-ranking Gems. Created specifically to be a soldier, Amethyst was grown and manufactured on Earth, along with many other Gems, in what is known as Prime Kindergarten. The intended purpose of Prime Kindergarten was to create powerful soldiers and exploit Earth’s resources, but Amethyst emerged five hundred years later than she was supposed to, making her a “defective” Gem—she is significantly smaller and less powerful. Until she joined the Crystal Gems to protect her “birth planet” of Earth, Amethyst lived in Prime Kindergarten, and she harbors a lot of self-doubt, especially as she compares her skills to those of the other Crystal Gems. Furthermore, because Amethyst comes from a place that the Crystal Gems sought to destroy, she oftentimes feels out of place. Amethyst’s character takes on a highly racially coded form: not only are her dance moves “erratic and formless,” but so is her personality, as she is childish, obnoxious, and lazy, and resists authority. And even though Gems do not have to eat or sleep to survive, Amethyst excessively indulges in literal garbage and sleeps for fun. In times of intense focus, such as the mission in “Giant Woman,” it is obvious that the show reasserts stereotypes of Black women in its portrayal of Amethyst. From the moment their fusion is discussed, Pearl

74

O. ZOLCIAK

insists that Amethyst replicate her dance moves so that they can be in sync, to which Amethyst responds, “I don’t dance like that” (“Giant Woman”). In terms of their hierarchy, Pearl is the stronger Gem, as she is incredibly precise in her skillsets, and she has had a lot more time to hone these skills. Pearl is dismayed to see that she shares something with Amethyst. Both of their histories reflect a dismal example of the way that systems of oppression function. The caste system in place on Homeworld denotes all “Pearls” as servants to higher-ranking Gems. As Peridot explains, Pearl is “a made to order servant just like the hundreds of other Pearls being flaunted around back on Homeworld” because Pearls aren’t for building or fighting; they’re for “standing around and looking nice and holding your stuff for you” (“Back to the Barn”). Pearl’s attitude toward other Gems is unsettling, as she has also experienced marginalization and oppression. Perhaps, as Pearl is free from her oppressors and is now stronger than ever in her abilities, she has become the oppressor or “sub-oppressor” because, for the victims of this type of hierarchal system, “[t]he very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped” (Freire 1972, 46). Pearl imposes her will over Amethyst as a woman of privilege and power whose past is also deeply rooted in oppression, and this behavior takes a physical form in Opal. Amethyst’s casting out as damaged, her abandonment, and her overall self-doubt juxtaposed with Pearl’s past as a submissive servant with no sense of agency demonstrate that both of their origins, at one point, were out of their control. The way that they work together now, however, is deeply rooted in their pasts, which have proven difficult for them to overcome. Halberstam writes of the representation of race in animation that “‘animatedness’ is an ambivalent mode of representation, especially when it comes to race, because it reveals the ideological conditions of ‘speech’ and ventriloquism but it also threatens to reassert grotesque stereotypes by fixing on caricature and excess in its attempts to make its nonhuman subjects come alive” (48). Although Scott Allison and George Goethals (2010) explain that “[d]irect leaders who become heroes usually enjoy a great deal of success in exerting influence over those whom they lead” (51), Pearl’s exertion of control is much more complex. Opal doesn’t necessarily evoke negative stereotypes of Black women; rather, her character erases Blackness altogether. Opal exemplifies some features that are visibly representative of Amethyst, such as her lips, hips, and long hair, but these attributes are those that are specific to her accentuated features as

4

“I AM A CONVERSATION”: GEM FUSION, PRIVILEGE …

75

a coded Black woman. Even more significant is how Pearl’s abilities and demeanor are more prominent in Opal. Opal is calm and precise, and, although her weapon is supposed to be the combined form of Pearl and Amethyst’s weapons, the bow resembles Pearl’s spear, while the arrows emit a bright light on impact, similar to the energy blasts emitted by that weapon. While superheroes symbolize the dichotomy and even juxtaposition of good and evil, Black superheroes are underrepresented or even erased in pop culture, as Adilifu Nama (2011) discusses: Lost, however, in the grand ethos and pathos that superheroes represent are the Black superheroes that fly, fight, live, love, and sometimes die. In contrast, even the most obscure White superheroes are granted an opportunity to make their way from the narrow margins of fandom to mainstream media exposure. … Nevertheless, what Black superheroes may lack in mainstream popularity they more than match in symbolism, meaning, and political import with regard to the cultural politics of race in America. Even the omission and chronic marginalization of Black superheroes are phenomena rife with cultural and sociopolitical implications. (252)

Amethyst’s status as a powerful hero is lost in Opal, although she’s an equal participant, risking her life to save Steven. Ultimately, her erasure is indicative of the politics of race in America, where the voices of Black individuals are silenced, and their representation is either lost or subjected to dominant stereotypes that perpetuate their systematic oppression. “Giant Woman” first introduces fusion as a battle tactic used in extreme circumstances; however, “Jail Break” reveals that for Garnet, a Gem who is constantly fused, the act of fusion signifies queer love. “Jail Break” is the first time that we discover that Garnet is a fusion composed of Ruby and Sapphire. In this episode, the Gems are held captive, and Garnet is injured, causing the fusion to fail. When Ruby and Sapphire are finally reunited in the episode, they run toward each other and embrace. This moment signifies their romantic attraction: Sapphire kisses Ruby’s forehead and the tears from her face as the two embrace, and Ruby lifts and spins Sapphire until they become one again. Once Garnet is formed, she is so ecstatic that she sings the song “Stronger Than You” to her captor during the battle that celebrates her relationship as a fusion. The lyrics in the song describe her relationship: “The two of us ain’t gonna follow your rules,” “I can see you hate the way we intermingle, but I think you’re just

76

O. ZOLCIAK

mad ‘cause you’re single,” and “This is who we are, this is who I am, and if you think you can stop me, then you need to think again” (“Jail Break”). This song can serve as a romantic anthem that celebrates love in all forms. Representing more than just heterosexual unions in media targeting children is important in order to challenge the perpetuation of oppression, and Halberstam states that “[r]ather than protesting the presence of queer characters in these films [or shows] … we should use them to disrupt idealized and saccharine myths about children, sexuality, and innocence and imagine new versions of maturation, Bildung, and growth that do not depend upon the logic of succession and success” (119). The symbolic union of Ruby and Sapphire is an example of magic in cartoons, which provides for children not only imaginative play but also an opportunity for learning. Children are “willing to suspend disbelief and open themselves to possibilities that are not fully culturally accepted and they are less socially conditioned to be biased against experiences or people that are new to them” (55–56). Older viewers are also able to appreciate the story line because they already anticipate magic in cartoons and understand its function (Dunn, 46–47, 56). Steven Universe expertly “takes advantage of this narrative expectation to imbue its magic with the power to represent queer gender expressions and changing bodies” (56). In regard to fusion, Dunn says that this “allows the symbol of the joined lovers to become actualized. In no other show is … [a] relationship shown so beautifully, powerfully and with such acceptance” (51). Utilizing magic in cartoons to depict queer relationships, therefore, is a stepping stone to providing various identities with the space that they deserve in the media. Dunn’s exploration of Garnet as an accepted relationship, however, tends to overlook some of the homosexual oppression that occurs throughout the show, incidents that are not always neatly resolved. In “Log Date 7 15 2,” we witness some obvious discomfort with Garnet’s fused form. Peridot, a new addition to the Crystal Gems, doesn’t understand why Garnet is always a fusion and states early in the episode that Garnet makes her “extremely uncomfortable;” later, she cries, “Alright, I’m at my limit … I can at least make sense of your existence if it is for a functional purpose … But I still don’t understand you! Why are you fused all the time?” (“Log Date 7 15 2”). Various fan-based blog posts and other social media platforms have discussed the root of Peridot’s discomfort with fusion as merely a fear of safety due to Garnet’s enhanced abilities. As fusion is used for battle tactics on Homeworld, Peridot views

4

“I AM A CONVERSATION”: GEM FUSION, PRIVILEGE …

77

Garnet merely as a weapon, but Peridot’s discomfort goes beyond a fear of Garnet’s abilities and strength. Garnet’s open expression of the physical embodiment of love suggests that Peridot is also the Gem equivalent of homophobic. Echoing the idea of compulsory heterosexuality, a term popularized by Adrienne Rich, Peridot Others Garnet, believing that her fusion is unnatural because it does not serve its functional purpose. Under the patriarchal enforcement of heterosexuality, other ideas of romantic relationships are not deemed functional solely due to reproduction. Because there are other Gems who express homosexual love and attraction, Garnet’s potential racial coding intersects with her sexual orientation. As Collins (2000) states, “Heterosexual privilege is usually the only privilege that Black women have. None of us have racial or sexual privilege. … maintaining our ‘straightness’ is our last resort” (155–156). Thus, because Ruby and Sapphire openly act on their love by fusing and are the physical embodiment of a homosexual union, it puts Garnet in a less privileged position. Pearl, on the other hand, openly expressed her love and attraction toward Rose when Rose was alive, a torch that Pearl still carries (see “Mr. Greg”), demonstrating her privilege as White. Although Peridot claims to understand Garnet at the end of the episode, this expression of homophobia is still significant because Garnet, as a Black queer female, is the only Gem subject to this nature of discrimination. Not only does Garnet as a Black woman experience discrimination toward her sexual orientation, but the show tends to reinforce dominant stereotypes of Black women, their bodies, and their sexuality, particularly in ways that undercut femininity, unless it is to meet the White male gaze. bell hooks (1992) explores the consistent images of Black female sexuality in popular culture in Black Looks: Race and Representation, where she observes that these images “rarely subvert or critique images of Black female sexuality which were part of the cultural apparatus of 19th-century racism and which still shape perceptions today” (62). Specifically, hooks states that “[i]n the sexual Iconography of the traditional Black pornographic imagination, the protruding butt is seen as an indication of a heightened sexuality,” and contemporary popular culture that celebrates this part of the body still demonstrates sexist/racist representations (63). Garnet’s coding as Black is signified by her cubic afro and skin tone, and her body type leans on dominant representations of Black female bodies, including her hyper-exaggerated hip-to-waist ratio. Not only is she subjected to dominant stereotypes, but her identity as a woman is often questioned—her female form is primarily deemed feminine and sexual when

78

O. ZOLCIAK

she is fighting against those who are deemed more masculine, such as in the fight scene in “Jail Break” previously referenced. In this episode, it becomes apparent that Black queer femininity can only exist when it is juxtaposed with an even more masculine figure. However, Garnet’s body is also sexualized in order to meet the White male gaze. In “Love Letters,” the mailman expresses an interest in Garnet, and her body is utilized to meet his gaze. More specifically, as Garnet emerges from the water, the mailman’s eyes widen, and he asks, “How are you able to swim to the bottom of the ocean?” (“Love Letters”). Waiting for her response, he positions his eyes on her dripping body, and the shot shifts to meet his gaze as it pans slowly from her feet to her lips. She sensually replies, “It’s easy. I’m a really good swimmer” (“Love Letters”). The representation of Garnet’s sexuality to either challenge other masculine figures or to meet the male gaze demonstrates the way in which sexuality, particularly Black women’s sexualities, “constitutes one important site where heterosexism, class, race, nation, and gender as systems of oppression converge” (Collins, 128).

The Matriarch and Jezebel Garnet and Amethyst are subject to other damaging stereotypes of Black women, including those of the matriarch and the Jezebel. The role of the Black matriarch, who is generally categorized by her failure “to model appropriate gender behavior,” labels Black women as “unfeminine and too strong” (Collins, 76–77), which reinforces the undermining of Black women’s controlled assertiveness. This is seen in “Coach Steven,” where Garnet and Amethyst fuse into Sugilite to efficiently complete a mission that requires incredible strength. This episode had the potential to represent agency from these Black heroic females without the aid and guidance of a dominant White character. Instead, much of the episode regresses to dominant stereotypes of the “angry Black woman” derived from the matriarch. However, right before we witness the wrath of Sugilite, there is also a small yet significant moment that alludes to the Jezebel stereotype. As Garnet and Amethyst are in the process of fusing, they synchronize their dance moves, and the formation of Sugilite occurs when Amethyst jumps into Garnet’s legs. Pearl’s reaction suggests the policing of women’s behavior, as she covers Steven’s eyes and blushes as Steven complains, “Aw, I want to see!” (“Coach Steven”). While their dancing is certainly different from Pearl’s, what promotes the negative connotations

4

“I AM A CONVERSATION”: GEM FUSION, PRIVILEGE …

79

of the Jezebel stereotype is Pearl’s embarrassment and disgust. Collins emphasizes this point: “Because efforts to control Black women’s sexuality lie at the heart of Black women’s oppression, historical jezebels and contemporary ‘hoochies’ represent a deviant Black female sexuality” (82). In the nineteenth century, manuals were created that demonstrated “proper” and “improper” ways to embrace while dancing, “specifying the position of the head, arms, and upper body, and the required distance that should be maintained between male and female torsos. In manuals directed toward the middle and upper classes, bodies that pressed close, spines that relaxed, and clutching arms were all denigrated as signs of lower-class dance style” (Desmond, 37). Not only does Pearl’s attempt to shield Steven from what she categorizes as inappropriate behavior emphasize this “deviant Black female sexuality,” but, because Steven Universe is a children’s television show, social learning theory would suggest that such moments are significant in shaping children’s learned prejudice. Social learning theory predicts that “people of all ages (and young people in particular) will learn a great deal about race, social expectations for what is a ‘proper’ way for Caucasians or African Americans or Latinos or Asians to act, and the social consequences of being a person of color just from being exposed to race-related media content” (Klein and Shiffman 2006, 166). Therefore, it becomes important to point out and critique that the monitoring of Garnet and Amethyst’s sexuality empowers Pearl as a White woman. Once Sugilite is formed, Pearl’s privilege and power are further emphasized while Garnet and Amethyst are reduced to perpetuating stereotypes in popular culture. More specifically, the fusing of Garnet and Amethyst creates a large, highly aggressive, and uncontrollable Black woman. In “Coach Steven,” Sugilite becomes exceptionally violent toward Pearl, threatening her and provoking her to fight. While Halberstam praises animation’s ability to create “a new space for the imagining alternatives,” he recognizes that race “falls all too often in the familiar and stereotyped patterns of characterization” (48). Sugilite’s behavior as the angry Black woman upholds “a myth that continues to be rehashed using stereotypes to perpetuate the oppression of Black womanhood” (Allen 2015, iv). Even more problematic is the need to control Sugilite in a way that undermines her intelligence, and the only one able to accomplish this is Pearl. Ultimately, instead of fairly representing and empowering these Black characters, the show subjects Garnet and Amethyst to perpetual stereotyping. The promotion of White privilege is indicated by the episode’s

80

O. ZOLCIAK

attention to Pearl’s development as a character to have strength “in the real way,” which is only through her ability to control Sugilite (“Coach Steven”). Collins makes an important point regarding the Othering of Black women, presenting them as strangers who “threaten the moral and social order. But they are simultaneously essential for its survival because those individuals who stand at the margins of society clarify its boundaries. African-American women, by not belonging, emphasize the significance of belonging” (70). At the end of the episode, both Amethyst and Garnet submit to the stereotypes and agree that they “should have listened” to Pearl and “deserve” to be subjected to her overt bragging (“Coach Steven”). Sugilite’s formation occurs to produce enough strength to tear down the Communication Hub, an ancient place that was used by the Homeworld Gems thousands of years ago to communicate through space. A few episodes later, the Communication Hub is rebuilt, thought to be the work of Peridot, at the time an antagonist stranded on Earth. Excitedly, Steven suggests, “You guys should form Sugilite!” Amethyst, smiling, looks to Garnet and says, “What do you say? Shall we mash it up?” “No,” Garnet replies. “Last time was a disaster. Last time we fused, Sugilite went berserk. I can be brash, you can be reckless. And we both get carried away. So, for the time being, Sugilite is benched. What we need now is to be careful. It’s you and me, Pearl. Let’s fuse” (“Cry for Help”). Once again, the series emphasizes the notion that Black women are uncontrollable, especially when they are together. Further, it suggests that the only way maintain control is to add Whiteness. Ultimately, the purpose of the stereotypes of Black women is “‘not to reflect or represent a reality but to function as a disguise, or mystification, of objective social relations.’ … These controlling images are designed to make racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life” (Collins, 69). Additionally, these controlling images are not believed only by White individuals—the images can be internalized by people of color, potentially robbing Black women of agency or political power. Because Black youth has the “highest number of viewing hours and preference for Black TV shows,” or shows with higher Black representation, cultivation theory would suggest that Black “youth will accept Black character portrayals and media images as valid models of acceptable and expected behaviors for Black people” (Adams-Bass et al. 2014, 370). Therefore, the images of Black-coded

4

“I AM A CONVERSATION”: GEM FUSION, PRIVILEGE …

81

characters in television and movies may falsely align with what children perceive as their social reality. Further, Steven Universe demonstrates how White characters perceive Black characters, even if they are friends, through racial stereotypes. Sardonyx, the fusion between Garnet and Pearl, is the physical embodiment of White superiority and utilizing race as a means for assigning gender roles. Collins explains that “[a]s part of a generalized ideology of domination, stereotypical images of Black womanhood take on a special meaning. Because the authority to define societal values is a major instrument of power, elite groups, in exercising power, manipulate ideas about Black womanhood. They do so by exploiting already existing symbols, or creating new ones” (69). Although all fusion dances differ according to personality and the relationship between the Gems, Garnet and Amethyst’s dance is highly sexualized, exemplifying the Jezebel stereotype. The dance between Garnet and Pearl, however, demonstrates a masculine/feminine ideal, putting Pearl in the spotlight as she is hoisted into the air, pirouetting until she reaches Garnet’s body to form Sardonyx. However, their dance does not become gendered until Garnet and Pearl touch. In fact, Garnet’s movements are performed as feminine prior to connecting with Pearl, sashaying and swinging her hips as she walks toward her. The masculinization of Black women derives from the slave era, but gained particular traction in the 1940s and 1950s. The Sapphire, an image of masculine Black womanhood popularized through the character of Sapphire Stevens, is verbally and physically aggressive in nature, and lies in “stark opposition to the submissive and sexually conservative norms of mainstream femininity” (Jerald et al. 2016, 611). The differences in gender portrayal between Garnet and Pearl perpetuate a long history of positioning Black women as the symbolic and literal opposite of White women: “The white woman weak/the black strong, the white woman undersexed/the black woman oversexed, the white woman the symbol of sexual desire/the black woman neutered … [this] corrupting imagery still rages in our heads and in our hearts, and makes it all the more difficult to throw a life or love line to one another” (Golden 1995, 3). Historically, these stereotypes have been used as a means to justify the interlocking systems of oppression that dominate the lives of Black women, and presenting them in a children’s show encourages the continuation of oversimplified beliefs about Black women and their behavior. As Sardnoyx forms, it is evident that the divide between White and Black becomes further pronounced, even though Sardonyx is a fusion between White- and Black-coded characters.

82

O. ZOLCIAK

The bold entrance of Sardonyx is marked by upbeat, theatrical music. Appearing from behind a curtain, Sardonyx begins her performance by saying, “Good evening, everybody! This is the lovely Sardonyx, coming to you alive from the soon to be former Communication Hub. How are y’all doin’ tonight?” (“Cry for Help”). At once, viewers are aware of Sardonyx’s characterization and her embodiment of Pearl. She justly represents both Garnet and Pearl in terms of physical appearance, weaponry, and character; however, Sardonyx embodies entitlement and privilege, favoring Pearl’s personality. In her introduction, she carries Steven in her hands and says, “So, what do you think? Was I worth the wait? What am I saying, of course I was!” (“Cry for Help”). Clearly amused and impressed with herself, Sardonyx lets out a peculiar laugh. Typically associated with anime, the noblewoman’s laugh, written “O-ho-ho,” is a stereotyped laugh used by women from aristocratic Japanese or pseudoJapanese families. Sardonyx emulates this high-pitched, artificial laughter as it validates her refined femininity and ultimately her character, which, in Japanese culture, is associated with the Ojou character type, who is perceived as an arrogant woman (“Noblewoman’s Laugh”). Aside from the defining laughter, there are other features of the Ojou character that are present in Sardonyx. Although my analysis specifically reads Pearl as a White female, other fans of the series read her as Asian, which is a justifiable approach to her character given the use of the noblewoman’s laugh as well as other characteristics that she emulates.3 Whether one reads Pearl as Asian or White, the noblewoman’s laugh provides further indication of her status as a self-identified superior Gem compared to Amethyst and, ultimately, Sugilite. A problematic moment occurs after Sardonyx introduces herself to Steven. As she expresses how she was “worth the wait,” she spins her torso a full 360 degrees with her other pair of hands touching her hair. She laughs her noblewoman’s laugh, and immediately, a starry-eyed Steven exclaims, “Wow, you’re so articulated!” (“Cry for Help”). “Articulated” requires further analysis, as there are a few interpretations of this word choice.4 On the surface, Sardonyx is literally articulated—her body is able to move on an axis. However, given her demeanor and the immediate insults directed at Sugilite and Amethyst thereafter, “articulated” insinuates “articulate,” essentially offering her a backhanded compliment. The term “articulate” is racially loaded, as it is often associated with African Americans who speak in a way that sounds “proper,” or White (Alim et al. 2012, 31). Sardonyx’s “articulation” is also reflected in the insults

4

“I AM A CONVERSATION”: GEM FUSION, PRIVILEGE …

83

directed toward Sugilite and Amethyst. Sardonyx wields her weapon, and an enthralled Steven asks, “Are you going to smash stuff with your war hammer?” (“Cry for Help”). Sardonyx confidently responds, “Smash is the word one would use to describe what someone else might do” (“Cry for Help”). At once, the scene cuts to a clearly disheartened Amethyst, who knows the comments are directed at her and her fusion with Garnet. “The proper words to describe yours truly are Specific! Intelligent! Accurate! Faultless! Elegant … Controlled! Surgical! Graceful! And … Powerful!,” Sardonyx continues as she effortlessly destroys the Communication Hub (“Cry for Help”). Using these words in such a passive-aggressive manner, specifically utilizing them in juxtaposition to Sugilite, is problematic because Sugilite is the fusion of two Black-coded women. Although Sardonyx is “occasionally known to ‘smash,’” the adjectives to describe her are in stark contrast to Sugilite’s character, ultimately depicting Black women as careless and unruly. Sardonyx is the physical manifestation of the White-dominated and White-controlled media, as Pearl clearly is the core of the fusion, and “[r]egardless of media form … Whites create and control the images of those who are not part of the mainstream, Blacks” (Wilson and Russell 1997, 244). Because Amethyst experiences feelings of inferiority, she begins to internalize the stereotypes that are thrust toward her. While Garnet and Pearl are fused for a second time, Amethyst sings, “Maybe you’re better off with her. I think she’s better for you. I forgot how great it felt to be us. Guess I got carried away” (“Cry for Help”). Once again, cultivation theory is significant, as even characters in the show demonstrate an awareness of their social environment and how they are perceived, encouraging young viewers to also be cognizant of such perceptions. Sardonyx’s formation and character not only reinforce White superiority and the negative perception of Black women, but the purpose of her formation further problematizes how Black women are treated and portrayed in the media because it is directed by deceit and ill-intentions. Although Sardonyx destroys the Communication Hub, it continues to reappear, driving Pearl and Garnet to fuse in order to destroy it. However, their constant fusion makes Amethyst feel a sense of inferiority and helplessness; therefore, Steven suggests that they investigate the Communication Hub location, which motivates Amethyst because “Garnet will be so impressed,” and “she’ll think I’m cool again” (“Cry for Help”). Their investigation is cut short as they soon discover that Pearl is the culprit who rebuilt the Communication Hub. Essentially, Pearl fabricates a threat in

84

O. ZOLCIAK

order to “feel stronger” and “to share more victories” with Garnet (“Cry for Help”). Feeling rightly betrayed and used, Garnet turns to Amethyst to destroy the Communication Hub once more. Driven by her own need to feel validated and powerful, Pearl uses Garnet as an outlet for her emotional baggage, including her unresolved feelings about Rose Quartz, the void Rose’s absence has left in her life, and her (implicit) sexual frustration because of it. Further problematizing the situation, Pearl gains Garnet’s “consent” by manipulating her to think that the Gems, and ultimately the Earth, are in danger. Additionally, she explicitly uses Garnet’s body as a way to handle her own emotional and sexual baggage, undercutting the importance of consent and disrespecting the positive and healthy relationship that she has formed with Garnet. Because Garnet’s character was more reserved in the first season, this form of abuse made her regress to a place of isolation, making it difficult for her to trust and open herself up to others. Unfortunately, using Black women’s bodies as tools is a common trope in popular culture and dates back to slavery, under which “the institutionalized rape of enslaved Black women operated as a mechanism of social control” (Collins, 32). If we follow social learning theory, this particular episode destructively teaches children about consent by demonstrating Garnet’s body explicitly being violated without sufficient consequence. Garnet’s progress was clearly in jeopardy, so it’s significant that the show carefully focused on the emotional arc of Garnet feeling abused and betrayed by Pearl throughout “The Week of Sardonyx.” The episode ends with Pearl walking and Garnet warping into the beach house simultaneously, avoiding eye contact as they pass each other. Clearly aware of the tension, Amethyst says to Steven, “Man, it sure would be nice if things worked out the way they do in cartoons” (“Cry for Help”). Even in the beginning of the subsequent episode, “Keystone Motel,” Pearl attempts to impress Garnet with her strategies for reaching Peridot, but Garnet will not respond—she is not ready to talk to, let alone forgive, Pearl. Thereafter, Garnet accompanies Steven and Greg on a road trip, where her emotional dilemma is literally embodied when Ruby and Sapphire de-fuse. Although Ruby and Sapphire have a solid foundation, their conflicting responses to the trauma trigger a rupture in their intimate bond. Because Ruby and Sapphire function better physically and emotionally as Garnet, their separation depicts “[t]he psychological and emotional strain that rape puts on rape victims” and how it “may lead to short or long term devastating effects for their survival” (Nasrin 2013, 430). The survival of Garnet is ultimately at stake due to the conflicting psychological reactions

4

“I AM A CONVERSATION”: GEM FUSION, PRIVILEGE …

85

which manifest as emotional numbness and post-traumatic stress disorder (432). Sapphire, who has future vision, is already aware that she will forgive Pearl, and, although she is angry, she appears emotionally numb to Ruby. And because Ruby is responding to this incident in the present, she experiences PTSD and flashbacks of the incident. The two stay split for nearly two full episodes, emphasizing the importance of their emotions. Garnet knows that she still needs to work through her feelings, as indicated by the conflicting emotions of anger and the desire to one day forgive her friend. While the show emulates pop culture’s tendency to utilize Black women’s bodies in any way it sees fit, “The Week of Sardonyx” attempts to remedy this by paying particular attention to Garnet’s emotions and by allowing her to have agency in terms of her grief, her anger, and even her forgiveness. Garnet never feels the need to forgive Pearl before she was ready; her feelings were given time, and although Ruby and Sapphire had differing opinions regarding how to deal with this situation, they land on a compromise, resulting in Garnet holding a hand up to Pearl, simply saying, “Not now” when Pearl asks how she’s doing. For Ruby, Sapphire, and Garnet, fusion is more than just becoming a stronger Gem—it is a demonstration of love and trust. Pearl’s betrayal of trust as a friend and the soiling of an emotional bond are recognized as problematic in the show, and having one of the focal characters make such a significant mistake demonstrates how vulnerability can make even the most laudable characters have faults. However, the episode falls victim to another trope in media regarding the relationship between White and Black women. More specifically, “In recent years, a few cable and network movie productions have featured White and Black women together, but the formula is nearly always the same—a weak willed, mixed up White woman is saved by a morally stronger Black woman. The fact remains that few shows on television have addressed women’s cross-race relations in nonstereotypical ways” (Wilson and Russell, 259). When Garnet and Pearl are forced to talk through their emotions during a dangerous mission, Garnet takes the time to listen to Pearl and begins to see her point of view, specifically her vulnerability and weaknesses. Pearl needs Garnet to feel strong physically, which in turn functions to support Pearl’s emotional grief through compensation. Garnet understands this and comforts Pearl when she says, “You’re wrong! I’m not as strong as you think! I-I fell apart over this. Ruby and Sapphire were in turmoil over how you deceived me! I came undone … I have weaknesses too, but I choose not to let them consume me. I struggle to

86

O. ZOLCIAK

stay strong because I know the impact I have on everyone. Please understand, Pearl … you have an impact too. There are times when I look up to you for strength” (“Friend Ship”). What could have been a defining moment for Garnet to express her emotions turns into a soapbox for Pearl and her emotional baggage. A central theme in this show, therefore, reveals how Whiteness is centralized in all fusions that involve Pearl. As previously discussed, forming Opal nearly eradicates Blackness altogether, and the fusion between Garnet and Pearl simply “enhances” Blackness by adding Whiteness. When two Black-coded females fuse, there is chaos and disorder, and, once again, Pearl is centered as the leader on whom people depend. She must protect the citizens and Steven from the angry Black woman, and she does so by exerting her intellectual strength rather than brute strength. Steven Universe, while worthy of praise for being intersectional and feminist, demonstrates a problematic display of stereotypes of Black women. While the show creates a unique space for female positionality and represents women who are queer, it privileges Whiteness in both power and sexuality. The use of family as a space of intersections, with a particular emphasis on the unconventional, is important for kids who are still absorbing cultural constructs, but given the subtle discrimination against and perpetual stereotypes of Black women, inevitably the show falls short of its progressive aims. Centering Whiteness has been a pervasive issue in feminism since its origins, and, as Midge Wilson and Kathy Russell note, “[f]or over twenty years, feminists have been proclaiming that all women are ‘sisters under the skin.’ But it turns out that appeals for sisterly solidarity during the first two decades of the modern feminist movement were issued largely by White women, rather than White women and Black women together” (2). Although Steven Universe has made headway in our conceptions of heroes and challenges our conventional views of the world, within the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality remains an important dialogue to be had about progressive representation of Black women and cross-race relations.

4

“I AM A CONVERSATION”: GEM FUSION, PRIVILEGE …

87

Notes 1. Cooley views Steven Universe as having positively moved beyond a suggested revolt that Halberstam explores in The Queer Art of Failure. However, the notion of revolt is particularly relevant if we look at race in conjunction with queerness. 2. In “Sadie’s Song,” Steven appears in a skirt, makeup, and heels when he sings the song “Haven’t You Noticed (I’m a Star).” Although he is stepping in for Sadie because she doesn’t want to sing at Beacha Palooza, it is his choice to wear her outfit, stating that “it was always me” who truly wanted to sing and dance on stage. See also Pitre, Chapter 2. 3. Sardonyx poses with a vertical palm to the side of her mouth, which is a frequent pose for the Ojou character and is customary for refined Japanese women to not expose their mouths while laughing (“Noblewoman’s Laugh”). Pearl’s coding as Asian also makes sense as she is characterized as a “model” Gem, much like the perpetuating stereotype that Asians are model minorities. 4. “Articulated” can also be attributed to the way in which a traditionally masculine action figure would move, as opposed to the ways that traditional feminine toys move, such as a Barbie doll.

References Adams-Bass, Valerie N., Howard C. Stevenson, and Diana Slaughter Kotzin. 2014. “Measuring the Meaning of Black Media Stereotypes and Their Relationship to the Racial Identity, Black History Knowledge, and Racial Socialization of African American Youth.” Journal of Black Studies 45 (5): 367–395. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934714530396. Alim, H. Samy, Geneva Smitherman, and Michael Eric Dyson. 2012. Articulate While Black Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the US. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Allen, Sherrie Sims. 2015. “Transforming Rage: Revisioning the Myth of the Angry Black Woman.” Dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute. Allison, Scott, and George R. Goethals. 2010. Heroes: What They Do and Why We Need Them. New York: Oxford University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Demarest, Rebecca. 2010. “Superheroes, Superpowers, and Sexuality.” Inquiries Journal 2 (10). http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/ 312/superheroes-superpowers-and-sexuality.

88

O. ZOLCIAK

Desmond, Jane. 1994. “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies.” Cultural Critique 26: 33–63. Dunn, Eli. 2016. “Steven Universe, Fusion Magic, and the Queer Cartoon Carnivalesque.” Gender Forum 56: 44–57. Freire, Paulo. 1972. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder. Golden, Marita. 1995. “Introduction.” In Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write About Race, edited by Marita Golden and Susan Richards Shreve, 1–6. New York: Anchor Books. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press. hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press. Jerald, Morgan C., L. Monique Ward, Lolita Moss, Khia Thomas, and Kyla D. Fletcher. 2016. “Subordinates, Sex Objects, or Sapphires? Investigating Contributions of Media Use to Black Students’ Femininity Ideologies and Stereotypes About Black Women.” Journal of Black Psychology 43 (6): 608–635. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095798416665967. Klein, Hugh, and Kenneth S. Shiffman. 2006. “Race-Related Content of Animated Cartoons.” Howard Journal of Communications 17 (3): 163–182. https://doi.org/10.1080/10646170600829493. Nama, Adilifu. 2011. Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes. Austin: University of Texas Press. Nasrin, Shahana. 2013. Aftermath of Rape: Stories of Rape Victims’ Struggle and Survival. Journal of Current Issues in Crime, Law & Law Enforcement 6 (4): 423–451. “Noblewoman’s Laugh.” TV Tropes. Accessed August 31, 2017. http:// tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoblewomansLaugh. Wilson, Midge, and Kathy Russell. 1997. Divided Sisters: Bridging the Gap Between Black Women and White Women. New York: Anchor Books.

Episodes Referenced “Back to the Barn” (season 2, episode 20, 2015) “Coach Steven” (season 1, episode 20, 2014) “Cry for Help” (season 2, episode 11, 2015) “Friend Ship” (season 2, episode 15, 2015) “Giant Woman” (season 1, episode 12, 2014) “Jail Break” (season 1, episode 52, 2015) “Keystone Motel” (season 2, episode 12, 2015) “Log Date 7 15 2” (season 2, episode 26, 2016) “Love Letters” (season 2, episode 4, 2015) “Mr. Greg” (season 3, episode 8, 2016) “Sadie’s Song” (season 2, episode 17, 2015)

CHAPTER 5

Globalizing Fandoms: Envisioning Queer Futures from Kunihiko Ikuhara to Rebecca Sugar Jacqueline Ristola

Steven Universe has been lauded by both fans and critics alike for its representation of lesbian, nonbinary, and other kinds of queer characters. Rebecca Sugar has said that the goal with the show is to “tear down and play with the semiotics of gender in cartoons for children” (HoweSmith 2015). This disruptive play ranges from Pearl’s unrequited love for Steven’s mother, Rose Quartz, to Garnet, a fusion of two womencoded Gems, to Stevonnie, a fusion of Steven and his friend Connie, who appears to be nonbinary. These varied forms of queer representation, in a show aimed at children no less, have attracted a large audience of both kids and adults, with a strong fandom active on social media sites such as Tumblr. While the Crewniverse (the moniker that the staff of Steven Universe uses) works at American-based Cartoon Network, much of Steven Universe’s representation of embodiment, being, and queer relationships draws from the oeuvre of anime director Kunihiko Ikuhara.

J. Ristola (B) Concordia University, Montréal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. R. Ziegler and L. Richards (eds.), Representation in Steven Universe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9_5

89

90

J. RISTOLA

While Steven Universe draws from many anime series and films, the influence of the works of Ikuhara runs deep and connects many of the series’ anime influences. In particular, Steven Universe derives many of its themes and motifs from two series that Ikuhara worked on, Sailor Moon (1992–1997) and Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997). While one could sort through the cornucopia of influences, references, motifs, and more that Steven Universe borrows from anime, and in particular from Ikuhara’s works, I will focus on a select few topics—queer representation, embodiment, and fandom—to illustrate the scope of how these two series impact the show. Acting as a nexus of cross-cultural exchange, Steven Universe draws upon the work of Ikuhara to create queer representation in a space—children’s media—where queer visibility is often perceived as “inappropriate” (see also Pitre, Chapter 2 and Cooley, Chapter 3). The remarkable influence that Ikuhara’s work has on Steven Universe—from aesthetics to depictions of queer love—highlights how transnational animation production, distribution, and consumption actively shape texts and serves as an example of how fandom connects emerging cross-national ideas of feminism, embodiment, and being/becoming. Within this context, Sugar’s own history as a fan of animation, and particularly anime, enables her to connect transnational ideas of queer embodiment to global audiences in new and inspiring ways.

Pushing Boundaries: Sailor Moon and the Magical Girl Genre Those familiar with the basic plot of Sailor Moon may already see some plot similarities between Sailor Moon and Steven Universe. Both the original Sailor Moon manga (written and illustrated by Naoko Takeuchi) and anime adaptation (made by Toei Animation) center around 14-yearold student Usagi Tsukino and her alter ego Sailor Moon, a powerful guardian tasked with finding and protecting the all-powerful Legendary Silver Crystal. As Usagi learns more about her powers and the evil forces seeking the crystal, she befriends other Sailor Guardians, forming a team to find the crystal and protect Earth from the forces of evil. There are plenty of surface references that highlight the Crewniverse’s appreciation of Sailor Moon, such as Steven winking with a star twinkling from his eye

5

GLOBALIZING FANDOMS: ENVISIONING QUEER FUTURES …

91

in “When It Rains,” or more obvious influences such as the preoccupation with gemstones.1 But Sailor Moon’s influences also run much deeper into the series’ construction itself. As Jacob Chapman (2015) notes, The show’s predominantly playful tone, interrupted by crushing drama at key moments, is comparable to many successful anime series, but feels closest to Sailor Moon in its glorification of the strengths of femininity, dilution of gender barriers, and emphasis on a wide variety of relationships between women, aimed at a family audience. Story-wise, Steven Universe uses its episodic format to develop complex ideas, symbols, and worldbuilding details into innocuous and sometimes silly stories, just like Utena.

Similarities also emerge from how they both ultimately derive from the magical girl genre. As Kumiko Saito (2014) defines it, mah¯ o sh¯ ojo [magical girl] as a genre signifies (usually serial television) anime programs in which a nine- to fourteen-year-old ordinary girl accidentally acquires supernatural power; majokko suggests the alternative setting that the female protagonist’s superhuman power derives from her pedigree as a princess of a magical kingdom or a similar scenario. In either pattern, the plot often revolves around the way she wields her power to save people from a threat while maintaining her secret identity. (145)

Steven Universe incorporates many of these magical girl dynamics. Magical girls often serve as role models for young girls, acting as powerful female characters who employ their own agency, or, in the case of Sailor Moon, use their powers for justice. In the case of Steven Universe, not only do the Crystal Gems have what humans would interpret as magical powers, but they, along with “magical boy” Steven, also fight for the defense of Earth (McDonnell 2017, 20). Sailor Moon is an inspiration beyond mere plot and world building, however. A cursory glance at relationships in both the manga and the anime series reveals many queer characters and relationships. Female characters Haruka Tenou (Sailor Uranus) and Michiru Kaiou (Sailor Neptune) serve as the most famous examples. In the manga, Michiru describes Haruka as both “male and female. She is a Guardian who possess strengths of both genders” (Takeuchi 2012, 72), which not only defies gender norms, but also leads some fans to interpret her, along with Makoto Kino (Sailor Jupiter), as trans (Wolfe 2014).

92

J. RISTOLA

The anime adaptation, particularly seasons directed by Ikuhara himself,2 added LGBTQ+ themes and imagery to the series. Ikuhara’s seasons include themes and imagery of sexuality, adolescence, and apocalypse, all subjects that he would refine in Revolutionary Girl Utena.3 When voice actor Megumi Ogata asked how to portray Haruka, Ikuhara responded that she should “act as if they are married couple” (“Rocking” 2001). The anime adaptation also adds queer coding to various characters who were not coded as such in the original manga. Zoisite and Kunzite, for instance, are antagonists at the start of the series and are specifically coded as a gay couple in the anime adaptation. While the plethora of queer characters is groundbreaking, relatively speaking, for Japanese media, Sailor Moon has been criticized for perpetuating certain gender stereotypes as well. Both Usagi and Makoto dream of being brides, for instance. Indeed, much of the later series revolves around Sailor Chibi Moon, the future daughter of Usagi and her future husband Mamoru (Saito, 157).4 These seemingly contradictory elements prompt Saito to conclude that “the supreme Sh¯ojo body does present various possibilities of power and liberation for both women and men, but these potentials materialize as ambivalent mixtures of contesting values, as exemplified by contradictory messages conveyed by metaphors of magic and transformation” (162). However, while Saito takes a more pessimistic view of the possibilities of feminine identity in magical girl series, her reading is primarily textual and does not engage with the actual animation of these series. A more productive reading of the anime Sailor Moon would acknowledge that magical girl transformation sequences can be seen as powerful metaphors of the transformative power of the feminine. Indeed, animation has immense potential as a powerfully queer art form, burgeoning with the promise and possibilities of transformation and identity formation reminiscent of José Esteban Muñoz’s work on the concept of queer futurity. As Muñoz (2009) writes, “queerness is also a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (1). The potentiality of animation and its limitless possible forms highlights its potentiality as a form of queer futurity. While Sailor Moon experiments with radically different forms of gender representation, Revolutionary Girl Utena is where Kunihiko Ikuhara envisions an alternative future, one with female-female love placed front

5

GLOBALIZING FANDOMS: ENVISIONING QUEER FUTURES …

93

and center. This centrality of lesbian love and, by extension, representation influences Steven Universe’s representation of multiple queer relationships, providing a set of images and animation gestures that embody non-normative gender roles, queer representation, and nuanced understandings of gender politics.

Revolutionary Girl Utena Female-female love is usually central to Ikuhara’s work, and this runs from Revolutionary Girl Utena’s symbolic dismantling of patriarchy to his more recent work Yuri Kuma Arashi (2015) and its critiques of lesbian stereotypes perpetuated in Japanese genre media. Steven Universe draws heavily from Ikuhara’s depiction of queer love and expression, be it through visual or thematic motifs. As one fan referenced on Ohtori.nu, the #1 fan site for all things Revolutionary Girl Utena, both series have a “diverse cast, sensitive and progressive handling of gender roles, nuanced character development, [and] canon lesbians” (“In the Rose Garden” 2015). While much of Steven Universe’s plotting and character dynamics are taken from Sailor Moon, character elements from Revolutionary Girl Utena are also visible. Pearl’s character development, for instance, is quite similar to the character arc of Anthy Himemiya. Both characters are raised to be demure and obedient, struggle with and eventually reject traditional roles of subservience, and grow into their own individual beings throughout each series. There are a bevy of motifs, themes, and other items of note that are worth exploring to illustrate Steven Universe’s influences,5 both in queer politics and in aesthetics, but I will focus here on how Utena uses the duel system to depict gender performativity within constraining political contexts. In the series, various students vie for betrothal rights, or, perhaps more accurately, ownership of Anthy Himemiya. The younger sister of the acting chairman of the academy, Anthy is known as the Rose Bride and ultimately holds the ability to unlock the “power to bring the world revolution” (Revolutionary Girl Utena 1997). This mysterious power is what Student Council members fight over in stylized duels in a hidden dueling area on campus. Utena becomes Anthy’s betrothed and fights to protect her in these ritualistic duels throughout the series as they both subtly fall in love.

94

J. RISTOLA

The duels in Revolutionary Girl Utena are sites of performance. Each duelist wears a rose on their chest, and the object of the duel is to destroy the other duelist’s rose. While the duels certainly test the physical limits of each duelist, it’s rarely ever about the duelists’ skill in combat. At the end of the series’ first arc, the Student Council Saga, it’s revealed to the audience that each duel is ultimately won not just through swordsmanship, but through self-actualization and a greater commitment to and understanding of certain values: friendship, choice, reason, love, adoration, conviction, and self. Each duelist performs their emotional turmoil within a system that is ceremoniously reiterated, and the repetition is important here: it’s all been done before. As Susan Napier (2005) notes, these duels hold “almost otherworldly emotion that is just barely controlled through the ritualized nature of the performance” (173). This system is ultimately revealed to be the machinations of Akio, the acting chairman of Ohtori Academy and Anthy’s brother, as a means of reclaiming the power of Dios, a powerful prince who first inspired Utena to become prince-like herself. By extracting the heroic virtues necessary to be a prince and infusing them into the Sword of Dios through the duels, this power is stored in the Rose Bride, the prize for the winner of every duel. Throughout the series, Akio manipulated other duelists to fight for “the power to revolutionize the world,” imbuing the sword with power. During the final duel of “revolution,” Akio takes the sword for himself and attempts to take the power of Dios, but fails; in fact, he repeated this plan countless times to no avail. The winner of the duel in the end is Anthy. Utena’s love enables her to realize that she has the power to leave the toxic, abusive system created by her brother and live a truly free life. Whereas the duel system in Revolutionary Girl Utena consists of performances where one individual stands the victor, the performance system in Steven Universe usually includes two individuals working in conjunction with each other to form a new being through a process known as fusion. Fusions, much like the duels, serve as performances of emotions. Gems usually dance together to sync with one another and fuse, though fusion can also occur during emotional catharsis, such as when Steven and Amethyst fuse in a small explosion after Steven reassures her that she is not an inferior Gem in season 3’s “Earthlings.” Fusion exceeds traditional categories and terminology around bodies, much as the use of anime influences in Steven Universe exceeds and challenges simple copying of anime and its aesthetics and tropes. Fusion, like the series’ anime

5

GLOBALIZING FANDOMS: ENVISIONING QUEER FUTURES …

95

influences, is not an over-deterministic force, but is instead generative and forms something new and creative. Both of these performative acts, duels and fusions, are constrained and shaped by strict codes of conduct. In Revolutionary Girl Utena, the structure of the duel system and the duel’s continuous occurrences are ensured by Akio, a symbol of princely masculinity pushed to its limit. Akio as a character plays a big part in the show’s central thesis: that gendered divisions such as princes and princesses should not merely be subverted, but destroyed and abandoned altogether, as they position agency and strength as specifically “masculine” traits, when everyone, regardless of gender, has agency to create change in his or her own life. Ohtori Academy, with Akio at the helm, represents the larger system of patriarchy and how it oppresses everyone through strict and oppressive gender roles. Utena, for instance, with her passion to become like a prince, wears her own unique uniform. Unlike the green and white uniforms of the school, Utena’s uniform is a black shirt with red shorts (see Fig. 5.1). Her teacher’s response, chastising Utena for wearing a “male” uniform despite it not resembling the male school uniforms whatsoever, illustrates the totalizing nature of the gender binary. Anything seen as “not female” is interpreted to be male. Akio runs the duels within this system of gender oppression, regulating them through secretive notes and having Anthy manipulate other students’ behavior to fight duels so that he may reap the empowered Sword of Dios in the end. In Steven Universe, the hegemony of Homeworld, the Crystal Gems’ original home and subsequently that of their oppressors, views the performative act of fusion quite differently than do the Crystal Gems. Fusion for Homeworld is a “practical function” only performed by Gems of the same type, usually to accrue more power (McDonnell, 125). Gems of different types (read: classes) are not allowed to fuse. The Crystal Gems reject Homeworld and its hegemonic, “oppressively conservative” ideology, embracing the fusion of individuals from different gem types and even different beings, such as Steven, a half-Gem, half-human hybrid, and his human friend Connie (McDonnell, 125). In the episodes “Off Colors” and “Lars’ Head,” we encounter the limitations being enforced on Gems as they hide from Homeworld. “Defective” Gems and fusions live together, hiding beneath the Homeworld in fear. While Garnet is arguably a representation of a lesbian couple, the series also debuted its first representation of polyamorous relationships with the character Fluorite, a fusion of six different Gems, which has been hailed as another example of

96

J. RISTOLA

Fig. 5.1 Utena’s uniform (right) differs from both the male and female school uniforms (episode 2 of Revolutionary Girl Utena)

Steven Universe “paving the way for [LGBTQ+] representation” (Brown 2017). So how do these series grapple with the toxic hegemonies that constrict their characters? In Revolutionary Girl Utena, Utena and Anthy walk away from such hegemonies of power altogether. At the end of the series, Anthy leaves Ohtori Academy in search of Utena, who was lost in the final duel. The film adaptation, Adolescence of Utena (1999), ends even more triumphantly, with Utena and Anthy embracing and kissing each other, naked, as they ride into a bright, undiscovered future. While Revolutionary Girl Utena’ s endings might seem a touch idealistic, its desire for a radical alternative future is inspiring, and Steven Universe certainly imports that spirit. Whereas Revolutionary Girl Utena encourages its audience to abandon the ideological systems of patriarchy, the Crystal Gems of Steven Universe take the next step and install a new ethics of community in their place.

5

GLOBALIZING FANDOMS: ENVISIONING QUEER FUTURES …

97

Fusion on Earth is treated differently than on Homeworld, the colonizing metropole of the Gem empire. Rejecting Homeworld’s restrictions on fusion, the Crystal Gems conceive of fusion as fostering a new community that respects the relational aspect of the act. Inter-Gem fusions are respected, and perhaps more importantly, the Crystal Gems form a community out of those whom on Homeworld would be considered outcasts. From political rebels (the original Crystal Gems who fought against the colonization of Earth), to the so-called deformed (such as Amethyst, the product of a “flawed” creation in the Gem kindergarten), to unacceptable fusions (Stevonnie and Garnet would no doubt infuriate Homeworld), Steven Universe envisions Earth as a place for putting into practice the ideal radical future that Anthy and Utena seek.

Weapons and the Materiality of the Body One of the most important motifs that Steven Universe borrows from Revolutionary Girl Utena in particular is the use of swords and other weapons as thematic symbols and physical representations of being. In Steven Universe, the Crystal Gems summon their weapons from their own gems, and they largely function as extensions of their own beings. For instance, Garnet’s melee weapons are gauntlets, representative of her blunt, no-nonsense personality, whereas Pearl’s use of slim swords and spears reflects her exacting, controlling nature. Steven’s shield is a clear extension of his desire to protect everyone and a remnant of his own mother’s protection for himself, whereas Amethyst’s whip reflects her wild, unbridled personality. As Sugar explains, “similarly to the placement of your gem, your weapon is a part of who you are” (“Steven Universe San Diego”). This weapon motif is clearly drawn from Revolutionary Girl Utena’s Sword of Dios, with Anthy acting as its vessel. While Utena is betrothed to Anthy, she wields the Sword of Dios in battle, literally drawing the blade from Anthy’s magical body for combat. In the series’ second arc, the Black Rose Saga, this motif of bodies as sheaths is expanded upon to reflect the Jungian shadows of other characters. In this arc, the duel system has been twisted by a mysterious figure named Mikage, who ultimately is a pawn in Akio’s game. Whereas duels in the first center around self-actualization and a greater grasp of virtues such as friendship, the

98

J. RISTOLA

Black Rose duels are about expunging the darker impulses that spur emotional regression, such as Wakaba’s feelings of inferiority when comparing herself to her friend Utena. Like with Anthy and her betrothed, swords are literally pulled from other characters in this arc, with sword hilt designs varying depending on from whose body the sword originated (see Fig. 5.2). Steven Universe takes this visual symbolism—that weapons represent certain character traits—and incorporates it throughout the series. Moreover, it represents a larger understanding of bodies and being that Revolutionary Girl Utena also articulates throughout its run. While gemstones

Fig. 5.2 Top: Steven pulls Rose’s sword from Lion’s head in “Lion 2: The Movie”; bottom: Utena pulls the Sword of Dios from Anthy’s body in episode 2 of Revolutionary Girl Utena

5

GLOBALIZING FANDOMS: ENVISIONING QUEER FUTURES …

99

themselves are not subject to change, save from external forces such as corruption or fissures, the projected Gem bodies are able to change and morph at will for short periods of time. The power of transformation is most used by Amethyst, from her wrestling persona “Purple Puma” to her undercover work seen in episodes like “Gem Heist.” Fusion, coupled with this power of transformation, destabilizes traditional understandings of the body as fixed and set from birth. This power of transformation, it is important to point out, is an adaptation of henshin, the term for transformation of the body in magical girl anime. Henshin is a transformation in the body that implies a change in social status, such as upward social mobility and/or, more commonly, a change in corporeal capacity, such as superhuman abilities. Such transformation is typically also done through a henshin device, such as the transformation brooch in Sailor Moon. Gemstones in Steven Universe are an adaptation of the henshin concept in magical girl anime. The gemstones that every Gem character has, such as Steven’s gem, are central to a Gem’s power: their gems are where their bodies emanate from, where they pull their weapons from, etc., and can be read as henshin devices, in that they are critical to any Gem’s powers and abilities, and directly enable such transformational abilities. While incorporating magical girl anime tropes, Steven Universe uses henshin in a few different ways to challenge traditional boundaries of embodiment. Rather that producing upward social mobility, a concept more common in earlier magical girl anime such as Himitsu no Akko-chan (1962–1965) or Creamy Mami (1983–1984), transformational powers such as fusion rebuke oppressive ideas of class and status altogether and go against traditional hierarchical structures embedded in Homeworld. Furthermore, Steven Universe elides the boundary between the henshin device and the body, as the gemstone is directly incorporated into the body itself. For Gems, their henshin devices are their bodies, as their gems produce the hard light to form their corporeal existence. When critically damaged, it is to the gems that that they return. In short, Steven Universe incorporates magical girl anime tropes and twists them to further challenge our conceptions of when the body ends and the inorganic begins. As Judith Butler (1993a) articulates in Bodies That Matter, bodies are interpolated into gender through the reiterative performance of sexual codes. Bodies, as social codes frame them, are static and unchanging within a heteronormative matrix, with LGBTQ+ bodies rejected and

100

J. RISTOLA

ostracized for disrupting this norm. But LGBTQ+ people illustrate the dissolving boundaries of such heteronormative understandings, and the characters of Steven Universe do as well. The Gems’ power to fundamentally change the boundaries of the physical body envisions a new queer future where bodies have the full freedom to exist however they want. As Donna Haraway (2000) describes, we should take “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and … [take] responsibility in their construction” (292, emphasis in original). The transformations in Steven Universe, from fusion to that of individual bodies, literalize the changing natures of our bodies and the constructed nature of gender, highlighting “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (295). Steven Universe’s recognition of materiality, its shifting borders, and its connection to the expression of being can produce greater transformational change in a world shaped by heteronormative social relations. As demonstrated above, such a queer project, both in its specific visual motifs and as a whole, has its roots in Revolutionary Girl Utena. Indeed, these political understandings of the destabilization and materiality of the body is something about which Rebecca Sugar takes inspiration from Revolutionary Girl Utena: I’m a really big fan of Revolutionary Girl Utena so I feel like I’m looking really specifically to that [genre]. What I love about that in particular is that [the transformations] physically happen—things are pulled out of peoples’ bodies, things are happening to peoples’ bodies—they’re not going somewhere else, it’s really happening right then and there in front of you. In terms of the magical girl genre, I’m especially drawn to that facet of it because I think that that stuff is really fun but there’s a point where it can even cross over from fun into this powerful escapist idea that’s part of the reality to you now. (Clemente 2013)

This focus on the materiality of the body is unique to Revolutionary Girl Utena, as such emphasis of physicality is not nearly as present in Sailor Moon nor in other magical girl anime from the 1990s onwards. As Saito notes, Whereas the magical girl genre prior to the 1990s clearly involved literal transformation of the body, usually from a small girl into an adult woman (that is, sixteen years old or older), recent magical metamorphoses rarely concern actual physical growth. Many of the magical girl anime still utilize

5

GLOBALIZING FANDOMS: ENVISIONING QUEER FUTURES …

101

the visual euphemism of transformation by adding frills or accentuating a hair style, but their morphing does not go beyond a cosmetic makeover. (157)

Whereas Sailor Moon’s transformation is primarily one of costume, and such costume changes do occur when Utena and Anthy enter the duel arenas, the emphasis on the materiality of the body stems from Revolutionary Girl Utena.6 It is this materiality of the body that supports the queer embodiment in Steven Universe and serves as a key point of interest for the fans. In short, Steven Universe gets from anime not only its particular understandings of queer corporeality but also its political queerness . Both Revolutionary Girl Utena and Steven Universe seek to dismantle oppressive structures of gender, presenting nuanced understandings of materiality and the performance of gender. Steven Universe, much like Revolutionary Girl Utena before it, envisions queer futures where the “abnormal” bodies are valued and hierarchies of bodies, gender, and class are destabilized and abandoned altogether. In this way, much of Steven Universe’ s progressive potential draws directly from the revolutionary work of Kunihiko Ikuhara. I write this not to diminish the strength of queer representation within Steven Universe, but rather to highlight how deeply anime influences American animators today. Transnational media production, circulation, and reception are shaping the American animation industry, both aesthetically and narratively. Whereas shows like Teen Titans (2003–2006), Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005–2008), and its sequel, The Legend of Korra (2012– 2014), directly incorporate anime aesthetics into their shows, Steven Universe pays homage in a different way, incorporating the very themes and motifs of the staff members’ favorite anime into their own creation. Steven Universe takes inspiration from both Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena precisely because the Crewniverse are fans of both series, and anime in general.

Fandom, Transnationalism, Globalization The Crewniverse’s love of anime is clear throughout Steven Universe, whether it be Garnet’s over-the-top training montage in reference to Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (2007) in “Garnet’s Universe” or the “Congratulations” scene from “The Test,” a direct homage to the final

102

J. RISTOLA

scene of the groundbreaking anime Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995– 1996) (Chapman). But how did Crewniverse members like Sugar get to be fans of particular foreign media in the first place, and why does their participation in fandom impact their creation of Steven Universe? It is the creators’ status as fans of anime that directly shapes Steven Universe toward critical acclaim and a strong fan following: the series’ groundbreaking aspects, such as queer representation and deep thematic explorations, are directly inspired by an appreciation for Ikuhara’s work made possible only by the dramatic expansion of the anime industry and the rise of globalization in facilitating cross-cultural exchange. Steven Universe functions as a nexus of cross-cultural exchange, taking inspiration from a variety of foreign sources and illustrating the strength of transnational flows of culture. As Steven Universe’s influences are specifically facilitated throughout the emergence of globalization, it’s important to recognize the material conditions that have shaped such exchange. As Aihwa Ong (1999) explains, “only by weaving the analysis of culture politics and political economy into a single framework can we hope to provide a nuanced delineation of the complex relationships between transnational phenomena, national regimes, and cultural practices in late modernity” (16). To better understand the fan relationships between these creators across the globe, the material conditions that support such relationships must also be investigated. Anime’s increasing global impact is buoyed by a number of factors, among them the mobilizing forces of international capital, globalizing digital technologies, and Japan’s intentional cultural exportation under the national branding of “Japan Cool” (Iwabuchi 2015, 32). The cultural import and adaptation of anime such as Sailor Moon proved to be a financially viable option for animated content on American television. As William Tsutsui (2010) explains, “an important reason why American audiences have historically had access to Japanese popular culture … [is] because it was so cheap and readily available … to serve a constantly growing American entertainment market” (41). The reasons for such affordable Japanese cultural imports, such as the long-term effects of America’s post-World War II occupation of Japan and the continual exploitative labor in anime studios, are varied and extend beyond the scope of this essay, but in addition to the possibilities of cross-cultural influences (as seen with Steven Universe), mass capitalist globalization generates numerous pitfalls as well.

5

GLOBALIZING FANDOMS: ENVISIONING QUEER FUTURES …

103

One pitfall is the deterritorialization of cultural products from their cultural contexts. The reappropriation and assimilation of anime aesthetics by American children’s animated television series such as Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005–2008) are usually underpinned by Korean animation labor. These conditions highlight an intertwining system of economic and aesthetic expropriation by American entertainment industries that traffics in Orientalism, “a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’)” (Said 1978, 51). Steven Universe too relies on Korean animation studios, Rough Draft Korea and Sunmin Image Pictures Company, but while the Crewniverse loves anime, they do not recreate an anime aesthetic itself, instead creating a unique aesthetic and world with character design influenced by diverse sources including Afrofuturism and Bauhaus design (McDonnell, 80). Sugar’s background as a fan of various forms of animation, including anime, also connects her to her audience. Sugar’s relationship with anime began with her father, who introduced Sugar and her brother Steven to various foreign animation, including anime (“Interview”) and its magical girl deconstructionist masterpieces Revolutionary Girl Utena and Princess Tutu (McDonnell, 18), and she has talked about how fandom is a powerful relationship between art and audiences: “I relate very, very much to the fans of the show, because growing up, I was a very extreme fan of cartoons. The cartoons I loved were such a huge source of strength for me. So with this show, I always wanted it to be something that could be a part of someone’s life in that way, a source of strength” (Opam 2017). As Sugar notes, “Animation is such an incredible tool when it comes to making characters that the audience can empathize with … My intent was to grow and to learn about myself and other people, and to forge relationships with the show. Me being a fan forged so many of my relationships” (Opam). This fan relation extends to Ikuhara as well, who was inspired by the gender-bending manga and anime The Rose of Versailles (1979–1980), the story of Oscar François de Jarjayes, a woman raised as a man to become the leader of the palace guards at Versailles. Tracing this genealogy of fandom from The Rose of Versailles to Ikuhara to Sugar to Steven Universe illustrates the impact of globalization and transnational flows of culture on media creation today. Such creation also emerges from deeper understandings of fan practices and relationships with popular culture, another force that drastically shapes the content of Steven Universe toward broader understandings of community and relationships.

104

J. RISTOLA

Fandom and Its Impact on Steven Universe Sugar and Steven Universe’s relationship to anime like Sailor Moon significantly informs the series’ understanding of relationships and fandom. From subtle references, such as Pearl owning a violin and a mirror in homage to Sailor Neptune, to outright celebration, such as Steven canonically being a fan of Sailor Moon, Steven Universe situates Steven and other characters as fans, as avid consumers of pop culture and fandom (Smith 2015; see also Ziegler and Richards, Chapter 6). As Mark Duffett (2013) describes, “media fandom is the recognition of a positive, personal, relatively deep, emotional connection with a mediated element of popular culture” (24). A fan will participate in various aspects of a work of media’s fandom with dedicated consumption of materials such as merchandise, art books, and more. Steven, for instance, owns a copy of a Sailor Moon tank¯obon (a volume of manga) in “House Guest” and collects merchandise such as Guys and their rarer counterpart, Gals, a reference to gachapon toy vending machines popular in Japan (Chapman). Such affinity for consumption practices illustrates how Steven Universe takes inspiration from Sailor Moon in another way, namely through the commodities that surround the magical girl genre. As Bryan Hikari Hartzheim (2016) notes, “viewers [of magical girl series] are encouraged to participate in the consumption of the property, but through a wide variety of media—from the animation of the television show to theatrical films to live performances—that in essence are a way for fans to channel their direct sponsorship of the series” (1081). In short, the magical girl genre can be understood in another way, as a nexus of experiences, from the televised series and movies to toys and costumes. With merchandise, video games, web shorts, and more, Steven Universe also aligns with this experiential framework, with the fandom engaging with series content through a variety of modes. But being a fan often means not only engaging in consumer practices such as buying merchandise (licensed or otherwise) but also producing fandom materials. As Henry Jenkins (1992) observes, “fans do not simply consume preproduced stories; they manufacture their own fanzine stories and novels, art prints, songs, videos, performances, etc.” (46). Steven participates in fan creation, for example, self-filming a reaction video for one of his favorite shows, Crying Breakfast Friends! (“Steven Universe | Webisode”). Outside of the series, Sugar encourages her fans to engage in creative expression by “absorbing everything you see” and

5

GLOBALIZING FANDOMS: ENVISIONING QUEER FUTURES …

105

expressing it through creativity, reflecting her own fan and creative practices (Sugar). Fandom, from its consumption to production practices, is encouraged by the show and also shapes the series’ understanding of relationships. Steven bonds with his estranged (or perhaps just strange) friend Onion over Guys collectibles in “Onion Friend,” while Amethyst bonds with Steven’s father, Greg, over binge-watching their favorite sitcom, Lil’ Butler, in “Maximum Capacity.” The show does not merely represent fan practices through surface clichés but rather illustrates a deeper understanding of fan practices and rituals deriving from the Crewniverse’s own participation in fandom subculture. This presentation encourages audiences to participate in the show’s fan community and strengthens their emotional bond with the show, extending the themes of the show into the real world.

Roland Barthes, Fandom, and Audience Interactions While the Crewniverse are generally fans of anime, a kind of fandom supported through the spread of anime by globalization, they also understand fandom as both a form of audience and a kind of relationship. Sugar notes that being a fan makes you feel like you know your favorite artists and creates an intimate connection unique to fandom (Thurm 2017). The Crewniverse and individual creators such as Rebecca Sugar and Ian Jones-Quartey have their own accounts on Tumblr, a popular social media site, particularly for fandoms, opening up sites for discourse between the Crewniverse and the fans. Sugar initially became well known in online communities for her fan art (or perhaps more famously, her Ed, Edd, & Eddy porn). Sugar mentions in multiple interviews that her understanding of fandom as a relationship is shaped by Barthes’ book A Lover’s Discourse. As Sugar interprets, Barthes “describes this concept called an ‘imagerepertoire.’ When you have a relationship with someone, your relationship is linked to an image of that person, and the [ideas that] you associate with that person” (Opam). Similar to Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary (Allen 2003, 109), it is in essence “a series of images that become inexorably linked to a person you love, and that essentially become the thing you fall for” (Thurm, emphasis in original). As Sugar describes, Barthes’ concept is easily adapted to the concept of fandom. Barthes (1977) asserts that “this discourse is spoken, perhaps, by

106

J. RISTOLA

thousands of subjects” (2). One can read this discourse as one made for and by fans, a discourse of affinity and affection that forms the bedrock of fandom itself, as Barthes notes that this discourse “has no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of an affirmation” (2, emphasis in original). Other passages appear to influence the creation of Steven Universe and its rejection of heteronormativity; Barthes writes that “figures cannot be clas sified: organized, hierarchized, arranged with a view to an end (a settlement)” (7–8, emphasis in original). One can see inspiration for fusion in another passage of A Lover’s Discourse. Barthes writes, for instance, that in a lover’s discourse, “a third skin unites us” (75), poetic imagery that describes fusion as well. Barthes continues to entwine tactile imagery with the concept of relationships and communication, writing that “language is a skin: I rub my language” (73), suggesting that communication, particularly in relationships, is tactile and physical; it is alive. This kind of sensual materiality of communication and embodiment is very much in line with Steven Universe, where relationships take a material form with fusion. While some of Barthes’ musings on the significance of “union” within such discourse appear resoundingly heteronormative and incredibly limited in terms of gender expression and identity, we must also acknowledge that Barthes died as a closeted gay man and that, while he “never [wrote] explicitly, definitively as a gay man … [his] homosexuality hovers over and resonates through many of his major texts” (Allen, 98), such as A Lover’s Discourse. As Pierre Saint-Amand et al. (1996) note, “Barthes’s sexuality may be problematic, not so much because of what it represses, but because of the complex distance Barthes puts between himself and sex” (157). His assessment of gender-defying beings such as “the hermaphrodite or the androgyne” leads Barthes to reject them as “monstrous, grotesque, improbable bod[ies]” (Barthes, 227). But such “improbable bodies” are the very subject of Steven Universe and its understanding of queer embodiment. While Sugar’s admiration of Barthes engages with her conception of fandom, her adaptation of its understanding of embodiment is radically different in execution from Barthes, producing results that dramatically shape the impact of Steven Universe in terms of queer representation. Barthes’ work in another seminal text, “Death of the Author” (1967), is also useful in reading Sugar’s relationship to fandom. Barthes argues for textual readings that do not rely on the author, their biography, or, perhaps most significantly, their authorial intent. For Barthes, “to give

5

GLOBALIZING FANDOMS: ENVISIONING QUEER FUTURES …

107

an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing” (5). Instead, Barthes argues for a radical opening of textual interpretation devoid of the figure of the author, creating, ideally, an equal playing field for all readers to interpret the text. Both fans and academics use Barthes’ “Death of the Author” to argue for the importance of fan cultures and derivative works. What is so salient about the concept is how it decenters power from the author and gives it to fans to create works within the fictional world that the author initially created. A more decentered relationship to authorial power is arguably what Sugar creates in her development of Steven Universe and her relationship to its fandom. Sugar notes in various interviews that she started participating in fan activities such as conventions as a fan, and only later as a creator, indicating her expertise on fandom and its activities. More importantly, she specifically structured Steven Universe to create space for fan interaction. Sugar notes that, in the process of character designing for the show, the Crewniverse wanted “a huge range of looks for characters that could create a huge range of looks for cosplay” (“Rebecca Sugar on Success”). This includes not only styles, but body types as well. These gestures are just a sample of the open relationship between the text and the fandom, inviting participation and interpretation from Sugar’s fans to produce rhizomatic connections of meaning.

Conclusion: Envisioning Queer Futures Representation matters. As Kathleen M. Ryan and Deborah A. Macey (2013) note, representation on television “can offer viewers a way to understand the rituals and norms of their own society” (7). Unfortunately, heteronormative assumptions still pervade traditional media, as Sugar notes: “[LGBTQ+] stories are not considered appropriate, are not considered G-rated content, and because they’re not, they’re kept out of media for kids. And I think that that is profoundly sad and awful” (Segal 2016). Steven Universe, through its fan-inflected anime inspiration and its commitment to LGBTQ+ representation, has attracted committed fans to the series, many of whom articulate how the series has profoundly shaped their lives. “I’ve learned to accept myself more” said one emotional fan to Rebecca Sugar at New York’s Comic Con in 2016 (Thurm). Sugar comments that “a lot of [the Crewniverse] are coming from a place where cartoons meant so much to us … and we’re really aware about how a cartoon can change who you are as a person and can also be this binding

108

J. RISTOLA

force between you and other people. It can forge connections with other people. We’re very conscious of that as we’re writing because it’s hard to separate a love of cartoons from just how we feel about everything” (Brown 2016). She notes that the desire to see LGBTQ+ representation in television also comes from within. As Aileen Wang (2017) notes, “to see yourself reflected in the media you consume, is to have your existence validated. To see yourself represented thoughtfully, with complexity and authenticity, is to have your humanity validated.” As a bisexual, nonbinary woman, Sugar emphasized this desire for media representation, saying, “I wanna feel like I exist, and I want everyone else who wants to feel that way to feel that way too” (“Steven Universe San Diego”). Creators of media are also consumers, their tastes often reified and concretized on the glowing screen. As both a creator and a fan influenced by the transnational reach of anime, Rebecca Sugar takes Steven Universe into new and inspiring directions in terms of queer embodiment and representation. Transnational fandom serves as a powerful connection between animators and audiences, bringing them together to celebrate new forms of embodiment made possible through animation.7 Butler (2004) articulates the necessity of transformational change in societal and cultural norms, asserting that “although we need norms in order to live, and to live well, and to know in what direction to transform our social world, we are also constrained by norms in ways that sometimes do violence to us and which, for reasons of social justice, we must oppose” (206). Or, as Garnet sings, “I will fight for the place I’m free to live together and exist as me” (“Steven Universe: We Are”). Both Ikuhara and Sugar envision radical futures as a means of escape from and an alternative to toxic gender norms. Much like Utena and Anthy leave Ohtori Academy, the Crystal Gems have escaped to Earth, searching for a better place for queer desire and imagination. In seeking new places of queer existence and expression, each series channels queer futurity, as Muñoz notes that “queerness is an ideality … the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (1). While such escape from heteronormativity is not easily attained, as “freedom, possibility, agency do not have an abstract or pre-social status, but are always negotiated within a matrix of power” (Butler 1993b, 22), such visions are what animate audiences today to agitate for social change and acceptance of LGBTQ+ people. Steven Universe illustrates the importance of fighting for such a future by fostering desired communities on Earth. As Josh Kramer (2017) articulates, “Earth is the one place in the universe where Gems can decide to

5

GLOBALIZING FANDOMS: ENVISIONING QUEER FUTURES …

109

become something besides what they are expected to be. For the Crystal Gems in Beach City, that has meant becoming a family.” The Crystal Gems are an intergalactic family of outcasts, queers, aliens, and children. It is only fitting that Steven Universe also produces a family, one that is transnational and full of fans, queers, allies, and animators, all yearning toward a better future for LGBTQ+ peoples.

Notes 1. Sailor Moon creator Naoko Takeuchi names many of her characters after gemstones and minerals throughout the series, such as the villainous Queen Beryl. 2. Working as an episode director before getting promoted to series director, Ikuhara then directed the majority of the seasons in the Sailor Moon anime adaptation, including Sailor Moon R (1993–1994), Sailor Moon S (1994– 1995), and Sailor Moon SuperS (1995–1996), as well as the Sailor Moon R: The Film (1993). 3. While an expansive look at all of Ikuhara’s influences in Sailor Moon is outside the purview of this essay, suffice it to say that Ikuhara’s influence continues in the recent anime adaptation Sailor Moon Crystal (2014–2016), with shadow puppet and silhouette title cards reminiscent of Ikuhara’s penchant for shadow puppet imagery. 4. Interestingly, some of the more daring gender-defying moments in the Sailor Moon anime adaptation occur before or after Kunihiko Ikuhara was chief director of the series, such as the gender transformations of the Sailor Starlights in Sailor Stars. For simplicity’s sake, I would like to mention the wonderful work of directors Junichi Sato and Takuya Igarashi in adapting the anime series and pushing representations of gender in new and exciting ways. 5. For instance, the prevalence of body possession/swapping in Steven Universe, which also occurs in Revolutionary Girl Utena, is indicative of the ways in which Revolutionary Girl Utena shapes Steven Universe’s representation of bodies. 6. Notably, bodily transformations do occur in the series. Transformations, such as Anthy and Utena exchanging bodies or Student Council member Nanami turning into a cow, are done for both comedic and thematic effect. 7. These circuits of fandom extend back to Japan as well. Studio Trigger animator Takafumi Hori (also guest animator for “Mindful Education”), for instance, is a vocal fan of Steven Universe and makes fan art of its characters, illustrating the dispersed flows of cross-cultural exchange associated with the series.

110

J. RISTOLA

References Allen, Graham. 2003. Roland Barthes. New York: Routledge. Barthes, Roland. 1967. “Death of the Author.” Available from https://writing. upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf. Barthes, Roland. 1977. A Lover’s Discourse. New York: Penguin Books. Brown, Tracey. 2016. “Rebecca Sugar on Finding That ‘Steven Universe Feeling’ and the Future of the Verse.” Los Angeles Times . Last modified May 6. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/herocomplex/la-et-hcsteven-universe-rebecca-sugar-20160512-snap-story.html. ———. 2017. “‘Steven Universe’s’ Rebecca Sugar Confirms Flourite Is a Representation of a Polyamorous Relationship.” Los Angeles Times. Last modified July 21. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-comic-con-2017steven-universe-rebecca-sugar-fluorite-1500664224-htmlstory.html. Butler, Judith. 1993a. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. ———. 1993b. “Critically Queer.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (1): 17–32. ———. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Chapman, Jacob. 2015. “Why Are Anime Fans Obsessed with Steven Universe?” Anime News Network. Last modified July 31. http://www. animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2015-07-31/why-are-anime-fans-obsessedwith-steven-universe/.91130. Clemente, Zachary. 2013. “NYCC ’13 Interview with Rebecca Sugar & Ian Jones-Quartey.” Amazing Stories. Last modified October 21. https:// amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/10/sw-23-4-nycc-13-interview-rebeccasugar-ian-jones-quartey/. Duffett, Mark. 2013. Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Haraway, Donna. 2000. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, 291–324. New York: Routledge. Hartzheim, Bryan Hikari. 2016. “Pretty Cure and the Magical Girl Media Mix.” The Journal of Popular Culture 45 (5): 1059–1085. Howe-Smith, Nia. 2015. “‘Steven Universe’ Creator on Growing Up, Gender Politics, Her Brother.” Entertainment Weekly. Last modified June 15. http://ew.com/article/2015/06/15/steven-universe-creatorgrowing-gender-politics-her-brother/. “In the Rose Garden.” 2015. Empty Movement. Last modified May 31. http:// forums.ohtori.nu/viewtopic.php?pid=267321#p267321. “Interview: Steven Universe Creator Rebecca Sugar.” YouTube Video, 5:05. Posted on June 6, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9rQlh0KxYo.

5

GLOBALIZING FANDOMS: ENVISIONING QUEER FUTURES …

111

Iwabuchi, Koichi. 2015. Resilient Borders and Cultural Diversity: Internationalism, Brand Nationalism, and Multiculturalism in Japan. Lanham, US: Lexington Books. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York and London: Routledge. Kramer, Josh. 2017. “The Hidden Message in the Architecture of Steven Universe.” The Atlantic. Last modified July 12. https://www.theatlantic. com/entertainment/archive/2017/07/the-peculiarly-magical-architectureof-steven-universe/533202/. McDonnell, Chris. 2017. Steven Universe: Art & Origins. New York: Abrams. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York and London: NYU Press. Napier, Susan. 2005. Anime: from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Opam, Kwame. 2017. “Steven Universe Rebecca Sugar on Animation and the Power of Empathy.” The Verge. Last modified June 1. https://www. theverge.com/2017/6/1/15657682/steven-universe-rebecca-sugar-cartoonnetwork-animation-interview. Revolutionary Girl Utena. 1997. Episode 1-1, “The Rose Bride.” Directed by Toru Takahasi and written by Yoji Enokido. Aired April 2, on TV Tokyo. YouTube video, 23:27. Posted by Nozomi Entertainment, November 1, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TQFlVcPyUA. “Rocking the Boat: Q&A.” 2001. Akadot. Last modified April 27. https://web. archive.org/web/20080623173408/http://www.akadot.com/story.php? id=31. Ryan, Kathleen M., and Deborah A. Macey. 2013. “Introduction.” In Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation, edited by Kathleen M. Ryan and Deborah A. Macey, 1–10. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Saint-Amand, Pierre, Charles A. Porter, and Noah Guynn. 1996. “The Secretive Body: Roland Barthes’s Gay Erotics.” Yale French Studies 90: 153–171. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge. Saito, Kumiko. 2014. “Magic, Sh¯ ojo, and Metamorphosis: Magical Girl Anime and the Challenges of Changing Gender.” The Journal of Asian Studies 73 (1): 143–164. Segal, Corinne. 2016. “Rebeca Sugar, Cartoon Network’s First Female Creator, on Writing LGBTQ Stories for Kids.” PBS. Last modified September 4. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/rebecca-sugar-steven-universe-lgtbq/.

112

J. RISTOLA

Smith, Zack. 2015. “Steven Universe: The Interview.” Newsarama. Last modified January 7. https://www.newsarama.com/23160-steven-universe-thecharacter-on-steven-universe-the-series.html. “Steven Universe Creator Rebecca Sugar on Success | San Diego Comic-Con 2017 | SYFY WIRE.” YouTube Video, 3:30. Posted on July 23, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObumAXwyS6Y. “Steven Universe San Diego Comic-Con 2016 Part 2: The Actual Panel.” YouTube Video, 46:48. Posted on July 24, 2016. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=jYuqG9IW32A. “Steven Universe: We Are The Crystal Gems—Music Video (Extended Intro).” YouTube Video, 3:14, Cartoon Network Asia. Posted on June 21 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-Z7ytsEZDo. “Steven Universe | Webisode: Steven Reacts | Cartoon Network Africa.” YouTube Video, 2:48. Posted on March 10, 2017. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Y2HlTlr-Ons. Sugar, Rebecca. (@rebeccasugar). Tweet. October 21, 2016. https://twitter. com/rebeccasugar/status/789691618144104448. Takeuchi, Naoko. 2012. Sailor Moon, vol. 7. New York: Kodansha Comics. Tsutsui, William. 2010. Japanese Popular Culture and Globalization. Ann Arbor, MI: Association of Asian Studies. Thurm, Eric. 2017. “‘Steven Universe’: How Rebecca Sugar Turned TV’s Most Empathetic Cartoon Into an Empire.” Rolling Stone. Last modified June 7. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rebecca-sugars-steven-universe-is-acartoon-empire-w485887. Wang, Aileen. 2017. “‘All Ages’ Means ALL Ages: For Adults Who Watch Kids’ Cartoons.” glaad. Last modified August 9. https://www.glaad.org/blog/allages-means-all-ages-adults-who-watch-kids-cartoons. Wolfe, Tash. 2014. “Visual Representation: Trans Characters in Manga.” The Mary Sue. Last modified December 28. https://www.themarysue.com/transcharacters-in-manga/.

Episodes Referenced “Earthlings” (season 3, episode 23, 2016) “Garnet’s Universe” (season 1, episode 33, 2014) “Gem Heist” (season 4, episode 12, 2017) “Maximum Capacity” (season 1, episode 43, 2015) “The Test” (season 1, episode 38, 2015)

CHAPTER 6

“Truth Is a Feeling in Your Gut”: Ronaldo Fryman, Conspiracy Theories, and Media Satire John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

Ronaldo Fryman is the self-appointed chronicler of all things weird in Steven Universe’s Beach City. In many ways, Ronaldo, who lives at the fringe of a community built around the Crystal Gems, fits the current realworld stereotypical characteristics of the American conspiracy theorist. He is a relatively disempowered, young, straight male who uses the Internet to disseminate his interpretations of and speculations about events under the label of truths revealed. While this association might evoke such ethically and morally reprehensible examples as Sandy Hook truthers, Steven Universe, with its alien Gems and space travel, employs at least some of the trappings of science fiction, and in science-fiction media, the believer

J. R. Ziegler (B) English Department, Bronx Community College, CUNY, Bronx, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] L. Richards English Department, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, Long Island City, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. R. Ziegler and L. Richards (eds.), Representation in Steven Universe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9_6

113

114

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

in conspiracies often is or becomes the hero. Whether it’s Fox Mulder against governmental conspiracy in The X-Files , Sarah Manning and her sisters against corporate conspiracy in Orphan Black, or Neo discovering that his entire world is based on a conspiracy in The Matrix, science fiction television and film are replete with protagonists whose conviction that shadowy forces are orchestrating events from behind the scenes is ultimately proved correct. In a parallel, many children’s and young adult science-fiction books since the 2000s “concentrate on children and teens rejecting adult authority because such authority was simply not in their interests or was deliberately malicious” (Mendlesohn 2009, 93). In such narratives, the conspiracists’ stubborn, unyielding conviction of their own rightness elevates them to something like modern, secular versions of the old Christian martyrs. Only they know the truth, and only the truth can save humanity. However, Ronaldo does not fit this heroic template, and the ambivalence with which the Steven Universe franchise treats his immersion in conspiracy theorizing presents a more critical view of the figure of the conspiracist than much science fiction does. When he is not working the deep fryer at his father’s small business, he is investigating and publishing his findings and theories regarding all of the strange occurrences in Beach City. His blog, Keep Beach City Weird, claims to be a source of hidden truth and is introduced when an awestruck Ronaldo snaps a smartphone picture for it of Steven’s shapeshifted cat fingers in season 1’s “Cat Fingers.” While Beach City is, in fact, very weird, the show consistently presents Ronaldo’s theorizing as partly correct at best and as sometimes leading to negative consequences. Further, it shows Ronaldo’s sense of self to be tied up in his conspiracy theorizing, and both his theorizing and sense of self to be tied up in his own narcissism. The result of this portrayal is a critical pastiche of the traditionally heroic sci-fi conspiracist. Satire is not the only way in which the show engages with Ronaldo’s obsessive hobby, though. Steven Universe’s representation of conspiracy theorists— in the cartoon itself, but also in the real-world Tumblr blog and book Keep Beach City Weird, both transmedia paratexts that are attributed to Ronaldo—plays on this lack of distinction between conspiracy theories and more mainstream modes of thought and media like celebrity gossip culture and Internet fandom, including the show’s own fan community and its fan-authored paratexts.1

6

“TRUTH IS A FEELING IN YOUR GUT” …

115

Ronaldo and Conspiracy Theories While science fiction has an extensive tradition of conspiracist heroes that has by no means ended, the Steven Universe franchise’s more critical presentation of the conspiracy theorist perhaps reflects the increased visibility of such figures as damaging forces in American culture and politics. The #PizzaGate theory, for example, which argued that Hillary Clinton and other Democrats were running a child-trafficking ring out of the basement of a Washington, DC, pizza shop, appeared, evolved, and spread through a combination of Wikileaks, Reddit, 4Chan, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. It eventually inspired one man to discharge a firearm in the pizza shop as part of his quest to save these non-existent children (Aisch et al. 2016), and it contributed to the rise of the “deep state”-focused QAnon conspiracy theory, which has gained a visible presence at Presidential rallies (McCarthy 2018). Within this same period, controversy arose over the decision by Megyn Kelly to interview rightwing conspiracist Alex Jones, who has claimed that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was a staged event, on her NBC show, with the NBC affiliate in Newtown refusing to air the segment (Miller 2017). The student survivors of the February 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, were similarly and rapidly branded as paid “crisis actors” by Jones and numerous other Internet conspiracists (Arkin and Popken 2018). This current vein of conspiracy theory is more directly and immediately harmful than claims about fake moon landings, Area 51, or who shot JFK, and with these types of people and claims, driven by the Internet, having become the most prominent examples of conspiracy theorizing, it is perhaps unsurprising that progressive transmedia storytelling like that of Steven Universe would choose to critique rather than embrace its own resident conspiracist. One of the franchise’s primary modes of critique operates through Ronaldo consistently being at best only partially correct in his explanations of strange events, thereby satirizing both contemporary real-life and traditionally heroic sci-fi conspiracists. This critique occurs across various instances of Ronaldo’s transmediality, the “transference of characters and narrative across different media platforms” (Geraghty 2015, 6). In the book version of his blog, for instance, Ronaldo at one point misinterprets tremors caused by the Cluster, an engineered fusion of millions of shards of Gems at the center of the Earth meant to function as an apocalyptic weapon, claiming to have emailed “a couple of seismology publications” to propose the coincidentally accurate name “Cluster Quakes” but

116

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

to have been rejected (Burnett and Levin 2017, loc. 80). In the face of rejection by experts, he asserts the superiority of his own knowledge to theirs: “But it doesn’t matter what the ‘ologists’ think, because there’s something more sinister than shifting tectonic plates happening here. I believe, at the center of the Earth, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of Rock People … HAVING A PARTY!” (loc. 81). He continues, “Like most parties, I wasn’t invited. Probably because I don’t have pebbles for blood. The Rock People must’ve been celebrating something big, because I could feel that music booming all the way up on the surface. I fear it was a celebration of the commencement of their CONQUEST OF EARTH” (loc. 81). Like many conspiracy theorists, he assembles some accurate pieces of evidence in support of an inaccurate thesis.2 He is correct that there is a “more sinister” cause, and even correct that “Rock People” are to blame, if we allow Rock People to stand in for Gems, but, of course, these tortured fragments of Gems are about as far from having a party as possible (and are set to lead to Earth’s complete destruction rather than its conquest). Furthermore, Ronaldo’s disdain for “what the ‘ologists’ think” evokes, for example, the conviction of anti-vaccination conspiracists that their own “research” has uncovered a truth that trained scientists are actively concealing. His remark that he doesn’t have “pebbles for blood” also participates in the biological Othering common in the strain of reptile people conspiracy theories addressed below. At an earlier point, Ronaldo constructs a similarly inaccurate theory from his observation of a different Gem weapon. In “Laser Light Cannon,” a large, autonomous, spherical Crystal Gem craft called a Red Eye appears over the ocean off of Beach City and, as it begins to exert a powerful vacuuming force, is destroyed by the titular cannon. In a complementary Tumblr post, Ronaldo, who does not appear in the episode, records the blood-red sky and incredibly high winds that accompanied this event, saying, “My little brother blamed global warming for the storm, but I know the TRUTH” (keepbeachcityweird 2013a). He argues that the “GIANT EYEBALL THINGY” in the sky was the Apollo 11 landing module, repurposed by the vampires whose exile had been the real, secret purpose of the 1969 moon landing. While he is correct that the anomalous storm was caused by a spaceship, the rest of his theory, which indirectly satirizes claims that the moon landing was faked, is more than a little off-base. James Darsey (2002) observes that arguments based on science and technology are increasingly “susceptible to conspiratorial

6

“TRUTH IS A FEELING IN YOUR GUT” …

117

interpretation” (471). He explains that the public sees the mystery created by its difficulties in interpreting science as a malign secrecy and that scientists have in common with secret organizations “the exclusivity, the private language, the power of collective action without accountability or oversight” (475, 477). The Crystal Gems themselves and those privy to their secrets could be described in the same way. The most extensive in-show critique of Ronaldo’s conspiracy theorizing via his misinterpretation, which occurs in the episode “Keep Beach City Weird,” also engages most directly with the type of reasoning that Darsey describes, as well as with some of the most well-known secretorganization theories. Tyson Lewis and Richard Kahn (2005) discuss British conspiracist David Icke, whom they note calls himself the world’s most controversial author and speaker, as a high-profile proponent of the reptile people conspiracy theory (45). Icke claims that alien Aryan hybrid lizards have been world leaders throughout history and that these reptile people run the Illuminati, which in turn controls such international organizations as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations (51–52). The elements of this narrative have all achieved enough exposure so as to become stereotypes and are often invoked mockingly; while many may mock it, though, Lewis and Kahn argue that the reptile people theory is “evidence of a popular dystopianism” in reaction to “fear and discontent” around issues such as “global imperialism and transnational capitalism” (45).3 In Lewis and Kahn’s estimation, belief in reptile people represents a major global counter-cultural trend, with adherents both on the extreme left and extreme right (46). They observe that alien conspiracy culture, influenced by historical context and reflected in media including film and television, is a post-World War II, Cold War phenomenon. In the 1950s, aliens were represented as helpful, but became harmful in the 1960s and 1970s, were joined with political conspiracy theories in the 1980s, and became extremely popular in the 1990s, coinciding with the growth of the concept of the New World Order (46–48).4 A 2013 poll showed that today, about 4% of Americans, or around 12.5 million people, believe that lizard people control politics (Bump 2013).5 Lewis and Kahn assert that conspiracy theories are part of an attempt “to regain a sense of political agency,” and one could argue that Ronaldo is someone who is susceptible to feelings of disempowerment (55). Aside from feeling like he is not invited to “most parties” (Burnett and Levin, loc. 81), he is young, works a menial job, albeit in a small business owned

118

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

by his father (a single parent), and, in contrast to Steven, lacks the ability to defend himself against or accurately understand the strange, often dangerous occurrences in Beach City. In the episode “Rising Tides/Crashing Skies,” it is Ronaldo’s father, “Mr. Fryman, who expresses a sense of powerlessness that Ronaldo spends the episode trying to ignore. He [Mr. Fryman] is legitimately concerned about the monsters that keep attacking his town, and frankly, he is right to be worried” (Thurm 2015c). Unlike his father, who is comfortable expressing his anxiety, Ronaldo attempts to conceal or deal with his feelings of powerlessness by channeling them into his conspiracy theorizing. When we first see Ronaldo in the episode “Keep Beach City Weird,” he has assumed trappings of power: he is dressed in military-looking garb on the beach and tells Steven that it is a restricted zone. As he takes pictures of mysterious holes in a cliffface that he declares must have an explanation beyond coincidence, he also tells Steven that he should be following Ronaldo’s blog. Ronaldo’s display of authority is undercut by his little brother Petey informing him that their father wants him back at work. Instead, Ronaldo gets Petey to cover for him and invites Steven to “get your hands really dirty.” Ronaldo asserts that the world is stranger than most people realize and uses the empowerment of insider status to appeal to Steven, telling him that they are alike, meaning in their awareness of hidden truths, and that Steven is someone whom he can trust. Ronaldo then claims that he has discovered the cause of Beach City’s paranormal activity. Rather than lizard people, “Snake people,” he says, “or sneeple, control our government at the highest level.” He then proceeds to interpret the back of the show’s version of a dollar bill to support his hypothesis. However, he is not sure what the diamond that appears there stands for, so he dismisses a potential error in his theory by saying that the details aren’t important. He remains convinced that the snake people pit mammals against each other in “elections, sports, and anime message boards” to distract us from the fact that the world is under their control. Lewis and Kahn argue that human/animal hybridity and its challenge of boundaries can be seen either as threatening or emancipatory, but also that the reptile people versus sheeple conspiracy theorizing uses the alien-animal hybrid in order to create a critical estrangement that allows human evils to be projected onto nonhuman others and thereby cleansed (60–61). Thus, it is unsurprising that Steven Universe, a franchise that embraces moral complexity and hybridity, including in its half-alien protagonist, satirizes this type of simplistic solution to anxieties about Others.

6

“TRUTH IS A FEELING IN YOUR GUT” …

119

Despite the inaccuracy of Ronaldo’s snake people theory, which is obvious to the audience, Steven accepts it, but when he returns home, Crystal Gems Amethyst and Pearl quickly recount the accurate explanations, which are actually stranger than Ronaldo’s fictions and larger in scale. The holes in the rock, for example, are the result of a fight that the Gems had been involved in, and the crystalline fragments in the sidewalk, which Ronaldo had suggested grew up from the ground when Steven asked if they fell from the sky, are actually debris from the explosion of the Red Eye in “Laser Light Cannon.” Directly after this conversation, we see Ronaldo attempting to interpret a crater on the beach from the game of shapeshifting tag that opened the episode as a sign from the snake people. Despite Steven revealing to Ronaldo what Amethyst and Pearl have just told him, Ronaldo chides Steven not to get hung up on minor facts because truth is about more than that. As he defines it, “Truth is a feeling in your gut that you know is true. Truth is searching for anything that proves you’re right, no matter how small, and holding on to that, no matter what.” Steven, looking uncomfortable, says that that sounds like the opposite of truth, and Ronaldo, pulling a cast from the crater that contains an imprint of Steven, realizes that his theory is inaccurate, is immediately deflated, and symbolically tosses and shatters the cast as he walks away. Steven feels guilty when he sees that Ronaldo has shut down his blog, but Pearl’s rejoinder could be seen as the episode’s thesis about conspiracy theorizing: “Humans just lead short, boring, insignificant lives, so they make up stories to feel like they’re a part of something bigger. They want to blame all the world’s problems on some single enemy they can fight instead of a complex network of interrelated forces beyond anyone’s control.”6 The conversation concludes with a mix of sympathy and critique. Amethyst adds, “It’s sad. And funny,” to which Pearl responds, “Don’t feel bad about it, ok? It’s not like he was ever going to be right.” In addition to depicting Ronaldo as misrepresenting rather than revealing objective truth, another way that Steven Universe critiques conspiracy theorizing is by portraying it as potentially damaging as well as selfcentered, and thus counter to the values that the franchise promotes. One might contrast Ronaldo’s drive to acquire secrets, for example, with Steven’s much greater concern in “Frybo”—which features the first appearance, albeit brief and without dialogue, of Ronaldo—with where his pants are than with Pearl’s half-heeded explanation of the dangerous properties of some alien shards. Steven, unlike Ronaldo, does not let the need to explain larger mysteries dominate or devalue his experience of

120

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

everyday life, and positioning the unknown location of Steven’s pants as more important than the unknown properties of objects from outer space undermines the seriousness with which Ronaldo regards himself. More significantly, Ronaldo’s obsession with snake people leads to physical violence: When Steven decides to “fix” Ronaldo by dressing up in a snake person costume and going to Ronaldo’s place of work to persuade him that these reptilian overlords are in fact real, a sweaty, maniacally laughing Ronaldo immediately knocks Steven out. While Ronaldo uses a potato, rather than, say, a rock here (it is, after all, a children’s cartoon), he still commits a violent act against the protagonist and follows it by chaining Steven up in a lighthouse to examine him. In a parody of the sci-fi trope of a character requesting to be killed if something goes wrong, Ronaldo gives Petey, who is videotaping the examination, another potato to hit him with in case he is turned into a host vessel. This suggestion of violence becomes actual violence when the Crystal Gems burst through the wall to rescue Steven. Ronaldo calls them snake people before they kick him, strike him with a wooden barrel, and otherwise injure him. They are clearly ready to continue to physically harm him when Steven stops the fighting. In short, Ronaldo’s need for his theories to be correct places his family, his friends, and himself in danger. The narcissism inherent in this need is seen in Ronaldo’s definition of truth as searching for anything that proves one right and in Pearl’s comment that humans need to feel significant, and it is further underscored in the lighthouse scene. When Petey cries in reaction to the idea of his brother becoming an alien host, Ronaldo tells him that he needs to look at big picture, that “Something important is finally happening to me!” (“Keep Beach City Weird”). After the fight, he insists that the truth that Steven reveals “makes no sense” and that there has to be more to things than just Steven himself. As he objects to Steven’s conflicting worldview, Ronaldo is reduced to holding his head in his hands. Petey recognizes Ronaldo’s inability to handle these developments and thus offers a new theory for who is “pulling the strings” (“Keep Beach City Weird”). Ronaldo, however, rejects his brother’s explanation due to his need to be the one who is intelligent and in control and uses it as a chance to pivot to a theory of “polymorphic sentient rocks,” which is closer to the truth of the Gems but still not accurate (“Keep Beach City Weird”). Petey and Steven then close the door on a disturbingly gleeful Ronaldo, and when Steven asks if Petey is sure that Ronaldo will be better like that, Petey

6

“TRUTH IS A FEELING IN YOUR GUT” …

121

responds, “Yeah. He’s happy, you know?” while obviously communicating his discomfort through his voice and his downcast eyes. Steven, staring straight ahead, adds a similarly unconvincing agreement. This is clearly not a happy ending, even though Ronaldo has been nudged toward a new, more accurate theory and will be restarting his blog. Instead, the show posits Steven and Petey’s catering to Ronaldo’s theorizing as a necessary defeat of reason. A similar critique of the mentality that undergirds Ronaldo’s conspiracy theorizing occurs in the episode “Rocknaldo,” which extends its criticism to the Othering through which conspiracy theories often function. Ronaldo, who is now aware of the Crystal Gems’ presence and origins, is offering pamphlets on the boardwalk titled “How to Protect Yourself Against ROCK PEOPLE,” which details that there are alien entities among us who add mind-controlling minerals to the water supply and also hate men. The familiar suggestion of misogyny is clear, as all Gems present as female, and the fear-mongering and xenophobia of Ronaldo’s exhortation to passersby to “Protect yourself against the menace that threatens Beach City” offers a clear contrast to Steven’s excited exclamation of “Let’s get knowledgeable” when he sits down to read a pamphlet. In an exchange that serves as an allegory for racist conspiracy theories, Steven quickly voices his displeasure with “all this mean stuff” about Crystal Gems in the pamphlet. Ronaldo denies that the Gems are his target, explaining, “Crystal Gems aren’t Rock People. Crystal Gems fight Rock People.” Steven, however, rejects this binary (which recalls the human-alien binary that appears in many reptile people theories): “Crystal Gems don’t just fight Rock People. We are Rock People,” he clarifies, adding a request that Ronaldo please not use the term because it is offensive. Unconvinced, Ronaldo claims that there is a clear difference: Rock People have rocks in their bodies, can summon weapons “from the mud dimension,” and can alter their forms, which is how they “trick humans into loving them.” His rationalizing here depends on the comforting assumption that threatening Others are distinct and easily identifiable and, more specifically, echoes claims that there are clearly distinguishable “good” and “bad” groups within minority populations.7 Steven again counters these assertions by himself demonstrating each characteristic that Ronaldo enumerates as he says it. “You’re not wrong about everything,” Steven concludes, unwittingly describing Ronaldo’s conspiracy theories as a whole. “We’re just ignored and misunderstood.” Ronaldo apologizes for his errors and

122

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

attempts to join the Gems, which Steven persuades them to allow. However, the narcissism displayed by Ronaldo in “Keep Beach City Weird” rapidly returns, with him criticizing Steven and condescendingly telling him how a real Gem would act. Steven confronts Ronaldo before he is ejected from their house, yelling that “the second it wasn’t about you, you stopped caring.” Three weeks later, as Ronaldo apologizes, he shows Steven his new pamphlet, titled “Crystal Gems: who are they and how can we help.” Nevertheless, his apology remains tinged with selfaggrandizement, as he claims that he works best alone because “even amongst outsiders, I am the ultimate outsider.”

Ronaldo, Conspiracy Theories, and Celebrity Gossip Culture Earlier in this episode, an irritated Steven calls Ronaldo “just a guy with a blog,” and the show’s critique of conspiracy theorizing also branches into other media forms, exposing the perhaps surprising similarities between conspiracists and other types of content creators. Mathijs Pelkmans and Rhys Machold (2011) argue that “conspiracy theories should not be seen as a category in and of itself” because the label is a deployment of sociopolitical power to marginalize through a “constructed stigma” (74, 76). Simon Locke (2009) asserts that “the attempt to account for conspiracy theorising as irrational is itself a form of moral accounting, delimiting the acceptable boundaries of social reasoning in relation to which conspiracy theory is made to appear excessive; as such, it is a means of professional boundary-work … [but] these boundary distinctions have become problematised … to the point of effective collapse” (568). In its critiques of Ronaldo, Steven Universe takes advantage of this generally unremarked lack of distance between conspiracy theories and other, more mainstream media communities. One doesn’t even have to look as far as grocery store checkout-lane mainstay Weekly World News for an example: One can simply turn to celebrity gossip culture. In a 2014 Tumblr post, Ronaldo writes, “In other news, Steven might be pregnant! Haven’t been able to get him to take a pregger test yet, but I did snap this pic of him hate-eating pizza” (keepbeachcityweird 2014a). Below this is the specified picture, and below that is a close-up from that picture of Steven’s stomach, adorned with arrows and question marks and labeled “BABY MAYBE?” in the standard meme font. Ronaldo’s blog post satirizes the conspiracy-adjacent elements that run both more and less obviously

6

“TRUTH IS A FEELING IN YOUR GUT” …

123

through celebrity culture. W magazine, for example, ran an article explaining nine conspiracy theories that circulated on the Internet in the wake of Beyoncé’s pregnancy announcement in 2017, including one which suggests that the photo accompanying the announcement contains clues that she is a member of the Illuminati (Munzenrieder 2017). However, something seemingly more mundane, like the decade-plus of baseless tabloid articles about Jennifer Aniston being pregnant, could equally be categorized as conspiracy theorizing. A headline such as “Baby Shocker! Jennifer Aniston’s Rep Exposes Major Secret About Pregnancy Rumors—The Truth Revealed,” from Star magazine, would fit right in with Ronaldo’s posts about Rock People, space vampires, and pregnant boys revealed (Cole 2016). Both conspiracy and celebrity-media discourses share certain rhetorical characteristics in order to bolster their appeal. One of these characteristics is the promise of conferring privileged status upon the reader or participant by revealing to him or her heretofore undisclosed information, the possession of which locates that person within a select group. In one study of tabloids, for example, the word “secret” occurred in thirteen of 212 tabloid headlines that made up the sample (Schaffer 1995, 31). Whether the “real story” on offer is the secret behind Illuminati domination of Earth or the secret behind Blac Chyna’s conflict with the Kardashians, the psychological attraction is created in basically the same way. Tabloids also use “language devices” to intensify the sense of belonging to a privileged, insider group, devices that have “the purpose of bringing the reader close to the individuals featured in the stories, making him or her feel intimately connected to them” (Schaffer 31).8 Conspiracists employ a similar tactic in the various ways that they create divisions between an enlightened “us” and unenlightened “them.” In Ronaldo’s Tumblr post on Steven’s supposed secret pregnancy, for instance, a belief that he derived from hearing Steven say “I’m orderin’ for two” at the pizza shop in the episode “Steven’s Lion,” he begins, “I was FOOLED yesterday. FOOLED into thinking Steven had an invisible pet lion. So Stupid. I like to think of myself as a skeptical free-thinker, so I’m surprised I believed such a silly idea” (keepbeachcityweird 2014a).9 While the rhetorical division that Ronaldo makes here is slightly more subtle than “sheeple” and “not-sheeple,” it fulfills the same function. There are “Stupid” people who are “FOOLED” by the way that the world appears, and then there are “skeptical free-thinker[s]” who can see things that others can’t (and then share their glimpses beyond appearances with those others, thereby

124

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

according them the desirable status of fellow skeptics). Ronaldo’s subsequent offering of the “other news” of Steven’s pregnancy asserts that Ronaldo is indeed a skeptical free-thinker and that his perspective as such affords him valuable information. One of the ways in which “secret” information has value is as social capital, which constitutes another appeal shared by celebrity media and conspiracy theory cultures. Tabloid stories can be understood as a system of gossip in which “unflattering stories about violations of norms or bad habits are most in demand. Stories about ordinary people typically only make it into the tabloids if they concern extraordinary events” (McAndrew and Milenkovic 2002, 1069). The predilection for negative narratives stems from their perceived utility within the social economy of gossip. People tend to be most “interested in information that might be exploited for social gain” (McAndrew and Milenkovic, 1070). To this end, they regard negative information about “high-status people and potential rivals” and positive information about “allies” as useful (McAndrew and Milenkovic, 1069). Specifically, according to Francis T. McAndrew and Megan A. Milenkovic, “Dishonest or irresponsible behavior is most likely to be used against high-status people and nonallies” (1079). Thus, in the same way that a reader of a story about how Jennifer Aniston’s outwardly enviable life masks the unending emotional devastation of being childless can feel fleetingly superior to a “high-status” figure, so a conspiracist like Ronaldo can gain a sense of superiority from “knowing” that, say, the President is secretly a snake person deceiving the majority of the populace. In both cases, the minority’s awareness of the supposed dishonesty of someone of high status affords someone of lower status a sense of power vis-à-vis the powerful. This method of obtaining social capital, or at least its illusion, serves to help Ronaldo attempt to meet his need to impress others with his intelligence and importance and to fulfill his desire for Internet fame (again, we can recall his feeling of being an outsider if not an outcast, of not being invited to most parties).

Ronaldo, Conspiracy Theories, and Fandom By representing through Ronaldo the association between conspiracist and mainstream tabloid discourses, Steven Universe draws attention to and mocks the often dehumanizing conspiracist cast of celebrity-oriented media, both corporate and fan-created. Fan culture itself, including Steven

6

“TRUTH IS A FEELING IN YOUR GUT” …

125

Universe’s own fan community, is a final target that the franchise satirizes through Ronaldo.10 While the blog and book attributed to Ronaldo represent instances of textual productivity, a form of paratextuality that “seeks to both emulate and transform the urtext,” the online fan paratexts discussed here more closely represent enunciative textuality, “aimed at commenting, appreciating, critiquing, and distributing the fan object in a form of metadiscourse” (Sandvoss et al. 2015, 64, 63). William Proctor and Bridget Kies (2018) call fandom a “battleground on which the new culture wars are being fought,” primarily “in online territories” (127) and observe that “toxic behaviors are often the result of hegemonic elites feeling as though they are marginalized or in the minority” (130). Matt Hills (2018) proposes that toxic behavior “is inevitably linked to issues of (fan) authenticity as much as indeterminacy” (105). He links this to doxa, “or an unquestioned sense of how capital can be amassed, or lost” (106), arguing that toxic behaviors occur when a “previously stable doxa has been disrupted or called into question by heterodox forces, or when a field’s doxa (expressed in orthodoxy) possesses a significant continuity with beliefs and values which can be articulated in toxic ways” (107). Ronaldo is clearly a nerdy fanboy. He goes to conventions, plays video games, and likes manga, anime, and Joss Wheedon’s Firefly (keepbeachcityweird 2013b). As A.V. Club reviewer Eric Thurm (2015c) says, Ronaldo “often comes across like a surrogate for the fans, or at least a certain kind of fan. … That Ronaldo often comes across as obnoxious reads … like a sense of projecting, an anxiety over interacting with the series solely as a fan who is often (lovingly) tweaked by the writers and storyboard artists for the relationship they have to the show.” On his blog, for example, Ronaldo reviews a fake anime called Soul Blaster with criticism that could easily apply to Steven Universe: “Now, for a show called Soul Blaster, there is surprisingly a lack of soul blasting. Most of the episodes focus on the relationship between the super cool Kyosuke and the dorky Kettaro. … [I]f you’re only in it for the soul explosions, you might as well just skip to the last two minutes of every episode” (keepbeachcityweird 2014b). This is actually a relatively mild example of the online fan reaction that Ronaldo’s blog parodies. Before Steven Universe began its run as a series, Cartoon Network posted the pilot online, which had differences in art style and character designs, and when a promotional poster with new art was released, according to former co-executive producer Ian Jones-Quartey,

126

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

Our then-tiny fan base was positively outraged! There were accusations that Rebecca was “selling out,” rumors of Cartoon Network cutting the show’s funding, that the show would look like early 2000s Flash animation, all kinds of stuff. People even tried to imply that the designs weren’t actually [creator] Rebecca [Sugar]’s work, and that Danny or I had purposefully “ruined” the designs. But from the inside, we had seen Rebecca fight so hard to get the show to this place, it was so surreal. (McDonnell, 77)

As with celebrity media, we again see the conviction in fandom that secret truths are being kept from the public by members of organizations or individuals that the fans view as having power. In a more troubling incident that took place in August of 2016, a group of fans on the Internet constructed an inaccurate theory based on leaked episode footage that showed Gems Peridot and Lapis living together. Some fans theorized that this footage indicated that the characters had entered into a romantic relationship, an idea bolstered by some artwork posted by storyboard artist Lauren Zuke. Fans angry at the thought that the theory was true or was receiving implied official support through the aforementioned artwork began to attack Zuke on Twitter for “showing favoritism for one ship [a romantic relationship desired by fans] over another,” while fans angry that the theory (like Ronaldo’s theories) turned out not to be true did the same, accusing Zuke, herself “a gay woman, of ‘queer baiting’ … teasing queer fans with a possible ship that never comes to fruition” (Elderkin 2016). The artist found the aggression of “days of harassment” sufficient to sever Twitter contact with the fan community by deleting her account (Elderkin).11 We can divine in such fan behavior the same feelings of disempowerment that drive what we categorize as conspiracy theorizing, as well as a more active version of the negative information-sharing engaged in by tabloid media, with the fans acting as producers in addition to consumers of the social capital of gossip. Online fan communities can of course also operate in a much more benign manner while still displaying many of the hallmarks of conspiracist communities. Internet fan theories display a similar obsessive connection of apparently unrelated details to support a larger hypothesis. Jason Mittell (2009) writes that “ludic narrative logic and transmedia storytelling promote a model of ‘forensic fandom,’ a mode of television engagement encouraging research, collaboration, analysis, and interpretation” (para. 2.3).12 The ongoing enigmas (and transmedia presence) of Steven

6

“TRUTH IS A FEELING IN YOUR GUT” …

127

Universe more than support this type of audience engagement, and in practicing forensic fandom, fans create, by simple virtue of the extensive knowledge of such details required to participate in the enunciative textuality of the discussion, a division between insiders and outsiders. As Mittell observes regarding an online fan community for Lost , “macrotheories are expected to offer compelling evidence, provide links to external sources supporting their underlying ideas, and present a case for accuracy. Discussion pages for such theories tend to be robust debates over their merits and inconsistencies, a model of collective engagement that many scholars highlight as one of the most participatory and exciting aspects of fan culture” (para. 2.14). Without discounting the positive aspects of this criticism or the defense of particular theories, we would suggest that they can simultaneously function as a mechanism by which to garner social power or status. While a Google search for “Steven Universe theories” returns hundreds of thousands of results, two representative examples will suffice here. The first is the Tumblr page “SU Theories,” a place that promises to post “any Steven Universe theories that I can find” and asks visitors, “Message me if you have an idea.” A 500-word post by user fantheoriesandfoodporn (2017) titled “Here’s how I think it happened” puts forth an argument regarding who killed Pink Diamond (an area of theorizing since complicated by the revelation that Pink Diamond and Rose Quartz were one and the same). The poster’s assertion that Pearl is responsible includes evidence such as a list of “the facts,” but it also involves the sort of negative evidence that one might see in a conspiracy theory. The post raises the objection that Pearl can’t shapeshift, something required for the theory to work, in order to refute it: “Can’t she? We’ve seen Pearl change her outfit on screen before, and according to Peridot their clothing is just a part of their bodies. We’ve seen Pearl change her outfit, but she always comes up with an excuse when it comes to changing her form. What if the reason is that she vowed never to use it again after using it to kill her diamond and frame Rose[?]” (fantheoriesandfoodporn). In this formulation, not only does the lack of positive evidence not rule out that an event occurred, but it actually supports that it did. At the time of writing, this post, based on series arcana and secret truths, had amassed 3070 “notes” (likes, reblogs, and comments). The second example, Tinfoil Fan Theories, whose very name is a self-aware jab at conspiracy theorists, includes but does not exclusively focus on Steven Universe material and mocks the sort of elaborate fan theorizing found in places like the “SU Theories”

128

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

Tumblr by posting similarly baroque postulations. One post posits that the show is actually under a sinister Gallic influence, and that Rebecca Sugar is “a shadowy agent of the French government,” contending, for instance, that the “show is rife with French imagery and themes. Most obviously, the Crystal Gems are the colour [sic] of the French flag once colour shifted to escape US censors: red (Garnet), blue (Amethyst) and white (Pearl). In this way, the viewer is constantly exposed to the French flag, and taught to correlate their heroic figures with France” (Tinfoil Fan Theories 2016b).13 This method of interpreting seemingly innocent details as parts of a larger coded message would be equally at home in discussing the plot of a popular television show, the signs that the moon landing was faked, or the hidden location of Walt Disney’s cryogenicallyfrozen corpse.

Conclusion With such similarities in mind, we can see how, both as a character and through his multimedia tie-ins, Ronaldo acts as a figure through which Steven Universe not only critiques conspiracy theorizing but also calls attention to the correspondences in discourse and function among conspiracy theories and other forms of media. Ronaldo highlights that theories of reptilian Illuminati, secret celebrity baby bumps, and overblown Internet fan reactions all ultimately offer mechanisms by which people attempt to feel a sense of control and importance, mechanisms which, while perhaps not as obviously dangerous as an alien invasion, are nevertheless at best problematic and at worst result in mental, emotional, and even physical violence against others. Although these critiques may seem tangential to the franchise’s primary concerns, they directly participate in the larger thematic explorations that run throughout Steven Universe. Ronaldo’s anti-authoritarianism as a conspiracy theorist, for example, mirrors, albeit misguidedly, the connection between the Crystal Gems’ independence and self-determination and their rebellion against the Diamond Authority. Ronaldo’s most important contribution as a satirical figure to the central themes of the show, however, is through the reflection in his search for the “truth” of the loss of innocence as a part of growing up. Because Steven is “so unabashedly a kid, he’s usually not privy to what would theoretically be the more engaging, meatier information floating around him” (Thurm 2015a).

6

“TRUTH IS A FEELING IN YOUR GUT” …

129

Steven Universe focuses on Steven’s own journey of self-discovery and maturation; and for both children (the show’s ostensible target audience) and conspiracists such as Ronaldo, the truth is something that is hidden by more powerful authorities, whether parents, government officials, or aliens. Children’s movement into the adult world involves difficult realizations that one’s fantasies and heroes often disappoint in the cold light of maturity. Thus, Ronaldo’s theories, even more so if they are debunked, provide an analog and a parallel to Steven’s finding out more and more of the truth about his dead mother, Rose, as the series progresses, an experience that involves the increasing and sometimes painful recognition of her imperfections. Series writer Matt Burnett describes the significance of this process of disillusionment: “To me, there are two Roses. The perfect goddess Rose that other people paint a picture of in the first couple seasons, and the actual Rose, who was as flawed as anyone. … Creating this idealized memory of someone and gradually pulling it back and showing that ‘Hey, this person actually wasn’t perfect all the time’ poses such an important thing people need to wrestle with” (McDonnell, 134). Lauren Zuke sees the acknowledgment of Rose’s shortcomings as valuable to Steven’s moral development, remarking, “Rose is complicated. She’s not this perfect thing Steven or the other Gems expect her to be. I think an important lesson for Steven is to find himself and not rely on Rose’s image as guidance for everything, because everything within the show has a moral grayness. … To me, Rose is an example of what happens if you admire an idea of a person” (McDonnell, 134). The idea that the truth about high-status people is commonly obfuscated, whether by themselves or by others, applies as much to world leaders and tabloid celebrities as it does to Rose and to parents in general. The same concealment by those with power is also true of the ethically questionable operations of the “real world,” the moral grayness invoked by Zuke. If this awareness, along with the awareness of the hidden truths themselves, makes up a part of most children’s maturation, then the vital differences come not in the mere experience but in how one reacts to it. According to Rebecca Sugar, Steven responds to these challenges to his worldview with personal evolution: “Steven’s world evolves as he learns, and the simple ideals that he stands by are challenged” (McDonnell, 129). When, in “The Good Lars,” Lars asks Steven when he got so mature, Steven answers, “Somewhere in between learning to summon my shield and finding out that my mom is a war criminal.” Storyboard artist Jeff

130

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

Liu adds, “Rather than admiring the Crystal Gems for being perfect, he admires them because he understands their vulnerabilities, too. In accepting their flaws, and in accepting his own, he begins to mature into a stronger hero” (McDonnell, 129). As Steven is the protagonist and hero, it seems safe to assume that, while by no means perfect, his reaction represents the franchise’s desirable model. Ronaldo provides a useful cautionary contrast to Steven’s acceptance of new “secrets” and consequent growth of character. As we have seen, Ronaldo most often refuses to recognize flaws in his own reasoning or gaps in his knowledge, preferring instead to alter his theories in order to maintain the status quo of his worldview and self-image. Steven knows that he doesn’t know everything and is not afraid to admit his ignorance while Ronaldo’s narcissism prevents him from acting similarly and drives him toward the less healthy outlet of conspiracy theories. Such behavior leads to Ronaldo’s belief, quoted above, that “Truth is searching for anything that proves you’re right, no matter how small, and holding on to that, no matter what” (“Keep Beach City Weird”). This belief, in turn, leads not only to the Gems viewing Ronaldo as sadly struggling for significance but also to the kind of fan conduct that drove Zuke from Twitter. As Ian Jones-Quartey explains, “The audience’s understanding of the complicated world always develops with Steven. It is the coming-of-age story every child goes through as the world they understand becomes more dangerous and complex” (McDonnell, 115). Audience members can choose to navigate these frightening insights using the behaviors and discourses that Steven Universe critiques through Ronaldo’s character, or they can choose to emulate Steven—and even Ronaldo wants to be a Gem.

Notes 1. The presentation of Ronaldo as the blog’s author and the fan interaction with that blog produce a “parasocial field” in which the “boundary between screen world and real world disappears” and “television entities and real-world entities mingle freely” (Lamarre 2018, loc. 568). Such a field “levels ontological and hierarchical distinctions in the encounter between humans and TV personalities and characters” and “has its own social reality” (loc. 568). 2. As science fiction “is curious” and “wants to know how the world works” (Mendlesohn, 15), Ronaldo’s attempts to assemble the truth also resemble those of a scientist or science fiction protagonist, albeit one who refuses to modify his theories to accommodate new evidence. 3. In Steven Universe, of course, the imperialism would be interstellar.

6

“TRUTH IS A FEELING IN YOUR GUT” …

131

4. Mendlesohn notes that, beginning in the 1990s, “motivation matters and most aliens are to be treated with sympathy” in an increasing amount of children’s and teens’ sci-fi literature (159). 5. Those numbers increase to 29%/91 million for belief in aliens, 28%/87.8 million for belief in the New World Order, and 21%/65.9 million for belief in a UFO having crashed in Roswell (Bump). 6. Some of these complex, interrelated forces would be systemic racism, sexism, and homophobia, all issues engaged with by the show. 7. Frederick C. Harris (2014), for example, laments that for “more than half of the twentieth century, the concept of the ‘Talented Tenth’ commanded black elites to ‘life as we climb,’ or to prove to white America that blacks were worthy of full citizenship rights by getting the untalented nine-tenths to rid themselves of bad customs and habits” and that this politics of respectability continues, in an altered form, today (33). He writes that the “word ‘ghetto,’ for instance, which a generation ago was used to describe poor, segregated neighborhoods, is now used to characterize the ‘unacceptable’ behavior of black people who live anywhere from a housing project to an affluent suburb” and discusses how hair, hoodies, and how pants are worn are just some of the markers involved in setting such boundaries (34). Mahmood Mamdani (2004), to take a second example, traces the political evolution and deployment of the American categories of “good” and “bad” Muslims: “good Muslims are modern, secular, and Westernized, but bad Muslims are doctrinal, antimodern, and virulent” (24). Other minority groups are subject to similar perceptual treatment. 8. These devices include using first names only or nicknames for celebrities and using “pseudo-quotes,” which create a “spurious sense that the information is authentic” (Schaffer, 31–32). 9. Steven corrects Ronaldo, telling him that he is not pregnant but referring to his “giant pet lion” (who is not invisible but has merely left while Steven was inside the pizza shop). Ronaldo says that he believes that Steven has a lion because lots of “weird stuff happens in Beach City” and, always self-promoting, plugs his blog and merchandise, but he retains the belief at the end of the scene that Steven is pregnant (“Steven’s Lion”). 10. There is thus perhaps a touch of irony to the fact that writer Ben Levin says, “The most fun fan interactions I’ve had have been with the Keep Beach City Weird [Tumblr] blog. The fans completely play along with the reality of Ronaldo. They get the joke and escalate it—it’s super funny. It feels like doing improv over the internet” (McDonnell 2017, 229). 11. Similarly, fans of another widely popular animated sci-fi show, Rick and Morty, conducted a “sustained campaign of harassment” against the writing staff, which had come to include more female writers, prompting cocreator Dan Harmon to deliver a lengthy rebuke in 2017 (Purdom 2017).

132

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

12. To take one example of the interplay among fans, media, and the show itself, Eric Thurm (2015b), in a review of the episode that revealed that Garnet was made up of Ruby and Sapphire, situates both his experience as a viewer and the show’s production within the context of online fan theorizing, writing that “while I may have heard the popular fan theory that Garnet was a fusion in passing, it wasn’t actively on my radar until I saw someone mention it in the comments on the ‘Rose’s Scabbard’ review. Thankfully, the writers (in particular, story editors Ben Levin and Matt Burnett) aren’t afraid of clever fans figuring out what’s going on, so this really makes a lot of sense in retrospect.” Elsewhere, Mittel (2006) points to the Internet’s enabling of “collective intelligence” of fan communities as a factor in the emergence of what he terms narrative complexity in television, a “shifting balance” of “episodic and serial forms” that rejects “the need for plot closure within every episode” and “foregrounds ongoing stories across a range of genres” (31–32). Steven Universe certainly meets these criteria. 13. Another post, “The Secret Hair Code” (Tinfoil Fan Theories 2016a), marshals a number of examples to prove that characters’ hair size varies in direct proportion to their heroism.

References Aisch, Gregor, Jon Huang, and Cecilia Kang. 2016. “Dissecting the #PizzaGate Conspiracy Theories.” The New York Times. Last modified December 10. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/10/ business/media/pizzagate.html. Arkin, Daniel, and Ben Popken. 2018. “How the Internet’s Conspiracy Theorists Turned Parkland Students into ‘Crisis Actors’.” NBC News. Last modified February 21. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/how-internets-conspiracy-theorists-turned-parkland-students-crisis-actors-n849921. Bump, Philip. 2013. “12 Million Americans Believe Lizard People Run Our Country.” The Atlantic. Last modified April 2. https://www.theatlantic. com/national/archive/2013/04/12-million-americans-believe-lizard-peoplerun-our-country/316706/. Burnett, Matt, and Ben Levin. 2017. Keep Beach City Weird: You Can’t Hide the Truth!. New York: Cartoon Network Books. Kindle edition. Cole, Desiree. 2016. “Baby Shocker! Jennifer Aniston’s Rep Exposes Major Secret About Pregnancy Rumors—The Truth Revealed.” Star. Last modified June 15. http://starmagazine.com/photos/jennifer-aniston-pregnantrumors-false-justin-theroux-pics/. Darsey, James. 2002. “A Conspiracy of Science.” Western Journal of Communication 66 (4): 469–491.

6

“TRUTH IS A FEELING IN YOUR GUT” …

133

Elderkin, Beth. 2016. “Steven Universe Artist Quits Twitter over Fan Harassment.” i09. Last modified August 13. http://io9.gizmodo.com/stevenuniverse-artist-quits-twitter-over-fan-harassmen-1785242762. fantheoriesandfoodporn. 2017. “Here’s How I Think It Happened.” Tumblr, July 2. https://steven-universe-theories.tumblr.com/post/162527421478/ heres-how-i-think-it-happened. Geraghty, Lincoln. 2015. “Introduction: Fans and Paratexts.” In Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, edited by Lincoln Geraghty, 1–16. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Harris, Frederick C. 2014. “The Rise of Respectability Politics.” Dissent 61 (1): 33–37. https://doi.org/10.1353/dss.2014.0010. Hills, Matt. 2018. “An Extended Foreword: From Fan Doxa to Toxic Fan Practices?” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 15 (1): 105– 126. http://www.participations.org/Volume%2015/Issue%201/7.pdf. keepbeachcityweird. 2013a. “Vampire Spaceship.” Tumblr, November 7. http://keepbeachcityweird.tumblr.com/page/10. ———. 2013b. “Jobs, Man.” Tumblr, November 20. http:// keepbeachcityweird.tumblr.com/page/10. ———. 2014a. “Invisible Lies.” Tumblr, January 20. http:// keepbeachcityweird.tumblr.com/page/9. ———. 2014b. Review of Soul Blaster, Tumblr, October 31. http:// keepbeachcityweird.tumblr.com/page/5. Lamarre, Thomas. 2018. The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kindle edition. Lewis, Tyson, and Richard Kahn. 2005. “The Reptoid Hypothesis: Utopian and Dystopian Representational Motifs in David Icke’s Alien Conspiracy Theory.” Utopian Studies 16 (1): 45–74. www.psupress.org/journals/jnls_ utopian_studies.html. Locke, Simon. 2009. “Conspiracy Culture, Blame Culture, and Rationalisation.” The Sociological Review 57 (4): 567–585. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467954x.2009.01862.x. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2004. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Three Leaves Press. Mendlesohn, Farah. 2009. The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. McAndrew, Francis T., and Megan A. Milenkovic. 2002. “Of Tabloids and Family Secrets: The Evolutionary Psychology of Gossip.” Journal of Applied Psychology 32 (5): 1064–1082. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2002. tb00256.x. McCarthy, Tom. 2018. “QAnon: Latest Trump-Linked Conspiracy Theory Gains Steam at President’s Rallies.” The Guardian. Last modified

134

J. R. ZIEGLER AND L. RICHARDS

August 3. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/03/qanonconspiracy-theory-trump-rallies. McDonnell, Chris. 2017. Steven Universe: Art & Origins. New York: Abrams. Miller, Hayley. 2017. “NBC Connecticut Refuses to Air Megyn Kelly Interview with Alex Jones.” HuffPost. Last modified June 18. http://www. huffingtonpost.com/entry/nbc-connecticut-megyn-kelly-alex-jones_us_ 5946e952e4b0f15cd5bc40dc. Mittell, Jason. 2006. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet Light Trap 58: 29–40. ———. 2009. “Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia.” Transformative Works and Cultures 3. http://journal.transformativeworks. org/index.php/twc/article/view/118/117. Munzenrieder, Kyle. 2017. “Beyoncé’s Pregnancy Photos May Be Full of Secret Messages.” W. Last modified February 2. https://www.wmagazine.com/ story/beyonce-pregnancy-photos-conspiracy-theories. Pelkmans, Mathijs, and Rhys Machold. 2011. “Conspiracy Theories and Their Truth Trajectories.” Focaal 59: 66–80. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2011. 590105. Proctor, William, and Bridget Kies. 2018. “Editors’ Introduction: On Toxic Fan Practices and the New Culture Wars.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 15 (1): 127–142. http://www.participations.org/Volume% 2015/Issue%201/8.pdf. Purdom, Clayton. 2017. “Rick and Morty’s worst Fans Don’t Deserve Rick and Morty.” A.V. Club. Last modified September 22. https://www.avclub.com/ rick-and-morty-s-worst-fans-don-t-deserve-rick-and-mort-1818667256. Sandvoss, Cornel, Kelly Youngs, and Joanne Hobbs. 2015. “Television Fandom in the Age of Narrowcasting: The Politics of Proximity in Regional Scripted Reality Dramas The Only Way Is Essex and Made in Chelsea.” In Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, edited by Lincoln Geraghty, 39–72. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schaffer, Deborah. 1995. “Shocking Secrets Revealed! The Language of Tabloid Headlines.” Et cetera: A Review of General Semantics 52 (1): 27–46. http:// www.jstor.org.bcc.ezproxy.cuny.edu:2048/stable/42577612. Thurm, Eric. 2015a. “Steven Universe: ‘Political Power’.” A.V. Club. Last modified March 11. http://tv.avclub.com/steven-universe-political-power1798183039. ———. 2015b. “Steven Universe: ‘The Return/Jail Break’.” A.V. Club, March 12. http://tv.avclub.com/steven-universe-the-return-jail-break1798183206. ———. 2015c. “Steven Universe: ‘Rising Tides/Crashing Skies’.” A.V. Club. Last modified June 12. http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/steven-universe-risingtidescrashing-skies-220141.

6

“TRUTH IS A FEELING IN YOUR GUT” …

135

Tinfoil Fan Theories. 2016a. “[Steven Universe] The Secret Hair Code.” Tinfoil Fan Theories, May 23. http://www.tinfoilfantheories.com/2016/05/ steven-universe-secret-hair-code.html. ———. 2016b. “[Steven Universe] The French Conspiracy.” Tinfoil Fan Theories, May 26. http://www.tinfoilfantheories.com/2016/05/steven-universefrench-conspiracy.html.

Episodes Referenced “Cat Fingers” (season 1, episode 6, 2013) “Frybo” (season 1, episode 5, 2013) “The Good Lars” (season 4, episode 23, 2017) “Keep Beach City Weird” (season 1, episode 31, 2014) “Laser Light Cannon” (season 1, episode 2, 2013) “Rising Tides/Crashing Skies” (season 2, episode 7, 2015) “Rocknaldo” (season 4, episode 17, 2017) “Steven’s Lion” (season 1, episode 10, 2014)

CHAPTER 7

Pungent Silence: Encounters with Onion Justin Saret

Introduction: Steven Talk Steven Universe talks to nearly everyone—nearly everything —that he encounters, such as when he amicably introduces himself to a magical hourglass: “My name’s Steven! You’re gonna live with me” (“Steven and the Stevens”). From the beginning of Steven Universe, Steven’s propensity to build relationships through earnest conversation is seemingly without prejudice or discernment. Anything that isn’t attacking him—and sometimes, things that are—is a friend whom he just hasn’t gotten to know yet. Zach Blumenfeld (2017) observes that Steven constantly “voice[s] his thoughts aloud;” that behavior forms a part of his tendency to connect with others through conversation. If his conversation with the hourglass seems implausible, it’s only a few episodes later that he successfully forms a relationship with a mirror that speaks by replaying and remixing scenes that it has witnessed. It’s this relationship that leads Steven not only to free Lapis Lazuli but also to be the only one to talk to her when she absconds with most of the water of the Earth’s oceans—even after she (indirectly) breaks Greg’s leg.

J. Saret (B) New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2020 J. R. Ziegler and L. Richards (eds.), Representation in Steven Universe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9_7

137

138

J. SARET

The examples of Steven resolving conflict through earnest conversation are legion. His interaction with the Cluster is typical: the Cluster poses a problem—in this case, a threat. He and a Gem (Peridot) approach it, the Gem focused on negating the threatening behavior to the exclusion of what the enemy thinks and feels and Steven advocating for understanding: STEVEN: Peridot, I don’t think we should hurt the Cluster. I don’t think it knows what it’s doing. PERIDOT: It doesn’t matter if it knows what it’s doing. It’s still going to do it. (“Gem Drill”)

As the threat becomes imminent, Steven enters into a conversation with the Cluster and learns that it doesn’t wish them harm and that its behavior is merely a product of the Cluster’s own internal struggle. Steven is able to help it address its own problems and so resolves the threat and redeems the character of the Cluster. Steven goes through some version of this process with Centipeetle, Peridot, Uncle Andy, and Bismuth, among others, including even the Diamonds. The message is clear enough when Steven returns to the Crystal Gems: PEARL: Did you destroy the cluster? STEVEN: No, I talked to it! (“Gem Drill”)

Blumenfeld (2016b) refers to Steven’s skill as “some sort of empathy superpower”—and, given how closely connected his powers are to love and empathy, including his ability to literally project his mind into the minds of others, this may not be far off the mark. Steven has, Blumenfeld observes, an “extraordinary ability not just to see the good in every creature, but to slide into their shoes – or rather, their mind – and see the world as they understand it” (2016b); he then uses his insights to change their minds. This is a central, if not the central, theme of the show, which culminates in a climactic return trip to Homeworld. Pearl tries to dissuade Steven from his plan to convince White Diamond to help the corrupted Gems by arguing that White Diamond is unreachable, a singular being who does not share an identity with anyone else:

7

PUNGENT SILENCE: ENCOUNTERS WITH ONION

139

PEARL: White Diamond isn’t like us. She isn’t even like them [Blue and Yellow]! You have no idea what she’s capable of. STEVEN: I just wanna talk! (“Legs from Here to Homeworld”)

Bismuth disagrees with Pearl, suggesting that Steven’s shared identity with the Diamonds will make the conversation possible: “You’re about to enter the lion’s den; luckily, you’re a lion, too. You gotta roar at them in their language” (“Legs from Here to Homeworld”). While Steven believes in the possibility of reaching White Diamond, he doesn’t think that his success or failure is predicated on identity. Steven frames the limit of his (super)power not in terms of identity but of listening—or of the failure to do so, as shown in “Mindful Education” when he is haunted by his failure to communicate, pleading with the specters of Jasper, Bismuth, and Eyeball: “I – I tried to help you. You wouldn’t listen. I … I told you to stop!” By his account, he doesn’t have a particularly special power, and it’s not Steven who changes anyone’s mind: it’s them. All he does is offer them the chance, as he sings in the episode’s closing song, to know him. Steven’s empathy isn’t just a power or practice, but one of his strongest virtues. The value of connecting to others through conversation, and of handling conflicts with reflection and empathy instead of violence and animosity, is a cornerstone of the show. Enter Onion.

Onion Talk VIDALIA: You too, Onion. Very expressive. (“Onion Friend”)

How many ways can a face look unperturbed, unfazed, unreactive, vacant, impassive, disinterested? (see Fig. 7.1) A catalog of Onion appearances in Steven Universe is an introduction to the blank expression. The eyes are usually wide, without a hint of eyebrow. The pupils, dilated to various degrees, are fixed, often gazing into the distance, perhaps even through an interlocutor. The mouth may be neutrally set in a straight line, or it may take on a more Mona Lisa-esque curve, a slight bend that only enhances the ambiguity of Onion’s state of mind. He bears a striking resemblance, in both appearance and spirit, to . With his roundly pyramidal face, the telltale the pile of poo emoji,

140

J. SARET

Fig. 7.1 From left to right, top to bottom: Onion sinking a boat after rebounding a harpoon off of Steven’s bubble (“Bubble Buddies”); Onion being asked “How are ya?” (“Onion Trade”); Onion moments before revealing a mouse, thought by Steven to be dead, in his mouth (“Onion Friend”); three panels of Onion walking towards Steven over the course of several seconds (“Onion Trade”)

dollop of his hair, stillness of expression, and “idiosyncratic,” humorous , a character presence, Onion reads as an animated embodiment of Pile of Poo”). Though used to signify a wide range of meanings (“ communicative gestures may accompany Onion’s face, a voice does not. Onion’s character exhibits great range throughout Steven Universe, but it is this blankness that I will take as a starting point and that I want to give room for fullness of expression. Writing on the rhetoric of silence, Cheryl Glenn (2004) notes that “Expected silence can go unrecognized, but unexpected silences … unsettle us” (11). In a show that narratively and thematically centers conversation, the silence with which Onion enters the frame is unexpected. It certainly unsettles Steven, who, it seems, can’t help but talk and is flummoxed by Onion’s silence. For example, when Onion shrugs—another expression of blankness—in response to his “How are ya?” (see Fig. 7.1,

7

PUNGENT SILENCE: ENCOUNTERS WITH ONION

141

top center), he replies, a little falteringly, “That’s good, that’s good,” as though trying to maintain the momentum of the conversation that he was expecting to have. Later in the episode, he faces continuous rejection from Onion as he offers an ever-growing number of Dave Guys in exchange for a Ranger Guy. He resorts to magic, using a replicator wand to make even more Dave Guys. As Onion rebuffs Dave Guy after Dave Guy, Steven cries, “Enough! What is it that you want?!” without noticing how Onion’s eyes have locked on the replicator wand in his hand. It isn’t until Onion points to it that Steven makes the connection—and still, he voices it aloud (though it may be for the audience’s benefit as well as his): “You mean…you want this? For Ranger Guy?” Onion nods, with a hint of a smile, and makes a gimme motion with his hand. Much as Onion unsettles Steven, he makes us laugh. Blumenfeld (2017) writes that “One consistent criticism I have of Steven Universe is its main character’s tendency to voice his thoughts aloud … the monologues … often amount to flat, boring process statements.” In the face of Steven’s regular, even tedious, use of words to describe his thoughts and feelings, as well as his dynamic mien, Onion’s subtle, silent facial expressions amount to a punch-line all their own. Joanna Gavins (2013) investigates the cognitive experience and textual characteristics of absurd humor. “The key to verbal humor,” she explains, citing Attardo and Raskin’s General Theory of Verbal Humor, “is the way in which incongruous scripts are opposed, so that expected, normal or plausible behaviours and situations are contrasted with unexpected, abnormal or implausible eventualities” (49). Onion’s behaviors certainly fit the bill of unexpected, abnormal, or implausible, whether he’s mowing down ketchup packets on the boardwalk or crouched in Steven’s cabinet holding a bag of Chaaaaps. He’s far from the only source of humor in the show, but what makes for absurd humor, Gavins continues, is how the incongruity is handled. She recounts that “The final critical point in verbal humour is that of ‘resolution’, when the incongruity established through the opposition of scripts is first identified and then resolved by the reader or listener…that adequate resolution is least likely to occur in what [Attardo] terms ‘absurd humor’” (49).1 An example of humorous incongruity and resolution can be found in the very first episode, when Steven joyfully sings the Cookie Cat theme song. It’s an upbeat and rhythmic number until the unrhymed and devastating line, “He left his family behind!” This incongruity is easily resolved.

142

J. SARET

Steven’s sudden and exuberant launching into the Cookie Cat song, combined with his muttering of the fine-print “Now available at Gerben’s off Route 109,” frames the whole event as a parody of commercial advertising for children. What’s more, the performance gives us some insight into Steven’s over-the-top, goofy, loving way of engaging with the world, which will come to have more serious resonances as he forms and deepens relationships, finds his magical and personal strengths, and comes to grips with his past as Rose Quartz/Pink Diamond. In short, such incongruous moments are easily explained and contextualized within the larger arc of the show. When it comes to Onion, however, incongruity is multiplied more often than it is resolved. This is the recipe for absurd humor that Gavins describes. Some line of dialogue or emotional expression might ground the strange circumstances with a window into his mind and offer a degree of resolution. Onion’s unexpected silence and blankness of expression leave the meaning of his actions to Onion particularly ambiguous. He looks by turns vacant, apathetic, deadpan ironic, carefully controlled, tranquil, and contemplative. In most situations, one interpretation could allow for plausible deniability if another is put forward, which could come in handy given the number of destructive crimes that Onion has committed.

Onion Tricks Listing common features of the mythical trickster, William Hynes and William Doty (1993) highlight first and foremost “the fundamentally ambiguous and anomalous personality of the trickster” (34). These traits surface again and again in my examination of Onion. There is ambiguity in his silence and in his blank face, anomalousness in his peculiar behavior and in his very being, and thus, the figure of the trickster is helpful for culturally situating Onion. Hynes and Doty write that “the trickster is [often] cast as an ‘out’ person, and his activities are often outlawish, outlandish, outrageous, out-of-bounds, and out-of-order. No borders are sacrosanct, be they religious, cultural, linguistic, epistemological, or metaphysical” (34). Onion certainly fits the bill: destructive, thieving, and at times violent; comically disorienting, gross and confusing; retreating to the woods to find community.

7

PUNGENT SILENCE: ENCOUNTERS WITH ONION

143

Criminal, horrifying, fugitive, without purpose: Steven Universe contends quite explicitly with these negative tropes by showing how Homeworld Gems figure rebels, fusions, off-colors, corruption, and organic life. Homeworld Gems’ impoverishing interpretive acts are contrasted with the Crystal Gems’ caring attentions, which provide space for a collection of characters to demonstrate new forms of love, skill, and justice. Onion, well-positioned for an exploration of comparable social and political themes, is instead mainly a source of humor and defamiliarization. In fact, despite regularly transgressing laws and behavioral codes, Onion seems to face no negative consequences for his actions, besides maybe the ire of Mr. Smiley. Onion does not transparently target a particular set of norms, but rather follows the mode of the trickster: “Anomalous, a-nomos, without normativity, the trickster appears on the edge or just beyond existing borders, classifications, and categories” (Hynes and Doty 1993, 34). He seems to operate on a metaphysical level, and so it may be that, within Beach City, he inhabits a space more mythical than political. Despite violating a good many boundaries, he never registers as a threat to Beach City or the Gems. However, he may register as a threat to the ideology that the show is founded upon. If we consider the show in terms of the lessons that it can impart and the culture that it can create, then Onion’s role is that of “official ritual profaner of beliefs” (Hynes and Doty 1993, 37). Maybe because this is a children’s cartoon, the actual quantity of profane content is low; he strikes provocative poses with all kinds of destructive equipment, but we never see the crowbar hit the metal onscreen. We see ketchup used to suggest blood. Hynes and Doty add that the trickster “is closely associated with the most profane of lewd profanations, excrement,” posing another connection between Onion and (1993, 44). What’s more, the role of “profaner of beliefs” would suggest an offensive quality to his work. We might think of him, in terms of another element of contemporary digital culture, as trolling—Gabriella Coleman (2014) draws the connection between tricksters and Internet trolls, “provocateurs and saboteurs who dismantle convention while occupying a liminal zone” (34). However, she notes that “[t]his is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice”—the distinction between being “the recipient not of a story … but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling” (Coleman 2010). Onion’s target for his most pungent provocations is not the audience, but Steven, or Mr. Smiley, or Suitcase Sam—such as the incident where, miming an act of

144

J. SARET

flashing, Onion and friends, stacked in a trench coat, snap a picture of Suitcase Sam’s shocked face. It may be that the offense given by Onion is removed from us and from the lessons that he stands to impart; his cultural position in Beach City is far removed from his cultural position relative to his audience. In a show that presents many cultural parallels to our world (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and colonialism being just a few of those explored in this volume), this is a significant distinction. Coleman adds that “Trickster tales are not didactic and moralizing but reveal their lessons playfully,” and Onion’s appearances are hardly didactic or moralizing (2014, 34). When it comes to the play of talking and silence, Onion does not outright defy Steven’s ability to make sense of his actions, but Steven is usually one or two steps behind and confused. As compared to the clarity with which Steven’s conversations usually take place, his conversations with Onion are marked by hesitations, missteps, retractions, and surprises on Steven’s part. Consider the moment when Onion returns to his door in “Onion Gang”: STEVEN: Oh! Onion! Need someone to hang out with again? Come on in! [View of Onion, motionless ] Oh, I see. Onion wanted to come in, but he paused in the doorway. He needed to take his shoes off [Onion looks at his feet ] – but he didn’t know how. [Onion shakes his head and extends his hand] You … wanna go somewhere else? [Onion pulls him into a run] … We just ran past your house, Onion! Where are you taking me?

Steven’s talks with Onion are littered with these confusions, only some of which are resolved. Sometimes Onion makes dialogical gestures, such as nodding, pointing, or beckoning, while other times, Steven just changes his mind as the situation confounds his expectations. There are instances when the audience knows better than Steven, such as when he misses Onion’s fixation on the replicating wand. Coleman, while teasing out the connection between trolls and tricksters, cites Lewis Hyde’s assertion that “‘the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on’” (2014, 34). If there’s one basic thing that is foregrounded by Onion’s encounters with Steven, it’s the image of a mutually clear and sincere (even if hostile) spoken dialogue that otherwise makes up a cultural anchor of Steven Universe. Blumenfeld (2016a) notes that an ideal of “constant, universal sincerity” also leaves Steven unprepared for some of his encounters with

7

PUNGENT SILENCE: ENCOUNTERS WITH ONION

145

Lars and Sadie: “there isn’t yet room for nuances like bad boy attraction or the idea of coyness” in his worldview. If there are times when Onion is deliberately messing with him, it’s pretty much beyond Steven’s ability to follow, as evidenced when he misreads Garbanzo’s fake death in “Onion Gang.” Yet Steven comes into an interesting third ground between his mind and Onion’s mind. Most of his conversations with Onion are either Steven speaking his mind or guesses at what Onion is meaning or doing, offered for Onion’s confirmation or rejection. “Onion Gang” introduces a third, more playful communicative form: narration. Rather than ask what Onion is doing, he narrates Onion in an absurdly humorous way, such as when Onion begins to eat his “favorite limited edition chips”: “Onion smelled the chip, savoring its delicious aroma. But no snack could satisfy his hunger … for POWER.” The narration and action occur simultaneously, so it’s hard to tell who is following whom. And while it’s just as unclear whether or not Steven’s words refer to Onion’s sincere self, a persona often adopted by Onion which Steven now understands to be a joke, or a caricature that Steven has concocted out of his own difficulty understanding Onion, which Onion plays along with, the coordination between the two of them is evidence of some kind of mutual understanding that has been reached. If clarity and sincerity are hard to locate in Steven and Onion’s relationship, it doesn’t prevent a mutual connection—one that is as ambiguous and anomalous as Onion himself.

Politricks STEVEN: [formal ] Dearly beloved: Gems. Humans! Lions big and small. Living gourds. [neutral – sly? wry? cordial?] Onion. (“Reunited”)

Identity is fundamental to the politics of Gems. Each Gem’s identity indicates their function and status within the rigid society of Homeworld, where there is little to no differentiating between Gems of the same type. They all share a name: for example, Peridot’s full identification is “Peridot Facet-2F5L Cut-5XG,” which suggests that, even if derived from different veins of ore, they are all cuts of a single stone. Consequently, identity is also fundamental to the politics of the Crystal Gems. When Rose first encounters Garnet, it adds a new layer to her battle for Earth, but the only way that she can understand the fusion of different Gems is in relation to

146

J. SARET

Earth as distinct from Homeworld: “Only on Earth, don’t you think?” (“Now We’re Only Falling Apart”). When Rose and the Crystal Gems came to appreciate life on Earth, they learned a new approach to identity as well. So, when Garnet justifies Rose’s shattering of Pink Diamond, she notes that relationship: “Destroying her was the only way to save the planet. For Amethyst to be herself, for Pearl to be free, for me to be together. For you to exist” (“Bubbled”). The Crystal Gems combat Gem society not only for Earth’s sake but for the sake of what Earth has made possible for them. Rose is the leading student of Earth. She marvels, while contemplating the planet in her video to Steven, “Each living thing has an entirely unique experience” (“Lion 3: Straight to Video”). The idea of unique experiences constituting unique beings transforms the Gems’ approaches to identity. It is to their surprise that uniqueness doesn’t preclude categories of identity from taking root. In another episode, Rose confesses to Greg, “You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to figure out that this [baby] and you are the same thing … You’re both human. You have to admit, it’s a little confusing. You’re big and can talk, and he’s small and can only make noises … But then I started to notice that you grow” (“Lion 3”). The language that she uses to express the idea slips into paradox: “You’re never the same even moment to moment – you’re allowed and expected to invent who you are” (“Lion 3”). How can two be the same as each other if one isn’t the same as themself? How can two unique and changing bodies be the same thing? For Earthly identity politics, difference is understood as a condition of identity, not a contest to it. In his book Alterity Politics (1998), Jeffrey Nealon explains that “any state of sameness actually requires difference in order to structure itself” (4). That is, Greg and the baby can both be humans because of how humans are differentiated from other living beings and inanimate objects. Greg can continue to be himself, even as he changes, by the same token. In the face of the instability of change and uniqueness, as William Connolly puts it, “‘Identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty’” (qtd. in Nealon 1998, 4). Onion, in turn, is marked by his difference from all others, creating an identity that extends only to himself. In his preamble to Ruby and Sapphire’s wedding, Steven locates Onion within his own category of identity, unlike every other entity; even though only one living gourd is present, we know of an island-ful somewhere in

7

PUNGENT SILENCE: ENCOUNTERS WITH ONION

147

the distance, so Steven’s classification system indicates that, to Steven and perhaps in the world of Steven Universe, Onion really is unique. That puts him in a comparable situation to one other attendee of the wedding: Steven himself, in a category all his own, half-Gem and half-human. Yet Steven’s nod to Onion does not disclose any more information about what category of identity might hold Onion. Indeed, the change in Steven’s tone—mirroring Onion’s own blankness of expression—sounds more like a personal acknowledgment. With this discursive shift, Steven situates Onion differently than anyone else in Steven’s speech, without respect to a category of identity. The first incongruity, and the first level of the joke, suggests that Onion inhabits a category not yet mentioned in the speech; the second level of the joke elides any indication of what that category might be. The further joke is that Onion does not react in any visible way to this salutation, giving no hint as to whether he agrees with it or not. Steven’s speech harkens back to an ambiguity that he established earlier in the series, when he listed examples of humans to Peridot: “there’s my dad, Connie, Lars and Sadie, the mailman, Onion – I think …” (“Warp Tour”). This running gag has provided a source of speculation for fans. A popular fan theory suggests that Onion is descended, via Vidalia, from a bulbous “species” of Rose’s making (see, e.g., “The Onion Theory” on Tumblr [HRH 2015] and “Omg. ‘Onion’ Theory…#Rose #Onion” on Pinterest). But even this naturalistic explanation wouldn’t account for how he is regularly singled out: it is the whole roster of his mysterious behavior and blankness, which distinguishes him even within his own family, that provides fodder for this expression of solitary identity—and lets what could, in other contexts, be frightening or tragic remain funny. If we seek a schema to offer some degree of resolution beyond the show, the figure of the trickster offers it to us. Hynes and Doty cite Robert Pelton, who has observed that the trickster ‘pulverizes the univocal’ and symbolizes the multivalence of life … Embodying this multivocality, the trickster himself eludes univocality by escaping from any restrictive definition: the trickster is always more than can be glimpsed at any one place or in any one embodiment. If one states that he is ambiguous, he will ‘insist’ that this assertion is far too simple, that he is more polyvalent than merely ambiguous. If one then asserts that the trickster is polyvalent, he will ‘reply’ that this is still too simple – and so on and so on. (1993, 35)

148

J. SARET

Onion’s reply to the aside in Steven’s speech is silence and blankness, giving him an even greater edge than the trickster described here. His response, rather than offering a counter-assertion that can in turn be countered on the same definitional ground, opens up the question of the grounds on which one could even define him. He doesn’t argue multiple positions but multiplies the number of questions of what he might say or mean. In a sense, his silence can be taken as indicating voice to mean something deeper than speaking, and so the distinction between “univocality” and “multivocality” collapses into a vision of voice as infinite.

Onions Onions At the end of “Onion Trade,” Steven makes a few guesses as to the state of Onion’s mind and the meaning of his behaviors. He gets two out of his three guesses correct: I think I understand why you took my Ranger Guy, Onion. I bet you get pretty lonely waiting for your dad all day. [Onion nods ] You were probably really bored, too. [Onion nods] And ‘cause you missed your dad, you took my Ranger Guy, which is symbolic of the relationship I have with my dad. [Onion shakes his head] No – just the first thing? [Onion nods ]

Could loneliness and boredom account for not just Onion’s theft of Ranger Guy but the whole day’s activities—including throwing a hamburger into the ocean, running over ketchup packets with a moped before exploding the vehicle, and burying Beach City in Dave Guys? Steven initially looks for both motivation and meaning in Onion’s behavior. Loneliness and boredom motivated him to do something to disrupt those feelings, and stealing Ranger Guy would satisfy, symbolically, the more concrete, socially grounded, and emotionally pressing of the two feelings. Loneliness has a clearer path to empathic resolution than boredom. Boredom fits the studious blankness of Onion, so one explanation could be that Onion is almost always bored and always looking for any way, however random, to entertain himself. Lars Svendsen, in A Philosophy of Boredom (2005), writes, “In boredom [,] events and objects are given to us as before, but with the important difference that they appear to have been stripped of meaning” (109). If Onion’s actions seem to us replete with possible meanings, then from the perspective of a perpetually bored subject, they would seem as meaningless and flat as any other activity.

7

PUNGENT SILENCE: ENCOUNTERS WITH ONION

149

I think it unlikely that Onion is always bored—for one, there’s too much evidence of his passions and enjoyments, and furthermore, he always seems to be up to something. When Steven starts following him out of Funland in “Onion Trade,” sleuthing music—a delicate high hat, a swinging theme in a minor key plucked on guitar, a tinkling bell—sets a tone of intrigue, one that often marks Onion’s appearances. Whether he’s hopping over a wall while holding a massive, unlabeled sack (“Pool Hopping”) or hawking onions at a roadside stand (“Raising the Barn”), Onion doesn’t seem to have a shortage of activities to occupy his time and attention. However, Svendsen also calls boredom a “fundamental existential experience,” and this is true, too, of absurdity (2005, 11). For this reason, absurd humor “can be seen as a means towards realism: an understanding of humanity’s predicament and our possibilities in an irrational universe” (Berger 2017, 19). Perhaps Onion understands our predicament and seeks to explore our possibilities in an irrational universe. Does this make his actions meaningful or absurd? (see Fig. 7.2). Why not both?

Fig. 7.2 Onion’s friend in “Onion Friend”

150

J. SARET

Note 1. Elliott Oring (2003) contends that “A tension between the incongruous domains always remains because the ‘resolution’ is spurious – never legitimate” (14). As a result, he contests the idea that any humor can be nonabsurd; he understands humor as the perception of an appropriate incongruity. However, it is the absence of even spurious resolutions that is my focus.

References Berger, Arthur Asa. 2017. An Anatomy of Humor. New York: Routledge. Blumenfeld, Zach. 2016a. “Empire City, Great Music and Steven Universe’s Summer Adventures: Week One.” Paste. Last modified July 23. pastemagazine. com/articles//07/empire-city-grief-and-steven-universes-summer-adve.html. ———. 2016b. “Steven Universe Gets Weird and Lonesome in ‘Onion Gang.’” Paste. Last modified September 16. pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/09/ steven-universe-gets-weird-and-lonesome-in-onion-g.html. ———. 2017. “Steven Universe Unleashes an Emotional Tempest in ‘Storm in the Room.’” Paste. Last modified February 17. pastemagazine.com/articles/ 2017/02/steven-universe-unleashes-an-emotional-tempest-in.html. Coleman, Gabriella. 2014. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy. Brooklyn: Verso. ———. 2010. “Hacker and Troller as Trickster.” Accessed February 1, 2019. gabriellacoleman.org/blog/?p=1902. Pile of Poo.” Emojipedia. n.d. Accessed February 1, 2019. emojipedia. “ org/pile-of-poo. Gavins, Joanna. 2013. Reading the Absurd. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd. Glenn, Cheryl. 2004. Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. HRH. 2015. “The Onion Theory.” Tumblr. Last modified April 1, 2015. hrhosmer.tumblr.com/post/115197541679/the-onion-theory. Hynes, William, and William Doty. 1993. Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. Nealon, Jeffrey. 1998. Alterity Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Oring, Elliott. 2003. Engaging Humor. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Pinterest. n.d. “Omg. ‘Onion’ Theory…#Rose #Onion.” Pinterest. Accessed February 1, 2019. pinterest.com/pin/309411436876375259. Steven Universe Wiki. 2019. Accessed February 1, 2019. http://steven-universe. fandom.com/. Svendsen, Lars. 2005. A Philosophy of Boredom. London: Reaktion Books Ltd.

7

PUNGENT SILENCE: ENCOUNTERS WITH ONION

Episodes Referenced “Bubble Buddies” (season 1, episode 7, 2013) “Gem Drill” (season 3, episode 2, 2016) “Gem Glow” (season 1, episode 1, 2013) “Legs from Here to Homeworld” (season 5, episode 25, 2018) “Lion 3: Straight to Video” (season 1, episode 35, 2014) “Now We’re Only Falling Apart” (season 5, episode 19, 2018) “Onion Friend” (season 2, episode 13, 2015) “Onion Gang” (season 4, episode 7, 2016) “Onion Trade” (season 1, episode 15, 2014) “Pool Hopping” (season 5, episode 15, 2018) “Raising the Barn” (season 5, episode 7, 2017) “Steven and the Stevens” (season 1, episode 22, 2014) “Warp Tour” (season 1, episode 36, 2015)

151

CHAPTER 8

Contact Zone Earth: Power and Consent in Steven Universe and Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood Emrys Donaldson

Stories of alien encounter tend to re-inscribe narratives of human prowess and success. Human victory over alien species reinforces our unique place in the cosmos, our own sui generis status. These victories support the idea that contact between two vastly different ways of being necessitates violent physical conflict. Rare are the stories of humans meeting aliens that engage with the difficulties of negotiating complex power relationships, particularly those pertaining to the navigation of consent. Rarer still are stories like this set on Earth. This chapter will focus on two Earthbased narratives, the television show Steven Universe and the novel trilogy Lilith’s Brood by Octavia Butler, both of which center the stories of children who are the result of extended hybridity between humans and aliens, and who in their liminality must navigate the conflicting needs of two species. To put these works in conversation with one another is to engage with science fiction’s complicated history of alien encounter

E. Donaldson (B) Department of English, Jacksonville State University, Jacksonville, AL, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 J. R. Ziegler and L. Richards (eds.), Representation in Steven Universe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9_8

153

154

E. DONALDSON

vis-à-vis reproduction and hybridity. Consideration of these two texts in dialogue will demonstrate how humanity must grapple with questions of consent in inter-species power relationships, particularly over a long-term time horizon. The two texts present largely opposing depictions of how the aliens treat humans; therefore, productive conclusions can be drawn from putting the texts in conversation with one another. How differing species treat the place of their meeting depends on how they perceive it and its inhabitants. When species meet one another, particularly companion species,1 the place of their meeting is a contact zone.2 In both of these texts, Earth is the contact zone. The difference between individuated experiences of consciousness is their umwelt (Winthrop-Young 2010, 215).3 To share in the inter-species suffering of others is to acknowledge the validity of that suffering and to empathize with it across the difference in umwelt. Empathy depends upon recognition of the effects that an action may have on others, which is contingent on the capacity to imagine how another being emotes and experiences consciousness. In Steven Universe, three magical alien guardians known as the Crystal Gems parent a half-human, half-Gem child, the eponymous Steven Universe. In Lilith’s Brood, Oankali aliens imprison what remains of humanity after a nuclear holocaust and force the humans to interbreed with them. Both texts illuminate narratives of alien salvation through a focus on reproductive futurity,4 but their approaches to this salvation differ greatly. Whereas Butler’s text navigates consent with a more traditional focus on human submission to alien species, Steven Universe offers hope for future narratives of inter-species meeting. I will address how alien– human interactions inform potential models for the diffusion of power in other types of cross-species relationships. Unimpeded two-way communication and a shared set of communication norms are a required first step for mutual consent, and the possibility of intertwined flourishing depends upon mutuality and respect. To consider the possibility of intertwined flourishing, one must first consider how existence itself is predicated on inter-species symbiosis. In When Species Meet , Donna Haraway (2007) discusses this symbiosis at the level of her own body. She notes that “90 percent of the cells [in her body] are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such … I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many” (4, emphasis in original). There can be no lone wolves nor single superheroes when survival depends on

8

CONTACT ZONE EARTH: POWER AND CONSENT IN …

155

others. The process of becoming with many requires a complex negotiation with other species, whether that is at the cellular level within a body or at the level of discussing consent for many bodies. Consent matters in savior narratives. Humanity has to want to be saved from destruction, not merely dully expected to be grateful for it. To assume that humanity wants to be saved negates humanity’s autonomy and ability to consent within inter-species relationships. Although the Crystal Gems in Steven Universe conceive of humans as their companion species, they are dependent on humanity at least as much as, if not more than, humanity is on them. The Crystal Gems5 say that humans need them in Beach City to protect humanity from the villainous Diamonds, dictatorial rulers based on the Gem Homeworld who see the Earth solely as an exploitable natural resource. However, the Crystal Gems need humans to give them a sense of purpose as saviors. Most humans remain unaware of the presence of the Gems, who mostly work in secret, yet they are interdependent with the Gems. The Gems become with humans and are also dependent on them, despite viewing them as lesser beings due to differences in innate bodily capabilities. By underscoring the mutual dependence of human and Gem species, the writers of Steven Universe demonstrate the falseness of the idea of existing outside of a web of relationships.

Fusion, Equilibrium, and Consent The Gems conceive of themselves as superior in part because of their ability to perform, and strict moral codes around, the act of fusion. For Gems, fusion is the primary activity through which they negotiate consent. Rose Quartz, Steven’s absent mother and the former leader of the Crystal Gems, calls fusion “love” (“The Answer”). Garnet, one of the Gems raising Steven and who is herself a fusion, calls it “not two people, not one person, [but] an experience” (“Alone Together”). Given the intimacy of the act, some critics see a direct correlation between Gem fusion and human sexual activity, but fusion represents emotional intimacy. Precisely how this intimacy translates into sexual activity matters less to the Gems because they are not depicted as experiencing sexual love as humans do (see also Pitre, Chapter 2 and Cooley, Chapter 3). The science fiction critic K. Tempest Bradford has argued that fusion is not a 1:1 relationship to sexual intercourse, but rather that it represents a standard for any kind of close relationship (Blauersouth et al. 2017). Insofar

156

E. DONALDSON

as emotional and physical intimacy are standards for close relationships, conceptualizing fusion as such a standard seems useful. Regardless of what type of intimacy fusion represents, it requires sharing one’s full self with another being. Perception, action, and emotion merge. To be fused is to exist in a consensual state of negotiated equilibrium, constantly checking and rechecking to ensure stability and mutual agreement. When any participant in fusion alters this equilibrium, the fusion ends. Take Garnet, a semi-permanent fusion of two separate Gems, as an example. While most Gems do not remain fused for long periods of time, Garnet represents a stable, loving, and long-term relationship. The two Gems who compose Garnet demonstrate physical affection for/toward each other, and they appear to be romantically happy when dancing together and fusing. When Garnet becomes upset, this equilibrium is disrupted, as when the Gems discover the extent of Rose Quartz’s true identity (“Now We’re Only Falling Apart”) and Garnet unfuses into Ruby and Sapphire. They recommit to their fusion with a traditional wedding ceremony (“Reunited”) where they state intentions and vows before they fuse back into Garnet. The Gems view humanity as lesser-than because humans (supposedly) cannot fuse,6 a difference that separates how they conceptualize themselves from how they conceptualize humanity. For example, Pearl asserts that Steven’s human father Greg cannot experience a deep connection with Rose, Steven’s Gem mother, because “fusion is the ultimate connection” (“We Need to Talk”). Pearl sees Greg’s inability to fuse as an impassable boundary. Yet this division between humans and Gems proves to be incorrect. Not only do Steven and Connie fuse into Stevonnie, but Rose and Greg fuse (in a different manner) into Steven Universe: Steven is composed of his mother’s gemstone and his father’s genetic material. Being a network television show marketed to children, Steven Universe does not examine the exact mechanics of reproduction between Rose and Greg, but it is safe to say that their act of association encompasses the merger of physical material from the two of them and that it is an act of love. Humans being able to fuse opens up new possibilities for sharing power and for equalizing an unequal power dynamic. Through the consensual dance of fusion, Gem aliens can share their magical abilities. The Gems’ power to use magic is diffused when humans can also use that magic. Stevonnie, the fusion between Steven and Connie, represents a way to

8

CONTACT ZONE EARTH: POWER AND CONSENT IN …

157

engage in power-sharing between someone with Gem powers and someone without. For Stevonnie, this means that Connie, a human, has access to Steven Universe’s magical abilities, which include flight, his protective bubbles, and his shield. Because Stevonnie’s umwelt differs from that of either Steven or Connie alone, their umwelt represents new and exciting territory within Steven Universe for how new forms of life can be in the world as well as how humans can share power with Gems. Think of Stevonnie as a prototype for future Gem-human interactions. In order to engage in fusion, the participants wishing to fuse must dance with one another. The dance represents a kind of greeting ritual, a form of communication through the physical boundaries of bodies. The space between two about-to-fuse beings flattens to the space where skin touches skin before it disappears completely. Similarly, Haraway characterizes her relationship with her Australian Shepherd dog, Cayenne, as a kind of emotionally intimate fusion. Referencing B. Smut, Haraway discusses greeting rituals as “embodied communication … more like a dance than a word. The flow of entangled meaningful bodies in time … is communication about relationship, the relationship itself, and the means of reshaping relationship and so its enacters” (26). Much like fusion, the embodied communication of a human-canine greeting entangles bodies. Due to the proximity of their bodies, the contact zone in which they exist flattens to near-nonexistence. This closeness, and a variety of species living alongside each other, means that the negotiation of consent happens in a small space. Too, the act of fusion is an act of communication about the relationship between the two individuals who fuse. Steadiness in that relationship is required for the fusion to continue. Living alongside humans means that Gems must value equilibrium and balance in interactions with them just as equilibrium is a prerequisite to remain fused. Garnet first defines her equilibrium via “Garnet’s Song” when she fights with an anti-fusion Gem named Jasper.7 She sings, go ahead and try and hit me if you’re able can’t you see that my relationship is stable I can see that you hate the way we intermingle but I think you’re just mad cuz you’re single .… and we’ll always be twice the gem that you are. (“Jail Break”)

Garnet further defines herself as a fusion by singing

158

E. DONALDSON

I am their fury I am their patience I am a conversation. (“Jail Break”)

Additionally, Garnet tells Blue Diamond that she is “the will of two Gems to care for each other and protect each other from any threat, no matter how vast or how cruel” (“Reunited”). As she states this, an instrumental version of “Garnet’s Song” plays as background music. Ruby, being more furious, and Sapphire, being more patient, converse and negotiate their relationship constantly while fused as Garnet. As a result of the steadiness of their conversation, they remain in a state of equilibrium. Consent and emotional stability are required from each of them in order to maintain their fused self: without both of them consenting, moment by moment, to remain Garnet, they would break apart. Show creator Rebecca Sugar has discussed the importance of talking to kids about consent (Brown 2016) and examples in the show of fusions ending due to a lack of attentiveness or a lack of consent seem to be used didactically to explore the ramifications of consent violations in relationships between humans. These lessons not only teach children about consent, they also provide case studies and examples. In season 2, the Crystal Gem Pearl persuades Garnet to fuse with her under false pretenses to mitigate a nonexistent threat (“Cry for Help”). In doing so, Pearl commits a severe act of emotional, interpersonal, and physical violence. Pearl convinces Garnet to literally give up her physical form under duress (Garnet believes that her family and planet are in grave danger). The extremity of this violation forces a break in Garnet and Pearl’s familial relationship. Because there are so few Crystal Gems on Earth, and because Garnet dedicates herself to the mission of protecting Earth to the level of self-sacrifice, she does not walk away despite the violation. While Garnet eventually decides to forgive Pearl and let go of her anger about the violence, the situation provides an opportunity for viewers to consider how a similar violation could be handled when it takes place between two humans.8 Yet the writers of Steven Universe complicate what may at first seem to be a straightforward victimization. After Garnet discovers Pearl’s violation, she orders another Crystal Gem, Amethyst, to fuse with her to eradicate even the possibility of a perceived threat. Although Amethyst protests and Garnet seems to pressure Amethyst to consent, Amethyst is not on the receiving end of violence from Garnet in the same way that Garnet

8

CONTACT ZONE EARTH: POWER AND CONSENT IN …

159

was from Pearl. At first, when Pearl is found out, Amethyst defends Pearl by telling Garnet, “You know, we’re so much weaker than you! Fusing with you is like our one chance to feel … stronger!” (“Cry for Help”). This interpretation not only elevates Pearl’s feelings and emotions over Garnet’s, but it’s also an attempt by Amethyst to gaslight Garnet into acting as though the violation never happened: Amethyst blames Garnet for her own innate bodily capabilities and uses them to defend Pearl’s behavior, justifying the use of Garnet’s body to make other Gems feel good, feel stronger, without Garnet’s full knowledge and consent. With her Afro and skin tone, Garnet codes as Black and Pearl codes as White, and in defending the violation, Amethyst reinforces centuries of human racialized oppression by defending a White-appearing character’s violence against a Black-appearing character (see Zolciak, Chapter 4 for further discussion of Blackness in Steven Universe). At the end of the same episode, Steven and Amethyst watch the showwithin-a-show cartoon Crying Breakfast Friends. In the episode, Crying Pear asks for forgiveness, which Sad Spoon gives. Then, Sad Spoon hugs Crying Pear. A clear correlation exists with Steven and Amethyst’s hope that Garnet will forgive Pearl. Amethyst comments, “Man, it sure would be nice if things worked out the way they do in cartoons” (“Cry for Help”). Following this comment, Steven directs his television remote outward at the actual viewing audience of Steven Universe and turns off the TV, which ends the episode of Steven Universe, breaking the fourth wall. One interpretation is that this is an Inception-style jest about layers of reality and which reality is the “real world” or which is “true.” However, I argue that this meta-commentary by the writers of Steven Universe is a critique of the idea that resolution of violations of consent is easy. To simply turn off the television is insufficient to address the complicated situation at play within the Crystal Gems, and it is analogous to a refusal to be present and to engage. It implicates the viewers not only of Crying Breakfast Friends (namely Steven and Amethyst) but the viewers of Steven Universe as well. Garnet returns to emotional safety not through a single action, such as the press of an OFF button, but through a process of apology and reconciliation. Amethyst desires a quick fix, similar to a child wishing that their parents would just stop fighting rather than work through a communication process. She seems to value the appearance of a lack of conflict over actual conflict resolution. However, things will not work out the way that they do in cartoons, not even for their characters.

160

E. DONALDSON

Intimate violence erodes trust, violates physical and emotional spaces, and undermines kinship structures. The violence enacted against Garnet brings up the consideration of fusion as an act of power and control rather than merely an act of spontaneous intimacy and love.9 It also criticizes the idea that the person impacted by violence has an obligation to engage in more emotional labor and forgive the person who enacted the violence. The show’s writers critique both Amethyst’s gaslighting of Garnet and her desire for an easy solution to complicated dynamics within her family. The complicated negotiation of consent must include resolution when violations of consent occur, whether the violations are within or across species boundaries.

Consent and the Oankali The power dynamic of alien–human symbiosis, including the discussion of consent, typically skews heavily toward the alien species due to its more complex technologies and innate bodily capabilities: while, as described above, the Gems see this boundary as relating to their seemingly magical capabilities, the Oankali in Lilith’s Brood see it as having to do with their scientific capabilities. Both the Gems and the Oankali perceive their own umwelt as more complex than what humans experience, and the difference in perceived complexity is read as an indicator that humans are a lesser species. How the Oankali treat humans without their consent—changing them genetically, impregnating them and stealing their offspring, performing surgeries on them—bears remarkable similarity to how modern humans treat animals on Earth. The aliens’ experience of humans as lesser beings means that they treat humans as though humans cannot adequately make decisions for themselves. The Oankali completely ignore humans’ autonomy and ability to fully participate in decision-making. They justify their behavior by conceptualizing their own abilities as far superior to those of humans. For example, in Dawn, the first book of the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, an Oankali named Nikanj patronizes the book’s human protagonist, Lilith, by telling her that her bodily limitations prevent her from the broader range of Oankali experience. He instructs her to “Move the sixteenth finger of your left strength hand,” which of course Lilith cannot, having two human hands with five fingers each. Lilith interprets this request as another “case of Oankali omniscience: We understand your feelings, eat your food, manipulate your genes. But we’re too complex for you to

8

CONTACT ZONE EARTH: POWER AND CONSENT IN …

161

understand” (Butler 1987, 225). This instruction of Nikanj’s comes after Lilith demands that Nikanj share its10 feelings and umwelt with her, because it shares how she feels without her consent.11 Humans lack the extra “strength hand” limbs that the Oankali possess, so they are unable to perceive their movement. Asking Lilith to move the sixteenth finger of her left strength hand underscores her human limitations. In the context of the novel, Nikanj and other Oankali weaponize these limitations to coerce Lilith and other humans into believing that forced human–Oankali hybridity benefits them due to Oankali genetic superiority. The Oankali designate themselves as superior beings so that they are better able to control humans. The Oankali believe that, because they are more complex beings than humans, they are able to better understand human needs than are humans themselves. Lilith’s relationship with Nikanj is physiologically symbiotic. Nikanj alters Lilith so that she is physically uncomfortable after being away from it for a while. She has no choice in the matter of her alteration, and the novel does not depict Nikanj asking for her consent. Any negotiation in which Lilith participates takes place on Nikanj’s terms, and Lilith has little power over it that does not also cause herself harm. In addition to Nikanj believing that (and trying to gaslight Lilith into thinking that) the Oankali are granted special provenance over humans by virtue of their genetic superiority, the language that Nikanj uses throughout the novels echoes the language of human rape and sexual assault. Nikanj impregnates Lilith without her consent. According to Nikanj, it is unable to control itself because it finds Lilith so appealing. When Nikanj describes how the Oankali felt about having to wait to be physically intimate with the humans assigned to them, it says that “most of us couldn’t wait … It might be better for both our peoples if we were not so strongly drawn to you” (Butler, 202). This language admits that the rape, sexual assault, forced captivity, and other horrors perpetrated by the Oankali against humans are negative for both species, but it does so in a way that attempts to justify the actions of Nikanj and the other Oankali. Curiously, Butler describes the third-gender aliens—the ooloi—as committing the largest violations of consent and leading the other Oankali to do so. The male and female Oankali follow the lead of those non-binary aliens who enslave humanity to serve as their reproductive vessels. This enslavement traumatizes the humans confined for forced breeding with the Oankali. Later in the book, Lilith tells another character that the Oankali never gave her a choice to run away from them, as some of the other humans were able to do after being sterilized while kept in

162

E. DONALDSON

captivity by the aliens (273). Decades after Nikanj violated her by impregnating her without her consent, she experiences normal human reactions to trauma and captivity, although she describes them as “flares of bitterness” (274). She admits that, despite wanting the child whom she delivered, she never asked for nor consented to him, saying that “if I had the strength not to ask, it should have had the strength to let me alone” (274). After Nikanj impregnates Lilith without her consent, it tells her that it’s what she wanted all along but would never ask for. This response to a violation of consent—gaslighting the survivor—echoes the Steven Universe episode discussed above in which Pearl violates Garnet. Because Lilith is not free to refuse decades of captivity by literally having her genes altered so that she experiences discomfort if away from her forced Oankali family, the relationship between the Oankali and humanity is one of abuse. When, at first, Lilith experiences horror at the physical presence of Nikanj, it keeps her prisoner, refusing to let her out of her cell on the alien spaceship until she tolerates it. This lack of freedom echoes how humans treat some species of intelligent life on Earth, especially cetaceans: ours for captivity, reproduction, and greedy enjoyment. Steven Universe’s Crystal Gems do not attempt to change life on Earth as the Oankali do. While the Oankali argue that they protect and alter life on Earth to save it, the savior narrative of the Gems focuses on treading lightly and interfering as little as possible. The Oankali not only impregnate Lilith without her consent, but they also change her genetically while she’s asleep. While at first she appears to be grateful for some of these changes—like removing a tumor that would have killed her—in time, she becomes bitter about the relationship and thinks of herself as a lesser form of life compared to the Oankali. When the ooloi Jdahya first tells Lilith that the Oankali have made voluntary changes to her genetic structure, including increasing her strength, Lilith let the silence lengthen until she was certain he would not answer. This was one more thing they had done to her body without her consent and supposedly for her own good. “We used to treat animals that way,” she muttered bitterly. “What?” he said. “We did things to them—inoculations, surgery, isolation—all for their own good. We wanted them healthy and protected—sometimes so we could eat them later.” (33)

Throughout most of the trilogy, Lilith operates under the assumption that the Oankali do not eat humans because they do not kill them and

8

CONTACT ZONE EARTH: POWER AND CONSENT IN …

163

take them away. They experiment on the more violent humans, and they manipulate them and study them in every possible way, but to Lilith there exists a definite line in the sand between doing this and killing them for consumption. Butler explicitly writes that these changes are “supposedly” for her own good—Lilith cannot know whether what the Oankali tell her about cancer is true or whether they have used her as a breeder. For Lilith, to prey on humans to satisfy immediate physical needs rather than intellectual ones is to cross a boundary into treating humans as animals with little to no autonomy over whether they live or die. Crossing such a line goes outside the realm of what Lilith will tolerate. However, the boundary set and understood by Lilith as outside what the Oankali do to her is incorrect. In a later conversation between one of Lilith’s ooloi children, Jodahs, and her ooloi partner/co-parent/abuser Nikanj, the reader discovers that the ooloi do actually consume humans. Jodahs narrates, I had once heard my mother say to Nikanj, “It’s a good thing your people don’t eat meat. If you did, the way you talk about us, I think you would eat us instead of fiddling with our genes.” And after a moment of silence, “That might even be better. It would be something we could understand and fight against.” Nikanj had not said a word. It might have been feeding on her even then—sharing bits of her most recent meal, taking in dead or malformed cells from her flesh, even harvesting a ripe egg before it could begin its journey down her fallopian tubes to her uterus. (680)

By being food for the Oankali, humans engage in further labor for the Oankali without their consent or even their knowledge. At least they know about their pregnancies and the children that result. The Oankali keep the knowledge of the feeding from humans because to feed on humans seems to be a boundary that most humans would not cross, a boundary that evokes monster myths. Instead, the Oankali use coercion and manipulation to make humans like Lilith lack firm and continued resistance. Coercion and true consent cannot coexist. In the novel, Butler echoes and parallels the historical crimes perpetuated in the United State against people of color, especially Black people (Lilith is a Black American woman), in the name of medicine. Nikanj and the other Oankali are species supremacists. As eugenicists, the Oankali eradicate human babies born without Oankali features. Yet despite the Oankali treating humans like lesser beings, the reason that they give for

164

E. DONALDSON

merging with humanity is that humans contain the genetic complexity of cancer, which the Oankali lack and which they desire. While engaging with historical crimes is outside the scope of this essay, plenty of scholarship exists on the subject.12 Coercion, a lack of informed consent, and thefts, both physical and psychological, permeate the historical narratives, as they do Butler’s fictional work. Yet despite the violence and trauma that the Oankali inflict on Lilith, she does not view them as evil. Due to the length of her confinement and continual emotional abuse from her alien captors, Lilith’s view of the Oankali’s relationship to humanity changes. Her Stockholm Syndrome is a result of psychological re-conditioning and long-term grooming: if she ever seems seriously uncooperative, the Oankali force her to sleep again, for a period of months or years until they believe that, when awakened, she will again demonstrate cooperation with them.13 Lilith’s Stockholm Syndrome impacts how she seems to think about consent, as evidenced by the change in how she talks about the Oankali to other humans. At first, she talks about humanity as being owned, saying that the Oankali “owned the Earth and all that was left of the human species” (59). Later, she changes her definition of the Oankali as she wakes up more humans, calling the Oankali first “our captors” and then immediately correcting herself by calling them “our rescuers” (129). As she navigates the relationships between the Oankali and humanity, she defends the Oankali to humans, telling them that “We’re protected from one another … We’re an endangered species—almost extinct. If we’re going to survive, we need protection” (141). Over time, and with additional exposure to other people, Lilith changes her views about the Oankali from thinking about them as an oppressive force to thinking about them as a protective force. This change demonstrates how pervasive and severe the Oankali violations of her consent are and how much they refused to negotiate with her. It is only through Akin, a human–Oankali mixed-species being, that Lilith sees the symbiosis of her relationship with the Oankali as potentially progressive. Given the presence of coercion in her relationship with the Oankali, she is unable to freely consent, but still, her decision to not actively engage in resistance against the Oankali makes her culpable and brings up the question of whether a “right” way to survive exists. Too, the problem of communicative responsibility arises. The extent to which, when communicating across species’ boundaries, one needs to assure understanding from the recipient of communication is dependent on the level of understanding expected from a member of that species.

8

CONTACT ZONE EARTH: POWER AND CONSENT IN …

165

For example, the Oankali do not expect humans to be able to understand the motivations behind Oankali decisions, although the Oankali–human mixed-species children are able to understand the thinking and justification of both species. Akin realizes that his Oankali parents control his human ones. He thinks, “Of course. You controlled both animals and people by controlling their reproduction—controlling it absolutely. But perhaps Akin could learn something that would be of use to the [human] resisters” (447). Eventually, awareness of the abuse in this relationship leads Akin to advocate for humans to have their own planet, Mars, on which to grow and reproduce. The people who have both human and Oankali heritage end up best able to empathize with human experience. Given an imbalanced power dynamic where consent necessitates equality in power, the part-human people, like Steven Universe and Akin, can advocate for humanity. The umwelt of Steven Universe’s and Akin’s experiences defines new spaces within what it means to have consciousness. Their experiences and perceptions, including how they interact with the environment and with other beings within their environment, are vastly different from those of any previous being, whether human or alien. They are new, and in their newness, everything about them is also exploratory. The posthuman selves of Akin, Jodahs, and Steven bridge not only human–alien cultural divides, but human–alien genetic divides too. Through reproduction, species fuse and newness emerges. Haraway writes, “Where reproduction is at stake, kin and kind are torqued; biographies and systems of classification, warped” (139). The definitions of who counts as a Gem and who counts as an Oankali—of who counts as kin and kind—expand to include Steven and Akin, where previously they may not have, freshening previously stagnant modes of being, introducing new beings, and destroying stolid, binary thinking. It allows for the power differential between two species to change into something more equitable. While, in theory, empathy with humanity should be possible regardless of one’s own self-identification as a human being, mixed-species children translate the experience of being human in both Steven Universe and Lilith’s Brood.

Emergents and Inter-species Boundaries When life forms multiply, complexity and resilience increase. Through blurring the alien/human binary, the children of inter-species interactions

166

E. DONALDSON

produce novel biological variation. Steven Universe, Akin, Jodahs, and the other part-human part-aliens from their fictional universes are interspecies contact zones made physical. Because their existence and experiences are new, no being in either fictional universe knows its limitations. And because of this hybridity, Steven Universe and the Oankali–human constructs represent more complex life forms than a single Gem, Oankali, or human. Haraway terms the life forms that arise from warped and new categories of being as “emergents.” She writes that emergents “require attention to process, relationship, context, history, possibility, and conditions for flourishing. Emergents are about the apparatuses of emergence, themselves braided of heterogeneous actors and action in torqued relationship” (136). By being able to advocate for the human halves of their ancestry, the new beings not only experience consciousness differently but also map new spaces in the terrain of the umwelt. Through this new experience of consciousness, they represent potential solutions for issues of power, control, and consent between their parent species. For example, Steven convinces Gems Lapis Lazuli and Peridot to join the Crystal Gems by impressing them with the possibilities of life on Earth. In Lilith’s Brood, Akin creates a path for humans to reproduce without Oankali interference if they move from Earth to the planet Mars. Yet, for both characters, these qualities are not innate: they required significant immersion in the world of humans—Steven in his relationship with his father and in his daily treks around Beach City, Akin during his abduction to the human resister village Phoenix. Akin straddles the line between Oankali and human, blurring that binary, in his navigation of the resisters’ desires. When he begins to organize the plan to have the Oankali allow humans to settle on the moon, Akin self-describes as “Oankali enough to be listened to by other Oankali and Human enough to know that resister Humans were being treated with cruelty and condescension” (Butler 404). He sees it as inevitable that the Oankali will use up the Earth when their Lo ships are ready to depart, so he focuses on convincing the humans to leave rather than fight the Oankali. As Akin expresses it, the future is certain: the constructs will interweave with life on Earth, and future hybridized generations will explore the universe together. The idea of coming together to prepare for the future is used in both texts as a way to excuse violations of consent. The false equivalency of children with the future and the tendency to see a path toward this future only through reproduction and coupling are not questioned in either text. In Lilith’s Brood, the acts of violence committed against humans by the

8

CONTACT ZONE EARTH: POWER AND CONSENT IN …

167

Oankali are undertaken for the sake of “the future,” a vague idea at the nexus of physical reproduction, preparation, and purpose. The future is defined and to the characters feels inevitable, yet in each episode of Steven Universe, the future seems uncertain and surprising. Perhaps this difference is due to the number and planning of the Oankali, which are accessible to the constructs such as Akin and Jodahs, whereas the Crystal Gems, being rebels in exile, are kept out of the other Gems’ planning. Through the character of Steven Universe, half-human and half-Gem, the Gems see a new future for the planet Earth and for their family.14 Likewise, the Oankali see their future in a “gene trade” between themselves and humans that results in mixed-species offspring like Akin and Jodahs. Even to a human resister in Lilith’s Brood, the future still equals children (albeit “fully human” children).15 The focus in both stories is on reproductive futurity via the creation of new mixed-species beings who lead humans and aliens alike toward new and unpredictable futures. Additionally, the biological variation introduced to human and alien species by the inter-species children remains essential to the continuance of a species and pivotal for balance and equilibrium in the spaces between and within species. Haraway quotes Margulis and Sagan as saying that “Attraction, merger, fusion, incorporation, co-habitation, recombination—both permanent and cyclical—and other forms of forbidden couplings, are the main sources of Darwin’s mission variation” (32). The reproductive fusion of Rose and Greg, once thought by the other Gems to be a form of forbidden coupling (although their coupling was completely consensual), provides the variation needed for members of humanity to possess the knowledge and innate skill to fight Gems from Homeworld and prepare to defend Earth in the future. Prior to Steven coming into existence, humans themselves would have no way to fight back against an exterior threat without outside help, if they even knew that they were being targeted before it was too late. Similarly, prior to Akin, the humans in Lilith’s Brood had no way to advocate for themselves among the Oankali. The Crystal Gems provide a positive relationship model between aliens and humans. Although their interactions are imperfect, their actions demonstrate a valuation of human consent whenever possible.16 In contrast, the Oankali use humans like a natural resource to be managed. Mutual emergence into new contact zones necessitates navigation of consent. Across chasms of time, media, and space, ideas about how best to move through this emergence and how to move through contact zones

168

E. DONALDSON

with other species point toward diffusion of power and equitable relationships as the way forward. Envisioning a future where many species communicate with one another to express their needs and have their needs met by other species in a shared stewardship of common spaces is not only possible, but necessary. The confirmed presence of extraplanetary life may not ever happen, yet at present, despite resources with the potential for developing two-way communication, humans generally treat non-human people (such as cephalopods and cetaceans) similarly to the way that we treat non-sentient life. Together, humans must move forward in tandem with other species and negate our own sense of human exceptionalism. Steven Universe and Lilith’s Brood show potential paths forward, but it is up to humanity to begin the work.

Notes 1. Haraway (2007) uses the term companion species to refer to creatures that are kin in terms of love, shared goals, and closeness. Examples of this dynamic include dogs as human companions and humans as Gem companions. Generally, the companion has less power in the relationship. 2. The places where the humans meet non-human others are “contact zone[s]” (Haraway, 4): interstitial locations where the boundaries between one species and another remain porous. Whether spaceship, exoplanet, or right here on Earth, the place where species meet informs their encounter. For example, for cetaceans or cephalopods, a contact zone might be the ocean or an aquarium. 3. Uexküll’s idea of the umwelt characterizes the complicated ways that individuals experience their own perceptions and experience of being in the world. A new definition of this term originated in his early twentiethcentury texts and was later popularized by the semiotician Thomas Sebeok. 4. The reason behind an action being for the sake of a child, the child being “the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention” (Edelman 2004, 2). 5. Because the Crystal Gems come from a society in which their social status and profession are decided from birth via a rigid caste hierarchy, the freedom found on Earth appeals to them. 6. The (at first) accidental fusion of Steven and Connie into Stevonnie proves the falsehood of the assertion that humans are incapable of fusion (“Alone Together”). 7. Homophobic undertones exist in this scene, as Jasper seems disgusted that Garnet is a composed of two different gems in romantic love with

8

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

CONTACT ZONE EARTH: POWER AND CONSENT IN …

169

each other, rather than being composed of many gems of the same type working together in a collegial relationship. In “The New Lars,” when Steven takes over Lars’s mind without his consent, Lars does not accept his apology and, in fact, rips his apology card in half. In “Jail Break,” Lapis Lazuli fuses with Jasper into Malachite as a way of imprisoning Jasper under the ocean. Their fusion is held together by mutual anger and hostile feelings toward each other, although Jasper and Lapis appear to take turns controlling Malachite rather than making unanimous decisions. They stay fused until “Super Watermelon Island,” when Alexandrite (the fusion of Garnet, Pearl, and Amethyst) finally separates them with the force of an arrow from Opal’s bow. In the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, all third-gender Oankali aliens, known as the ooloi, use “it/its” pronouns. The Oankali can manipulate even the most private, internal realms of human experience, like emotional processing and digestion. See, for example, Harriet A. Washington (2008), Medical Apartheid (New York: Anchor Books) and James H. Jones (1993), Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York: The Free Press). See also Ruha Benjamin’s (2013), People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press) for a compelling argument about democratizing scientific research. This seems to echo both the Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast fairy tales. As Sleeping Beauty, Lilith sleeps for long periods of time before being awakened by an Oankali “prince.” As Beauty, she is forced to live with her captor in a household for a long period of time. In Steven Universe, the Crystal Gem Bismuth tells Steven directly that “someone is making them [the Crystal Gems] believe in the future, and it’s you!” (“Made of Honor”). Of course, the triadic couplings that human couples form with the ooloi Oankali could be read as suggestive of human polyamory. And, of course, there’s the question of whether physical intimacy with an alien is itself a queer act (a question which is outside the scope of this essay). In “The New Lars,” Steven accidentally takes over Lars’ body as an act of wish fulfillment (see also note 8). While he spends an entire day in Lars’s body without Lars’s consent, he did not originally intend to control Lars, and the Crystal Gems as a group do not take over human bodies for their own uses. While Blue Diamond maintains Pink Diamond’s zoo of captive humans (as seen in “Gem Heist” and “The Zoo” and described in the former episode by Holly Blue as “specimen containment”), the Homeworld Gems as a group do not seem to enter human bodies in order to control them, nor do they reproduce with humans. The ability to enter others’ minds also forms a central part of Butler’s Patternist series, where

170

E. DONALDSON

Patternists use this talent to control non-Patternist humans (referred to in the series with the derogatory term “mutes”).

References Blauersouth, Ty, K. Tempest Bradford, J.P. Fairfield, Seth Frost, and @thingswithwings. 2017. “Steven Universe and Consent.” Paper presented at Wiscon 41, Madison, WI, May. Brown, Tracy. 2016. “‘Steven Universe’s’ Rebecca Sugar Shares Why LGBTQ Representation Is Personal.” Los Angeles Times, July 24. Accessed September 1, 2017. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-hc-comic-conupdates-steven-universe-s-rebecca-sugar-talks-1469218639-htmlstory.html. Butler, Octavia E. 1987. Lilith’s Brood. New York: Warner Books. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. 2010. “Bubbles and Webs: A Backdoor Stroll Through the Readings of Uexküll.” Afterword to A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning, by Jakob von Uexküll, translated by Joseph D. O’Neill, 209–243. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Episodes Referenced “Alone Together” (season 1, episode 37, 2015) “The Answer” (season 2, episode 22, 2016) “Cry for Help” (season 2, episode 11, 2015) “Gem Heist” (season 4, episode 13, 2017) “Jail Break” (season 1, episode 52, 2015) “The New Lars” (season 3, episode 10, 2016) “Super Watermelon Island” (season 3, episode 1, 2016) “We Need to Talk” (season 2, episode 9, 2015) “The Zoo” (season 4, episode 14, 2017) “Now We’re Only Falling Apart” (season 5, episode 19, 2018) “Made of Honor” (season 5, episode 22, 2018) “Reunited” (season 5, episode 24, 2018)

CHAPTER 9

Growing up in the Crystallocene: How Steven Universe Teaches Compassion for Broken Worlds Evelyn Ramiel

Introduction Before I watched Steven Universe, I had forgotten about stones. Though I approached elementary geology lessons with delight, committing words like tectonics, igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary to mind and reveling in collecting stones from beaches that I visited, professionalization and many, many moves eventually saw me losing both my passion for geology and my stone collection. Left with a slice of geode and a single obsidian arrowhead in my keeping, I lost any kind of emotional relationship with stones. This was, of course, not helped by living more than a dozen floors off the ground for most of my university career. Watching Steven Universe, then, reminded me that stones have always been personal for me. In the words of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, I recognized, “ Too often reduced to a metaphor for death, entrusted with history and remembrance, stone also engenders unpredetermined futures and unexpected thrivings. Stone holds life” (Cohen 2015, 197).

E. Ramiel (B) York University, Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 J. R. Ziegler and L. Richards (eds.), Representation in Steven Universe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9_9

171

172

E. RAMIEL

This chapter, therefore, revolves around the ways that the lives of rocks—from as big as the Earth to the size of my palm—form a “hard core” around which Steven Universe’s themes are structured. In paying closer attention to what we could call the “ecological” and “geological” strata of the show, I hope to explain how the show’s ethic of care extends not only to queer people and imperfect people but also to polluted and broken planets. It is a geological and cosmic attention to healing. In order to communicate this argument, I will be drawing mostly from the show’s background art, a method that I have chosen to pull attention momentarily away from the show’s characters and character animation and toward the dynamic synthetic environments that shape and contextualize character actions. With the core argument explained, I will further elaborate on the sequential pieces of this chapter and how they will fit together. First, I will relate how my own critical response to the show fits into three theoretical and scholarly contexts: 1. The preexisting scholarly literature on the show. 2. Animation theory’s preferential treatment of characters over backgrounds and recent theoretical attempts to push animation studies in a more holistic or background-friendly direction. 3. Literature on the Anthropocene and the vital role that media, including animation, plays in revealing and influencing our place in a troubled world. After mapping out my approach as noted, I will explore the way that Steven Universe’s staff construct the geological worlds of Steven Universe through worldbuilding, storyboarding, and, especially, background design and compositing. At the conclusion of this technical review, I will “read” three pieces of background art and their role in establishing the emotional and formal structure of Steven’s universe. Finally, in the conclusion, I will reflect on the outcome of the preceding parts and comment on how Steven Universe addresses ecological and geological narratives both within its own constructed worlds and in the wilder and thornier world “around” the screen—as well as outline the outer limits of the show’s ethic of empathy with a broken world and the forces that govern it.

9

GROWING UP IN THE CRYSTALLOCENE: HOW STEVEN UNIVERSE …

173

Context 1: Steven Universe and Queerness Since its debut in 2013, Steven Universe has begun to attract critical attention from the academic world. By and large, the focus of most of the literature around the show is on bodies, queerness, and the politics of representation.1 As some of the titles that I’ve included in the endnote suggest, the discourse on queer representation in the show is both lively and vital. My own contributions here connect to this ongoing effort to parse the means and effects of representation in Steven Universe, but before discussing how, I want to look at the ways that bodies, in particular, have been addressed in many of the scholarly analyses of the show. In Paulína Kožuchová’s (2018) view, the bodies of the Gems, the animate geological beings who make up most of the show’s cast, are inherently queer because they do not conform to human reproductive logic. As she writes, the Gem body is “made with the help of Injectors—huge machines that plant Gems in the ground, from which they emerge fully grown after a kind of ‘gestation’ period, lasting several hundreds or thousands of years,” and “Gems do not have real bodies. Their bodies are only an illusion, their gemstones being their only real material part” (45). For Kožuchová, therefore, the queerness of the Gems in some ways inheres in their inorganic bodies that are comprised of a hard gem core corresponding to a terrestrial gem formation (pearls, garnets, diamonds, rubies, etc.) and a tangible, projected self-image that forms their anthropomorphic appearance. They are made, not born, and therefore by and large do not participate in biological reproduction or sexuality as such. Kožuchová even compares them to borderline life forms like viruses, a comparison that is founded on the show’s own representation of the Gem-making “Injectors” as virus shapes. Honing in on a related but separate observation about the Gems’ artificiality, and that of the show itself, Jacob Pitre positions animation as itself highly susceptible to queer uses. He writes, “Animation is inherently artificial … unfixed and endlessly malleable,” connecting the queerness of Steven Universe (and queer fan engagement) to a longer history that includes Ren and Stimpy, SpongeBob SquarePants , and He-Man, among others (20). In this analysis, queerness’s characteristic fluidity finds affinity with the animated, mutable, endlessly flexible medium of animation. In short, scholars have found something uniquely queer and unstable about the geological bodies of the Gem characters as well as in synthetic animated worlds as a whole. Gems self-construct and are explicitly drawn

174

E. RAMIEL

and brought to life by human input—there is no illusion of naturalness to the way that Gems are born, the way they move, or their relationship to Earth. Animated Gem bodies, we can so far assert, possess or embody queerness through their distance from the natural and the biological alike. This observation becomes even more critical when following the show’s thematic concerns into character-less spaces and places because, while the connection between the Gems as geological and artificial and the value of imperfection has been amply made with regard to characters, the show’s cosmic and Earthly worlds have not received such attention. In order to move into that field, however, it is first necessary to explore the ways that animation studies attuned to environments have treated backgrounds and landscape depictions.

Context 2: Animation’s Fixation on Character and the Rise of the Moving Image 2015 saw the publication of Animated Landscapes, a scholarly volume of essays on landscape and its relationship to animation, edited by Chris Pallant. In Pallant’s introduction, he notes, “Character has become the conceptual core around which the production and interpretation of animation frequently gravitates” (1). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to delve into the full history of why animation studies has consistently centered character animation over, say, storyboarding or cinematography or background art, a consideration of the collection’s engagement with Steven Universe shows that this gravitation toward character animation characterizes most of the writing on representation, animation, and theme as discussed above. Further, Thomas Lamarre (2011) offers a schematic explanation for some of the technological and social reasons that character animation predominated: because the mechanical setup that animators worked on— largely standardized in big animation productions by the end of the 1930s—held the camera static, characters became the natural outlet for animators’ creativity in lieu of the ability to make grand camera moves without great difficulty (113). This explains, at the same time, why backgrounds became thought of as static backdrops that could be painted and worked on as pieces of art but were not part of the art of animation per se.

9

GROWING UP IN THE CRYSTALLOCENE: HOW STEVEN UNIVERSE …

175

Even if we can reasonably establish that the dominance of character over setting is a pronounced trend in studies of Steven Universe, however, the question remains: what resources do we have for addressing that imbalance and broadening our view of the animated image? After all, as Pallant forcefully argues, “Ultimately, our active cognitive negotiation and visual exploration of the animated landscape—whether literal or figurative—foregrounds it as an object of meaning within the realm of moving images” (9). Over the past decade plus, there has been a great deal of attention given to broadening scholarly appreciation of the whole animated image as well as Pallant’s concept of the animated landscape, which is a related but not entirely contiguous notion with some of the other theoretical proposals that I am about to review. In this discussion, I want to first highlight the work of Lamarre (2009) in The Anime Machine; second, discuss Paul Wells’s (2015) contribution to Animated Landscapes; third, look at the rise of setting animism in animation documented by Fran Pheasant-Kelly (2017); and fourth, look at how Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann’s (2011) book That’s All Folks: Ecocritical Readings of American Animated Features attempts to deploy landscape in its ecocritical readings of animation. To conclude, I will situate my own perspective among these before plunging into a brief but difficult discussion of how media like Steven Universe can be said to relate to our ecologically and geologically fraught lives on Earth in 2019. Lamarre’s heavily Deleuzean readings of animation as a technological medium and “ecology” in its own right provide compelling counterpoints to the focus on full character animation that has mostly surrounded Steven Universe’s reception. In Anime Machine, Lamarre displaces character drawing and the conception of animation as the “art of the hand” and focuses on the ways in which cel animation is the product of a particular assemblage of technological processes and articulations of the human body. In his words: Because of my emphasis on movement, on animation as an art of the moving image, I also tend to de-throne the art of the hand. Although integral to animation, the art of the hand in drawing movement (especially evident in character animation) is folded into the animetic machine, which is the site for harnessing and channeling the force of the moving image to generate orientations and directions. Animation is as much a matter

176

E. RAMIEL

of compositing under conditions of movement as it is about animating characters or objects. This is true both of full and limited animation. (159)

Lamarre’s formulation is very useful for positioning the geological and ecological images because here animation is not the realm of character but the realm of moving image as a whole. Backgrounds and other ways of visualizing landscapes fit much more easily into this scheme than into a character-driven scheme because they are not merely static backdrops or “stages” on which the action plays out and provide a more dynamic way of following the motion of character and background—and other layers— together, recognizing that narrative animation is as much setting-driven as character-driven. Expanding on this theme, Lamarre writes, “The art of animation is usually imagined in terms of lavishly painted backgrounds upon which characters move fluidly, gracefully, that is, fully. Of course, in animated worlds, elements of the landscape and in- animate objects frequently come to life—a car, a spoon, a fence, a tool, truly any object can be imagined to speak and move, to be animated … Its movement usually happens against a background, which may have moving luminous elements (streams, clouds, vehicles, and other entities), but which is nevertheless relatively stable and solid” (66). Nevertheless, Lamarre notes, the magic of animation, especially limited animation like that used on Steven Universe, derives not from character cels dancing unanchored “on top” of a fixed stage but from the motion of layers overlapping and intersecting with each other, which is made possible by compositing, whether digital or analogue (72). Working in a different key, Paul Wells’s chapter in Animated Landscapes is primarily concerned with the ways that sports landscapes have been animated but articulates a useful theory of animated landscapes more generally. Paying especially close attention to the difference or uniqueness of animation, Wells notes that landscapes in animation straddle literalism, imagination, and “acts of memory,” often simultaneously, implying that animated landscapes exist as landscapes in different ways within Lamarre’s moving image. Wells writes that his theory “insists upon an understanding that [animated landscapes] play a bigger part in speaking to dramaturgical moments of significance, and potential metaphorical implications” (216, emphasis in original) than is typically recognized. Wells’s definition of the animated landscape follows: “To this end though, the animated landscape should also not be understood as something that apes the landscape in the traditional filmic or painterly sense—a ‘background,’

9

GROWING UP IN THE CRYSTALLOCENE: HOW STEVEN UNIVERSE …

177

for example, or the consequence of layout, or even an obvious depiction of the countryside or a city skyline. It is ultimately a specifically imagined and constructed environment dramatized through its plasmatic motion in the moment, and revealed by the cognate disciplines it relates to or represents” (218). Wells’s main thrust, therefore, is to disentangle the animated landscape from its potential filmic analogue, the background painting or set. Going further, he also prises the animated landscape from any “obvious depiction” of real locations. Let’s briefly consider the example of a background that depicts the interior of an arcade from the carnival pier in Steven’s hometown of Beach City in the episode “Arcade Mania.” While we could discuss this background—and other examples to come—as we would a painting, carefully examining its lighting, perspective, fidelity to the SkeeBall machines in the real world, or its evocation of childhood nostalgia, Wells would encourage us to go further, to assess the background only as part of the whole animated image. Highlighting the constructed and imaginary qualities of the carnival pier, his method requires us to consider the way that it facilitates the drama of the story and, set into motion, embodies certain narrative implications. In other words, our focus would ultimately rest on what Wells calls the “confluence of deliberately designed aspects with specific dramatic purpose” in contrast to the often found or partially configured settings in live-action cinema (217). Nevertheless, while Wells’s dramaturgy-driven approach to discussing animated settings is useful, it does not address the relevance of these backgrounds and environments to ecological or geological problems. In other words, we have located the specific quality of animated settings as dramatic and constructed but not why or how those constructions resonate with the environment arrayed around the screen. Fran Pheasant-Kelly, however, gives us a clue, writing that animated landscapes have the potential to become animate in ways that are not as overt as trees walking or mountains grinning but still show what she calls “psychological motivation” (192). While her main focus is on the animism shown in CGI fantasy settings, her insights also illuminate Steven Universe’s unique inviting and emotion-driven environmental design and the thematic and dramatic centrality of place in its story. While nowhere as explicit as, to use Pheasant-Kelly’ example, the Ents attacking symbols of industrial development in Lord of the Rings, the show’s deliberate contrasting of eerily “wrong” refined and perfect spaces with homey and imperfect Beach City confirms that the show’s construction of setting is

178

E. RAMIEL

on some level conscious of the environmental implications of its landscape design (McDonnell 2017, 174).2 By consistently associating geometrically perfect and highly synthetic landscapes with foreboding, imperial colonialism, and harshness, the show’s art design has chosen an environmental ethic favoring the rustic, inexact, and less-refined. Concluding the discussion of the place of the background and setting in animation studies, I want to segue into considering the place of Steven Universe in discussions of media and the Anthropocene by bringing up the concept of the eco-toon as discussed in Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann’s That’s All Folks: Ecocritical Readings of American Animated Features. To bolster their argument that animation studies have a place within the larger field of ecocriticism—which has, they note, mostly focused on literature—the authors fashion the concept of the enviro-toon. Far from being a category that includes all animated media that present “nature” or landscapes, the enviro-toon will “confront the natural in increasingly complex ways in relation to [its] historical and cultural contexts” (22). While Steven Universe fits that definition both through its queering of embodied gender and its valorization of artificial, geological beings as worthy of care, love, and concern, it is not, unlike most of the films considered in That’s All Folks, driven by an ecological message. Its ecological themes are in many ways inseparable from its themes of interpersonal relationships, maturation, and emotional honesty—much in the way that the show frequently blurs the lines between inorganic and biological, setting and character, and human and non-human. Therefore, Steven Universe could be classified instead as an “eco-toon” or “geo-toon,” a show whose exploration of emotion goes from the hearts of its characters to (literally) the depths of the Earth and the furthest reaches of the cosmos, rendering all of its settings as dramatic, motivated, and animate as its characters.

Context 3: The Animated Anthropocene/Crystallocene Earth in Steven Universe is both like and unlike the ones shown on globes in the world around the screen. As seen in the world map included in the book Steven Universe: Art & Origins (McDonnell, 170), the show’s version of Earth is a significantly warped and wounded version of our own. Within Steven Universe’s own history, much of Earth’s landmass was irrevocably poisoned by colonial resource extraction commanded by

9

GROWING UP IN THE CRYSTALLOCENE: HOW STEVEN UNIVERSE …

179

the rulers of the galactic Gem Empire. Most dramatically, a vast chunk of Eurasia is missing, replaced by the Tunguska Sea, a huge body of water named after the famous “Tunguska Incident.” Other continents have pieces missing or displaced, and while Europe and North America are largely congruent with their real-world counterparts, the Southern Hemisphere appears tectonically distorted. While Gem extraction is not necessarily to blame for any or all of these deformations, the presentation of this global geography, which is often planted into background globes, maps, or views of the Earth from space, serves to separate the show’s world from reality and gives it a unique geological history. That geological weirdness is reinforced by settings like the Kindergarten, a manufacturing apparatus designed to extract minerals from the Earth to produce more Gems who then emerge, leaving permanent gaps in the rock from which they gestated and emerged. As Paulína Kožuchová observes, the Crystal Gems attempt to beautify the Kindergarten by planting crops but find that the soil is permanently stripped of nutrients. She writes, “This destruction is caused by the growing Gems utilizing all of the natural resources,” and in that way, the show directly ties Gem production (as opposed to reproduction in the organic sense) to the devastation of formerly fertile lands (47). On both global and local scales, therefore, Steven Universe’s setting reveals itself to be made in a significant and often negative way. The world that Steven and the Crystal Gems inhabit, and defend, is permanently scarred by its encounter with cosmic forces of colonialism and industrial extraction. That being the case, the show’s narrative fits perfectly into crossdisciplinary writing on the Anthropocene, the theorized geological era that humans created on Earth by irrevocably altering its geological makeup. While the term itself has been troubled by criticism and a panoply of rival “-cenes,” it has also solidified a whole discourse around the crisis of human life on planet Earth and arguments about the proper response to this reality. I will focus on one book, in particular Alexis Shotwell’s (2016) Against Purity, which articulates an ethic of coexisting with ruin and pollution on Earth that, as the title suggests, militates against prelapsarian ideals of untouched wilds and the restoration of primeval harmony. Shotwell defines the position of being “against purity” thusly: “To be against purity is to start from an understanding of our implication in this compromised world, to recognize the quite vast injustices informing our everyday lives, and from that understanding to act on our wish that it

180

E. RAMIEL

were not so. I believe that this orientation is at the heart of prefigurative, loving, social movement practices whose point is not only to interpret the world, but to change it” (204). Her words have a curiously strong resonance with the thematic thrust of Steven Universe’s narrative both as explicitly stated and as imbued into its settings. Shotwell’s ethic, which rejects pretensions to perfection and abjures the pursuit of the same, reckons, as do Steven and the Crystal Gems, with a world that has already been harmed by war and depredation. Moreover, her concern is not just with not doing a particular action but also with attaining a deep-seated recognition that our bodies are deeply implicated in the brokenness of the world and that our relationship to our world cannot be restored to a mythical state of “nature” free of conflict or alienation. Steven Universe aligns with Shotwell in another aspect of its worldbuilding and narrative tension—namely, the way that it handles the fusion of Gem beings and the social taboos and imperial classification systems that divide Gems from creation by their utility. Embedded in the world and gestating for centuries, each Gem emerges as a fully formed tool meant to serve the purposes of the authorities, the Diamonds, running the empire. While two or more Gems of the same kind—two Rubies, two Pearls, two Amethysts, and so on—are permitted to fuse in order to accomplish a more difficult task since the process creates a more powerful being, cross-Gem fusion is strictly against Gem law. As Pitre explains, “Gem culture back on Homeworld looks at fusion generally as a perversion, or even a crime … This rather powerfully codes fusion itself as inherently queer” (82–83). Transgressive fusion, therefore, violates the utilitarian design and classificatory purity of the imperial society in which Gems for the most part exist. Shotwell makes an explicit connection between the kind of aspirational purity of consumption-driven health and the attempt to maintain inviolable boundaries between taxonomical groups. More importantly, however, she argues that this attempt to maintain pristine conceptual and material purity always fails, writing, “The delineation of theoretical purity, purity of classification, is always imbricated with the forever-failing attempt to delineate material purity—of race, ability, sexuality, or, increasingly, illness. The imbrication of failure with attempt … is a feature of classification itself” (5). Especially in the most recent episodes, Steven Universe has spent a great deal of attention on the stigmatization of “impure” cross-Gem fusions and the impurity that attends free will in general, as series arch-antagonist and Gem ruler White Diamond is shown to be

9

GROWING UP IN THE CRYSTALLOCENE: HOW STEVEN UNIVERSE …

181

so anxious about boundary-breaking of any kind that she would rather puppeteer Gems than suffer the sight of her perfect world spoiled. Along with the obvious queer interpretation of love-driven fusions, relationships that are considered taboo and punishable on the Gem Homeworld, these fusions also, I would argue, further push the show’s point that perfection is neither attainable nor desirable, that relating to the world and to each other implies mixture and danger. Underlying all of these dramatic and metaphorical implications, however, is the central conceit of the Gem characters being anthropomorphic stones, geological and technological beings who are every bit as alive as organic beings. This sends us further down into a discussion of the geological aspects of character and setting in Steven Universe and the way that its central themes of perfection, impurity, and technological colonialism all cohere around its stylization and appropriation of geological figures. Given the prominent role given to stones in the show, I was drawn to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s beautiful monograph Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman to help make sense of the implications of the show’s use of living rocks in various shades of the anthropomorphic. A poignant part of Cohen’s introduction is worth quoting at some length: Despite relegation to a trope for the cold, the indifferent, and the inert, stone discloses queer vivacity, and a perilous tender of mineral amity. Stone aggregates, attracting to itself disparate matter, varied rhetorical devices and narratives, especially of the compound and dilatory sort: catalogue poems, encyclopedia entries, biographical digression, etymological impulses, lapidaries arranged alphabetically or by colour to mask their disorder, wonder-filled romance. Because of its ardor for unconformity, stone sediments contradiction, there to ignite possibility, abiding invitation to metamorphosis. (6)

Suffice to say, given the discussion thus far, Steven Universe does not play into the trope of stone as cold, indifferent, or inert, and the celebration of stone’s queer aggregative quality and life abounds in Rebecca Sugar’s world. Sugar’s strong interest in geology appears in an interview that she gave to Entertainment Weekly, and this interview only reinforces the strength of the inspirational link between stones “out there” and the Gems and other lithic structures found in Steven Universe (Kickham 2016). Nevertheless, there is still the problem of a possible disconnect between Cohen’s musings on stones in the outdoors and the ways that

182

E. RAMIEL

rocks are conjured in the show. Cohen even writes about the dangers of a “wrongheaded anthropomorphism” that robs stone of its difference and inserts it into human stories too easily (226). Steven Universe might be vulnerable to such a line of criticism because its appropriation of stone does include a hefty amount of emotional and formal anthropomorphization. Luckily, there are theoretical tools to shore up conclusions about the ecological implications of the Gems and the other geological themes of Steven Universe. Recall, for a moment, Paul Wells’s characterization of animated landscapes—and, by extension, all aspects of the designed environments within animated media—as a “specifically imagined and constructed environment” that plays a creative role in the unfolding of the narrative and its metaphors (218). When Steven Universe maps borrowed elements from the geology of our Earth, therefore, it is doing so purposefully and, in a new material assemblage called animation, mediating those gems in new ways. Much as a metallurgist or smith would select specific metals and shapes for their beauty, tensile strength, resistance to tarnishing, and so on, the animators have selected stones that reflect qualities that they want to bring out in their storytelling. The qualities and affective possibilities, as well as the cultural connotations of those stones, therefore, matter a great deal. What Sugar and the rest of the team—colloquially known as the Crewniverse—have, therefore, created is a world of stones that are vulnerable, mutable, and, to borrow Cohen’s words, “full of shift” on scales ranging from the personal to the global and beyond (257). From the gem embedded in Steven’s stomach to his close friends and allies, the Crystal Gems, to the very core of the Earth and the hollowed Kindergartens, Steven’s universe is one where stones participate in all of the joys and pains of experienced history. Earth is at the mercy of the Gems, its being reshaped through war and the trauma of the “Crystallocene” into a world that invites our compassion and investment, like an old friend beautiful and wounded. As Jussi Parikka (2015) argues, “Media technologies as an epistemological framework, which enable one to perceive, simulate, design, and plan in terms of the environment and the climate; media compose the framework that allows us to talk about, for instance, climate change in the way in which we do nowadays” (60). Even before we go into the detailed case studies, it’s fair to say that, at the least, Steven Universe shows that

9

GROWING UP IN THE CRYSTALLOCENE: HOW STEVEN UNIVERSE …

183

there is a place for animation to play an illuminating and edifying role within that media framework.

The Life History of a Steven Universe Background Like most narrative television animation, Steven Universe comprises a number of layers that are constructed by different parts of the overall creative staff and then composited and edited into a more-or-less coherent whole. These layers include characters and backgrounds arranged in such a way as to produce moving images that are both economically feasible and embody the kind of effect that the creators want to achieve. In this section, I will be accomplishing two tasks. In the first, I will give a rough overview, largely sourced from the book Steven Universe: Art & Origins chapter on background art, of the method by which the show’s backgrounds come into being. After that, I will offer a few case studies of backgrounds from different parts of the show that will be informed by the principles and methods described as well as the theoretical discussion provided above. The best place to start such a discussion is at the beginning of the background’s life history: the storyboard. Because the production of Steven Universe is storyboard-driven, not only backgrounds but also character actions and dialogue follow the visual outlines of the initial storyboards. Backgrounds, in particular, “start as rough drawings in the storyboards; the storyboarder sketches out the broader ideas of each location behind the character, though the level of specificity can very” (McDonnell, 169). The spatial arrangement of layers is therefore embedded in the production from the beginning, with setting framing and contextualizing character actions that are plotted on top of these rough sketches. Steven Sugar, the lead background designer for many of the show’s episodes, is subsequently tasked with adapting these storyboard drawings and produces black-and-white line art that details the locations with enough elements that they feel like completed spaces (169). Priority is given to shape and content rather than to color or mood: the show’s production process establishes the physical plausibility of a setting—whether characters could convincingly inhabit the spaces it depicts—before any other task. Once the line art of the backgrounds is complete, the show’s background painters take the completed drawings and transform them into fully colored images that convey mood and a robust sense of tangibility.

184

E. RAMIEL

It is during this process that Steven Universe’s much-noted stylized backgrounds come into their own. Including quite a few of what Lamarre (2009) names “luminous elements,” including clouds and other atmospheric forms and a great number of explicitly geometric figures embedded into the painting, the backgrounds permit character legibility while also expressing strong emotional content (66). As Art & Origins makes clear, the art directors and Rebecca Sugar herself are also heavily involved in shaping the appearance and affect of these backgrounds. The painter’s primary goal “is to complete the scene, story-wise … while, secondarily, enhancing the mood and strengthening composition,” and this process involves a great deal of leeway for the painters as the line art is more of a basic guide than a fill-in-the-blank sheet (McDonnell, 174). One final note to make on the actual process of fabricating backgrounds is the transnational nature of this endeavor. While the primary background art is created in-house by Cartoon Network staff, the show’s more nitty-gritty aspects, including many of the secondary backgrounds, are produced by the show’s Korean partners at Rough Draft Studios (175). Importantly, the Korean animators have access to, among other assets, “a black-and-white background reference list (a breakdown of which backgrounds should be used or referred to for each scene), and a model pack of all the black-and-white line art designs for backgrounds, characters, props, and FX” (198) roughly two weeks before coloring and painting are completed. Background layers in Steven Universe are, therefore, products of collaboration across countries, composite not just in the material sense but in the international sense as well. While this chapter cannot cover this phenomenon in depth, I wanted to point it out in order to clarify the technical process and to acknowledge the Korean artists for their creative role in shaping the show’s setting. While I have theorized the role of setting in Steven Universe above, it is important to acknowledge that the show’s creators have also created core disciplines and concepts to guide setting construction. As McDonnell records, “[The crew] discussed theories of the sublime as non-frameable,” and explains, “We looked at Barnett Newman and Piet Mondrian and wanted to include hints of things off screen, a light source or a shadow” (174). This gives us an important clue: to look not just at the central subjects of each frame but also at what is making itself known at its edges. As for the style of painting, the creative staff drew on the optical media techniques of Paul Cézanne, in which colors are put off-register and paints are applied loosely in certain areas to guide the viewers’ eyes

9

GROWING UP IN THE CRYSTALLOCENE: HOW STEVEN UNIVERSE …

185

(174). Modernist painting in many forms, therefore, decisively shapes the crew’s approach to image production, albeit in a radically different way from the minimizing aesthetics of studios like UPA. Additionally, as mentioned before, the background artists also emphasize what is called “threat of activation” for backgrounds: certain background elements are fashioned in the same style as props or characters, and “since the audience at least subconsciously knows that drawings on cels are probably going to move, you create this illusion that those things could move even if they never do!” (182). Because the capacity for intentional motion in animation is much more widely distributed than in liveaction, where there is an audience expectation for more “natural” motion, animators are able to exploit this material difference between cel and painting to “prime” the audience to expect a lively element even where it does not materialize. This links to the ways that Wells theorizes that the entire image harbors the potential for dramaturgical and metaphorical significance. In Wells’s terms, the Steven Universe background crew has specifically re-positioned the audience’s gaze through the use of animation’s unique difference or capacity (216).

Case Studies With the foregoing in mind, I will conduct informed analyses of three images from throughout the show’s run to date. My selection process for these images was mostly intuitive and relied on a few basic criteria. I wanted to use screencaps from the show itself, including characters, whenever possible in order to display a full environment of movement rather than a static backdrop. I made one exception, with the first image, to make specific and detailed points about landscapes standing alone in the show. Second, I chose images that have appeared throughout the show’s run with emphasis on variety of color palettes, levels of abstraction, and mixtures of the natural and synthetic or supernatural within each image. Third, and most simply, I wanted to show images that demonstrated some of the aspects of background production described in the first part of this section. Finally, I chose some of my favorite images and ones that I felt, as a group, encompassed the themes and ideals that Steven Universe embeds in its characters and landscapes. This first background (see Fig. 9.1), alone of the four case studies, is multilayered in and of itself, with its cavernous depth framed by increasingly misty impressions of canyon walls receding. Dominating the front

186

E. RAMIEL

Fig. 9.1 A Kindergarten in “Keeping It Together”

of the image are two sets of objects: a set of monumental crystals, some whole and some broken, on the upper left and the virus-mimicking Injectors, which insert embryonic gems into the Earth in a series of roughly ordered patterns. In this case, as the color palette suggests, this canyon hosted an Amethyst Kindergarten in which the Crystal Gem Amethyst grew. Like the larvae of tarantula hawk wasps, the Gem cores then devour the Earth from the inside out until they can emerge. Emerging from the ground leaves behind the other striking feature of this landscape: the thousands of large holes that pockmark the canyon walls. Viruses are a particularly potent reference point that serves a number of roles both within the scene and in the show’s overall metaphorical structure. Injectors being shaped like viruses, of course, brings to mind the twinned ideas of infection and rapid multiplication and consumption of resources. Additionally, viruses are not, strictly speaking, alive, straddling the line between living and nonliving much in the way that the Gems themselves do. Finally, their machine-like (and insect-like) body structures bring to mind industrial efficiency—technology—and a colony or swarm formation. This is particularly noticeable further back in the frame where there are seven Injectors all huddled together on one mountain, suggesting that the entire canyon once hummed like a hive/factory. As Kožuchová writes, “whether we think of the Gems as viruses or colonizers, the theme of danger and destruction is linked to their (non)reproduction” (48). This background design reinforces the

9

GROWING UP IN THE CRYSTALLOCENE: HOW STEVEN UNIVERSE …

187

alien nature of the Gems, which before the Kindergarten was explained on the show was mostly connected to the positive, magical powers possessed by the Crystal Gems, such as transformation and immortality. Positioning much of the core cast of heroes—as well as the villains who are the willing servants of the imperial Diamond Authority—as willful rebels against a technological instrumentalism, the Kindergarten background uses insect imagery to validate their rebellion against what appears to be a perfect, efficient machine that can consume planets in the wink of a cosmic eye. In analyzing Victorian and more recent uses of insect metaphors for technology and society, Parikka (2010) notes the following: “The social division of bees seemed to resonate with Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Like nature, the reality of modern technological society was to be structured according to rational management. Everyone was to have one’s own duties, and happiness would result from understanding one’s place in the whole” (40). Invoking, all at once, the images of the virus, the machine, the parasitic or hive insect, and the ore mine, Steven Universe endows ideas of perfect efficiency and utilitarianism with a sinister air. These images resonate not with utopian images of waste-free societies but with the suffocating conformity and environmental destruction of dystopia. It is, however, crucial to recall that, although all of the Gems originated in Kindergartens, their lives are not, as their authorities might wish, predetermined by their useful designs. Amethyst’s own guilt about her complicity and origins in this Earth-destroying system are met not with condemnation but with acceptance and caring by the other Crystal Gems and especially by Steven. They enact what Shotwell calls “a thick conception of entanglement and coproduction” and, especially, “an obligation toward mutual nourishing” in spite of their own participation in the subjugation and ruin of much of Earth (100). Where the Kindergarten background was on the whole naturalistic, if stylized, the frame depicting Steven’s first in-person encounter with the Cluster (see Fig. 9.2) is far more abstract in style and blends multiple layers to blur the line between character and setting. This is appropriate, as the Cluster, as mentioned before, is a gigantic multi-fusion of thousands or millions of Gems that, designed to be unstable and emotionally discordant, can be activated in order to detonate a troublesome planet— in this case, Earth. Just before this moment, Steven had joined Peridot (one of the show’s many villains-turned-allies, who has an eccentric personality and an affinity for mechanics and engineering) in an attempt

188

E. RAMIEL

Fig. 9.2 Steven and the Cluster in “Gem Drill, Pt. 2”

to destroy the Cluster with a drilling machine. Now removed from the cockpit, Steven is demonstrably distressed, though his Gem’s glow also reminds the viewer that he has some affinity with this colossal and alien living weapon. In terms of composition, the frame follows the traditional setup of having a character (Steven) and a prop (his seat) clearly differentiated from a background. In context, however, the Cluster is moving rapidly while Steven and his seat appear relatively fixed, conveying motion not with character movement but with a vivacious backdrop. The Cluster is represented, however, not so much as a character but as a collection of anguished, ghostly faces flying around a magical space. In addition, the entire frame behind Steven is bathed in an ethereal white light with shining flecks meant to represent the countless Gems who have been forced to fuse into the Cluster. Later in this scene, Steven will make an empathic connection with this suffering, discordant living force at the core of the Earth. All attempts to destroy it failed, but, in a pattern that the show repeats multiple times, Steven’s greatest power is not in martial strength but in his ability to feel what others feel and address their problems peacefully (see also Saret, Chapter 7). Eventually, he is able to calm what could be taken as a synecdoche for the wounded Earth itself, or as a kind of tumor threatening to

9

GROWING UP IN THE CRYSTALLOCENE: HOW STEVEN UNIVERSE …

189

destroy the planet, and finds a way to help the Cluster live in harmony with its own myriad personalities. Care for the world once again finds itself at the center of a major turning point in the show’s grand narrative arc. Impressively, this not only portrays our own intimate crisis of selfdefinition in a world under threat of disintegration, but it also enacts the show’s ethic of care for those beyond a pure return to “normalcy” on what has become an inextricable part of Steven’s Earth itself. Recall the words of Pheasant-Kelly that an audience’s awareness of landscape destruction “is therefore intensified by the credibility of animated settings, which encourage the spectator to identify with the setting as character, or otherwise to view the animated landscape as centrally implicated in the narrative trajectory” (192–193). While the original context of that passage defines credibility as visual naturalism, the image in Fig. 9.2 gains credibility precisely through its abstraction, its shattering of the normal pattern of the show’s background design, and its embedding of a geological character beyond human comprehension into the show’s plot and setting. It has, in other words, affective credibility, the ability to create a genuine connection between character and setting and between audience and living stone. In the most recent arc of the show, Steven has traveled with antagonists Blue and Yellow Diamond to the Gem Homeworld to attempt to sway White Diamond to do something to heal so-called corrupted Gems. Corrupted Gems, encountered first in the initial episodes of the show as monsters-of-the-week, are later shown to be victims of the great war waged between the Crystal Gems and Homeworld over the fate of the Earth. When the Crystal Gems prevailed, Homeworld left the planet alone for a long time but also abandoned a great number of their old soldiers in a state of brokenness that leaves them without the capacity for rational thought and with the ability to manifest only in monstrous forms. The corrupted Gem known as Centipeetle was one of the earliest monsters to appear and was subsequently found hiding in a crashed Gem spaceship with a family of other beings like her, all of them manifesting as centipede creatures who spit acid. In the scene in the upper half of Fig. 9.3, Steven, who has tried to use his healing powers and empathy to heal the Gem but failed, joins Yellow and Blue Diamond in touching Centipeetle’s body to temporarily restore her to an anthropomorphic form. Despite their combined powers being incredibly potent, the

190

E. RAMIEL

Fig. 9.3 Top: Steven and Blue and Yellow Diamonds temporarily healing a corrupted Gem named Centipeetle in “Legs from Here to Homeworld”; Bottom: The corrupted Gem scene pixelated

9

GROWING UP IN THE CRYSTALLOCENE: HOW STEVEN UNIVERSE …

191

reshaped Gem begins to break down in anguish, leading the background to turn pitch black. Narrative context aside, the image is a fascinating case study in the way that Steven Universe’s backgrounds are colored and composed and the ways that characters are separated from and also linked to the background through color. In the bottom half of Fig. 9.3, I’ve run the above scene through a pixelation filter in digital imaging software, isolating broad patches of color to give a better sense of the general palette used in the image and how it helps to convey the emotions and ethical imperatives that the scene communicates. Through the pixelation filter, we can see that the characters are distinguished by their purer and bolder color schemes, with Yellow, Blue, and Steven being especially prominent. Centipeetle, meanwhile, is prominent mainly because of her patches of bright, alien green and pure blacks that do not appear in the more naturalistic backdrop. Non-character parts of the scene display a wide range of more muted colors depending on the kind of material that they are supposed to mimic. The bits of the crashed Gem ship that are visible at the far back cast odd pink shadows and show up much darker and greyer than the rest of the image. More organic elements of the picture, by contrast, range from greyish greens and muted oranges to sunny yellows pooling underneath the feet of the corrupted Gem. Within the color scheme itself, there is a tension between the perfectly angular, metallic or mineral surface of the Gem ship and the Earth tones of the forest in which it crashed. Note, too, that the painting texture varies drastically throughout the image, from the clear coloring of the character drawings to the color-spilling and dappled lighting painted onto the background and the rough shadows of the Gem ship behind them all. In this scene of intimacy and tension, where even antagonists have stretched out in an attempt to understand Centipeetle, the backdrop performs the enormous task of grounding this turning point in a way that is both “physically” credible and emotionally readable. Coded into the background through color, shape, and texture is the confirmation of the difficulties of empathy and the darkness of the pain that resulted from Homeworld and Earth’s traumatic initial encounter. The show does not ultimately offer an easy way out through either technology or Gem magic, and the corrupted Gems are only healed in the aftermath of the most recent season finale. But care and empathy for living and inorganic beings alike find their way to the heart of every unfolding of the series’

192

E. RAMIEL

plot and themes. Everything that is broken, from your bitterest enemy to the troubled world in which you live, deserves, or so the show says in these background examples, your understanding—though it should not come at the cost of your own happiness or integrity. Its message is not, as Shotwell puts it, “Save the planet! Kill yourself!” but, instead, “love yourself through loving others, as broken and difficult as they might be.” And, as amply shown by this point, those “others” include the very Earth and the stones that it is made of.

Conclusion “Landscape,” writes Elizabeth Grosz (2008), “is that space revealed by sensation, which has no fixed coordinates but transforms and moves as a body passes through it. Landscape art has … the peculiar possibility of making visible that which sensation senses of the invisible” (72). As Steven Universe’s latest arc wraps up and the show goes into one of its periods of dormancy, assessing its legacy up until now is vitally important. This show has grown an immense fanbase of passionate and often marginalized people—like myself—who have seen in its invocation of empathy a potent answer to our own crises of self-worth and of our relationship to the world that we took for granted as children. For me, the impetus to write this chapter came from my dissatisfaction that the show’s ecological themes had not been considered as deeply and seriously in academe as they ought. Partly, this arises from my own affinity with ecological and geologically minded modes of thinking and the way that I saw the show. But, more profoundly, I think that focusing exclusively on the show’s representational victories regarding queer characters and oppositional or fluid gender identities misses a crucial aspect of the show. Steven Universe’s queerness, its strange and purposeful love, pervades not just the characters but also the entirety of its cosmos. To ignore this robs the laudable representation of marginalized identities of its context, as if they were living their storyboarded lives floating in a void. So it goes for one of the three contexts that we’ve explored. For the second, the study of animated backgrounds and landscapes, I hope that my work here will provide impetus for work putting into practice Thomas Lamarre’s, Paul Wells’s, and Chris Pallant’s (among many others’) calls for scholars to see the forest, the trees, and the talking creatures when watching animation and to take the affective and metaphorical weight

9

GROWING UP IN THE CRYSTALLOCENE: HOW STEVEN UNIVERSE …

193

of animated landscape seriously. Though Steven Universe is a particularly good example to which to apply these ideas because of how deliberately its worlds are constructed and how well they mesh with the characters’ journeys, I strongly believe that we should be visiting more background art and thinking about its materiality and the way that it pushes the narrative and even finds its own occasions to move and change with the protagonists. Finally, and most personally meaningfully, I take Parikka’s (2015) notion that media, broadly defined, constitutes a kind of web of senses. Media allows us to form a more global, informed, and emotionally intelligent relationship to our world, all the while also forming part of our geological legacy on this planet. Animation, as a form of media with an especially close relationship to the way that we perceive animal motion, the built environment, and the force of movement and plasmatic change in the world, has a distinct role as an environmental media in the Anthropocene, and in my evaluation, Steven Universe’s commitment to a universal empathy shows that it is playing a responsible role in framing our understanding of Earth and our place on it. We should, however, remember that the magic of empathy and understanding, while still potent in our own world, is not where we should stop in our attempts to overcome the social and technical entities that are heating, flooding, and polluting the air, water, and Earth. Hostility directed against the bleak terror of a colonized Earth, against the reduction of bodies to labor inputs, against the ways in which our world has been made a place where empathy is punished or impossible: none of this undermines the simple truth that Steven Universe offers—empathy is essential for living in a damaged world—only we must remember that the entrenched powers of the world around the screen will not likely yield to kindness. Nevertheless, we can hold fast to fantasies, to worlds, to landscapes, to geologies, that lend us visions of worlds where kindness is the dominant force of the universe if only we could see it.

Notes 1. See, for example, a number of dissertations and theses by junior scholars, including Pitre (2018), Kožuchová (2018), and Clark (2017). In addition, there are several chapters in this volume that address the question, including those by Jacob Pitre (Chapter 2), Kevin Cooley (Chapter 3), Olivia Zolciak (Chapter 4), and the introduction to the volume (Chapter 1).

194

E. RAMIEL

2. See also McDonnell, 182 for a discussion of how the animators planted a sense that objects in the backgrounds could move even if they don’t as a way of intensifying viewers’ connections with the settings.

References Clark, Heather L. 2017. “‘My Lesbian Space Rock Show’: Representations of Intersectional Identities in Steven Universe.” MA thesis, Humboldt State University. https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/etd/39. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 2015. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Kickham, Dylan. 2016. “Steven Universe: Lapis Lazuli Discovers Earth’s Wonders in Exclusive Clip | EW.com.” Entertainment Weekly. Last modified May 16. Accessed February 8, 2019. https://ew.com/article/2016/05/16/ steven-universe-clip-rebecca-sugar-interview/. Kožuchová, Paulína. 2018. “Non-normative Family on Children’s Television: Queering Kinship, Temporality and Reproduction in Steven Universe.” MA thesis, Linköping University. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu: diva-150390. Lamarre, Thomas. 2009. The Anime Machine. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2011. “Speciesism, Part III: Neoteny and the Politics of Life.” Mechademia 6: 110–136. McDonnell, Chris. 2017. Steven Universe: Art & Origins. New York: Abrams. Murray, Robin L., and Joseph K. Heumann. 2011. That’s All Folks: Ecocritical Readings of American Animated Features. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10559297. Pallant, Chris. 2015. “Introduction.” In Animated Landscapes: History, Form and Function, edited by Chris Pallant, 1–12. New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press. Parikka, Jussi. 2010. Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2015. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pheasant-Kelly, Fran. 2017. “Between Setting and Character: A Taxonomy of Sentient Spaces in Fantasy Film.” In Animated Landscapes: History, Form and Function, edited by Chris Pallant, 179–196. New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press. Pitre, Jacob. 2018. “I Think We Made Something Entirely New: Steven Universe, Tumblr Fandom and Queer Fluidity.” MA thesis, Carleton University. https://curve.carleton.ca/4466f807-fd52-401e-a3fa-1b82008e36a3.

9

GROWING UP IN THE CRYSTALLOCENE: HOW STEVEN UNIVERSE …

195

Shotwell, Alexis. 2016. Against Purity: Living in Ethically Compromised Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wells, Paul. 2015. “Plasmatic Pitches, Temporal Tracks and Conceptual Courts: The Landscape of Animated Sport.” In Animated Landscapes: History, Form and Function, edited by Chris Pallant, 215–232. New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press.

Episodes Referenced “Arcade Mania” (season 1, episode 11, 2014) “Gem Drill, Pt. 2” (season 3, episode 2, 2016) “Keeping It Together” (season 2, episode 8, 2015) “Legs from Here to Homeworld” (season 5, episode 24)

CHAPTER 10

Off-Color, Off-Center: Decolonizing (in) Steven Universe Mandy Elizabeth Moore

Steven Universe’s episode “Rocknaldo” tackles cultural appropriation and fake allyship, explaining these concepts through the character of Ronaldo in a way that child viewers—and older viewers—can easily understand. Ronaldo is Beach City’s resident conspiracy theorist, and the episode chronicles his various responses toward the Other—in this case, the alien warriors, the Crystal Gems. Ronaldo expresses first a fear of the “Rock People,” and then, when he realizes that the Crystal Gems are in fact heroes, a desire to be the most Gemlike of all the Crystal Gems, trying to overtake Steven himself as a member of the group (see also Ziegler and Richards, Chapter 6). The episode explores the way that some allies center their own need to be accepted over the day-to-day struggles of minoritarian groups, appropriating their culture and their oppressions instead of lifting up marginalized voices. However, while the episode certainly does important work in explaining these unfortunate side effects of activism and social justice—in such a way that left me cheering as I watched— “Rocknaldo” reads quite differently through a decolonial lens.

M. E. Moore (B) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. R. Ziegler and L. Richards (eds.), Representation in Steven Universe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9_10

197

198

M. E. MOORE

“Rocknaldo” positions the Crystal Gems as a minoritarian group, one whose culture is in danger of being appropriated by a powerful majority and who faces daily oppression, first by having Ronaldo use offensive terms and perpetuate harmful stereotypes about the Gems, then by having him try to appropriate and become an expert on Gem culture. But in terms of colonial history within the show, the Gems are, in fact, the powerful majority, the oppressors of human culture. The Gem Homeworld, run by the Diamond Authority, colonized the Earth thousands of years ago, stealing human land to grow new Gems and build monuments to Gem culture. Though the Gems left Earth before the colonization process was completed, they still hold immense intergalactic power. Even the Crystal Gems, the faction that broke away from Homeworld’s colonial regime, have access to knowledge, technology, and power that humans can scarcely imagine. Although the Crystal Gems’ identities often align with real-life minoritarian identities—they are, with the exception of Steven, femme-identified agender characters voiced by women of color— they do not experience violence or oppression on Earth because of their gender or race (see also Zolciak, Chapter 4). And although the Crystal Gems do face discrimination at the hands of the Diamond Authority’s strict, violent hierarchy, even the lowliest Gem stands above humans in that system. The Crystal Gems may be minoritarian subjects by Homeworld’s standards, but on Earth, they are the last remnants of a colonial empire. The metaphor for fake allyship and cultural appropriation in “Rocknaldo” does not quite translate because on Earth, the Crystal Gems are ultimately an anti-colonial faction of colonizers rather than a group of colonized subjects. Although Garnet, Pearl, and the rest have renounced the colonizing paradigm of Homeworld, they still belong to that species which has intergalactic power, just as Western anti-colonial activists are still part of the West. They are settler colonists who have sided with the humans over their own species. In this way, the episode is asking viewers to empathize with the settlers when Ronaldo, a colonized human, wants to mimic their culture and gain status based on the hierarchies of the colonizing regime; such focalizing of the narrative is troubling because it conflates the spread of a dominant, colonizing culture with cultural appropriation and foregrounds the “pain” of the settlers at having their culture stolen and misused rather than the erasure of colonized culture under the domination of settler culture. This episode epitomizes a larger trend in Steven Universe of asking viewers to empathize with the colonizers over

10

OFF-COLOR, OFF-CENTER: DECOLONIZING (IN) STEVEN UNIVERSE

199

the colonized and raises troubling questions about the colonial mythos of the show. In particular, “Rocknaldo” leads to the question, Why do Gem characters face consequences from the colonial Homeworld regime but not from human characters? As a show, Steven Universe is certainly anti-colonial: it features the colonizing Diamonds as the main villains and affirms in episode after episode that their imperialistic tendencies are violent and oppressive. The series is also, in many ways, decolonial—not just against colonialism but actively working to undo its ideologies. In this chapter, I will demonstrate how the show deconstructs the intersecting oppressions that the Diamonds’ colonial order has enacted on both the Crystal Gems and its own loyal citizenry, oppressions which mirror real-world colonial hierarchies of race, class, sexuality, and disability. As Bitch Media’s Bemnet Gebrechirstos (2017) explains in an analysis comparing the show to real-world oppressions, “Steven Universe is much more than a simple cartoon. It serves as text that highlights the importance of navigating positionalities and rejecting colonial projects.” However, the show focuses on how the legacy of Gem colonization affects Gems rather than on how that legacy affects the actual colonized subjects—the humans of planet Earth. Most humans have little to no knowledge that Earth was once a Gem colony, and no human struggles with their identity as a postcolonial subject, except perhaps Steven himself. In fact, the humans on the show act as if colonialization—by the Gems or even by humans—never happened. Christian Ravela (2017) puts the problem this way in his review of the show: the diversity of Steven Universe “derives [meaning] from its opposition to, rather than its articulation within, a colonial order” (393). The show ignores how a colonial legacy might affect the colonized, who, in any other colonial situation, would face violent and longlasting effects. In this way, despite its decolonial efforts, the show fails to engage one of the most central aspects of decolonial theory and praxis, defined by Beth Blue Swadener and Kagendo Mutua (2008) as a process of “valuing, reclaiming, and foregrounding indigenous voices and epistemologies” (31). I argue that, by choosing to focus on the damage that colonialism does to colonizers instead of the colonized, Steven Universe unfortunately centers the colonizers in the conversation. While denouncing the violence of colonialism and deconstructing its hegemonies are certainly important, the show fails to center the experiences of colonized subjects and, therefore, to truly engage in radical decolonization. The episode “Rocknaldo” may demonstrate the importance of uplifting marginalized

200

M. E. MOORE

voices rather than the voices of allies, but the show overall falls into that self-same trap of focusing on allies rather than on marginalized subjects. Importantly, this chapter is concerned not with the post colonial implications of Steven Universe but rather with the ways in which the show is and is not decolonial. Although, as Walter Mignolo (2011) argues, postcoloniality and decoloniality are “complementary trajectories with similar goals of social transformation,” the postcolonial “has a different genealogy of thought” which stems from the specificity of British colonization (xxvi). Decoloniality, on the other hand, grew primarily out of Latin America and, as Gurminder K. Bhambra (2014) explains, works to extend and deepen our understanding of the condition of coloniality by both looking further back in history and by “providing us with a way to discuss the more profound realities of colonialism, especially ‘after’ the event” (119). In a story like Steven Universe, where the colonization technically ended thousands of years ago, such a theory seems particularly relevant. Additionally, decolonial thought includes dismantling, piece by piece, what Aníbal Quijano (2000) terms the “patrón” (pattern or matrix) of colonial power, as well as centering Global South and indigenous perspectives. This decolonial turn parallels the spirit of this project, which aims to dissect how Homeworld’s colonial regime works through a matrix of power and how audiences problematically only see the effects of that matrix on colonizers.

Off-Color: Shattering Homeworld Ideologies Thousands of years ago, the Diamonds of Homeworld decided to take on planet Earth as a new colony, giving the young Pink Diamond her first opportunity to run her own colony. Their primary purpose in colonizing Earth was to utilize its geological resources to grow new Gems in “Kindergartens,” destroying the planet and its early human inhabitants in the process. However, when Pink Diamond arrived, she was enchanted by the Earth’s beauty and its people. She began masquerading as a lowly Rose Quartz, accompanied by her servant, Pearl. Pink wanted to protect the Earth and stop the colonization, but her fellow Diamonds refused to listen. Eventually, Pink faked her own death—the “shattering” of her gem—and took on the mantle of Rose Quartz permanently, forming the Crystal Gems with other anti-colonial discontents and leading a somewhat-successful revolution. Most of the Crystal Gems were destroyed, but the Diamonds finally left Earth behind, too devastated by the apparent loss of

10

OFF-COLOR, OFF-CENTER: DECOLONIZING (IN) STEVEN UNIVERSE

201

Pink to continue the colony. Fast-forward to the nearly present day, when Pink/Rose gives up her physical form to have a child with a human named Greg Universe, with whom she has fallen in love. Their son, Steven, is raised by the remaining Crystal Gems, Garnet, Pearl, and Amethyst, who are later joined by other anti-Homeworld Gems including Peridot, Lapis Lazuli, and Bismuth, as well as Steven’s human friend, Connie. Each of the Crystal Gems has been affected in some way by the oppressions of Homeworld’s colonial regime, leading them to defect and join Rose’s cause. In order to maintain the Diamonds’ strict control and to continually reproduce—literally and figuratively—their empire, Gem society consists of rigid hierarchies that replicate systems of oppression from our own world, such as racism, classism, ableism, and homophobia. These systems function concomitantly with the colonial project, intersecting in a fundamental way rather than simply overlapping in their violence. Located at the very center of these intersections are the Diamonds’ two central, intertwined goals: to maintain the hierarchy within the empire and to reproduce to push the empire further, both of which increase the Diamonds’ power to near-absolute levels. These goals of hierarchy and reproduction together create the various kinds of violence faced by Gems, both those who have stayed within the system and those who, like the Crystal Gems, have chosen to leave it. These goals also connect to Quijano’s (2000) formulation of the colonial matrix of power, which operates in four domains: labor and the economy, sex and sexuality, authority and boundaries, and knowledge and intersubjectivity (545). Although the specific means through which Homeworld regulates these four domains may look different from our real-world systems of power, the underlying goals are the same—to police and control to maintain and reproduce power. Under the Diamonds’ regime, the four Diamonds occupy, of course, the uppermost layer of the hierarchical pyramid. Each type of Gem has a certain function and place below the Diamonds in that hierarchy—Pearls, for example, are servants, while Rubies are soldiers. As Geraldine Moane (2011) notes, the very dynamics of hierarchies themselves have psychological consequences (30–31), especially when the dominating party must enact some kind of violence (physical, political, economic, cultural, etc.) to maintain the fiction of superiority (34–35). The Diamonds’ methods, which include shattering those who resist or fail to fit into their system, are certainly violent, and the psychological effects of their hierarchy can clearly be seen in the personalities of Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl, as

202

M. E. MOORE

well as in a group of Homeworld Gems called the Off Colors. Each of these Gems demonstrates a different decolonial critique of a Homeworld practice—controlling intimacy as a resource, defining normal bodies, colonizing the mind, and policing bodies in space. The show’s depiction of Garnet as an inter-gem fusion deconstructs how Homeworld views bodies and bodily intimacy as resources for maintaining hierarchies and reproducing empire. Garnet is actually a combination of two Gems who “fuse” into a single entity, combining physical attributes and personality traits. Ravela explains how fusion riffs on a “standard Japanese anime trope in which characters combine together to create more powerful versions of themselves” by “rais[ing] the sexual subtext of this trope into the text itself” (390). While many other series try to suppress the sexual charge of combining bodies, Steven Universe actually uses fusion as a metaphor for romantic and sexual relationships, foregrounding consent as the foundation for healthy relationships. In the case of Garnet, fusion metaphorizes not only the long-term relationship between her constituent Gems, Sapphire and Ruby, but also a kind of interracial relationship. Under Homeworld’s regime, Gems only fuse with other Gems of the same kind. For example, a Ruby might fuse with another Ruby to make a larger Ruby so as to be more powerful in battle. A Ruby fusing with a Sapphire, however, is unheard of. As Garnet narrates to Steven during “The Answer,” Ruby fuses with Sapphire quite by accident while trying to protect her, but they enjoy being together so much that they decide to leave the Homeworld-run colony on Earth, eventually joining Rose Quartz’s rebellion. For the Homeworld regime, intimacy in the form of fusion is seen as a colonial process and tightly regulated resource rather than a personal choice. Multiple Gems fusing, for instance, is a way to create more powerful soldiers and guards, not a consensual physical, emotional, and mental bond. Thus, when Sapphire and Ruby fuse for the first time, they are not simply breaking a taboo—they are challenging the underlying epistemology of the Diamonds’ authority, posing a threat to not only the goal of maintaining hierarchical control but also the goal of reproducing empire. By choosing to maintain a fusion that has no purpose other than personal enjoyment and satisfaction, Sapphire and Ruby interfere with a colonial process of control, just as their analogous real-world parallels of interracial and queer relationships threaten white supremacist and heteropatriarchal epistemologies of control. For example, as Cheryl I. Harris (1993) describes in her seminal Whiteness as Property, Whiteness in itself is a form

10

OFF-COLOR, OFF-CENTER: DECOLONIZING (IN) STEVEN UNIVERSE

203

of property that has historically been used as a way of gatekeeping other legal processes of obtaining property, such as owning land. Interracial relationships and miscegenation, therefore, threaten that legal system of property rights that maintains control for white supremacy because such unions and their offspring “taint” the property value of Whiteness and blur the lines of hierarchical categories used to delineate who gets which rights. Similarly, Sapphire’s particular Gem status and ability to utilize future vision are a kind of property in two ways—first, she is the property of Blue Diamond, with her ability to see the future as a weapon in Blue’s arsenal and her nobility a resource that Blue can use. Second, just like Whiteness, Sapphire’s rare Gem status becomes a form of property for her in that it affords her certain material benefits, such as the ability to travel and the guarantee of protection from other Gems. For Sapphire to fuse with an “inferior” Gem like Ruby taints her property value for both herself and her Diamond, thereby undermining the legal and social systems of Homeworld that give the Diamonds control over Gem movement and intimacy. Homeworld views reproduction, like intimacy, as a colonial process and resource rather than a personal choice. In fact, because Gems are “grown” in the ground in Kindergartens rather than born from a sexual union, almost all Gems are created for and by the colonial regime. Although Gem bodies are illusory light projections around their material gemstones, those bodies and their production are still seen in terms of resources, both the resources needed to grow more Gems in the ground and those new Gems themselves as resources to bolster the Diamonds’ empire. With the bodies of Gems becoming resources instead of beings, the Diamonds are accordingly concerned with creating and maintaining bodies that “fit” their prefabricated categories. Gems must fit neatly into the categories of the hierarchy, which is one reason that Garnet’s hybrid status so threatens the Diamonds’ authority. In Amethyst’s case, she quite literally does not “fit”—the hole that she emerged from in the Kindergarten, and thus, her normal body size, is much smaller than that of the average Amethyst. When she and Steven visit the Kindergarten, she demonstrates this size difference by juxtaposing her own hole with the holes of all the other Amethysts, spaces in which she does not fit. Amethyst was left behind because she, as a smaller being, took too long to emerge from her hole when everyone else was ready to move on. Her growth and her body do not fit the timeline or the shape of the colonial paradigm, and so she is

204

M. E. MOORE

cast out from that culture, valueless to its colonial project. Throughout the series, we see the effects of this on Amethyst and her subjectivity. In “On the Run,” Amethyst reveals that her creation as a part of Homeworld’s colonial project has severely damaged her self-esteem and mental health. She knows that Kindergartens are inherently bad places, even though that knowledge conflicts with her own emotional attachment to the Kindergarten in which she was made. After the other Amethysts left her behind, she lived there alone for a time until she met Rose Quartz and the other Crystal Gems. She sees that Kindergarten as her home, and the space is full of fond memories of her favorite rocks—her Climbing Rock, her Sitting Rock, and most importantly, the actual hole that she emerged from, which she crawls into for comfort (“On the Run”). As she and Steven wander through the Kindergarten, her enthusiasm is contrasted with a gray-tinged color scheme, ominous music, and the creepy shapes of spider-like Gem machines lining the rocky canyon (see Fig. 10.1). This contrast highlights Amethyst’s own conflicting feelings of nostalgia and hate. When Pearl comes to bring Amethyst and Steven back home, Amethyst gets angry and bitter, referring to herself as a “parasite” and a “big mistake.” This scene begins to unravel Amethyst’s complicated feelings about Homeworld, which created her for an evil purpose and then told her that she was not good enough to fulfill it.

Fig. 10.1 Amethyst and Steven at the Kindergarten

10

OFF-COLOR, OFF-CENTER: DECOLONIZING (IN) STEVEN UNIVERSE

205

As a metaphor for real-world oppressions, Amethyst’s failure to fit the Homeworld mold can be read in several ways. Gebrechirstos compares Amethyst’s struggle to colorism and colonial beauty standards. She has internalized the belief that amethysts should be bigger and that she is somehow wrong for looking the way that she does. In addition to looks, her size also reads as coded disability, especially in the episode “Steven vs. Amethyst” when she begins to compare her fighting abilities to Steven’s. “I know what’s wrong with me,” she finally admits. “I’m not supposed to be small. And everyone’s always acting like there’s no problem. ‘You can be anything you want to be.’ No! I can’t … I can’t even be the one thing I’m supposed to be, you know?” Amethyst is frustrated and ashamed that her body does not fit the “normal” shape and ability of her kind of Gem. She internalizes the message that she is “supposed” to be bigger and therefore more capable in battle. This belief stems from underlying Homeworld epistemologies that base worth on productivity and ability to reproduce empire—size is important for Amethysts because bigger bodies mean bigger soldiers for defending Homeworld colonies. Gem hierarchies of abilities and looks are fundamentally connected to how those abilities and looks can contribute to the colonial mission. Like Amethyst, Pearl has also internalized Homeworld epistemologies that damage her sense of self-worth. Fans have hotly debated Pearl’s racial coding and have not come to a consensus, with some reading her as a woman of color and others reading her as White (including Zolciak, Chapter 4). One popular reading is that Pearl is Asian, since she is voiced by Filipina American actress Deedee Magno Hall and struggles, as many Asian Americans do in real-life, with the model minority myth. The hierarchy of Homeworld dictates that Pearls are hardworking, dutiful, and rule-following servants whose very personalities inherently support the Diamonds’ regime; as Peridot explains in “Back to the Barn,” on Homeworld, Pearls are “made-to-order” servants “for standing around, and looking nice, and holding your stuff for you.” In fact, when the Crystal Gems journey to Homeworld to speak with White Diamond, Pearl is treated as one of Steven’s “things” alongside his bag of clothes (“Familiar”). Pearls provide a model for successful Gem life even though they are consistently told how inferior they are and ordered about by higher-ranking Gems. Pearl struggles to articulate her own personality and desires despite her socialization to always put Pink Diamond/Rose Quartz first. Pearl loved—and was in love with—Pink/Rose, and now that she is gone, having chosen Greg Universe and the existence of Steven over

206

M. E. MOORE

staying with Pearl, Pearl has trouble figuring out how to be her own person. She spent such a long time dedicating her existence to Rose, defining herself in terms of her service to and love for Rose, that now Pearl is not only lost but also fighting with the remnants of Homeworld ideologies that tell her that she is wrong to try to find herself. In “Sworn to the Sword,” Pearl finally starts to express this paradoxical pull on her psyche when she begins training Steven’s friend Connie in the art of sword fighting. Pearl has a difficult time disentangling Connie’s relationship with Steven from her own relationship with Pink/Rose, teaching Connie through song, “You do it for her / That is to say, / You’ll do it for him.” Through Garnet’s narration, we learn that “Back during the war, Pearl took pride in risking her destruction for [Steven’s] mother. She put Rose Quartz over everything; over logic, over consequence, over her own life.” The later revelation that Rose was in fact Pink Diamond and that Pearl was her personal servant helps to illuminate the source of this self-destructive devotion. Pearl’s evident love for Rose is compounded by the Homeworld idea that a Pearl must belong to a Diamond, that she is merely an “asset” rather than a person in her own right. Pearl tries to indoctrinate Connie into this same self-effacing ideology by telling her, “Remember, Connie. In the heat of battle, Steven is what matters. You don’t matter.” Luckily, Steven is there to challenge this belief, reminding Connie that they are partners and equals, even on the battlefield. They confront Pearl, asking if Rose made her feel like she was nothing. Pearl laughs sadly and says, “Rose made me feel … like I was everything.” This line reveals her underlying conundrum: the system which gave her purpose also taught her not to value her own life, and the being (Rose Quartz) who wanted her to value herself also provided the perfect outlet for Pearl to sacrifice herself. Over the course of the series, Pearl struggles to find her place outside of that deeply unhealthy devotion to Rose and the system that engendered her lack of self-worth. However, when other Gems from Homeworld arrive, they are shocked by the sight of a Pearl without an owner, a Pearl who dares to have her own desires and opinions. Peridot, for example, tries to order Pearl about and even claim her as property (“Back to the Barn”). Pearl’s experience exposes how damaging the model minority myth can be in the long term, especially for those who do not fit within the prescribed personality of that myth. As with Garnet and Amethyst’s experiences, this issue of “fitting” comes back to the Diamonds’ colonial project and their need to maintain absolute control over their resources.

10

OFF-COLOR, OFF-CENTER: DECOLONIZING (IN) STEVEN UNIVERSE

207

As servants (really slaves), viewed as objects more than subjects, Pearls must fit within the specific personality parameters of their Gem type in order to provide acceptable service to their masters. They are themselves a resource, serving the Diamonds and maintaining the fiction of Diamond superiority through their cookie-cutter, worshipful personas. Pearl, by existing outside of these parameters, thus threatens Diamond control and the colonial project, which depends on Pearls who do as they’re told. All of these issues faced by the Crystal Gems—Diamonds policing bodily intimacy, defining the normal body, and creating internalized selfhatred through hierarchy—are also faced by Gems on Homeworld, particularly a group called the “Off Colors.” These Gems live in the literal underbelly of Homeworld, hiding in old Kindergartens far below the Gem cities. For various reasons, none of them fit into Gem society—they aren’t, as one such Off-Color Gem puts it, “needed.” In other words, they are not useful to the colonial project because they do not fit the predetermined shapes and roles of that colonial hierarchy. Two of these Gems—Fluorite and Rhodonite—break the Homeworld rules of fusion. Fluorite is actually a combination of six totally different Gems, a fusion of epic proportions whose existence is practically unimaginable to everyday Gems. Similarly, Rhodonite explains that she was “replaced” by her supervisor when her illicit fusion of a Ruby and a Pearl was discovered. Padparadscha is a rare Sapphire who should have the gift of future vision but can only predict events that have already occurred. Finally, the Rutile twins are a “Rutile that came out wrong,” with two connected heads on one body (“Off Colors”). The twins tell Steven that the only reason that they survived is that “all the other Rutiles ran away when [they] emerged,” terrified of what appears to the average Gem as an abomination. While the Crystal Gems face lingering effects from their experiences with Homeworld’s colonial system, as well as the occasional offensive taunt from Homeworld Gems like Jasper, the Off Colors experience a much more acute form of policing that both teaches them self-loathing and regulates their bodies in space. The Off Colors make it clear that were they to be discovered by Diamonds, their gems would be shattered. They live in fear of discovery, scrounging along the literal bottom of Gem society in the chasms of ancient Kindergartens. Their bodies, desires, and abilities do not fit within the dominant Gem paradigm, so they are physically cast out from that paradigm, knowing that death is the penalty for attempting to rejoin that culture. Gebrechirstos points out that this lethal policing is highly reminiscent of “All the ways in which the U.S. police

208

M. E. MOORE

state has been a strong arm of white supremacy, waging a centuries-long, one-sided war against Black folks.” Like people of color, these Gems live in a world where their bodies are constantly under scrutiny and subjected to violence. This scrutiny and violence also translate to the Off Colors’ subjectivity and sense of self, which have been severely damaged by Homeworld ideology. For example, when Garnet meets the Off Colors and begins complimenting them on their beautiful differences, the Off Colors think that she is making fun of them because they are so used to being seen as wrong: “Who would say nice things about Gems like us? We’re completely inappropriate, and so are you. We should all be ashamed,” says Rhodonite (“Your Mother and Mine”). The Diamonds’ insidious belief system has been so internalized that the Off Colors have a difficult time recognizing their own value. The experiences of the Off Colors and the Crystal Gems together demonstrate the intersecting realms of the colonial matrix of power— the economy, race/gender/sexuality, authority, and subjectivity. Fusions like Garnet, Fluorite, and Rhodonite face opposition to their “interracial” intimacy and reproduction of new bodies which cannot be classified by Homeworld’s hierarchy, challenging the Diamonds’ authority and threatening their resources. Gems whose bodies and abilities do not fit the mold, like Amethyst, Padparadscha, and the Rutile twins, also threaten the Diamonds’ economy of material resources, which includes the bodies and abilities of their subjects as a means of reproducing empire. Pearl threatens Diamond authority by refusing to be a servant/slave any longer, taking charge of her own life and thereby negating her status as a Homeworld resource. All of the Crystal Gems and Off Colors experience trauma of subjectivity because of this violence, struggling to reconcile their knowledge of themselves as valuable and important with the sticky epistemologies of Homeworld culture. Through their stories, Steven Universe deconstructs those overlapping realms of colonial violence, demonstrating how coloniality and its other attendant oppressions operate together to form a matrix of power.

Off-Center: Humans on the Margins In their Bitch Media analysis, Gebrechirstos says that Amethyst, “along with Peridot and other Homeworld Gems, internalize their colonizers’ beauty ideals” (emphasis added)—and therein lies the issue with focusing on Amethyst, Peridot, the other Crystal Gems, and the Off Colors: They

10

OFF-COLOR, OFF-CENTER: DECOLONIZING (IN) STEVEN UNIVERSE

209

are not the colonized. Gems do not have colonizers; they are the colonizers. The Crystal Gems and the Off Colors are certainly victims of colonization, as I have demonstrated, in that the oppressions that they face are intimately tied up with Homeworld’s colonial project. They experience policing of their bodies, indoctrination of their minds, and even threatened shattering of their gems because of the Diamonds’ twin colonial goals: maintaining hierarchy and reproducing empire. Ultimately, however, all of these Gems, oppressed as they are, fall into the category of “colonizer.” Where, then, are the stories of human oppression? Where are the Earthlings struggling with their hybrid status or their failure to meet the inorganic beauty standards of Homeworld? Where are the humans mimicking, as Homi Bhabha would say, Gem culture? Aside from three small exceptions—the zoo, the Cluster, and Steven himself—these stories do not exist within the series. The most obvious exception to this lack of colonial consequences for humans is the zoo—the literal human zoo in space run by Blue Diamond as a tribute to her fallen sister’s colony. When Greg is kidnapped by Blue and taken to the zoo, Steven and the Crystal Gems must go and rescue him, discovering that Blue has been keeping a population of humans captive for thousands of years. This Gem practice mirrors the real-life human zoos that existed well into the mid-twentieth century, where African or Asian captives were put on display as exotic objects for the amusement and edification of European or North American audiences (Schofield 2011; Kakissis 2018). In Blue’s human zoo, humans with identification numbers for names (Y-6, J-10) live in a large enclosure that mimics conditions on Earth. They are all fitted with identical outfits and a set of earrings that give instructions in a little voice: “Time to clean up, everyone. Let’s all take a refreshing bath” (“The Zoo”). They spend their days eating, playing, washing, smelling flowers, and—occasionally—participating in a ceremony they call the “choosening.” The little voice has the humans stand in a circle and then pairs them off in male-female duos, “choosening” them for each other, presumably to continue the population. Although Greg and Steven agree that the humans are happy to live in the zoo, they also bring up that these people have “never been anywhere else” and “don’t even know that they’re trapped” (“The Zoo”). The colonization process is so complete here that policing of bodies in time and space, forced relationships, imprisonment in a single enclosure, and total lack of knowledge of anything outside the zoo are seen by the humans not only as normal but, further, as ideal. For these humans, there

210

M. E. MOORE

are certainly negative consequences to colonialism; however, those consequences are not perceived as negative by the humans, meaning that, unlike real-world colonized subjects, they never deal with their hybrid identities or the process of decolonialization. Although Greg introduces the possibility of these humans decolonizing certain pieces of their lives when he teaches them about consent during the choosening, the narrative then moves away from the people in the zoo, preventing the audience from seeing the long-term effects of this challenge to the dominant police state. Thus, while the zoo does provide an example of the show depicting negative consequences of colonialism for humans, we still do not see any humans doing the work of decolonizing the harmful ideologies of Homeworld the way that we see with the Crystal Gems. A second exception to the lack of colonial consequences for humans could be the Cluster—a weapon lodged in the center of the Earth. Thousands of years ago, when it became clear that Earth would no longer be a viable colony, the Diamonds created the Cluster by artificially force-fusing millions of shards of shattered Gems together into a single entity. If the Cluster were to take on its physical form, it would be so enormous that it would destroy Earth from the inside out, blasting the planet apart. Furthermore, Peridot implies in “Gem Drill” that the Diamonds would then be able to use the Cluster to attack other planets, calling it “an inseparable fusion capable of destroying worlds, starting with this one.” Luckily, Steven is able to communicate with the Cluster, convincing it not to fully form and instead to help him create a protective bubble around its own shards to keep them dormant. The Cluster later acts as an ally to the Crystal Gems when the Diamonds attack, rejecting its own status as weapon for Homeworld. Before its “bubbling,” however, the Cluster poses a continued threat to human life. Gebrechirstos reminds us that the Cluster “isn’t at all separate from the white-supremacist legacy of colonizing indigenous lands, setting up military occupations, and weaponizing stolen resources to accumulate new riches.” Like real-world colonizers, who leave behind all kinds of bombs—literal and figurative—when they finally retreat from their colonies, the Gems’ violence toward humans continues long past the technical end of their colonization. And yet, once again, humans have no idea that this violent threat hangs over their heads or that the Cluster even exists. They experience a few earthquakes when the Cluster tries to form but have no clue that their entire existence was almost wiped out in

10

OFF-COLOR, OFF-CENTER: DECOLONIZING (IN) STEVEN UNIVERSE

211

that moment. Unlike real-life postcolonial subjects, who face the continued violence of neocolonial weapons with eyes wide open, the humans of Steven Universe never even know that they are in danger. The last exception is, of course, Steven himself, who is both a literal Gem-human hybrid and a postcolonial hybrid subject. Unlike the rest of planet Earth, Steven was raised in part by Gems and therefore grew up learning and internalizing many of their beliefs and values. Especially in early episodes, he worries that his hybridity will prevent him from being a real Crystal Gem because he does not yet know how to summon his Gem weapon or fuse. In this way, Steven, like Amethyst, is afraid of not fitting into the prefabricated categories of usefulness and productivity that indirectly stem from Homeworld ideologies about what constitutes a “normal” Gem with “normal” abilities. Also like Amethyst, Steven worries about his size and tries to change it by shapeshifting his body to seem older (“So Many Birthdays,” “Steven’s Birthday”). However, most of Steven’s internal struggles have less to do with living up to Gem standards of beauty, power, and knowledge and more to do with living up to his mother’s legacy. As he reveals to Amethyst in “Steven vs. Amethyst,” Steven worries that he is supposed to fill Rose’s shoes. When he (as the fusion Stevonnie) hallucinates about his feelings of guilt in “Mindful Education,” Rose is the last and largest image to appear, staring Steven down as if she is disappointed in his failures (see Fig. 10.2). Furthermore, Steven sometimes feels guilty for even existing because it took his mother away from the Crystal Gems; he worries that the Gems blame him for Rose being gone and is in general afraid to talk to them about his mother (“Joy Ride”). Steven also demonstrates feeling guilty for his mother’s crimes— first for shattering Pink Diamond, then for being Pink Diamond and lying about it—including when he volunteers to go on trial for Rose in “I Am My Mom.” Rather than facing questions of how to live between two worlds, how to succeed by Gem standards, or how to preserve his human culture in the face of Gem domination, as many real-world postcolonial subjects do, Steven mostly faces questions specific to his position as the child of a complicated and absent mother. While Steven, therefore, sometimes becomes the exception to the general lack of human consequences of Gem colonization in the show, he more often struggles with his identity not as a hybrid character but as Rose’s son. With all of this in mind, as some colleagues have asked me, why should Rebecca Sugar and the “Crewniverse” focus on the humans when this story is mostly about the Crystal Gems? Aside from a few ruins and the

212

M. E. MOORE

Fig. 10.2 Rose stares disapprovingly at Stevonnie

aforementioned Cluster, there really aren’t any colonial vestiges on Earth. Gem colonization did not radically alter the epistemologies, governments, social structures, histories, or subjectivities of human culture. Furthermore, the colonization process took place thousands of years ago, which is perhaps enough time for humans to recover. Why, then, would I argue that Steven Universe should pay attention to human effects of colonization if those effects are virtually non-existent? In response, I would like to change the question: why would Rebecca Sugar and her team create a storyworld in which there are no lasting effects of colonization on the colonized people in the first place? True, within the existing parameters of the show, it does not make sense to look at human victims of colonization (outside of Steven himself and the people in the zoo) because there is nothing to see—no struggles with hybridity or mimicry, no attempts to hear the subaltern speak, no re-writing of histories from an indigenous perspective. But why are these the parameters of the show? Why, in a moment when the lingering effects of colonialism and the continuing problems of neocolonialism are of enormous consequence, are we telling a story where the revolution occurred before colonialism even got through the door, stopping the spread of empire before it could do much harm? Why give an alternate history when what we need is an alternate

10

OFF-COLOR, OFF-CENTER: DECOLONIZING (IN) STEVEN UNIVERSE

213

future, one that figures out how to start repairing the damages inflicted by colonialism? This is not to suggest, of course, that Sugar consciously chose between these two storytelling options—one that looks at Gem victims and the other at human victims—and picked the less decolonial of the two, but rather to suggest that even in decolonial works, it is easy to unconsciously focus on the feelings of colonizers rather than the colonized. Although the work that this series does in deconstructing certain ideologies through the Crystal Gems and the Off Colors is certainly important, focusing on Gem victims without also looking at human victims has some potentially worrying consequences. Perhaps most importantly, for Sugar and the Crewniverse to tell a story in which only Gem colonizers are negatively affected by colonialism means that they are unintentionally colluding with those Gem colonizers, and the colonial project in general, on an epistemological level. As Patricia Richards (2014) explains, many post- and decolonial scholars, from Edward Said to Raewyn Connell, have explored how academic institutions have “colluded with colonial power” by conducting scholarship only through a Global North lens, ignoring theory and praxis developed by those in the Global South (142). Even when Global North scholarship is working to deconstruct colonial theories, if that scholarship does not pay attention to the knowledge and work of those who actually experience(d) colonialism and neocolonialism, it is ultimately participating in a colonial project of centering the Global North. Connell (2007), in discussing theories of globalization, argues that theory from the Global South does not simply “add to the existing theory” from the Global North but in fact “challenge[s] the terms in which the theory is constituted” in the first place (381). Similarly, in Steven Universe, focusing solely on perspectives of the colonizer and not only ignoring but erasing the suffering and knowledge of the colonized is a kind of epistemological collusion with colonial power. For the story to address the human consequences of and perspectives on Gem colonization would not just add to the story but would fundamentally challenge the ideologies on which that story is built. The show’s unintentional collusion has many ramifications that would be challenged by changing the parameters of the story to include the colonized, two of which I will discuss below: the reification of a hierarchy in which Gems are above humans and the implication that colonization does not have long-term detrimental effects on the colonized.

214

M. E. MOORE

First, the current parameters of the show reify the hierarchical belief that Gems are more important than humans, undermining the show’s overall humanist message. As evidenced by Rose’s and Steven’s continual speechifying about how beautiful human life and planet Earth are, one major goal of the show is to assert a humanist belief in the inherent worth of all people and, by extension, their planet, a worth that is challenged by Gem colonization. Homeworld’s ignorance of and disregard for the value of human life is, the show argues, the underlying cause of their villainy. Steven’s rehabilitation of certain Gem antagonists, like Peridot, happens through a humanist education about the wonders of living among people: “Is there anything that’s worth more / than peace and love on the planet Earth?” sings Steven to Peridot as he attempts to teach her about how amazing humans can be (“It Could’ve Been Great”). However, when the show makes Gems the center of the conversation about the dangers of colonization, it undermines this very goal. If, as Greg says in “The Return,” thousands of humans died in the war against Homeworld, why are their lives only mentioned in a throwaway comment while the lives of the dead or corrupted Gems are mourned at every turn? If the value of human life is so important, why not address how that value was trampled on by the hierarchies and policing of Homeworld? Secondly, the story of Steven Universe as it stands now implies that colonialism does not negatively affect the colonized subjects in the long term. Although the series affirms over and over that colonizing Earth was terrible, with the Crystal Gems calling it “the bad thing,” its terribleness resulted from the immediate problem of invasion and theft of land/resources only rather than from those factors alongside the devastating long-term effects of the colonial matrix of power. Certainly, the initial act of invasion is horrendous enough, as is the act of stealing, exploiting, and ravaging the Earth’s natural resources and planning to leave it a dead, wasted planet. But as a metaphor for real-world colonialism and imperialism, these initial phases are not enough to describe the full horrific consequences of dominating another culture. Real-world colonialism, as Quijano (2007) explains, includes a “systematic repression … of the specific beliefs, ideas, images, symbols or knowledge that were not useful to global colonial domination” as well as “the imposition of the use of the rulers’ own patterns of expression, and of their beliefs and images … [which served] as a very efficient means of social and cultural control, when the immediate repression ceased to be constant and systematic” (169). In other words, the repression of indigenous beliefs and

10

OFF-COLOR, OFF-CENTER: DECOLONIZING (IN) STEVEN UNIVERSE

215

imposition of colonizer beliefs helped colonizers to maintain control even after colonization had technically ended, extending coloniality into the present and future. By ignoring these ways in which a colonial matrix of power would continue to operate long after the end of the technical colony, the show plays into the belief that we truly exist in a postcolonial society, where the “post” indicates finality. In depicting only former and current colonizers as experiencing long-term damage from the colonial project, the show implies that colonialism and neocolonialism do not continue to affect former colonies in material, epistemological, cultural, and emotional ways. If the show is a metaphor, it seems to say that while oppressive hierarchies still affect people in the Global North, the Global South is totally fine because colonialism is over and they have their independence. In addition to these two consequences, it should also be noted that the series erases any mention of human colonization. Although there are characters of South/Southeast Asian descent (Connie, Lars) and characters from Ghana (the Pizza family), the series never mentions colonization and never shows those characters expressing any kind of postcolonial consciousness. Not only does the series, therefore, imply that humans were not affected in the long term by Gem colonization, it also ignores the long-term effects of real-world colonization. For a series in which colonialism is the “big bad” of the narrative, Steven Universe does a pretty good job of pretending that the European land grab never happened.

Conclusion Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) lists a series of questions that researchers can use when approaching projects that involve indigenous subjects as a way to ground their critical theory in a decolonial morality: “Whose research is it? Who owns it? Whose interests does it serve? Who will benefit from it? Who has designed its questions and framed its scope? Who will carry it out? Who will write it up? How will its results be disseminated?” (10). The answers to those questions must privilege indigenous perspectives and autonomy, pushing researchers of all backgrounds to question the epistemologies that undergird their projects as well as the material and ideological consequences of those projects. We might ask a similar set of questions about Steven Universe, or any text that aims to enact a decolonial morality: Whose story is it? Who owns the story? Who benefits from the story? Whose perspectives are we asked to empathize with in the story?

216

M. E. MOORE

Who writes and produces the story? How is the story disseminated? Most of these questions address the way that the show is created and distributed outside the narrative diegesis, which is an entirely different project than the one I’ve explored in this chapter; certainly a decolonial analysis of the creative process, labor, production, and distribution of Steven Universe would be an interesting and messy project for another day. Here, however, we can ask, whose story is this? Whose perspectives are privileged? Who does the story ask us to identify and empathize with? What narratives does this story challenge? Steven Universe does indeed work to deconstruct narratives which obscure the connections between coloniality and other forms of oppression by showing how these matrices of power fundamentally intertwine, creating a whole network of violence and control. However, it does so from the perspective of former colonizers, privileging their perspective on the world and asking viewers to empathize with their stories. This focalizing has continued through the season five episodes and the movie which have been released since the bulk of this chapter was written, where Steven’s narrative goals include rehabilitating both the Diamonds and Spinel, another Gem antagonist whose rage stems from her traumatic experiences as a resource for Homeworld’s use. Even when Spinel’s actions do threaten Earth and all its inhabitants, human and Gem alike, the story ultimately hinges on Spinel’s character arc and resolving her emotional distress. Again, the ramifications of colonial violence on humans become a footnote. This is not to say that the Crystal Gems, the Off Colors, and Spinel do not face oppression and violence—their experiences at the hands of Homeworld’s regime clearly showcase the cruelty and rigidity of the Diamonds’ system. However, their perspective only gives us half the story, leaving out the most central aspect of any decolonial project: the perspectives of the indigenous people—in this case, the humans. By telling a story in which that perspective is not only ignored but totally erased from the storyworld, Steven Universe unfortunately falls short of a completely decolonial morality. While we can appreciate the work that the show does accomplish in teaching its viewers, young and old, about systemic oppression and violence, we must also acknowledge the places where it reifies those systems. As the show wraps up its main narrative and moves into its epilogue, we must continue to ask, whose story is Steven Universe telling?

10

OFF-COLOR, OFF-CENTER: DECOLONIZING (IN) STEVEN UNIVERSE

217

References Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2014. “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues.” Postcolonial Studies 17 (2): 115–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790. 2014.966414. Connell, Raewyn. 2007. “The Northern Theory of Globalization.” Sociological Theory 25 (4): 368–385. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20453089. Gebrechirstos, Bemnet. 2017. “This World Looks Familiar: Steven Universe’s Anticolonial Critique.” Bitch Media, October 31. https://www.bitchmedia. org/article/familiar-world/steven-universes-anticolonial-critique. Harris, Cheryl I. 1993. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106 (8): 1707–1791. https://doi.org/10.2307/1341787. Kakissis, Joanna. 2018. “Where ‘Human Zoos’ Once Stood, A Belgian Museum Now Faces Its Colonial Past.” NPR, September 26. https://www.npr. org/2018/09/26/649600217/where-human-zoos-once-stood-a-belgianmuseum-now-faces-its-colonial-past. Mignolo, Walter D. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press. https://read-dukeupressedu.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/books/book/1582/. Moane, Geraldine. 2011. Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1 (3): 533–580. http://lp.hscl.ufl.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct= true&AuthType=ip,uid&db=aph&AN=9369833&site=eds-live. ———. 2007. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21 (2– 3): 168–178. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353. Ravela, Christian. 2017. “Steven Universe, Created by Rebecca Sugar (2013– present).” Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture 2 (3): 389–394. https://doi.org/10.1386/qsmpc.2.3.389_5. Richards, Patricia. 2014. “Decolonizing Globalization Studies.” The Global South 8 (2): 139–154. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/globalsouth. 8.2.139. Schofield, Hugh. 2011. “Human Zoos: When Real People Were Exhibits.” BBC News, December 27. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16295827. Swadener, Beth Blue, and Kagendo Mutua. 2008. “Decolonizing Performances: Deconstructing the Global Postcolonial.” In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 31–44. Los Angeles: Sage. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.

218

M. E. MOORE

Episodes Referenced “The Answer” (season 2, episode 2, 2016) “Back to the Barn” (season 2, episode 20, 2015) “Familiar” (season 5, episode 26, 2018) “Gem Drill” (season 3, episode 2, 2016) “Joy Ride” (season 1, episode 52, 2015) “I Am My Mom” (season 4, episode 24, 2017) “It Could’ve Been Great” (season 2, episode 24, 2016) “Mindful Education” (season 4, episode 4, 2016) “Off Colors” (season 5, episode 3, 2017) “On the Run” (season 1, episode 40, 2015) “The Return” (season 1, episode 51, 2015) “Rocknaldo” (season 4, episode 17, 2017) “So Many Birthdays” (season 1, episode 13, 2014) “Steven vs. Amethyst” (season 3, episode 23, 2016) “Steven’s Birthday” (season 2, episode 23, 2016) “Sworn to the Sword” (season 2, episode 6, 2015) “Your Mother and Mine” (season 5, episode 13, 2018) “The Zoo” (season 4, episode 13, 2017)

CHAPTER 11

Change Your Mind: Cultural Memory and Reconciliation Ellery Thomas

The identity of Rose Quartz, and her relationship to Steven, the Crystal Gems, and the Gem Homeworld, is one of the central questions in Steven Universe. Yet we only see her through remembrances—as an idealized figure in the portrait ever-present in Steven’s home, a hologram from Pearl’s memories, a figure on a videotape, a character in a story, or a vision in Steven’s dreams. We see the cultural memory of Rose Quartz and the Crystal Gems being actively and openly negotiated as the Gems individually and collectively attempt to express their identity and heritage to Steven as they grieve and memorialize his mother. We also witness turmoil and change in the official cultural memory of Homeworld, originally imposed by the Diamond Authority. The intersection of these dual processes and the ways that they change and are changed by Beach City, Steven, and Gems comprise the moral center of the series. This chapter focuses on that moral arc and will examine three sets of opposing mnemonic forces as they appear in Steven Universe: personal and cultural memory; official and vernacular memory; and human and Gem memory. The conflicts and consequences of these interactions will

E. Thomas (B) New Haven, CT, USA © The Author(s) 2020 J. R. Ziegler and L. Richards (eds.), Representation in Steven Universe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9_11

219

220

E. THOMAS

be examined with a particular eye toward one specific effect: the healing of the corrupted Gems. What is cultural memory? Some theorists, such as Jan Assmann, elevate only that heritage which is officially recognized to the level of legitimate cultural memory; all other heritage types are dismissed as mere “communicative” memory, notable for its “instability, disorganization, and specialization” (Kansteiner 2002, 182). Others view any shared heritage as cultural memory and decline to distinguish between top-down (official) and bottom-up (vernacular) mnemonic constructions (see Collins 1991). While it is true that the distinctions between different originations of memory are frequently blurred—that “vernacular memory [is] not as saintly and official memory not as brutal” as some suggest, that the types commingle, and that the official construction of the national-state is often internalized as a vernacular memory—the dichotomy is a useful one for identifying opposing forces in Steven Universe, even if “in the real world, things are not as neat” (Confino 1997, 1402). For our purposes, cultural memory is the method by which people construct their sense of the past (1386): It touches significantly on matters of identity, authority, and power (Said 2002, 242); it concerns not only how a past is represented but why it is integrated or ignored. It is both the collectively constructed image of the past and the reception of that image, the extent to which it guides emotion and prompts action (Confino, 1390). It operates in both micro- and macro-cultures, at the family level as well as that of the nation-state (Kansteiner, 189). It asks “who wants whom to remember what, and why?” (1393). The effects of memory and culture are multidirectional, which is to say that they act on each other. A person’s culture of origin impacts what memories they form in the first place (Ross and Wang 2010, 401), and conversational dynamics within that culture have “mnemonic reinforcement and suppression effects” (Coman et al. 2016, 8171). Thus, it is necessary to ask what constitutes Crystal Gem culture: what does Steven learn, and what do we as an audience learn, especially during the first season?

Mnemonic Transmission and Personal/Cultural Memory The pace at which new information is revealed to the audience/Steven gives us a sense of how this culture and its memory are taught, a learning process that had happened earlier for Amethyst. From the first episode,

11

CHANGE YOUR MIND: CULTURAL MEMORY AND RECONCILIATION

221

we are told that Crystal Gem cultural identity centers on protecting the planet from monstrous threats and that learning to control one’s Gem powers is an important rite of passage (“Gem Glow”). Steven summarizes it succinctly in another early episode: the first time that we witness Steven meeting someone new to him, he informs her that he’s “a member of the Crystal Gems; we fight monsters and protect humanity and stuff” (“Bubble Buddies”). Although the Gems live somewhat apart from the nearby human settlement, it’s made immediately clear that they are not entirely separate from human culture. While they are extremely dubious about the notion that Steven’s human father could contribute to their defense of Earth from its numerous threats, they soon learn not only that a powerful Gem cannon was in his possession, but also that his intrinsically human philosophy— “If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hot dogs!”—is the activation code for their lost leader’s weapon (“Laser Light Cannon”). We also learn from the grand but crumbling monumental structures that the Gems visit that they are remnants of a larger culture fighting a losing battle against entropy; as they try and fail to preserve the Sea Spire, a massive and deteriorating temple, Pearl urgently and explicitly reminds Steven that it is his heritage (“Cheeseburger Backpack”). Our first serious glimpse of the potentially fractured nature of Gem heritage is our first view of the Gem Battlefield (identified as such by Pearl); their mission in that episode (“Serious Steven”) takes them past carvings which clearly depict opposing armies, one of which is headed by a figure who resembles Rose Quartz. We eventually learn that some of these heritage sites have existed “for thousands of years” (“Beach Party”) and that the Gems are likewise ancient (“So Many Birthdays”). “Birthdays” is an early instance of Steven learning the differences between human and Gem cultures: the revelation that Gems live much longer lives unmarked by birth anniversaries creates a crisis for Steven, who attempts his first difficult mediation of human and Gem cultures with limited success. Much of what we learn of Gem heritage after this point, however, is shared under duress, when the need for a sudden explanation is forced by dire circumstances outside of Garnet and Pearl’s control. In “Mirror Gem”/“Ocean Gem,” we meet Lapis, our first new uncorrupted Gem, who reveals that not all Gems are Crystal Gems and that they are not from Earth. These episodes provide an early hint at the Crystal Gems’ past crimes and explicitly state that the monsters that they currently fight are all corrupted Gems. It is only after this that Steven is told about the Gem Homeworld and the existence of Homeworld-controlled planets (“Space Race”).

222

E. THOMAS

Although the Gems do voluntarily teach Steven how to fuse in a lesson that frames fusion as a key aspect of becoming a Crystal Gem (“Alone Together”), he learns about the concept of fusion in the first place almost accidentally, through a throwaway comment from Amethyst in “Giant Woman”—perhaps reflecting Pearl’s Homeworld-learned sense of fusion as taboo. (A similar sensibility may guide Garnet’s concealment of her fused nature until involuntary unfusing forces her hand.) This is not the last time that Amethyst is the catalyst for knowledge that Garnet and Pearl were unwilling to share with Steven. In “On the Run,” Amethyst impulsively whisks Steven away to the Kindergarten, where we first learn of Homeworld’s purpose in expanding to other planets: the creation of new Gems via environmental destruction. This aim is outlined more explicitly in “The Return” by Greg, who, in a moment of stress and panic, tells Steven that the Gems are “aliens who invaded Earth” and who “were doing something awful to the planet” until Rose fought to stop them. This recalcitrance may be due to the effect of this knowledge on Amethyst and a fear that teaching it might likewise impact Steven in a painful way. Part of Crystal Gem culture is formed in opposition to the Diamonds’ imperial project; more specifically, it sets itself against the appropriation of Earth’s resources for the creation of new Gems. This cultural identity poses a problem for Amethyst: under Crystal Gem cultural ethics, she should not exist. The idea of the Kindergarten as a traumatic memory site is damaging for Amethyst’s self-concept, and Pearl’s attempt at consolation—“You’re not a mistake, you’re just a by-product of a big mistake!” (“On the Run”)—does little to help (see also Ramiel, Chapter 9 and Moore, Chapter 10). This memory/identity crisis is an early instance of how repressed and sublimated cultural memories ultimately damage members of Gem culture, a key theme woven throughout the show. Additionally, Steven’s response demonstrates his embodiment of yet another theme—children healing the damage created by intergenerational trauma memory, or how the “repetitive representations [which] form the backbone of collective memories” can be “questioned and perhaps overturned, often in the wake of generational turn-over” (Kansteiner 2002, 190). This generational opportunity reveals much about the different relations that Garnet, Pearl, and Amethyst have to their heritage. Each question of Steven’s provides a chance for the Crystal Gems to rearticulate their history and identity, reflecting the multidirectional nature of cultural memory. As originator of multidirectional analysis Philip Rothberg (2014) writes, “the borders of memory and identity are jagged. …

11

CHANGE YOUR MIND: CULTURAL MEMORY AND RECONCILIATION

223

Groups do not simply articulate established positions but come into being through dialogical acts of remembrance that take place on a shared, but uneven terrain” (176). It is through these dialogic acts that Steven Universe portrays the immense tension between personal and cultural memory, particularly at the moment of mnemonic transmission. One instance of this motif appears in a brief history lesson imparted in “Rose’s Scabbard.” Pearl’s and Garnet’s differing attitudes to their war memories have them imparting information that is wildly divergent in tone: PEARL: This was the site of a historic battle! Every weapon here was left by a Gem over 5,000 years ago. GARNET: Countless gems were broken here. It was a maelstrom of destruction and death. PEARL: But we wooon! Your mother led us to glorious victory. The odds were against us, and our hearts were uncertain, but we chose to fight alongside Rose and made our stand here against Homeworld! (“Rose’s Scabbard”)

This conversation is one of many that José Medina (2011) would call “epistemic negotiations in which memories are formed or de-formed, maintained alive or killed”; “not uniform and harmonious, but heterogeneous and full of conflicts and tensions” (10). Another instance of this negotiation is at the center of “Sworn to the Sword.” In teaching Connie about knighthood and swords(wo)manship, Pearl’s personal memories color the tone and content of the cultural memories and concepts that she is attempting to impart. Her understanding of “the human concept of being a knight” is inextricably tied to her hierarchical relationship with Rose; her recollections of war and battle are romanticized for this reason. Pearl’s emphasis on putting duty “over everything: over logic, over consequence, over her own life” induces Connie to adopt the same unhealthy attitude until Steven interrupts the cycle. Once again, Steven demonstrates the active resistance that is necessary to overcome maladaptive learned behaviors from intergenerational trauma. We see a more literal mnemonic healing occur in “Mirror Gem” and “Ocean Gem.” The moral concerns of these episodes reflect the series’ broader themes of Steven’s insistence on the agency of “objects” and “monsters” (seen in his interactions with Centipeetle, the Cluster, and the Pebbles) and the outsized role that personal memories necessarily play in Gem cultural memory formation. In “Mirror Gem,” Pearl is initially

224

E. THOMAS

ecstatic to have uncovered a device that will purportedly show Steven everything that he needs to know about Gem culture. It is presumed to be an objective record, one that can display dispassionate and factual renderings of important moments in Gem history. However, far from the device embodying either “technological storage” or “the symbolical order of the institutional archive” (Ernst 2017, 44), Steven discovers that it is sentient and powered by one cracked Gem’s personal memories and imaginings. This has the potential to spark an epistemic crisis. Suddenly, it seems necessary for the Gems to defend how they know what they know. “Left to itself,” Jay Winter (2010) writes, memory “renders history, a documented account of the past, impossible” (314). The realization of the mirror’s nature damages the audience’s sense of the Crystal Gems’ historical objectivity and our faith in their representation of the “real” past. The mirror reveals the extent to which mnemonic transfers “emerge out of a complex dynamic between past and present, individual and collective, public and private, recall and forgetting, power and powerlessness, history and myth, trauma and nostalgia, conscious and unconscious fears or desires,” and how they are “acts of performance, representation, and interpretation” which can be both “conscious and deliberate” and “involuntary, repetitious, [and] obsessive” (Hirsch and Smith 2002, 5). The Gems must question the extent to which the histories that they have shared with Steven are mediated by traumatic personal memory if they are to question the value of the mirror. Yet the mirror’s suddenly dubious historicity is not the crux of the problem that presents itself. The Crystal Gems initially resist the notion of the mirror’s sentience and are deeply disturbed by its rudimentary attempts at communication. They are horrified to learn that the cracked Lapis inside was fully cognizant of her imprisonment for thousands of years. The implications of this are almost immobilizing for the Crystal Gems: who else have they literally objectified and used? Steven alone, unburdened by the personal guilt of these implications and guided by a deep sense of moral righteousness, is able to take action and heal Lapis Lazuli. This ability to acknowledge the past and heal its victims is key to the resolution of one of the show’s most significant overarching plot threads. To what extent are the Crystal Gems aware of their roles as creators and not merely conduits of cultural memory? Pearl frequently positions herself as an authority on the history of Homeworld (prior to her departure), the

11

CHANGE YOUR MIND: CULTURAL MEMORY AND RECONCILIATION

225

Rebellion, the rest of the Crystal Gems’ time on Earth, and even human history (“Historical Friction”). She considers herself to have had unique access to Rose and is deeply shaken by the implication that Rose might have kept anything secret from her, as in “Rose’s Scabbard.” It is clear that, like many expatriates, her memory is “stylized”; it is nevertheless the memory that she expects Steven and Connie to embrace (Hwang 2017, 117). Part of the stylization is, of course, performed in the service of deliberate concealment. Pearl speaks around the reality of Rose’s true role in the Rebellion, circumlocuting or keeping quiet when the subject surfaces. Looking back at Pearl’s careful “historical” explanations—elided and elliptical—over the course of the series in light of the Pink Diamond revelation, the extent to which Pearl has engaged in mnemonic composure becomes apparent, enacting a dynamic that is frequently found in wartime groups. In these groups, social acceptance is particularly important, and the desire to maintain group approval often leads individuals to conceal or repress individual memories that are inconsistent with those of other group members in order “to compose a past that is publicly acceptable” (Green 2004, 39) and that provides one with a sense of coherent identity. This composure is not without consequence. It requires the active management of traumatic and painful experiences; when it is unsuccessful, it leaves fragmented identities and psychic anxieties (40). This fragmentation is made real in “A Single Pale Rose”: inside Pearl’s gem, there are layers of memory, Pearls within Pearls, and Steven must climb deeper into each successive one to discover the buried truth. Garnet too participates in mnemonic composure and encourages healing via mnemonic transmission. In “Your Mother and Mine,” Garnet shares a tale of her first encounter with Rose Quartz. Rose, elevated in this telling to a folk-heroic figure, is framed in opposition to the Diamond Authority and aligned with the Earth. She and the planet that she chose to protect are held up as beacons of individuality, as safe havens for Gems like the Off Colors. The latter are swayed by Garnet’s story, for cultural memory “is most forcefully transmitted through the individual voice and body—through the testimony of a witness” (Hirsch and Smith 2002, 7). Like the best individual stories, Garnet’s account of Rose’s Rebellion “serves as a challenge and a countermemory to official hegemonic history” (7). The official hegemonic history, in this context, is the narrative crafted by the Diamond Authority. It is not free from the influence of personal

226

E. THOMAS

memory; on the contrary, Diamond cultural memory directly reflects the Diamonds’ personal priorities and traumas. The Authority’s timekeeping is decided by White Diamond’s whim: she declares the beginning of Era Two to mark Pink Diamond’s apparent destruction (“Familiar”) and considers marking the start of Era Three to commemorate Steven’s official arrival on Homeworld (“Together Alone”). Detailing the opposition of these two mnemonic forces—the vernacular and the official—is crucial to understanding the conflict at the heart of Steven Universe.

Vernacular and Official Culture/Memory Initially, Steven and the audience are unaware that the Crystal Gems and their culture/memory could be distinguished from Gem culture as a whole: the Crystal Gems are the only Gems that we meet for over 20 episodes. This changes in “Mirror Gem”/“Ocean Gem,” first when Lapis furiously cries “You’re the Crystal Gems!” and later when Steven’s family delicately attempts to explain that there is much that he does not understand about “other” Gems, who are not like them. These episodes also contain our first explicit clues that the Gem Homeworld is elsewhere. Lapis asks, “Don’t you know anything, Steven? Your friends, they don’t really care about other Gems. All they care about is the Earth. But I never believed in this place. [She gazes towards the stars ]” (“Ocean Gem”). This extraterrestrial origin is confirmed a few episodes later in “Space Race,” when Pearl teaches Steven some minimal facts about the Gem Homeworld and its imperial project. Although we begin to learn more about the Crystal Gems’ understanding of the differences between their cultural memory and that of Homeworld, it is only with the introduction of Homeworld Gems that we can witness these differences for ourselves. The first striking contrast is in how the Crystal Gems view themselves (as “protectors of Earth and all its living creatures”) in opposition to the Homeworld Gems’ ignorance (“Marble Madness”) or hatred (“Jail Break”). Jasper calls the Crystal Gems “traitors to Homeworld” and expresses a deep disdain for Rose Quartz that contradicts the unilaterally positive commemorations that we have seen up to that point. It is clear that Peridot has adopted this attitude in “Catch and Release,” where, in an attempt to distract the Crystal Gems, she shouts “Look! Over there! Another planet to betray!” Much later, we see that

11

CHANGE YOUR MIND: CULTURAL MEMORY AND RECONCILIATION

227

even the Off Colors, who are fighting their own battles against Homeworld, conceive of Rose as “the Anti-Gem,” “an organic beast” of “malformed quartz” (“Your Mother and Mine”), if they even believe that she is real. The effect of Homeworld propaganda on popular perceptions of Rose Quartz and the Rebellion illustrates Red Chidgey’s (2012) observation that “The State and mainstream media do not typically guarantee collective memories of social justice movements, but subject them to distortion, domestication and erasure” (87). Attitudes toward fusion, an act or state of being already established as central to Crystal Gem culture and memory, are another significant point of dissent. We first hear disdain for fusion from Jasper in “Jail Break,” who dismisses it as “a cheap tactic to make weak Gems stronger”; Peridot expresses disgust and confusion for it at first, referring to Garnet as a “filthy war machine” (“Catch and Release”). This warped view of fusion is confirmed in “Keeping It Together,” where a horrified Garnet witnesses the forcibly fused Gem shards: “So this is what Homeworld thinks of fusion. … This is where they’ve been, all the ones we couldn’t find. They’ve been here the whole time. This is punishment for the rebellion!” (see also Cooley, Chapter 3 and Moore, Chapter 10). We learn even more about Crystal Gem fusion in “The Answer,” when we first see how fusion is meant to work according to Homeworld: it is intended to be a practical measure wherein identical Gems combine forms to obtain a strategic advantage. Fusions of different gems were “unbelievable, disgusting, unheard of,” and Ruby was slated to be shattered for daring to attempt it with a “rare, aristocratic” Gem like Sapphire. Even Rose Quartz had not witnessed this type of fusion before. This new concept becomes foundational to Crystal Gem cultural memory, and this willingness to adopt new and strange practices is what makes it a vernacular culture rather than an official one. While Crystal Gem culture at times resembles a cult of personality devoted to Rose Quartz, “The Answer” and “Now We’re Only Falling Apart” emphasize that it is a culture of collaboration. “This whole time,” Sapphire reflects in the latter episode, “we thought we were following her, but she was following us. [to Pearl ] How could she not, after you swept her off her feet?” Dictates concerning fusion on Homeworld, however, come directly from the Diamonds and are enforced by violent means. Even near the end of the fifth season, after Steven, Yellow, and Blue have reached a degree of understanding and share common aims, Yellow Diamond is still quick to forcibly separate Garnet and other fusions (“Together Alone”).

228

E. THOMAS

The damaging aspects of official narratives about fusion are clear from their effects on Garnet and, later, Rhodonite, one of the Off Colors. Conversely, the healing and empowering aspects of vernacular narratives about fusion are evident throughout the series, from the first explanation of fusion in “Giant Woman” to the climactic fusion sequences in “Change Your Mind.” This dichotomy is also apparent in official/vernacular narratives about hierarchy, identity, and power. In “Friend Ship,” we learn about the impact of Homeworld strictures on Gems like Pearl, who grapples with her assigned role as “just” a Pearl who needs to be given orders and direction; this issue is revisited in “Back to the Barn,” where Peridot openly questions the necessity of Pearl’s existence. When Pearl defiantly exclaims “I don’t belong to anyone!”, Peridot deadpans: “Then what are you for?” Pearl’s redefinition of her role and identity unnerves Peridot, who believes that Gems were all “made to serve” the Diamond Authority; despite intense pressure, she defends their plan to destroy all life on Earth for the sake of creating new Gems (“It Could’ve Been Great”). She proclaims that she will “never forsake the Gem [she] was made for” (“Message Received”). These sentiments are echoed in several statements by Jasper in a later episode: This planet ruins everything. I’ll never let this planet twist me like it’s twisted you. Your weakness embarrasses Homeworld. You suffer because it’s what you deserve. Every Gem is made for a purpose: to serve the order of the Diamonds. Those who cannot fit inside this order must be purged! To come out misshapen, to reshape yourself outside your purpose, and to defend this ruined worthless planet is a disgrace! (“Earthlings”)

However, Amethyst’s rejection of Homeworld’s standards for Quartz soldiers and embrace of fusion are what allow her to emerge victorious from her conflict with Jasper, one of Homeworld’s most culturally valued Quartzes (as evidenced by the Rubies’ rescue mission and their worshipful attitudes in “Back to the Moon”). Jasper and Peridot’s allegiance to the ideals regarding the Diamond Authority’s flawlessness and the validity of their imperial project reflects how “many a national memory succeeds to represent, for a broad section of the population, a common destiny that overcomes symbolically real social and political conflicts in order to give the illusion of a community to people who in fact have very different interests” (Confino 1997,

11

CHANGE YOUR MIND: CULTURAL MEMORY AND RECONCILIATION

229

1400). In Peridot’s case, this illusion does not survive contact with Yellow Diamond, who dismisses Peridot’s report and fails to live up to Peridot’s expectation of her logic and objectivity. Through this, Peridot is swayed by the Crystal Gem cultural narrative that the Earth is worth protecting, and after repudiating Yellow Diamond, she embarks on a similar journey toward role redefinition. “Earth,” as Peridot tells Jasper in “Earthlings,” “can set you free.” Too free, in Homeworld’s view: in “Gem Heist,” Holly Blue Agate explains the lax and unbecoming behavior of the Amethyst guards by informing her guests that the Amethysts are from Earth. Steven and the audience hear a particularly moving tale of Crystal Gem vernacular cultural memory’s effect on identity from Bismuth, who tells us: Rose Quartz changed my life. I came to Earth thinking this was just another colony. Build another arena for important fighters to fight in, build another spire for important thinkers to think in, and then, I met her. Just another Quartz soldier made right here in the dirt, but she was different. And she was different because she decided to be. And she asked me what I wanted to build. And I’d never heard that before. Gems never hear they can be anything other than what they are, but Rose opened our eyes. (“Bismuth”)

Bismuth’s story also provides more evidence for the collaborative aspect of Crystal Gem cultural memory in resisting Steven’s attempt to dictate what a Crystal Gem ought to do, asserting “Don’t tell me what a Crystal Gem would do. Nobody’s more Crystal Gem than I am” (“Bismuth”). At the same time, Rose’s and Steven’s respective responses to Bismuth’s lethal invention contrast Rose’s impulse toward top-down control of Crystal Gem narratives with Steven’s open, vernacular approach. While Rose’s decision to bubble Bismuth was in part a tactical decision to prevent her own destruction without revealing her identity as Pink Diamond, it also reveals her impulse to curate her memory and memory of the Rebellion, controlling what stories are told about Crystal Gem identity and culture even after she is no longer present. This impulse is seen again in “A Single Pale Rose,” when Rose—as Pink—orders Pearl never to reveal their plot in such a way that Pearl is physically unable to speak of it. When Steven chooses instead to “tell them everything,” Bismuth responds: “You really are better than her.”

230

E. THOMAS

Although we learn from Pearl some vestiges of Crystal Gem history and etiquette—she is frequently concerned with what constitutes proper behavior and is more driven than any other Crystal Gem to preserve aspects of heritage like the archaic and formal names for legendary weapons (“Rose’s Scabbard”)—the general attitude of Earth-based Gems toward art and music is that they are freeform activities in which anyone can participate. (There are some humorous examples of new Gems learning about this; Peridot seems to have been unaware of the existence of music in “It Could’ve Been Great,” and she and Lapis believe that they spontaneously invent art, which they refer to as “meep morp,” in “Beta.”) On Homeworld, however, music is only for elite Gems, who command their Pearls to sing for them (“That Will Be All”) or otherwise play sedate and mechanical music to which their subjects are allowed to rigidly dance for the Diamonds’ pleasure. A final aspect that differentiates vernacular from official Gem culture is their attitudes toward humans. Homeworld perspectives on humans range from negative (with a Zircon in “The Trial” stating in court that “humans are loud, absolutely hideous creatures that serve no purpose whatsoever”) to, at best, condescending (Blue Diamond being “surprised at humans’ ability to survive in the wild” and spiriting one away in “Steven’s Dream”). Crystal Gems, however, consider the Earth in general a liberating influence, and their drive to protect Earth and the people who live there is a central part of their group identity and mythmaking. The willingness to incorporate human practices and perspectives is one of the Crystal Gems’ most significant cultural departures from Homeworld, and it is one of the keys to the final confrontation with the Diamonds and the healing of the corrupted Gems. Rose’s sacrifice of her physical form in order to create Steven, who will be “something extraordinary … a human being” (“Lion 4: Alternate Ending”), is an extreme example of this ethos, one that sets the events of the series into motion.

Human and Gem Cultural Synthesis Although Garnet, Amethyst, and especially Pearl sometimes display resistance to the idea of interacting with humanity, this is always demonstrated to be a misguided impulse. It is through the enjoyment of human treats that Steven first manifests his powers (“Gem Glow”), and although the Gems are extremely dubious that Greg can offer anything of value, he is key to the resolution of several episodes. His importance in “Laser Light

11

CHANGE YOUR MIND: CULTURAL MEMORY AND RECONCILIATION

231

Cannon” is referenced above, and he is similarly instrumental in decoding the Wailing Stone’s warning in “The Message.” Contact with human culture is shown, time and again, to be fun and funny, transformative and terrifying, awkward and amazing, but always rewarding. “Beach Party” marks the start of a closer relationship between the Gems and the citizens of Beach City despite initial reluctance on both sides, while “Fusion Cuisine” explores how human and Crystal Gem conceptions of what constitutes a family positively influence each other. In “Gem Harvest,” we’re told that Gems did not have families until their arrival on Earth and interaction with the culture there, so the Crystal Gem family owes its existence to humanity in a very real way. By the end of the series, the Gems emulate local human marital traditions to provide formal validation for Garnet’s existence in “Made of Honor.” While Steven initially resembles a human child more than a mature Gem, this is its own strength according to Garnet: “But the truth is, we rely on you. Your voice inspires us, binds us, reminds us of why we protect the planet. … You need to be there to protect them like your mother once did. It’s your destiny” (“The Return”). And although Steven contemplates fencing himself off from Connie specifically and human culture generally in “Full Disclosure,” ostensibly for their own protection, this is emphatically framed as the wrong decision, something reinforced in “Story for Steven,” when Greg’s passage through a literal fence has positive outcomes. Instead, humans deserve a place in defending their planet: in “Sworn to the Sword,” Connie points out, “The Earth is my home too! Can’t I help protect it?” What she learns from Pearl is itself already a product of human–Gem cultural interaction, as discussed above. Just as humans play an important role in Crystal Gem cultural memory, Gem input enriches human cultural memory, with their personal memories informing human history. In “Historical Friction,” a propagandistic play about the founding of Beach City is improved and “corrected” by Pearl, who, despite a personal bias, provides an important counterpoint to the narrative and helps to make the play a success. In fact, the Crystal Gems were instrumental to the founding of Beach City and to the travels of a historic town figure (“Buddy’s Book”). Additionally, Garnet teaches Stevonnie healthy mechanisms for dealing with personal memory and emotion in order to improve group dynamics in “Mindful Education.” These interactions are not without tension. Greg is emotionally distressed by Rose’s attitude toward their partnership and has to find a new

232

E. THOMAS

way of relating in “We Need to Talk,” an episode that chronicles an early attempt at serious discourse with human culture on an emotional level. In “Nightmare Hospital,” we see an even more painful interaction of Gem and human culture, where strict human rules and norms influenced by Dr. Maheswaran’s understanding of what human childhood should look like make Connie’s life as someone adopted into the Crystal Gems intolerable; breaking these norms is literally life-saving. Misunderstanding human development causes distress and endangers Steven in “Three Gems and a Baby,” and Pearl reflects bitterly on Rose’s enthusiasm for the growth and change that comes so naturally to humans and not to her. However, it is Steven’s particular ability to grow and change in ways that even Rose could not that brings healing to Pearl and other Gems. His willingness to consider problems from an emotionally open growth mindset is seen first in the resolution of “Ocean Gem,” and more spectacularly in “Gem Drill,” when Steven talks to the Cluster rather than attempting to overcome it by force and thus averts serious catastrophe. He revisits Lapis Lazuli’s emotional growth in “Same Old World” in a delightful monologue: “Yeah, but nothing is still on Earth. Everything’s always changing — leaves, cities, even Jersey changes. My dad says the rest stops used to be pretty gross, but now they have sushi. This isn’t the same world that held you prisoner, not anymore, and I know it doesn’t feel like home, but maybe that can change, too” (“Same Old World”). This happens again in “Alone at Sea,” with Steven using Earth-derived seafaring rituals to attempt to heal Lapis’s fraught relationship with the ocean. Similarly, in “Mr. Greg,” involving Pearl in human cultural practices promotes healing through cultural syncretism. In the brief time that we spend with her, we find that Bismuth also approves of these new human-derived rituals, such as badminton, card games, baking, and Lonely Blade. Steven’s healing influence is not limited to old and new members of the Crystal Gems. He and Lars model human openness and honesty in front of Topaz, who is finally able to admit their desire to stay fused despite Homeworld taboos; human-influenced ideas about individuality are inspiring and empowering for the Off Colors, who then look to Lars for leadership. Steven draws a direct line from his Earth experience with healing family tensions to his diplomatic mission with the Diamonds in “Familiar.” When Blue accuses his “time on Earth” of having “warped [his] sense of right and wrong,” Steven agrees:

11

CHANGE YOUR MIND: CULTURAL MEMORY AND RECONCILIATION

233

Yeah, maybe it has. Maybe Pink thought you guys were right to lock her in here when she messed stuff up. But I know what it’s like to have a loving family, and we don’t do stuff like this to each other. The Crystal Gems understand that I’m Steven, and they support me and Connie. …This isn’t normal. How many times did you lock her in here? How many times did you make her cry? BLUE: I always thought you were failing this world. But if you were happier on Earth, maybe this world was failing you. (“Change Your Mind”)

When Yellow Diamond defends their hierarchical cultural practices by declaring the necessity of making sacrifices “for the sake of our perfect empire,” Steven rebuts with a summation of the human/Crystal Gem philosophy that he has taken from Earth: “If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hot dogs! If you try to make this empire perfect, if you just wipe away all the things you see as flawed, you lose all the things that make you happy—like hot dogs!” (“Change Your Mind”). Embracing change and decrying flawlessness cause an identity crisis for White Diamond, who asks in consternation, “If I’m not perfect, who am I? If you’re not Pink, then … who are you?! Who - who is anyone?” The question is answered in part when we see White stepping into new roles as a family member and as a healer. Through synthesizing human/Gem, vernacular/official, and personal/cultural memories, Steven and the other Diamonds are finally able to reconcile the damage from a six-thousandyear-old conflict: they are finally able to heal the corrupted Gems.

Corrupted Gems and Mnemonic Reconciliation Through exploring the points of contact and conflict in different pathways of memory, Steven Universe demonstrates that mnemonic synthesis leads to healing. Exposing and working through personal memories are restorative; vernacular and official cultures meeting in the middle is healing, and so is cultural exchange between humans and Gems. These are all united in the corrupted Gem storyline, which extends from the first to the most recent episode. The corrupted Gems, created when the other Diamonds launched a devastating attack on Earth to avenge Pink Diamond’s apparent assassination, are warped and broken pieces of former combatant and civilian Gems who take on a monstrous aspect and present a Sisyphean problem

234

E. THOMAS

for the Crystal Gems, who are constantly engaged in battle with them. Steven and the audience are ignorant of these origins until “Ocean Gem”: STEVEN: Gems shouldn’t fight each other. PEARL: We’re always fighting gems, actually … All Gems aren’t necessarily… good. AMETHYST: All those monsters we fight used to be just like us! Right, Pearl? PEARL: But they’ve become corrupted. We have to take care of them, subdue them, contain them. It’s the best we can do for them for now. If we don’t, then … (“Ocean Gem”)

The corruption has changed the Gems both physically and psychologically; Garnet explains this to Steven through simile, saying that Centipeetle’s condition is as “if MC Bear Bear tore not the fabric of his arm, but the fabric of his mind” (“Monster Reunion”). The corrupted Gems are the product of lies, secrecy, and conflict; of failed attempts to impose official culture or to integrate it with vernacular culture; of Pink’s/Rose’s failures as a wayward child and rebellious leader; and of the Diamond Authority’s failures to address her concerns or contain her power in either form. Pink/Rose was unable to conceive of an appropriate way to resolve her personal and geopolitical problems with the other Diamonds; thus, GARNET: Rose Quartz had tried to use her powers to save these monsters too, but she was never able to heal them. PEARL: You might help them in ways even your mother couldn’t. (“Monster Buddies”)

Steven tries multiple times to do so, and it is his first impulse when his healing powers return in “Monster Reunion.” He finds limited success, enough to interview Centipeetle about her trauma but not enough to transform it. He tries again with Yellow and Blue Diamond, but even the three of them together cannot make a permanent change (“Legs from Here to Homeworld”); they require White Diamond’s cooperation and must speak truth to power in order to do so. When the four of them return to Earth to power Rose Quartz’s healing fountain, the corrupted Gems and Gem culture at large are finally and permanently healed, and the series’ five-year narrative arc can end.

11

CHANGE YOUR MIND: CULTURAL MEMORY AND RECONCILIATION

235

Representative of the crimes and mistakes that a post-war culture seeks to hide and repress, the past trauma and present danger of the corrupted Gems are the final wounds to be healed in the wake of generational turnover. Steven shows us that the past can only be healed when it is brought fully into the present, acknowledged, and integrated into cultural memory; the only way toward healing is through difficult confrontations held in the spirit of productive openness and honesty, spurred forward by those (like Amethyst and Steven) who share cultural but not personal trauma of the war. Amethyst candidly summarizes her abilities and responsibilities in the wake of the Pink Diamond revelation: “I am not responsible for what Rose did. None of us are! Not you, not Pearl, not Garnet. But I am responsible for me. And I am not gonna dump another 1000year-old complex on you or anyone else. I am ending it right here! I am the ding-dong sunshine future. Your friend forever! And I’m not gonna fall apart on you” (“What’s Your Problem?”). Amethyst, Steven, and all of their Gem and human allies come together to make good on this promise. In doing so, Steven Universe provides a model for cultural and mnemonic reconciliation, exploring with grace and sensitivity what can come after conflict.

References Chidgey, Red. 2012. “Hand-Made Memories: Remediating Cultural Memory in DIY Feminist Networks.” In Feminist Media: Participatory Spaces, Networks, and Cultural Citizenship, edited by Elke Zobl and Ricarda Drüeke, 87–97. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Collins, Jim. 1991. “Theorizing Cultural Memory: Totalizing Recall?” American Literary History 3 (4): 829–840. https://www.jstor.org/stable/489892. Coman, Alin, Ida Momennejad, Rae D. Drach, and Adra Geana. 2016. “Mnemonic Convergence in Social Networks: The Emergent Properties of Cognition at a Collective Level.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113 (29): 8171–8176. https://www. jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26470882. Confino, Alon. 1997. “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method.” The American Historical Review 102 (5): 1386–1403. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/2171069. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2017. “‘Electrified Voices’: Non-Human Agencies of SocioCultural Memory.” In Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology and the Social, edited by Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo, and Eivind Røssaak, 41–59. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

236

E. THOMAS

Green, Anna. 2004. “Individual Remembering and ‘Collective Memory’: Theoretical Presuppositions and Contemporary Debates.” Oral History 32 (2): 35–44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40179797. Hirsch, Marianne, and Valerie Smith. 2002. “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction.” Signs 28 (1): 1–19. https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 10.1086/340890. Hwang, Seunghyun. 2017. “Lingering Cultural Memory and Hyphenated Exile.” In Performing Exile: Foreign Bodies, edited by Judith Rudakoff, 113– 124. Intellect. Kansteiner, Wulf. 2002. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies.” History and Theory 41 (2): 179–197. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3590762. Medina, José. 2011. “Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism.” Foucault Studies 12: 9–35. Ross, Michael, and Qi Wang. 2010. “Why We Remember and What We Remember: Culture and Autobiographical Memory.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 5 (4): 401–409. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41613447. Rothberg, Michael. 2014. “Multidirectional Memory.” Témoigner. Entre histoire et mémoire 119: 176. https://doi.org/10.4000/temoigner.1494. Said, Edward. 2002. “Invention, Memory, and Place.” In Landscape and Power, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 242–245. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Winter, Jay. 2010. “Sites of Memory.” In Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, edited by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, 312–324. Bronx, NY: Fordham University.

Episodes Referenced “Alone at Sea” (season 3, episode 15, 2016) “Alone Together” (season 1, episode 37, 2015) “The Answer” (season 2, episode 22, 2015) “Back to the Barn” (season 2, episode 20, 2015) “Back to the Moon” (season 3, episode 24, 2016) “Beach Party” (season 1, episode 18, 2014) “Beta” (season 3, episode 22, 2016) “Bismuth” (season 3, episodes 20 and 21, 2016) “Bubble Buddies” (season 1, episode 7, 2013) “Buddy’s Book” (season 4, episode 3, 2016) “Catch and Release” (season 2, episode 18, 2015) “Change Your Mind” (season 5, episodes 29–32, 2019) “Cheeseburger Backpack” (season 1, episode 3, 2013) “Earthlings” (season 3, episode 23, 2016)

11

CHANGE YOUR MIND: CULTURAL MEMORY AND RECONCILIATION

237

“Familiar” (season 5, episode 26, 2018) “Friend Ship” (season 2, episode 15, 2015) “Full Disclosure” (season 2, episode 1, 2015) “Fusion Cuisine” (season 1, episode 32, 2014) “Gem Drill” (season 3, episode 2, 2016) “Gem Glow” (season 1, episode 1, 2013) “Gem Harvest” (season 4, episode 8 and 9, 2016) “Gem Heist” (season 4, episode 13, 2017) “Giant Woman” (season 1, episode 12, 2014) “Historical Friction” (season 2, episode 14, 2015) “It Could’ve Been Great” (season 2, episode 9, 2015) “Jail Break” (season 1, episode 52, 2015) “Keeping It Together” (season 2, episode 8, 2015) “Laser Light Cannon” (season 1, episode 2, 2013) “Legs from Here to Homeworld” (season 5, episode 25, 2018) “Lion 4: Alternate Ending” (season 4, episode 21, 2017) “Made of Honor” (season 5, episode 22, 2018) “Marble Madness” (season 1, episode 44, 2015) “The Message” (season 1, episode 49, 2015) “Message Received” (season 2, episode 25, 2016) “Mindful Education” (season 4, episode 4, 2016) “Mirror Gem” (season 1, episode 25, 2014) “Monster Buddies” (season 1, episode 23, 2014) “Monster Reunion” (season 3, episode 14, 2016) “Mr. Greg” (season 3, episode 8, 2016) “Nightmare Hospital” (season 2, episode 16, 2015) “Now We’re Only Falling Apart” (season 5, episode 19, 2018) “Ocean Gem” (season 1, episode 26, 2014) “Off Colors” (season 5, episode 3, 2017) “On the Run” (season 1, episode 40, 2015) “The Return” (season 1, episode 51, 2015) “Rose’s Scabbard” (season 1, episode 45, 2015) “Serious Steven” (season 1, episode 8, 2014) “A Single Pale Rose” (season 5, episode 18, 2018) “So Many Birthdays” (season 1, episode 13, 2014) “Space Race” (season 1, episode 28, 2014) “Steven’s Dream” (season 4, episode 11, 2017) “Story for Steven” (season 1, episode 48, 2015) “Stuck Together” (season 5, episode 1, 2017) “Sworn to the Sword” (season 2, episode 6, 2015) “That Will Be All” (season 4, episode 15, 2017) “Three Gems and a Baby” (season 4, episode 10, 2016)

238

E. THOMAS

“Together Alone” (season 5, episode 27, 2018) “The Trial” (season 5, episode 2, 2017) “We Need to Talk” (season 2, episode 9, 2015) “What’s Your Problem” (season 5, episode 20, 2018) “Your Mother and Mine” (season 5, episode 13, 2018) “The Zoo” (season 4, episode 14, 2017)

Index

A ableism, 201 Abrams, Lamar, 32 absence, 58–62 Adolescence of Utena (film), 96 Adult Swim, 31 Adventure Time (TV show), v, 1, 10, 13n, 32, 34, 49 affective credibility, 189 Afrofuturism, 103 Against Purity (Shotwell), 179–180 agender identity, 27 agray06, 38 Ahmed, Sara, 21 Akin, 164–167 Akio, 94–95 Alexandrite, 64 alienation, 21 alien encounter narrations, 153 alien–human symbiosis, 160 aliens, 7 humans treated by, 160–165 “Alone at Sea” (episode), 232 “Alone Together” (episode), 155, 222

Alterity Politics (Nealon), 146 American empire, 64 Amethyst, 2, 146, 201, 206, 220, 234, 235 at ball, 5 beauty ideals of Homeworld internalized by, 208, 211 black stereotypes of, 73–74, 78–81, 83 as botched reproduction, 56, 97, 202–205, 208, 211 conspiracy theory debunked by, 117–119 dancing by, 73–74 and destruction of Communication Hub, 83–84 Garnet’s fusion with, 63, 78–81 Greg’s bonding with, 105 guilt of, 187 Kindergarten of, 186, 203–205, 222 made from mineral, 49 oppression of, 71 Pearl defended by, 158–160

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. R. Ziegler and L. Richards (eds.), Representation in Steven Universe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9

239

240

INDEX

Pearl’s fusion with, 53, 70, 72–73 Pearl’s self-identification as superior to, 72–73, 82 power of transformation of, 99 rejection of Homeworld standards for Quartz soldiers, 228 relation to heritage of, 222 reluctance to interact with humans, 230 self-concept of, 222 self-doubt of, 73, 74 Steven’s fusion with, 3, 56–57, 94 “amplification through simplification”, 59–60 animals, 160, 162, 165, 168 animated bodies, 13n Animated Landscape, 174 animation amorphous abstractions of the future in, 47 as “ecology”, 175 as environmental media, 193 as escaping trap of heteronormativity, 69 as extremely gendered, 28 episodic structure of, 10 fixating on bodies, 178 heteronormativity of, 14n, 22, 26, 31 landscapes in, 178, 182 malleability of, 23–26, 46–47, 49, 52, 56, 57, 61, 173 queer futurity in, 46, 51, 92 race in, 74–75, 79 as untraditional, 22–23 animation studies moving images in, 174–176 preferential treatment of characters in, 172, 178 anime, 6, 9–12, 90, 94, 101, 102 Crewniverse’s love of, 102, 103 fusion in, 46, 202

global impact of, 102 Sait¯ o on impoverishment of visual information in, 59 see also Revolutionary Girl Utena (TV show); Sailor Moon (TV show) Anime Machine, The (Lamarre), 175 Aniston, Jennifer, 123, 124 “Answer, The” (episode), 50, 55, 155, 202, 227 Anthropocene, 172, 178–183, 193 Anthy Himemiya, 93, 96–98, 101, 108 anushbanush, 39 Apollo 11 landing module, 116 “Arcade Mania” (episode), 177 Area 51, 115 “articulate”, 82, 87n “art of the hand”, 175 Asian Americans, 205–206 Assmann, Jan, 220 Attardo, Salvatore, 141 authorities, 201 Avatar: The Last Airbender (TV show), 101, 103 A.V. Club, 125

B “Back to the Barns” (episode), 205, 206, 228 Barthes, Roland, 22, 48, 52, 105–107 Bauhaus design, 103 Beach City, Delmarva, 2, 177, 231 “Beach Party” (episode), 221, 231 Beauty and the Beast, 169n Beauty and the Beast (film), 20 Bee, 40 “Beta” (episode), 56, 230 Beyoncé, 123 Bhabha, Homi, 209 Bhambra, Gurminder K., 200

INDEX

bildungsroman, 6, 8 Bilge, Sirma, 71 biological sex, 3 biopower, 55 Bismuth, 55, 138, 139, 169n, 201, 229 human cultural practices enjoyed by, 232 tracing by effacing in, 60–62 “Bismuth” (episode), 229 Bitch Media, 199, 208 Black Looks: Race and Representation (hooks), 77 black people, 131n, 208 crimes against, 163–164 Black Rose duels, 98 black women heterosexual privilege, 77 historical stereotypes of, 81 Jezebel stereotype of, 78, 81 matriarch stereotype of, 78–79 in recent television shows, 85 Steven Universe as reinforcing stereotypes of, 69, 70, 73–86 black youth, 80 Blue Diamond, 50, 158, 169n, 189, 203, 227, 230, 232, 234 human zoo run by, 209–210 Blumenfeld, Zach, 137, 138, 141, 144 bodies, 173–174 arriving at queerness, 63 as illusions, 27 improbable, 106 LGBTQ+, 99 as not fixed, 46 Bodies That Matter (Butler), 99 Bollen, Jonathan, 57, 58 Boo Boo, 23 boundaries, 201 Bradford, K. Tempest, 155–156 British colonization, 200

241

bronies, 33–34 “Bubble Buddies” (episode), 221 “Buddy’s Book” (episode), 231 Bugs Bunny, 22, 28, 62 Bullwinkle, 23 Burnett, Matt, 4, 128–129, 132n Butler, Judith, 47, 99, 108–109 Butler, Octavia, 12 Butler, Olivia, 153, 162–164

C Cartoon Network, v, 30, 89, 125 criticized by PTC, 34–36 as eliminating “just for kids” animation, 31 Cartoon Network UK, 34 cartoons as bringing to life that which has-never-been, 47–48 criticism of simplicity of, 59 political potential of, 65 Castañeda, Claudia, 25 “Catch and Release” (episode), 226 “Cat Fingers” (episode), 114 Cayenne (dog), 157 Centipeetle, 138, 189–192, 223, 234 cephalopods, 168n cetaceans, 168n Cézanne, Paul, 184 CGI, 177 Chambers, Samuel A., 29 “Change Your Mind” (episode), 228, 233 Chapman, Jacob, 91 “Cheeseburger Backpack” (episode), 221 chibi, 62 Chidgey, Red, 227 child, 25 children’s television, 6, 10 Chyna, Blac, 123

242

INDEX

classism, 201 climate change, 182 Climbing Rock, 204 Clinton, Hillary, 115 Cluster, 115, 138, 187, 209–211, 223, 232 Gems fused into, 187–189 Cluster of Gem shard, 9 Cluster Quakes, 115–116 “Coach Steven” (episode), 78–80 coercion, 163 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 181, 182 Coleman, Gabriella, 143–144 Collins, Patricia Hill, 71, 77, 79, 81 colonialism, 179, 199–215 Amethyst’s body and, 203 technological, 181 “Come Along With Me” (episode), 49 comic books, 6 Communication Hub, 80, 82–84 communicative responsibility, 164 companion species, 168n compulsory heterosexuality, 47, 76–77 Homeworld embodying, 63 Connell, Raewyn, 213 Connie Maheswaran, 147, 201, 215, 231, 232 at ball, 5 Garnet’s urge to fuse with Steven, 53–54, 60 Pearl’s training in sword fighting, 206–207, 223 Steven’s fusion with, 6, 60–62, 156, 168n Connolly, William, 146 consent, 12, 155, 160–165, 167 fusion’s negotiating of, 155, 157, 202 and interspecies relationships, 157, 161–162 and preparation for future, 166–167

conspiracy theories, 65–66, 114 about celebrities, 122–123 about fandom, 124–128 as attempt to regain sense of political agency, 117 real world, 115 as social capital, 124 conspiracy theorists, 12 boundaries of, 122 as heroes, 114, 115 contact zones, 168n Cookie Cat theme song, 141 Cooley, Kevin, 11 corrupted Gems, 189, 220, 222–224, 232–235 Creamy Mami, 99 credibility, 189 Crewniverse, 89, 90, 101, 182 anime loved by, 101, 103, 105 focus on humans of, 211 involvement in fandom subculture of, 105, 107 “Cry for Help” (episode), 80, 82–84, 158 Crying Pear, 159 crystalgemjammin, 40 Crystal Gems, 2, 27 as aided by monsters, 9 and Amethyst’s guilt, 187 bodies of, as property, 203 culture of, 220–224 divvying up sexual rituals between Homeworld and, 63 Earth seen as liberating by, 230 embodiment of, 14n fan art of, 39 full identity of, 146 fusion of. See fusion Greg rescued from zoo by, 209–210 Homeworld memories of, 226 humans seen as companions by, 155 humans seen as lower by, 155, 156

INDEX

as independent from normative structures of gender and sex, 27 Kindergarten beautified by, 179 as minoritarian group, 197–198 as not interfering with life on earth, 162 as not predetermined, 187 Peridot’s conversion to side of, 10 as presenting as female, 71 queerness embodied by, 70, 173–174 in rebellion against Gem Homeworld, 28, 50, 225 relationship with Beach City humans of, 231 reluctance to involve Steven in danger, 8 Ronaldo’s mirroring of, 129 Rose’s cause joined by, 201 transformation and immortality possessed by, 187 as victims of Homeworld retaliation, 8 violence performed by, 72 weapons materialized by, 6, 9 Crystallocene, 179–183 cultural appropriation, 197, 198 cultural memory, 219–235 and attitude toward fusion, 227–228 of humans, 227–232 multidirectional nature of, 220, 222 culture wars, 124–125

D Darsey, James, 116 Darwin, Charles, 167 Dave Guys, 141, 148 Dawn (Butler), 160 death drive, 25

243

“Death of the Author” (Barthes), 106 decoloniality, 200–202, 213, 215–216 deep state, 115 defective gems, 95–96 de Jarjayes, Oscar François, 103 Demarest, Rebecca, 72 Dennis, Jeffrey P., 10, 13n, 22–23 Den of Geek, 51 Derrida, Jacques, 59 Desmond, Jane, 73 DeviantArt, 45 Diamond Authority, 4, 128, 187, 198–200, 225, 228–229, 234 “Diamond Days” (episode), vi Diamonds, 138, 233 bodies created by, 203–204 Gems as tools of, 180 methods of control of, 201 Pearl’s threat to authority of, 208 différance, 59 Dios, 94 Disney, Walt, 128 domestic abuse, v Donaldson, Emrys, 12 Doty, Alex, 21 Doty, William, 142, 147 “Dove Self-Esteem Project”, vi Dragon Ball Z (TV show), 10, 56–57, 62 duels, 93–95, 97, 101 Duffett, Mark, 104 Dunn, Eli, 3, 27, 50, 61, 70, 72, 76 dystopia, 187 E Earth, 182, 188 attitudes towards, 230 colonized by Gem Homeworld, 198–199 natural resources of, 214 “Earthlings” (episode), 56–57, 94, 228–229

244

INDEX

ecocriticism, 178 economy, 201 Ed, Edd, & Eddy (TV show), 105 Edelman, Lee, 11, 25, 47, 63 efficiency, 187 emergents, 165–166 Emmys, v empathy, 12, 193 Entertainment Weekly, 181 environment, 182 enviro-toon, 178 equilibrium, 157 ethnic discrimination, v eugenics, 163–164 Eurasia, 179 Eyeball, 139

F Facebook, 37, 38 fake allyship, 197, 198 “Familiar” (episode), 205, 226, 232 family, as space of intersection, 86 fandom, fans, vi, 11, 12 becoming, 36–37 conspiracy theories about, 124–128 impact on Steven Universe of, 104–105 infighting in, 36–38 pathologization of, 33–36 as relationship, 105–107 Steven Universe art by, 40 “toxic”, 37 Farrell, Nicoloe, 10 Firefly (TV show), 125 Fleischer Studios, 45 fluid embodiments, v Fluorite, 64, 207 Focus on the Family, 34 Foucault, Michel, 54–55 French government, 128 “Friend Ship” (episode), 86, 228

“Frybo” (episode), 119 “Full Disclosure” (episode), 231 fusion, 2–3, 19, 25–26 as abominations on Gem Homeworld, 27, 50–52, 95, 180, 207, 221, 227 as act of communication, 157 attitudes toward, 227–228 consent negotiated by, 155, 158, 202 as contrasting Crystal Gem Homeworld with Earth, 5 and deconstruction of Homeworld view of intimacy, 201–202 as demonstration of love and trust, 85 as destabilizing traditional understanding of body, 99 different interpretations of, 11 on Dragon Ball Z , 56 as exceeding traditional categories and terminologies around bodies, 94 flexible rules of, 64 as fostering new community, 97 heterogem, 56 homogems, 50, 56 as journey, 26 as metaphor for romantic and sexual relationships, 202 nonconsensual, 26, 158–160 as novum, 8 open communication and, 27 queer relationships investigated by, 26, 27, 46–47, 50 as representing relationships, 155–156 signifying carnivalesque, 72 stigmatization of “impure”, 180–181 and theme of transformation, 25, 99

INDEX

three criteria for, 57, 60 as useful in combat, 47, 50 as way of co-opting remnant of stable identity, 52 “Fusion Cuisine” (episode), 27, 231 fusion dance, 3, 57–58, 81, 156 future(s), 5–6, 166–167

G Garbanzo, 145 Garnet, 2, 3, 5, 49, 85, 201, 206, 222, 234 agency of, 85 Amethyst’s fusion with, 78–81 at ball, 5 on bodies as illusion, 27 coded as Black, 159 complication of boundaries between queer and not queer, 64 and destruction of Communication Hub, 83–84 discrimination against, 71, 77 as disruptive, 89 as fusion, 19, 26, 63–64, 75–76, 132n, 202–203 on fusion, 155, 157 homophobia faced by, 77 Jasper’s battle with, 54, 157, 168 made from mineral, 49 marriage of, 64 multiple senses of “discourse” claimed by, 53–54 oppression of, 71 participation in mnemonic composure, 225 Pearl comforted by, 85 Pearl forgiven by, 158–159 Pearl’s fusions with, 60, 81, 83, 162, 158–160 Pearl’s using as outlet, 84 Peridot’s disdain for, 227

245

relation to heritage of, 222 reluctance to interact with humans, 231 as representing stable relationship, 156 Rose’s meeting with, 145 sexualization of, 77–78 Steven’s fusion with Connie pushed by, 53, 60 on Steven’s strength, 231 on three criteria necessary for fusion, 57, 60 training montage of, 101 unfusing of, 156 war memories of, 222–223 weapons of, 97 “Garnet’s Song”, 157 “Garnet’s Universe” (episode), 101 Gavins, Joanna, 141–142 Gebrechirstos, Bemnet, 199, 205, 207–208, 210 Gem Battlefield, 221 “Gem Drill” (episode), 138, 210, 232 “Gem Glow” (episode), 221, 230 “Gem Harvest” (episode), 231 “Gem Heist” (episode), 99 Gem Homeworld, 2, 4 ball on, 5 beauty ideals of, 208 caste system and hierarchy on, 4, 5, 71, 74, 168n, 198, 201–202, 205–207, 213, 216, 233 Crystal Gem’s memories of, 226 disregard of human life on, 214 divvying up sexual rituals between Crystal Gems and, 63 earth as seen by, 230 Earth colonized by, 198 fusions seen as abomination on, 27, 50, 95–96, 180, 207, 222, 227 Gem rebellion against, 28, 50, 225

246

INDEX

gem reproduction on, 19, 54–58, 203 human deaths in war against, 213 intimacy viewed on, 201–203 Pearl as authority on, 224 retaliation on Gems from, 8 Steven’s journey to, 189, 226 Steven’s learning about, 222 Gems, 226–227 bodies as projections of gemstones, 2 as colonizers, 197–209 concept of gender lacking in, 19 corrupted, 189, 220, 233, 235 creation of bodies of, 173–174 defective, 95–96 full identity of, 145 healing of, 220, 222–223, 228, 230, 232–235 hierarchies of looks and abilities in, 205 production of, 179–180 as tools of authority, 180 see also Crystal Gems gemsona, 40 Gem Talk (podcast), 46 gender, 4 non-binary, 12 tearing down of semiotics in, 89 gender norms, 27–29 bronies and, 33 genderqueer identity, 27 genderqueerness, in anime, 9–10 gender stereotypes, 12 General Theory of Verbal Humor, 141 geo-toon, 178 Geraghty, Lincoln, 11 ghetto, 131n “Giant Woman” (episode), 27, 53, 70, 72–76, 222, 228 Gilbert, Anne, 33–34

GLAAD Media Award, v Glenn, Cheryl, 140 globalization, 101–103 Global North, 213, 215 Global South, 200, 213, 215 global warming, 116–117 Goethals, George, 74 Goku, 62 “Good Lars, The” (episode), 129 Gravity Falls (TV show), 10 Gray, Jonathan, 11 Greg Universe, 34, 57, 146, 201 Amethyst’s bonding with, 105 broken leg of, 137 on deaths in war against Homeworld, 214 distressed with Rose’s attitude toward partnership, 231–232 fan art of, 39 Gem cannon of, 221 in human zoo, 208–210 inability to fuse, 156 as key to resolution of several episodes, 230 as “largely absent” father, 8 Rose’s “fusion” with, 156, 167 Steven informed of Crystal Gems by, 221 Groensteen, Thierry, 52–53, 58–59 Grosz, Elizabeth, 192 Guynn, Noah, 106

H Halberstam, J. Jack, 48, 49, 52, 56, 69 on queer characters, 76 on race in animation, 74–75, 79 Hall, Deedee Magno, 205 Haraway, Donna, 100, 154, 157, 165–167, 168n Harmon, Dan, 131n

INDEX

Harris, Anne, 26 Harris, Cheryl I., 202 Harris, Frederick C., 131n Hartzheim, Bryan Hikari, 104 Haruka Tenou, 91 “Haven’t You Noticed (I’m a Star)” (song), 87n healing, 233 of corrupted Crystal Gems, 219, 222, 224, 231–235 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (TV show), 23, 173 Hendershot, Heather, 24 henshin, 99 heterogeneity, 52–53 heteronormativity, 2 animation and, 22, 23, 32, 69 bodies as static in, 99 escape from, 108–109 fusion as subversion of, 11 Steven Universe’s revolt against, 70, 106 sustained by gay tv shows, 29–30 in traditional media, 107 in U.S. animation, 14n heterosexuality, children’s sci-fi as challenge to compulsory, 14n heterosexual privilege, 77 Heumann, Joseph K., 175 Hills, Matt, 36, 124–125 Himitsu no Akkochan, 99 “Historical Friction” (episode), 225, 231 Holly Blue Agate, 229 Homeworld. See Gem Homeworld homogeneity, 52–53 homonationalism, 63 homonormativity, 60 homophobia, 77, 201 homosexual oppression, 76–77 hooks, bell, 77 Hori, Takafumi, 109n

247

horror cinema, queer desire coded as monstrous in, 26 “House Guest” (episode), 104 “How to Turn an Angry Space Alien Into Your New Aunt With the Power of Friendship or Whatever by Steven Universe”, 39 human-Gem hybrids, fusion among, 7 humans alien treatment of, 160–165 Crystal Gems’ relationship with, 231 death in war against Homeworld of, 214 fusion among, 7, 156 Sugar’s focus on, 211, 213 as unaware of Gems, 155 viewed as lower than Gems, 155, 156 human zoo, 169n, 208–210, 212 hybridity, 12, 154 Hyde, Lewis, 144, 147 Hynes, William, 142

I “I Am My Mom” (episode), 211 Icke, David, 117 identity, vi identity politics, 146 identitarian impulse, 50–52 ideology, 7 Igarashi, Takuya, 109n Ikuhara, Kunihiko, 12, 89–97, 101, 103, 109n Illuminati, 117, 123, 128 image-repertoire, 105 Imaginary, 105 imperialism, 56, 180 industrial extraction, 179 Injectors, 173 Instagram, 115

248

INDEX

International Monetary Fund, 117 internet trolls, 143 intersectionality, 71 failure of, 72–78 inter-species relationships, 157 inter-species symbiosis, 154 intersubjectivity, 201 intimacy, 155–156, 201–203 intimate violence, 158–160, 166–167 Inu (anime), 11–12 invisible hand, 187 “It Could’ve Been Great” (episode), 214, 228, 230

J Jade, 5 “Jail Break” (episode), 26, 54, 75–78, 157, 226–227 Japan, 9–11 U.S. occupation of, 102 “Japan Cool”, 102 jasker, 40 Jasper, 27, 139, 207, 228 allegiance to Diamond Authority, 228 Amethyst and Steven’s battle with, 56–57 Crystal Gems called traitors by, 226 disdain for fusion of, 227 fighting for reproductive futurity, 64 Garnet’s battle with, 53, 157 as “ultimate Quartz”, 56 Jdahya, 162 Jenkins, Henry, 104 Jenson, Joli, 33–34 Jezebel, 78–79, 81 Jodahs, 163, 165–167 Johnny Bravo (TV show), 30 Johnston, Joe, 3 Jones, Alex, 115

Jones-Quartey, Ian, 125, 130 Jones, Stacy Holman, 26 “Joy Ride” (episode), 211 “Jungle Moon” (episode), 61

K Kahn, Richard, 117 Kardashians, 123 Keep Beach City Weird (blog), 12, 114, 118–120, 125, 130n Keep Beach City Weird (Fryman), 12, 114, 115 “Keep Beach City Weird” (episode), 65, 117–118, 120, 122, 130 Kelley, Shamus, 50–52 Kelly, Megyn, 115 Kennedy assassination, 115 Kenya, 34 “Keystone Motel” (episode), 84 Kies, Bridget, 125 Kindergartens, 19, 54–58, 73, 179, 182, 187, 200 of Amethyst, 186, 203–205, 222 as inherently bad places, 204 Off Colors living in, 207 knowledge, 201 Korean animation studios, 103 Kožuchová, Pauline, 173, 179, 186 Kunzite, 92

L labor, 201 Lacan, Jacques, 105 Lamarre, Thomas, 13, 174, 175, 184, 192 Lapis Lazuli, 10, 27, 40, 137, 201, 221, 226, 232 conspiracy theory about, 126 convinced to join Crystal Gems by Steven, 166

INDEX

Jasper’s abusive relationship with, 63 in mirror, 224 Lars, 61, 147, 169n, 215, 232–233 “Lars’ Head” (episode), 95 “Laser Light Cannon” (episode), 115, 119, 221, 231 Latin America, 200 Legend of Korra, The (TV show), 101 “Legs from Here to Homeworld” (episode), 139, 234 lesbian stereotypes, 93 Levin, Ben, 32 Levy, Michael M., 8 Lewis, Tyson, 117 LGBTQ+ bodies, 99 LGBTQ+ community, 21 LGBTQ+ themes, 26, 34 in Sailor Moon, 91 Lil’ Butler, 105 Lilith, 160–163, 169n Lilith’s Brood (Butler), 12, 153, 160–168 interbreeding in, 154, 160, 161, 165, 167 “Lion 3: Straight to Video”, 146 “Lion 4: Alternate Ending” (episode), 230 Liu, Jeff, 130 Locke, Simon, 122 “Log Date 7 15 2” (episode), 76 Looney Tunes, 20 Lord of the Rings , 177 Lost (TV show), 127 “Love Letters” (episode), 78 Lover’s Discourse, A (Barthes), 106 “luminous elements”, 184 Lury, Karen, 30–31

M Macey, Deborah A., 107

249

Machold, Rhys, 122 magical girl, 91, 92, 99 Maheswaran, Dr., 232 mah¯ o sh¯ ojo, 91 Maier, Lauren, 31–32 majokko, 91 Makoto Kino, 91, 92 Malachite, 26, 27, 63 Malaysia, 34 malleability, of animation, 46–47, 49, 52, 56, 57, 61, 173 Mamdani, Mahmood, 131n mametchi, 40–41 manga, 9 fusion in, 46 “Marble Madness” (episode), 226 Marceline, 13n, 32, 49 Margulis, Lynn, 167 matriarch, 78–79 Matrix, The (film), 114 “Maximum Capacity” (episode), 105 McAndrew, Francis T., 124 McCloud, Scott, 58, 59 McDonnell, Chris, 45, 184 media self-production, 37 medicine, 163–164 Medina, José, 223 memories war, 22–223 see also cultural memory memory, as multidirectional, 12 Mendlesohn, Farah, 7, 14n “Message, The” (episode), 231 “Message Received” (episode), 228 Michiru Kaiou, 91 Mignolo, Walter, 200 Milenkovic, Megan A., 124 “Mindful Education” (episode), 53, 139, 211, 231 “Mirror Gem” (episode), 221, 223–224, 226 Mittell, Jason, 126–127, 132n

250

INDEX

Moane, Geraldine, 201 model minority myth, 205 modernist paintings, 185 Mondrian, Piet, 184 monogamy, as queer, 64 “Monster Buddy” (episode), 234 “Monster Reunion” (episode), 234 monsters, 7 in anime, 9 moon landing, 115, 128 Moore, Mandy Elizabeth, 5, 12 Morris, Kat, 5 “Mr. Greg” (episode), 232 Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, 32 Mr. Smiley, 143 Muñoz, José Esteban, 47, 52, 57–58, 92, 108 Murray, Robin L., 175, 178 Muto, Adam, 13n Mutua, Kagendo, 199 myles, 40 My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, 33

N Nama, Adilifu, 75 Napier, Susan, 94 Nealon, Jeffrey, 146 Neighbors, R.C., 5–7 neoliberalism, 7 Neon Genesis Evangelion, 102 “New Lars, The” (episode), 169n Newman, Barnett, 184 New York Comic Con, 107 Nickelodeon, 30 “Nightmare Hospital” (episode), 232 Nikanj, 160–163 “Noblewoman’s Laugh” (episode), 82–83, 87n non-traditional family structures, v novum, 7

“Now We’re Only Falling Apart” (episode), 146, 156, 227 O Oankali, 154, 160–164, 166, 167, 169n “Ocean Gem” (episode), 221, 223, 226, 232, 234 Off Colors, 202, 207–208, 213, 225, 227, 232 “Off Colors” (episode), 64, 95, 207 Ohtori.nu, 93 Ojou character type, 82, 87n Olson, Olivia, 32 Ong, Aihwa, 102 Onion, 12, 105, 148–149 boredom of, 148–149 fan theory on, 147 and poo emoji, 139, 143 “Onion Friend” (episode), 105 “Onion Gang” (episode), 145 “Onion Trade” (episode), 148 “On the Run” (episode), 204, 222 ooloi, 161, 163, 169n Opal, 5, 53, 70, 74 Pearl more prominent in, 75, 86 Oring, Elliott, 150n Orientalism, 103 Orphan Black (TV show), 114 Osmond, Donny, 30 P Padparadscha, 207, 208 Pallant, Chris, 174, 175, 192 Palumbo, Donald, 6 Parents Television Council (PTC), 34–35 Parikka, Jussi, 182, 187, 193 Parkland shooting, 115 Paste, 25 Patrick Star, 23

INDEX

patrón, 200 Patten, Fred, 9 Patternist series (Butler), 169n PBS NewsHour, 26 Pearl, 2, 146, 200, 204, 221, 222, 230, 233–235 alien shards explained by, 119 as allegedly responsible for Pink Diamond’s death, 127–128 ambiguous racial coding of, 205–206 Amethyst consoled by, 222 Amethyst’s defense of, 158–160 Amethyst’s fusion with, 53, 70, 72–74 and Amethyst’s fusion with Garnet, 78–80 as authority on history of Homeworld, 224 at ball, 5 coded as white, 159 Communication Hub rebuilt by, 80 Connie trained to sword fight by, 205–206, 223 on conspiracy theories, 65, 117–119, 121 as core of fusion, 83 deception involving Rose’s identity of, 4–5 and device for teaching Gem Culture to Steven, 223–224 Diamond authority threatened by, 208 exertion of control over Amethyst by, 74 Garnet’s comforting of, 85 Garnet’s forgiving of, 158–159 Garnet’s fusions with, 60, 81–83, 158–160, 162 Garnet used as outlet by, 84 grappling with assigned role, 228

251

Greg seen as unable to connect with Rose by, 156 as homage to Sailor Neptune, 104 human cultural practices enjoyed by, 232 on human-gem hybrid, 60 made from mineral, 49 as made to order servant, 74, 205–206 propagandistic play corrected by, 231 reaction to Amethyst’s dance, 73–74 read as Asian, 82, 87n relation to heritage of, 222 reluctance to interact with humans, 231 Rose Quartz embraced by, 34 as Rose Quartz’s lover, 55 Rose’s death faked by, 28 Sapphire’s forgiving of, 85 self-identified as superior to Amethyst, 72–74, 82 Steven’s conversation with White Diamond opposed by, 138 Stevonnie dismissed by, 62–64 stylized memory of, 225 on “ultimate connection between gems”, 57 unrequited love for Rose Quartz, 89 war memories of, 222–223 white privilege and, 71 Pearls, as servants, 205–206 Pearson, Wendy, 14n Pebbles, 223 Pelkmans, Mathijs, 122 Pelton, Robert, 147 perfection, 181 Peridot, 10, 74, 76–77, 84, 138, 145, 147, 201, 228

252

INDEX

allegiance to Diamond Authority, 228 attempt to destroy Cluster, 189 beauty ideals of Homeworld internalized by, 208 on clothing, 127 on cluster, 210 conspiracy theory about, 126 convinced to join Crystal Gems by Steven, 166 disdain for fusion, 227 Pearl claimed as property by, 206 Steven’s education of, 214 permafusion, 50 Petey Fryman, 118, 120–121 Pheasant-Kelly, Fran, 175, 178, 189 Philosophy of Boredom, A (Svendsen), 148 Phoenix, 166 Pink Diamond, 4–5, 142, 146, 169n, 200, 205, 211, 225, 226, 229, 233, 235 Pear as servant of, 205 theories on killing of, 127–128 see also Rose Quartz Pinky and the Brain (TV show), 14n, 22 Pitre, Jacob, 173 Pitre, Jake, 11 Pixar, 49 Pixarvolt, 69 pixelation filter, 191 Pizza family, 215 #PizzaGate theory, 115 Pokémon (TV show), 9 political queerness, 101 polyamory, 169n “Pool Hopping” (episode), 149 Porter, Charles A., 106 post-coloniality, 200, 211 Pott, Julia, 10 Princess Bubblegum, 13n, 32, 49

Princess Tutu, 103 Proctor, William, 125 property, 203 psychoanalysis, 36, 41n Puar, Jasbir K., 63 public education, 54 purity, 179–181

Q QAnon, 115 Quartz soldiers, 228 Queer Art of Failure, The (Halberstam), 48, 69 Queer as Folk (TV show), 29 queer children’s entertainment, 20 queer-coded relationships, v queer corporeality, 101 queer dance floors, 57–58 queer desire, v in anime, 9–11 coded as monstrous in horror movies, 26 queer future, 11, 46, 47, 49–53 queer futurity “amplification through simplification” in, 58–60 in animation, 45–46, 51, 92–93 queer identity, 11 queer narratives, 25–27 queerness, 173–174 bodies arriving at, 63 in closed political systems, 63–64 in cosmos of Steven Universe, 192 embodied by Crystal Gems, 63 embodied by Steven and Crystal Gems, 70 in fandom of Steven Universe, 12 flexible boundary of, 64 as ideality, 47 meaning of, 22 as potentiality and fluidity, 20–22

INDEX

of same-sex marriage, 3–4 in traditional animation, 22–24 white supremacy threatened by, 202–203 queer potentiality, 49 queer relationships, 12 queer representation, 107–108 queer theory, 29 amorphous abstractions of the future in, 47 queer utopia, 48 Quijano, Aníbal, 200, 201, 214

R race in animation, 74–75, 79 see also black women racial coding, different interpretations of, 11 racial discrimination, v racism, 201 Rainbow Quartz, creation of, 57 “Raising the Barn” (episode), 149 Ramiel, Evelyn, 12–13 Ranger Guy, 141, 148 Rankin, Sandy, 6, 7 rape, 84 Raskin, Victor, 141 Ravela, Christian, 4, 12, 199 Reagan era, 23 Reddit, 29, 115 Red Eye, 119 Regular Show (TV show), 10 Ren and Stimpy (TV show), 23, 173 representation, v reproduction, 200–201, 203 Amethyst as botched, 56, 97, 203–205 on Gem Homeworld, 19, 54–58, 203 reproductive futurity, 11, 154

253

condemnation of, 47 Jasper’s fighting for, 63 reptile people, 117–118, 121 “Return, The” (episode), 214, 222 “Reunited” (episode), 3, 5, 64, 145, 156, 158 Revolutionary Girl Utena (TV show), 90, 92–97, 98, 100, 101, 103 Rhodonite, 207, 208, 228 Rich, Adrienne, 77 Richards, Leah, 12 Richards, Patricia, 213 Rick and Morty (TV show), 33, 131n “Rising Tides/Crashing Skies” (episode), 118 Ristola, Jacqueline, 12, 31 “Rocknaldo” (episode), 121, 197–199 Rocko’s Modern Life (TV show), 14n Rock People, 197 Rocky, 23 Rolling Stone, 25 Ronaldo Fryman, 12, 113–130 Crystal Gems emulated by, 198 empowered by insider status, 117–118 in-show criticism of, 117–120 lion conspiracy theory of, 123–124, 131n as mirroring Crystal Gems, 128 narcissism of, 114, 130 as only partially correct in theories, 115 response to the Other, 27 Rock People theory of, 116, 121–123 snake-people theory of, 117–119, 124, 128 Steven contrasting with, 129–130 Steven’s attempt to fix, 120 Steven’s debunking of conspiracy theory of, 65–66

254

INDEX

and Steven’s supposed pregnancy, 123–124, 131n theories about fandom, 124–125 truth defined by, 119, 120 xenophobia of, 121–122 Rose Bride, 93, 94 Rose of Versailles, The, 103 Rose Quartz, 1–2, 77, 84, 200, 205, 206, 223, 227 attitude toward partnership with Greg of, 231–232 in battle for Earth, 145–146, 202 on beauty of life and Earth, 214 Bismuth’s life changed by, 55–56 complicated legacy, 28 conception of new modes of being of, 55–56 death faked by, 28 death of, 128–129 embraced by Pearl, 34 escape from Homeworld of, 28 in fan art, 39 fusion called love by, 155 Garnet’s first meeting with, 225 Gems’ discovering identity of, 156 Greg’s “fusion” with, 156, 167 healing fountain of, 234 identity as central to Steven Universe, 219 Jasper’s disdain for, 227 as Pearl’s lover, 49 Pearl’s unrequited love for, 89 as Pink Diamond. See Pink Diamond reaction to Bismuth’s lethal invention of, 229 secrets kept from Pearl by, 225 Steven’s worries about filling shoes of, 211 Rose, rebellion of, 8 “Rose’s Scabbard” (episode), 222–223, 225, 230 Rothberg, Philip, 222

Rough Draft Korea, 103, 184 Rubies, 228 Ruby, 3–5 de-fusing of, 83–85 Garnet’s unfusing into, 156 on homogems, 50 as mass-produced foot soldier, 55 PTSD of, 85 Sapphire’s fusion with, 2–3, 19, 20, 26, 50, 53–55, 75, 77, 132n, 158, 202 Sapphire’s marriage to, 2–3, 5, 51, 146 slated to be shattered, 227 Rupphire, 40 Russel, Kathy, 86 Russia, 34 Rutile twins, 207, 208 Ryan, Kathleen M., 107

S Sadie, 61, 147 “Sadie’s Song” (episode), 87n Sad Spoon, 159 Sagan, Dorion, 167 Said, Edward, 213 Sailor Chibi Moon, 92 Sailor Moon (TV show), 90–93, 100–102, 104, 109n Sailor Moon Crystal , 109n Sailor Moon R, 109n Sailor Moon R: The Film, 109n Sailor Moon S, 109n Sailor Moon SuperS, 109n Saint-Amand, Pierre, 106 Sait¯ o, Kumiko, 91, 92, 100 Sait¯ o, Tamaki, 59 “Same Old World” (episode), 232 same-sex couples, in Pinky and the Brain, 14n same-sex marriage, 1–3

INDEX

San Diego Comic-Con, 22 Sandy Hook truthers, 113, 115 Sapphire, 3–4, 56 de-fusing of, 83–85 Garnet’s unfusing into, 156 Gem status of, 203 on heterogem fusion, 56 Pearl forgiven by, 85 Ruby’s fusion with, 2–3, 19, 26, 50, 53–55, 75, 77, 132n, 158, 202 Ruby’s marriage to, 2–4, 51, 146 wedding vows of, 5 Sapphire Stevens, 81 Sardonyx, 64, 81–83, 87n Saret, Justin, 12–13 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 47–48 Sato, Junichi, 109n science fiction, 5, 11 as art form of identity, 6–7 conspiracy theorists as heroes in, 113, 114, 116, 130n as multigeneric, 6–8 young adult, 8 Scott, Suzanne, 14n Sebeok, Thomas, 168n Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 25 Seed, David, 6 self, 3 “Serious Steven” (episode), 221 sex, 155, 201 sexual consent, v sexual conventions, bronies and, 33 sexual exceptionalism, 64 sexuality, 4, 201 shonen manga, 46 Shotwell, Alexis, 179–181, 187, 191–192 signs, 23 arbitrary, 48 in cartoons, 48 discontinuous, 48

255

Simpsons, The (TV show), 14n “Single Pale Rose, A” (episode), 56, 225 Sitting Rock, 204 Sleeping Beauty, 169n Smith, Adam, 187 Smut, B., 157 snake-people theory, 119, 124, 128 social capital, 124 social inequality, 71–72 social learning theory, 79 social media, 36–40 hyper-individuation on, 38 see also Facebook; Tumblr “So Many Birthdays” (episode), 211, 221 Soul Blaster, 125 “Space Race” (episode), 221, 226 SpongeBob SquarePants (TV show), 14n, 23, 173 stabilization, 52, 53 Star, 123 Star Trek (TV show), 7 Stein, Louisa Ella, 37 “Steven’s Birthday” (episode), 2, 211 “Steven’s Dream” (episode), 230 “Steven’s Lion” (episode), 123–124 Steven Universe, 1 ability to grow and change, 232 able to communicate with cluster, 210 admirable qualities of, 27–29, 188 as aided by monsters, 9 Amethyst and Pearl’s fusion encouraged by, 70 Amethyst’s fusion with, 3, 56–57, 94 and Amethyst’s fusion with Garnet, 78–80 and Amethyst’s guilt, 187 Amethyst’s Kindergarten visited by, 203–205, 222

256

INDEX

appeal to White Diamond, 8 arcade pier in, 177 attempt to destroy Cluster, 188 attempt to fix Ronaldo, 120 at ball, 5 on beauty of life and Earth, 214 Connie’s fusion with, 2–3, 6–7, 60, 156, 168n Connie’s unhealthy attitude changed by, 223 consciousness projected by, 6–7 and corrupted Gems, 189 desire to be giant woman, 27, 70, 72 and device for learning Gem Culture, 223–224 as embodying non-toxic masculinity, 4, 29 empathy of, 189 evolution of character of, 27–28 as fan of Sailor Moon, 104 femininity embraced by, 29 first manifestation of powers of, 230 and Garnet’s forgiving of Pearl, 159 Garnet’s urge to fuse with Connie, 53–54, 60 gem in stomach of, 182, 188 Gems see new future for earth through, 166–167 Greg rescued from zoo by, 208–210 Greg’s informing of Crystal Gems by, 222 growing independence of, 8 healing influence of, 232 insistence on agency of objects and monsters, 223 journey to Homeworld, 189, 226 Lapis Lazuli and Peridot convinced to join Crystal Gems by, 166 learning about Gem culture, 221 learning about Gem Homeworld, 221

magical abilities of, 156 as manifesting as male, 49 maturation of, 129–130 missing pants of, 120 Onion’s bonding with, 104–105, 141, 144, 145, 147–148 Pearl’s memory excavated by, 225 Peridot educated by, 214 as postcolonial hybrid subject, 211 in preamble to Ruby and Sapphire’s wedding, 146 propensity for earnest conversation of, 137–139 queerness embodied by, 70, 178 reaction to Bismuth’s lethal invention of, 229 Rock People conspiracy rejected by, 121 Ronaldo’s conspiracy theory debunked by, 65–66 Ronaldo’s contrasting with, 129–130 Ruby and Sapphire’s marriage officiated by, 3 Sardonyx’s introduction to, 82 shield of, 97 in skirt, 87n snake-people theory accepted by, 119 strength of, 231 struggle with identity as Rose’s son, 211–213 supposed lion of, 123–124, 131n supposed secret pregnancy of, 123–124, 132n surrogate parents of, 2 unique experiences of, 165 weapons of, 9 worried about filling Rose’s shoes, 211 Steven Universe (TV show), 109n adult themes of, 32

INDEX

“amplification through simplification” in, 59–60 anime tradition and, 6, 9–11 as anti- and decolonial, 199–200, 208 artistic flexibility of, 45, 173–174 as aspirational, 31–32 average age of fans of, 31 background of, 183–185, 187–191 blackness in, 159 bodies not fixed in, 46 censorship of, 34, 49 colonizers centered in, 199 comprised of layers, 183 desired communities fostered by, 108 diverse audience of, 30 as eco-toon, 178 as explicit about queer relations, 34 failure of intersectionality of, 72–78 fan art of, 39, 104 fan blog for, 40 fan complaints about, 45 fan fiction of, 39 female collaboration important to, 70, 71 female Gems as performing violence in, 72 fusion reimagined by, 46–47 Ikuhara’s influence on, 89–97, 101, 104, 109n immaterial bodies inclining toward ever-arriving queerness in, 63 “improbable bodies” in, 106 inclusivity in, 24–25 landscapes in, 185 legacy of, 192–193 magical girl dynamics in, 91, 99 materiality of body in, 100–101 merchandising of, 14n, 104 message out in the open on, 49

257

monsters as misunderstood creatures in, 9 as most explicitly queer show in North American history, 35 negative portrayal of fans of, 41 as nexus of cross-cultural exchange, 102 optimism of, 19, 21, 25 as part of media ecology, 13, 14n planets in ethics of care of, 172 postcolonial narrative of, 5, 13 praise for, 19 purity and, 179–180 queer fandom of, 20–22, 34–36 queerness in cosmos of, 192 queerness in fandom of, 12 redemption in, 25 as reinforcing stereotypes of black women, 69, 70, 73–86 revolt against heteronormativity, 70, 106 Rose Quartz’s identity as central to, 219 ruptures with contemporary world in, 7 same-sex wedding on, 1 science fiction tradition and, 6–8, 11 as sci-fi, 6 serialization of, 10–11 stories of human oppression missing from, 208–215 Sugar on queer themes of, 22 synecdochic simplification in, 58–60 “toxic” fandom of, 37–39 transformations in, 99–100 Tumblr fandom of, 11, 37–40, 41n, 89 Uncle Grandpa crossover episode with, 38–39 version of Earth in, 178 weapons in, 97–101, 115–117

258

INDEX

Steven Universe: Art & Origins (McDonnell), 20, 23–24, 45, 178, 185 stevenuniverse.me, 40 “Steven Universe San Diego”, 97, 108 “Steven Universe | Webisode”, 104 “Steven vs. Amethyst” (episode), 205, 211 Stevonnie, 53, 60–62, 156, 157, 168n, 231 as disruptive, 89 hallucination about guilt of, 211 Pearl’s dismissal of, 63–64 as vampiric, 61 Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Cohen), 181, 182 stone(s), 171, 181–183, 189, 192 “Story for Steven” (episode), 231 strangers, 7 “Stronger Than You” (song), 75 subalterns, 212 subjectivity, 208 Sugar, Rebecca, 13 accused of “selling out,” 126 alleged Gallic influence on, 128 background shaped by, 183–184 Barthes admired by, 105, 106 as bisexual, 22, 108 childhood of, 20 fan art encouraged by, 104, 106–107 fan art of, 105 as fan of animation, 90, 103 as fan of foreign media, 102 as fan of Revolutionary Girl Utena, 100 focus on humans of, 211, 213 on fusion, 26 on Gems as lacking sex, 29 on Gems as self-expression, 3 on gendered animation, 28

“Giant Woman” song written by, 27 on importance of consent, 158 interest in geology of, 181 on lack of evil in fantasy, 25 on LGBTQ+ stories, 107 as non-binary, 2 on queer themes of Steven Universe, 22 on show as “subversive in positive way,” 3 on simple character models, 24 on Steven’s evolution, 129 on tearing down semiotics of gender in cartoons, 89 Tumblr site of, 105 on weapons, 97 as writer on Adventure Time, 32, 49 Sugar, Steven, 183 Sugilite, 64, 78–83 Suitcase Sam, 143, 144 Summer Camp Island (TV show), 10 Sunmin Image Pictures Company, 103 “Superheros, Superpowers, and Sexuality” (Demarest), 72 “SU Theories” (Tumblr page), 127–128 Suvin, Darko, 6–7 Svendsen, Lars, 148–149 Swadener, Beth Blue, 199 Sweden, 34 swords, 97–98, 206–207 “Sworn to the Sword” (episode), 206, 223, 231 synecdochic simplification, 58–60

T tabloids, 12, 123, 124 Takeuchi, Naoko, 90, 109n Talented Tenth, 131n

INDEX

technological colonialism, 181 technology, 186 Teen Titans (TV show), 101 Teen Titans Go (TV show), 10 television, boundary between children and adult or teen television, 28–30 Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, 101 Terrytoons, 45 “Test, The” (episode), 101 That’s All Folks: Ecocritical Readings of American Animated Features (Murray and Heumann), 175, 178 Thomas, Ellery, 12 threat of activation, 185 “Three Gems and a Baby” (episode), 232 Thurm, Eric, 125, 132n Tinfoil Fan Theories, 127, 132n Toei Animation, 90 “Together Alone” (episode), 5, 226, 227 Topaz, 232 tracing by effacing, 58–62 trans identity, 27 media representation of, 51 transnationalism, 101–103, 108 “Trial, The” (episode), 230 tricksters, 142–144 trolls, 39–40 truth, 119, 120 Tsutsui, William, 102 Tumblr, 11, 21–22, 36, 89, 105, 114 adult content banned from, 42n fan art on, 39 infighting on, 36–37 of Ronaldo, 116–117, 122, 123 Steven Universe fandom on, 37–40, 41n Tunguska Incident, 179 Tunguska Sea, 179

259

Turkey, 34 Twitter, 126, 130 typification, 52–53

U umwelt , 154, 157, 160, 165, 168n Uncle Andy, 138 Uncle Grandpa, 37, 39 United Kingdom, 34, 57 United Nations, 117 United States, Japan colonized by, 102 UPA, 185 Usagi Tsukino, 90, 92 Utena, 94–97, 101, 108 Utena (TV show), 91 utilitarianism, 187

V Vidalia, 139, 147 viruses, 186–187 von Uexküll, Jakob, 168n

W W , 122–123 Wailing Stone, 231 Wang, Aileen, 107–108 Warner Bros., 45 weapons, 6, 9, 97–101, 115–117 Weekly World News, 122 “Week of Sardonyx” (episode), 84, 85 Wee, Valerie, 36–38 Wells, Paul, 175–177, 182, 185, 192 “We Need to Talk” (episode), 34, 45, 57, 156, 231–232 “What’s Your Problem?”, 235 “What Was Missing” (TV show), 32, 49 Whedon, Joss, 125 “When It Rains” (TV episode), 91

260

INDEX

When Species Meet (Haraway), 154 White Diamond, 5, 138, 139, 180, 189, 205, 226 Steven’s appeal to, 8 White Gem, 71 White male gaze, 77–78 Whiteness as Property (Harris), 202 white privilege, 71, 79 white supremacy, 202–203, 208 white women, in recent television shows, 86 WikiLeaks, 115 Will & Grace (TV show), 29 Wilson, Midge, 86 Winnicott, Donald, 36 Winter, Jay, 224 World Bank, 117 X xenophobia, 121–122 X-Files, The (TV show), 114

Y Yahoo, 39 Yellow Diamond, 5, 189, 227, 229, 233, 234 Yogi Bear, 23 Yogi Bear Show, The (TV show), 23 “Your Mother and Mine” (episode), 208, 225, 227 YouTube, 115 Yurikuma Arashi (TV show), 93

Z Ziegler, John R., 12 Zircon, 230 Zoisite, 92 Zolciak, Olivia, 11–12 zoo of humans, 169n, 208–210, 212 “Zoo, The” (episode), 169n, 209 Zuke, Lauren, 26, 126, 129