About
Steven Universe, created by Rebecca Sugar, is a really special cartoon. Deliberately created to turn a lot of our narrative tropes on their heads, the show follows a young boy who is half-human and half from an alien race called Gems. Steven is surrounded by adult women who prepare him for the “magical destiny” his mother left for him when she gave up her physical form at his birth.
Steven Universe ran for five seasons between 2013 and 2019. The show was praised for its storytelling, visuals, voice acting, and inclusion of LGBTQ+ and multi-racial themes. However, it was cut short by Cartoon Network, which limited it to five seasons. Rebecca Sugar fought to extend the last season by six episodes and also negotiated a movie to cap the series. Cartoon Network wanted the movie to act as promotion for further content, so Sugar was also tasked with creating a 20-episode mini-series, which became Steven Universe Future.
Steven Universe Future ran between December 2019 and March 2020. It was praised by critics and remains controversial among fans for its treatment of difficult topics. The show follows Steven as a teenager who, having saved the universe, doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. The residue of trauma, guilt, and self-doubt caused by events from the original series result in a great amount of psychological duress for Steven, which he must address before being able to move on. While the series is packed with jokes, references to the original series, and songs, it can be at times difficult to watch compared with the relative light-heartedness of the original.
Steven Universe Future asks a lot of tough questions: what is the best way to be accountable for harm you’ve caused? What do you do when people don’t want your help? How do you figure out who you really are when everyone around you thinks they know? In Steven Universe, we saw a boy whose greatest quality was in his humanity, even as he was fighting an alien empire. Now having resolved the Gem conflict insofar as he is able, he has to learn how to grow up, to become human.
I’m creating this site because Steven Universe Future is a really smart, heartfelt, well-done show. Because of its realistic portrayal of the after-effects of trauma and social inequality, it’s not an easy show to watch sometimes. For that reason, I think it turned off a lot of fans. I hope that Steven Universe Future gets more recognition as time goes on. It may be that a lot of fans just weren’t old enough to see what the show was trying to do.
In the meantime, I’ve created this site as a place for analysis and mini-essays on the episodes and related themes. There are so many good moments that I want to draw attention to and so many themes that I think are more broadly applicable to life. Most of the content on this site is my writing with occasional links to other content.
My Story with Steven Universe
I was partly raised by the TV. Some of my earliest memories are of watching television and there were times in my childhood, during the summers, where I spent at least 8-10 hours every day watching. When I was very small, we didn’t have cable so the only cartoons I watched were Loony Tunes. When I was 4 or 5, we got cable and I spent a lot of time watching Nickelodeon in addition to the sitcoms my parents like to watch, the gameshows and soap operas my babysitter liked to watch, and the Westerns my grandparents liked to watch. As I got older, I branched out into anime, thanks to Toonami. My TV watching habits continued up to around when I turned 18 and gradually started cutting TV out of my life.
I think that before I turned 18, I watched enough TV for an entire lifetime and I just burned out on it. I began to feel like watching TV was waste of time, a feeling that soon crept into watching movies and even reading fiction. (Video games never had a chance; I was exposed to them at a young age but just never had any interest in them.)
I want to be clear that this isn’t because of some high-minded stance that I’m too good for TV. I know that there’s a lot of TV shows that I would like. But I just don’t want to spend time sitting in front of a screen absorbing fictional stories. I think in part because of how much TV I watched as a child, my mind is very sensitive to audio-visual narrative. Even when it doesn’t contain content like violence and horror, I can get overstimulated by narrative very easily. For instance, if I watch a movie before going to bed, I’ll have a hard time sleeping because I can’t stop thinking about it. Back when I watched TV, I walked around in a fog, thinking about stories and characters other people made up, getting hooked on them emotionally, writing and reading fanfic, and in general not being present to my own life.
So when I make the choice to let a TV show into my life, that choice is both deliberate and circumscribed. It happened with Steven Universe, as with many things out of the ordinary, because of the pandemic. In June 2020, my beloved cat George died of an acute episode of Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Two days later, I sprained my ankle. At that point, I was working maybe 20 hours a week, so I had a lot of time to fill, a grieving heart, and I couldn’t go anywhere or exercise. So I decided to sign up for some streaming service free trials and watch one of my partner’s favorite shows: Steven Universe. I tried to pace myself, watching 10-20 episodes a day of the original series. After I finished that, I watched the Movie, and after I finished that, I watched Steven Universe Future. So unlike the typical Steven Universe fan, who followed the show as it was broadcast intermittently over the course of seven years, I saw the whole thing from beginning to end in about a month.
I have never engaged with the Steven Universe fandom because I came in after the whole thing was over and because I am much older than the target audience of the original series. I do know what it means to have a cartoon that’s very important to you, though and I can imagine what it would have been like to actually grow up with this show.
When I think about my relationship with Steven Universe, there’s a line from Jane Austen’s Persuasion that comes to mind: “Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not.” In the same way, I hope that I’ve outlived the age of fanfiction—of getting emotionally hooked on fictional characters—but that doesn’t mean I can’t feel for and understand them deeply. The purpose of this site is to show my appreciation for the intelligence—both emotional and intellectual—of Steven Universe Future by drawing it out explicitly in writing. This site is my attempt to give depth of attention to one show and to hopefully help others see its strengths, too.
Colophon
This site is made of 100% hand-coded CSS and HTML. It was coded in VS Code and published with GitHub Desktop. It uses Saira for the headings and Montserrat for the text font, both hosted by Google Fonts. The images are deliberately dithered to make them small and grainy to give the site a lighter footprint. This was done using Dither Me This. The background image was created using doodad.dev pattern generator. All images on the site are taken from fancaps.net.