Forgive me for the essay but also I think a key part of the hatred is because Steven Universe does something not a lot of stories–and especially not a lot of stories for children–are willing to do; they treat Rose’s death as truly final.
In a lot of stories the dead are never really shown as being truly gone. Which I understand, most humans are kinda hard-wired into believing that the dead are still with us in one way or another, we don’t cope well with the idea that someone can just stop, but that means that not a lot of writers are willing to actually engage with death as something final in their narratives. Not to paraphrase wiser people than I, but Geoff Thew of Mother’s Basement pointed out in one of his critiques of SAO that killing a character is interesting and tricky because it means they are no longer a force that can effect the narrative. Whatever arc they were having is cut short, their relationships cannot progress in a way that isn’t one-sided, they are stuck as who they were when they died and no longer have agency. They are stagnate, frozen in time, unchanging as everything and everyone else changes without them.
So a lot of stories will confirm that the character is “still there” in some way. They will come visit another character in a dream or as a ghost to offer comfort and advice, or it will be hinted/confirmed that they are doing things behind the scenes like protecting living loves ones, they’re still around, just not in the same way the living characters are. And while that can be sweet and wonderful and some stories deploy it in truly masterful ways that make me weep so hard I can’t breathe and live rent free in my head forever…it’s also a bit of a cop-out imo. You don’t have to contend with the massive narrative shift that is having an entire character just stop, you just slide them into a passive state where they can keep going in their own way that’s separate but still present.
Steven Universe does not take that cop-out. Rose is dead. She’s gone, they DRIVE that home time and time again. Everything that was Rose became Steven, and that might mean that she’s essentially reincarnated or whatever, but for all intents and purposes Rose as she was is 100% gone forever and will never be coming back.
That on it’s own is interesting, but then SU does something even smarter; it sets Rose up as the perfect embodiment of all things good and pure and then spends the rest of the show meticulously tearing her back down. We see ALL of Rose’s mistakes come to light, every unkind and messy and hurtful and awful thing she’s done is dragged out in front of our very eyes and ROSE IS NOT THERE TO FIX ANY OF IT. We don’t even get her BEING there to remind us that she was a flawed person with unfathomable power in a horrible situation with no good options trying her hardest to do as much good as she possibly could under the circumstances. All we see now is Rose’s problems. Her flaws. The mistakes she made. And she’s not there to help us pick up the pieces.
Rose probably would apologize to Bismuth and Spinel and Pearl and everyone she ever hurt if she could, we can tell when she was alive she was absolutely drowning in guilt and regret, but she can’t mend those wrongs because she’s dead. She doesn’t get to visit Pearl or Greg in their dreams and beg them to stop hating each other, or release Pearl from her unintentional vow of silence, she can’t apologize to Bismuth or even just TELL anyone where Spinel has been all this time, she cannot explain why she did the things she did to Steven so he can understand her better or get closure or even just tell him that she really did love him more than anything. Rose cannot fix her mistakes, she cannot give anyone closure, she can’t do anything at all.
She’s gone, and all we are left with is the memory and legacy of an imperfect person who tried her best and failed far more than she succeeded but still loved with everything she had.
The closest thing we get to Rose adding her own voice to the story after she’s gone is the tape she leaves for Steven, in which she is the person she became after everything; a kind, flawed gem who loves her family and earth so deeply that she’s willing to die just so her son can have a chance to experience the joy that is being alive. And tbh I wish more people would remember that version of her, and offer her a bit of grace or at least recognition that she did change and mend things as best she could, but still. We can’t ask the tape questions. The tape can’t tell us what Rose would have thought about whatever was going on at the time. The tape cannot beg our forgiveness or express remorse. It’s a snapshot of a brief moment where Rose was free and happy, a reminder that she did love Steven, but it can never replace her.
The show even goes out of it’s way to drive Rose’s absence home, by having Steven TRY to use her room to make her, only to realize he’s still just talking to his perception of who she might have been, not who she actually was. So much of his grief and pain in the show comes from the fact that he cannot talk to the one person he needs to speak to more than anyone because she’s gone, and that’s the point.
Steven Universe is about grief just as much as it’s about love, and that’s something I really appreciate both as a writer and as someone who has lost people I loved dearly.
I think that’s part of the issue. People just don’t get what Rose being dead means, and they hold her to a standard the show is actively working against. We understand that death is not redemption, redemption is a flawed concept in the first place but it requires the person trying to make things right like, actually being alive to make things right. Rose had her redemption arc off screen for the most part, and Steven never got to see it, WE never get to see it outside of flashbacks. We never get to spend a lot of time with post-war but pre-Steven Rose, when she was at her best. We mostly just see her mistakes because those are what’s causing half the problems in the show. We see her in reverse, going from being a goddess of goodness to someone so profoundly flawed it’s hard to even know how to feel about her, and then the show drives home that you just have to learn to live with that.
The show is asking us to accept that Rose was flawed, and has done things that she shouldn’t have as well as things that are probably hard if not impossible to forgive, but that she was good, and she loved so deeply and profoundly that she was willing to fake her death, cut ties with everything she ever knew, go to WAR, and eventually die so her son could live, and she’s gone now.
Steven Universe really is one of the most realistic and beautiful depictions of death and grief I’ve ever seen and I hate how all of that gets ignored in favor of making Rose out to be a supervillain rather than the flawed yet good person she really was. Y'all have to stop standing at the foot of her statue and demanding she answer for her crimes. She can’t. But we, the characters and the fans, can accept her for who she was flaws and all, let her go, and pick up the pieces ourselves.
