āthe ending of Steven Universe is about mending a familyā āthe ending of Steven Universe is about forgiving* dictatorsā
the ending of Steven Universe is about both and thatās what makes me fascinated by it lmao. these sorts of tensions between a reactionary reading and a āitās not that deepā reading are always way more interesting when you say both are true and that one has implications for the other. said tensions also heavily imply things about modern society. whaaaaat? a metaphor for families and a metaphor for dictatorships wind up heavily intertwined in a queer show under late capitalism? and the non-radical nature of said writers leads to these overlapping metaphors taking on weird implications? nooooooā¦
*Steven doesnāt even really forgive the Diamonds, although lets face it, the fact that this is used as a point is itself fairly liberal insofar as itās about Stevenās individual forgiveness rather than the structural forgiveness. Once the diamonds are treated primarily as damaged family members, their political crimes become subordinate to their psychological development, and to Stevenās psychological development. The explanatory direction of the show is generally psychological in nature. Not that psychological causality is bad per se (Iām a reader of Vygotsky after all), but when you treat the relations between individuals psyches as the primary explanatory lens, characters become a specific sort of moral object highly conducive to the sort of interpersonalism of liberalism. At the end of the day, the show is much better at imagining the transformation of subjects than the transformation of social relations. Put another way, it knows why an individual becomes oppressive much better than it knows how an oppressive social formation reproduces itself. And the way it represents individuals is quite radical by current bourgeois norms, all things considered! But thatās the only half of the story the show seems interested in.
anyway, this actually makes me like Steven Universe more than if it was morally squeaky clean. i like my interests to come with a bit of splinter in the eye. Iām just less interested in āis it good or badā and more in āwhat contradiction in contemporary social life makes it plausible for a story about defeating an empire to imagine that defeat primarily through the language of family therapy and interpersonal reconciliation?ā
This doesnāt get into the biopolitics of gems, nor the fact that the ideal family in the show is not biologically related, both of which are interesting lines of thought which Iād touch on in a full analysis, but still.
