The Normalisation of LGBT Done Right: A Review of Steven Universe · 10:30pm Jan 27th, 2017
WARNING: There will be spoilers ahead for Steven Universe series one through four. Read at your own risk. Spoiler bars will be employed, but reviewing Steven Universe meaningfully without any spoilers is sadly not possible. You have been warned.
About a month ago, there was a thread posted on the LGBT group inviting discussion on a YouTube channel by the name of Queer Kids Stuff. Below is an example of the channels content:
I dutifully watched the video and recorded my first thoughts on the thread:
"I just got back from work and actually watched the videos (the transgender and bisexuality ones), and good lord, does she ever fuck it up.
Her first big error is telling Teddy that children are assigned a gender at birth, and sometimes the doctors get it wrong. This is correct in that some people go on to suffer gender dysphoria, in that their identified gender does not match their biological gender. However, save in the case of intersex people (who may require DNA analysis), it is highly unlikely that the doctor got the biological sex wrong. The distinctions here will likely escape the average toddler.
Further, the nuances of the language involved (gender assignment and identification vs biological sex), and indeed all of the above, will fly over the head of a three to five year old kid.
I see what she is trying to do, but she is not doing it very well.
Her bisexuality video is just a complete clusterfuck. She uses love as a euphemism for sexual attaction, which will confuse the hell out of her audience, who are most likely to understand love in terms of loving mommy or loving their friends (platonic love). Further, she never clarifies that she is refering primarily to adolescents and post adolescents (her target audience are too young to understand sexual attraction themselves).
Her audience will be assuming throughout all this that she is referring specifically to them and their direct peers, which is erroneous; to quote Martin Prince, when asked if he was gay: "I'm ten. I'm not anything yet." Three to five year olds don't have sexual identities in the adult sense, and will not see through the euphemisms to realise that she is referring to sexuality and sexual attraction in adults.
In short, a mess, more likely to confuse its target audience than educate them.
I stand by my previous statement: it would be wiser to educate children over time in a manner befitting to their developmental level. This whole thing seems more for the benefit of adult doing the teaching than for the kid doing the "learning."
I'm a chemist, so I will put my feelings here in those terms. There is a reason that secondary school teachers teach kids about octets and use sodium and chlorine as an example when they want to first teach chemical bonds to kids: it's so they don't have to try to teach quantum mechanics, orbital hybridisation and electron particle wave duality right out the bat at age eleven.
Start with a simple model and build up from there."
Naturally, this channel invoked a considerable number of responses on YouTube. As well as the usual suspects poking fun at an easy target, there were several earnest critiques. Having watched those, and with the benefit of hindsight, about the kindest thing that can be said is that it is at least a well meaning attempt to normalise the LGBT community in the eyes of the young.
Probably.
Still, pointing out that this is an abject failure at its stated goals is not particularly helpful for those who seek something to watch with their kids featuring strong LGBTQ themes and characters that won't cause said youngsters to cringe away from the screen and search longingly for escape routes.
Happily, such a show does exist. And it's a good show, one that can genuinely be enjoyed by anyone, young and old alike. That show is Steven Universe.
Steven Universe has been called "the gayest show on TV," which is likely accurate, but doesn't tell the whole story. Allow me to clarify: Steven Universe does not do tokens. There are characters of many ethnicities and sexualities in the cast, however you will not see an African American character, who exists to be the (stereotypical) "black guy," nor will you see the (equally stereotypical) "gay best friend."
An important criticism of LGBT representation in the media in the past, in terms of LGBT characters, is that either:
They were caricatures defined completely by their sexuality; the gay man who acts gay and does gay things because he's gay, and that's all there is to him. Think Big Gay Al, but without the self awareness.
Or:
They were satellite characters defined solely by their relationship with another character, with no agency or identity outside that relationship, to the point that they are little more than that person's unpaid helper slash therapist. Or, in extreme cases, pet. This typically takes the form of the gay best friend.
Steven Universe subverts these tired tropes handily, but before I go into the hows and why fores, allow me the liberty of providing a pertinent quote from Lady Froey, from the aforementioned Queer Kids Stuff thread:
Anyways, if you want a way to normalize LGBT people to kids:
Kid: "Mommy, Timmy has two dad's! How come I don't have two dads?"
Mum: "Some kids have a mom and dad like you son, some like Timmy have two dads. The really lucky kids however have two moms."
Kid: "Wowy zowy!"
Kid: "Mommy, there is a boy in class who is a girl now. Why did they do that?"
Mum: "Probably because they identify as a girl."
Kid: "I like My Little Pony, does that make me a girl?"
Mum: "No, that makes you a boy that likes My Little Pony."
By that metric, the eponymous Steven is very fortunate indeed. Allow me to describe Steven's home situation.
Steven lives with the Crystal Gems. The Crystal Gems are incredibly fascinating and creative from a conceptual standpoint. They are: sapient, agender, asexual (from a human standpoint; their equivalent of sexuality is very important and very spoilertastic), magical alien space rocks. Or, as the SU fandom likes to call them: lesbian space rocks.
Each of them has a large gemstone set into their bodies. These stones are their true bodies. What we see as their physical bodies are solid light holograms. The Crystal Gems all have (varyingly) feminine features and assume female identies. They use female pre nouns.
Steven lives with all three of them, and they are, essentially, his adopted mums. Steven's household can therefore be described thus: Three mums, no dad, one kid. We have, in a mainstream western animation, a main character adopted and raised by same sex group.
Not that said father is completely absent: he is brilliant in his own right, and I could (and might) right another essay detailing all the ways in which he, his situation and the depiction thereof is awesome.
The most delightful thing about this, however, is subtle: the show almost never draws attention to Stevens living situation. There are no Very Special Episodes (remember those? Google "Captain Planet AIDS" if you're feeling particularly masochistic). It's not made out to be a big deal. No fuss is made.
In short, it is treated as completely normal.
And that is the glory of it. You don't normalise something by making a huge deal of it: there's Steven. He lives with three women, who are all his mums. It's not a big deal.
Lets talk about said mums shall we? But first, another warning: here be spoilers. There is no way to discuss and critique the characters of SU (particularly Garnet) and their relationships without spoilers. If you wish to go in completely unspoiled, turn back now.
Let us begin with Garnet. Garnet is a relationship. She is a love story (needless to say, she's a better love story than Twilight). Allow me to explain: Gems are capable of fusion. Two Gems can do a "fusion dance," to get in sync, before temporary fusing into a new Gem. This fusion is explicitly stated to be emotionally intimate.
Garnet is the fusion of two Gems: Ruby and Sapphire. This is not revealed until about fifty episodes in. Sapphire and Ruby are a couple in a long term relationship. Very long term. About five and a half thousand years. Garnet regards herself (an opinion Ruby and Sapphire share) as the physical manifestation of their love. She puts it nicely herself. In song:
This isn't infered. This isn't a conclusion I have reached. It is put to the audience in plain terms. Nor does SU shy away from showing Ruby's and Sapphire's mutual affection: when onscreen, they are physically affectionate and flirt shamelessly.
Remove the Sci Fi elements, and Ruby and Sapphire are just a normal couple: they love one another and are demonstrative in their love. They flirt, they occasionally argue and disagree. Sapphire can be too passive, Ruby doubts her worth, and wonders if she is good enough for Sapphire.
Again, no attention is drawn to the fact that both Ruby and Sapphire identify as female. It is treated as completely normal, and presented as normal and unremarkable to the audience.
This is how you normalise LGBT relationships for young audiences: you show them the relationship, in context, and you show them that it is simply a normal relationship. Nothing more or less, and nothing to kick up a fuss over.
Fusion as a concept is used to explore relationships between characters on SU. In contrast to Garnet, we have Malachite. The tempory fusion of Lapis Lazuli and Jasper, she represents an abusive, dysfunctional relationship. The two are bad for each other: Lapis takes out her anger and frustration on Jasper, and Jasper accepts this in exchange for the power the fusion grants her.
This depiction of an unhealthy relationship is, in its way, also refreshing. It furthers the normalisation process: regardless of sexual orientation, bad relationships are a thing. By depicting such relationships, SU is refusing to aford same sex relationships special status in a manner that differentiates them from opposite sex relationships.
Again, this is done via showing the audience, without feeling the need to make a fuss or draw special attention.
Special mention, however, must go the character of Stevonnie. Stevonnie is the fusion of Steven (male) and Connie (female) and is thus gender non binary. Gender non-binary people have a really rough time with representation in the media; most of it is via YouTube or Tumbler.
In general, you'll see: videos by young people (mid to late teens) who identify as such, and videos mocking them. The latter tend to outnumber the former, and have better visibility, particularly on YouTube.
Many of these are young people, often confused and still figuring things out. Some of them don't do a fantastic job of presenting themselves. Neither did I, at seventeen. Most of their visibility is people (who should know better) attacking and mocking them.
It is refreshing, therefore, to see an unambiguously positive portrayal of a gender non binary person in the mainstream media. All my previous points naturally apply: Stevonnie is treated as beautiful and likable, but no great fuss is made. Stevonnie is just another person.
There are more examples; I could go on all day. I haven't even touched on Pearl and her life defining relationship with Rose Quartz. Nor have I greatly detailed the fantastic pacing, the excellent world building with its slow burning reveal, or the beautiful art, or the fascinating xenofictional depiction of the Gems.
Steven Universe is a fantastic show, one of the very best in recent years. I recommend it to everyone.
Here, here!
I've heard so much good about that show, particularly with regard to relationships, as you noted; but I still have not seen it. I definitely need to do something about that very soon.
This essay is great, I really need to watch more Steven Universe! However, at one point, it says "nuisances" where it should say "nuances".
Unfortunately, many LGBT supporters nowadays (or supporters of anything, really) are often either subtle as a trainwreck, hilariously wrong, or antagonising people they talk to. Definitely not helping their case. Good to see someone knows how to do that well.
4400328 "Subtle" is not exactly a thing I think it's a good idea to call inherently necessary to support LGBT rights. Steven Universe isn't exactly subtle either. Most of its major strides for representation have been in just how not-subtle-at-all it is. We just got through a few arcs that have included, among other things, Pearl successfully flirting with a mysterious biker lady who gives her a phone number. You do not get more un-subtle than that. It's one of the gayest things I have ever seen, and that's counting the fact that one of my favorite anime is a queer love story about lesbian bears with more yannic imagery per scene than a Georgia O'Keefe painting. And I'd like to think that I'm not particularly subtle either. Being openly queer is, y'know, fun. Strong traditions of hedonism and all that. Trying to be "subtle" about being in favor of gay people might be interpreted as just quietly supporting them, or it might be interpreted as returning to the time period where you could have all the queer characters you wanted in your movies as long as you hid them behind eighty layers of coding in a sort of don't ask/don't tell approach to storytelling. You'll have to forgive all of us for enjoying our relative freedom and ability to not hide in the closet.
The bigger issue with this attempt to normalize queer shit for kids in the manner of this channel that much of the time it's inoffensive, clinical, and just sort of bland. Even assuming kids can follow, and children's show presenters and people with actual child-teaching experience would be better suited to talk about that, it's also rarely engaging. Reading a story or watching a cartoon is more fun than listening to someone clinically explain the process by which one girl finds other girls attractive, and trying to simplify that can often feel stealth-deceptive, like telling kids that babies come from storks. Yes you've avoided having to discuss sex with a five year old, but now you have to un-deceive them later in life. I've never been comfortable with that.
Even if you're building this material to present to adults, who do need remedial friggin' education on the matter depending on where you live and what the local neighborhood is like - hi, my name is Scarlet and I used to live in rural virginia in part of a fundamentalist bubble - that blandness can often be a turn-off. Nobody wants to just be lectured at, and I find that lecturing people is the least effective way of convincing them to give up old beliefs.
Hence why I make jokes about lesbian bear anime in my internet comments.
Incidentally, you want the real triumph for Steven Universe, it's that at this point it has traumatized ten year olds more effectively than anything else I've seen on television. Bismuth's arc probably broke a few people.
4400340
I was cheering for Pearl when she bagged Mystery Girl's number. Have you seen the leaked episodes, by any chance?
4400353 The last thing I caught up with was the whole Let's Go Visit the Diamonds And Rescue Greg arc. If that was the leak then, yes.
4400340
Y'know, being straight is also fun, but I don't walk around telling people how fun it is. And that's, more or less, what I mean by lack of subtlety.
4400385 That's because straight people haven't had literal decades where people shamed and ostracized them for bein' straight, darling. ^^
4400385
You hardly need to, when you've got every single teen movie and romantic comedy of the last fifty years doing literally exactly that. American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile doesn't exactly take an agnostic position on the pros and cons of hetero sexings.
4400393
Well, being an atheist is also fun and one could be killed for it in the past too, but I don't walk around telling people I'm an atheist either. Maybe I'm just a quiet kinda guy.
4400397
I'd say any movie about teen pregnancy is about cons of hetero sex, but that's not the point. You know, there were times when people watched movies for entertainment rather than in search of reasons to get offended. Those were good times.
4400408 Yes, and I appreciate that you don't demand everyone else be as quiet as you. Some of us enjoy making noise! And being a vocal atheist is a fine thing to be, as well. I appreciate and support efforts by the atheist community to fight back against public perceptions of themselves as amoral, godless assholes who are intellectually dishonest and have no respect for human life. Hell, I've been on both sides of that one!
(Again, fundamentalist).
My point is it's one thing to tell people off for being wrong, but at the point where you're asking LGBT advocates to be subtle I feel like we're treading into really dumb territory. What does being "subtle" look like? What does not being loudly and flagrantly gay look like? Are you asking people to just never talk about their sexuality openly? We literally got rid of Don't Ask, Don't Tell because of how much of a divide that creates. Are you asking people not to aggressively proposition you for gay sex? That feels like a separate issue. Are you asking people to stop advocating openly for LGBT rights and talking about problems they're still dealing with? That's uncomfortable. I can appreciate being asked to be right, but being asked to be subtle both worries me in that it's eerily reminiscent of the closet a good number of us used to be trapped in - and where some of us are still trapped - and because on an aesthetic level, I will proudly defend things that are not subtle because I like cheese and bombast and operatic melodrama. None of these things are subtle, but all have a place in entertainment and even in discourse.
4400417
And then you write a lot of words because I just happen to have a different opinion. Someone mentioned fundamentalism? Gotta bail out, that discussion is getting pointless.
On a side note, it says "normalisation" right in the title of this blog. Dunno, but for me if some group of people becomes normal, they don't have to run around showing how normal they are. Just saying.
That is amazing. I'm honestly still laughing, ten minutes later.
4400424 Sweetie, the fact that you can't bother to compose a detailed reply is not an argument invalidating what I've said. I didn't even object to a single thing you mentioned beyond the word "subtle!"
You do know that despite sharing a root word, "normalization" and "normalcy" are two different ideas, right? One is a process, the other is a state. And the point is that we're approaching that state, not that we've arrived.
Basically your argument is that being gay is normal so you don't want people to talk about it being normal anymore because... something. Like, do you run into gay advocates in the streets, aggressively shouting that they are normal? What, precisely, are you encountering that's making you feel the need to comment on it? Why are you commenting on it? Why do you feel like me pointing out that subtlety is not necessarily a laudable thing is something to engage with by not-engaging?
Like, yeesh, you comment that I'm writing a lot of words because you have a different opinion, but I'm a blogger on the internet and having opinions is literally turning into a sub-business for me. Why is this shocking?
You should link this blog to every FF story on the site.
Also, why have I not followed you before now? It is fixed.
4488643
I'm glad you like it, I wrote it shortly after marathoning SU, and it relevant to a couple of conversations I was having at the time. Thanks a bunch for the follow