Steven Universe and Inclusion in Stories: Feeling Like a People Too

Isn’t it nice to find yourself somewhere different, whoa-oh (Steven Universe, “Island Adventure”)

A relatively large number of people I know say they aren’t able to get into Steven Universe because the plot feels too simplistic, which is fair: the series starts slowly and carefully, and it takes almost a whole season before Steven gets his first sense of who the Crystal Gems really are and where they come from. But because the plot afterwards is so interesting, I often forget what actually drew me through those first couple dozen episodes.

It wasn’t that the fighting monsters/Crystal Gem powers/interpersonal moments tugged me along. Unlike most series I get obsessed with, there was no future moment I anticipated — Lois finding out Clark is Superman, Poirot unmasking the murderer, Mulder and Scully finally smooching in True Love. I had zero drive to find out what happened next.

Instead, I craved how the show made me feel.

Relaxed and content. Like I could let down my guard. Like I belong.

That feeling, consuming popular media, is so rare for me that it took me a while to put my finger on it. So much of my time watching and reading is spent doing mental gymnastics trying to process the parts that make me uncomfortable — the toxic masculinity, the white privilege, the heteronormativity — that it feels novel and refreshing to watch a show I trust not to make me have to do that.

“Make you uncomfortable? What, every TV show and book has to be catered exactly to you to avoid triggering your precious fee-fees?”

No, that’s not what I’m saying. Me not feeling comfortable with a show is not the same as me thinking that show shouldn’t exist, for one thing, or that anyone who enjoys it is bad. And I’m not actively looking for things to feel uncomfortable about: I just feel naturally uncomfortable when a story I’m reading or watching doesn’t have room in its fictional universe for people who share key parts of who I am, or, worse, doesn’t treat people like me or those I love like we are human beings as real as the people who are different from us.

I feel welcome in Steven Universe. I feel that my female-ness, my gender-non-conformingness, my queerness, my Jewishness, my body type, my neurodiversity, my physical limitations are all celebrated and respected along with the aspects of me that are usually privileged like race and class. It’s a story space where I am invited to be a hero or a romantic lead with nothing but love: no tokenism, no diversity cookies, no snide fourth-wall winks.

Even better, I’m not the only one with an invitation. Characters of colour and characters with racialized coding invite others in. Some characters are rich and others are living out of their vehicle. Many important characters are gender non-binary. Some characters have been claimed by the transgender community as coded trans.

Crystal Gems who are fat or muscular or skinny can all fight for what’s right. Masculine-looking female-coded characters can find True Love without that aspect of them being treated as anything other than normal. A female-coded character who looks amazing in both tux and tutu can fall in love with a gorgeous, large, pink-and-flowers female-coded character. A boy who cries and doesn’t care who knows how much he loves the people around him can be funny and brave and smart and go onstage wearing a dress if he feels like it.

Why can’t you let yourself just be wherever you are? (also Steven Universe, “Island Adventure”)

It’s maybe natural to wonder why I can’t feel all this watching other shows. After all, just because a story features male or straight or gender-conforming or non-Jewish characters doesn’t mean that their world isn’t open to one. Sure, there are shows that actively make fun of people like me and others with marginalized identities, but there are so many more that mean well or simply don’t have anything to say about us.

Why can’t we just assume there are accepted, heroic lesbian people in the Star Trek universe who don’t happen to be the protagonists of our story? Or that this book happens to be focussed on a gender-conforming Golden Trio but there are plenty of gender non-conforming students at Hogwarts who are loved and respected?

Well, sure, I appreciate that many of my fandoms don’t slam the door in my face. But there’s a difference between welcome and not hostile. It’s the same difference between a closed door and an invitation. Would you be justified in saying that all your neighbours hated you because their doors were always closed and they never invited you in? Of course not.

But would you feel welcome in their homes? Would you feel like you were making strong and loving connections?

What if nobody spoke to you unless you spoke to them first? Would you feel like people liked you?

We accept that fruitful and positive social relationships are reciprocal: aside from specific instances where both parties have agreed or settled on a system that works for them, most of us expect friends to reach out to us sometimes, the way we reach out to them. If they don’t, it doesn’t feel like they’re our friends. It feels like they tolerate us.

We don’t need everyone to approach us with friendly overtures all the time. But we do need at least a small circle who invest energy in us specifically, to make us feel valued and loved.

Similarly, I don’t need every story to feature characters who incorporate major aspects of my identities. But I do need some. And just like we prefer the way our friends make us feel to the way a distant but affable stranger makes us feel, I prefer the way stories that don’t just tolerate me but welcome me.

I don’t like feeling like an afterthought, an almost-forgotten “oh yeah” variation on the way “normal” people are. One of the soul-taxing parts of any marginalized identity is navigating the way many people like to pretend we don’t exist: when they — we, since I know I do it from my places of privilege too — use “people” in a way that means “people like me,” it’s wearying to need to keep butting in with “and me too — I’m a people too.”

I don’t have to tell Steven Universe that I’m a people too. He and his cast and crew already know. And for me, that’s one of the things that makes the show my favourite.