How Steven Universe made me better
Throughout all of This™, I have been finding a lot of solace and escape within cartoons. Something about the innocence of this stuff makes it really easy to forget about the tragic, tragic reality that I’m living through. Recently, as I slip into another world of a show, I’ve started to remember that I’ve done this for much of my life.
I’ll spare the details of another childhood trauma story and instead focus on how I got through it.
Cartoons!
As a kid, it often felt like the world around me was falling apart. And there was only so much I could do to control it. I would rather be fighting monsters or chasing adventure with my team of friends than face the realities of a broken family or a queer awakening (okay a few details).
What more is a cripplingly shy nine-year-old supposed to do other than try to distract himself from all of it with fantasy stories? The struggles of Ash tenaciously chasing his next Pokemon badge or Ben and his cousin fighting off alien invaders every week to save the world seemed to make my problems less important and they were a hell of a lot more entertaining.
Nothing does the trick for me like a fantasy animated adventure. Even more so with cartoons than live-action. Maybe because it’s harder to ignore emotions and sadness with real, human-beings? Maybe it’s because you see yourself more in real people than in cartoons. An art class taught me that this makes it easier for artists to separate their laws of reality from ours.
I don’t really know. All I do know is that the farther detached from reality, the easier it is to forget.
I know I’m not the only one who spent his childhood in front of the warm light of a television screen. These shows comforted me when I was alone, made me forget why I was sad and taught me a few lessons in compassion and friendship. These, mostly boy, characters weren’t dealing with the same shit I was, but I convinced myself that their struggles were just as valid.
Way later, at 19 (with yes, you guessed it, more trauma) I continued to find what seemed like an escape in the world of animated stories. It wasn’t until Rebecca Sugar that I found I could be processing my emotions and escaping at the same time through the adventures of a chubby young boy in sandals named Steven Universe.
Sugar’s world follows a trite 13-year-old named Steven who lives in a small-little beach town creatively named Beach City. He’s cared for by his single father and three femme-presenting alien rock creatures dubbed the Crystal Gems. The show premiered in 2013 on Cartoon Network and recently aired its final episode in March. There are long-term story arcs, serious “bad-guys” and high stakes, but within all of it, there’s self-discovery and emotional development within these characters unlike most of the cartoons I’ve ever seen before.
In the world of Sugar’s, I don’t have to ignore or forget the turmoil that is my life at times. The characters are just as emotionally complicated as I am. Fear, abandonment, betrayal, grief and self-doubt peek their ugly heads in this children’s show as much as they would in real life. However, Steven and the Gems teach us that those feelings are not to be ignored, but confronted. Steven is emotional, and that’s something that main characters from many of my childhood favorite cartoons lacked. Especially the boy ones.
In this beautifully animated series, our inner issues are just as real as the villains are. And at the core of Steven is self-love, something I hadn’t even heard of when I was a kid.
I’m very happy kids of today get to grow up with characters like Steven and whatever other cool emotionally intelligent characters that network giants cook up in their production studios. As long as they know they’re not alone in whatever crumby situation they’re in and that things get better.
These times are collectively shitty for many of us and I know many people are looking for means of escape wherever they can find it. I’m still turning to cartoons for this. Only now, as the world around me falls apart again, I find solace in cartoons that show me how to be better.
