It's time to face Steven's trauma on this week's Steven Universe Future
I’ve compared Steven Universe Future to Sailor Moon, Dragonball, Twin Peaks: The Return, and perhaps most accurately, the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In each example, what I’m trying to do is make sense of a story with no real precedent in American children’s cartoons. Shows like She-Ra: Princesses of Power and OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes, wouldn’t exist without Steven Universe, just like Steven Universe could not have come to be without Adventure Time. But while Adventure Time reveled in ambiguity, Steven Universe has been more direct, emotionally, and with its battles too. Every battle on Steven Universe has a direct emotional purpose and outcome. What makes Steven Universe Future so difficult to discuss at the moment is that the entire limited series is one large battle with no clear outcome: Steven is fighting with himself, and there’s no telling which side is which or what the ending of it all will look like.
Each episode we’ve seen Steven approach a problem and have it seemingly resolve, but his pain lingers. That is until “Together Forever” (A) an episode that makes it clear that Steven is not going to bounce back this time, at least not immediately. In this episode Steven is feeling directionless, so he, like many boys before him, decides the best way to solve his problems is by marrying the girl he loves. He proposes to Connie with his usual sweetness, with a picnic on the beach where they met and a beautiful song. But Connie has always had big dreams for her future and getting married now would be sure to derail them.
She’s been studying nonstop since the beginning of the limited series, attending cram school and planning for college. When Together Forever opens, she’s trying to decide between majoring in political science or sociology, which is totally in line with her personality and the adventures she’s gone on with Steven. In the past, Connie had set her studies aside to protect Steven in battle, even studying under Pearl to learn how to use Rose’s sword. For a while there, it seemed as if Connie was on her way to becoming a knight. I thought about Utena Tenjou more than once while watching her in battle. But the magical girl life was never Connie’s path and Steven was the last to know.
Watching a 16-year-old boy propose to the first girl he ever loved is such a uniquely 90s experience. It’s the kind of boundless optimism that became popular in the wake of Lloyd Dobbler, arguably the most influential 80s romantic hero to hit the screen. You can see his footprints in everything from Can’t Hardly Wait to the Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies. He’s the guy that sticks around. He’s the guy that watches the girl and loves the girl forever. But the romantic boy hero Steven reminds me most of in “Together Forever” is Cory Matthews, the boy who got it all very young and spent the rest of his tenure on Boy Meets World trying to hold on to what he had. And he succeeded because he lived in a comforting world with very little trauma or hardships. Steven, on the other hand, has only known trauma. And now he’s 16 with no idea what normal is for him or how to get it.