[[su leak spoilers]] & critical analysis

ok so imo the thing with the human zoo in the latest stevenbomb is that you know human zoos actually existed in real life. white people stole indigenous people (yes that includes indigenous african people) from their homes while colonizing their countries, and not only used them as slaves for labor, but they also showcased non-white captives to white audiences in europe & america as sideshow oddities, similar to freak shows or traveling zoos. the ethnic features on non-white people were seen as bizarre and exotic to white people, and the perpetrators of these freak shows used them for profit. one of the more famous accounts of this exploitation is of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikoi woman who was exhibited as a freak show attraction under the name of “The Hottentot Venus” for having large buttocks.



now back to the the human zoo in su. the thing about writing fictional allegories to real life atrocities is that based on how you write the story, you bring along a lot of implications towards the real life event. even if you didn’t mean to imply certain things, when you make a fictional parallel the audience has no cue on to where that parallel is supposed to stop. the audience doesn’t know if you’re only trying to depict one aspect of a real-life event and that everything else you wrote wasn’t supposed to hark back to real life.

and to be frank, when you’re telling the stories of oppressed people through fictional allegories, you have the responsibility to tell the whole truth. you should not be “borrowing” irl narratives of oppression and the horrific events caused by them solely as a plot device, or to make your fiction “more interesting”. you should be depicting these things because you actually care about the real people that are affected by those real life events, and you want to make a statement about it through fiction. when you are writing about “touchy” subject matter that has a parallel in real life, like a human zoo, you have a responsibility to cover all your bases while writing it; depicting it clearly, treating it seriously, and handling the captive characters’ and their culture with respect.

if you show a human zoo with lots of characters of color in it, but make no effort to actually make the zoo’s conditions accurate to the human zoos that poc were captured in irl, then your point is moot. there is no point in taking out the Family Unfriendly or “too dark” aspects of oppression narratives in fiction, because then you are not honoring the real people who are oppressed by telling the story accurately. instead you’re allowing the oppressors to partially get away with what they did by sanitizing their crimes.

the human zoo run by the diamonds i felt was an example of a so-called “ethical” human zoo, meaning that homeworld would probably pat themselves on the back for treating their human captives like exotic pets by meeting all their needs for survival (food, enrichment, etc). while the narrative expressed that the human zoo as disturbing and wrong at first, the captives in the zoo were shown as carefree, silly, and almost child-like in their general ignorance of Normal Earth Human behavior. the human zoo is not consistently depicted as bad, because the captives there are shown as happy and satisfied. rather than clearing this issue up, the writers kind of just leave it open-ended and unresolved. Here’s an excerpt from The Zoo that shows this:

Steven: I can’t believe this! They’re all so happy, it’s like they don’t even know that they’re trapped here. Greg: Well of course they don’t, they’ve never been anywhere else. They love it here, I mean look at this place. Can you blame them? They’ve got everything they need and they never have to worry about a thing. Steven: I guess you’re right.

This part in particular felt pretty uncomfortable to me because it is very reminiscent of a real anti-abolitionist argument used by American slaveowners in the 1800′s: that black slaves were too simple-minded and unintelligent to take care of themselves, and that they were content to be taken care of by their captors. while the humans in The Zoo are not used for slave labor, they are still practically slaves because they’ve been captured for the purpose of entertaining gems.

The allegory in The Zoo carries a lot of grating implications of how human zoos are depicted by the writers. the gems are not clearly meant to represent white people since many of them have ethnic traits, and the humans are oddly diverse in the The Zoo, including white humans. furthermore, the humans in the zoo are depicted as goofy and ignorant, not aware that they’re held captive and denied their right to freedom. and rather than planning to free these people, or telling them that it’s wrong that they are held in the zoo, the crystal gems just leave them there. yet another plot arc unresolved with no idea of when– if at all– it’s going to be picked back up again. Just another very sloppy allegory of oppression from su.