Seeing is Believing: Actually Perceiving Magic Might Be Harder Than It Looks

Alternate title: They Were Car Crash Victims, Until They Weren’t

WARNING: This has Nightmare Hospital spoilers. In fact, the very foundation of this meta comes from Nightmare Hospital, so watch that before you read this, or you will be very confused.

Okay, so I think we can all agree that Dr. Maheswaran underreacted to the cluster-monsters in Nightmare Hospital. The hospital’s entire staff seemed to have underreacted (with the possible exception of the individual who called her back to work to begin with). We have already made jokes at Dr. Maheswaran’s expense—a particular Toy Story gif comes to mind (“I don’t think that man’s ever been to medical school”). I laughed, too, but then I got to thinking: The writing of Steven Universe is phenomenal. Up until this glaring oversight, they’ve thought everything through.

So, then I start to wonder, is this really an oversight? What if, instead of being so desensitized to Weird Stuff as brought to Beach City by the gems and an Earth that has been altered by their presence (I’ll get into that later), the regular citizens literally can’t see the Weird Stuff at all?

Hear me out. I think I might be on to something.

Let’s use Dr. Maheswaran as a case study. Instead of focusing on what she isn’t saying (like, “Hey, why does one of my patients have two arms where their head should be?”), let’s focus on what she does say. Here is a collection of her quotes on the clusters, both prior to and after they begin attacking:

“It doesn’t look like a car accident… you didn’t find an ID?”

“Hm, no heartbeat.” *looks skeptically at the patient who is very clearly alive, because they are very obviously writhing on the hospital bed* “Cheap hospital budgets” *throws stethoscope away*

“You—it’s my other patient—what are you doing out of bed?”

“These patients are beyond reason!”

Objectively, these quotes do not jive with the context they are used in. It’s almost as if Dr. M is in a different scene entirely. Almost as if she is seeing something else entirely.

Now, we don’t know much about Connie’s mother, I will admit that. However, from what little we have seen of her I think she comes across as stern, but practical (if overprotective). While I have never seen her put her medical skills to action on screen, I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she’s not terrible at her job.

That established, I look at her quotes and reactions again, and I realize, everything she does is better suited to a competent doctor dealing with two extremely traumatized car crash victims than a competent doctor trying to deal with something that is so obviously not human. She expects the cluster with the heavy arm to not only understand what she says to it, but also to respond (she asks it a question). Even after the first cluster attacked, when the cluster in the bed starts thrashing about, her first instinct is to rush towards it, not away (presumably to calm it down).

We know, as viewers, that Steven Universe is shown through Steven’s perspective (the only exception so far being those two snippets from Peridot’s POV in Friend Ship). Think about this. We get to see what Steven, a gem-human hybrid, sees. Crewniverse has already taken advantage of the implicitly trusting nature of viewers before—remember how we all used to assume that Garnet, Amethyst and Pearl were representatives of gemkind’s norm? In that same vein, we take Steven’s perspective for granted, and assume that everyone else sees the same things that we viewers do.

It’s pretty clear to me that Dr. Maheswaran and Steven didn’t see the same thing when they looked at those clusters. But Connie does. Connie is right there with us and Steven, looking at these half-sentient, miserable creatures and thinking to herself, “We’ve got to poof them.”

Speaking of Connie, how odd is it for an overprotective mother who meticulously plans every minute of her child’s day to just not notice that her daughter’s glasses suddenly and obviously don’t have lenses anymore? And then, when Connie points it out while very conspicuously sticking her hand through one of the frames, remark sarcastically, “What, your eyesight just magically got better?”

Dr. Maheswaran is a lot of things, but I refuse to believe that she incompetent and/or unobservant (especially not of Connie). She just doesn’t see what Steven sees—she can’t see the magic inherent in gemkind’s influence.

Actually, Ronaldo himself has remarked upon this phenomena. In Rising Tides/Crashing Skies he actually goes around Beach City asking why people are not reacting more to—oh, I don’t know, the giant hand ship falling from the sky and exploding on the beach.

Their responses are oddly bland. Nanafua talks about fish, Kiki and Jenny mention the events of Beach Party, and Sadie straight out says that it’s “hard to believe” that the gems “protect the planet and the human race and… have magic powers” when in the past she has literally seen Garnet drenched in fresh coffee that would have given a human third-degree burns (according to Garnet’s future vision), make a quip, and then magic the coffee off of her person. Oh yeah, and the week or so that Sadie herself spent on a magic damn island that culminated in fighting an invisible gem monster.

There is a partial explanation to these blasé reactions that we already know, of course. Gems have been living on Earth for millennia now. Obviously, they brought their magic stuffs with them, and the Earth in Steven Universe has been notably altered from our own gem-less reality. Hollywood is located in Kansas now, and gem ruins have altered landscapes all over the globe (the sea spire that stood for several centuries in a giant whirlpool in the middle of the ocean, anyone?).

But the Crystal Gems—five individuals, if you count Ruby and Sapphire as separate—have been alone on earth for thousands of years now. That’s pretty much all of recorded history, so maybe Beach City is accustomed to their magic-antics, but the rest of the world is not (not anymore, anyway). Pearl herself has talked about a space program on this version of Earth. You can’t tell me there aren’t satellites and observatories—and Peridot’s ship was in no way inconspicuous. But there was no media uproar about the giant hand ship that came to Earth that one time, no real reaction from the citizens of Beach City… nothing, really. Especially after the wreckage of the ship had been cleaned up. Not even a, “You gems do what you do, and we’re cool with that, but could you take it easy? You almost ruined the entire town with that last stunt.”

Even if the people of Beach City were all just ridiculously lackadaisical about weird magic stuff, they would still have the right to say something when their lives and wellbeing nearly become collateral damage in the wake of the gems’ magical lifestyle. We’ve seen from when the electricity goes out in Political Power that the folks of Beach City are not afraid to call you on your shit when they feel it’s warranted, but this never happens with the gems (unless they or Steven break Mr. Smiley’s things, of course). This lack of confrontation doesn’t really seem to be fear-based, either, otherwise there would be more cowering or tension or scowling and less glibness whenever Steven brings one of the gems with him into town. There is just—no reaction whatsoever. Most days the citizens of Beach City barely seem to remember that the gems exist, and the only reason they do now is because Steven never stops talking about them. Even then, though, their tones and dialogue are simply humoring the sweet little kid with the single father. Lars’ line “Then why don’t you fix it with your magic belly button?” from Gem Glow is something that immediately comes to mind when I think about this.

I think the used-to-the-gems explanation plays a part in the reactions of the civilians in the Steven Universe version of Earth, but it doesn’t explain everything. Even if Beach City is accustomed to magic, that doesn’t mean the rest of the world would be, and I still refuse to believe that this hole in the show’s writing is anything less than intentional. There has to be another explanation. There has to be a reason why Dr. Maheswaran didn’t see the clusters for what they were.

The answer, I think, can be surprisingly simple: because gems are aliens. The magic they possess, the ships they travel upon, the very forms they project—all of it is fundamentally foreign to Earth, to us. Our very physiological makeup doesn’t know what to do with it because it was never made to. Dr. Maheswaran didn’t see the clusters for what they were because she had literally never interacted with material like that before, she wasn’t—for lack of a better word—inoculated with a basis for understanding it. Her own physical and intellectual view of the world and how it works (which, from what we’ve seen, seems remarkably like our own) would never have allowed for anything less, up until Nightmare Hospital.

This isn’t to say that the rest of the world is trapped in a collective illusion of mundanity, either. The reason most of Beach City can’t see the magic stuff is—well, because magic is keeping them from it. Stick with me; I’ll dive into what that might mean in just a sec.

I hear some of you saying, “Yeah, okay, so maybe Dr. M can’t see the cluster’s—but you can’t say it’s just because she’s human. Greg and Connie are well and truly immersed in Magic Stuff at this point, and they seem to see and interact with everything as humans just fine. How do you explain that?”

I’m not trying to imply that it’s impossible for humans to suddenly start seeing/interacting with magic gem stuff, because it obviously is. What I am saying, though, is that I think there needs to be some kind of catalyst before any of the gem stuff is perceivable to a human individual—and the more time you spend with the magic, the better your perception of it becomes.

Let’s take Connie, for instance. When she first meets Steven in Bubble Buddies, her reaction to his bubble is frankly a little bland, too. It was a pink sphere, and she was clearly in it, but for a while she just sort of rolled with things in the strange way that citizens of Beach City tend to do—until the situation started getting seriously dangerous, and Steven’s own poor grasp of it started rubbing off on her. The fact that Steven—half magic himself—is in close proximity the entire time is the beginning of her inoculation. Connie has only ever gone deeper into the realm of gem magic since then, picking up with Lion 2: The Movie and moving right on through to her appearance in Nightmare Hospital, where she is about as close to an honorary Crystal Gem as a full-blooded human can get. However, I think the real turning point in Connie’s involvement with Magic Stuff is characterized by Steven accidentally healing her eyesight with his magic spit—she is fundamentally changed by the very alien biology that nobody else sees or reacts to, and this event alters how Connie herself interacts with alien matter on a physiological level. She can see the clusters for what they are because she has adapted (evolved?) to understand and interact with them.

Greg Universe, I imagine, has a similar story of inoculation and then steadily becoming so immersed that he no longer needs help to see things as they truly are. I’m positive that Rose has also healed him of injuries the same way that Steven healed his broken leg in House Guest. The reason that folks like Jenny and Sadie can sort of half-believe the Magic Stuff is because they have interacted with it physically and personally. There are a couple of other characters that also fit this bill, too, like Buck and Sour Cream and Ronaldo and Peedee—ever so slowly, citizens are being inoculated by Steven’s loud and proud evangelism of Crystal Gem Stuff. There is a growing radius of people who are seeing more and more of the things that Steven and us viewers see, but everyone else only sees what they are equipped to understand, and Dr. Maheswaran—who, despite having met the gems themselves as well as their fusion Alexandrite, has not had a truly physical or personal interaction with Magic Stuff until Nightmare Hospital—is no exception.

The majority of citizens of Beach City didn’t really react to the giant space hand because that’s not what they saw. Perhaps they saw the aftermath of a hurricane, or a tsunami, or some other natural phenomenon, but I truly believe that if they had actually seen a giant space hand descend into the atmosphere their reaction would have been much more animated than idly listening to Mayor Dewey, and then saying to themselves, “Well, he sounds pretty serious, I guess we will evacuate.”

Now, whether this ignorance is incidental—just a byproduct of gems being an alien and being made of Foreign Stuff—or a kind of defense mechanism towards foreigners that gems have developed and woven into their foundational coding is an entirely different story. An entirely different meta-rant. Nevertheless, I think what we saw with Nightmare Hospital was Dr. Maheswaran’s inoculation and first perception of Magic Stuff happening in real time. She didn’t really react to being in Steven’s bubble, just like Connie didn’t really react the first time, but her look of fear and vulnerability after Connie and Steven poof the clusters is, I think, indicative that she is finally starting to see what us viewers have been viewing all along, because we are privileged enough to have a half-gem perspective at our disposal.

Remember how Dr. Maheswaran says, “So that’s why it had no pulse—gem experiments…” towards the end of the episode, like she still can’t quite understand how her patients were monsters but her sense of reality has been shaken enough that she’s willing to try anyway. And then she runs into Lion and nearly screams, because for the first time in her life she is seeing a giantpink lion. Her fear then—the way she trembles—is, I think, about so much more than a loss of control. It’s the paradigm-shattering realization that what you’ve always known to be true isn’t precisely so, because she has finally come to see the magic inherent in what Connie and Steven are doing with her own eyes. Next time Magic Stuff crops up in front of her, I think we will find that Dr. Maheswaran’s reactions won’t feel as non sequitur.

We are such a visual culture. What we see really is what we believe. We viewers believe everything that Steven sees is true, and we believe that everyone else must see these things, too, because what other reason do we have to doubt the reality that Steven has shown us? However, I think that Nightmare Hospital makes it glaringly obvious that smart and capable people like Dr. Maheswaran are seeing and subsequently believing and reacting to different things entirely, and that’s why our perspective makes the way they behave seem utterly ridiculous. Perhaps an ‘inoculation and interaction’ phase isn’t necessarily the right idea or terminology. I’m totally willing to admit that. Maybe just seeing and interacting with half-magic Steven is exposure enough that the citizens of are slowly starting to see things less as a mundane illusion and more for the magic items and events they truly are. But there is something going on with normal people’s perceptions of the gems’ magic, and Connie and Greg somehow being the exception to the rule, and after writing this ginormous meta-rant there is nothing that can convince me otherwise.

So, in conclusion, while the deadbeat-doctor jokes are admittedly funny, but let’s give Dr. Maheswaran some slack. She’s doing the best she can with the reality she perceives. She doesn’t have the privilege of a half-gem perspective to guide her, like we do, but if her heart-wrenchingly wonderful reconciliation with Connie is indicative of anything, that’s slowly starting to change.