I’ve been repeating some of the same points over and over for the past few days, so I’ve decided to write a blog post and put it all in one place. It is my current hypothesis that Yellowtail is a snake person, a refugee from a war between the Homeworld Gems and his own people. Onion, therefore, would be half snake-person, much in the way that Steven is half gem.

First, I think I need to go into why I believe snake people actually exist in Steven Universe at all. We’ve seen no hard evidence suggesting their existence and it seems as though Ronaldo’s ramblings have been largely debunked after the events of Keep Beach City Weird. Steven points out that all of the weirdness in Beach City is connected to the Crystal Gems, not to any snake person in evidence.

I believe Ronaldo is correct, though. I believe that there are, in fact, snake people walking the earth in Steven’s universe. There isn’t a lot of in-universe evidence for it, I’ll grant you, but there is plenty of meta-textual evidence to support the idea that Snake People are a real thing.

Ronaldo has been correct about other things, having put together connections that others don’t seem to see. He is the character that named the Diamond Authority, after all, and he claimed that polymorphic sentient rocks were manipulating the world – and they actually are. Though his judgment is clouded by his need for these conspiracies to be perhaps larger than they are, Ronaldo does seem to have the basics right. I’m willing to bet that his pet conspiracy – that snake people live on earth – is not just some crack-pot conspiracy but something that the young Fryman put together from real evidence.

Also, let’s look at all of the snake symbology that exists in Steven Universe.

Lars’ shirt has a snake on it. When called out on how nasty that particular snake is, he suggests that he hates snakes. Buck Dewey’s response is that some snakes are pretty cool. I believe this conversation to be about Yellowtail; there are nasty snake people out there, but some snake people are pretty cool.

At one point, Steven closely empathizes with snakes to the point of crying, bemoaning their lack of arms. This could mean so many different things that it’s hard to really examine, but here are a couple of shots in the dark: Snake people are not a warlike people and do not have weapons (‘arms’). Steven would be sad to know that Snake people lack something he considers vital (perhaps the ability to eat food, or the ability to speak coherently). Maybe he’s just sad because snakes have no arms, and that symbolizes that he is in a place where he could empathize with snake people where others would not.

Snakes are involved in many of the government’s dealings. The state of Delmarva has a snake on its flag. There was a snake on a national anti-drug warning in the Funland Arcade. There are also snakes on dollar bills and on the backs of coins. This could very well indicate that snake people are somehow influential in government, or it could just be that snake symbology has become somewhat venerated in the States for reasons related to the snake people living there.

And finally we have Onion’s snake, and the fact that Onion is more than willing to let a mouse hang out in his mouth for… a while…

Alright, so why Yellowtail?

Onion is clearly meant to be something of a dark/weird mirror of Steven himself. Where Steven loves eating food, Onion throws it off the pier. Where Steven is outgoing and friendly, Onion is cold and distant, sometimes downright hostile. Steven loves good, clean fun. Onion is the trolliest troll in Beach City. But it also goes a bit deeper than that.

First of all, we know that Greg’s voice actor – the indomitable Tom Scharpling – is also Yellowtail’s voice actor. Onion’s voice actor is none other than Zach Callison, the young man who voices Steven Universe. This would be enough to convince me of their mirrored connection all by itself, but it still goes even deeper than that.

The first episode that really focused in on Onion and his weirdness was Onion Trade, which revolved around Steven making a deal to get a G.U.Y.S figure that Onion had. The G.U.Y.S in question was notable because he had a miscolored hat, which I feel symbolizes that Onion is something of a “miscolored” Steven, they’re fundamentally the same, but the details are noticeably different. It should be noted that in Onion Friend, there is another mention of a color-variant G.U.Y.S. figure, which I feel hammers this point home: Onion is a miscolored Steven Universe.

Others have noted the parallel between Onion’s birth video with Steven’s video of his mother, and I feel that this further cements the connection between the two. In both videos, their mothers were in a place of vulnerability and sincerity, and both videos were shared with someone that was peripherally affected by it. These videos left an impact on the boys. The fact that Onion’s video is a bit of a dark perversion of Steven’s still suggests that Onion may be something of a dark version of Steven.

Steven has also been shown to doubt Onion’s humanity.

So. If Onion is indeed a dark mirror for Steven, it stands to reason that he is half alien. He is clearly not a gem (as there is video evidence of his being born to a normal human woman, and both of his parents are still alive), which suggests that he is a different kind of half-alien. The only other kind of aliens the show has thus far mentioned has been snake people, and the number of references to snakes through the show makes it difficult to accept that the existence of snake people has been completely debunked.

So that’s where my head is at right now. I believe the Yellowtail is a snake person refugee and that his son is Steven’s dark mirror, half-alien and all.