So it’s been a while since I’ve really posted about some goshdang rocks on this blog but I have been staying posted with Steven Universe and it’s really starting to bother me how often I’ve seen people in the fandom insinuating Change Your Mind, or the show at large, is naively idealistic in the way that it handles talking to dangerous people.

Here’s the thing: I don’t think there’s anything naive or idealistic about SU as a show and how it depicts talking to people.

First and foremost, Steven does not ever successfully talk to people in a situation where he hasn’t protected himself. When he does, it’s a bad thing. Steven doesn’t get the upper hand on White because he makes bambi eyes at her and sniffles a little and goes “oh granny won’t you be nice to me” and she immediately falls over herself to go “oh my goodness you beautiful baby child how could I ever have thought to wrong you.”

White endangers Steven. And at that point, Steven makes considerable emphasis to protect himself and his friends. Neither half of split Steven waste much time looking at White or acknowledging her. Their focus is on each other. Steven takes care of himself first. He makes sure he’s safe and healthy.

Thing is? Pink split Steven makes it clear that White can’t hurt him. She literally tries. She gets steamrolled. She’s lying unconscious on the floor at the point that Steven’s halves reconcile.

Steven at no point neglects protecting himself to negotiate with people. Even as early as Monster Buddy half of his argument at protecting Nephrite is the awareness that she’s obviously not trying to hurt him and becomes dangerous when she’s triggered by the senior CGs’ overbearing interventions. Steven not attacking Nephrite is literally the sensible thing here and the Crystal Gems are wrong because they assume that being violent will fix everything in absence of factual evidence. Steven is in no danger. The reason things go to hell at the climax of Monster Buddy is because Garnet’s earlier violent behavior meant that the sight of her summoning her weapons was a trigger for Nephrite- and, even then, she still protects Steven, the person who was consistently nice to her.

This is not a whimsical fantasy scenario. If you use brute force to push people around, they will remember, and will either resent you or panic when it seems like you’re about to hurt them again. If you’re up against someone who is motivated primarily by fear, don’t scare them.

“Violence isn’t the solution here” in this case is not an arbitrary nicey-pants talking point where “oh but see if you just sing songs and hold people’s hands they will all universally like you!” it’s talking about the fact that you need to actually meaningfully develop your response to situations based on information. Nephrite is a traumatized soldier suffering from an affliction that makes her easily startled. When she’s able to maintain a clear head, Steven is readily able to observe that she is friendly and willing to work with him. Steven not being violent to Nephrite is based in the fact that she is not a threat, and the Gems are failing to reevaluate because they’re just assuming she’s a threat based on prior behavior (and likely some bias- both out of the assumption that corruption can’t be cured and out of knowing Nephrite is a Homeworld soldier) and they’ve stopped observing what she’s actually doing.

The show doesn’t even exaggerate how much or how well talking to people works. We see people rebuff Steven (e.g. Jasper in Earthlings). We see people indifferently stonewall his overtures of friendship (Peridot in Marble Madness). We see people who take fondly to him because he’s nice to them but frankly trust him as far as they could throw him and don’t feel that bad selling out his friends (Lapis in The Return).

We see people give him a blank look of “are you actually kidding me” when he tries to talk to them (Aquamarine in Stuck Together)

Heck- the entire thesis of Beach City Drift is that Stevonnie needs to reevaluate the way they’re responding to Kevin because he’s engaging with them in bad faith and using it as an opportunity to mess with them.

The idea that this is unrealistic because, we guess Stevonnie doesn’t decide that Kevin messing with them means they need to take him out back and extrajudicially execute him on the spot just tells us something: Our culture has been spoonfed the idea, over and over and over again and mostly through popular cartoons, that violence is the default solution for problems.

This is an idea that SU is deliberately deconstructing like in Monster Buddy. Because- why are Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl just assuming Nephrite can’t be trusted? In-universe, they have their reasons, but those reasons are also wrong.

However, we have to consider that Steven was clearly operating on the assumption all the monsters are bad even though he was able to observe that some of the monsters were only dangerous by accident (the worm from Bubble Buddies).

He assumed the monsters were dangerous even though time and time again, they largely only targeted the Crystal Gems, and most of them were in remote environments hiding, and only are drawn out of hiding because the Crystal Gems deliberately hunt them down.

And this is an assumption so pervasive that when given starkly contradictory evidence in Monster Buddies, his initial reflex is to defend this viewpoint- saying Nephrite “isn’t like the other monsters” and then trying to tell her “you’re not a monster any more!” when she never was in the first place. She only seemed “like a monster” because Steven was fed a specific narrative from people who were in some ways ignorant to the reality of Nephrite’s situation, and in others withholding information. And Steven is not a gullible, unobservant, or callous person.

Here’s the thing: before we as an audience are told anything about the Gem monsters, we accept that. We take it as a given the Red Eye is going to crash into Beach City just because it’s bad. We assume the “Centipeetles” are hostile even though Nephrite’s drones are frankly no more aggressive than you’d expect a stray cat loose in your house to be, and Pearl is the one calmly standing there snapping one’s neck.

Personally, I grew up with the high fantasy genre. Heavy door-stopper books with dragons on the cover, and games like Final Fantasy. This is a genre that most popular codifying installments of give you broad, sweeping pastoral environments chock full of monsters that live exclusively to fight and kill you, and you need to kill them first. Anything that you shouldn’t kill on sight is going to immediately broadly flag you down so that you know not to murder this one. And killing monsters is never wrong. The ones that you aren’t supposed to kill, the narrative will coddle you so that you could never even think they might be just like the intrusive offal.

Sometimes you’re explained these monsters, they’re especially bad, because they did this bad thing or caused that bad thing to happen. Often you don’t actually witness it. Sometimes there’s simply no explanation given at all, but they are called “goblins” and they look strange and pointy and dangerous compared to the pretty likable-looking Heroes, and that’s supposed to be all the evidence you need to never worry if your heroes run them through.

We don’t worry, even if these monsters are actually people. We don’t worry even if they will directly talk to you and make it clear they believe they’re doing the right thing. After all, they have an entry in the in-game bestiary, and if they were really good, the game wouldn’t have given us the option to kill them, right?

When I hear people talk about “villains” and which villains are entitled to “redemption arcs”, what I hear overwhelmingly is thinking that sprouted from that genre, those games and those books. I hear, basically, the indoctrination that we just accept that worlds just have a bunch of Evil Things and the way to solve Evil is to kill it, and that the world will gently guide our hand so if it’s not actually Evil, then it will throw up its hands and drop to the floor and the battle music will stop and all of our combat commands will lock up.

We accept that Nephrite is evil, going in. Even though, actually watching that first episode, she’s standing on the outside of the Gem Temple, and doesn’t attack until the Crystal Gems barge out to threaten her. Nephrite is written from the very beginning of the show as an expression of its thesis statement.

Nephrite does not fling herself to the ground and whimper for mercy and try to stagger back to her proper Gem form as soon as she’s encountered. Nephrite is written, deliberately, as a monster. We accept that she’s here to be a threat for Steven to beat to prove himself. We accept that her pain doesn’t matter because she’s a monster.

We accept, in effect, that she is not a character with a life or a story. We accept that she is merely an empty receptacle for Steven’s fighting capabilities and inventiveness.

That’s preposterous. That’s ridiculous. If you suggest someone disagreeing with you is actually just an empty caricature of a person here to galvanize your growth as a person, or just show off what you’ve learned or accomplished since your past, people would look at you like you’d grown another head and rightfully so. There’s nothing “realistic” about that.

But it’s pervasive. It’s everywhere. And when patterns are repeated endlessly and repeatedly and constantly we get used to them.

It’s why Steven Universe, why Undertale, why even Off are treated as subversive narratives, even though they’re actually more realistic.

“But Clockie,” you say, “the Diamonds were so willing to talk and listen to Steven! That’s preposterous!”

“They sure weren’t in The Trial, or most of Reunited,” I say. “In fact the only reason they’re shown to have changed their mind so quickly is because Steven had a direct personal connection to them, and is that really so unlikely- that these people who have been alive for thousands of years and live at the heart of a densely populated empire would actually have connections with other people, who would not all homogeneously believe the same thing? That they could meet and interact with others who might change their opinions even slightly?”

And even then both Blue and Yellow try to talk Steven out of actually trying to say anything to White. And Steven literally points out why he’s doing this: because they tried fighting White, they tried fleeing White, and none of that worked. It failed to meaningfully change anything. And forcing change through by murdering White and standing on her corpse would just repeat the doomed rebellion because the staged murder of Pink Diamond just entrenched more people against the Crystal Gems.

Steven literally criticizes the refusal to attempt any form of negotiation as impractical. Because it is. The only reason people genuinely think violence as a narrative cure-all works is because we are basically raised in narratives- even narratives that are otherwise optimistic, friendly, and colorful- where the only solution is murder.