This is often conveyed through Pearl, the Crystal Gem who reminds me most of my own mother. In a particularly moving episode, Pearl teaches Steven’s human friend Connie how to sword fight so she can defend Steven during their adventures. This is not unlike my mother’s own history of subordinating her needs to mine; I also feel a responsibility to fight battles my mother never asked me to.

Much of it is in the small things. I watched for years as my mother strategically deployed my father to return goods or pick up the rental car, so she could avoid being racially profiled. Now, when my mother walks into salons where white women are offered beverages while she is handled with overpronounced English, I make a point to ask them if they have tea or coffee for her. When she told me Costco denied her a return on a rotten watermelon because she did not bring it back as evidence, I seriously contemplated fishing it out of the trash.

I pick the most pedantic examples because these are the kinds of accommodations any white American would assume they’d receive. I pick these examples because I can control them — the wounds of her past are inaccessible to me.

Just as my perpetual sense of foreignness irritates me, my own rush to act as her personal white savior also irritates me. Providing for our parents is a bedrock of my culture. At the same time, without financial stability or access to capital, I don’t know what better I can do than use my white-passing face to fight for a better seat on an airplane, the ability to return defective products and tea at the hair salon.

I stare at the mirror wondering about the liminal spaces where my Asian-American identity begins and my whiteness begins, prodding at tender spots where my emotional scars might be separable from those I have inherited.

In the finale of “Steven Universe,” Steven’s gem is grotesquely removed from his body. He splits into two parts. But both of them are Steven, identical in appearance, different only in color grading.

What would I be, I wonder, if I were split into two component parts? I am not Steven Universe, I am a speck in the universe that will outlive me. But seeing him cleaved in two to prove the consistency of his identity to his nemeses made me contemplate the ways I perform my identity on the behalf of others. Watching him repeatedly attempt to save the universe made me reflect on the absurd expectations I place on myself. And that is a kind of progress.

As a coda to the original series, “Steven Universe Future” delivers an even more poignant and direct message as the hero begins to understand the roots of his post-traumatic stress. Without the pressures of saving the world or living for others, Steven finally has time to process his earlier teenage years. Watching him learn to live for himself is an even greater balm.

Nicole Clark (@nicalexiac) is a culture writer and contributing editor at Catapult.

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