Part Two. Exaltation to Saint Steven

(Part I)
Warning:
The text contains minor spoilers from the show Steven Universe.
The videos however contain major spoilers,
I recommend not watching the videos if you’re trying to avoid spoilers.

The Prophet first revealed her vision in May 2013.
Her first words, a 7 minute pilot episode, let us glimpse of what was to come.
The Gospel. Our Salvation.

The prophet’s followers were eager to receive the Divine Word.
The Gospel of Rebecca Sugar officially started being preached during November 2013 and kept flowing and nurturing the Congregation until March 2020.

Five seasons, a musical and an epilogue series.
Seven years of a living mythology.
A new religion.
A new worldview.
A useful mythology.

According to Joseph Campbell, a useful mythology must serve four functions:1

THE MYSTICAL FUNCTION. A useful mythology must awaken and maintain a sense of awe and gratitude 
in the experience of existing and being part of the mystery of the Universe. 

Steven Universe develops in a reality where a race of alien mineral lifeforms called “gems” exists. Gems live forever and consolidate their Empire by extracting resources from different planets until nothing remains.

The plot is set in motion when a handful of gems are sent to colonize the planet Earth and they are so moved, so surprised and awed by life here, by the beauty of our home world, that they decide to leave everything behind and declare a rebellion to their Home World to defend Earth.

That’s not all. The leader of the rebellion loves Humanity so much, she decides to give up her eternal life in order to have a child, and through him, live as a half human, even if for just a few years. For her, to experience ephemeral life as a human is worth more than an eternity as a gem.

2. THE COSMOLOGICAL FUNCTION. A useful mythology must offer an image of the universe in accord 
with the knowledge of the time, the sciences and the fields of action of the folk whom the mythology is addressed.

Her son Steven Universe, a teenager armed with only a shield and a whole lot of love and compassion, is left in the care of the last three living rebels. Each of them stablished a different kind of relationship with Steven’s mother, centuries of intimacy. Steven, the living memory of his mother’s sacrifice-abandonment, must deal with the pressures, projections and consequences of his mother’s actions, in the emotional as well as in the cosmic spheres. 

As the series progresses, it explores different kinds of human relationships with a level of complexity and clarity you wouldn’t see even in the most convoluted HBO shows. I don’t want to spoil anything in this post, but I don’t exaggerate when I say the way relationships are explored in this show is unparalleled with anything seen before or since.

Moreover, gems can fuse and temporarily form a new gem. A narrative device that serves to explore intense bonds between individuals, often marked with erotic undertones. The show doesn’t play games or hold back and explores every nook and cranny of possible relationship dynamics between two (or more!) individuals. 

3. THE SOCIOLOGICAL FUNCTION. A useful mythology must validate, support 
and direct the norms of the specific moral order in which the individual will live.

Steven starts out as a burden, a useless and somewhat obnoxious child. From the very first episode, the hashtag the series used was #BelieveInSteven. We must believe in him, and are rewarded in turn, over the course of 5 seasons, with his rise to enlightenment. Steven grows before our very eyes into the role model, the paragon, of every human virtue imaginable. Saint Steven. What makes him special are not his powers but his humanity and his compassion.

As the episodes unfold, we get nuggets of useful and applicable knowledge. Deep and practical insight is unveiled about things like how to handle different types of relationships, how to connect with other people, how to learn to be more compassionate or when to give someone space.

Throughout the show, the characters support each other cementing the importance of community, found family, bonds and seeing love as an act of radical acceptance. We are shown how to approach trying to repair a relationship after deeply hurting someone we love and how each character faces their traumas and fears and grows as a person. It offers us wonders such as the song "Here Comes a Thought ", which is, when sung, an exercise in breathing, relaxation and mindfulness.

One 10-minute episode at a time (how can SO MUCH happen in a 10-minute episode?!), five seasons are impeccably built in a manner worthy of narrative analysis; a true masterclass in world creation and exposition, accompanied by music made specifically for each episode (this will have to be another post, there is much to say). A perfectly orchestrated masterpiece, with 5 Emmy nominations, and masterful performances of legends such as Amy Sedaris3, Patti LuPone, Jinkx Monsoon and Estelle.



Upon finishing the main series, The Prophet decided to gift us a new chapter of The Sacred Scriptures. Steven Universe: The Movie, a musical where almost miraculously, in a mere 80 minutes, we go through the whole character arc of each character in the series while also exploring how deeply a person can be transformed by betrayal, how the self-hatred born from that betrayal is reflected as hatred for others and how someone could move forward despite that transformation.

Spinel going bonkers _⁴

In the opening song of the musical, The Tale of Steven, Steven is portrayed as a divine being. Christine Ebersole, Lisa Hannigan and Patti LuPone raise an ecclesiastical choir chant honoring his divine origin and crowning him as savior of all galaxies by virtue of his Humanity. A true ode to St. Steven. I still get chills every time I hear it.

The musical is available as an album on Spotify. It's pretty much like re-watching the whole series on your earphones while shopping and cooking dinner. Listening to that album like is going to Mass, but watch out as it’s full of spoilers from minute one.

4. THE PEDAGOGICAL FUNCTION. A useful mythology should guide the individual, providing vitality, strength 
and harmony of spirit in every phase of the course of their life.

The only problem with Steven Universe as a series is that Steven is too faultless as a character. But The Prophet, in her infinite radiance, gave us an epilogue series of 20 more episodes that works as closure. Steven Universe Future explores the emotional wounds that the (super traumatic) events shown throughout the series would cause on a young person's mind and how to go through them.

Steven Universe Future is the perfect closure to the series, anchoring Steven to the suffering of the human condition and teaching him how to be himself after the dangers have passed. Future answers the question that afflicts my entire generation, "If everything seens to be fine, why am I having trouble breathing?" and offers solutions.
 

SU: Future closes the entire Gospel by proclaiming that there are no happy endings because life goes on, but you can always continue to live a good life as long as you remain open to change.


The Gospel of St. Steven, the Word of Prophet Rebecca Sugar, my diamond, is a useful and practical mythology that responds to our current anxieties and teaches us how to live in peace and harmony.

I don't think I'm reaching when I say that so far I haven't seen any examples of a current mythology, of a worldview, of a belief system and teachings, that responds better to the moment we are living now than the one put forward in arcs of Steven Universe.

I invite you to receive the Gospel of St. Steven if you have not already done so.
We await with open arms.

notes

- The creator of Steven Universe is Rebecca Sugar, but clearly there is a large team behind the creation, planning and execution of the entire series in all its aspects. I wrote “The Prophet” partly in jest/ as a narrative resource, partly out of admiration and gratitude to Rebecca Sugar for her work and vision, for directing it, driving it, and making it all possible.

- Personal fun fact. During the first few weeks of the COVID crisis I was working as a doctor and was having a really rough time. My friend Rae wrote to Rebecca Sugar, a complete stranger and explained the situation, and Rebecca with the big heart she has, recorded a video specifically for me, encouraging me to keep up the fight. It really worked and helped me cope for many more weeks. It was really very sweet and I will be forever grateful to both of them for that.

¹ In this second part I also rely on Joseph Campbell's "Myths to Live By". Here is the relevant passage (Bantam Books 1988, 11th printing, pages 220-222):

“ [...]Every mythology is an organization, consequently, of culturally conditioned releasing signs, the natural and the cultural strains of them being so intimately fused that to distinguish one from the other is in many cases all but impossible. And such culturally determined signals motivate the culturally imprinted IRMs of the human nervous system, as the sign stimuli of nature do the natural reflexes of a beast.

A functioning mythological symbol I have defined as “an energy-evoking and -directing sign”. Dr Perry has termed such signals “affect images”. Their messages are addressed not to the brain, to be interpreted and passed on; but directly to the nerves, the glans, the blood, and the sympathetic nervous system. Yet they pass through the brain, and the educated brain may interfere, misinterpret, and so short-circuit the messages. When that occurs the signs no longer function as they should. The inherited mythology is garbled and its guiding value lost or misconstrued. OR, what is worse, one may have been brought up to respond to a set of signals not present in the general environment. [...] Such a person will never quite feel at home in the larger social field, but always uneasy and slightly paranoid. Nothing touches him as it should, means to him what it should, or moves him as it moves others. [...]

[...]
And so we have this critical problem, as I say, this critical problem as human beings of seeing to it that the mythology - the constellation of sign signals, affect images, energy-releasing and -directing signs - that we are communicating to our young will deliver directive messages qualified to relate them richly and vitally to the environment that is to be tiers for life, and not to some period of life already past, some piously desiderated future, or - what is worst of all - some querulous freakish sect or momentary fad. And I call this problem critical because, when it is badly resolved, the result of the miseducated individual is what is known, in mythological terms, as a Waste Land situation. The world does not talk to him; he does not talk to the world. When that is the case, there is a cut-off, the individual is thrown back on himself, and he is in prime shape for that psychotic break-away that will turn him into either an essential schizophrenic in a padded cell, or a paranoid screaming slogans at large, in a bughouse without walls.”

2  Obviously, all Steven Universe content belongs to Cartoon Network, this clip specifically was stolen from the @SU_Quotes youtube channel. 

3  Amy Sedaris' performance in the first episode of the fifth season, The Trial, where she voices two rival Zircon lawyers, one defending and another prosecuting Steven, is not only highly entertaining and super memorable, but also ends up planting the seed for one of the most radical plot twists of the whole series. I could not fail to mention it. It's delightful.

4 While I'm at it, I gotta mention that there are visual and musical nods to Zelda: Majora's Mask in the musical. Bless their heart, wink. All video is obviously property of Cartoon Network. This is a clip from Steven Universe: The Movie, that I stole from stolen from TarzyD’s youtube channel. 

5 Again, all rights belong to Cartoon Network, this clip is from the Steven Universe Future episode titled Growing Pains, taken from from Creative Kids Crafts youtube channel.