How Steven Became His Own “Final Boss” in Steven Universe Future

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Once upon a time, in the not so distant past, a little human boy with a pink gem for a belly button crash-landed into our hearts. His name was Steven Universe (Zach Callison), and he lived with his three Crystal Gems, alien refugees who rebelled against their authoritarian homeworld. Raised by his Gems and his human father who never quite grew up, Steven had charming misadventures in a vibrant coastal town called Beach City as he learned to control his own budding Gem powers.

At least, that’s where Steven Universe, Rebecca Sugar‘s groundbreaking animated show, began. In the seven years since Steven Universe premiered, the series introduced queer and nonbinary characters to children’s animation (a first), broke down gender roles, and held astonishingly empathetic discussions about mental health. The series redefined what children’s animation could look like, and in doing so garnered legions of fans of all ages. Steven Universe is lightning in a bottle, and the saga is finally coming to an end with the finale of Steven Universe Future.

Now 16 years old, Steven has no more big bads to fight, no more dark family secrets to unravel, and no more earth-shattering problems to solve. But he has to face one final battle, and it’s with himself. TV Guide caught up with series creator Rebecca Sugar to chat about the long road to the finale, how the series has evolved, and why the future is, in fact, bright.

Spoilers for Steven Universe Future beyond this point.

Was the ending of the series different than what you pictured when you first pitched the show?
Rebecca Sugar:
It’s a complicated answer, because when I initially pitched the show, I pitched it as a show about change and growth. The fact that the story did evolve, and that we did grow to feel differently about the characters and ourselves, was [baked into] the initial pitch. In that sense, it’s very true to what I pitched initially.

I always wanted the core of the show to be based on my relationship with my younger brother, Steven Sugar. Really early on, when we were first starting, as the older sibling I wanted to show the different aspects of our relationship and the way that I wanted to be a good role model for him. But as we were working on the show and I was under a lot of pressure, he was there. He was our lead background designer, and as I was buckling under a lot of that pressure, he supported me and that became a part of the show in real time. Our relationship evolved a lot through the course of making the show, and that became part of the evolution of the show.

How did that evolution turn into the germ of Steven Universe Future?
Sugar:
One of the things that looked really exciting going into Steven Universe Future is that we had a lot of new crew members — a new set of story editors, a new set of writers. I was working with Kate Sang, Taneka Stotts, and Jack Pendarvis. Though it was an epilogue, we wanted to figure out how to make this unique. We were also working on the Steven Universe: The Movie at the same time and really reflecting on the entirety of the series.

They came to me with the idea that we should really see Steven start to make some of his own mistakes and I loved that. He spent so long dealing with the mistakes that his mother made. I thought that it would be really interesting to explore him now that Steven really understands that he is himself. He has to take on a different kind of responsibility and also think a lot differently about who he is now that he understands that he isn’t Pink Diamond.

Looking back at his character, Steven’s always had this very crucial flaw where he puts other people ahead of himself, and we always intended that to be one of the most difficult things for him as a character. So this also seemed like an opportunity to show the damage that mentality had done and how difficult it was for him to maintain this relationship with himself because of it.

Steven Universe Future was a really satisfying conclusion to the story, because we’re not just saying goodbye to Steven, we’re saying goodbye to all of these characters we’ve met over the years. But it somehow never felt like a goodbye?
Sugar:
I wanted to make sure that it didn’t feel exactly like an ending, that you get the sense that their lives are going to go on, they’re going to continue caring about each other, and working on the various things that they’re struggling with. In reality there aren’t neat endings.

Yeah, it almost felt like instead of writing outros in the finale, you gave every character an intro.
Sugar:
Yes! We wanted you to feel all the possibilities for them, especially for Steven, that they have so many options. He spent so much time in Future feeling trapped, but to be able to take that step…I wanted the audience to feel that potential for him and for themselves.

One of my favorite things about Future is seeing the progression of how Steven’s negative thoughts manifested over the season and how he dealt with them. The fact that the show vocalized Steven’s negative thoughts out loud, like in “Homeworld” when he tries to shatter White Diamond, really struck me. Those dark feelings everyone has toward themselves (and others) sound a lot more insidious when they’re not trapped inside our heads. Why was it important to show and tell in this case?
Sugar:
We really wanted to show all the ways that self-hatred and self-destruction can manifest. And I was excited to show it with a character like Steven who you really know and trust, that this is not how he wants to be. To show that that can happen to him is a way to show that it can happen to almost anyone.

Definitely. My therapist used to make me write down all of the stuff I’m thinking, read it out loud to her, and then ask, “Why would you say this about yourself?”
Sugar:
Right? Yes! I did learn to start to listen to the words that came out of my mouth at a certain point, especially when showrunning. I was so hard on myself and so down on myself in a very visible, public way. People would tell me, “We’re concerned about you.” And I really couldn’t let that get in the way of the work I was trying to do. I had to become aware of that and try to shift that. But it’s very hard, to notice when you’re in that place where you think that a joke about yourself is a joke that everyone is in on because everybody must be as unhappy with you as you are. It’s dangerous stuff.

In a lot of ways therapy has made me more aware of what I have been saying with my medium and also what I say when I speak, in any form. Cartooning is the way that I express myself, the language I love most. In a way, even more so than the words that I hear come out of my own mouth, the drawings I make and the stories I want to tell, are something I can look at that tell me where my head is at.

What also really struck me in “Everything’s Fine” is when Steven finally admits that he’s been hiding from his family to protect their image of him. Tell me a little bit about how you wrote the family intervention that breaks Steven.
Sugar:
That really comes down to a lot of Steven’s struggles with his own identity that goes back over the course of the whole show. Very early in the show, there’s this extended music video of the theme song where everyone is really solid in who they are, even though it comes with a lot of baggage. The reason that they’re fighting has to do with their own stories. But Steven’s reason for fighting is that he wants to be what other people want him to be. We always wanted that to be a flag, something that’s not necessarily positive.

And so this mindset that Steven has — that his worth is tied to his usefulness, to his ability to stay positive when everyone else is spiraling; that’s what they need him for, that’s what they want him for; he is of use to them in certain ways — I’ve felt that way, too. I’ve felt that fear that if I were to unload on someone or even just get together with someone, that my negativity would drag them down, that it would be better if I avoided it or if I just pretended to be happier. But then you wind up feeling like no one is there for you because they don’t know what you’re going through. It’s a real snake-eating-its-own-tail situation.

And then the show took it one step further by visualizing how unbearable it is receiving affection when you feel unworthy of it. Steven’s family is trying to comfort him in “I Am My Monster,” but because Steven’s so anxious about hiding what he’s really feeling, his body blows up out of control like he’s being attacked.
Sugar:
I learned a lot from the book The Deepest Wellby Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, which was a huge inspiration. It talks about healing the effects of childhood trauma and the way that difficult experiences in your childhood will manifest physically, socially, and emotionally as you grow older. One of the ideas that I found so fascinating about that book is that having your parents and friends, the supportive figures in your life, come together, care, and want to help you makes such an incredible difference. I looked to that book for inspiration, particularly for the episode “Growing Pains” and also for the final episodes of Steven Universe Future, to have Steven’s friends and his family offer their support without telling him how he needs to be.

They’re there for him, they understand what he’s going through, and they’re offering their care. And obviously that’s difficult for Steven. Everything about this is difficult for him, but I felt it was critical that they be able to be there for him without giving him a set of instructions on how he needs to heal.

And then in terms of the visual itself, how did you guys design the Steven monster, for lack of a better word? It’s arguably one of the scariest things we see in the show because we know who’s underneath.
Sugar:
That was a real group effort. I sat down with our character designer, Becky Dreistadt, and also with Miki Brewster and Etienne Guignard, who storyboarded the episode. We were inspired by kaiju monsters mainly, but also a little bit by Ganon at the end of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. We also wanted elements of Steven’s shield. We wanted to get this feeling that the spikes coming off of him were almost like pieces of his shield digging into his body. And we wanted to really continue the theme of him being overtaken by the pinkness of his gem, by the powers that his gem is flooding him with when he feels that his life is in danger. We sat down and worked on it together, pushed and pulled the design. We wanted the feeling of Steven as his own final boss.

The final episode, “The Future,” really felt like an emotional coda, as if it was an entire episode dedicated to hugging the audience goodbye. Tell me a little bit about why you didn’t want to end it with a climactic battle episode, like “I Am My Monster.”
Sugar:
We really designed “I Am My Monster” and “The Future” as a climax and a denouement, so we wanted “The Future” to be very calm. It was very difficult because when we originally were working on the episode, there was so much that we wanted to do and we also wanted to let all of it breathe. The episode ended up being almost 17 minutes long, but we had to find a way to get it all into 11 minutes. So it came down ultimately to the things that I couldn’t stand to cut. In “The Future,” we wanted to touch on a lot of the smaller, sweeter moments that tie back to the first season. The moment he spends in the kitchen with the Gems is a nod to the very first episode. His morning exercises are a nod to “Future Vision.”

But then also what I really wanted to show is that not only is Steven setting off to take some time for himself, he’s been organizing a way to keep in touch with everyone. I wanted to re-contextualize Steven’s fear of everyone moving on without him. When he’s able to move on, he can also be one of those people that’s moving forward, that’s heading towards something and can keep in touch. He can keep in touch with people the way he would like them to keep in touch with him. That he has power over that.

How hard was it for you personally to say goodbye to Steven?
Sugar:
I felt as if I’d been saying goodbye for years. In the beginning, we had this overarching story that we wanted to tell over the course of over 100 episodes, but we really had no idea how long we would be able to make Steven. We never knew if our next pickup would be our last. That was very scary at the time, and we would have to keep building in these escape hatches in case “Ocean Jam” or “Jailbreak” or “Change Your Mind” was the last episode. We needed to figure out how to do something that would still be satisfying if we didn’t get picked up for more.

And then towards the end of the original series, I was told with a fair amount of certainty that there would not be any more show. So my mourning process really began then. That was probably in 2015 or 2016, just knowing that we were working towards the end. And at that time, I was furiously pitching the movie, because I did not want to say goodbye to the team or to the characters. I was not done. I needed more time.

When the movie got picked up, an additional 20 episodes were picked up as well. And so that was a huge sigh of relief that I’d get to spend just that much more time in this world. And the things that had been crunched for time because of circumstance, I could spend a little more time exploring them and re-contextualizing them with the final 20 episodes. That pang of fear that we wouldn’t get to finish the story, especially doing the kind of work that I wanted to do with the show, which was such a lofty goal and so impossible back then, was something I was living with for a long time, and I’m free of it now. In 2013, Steven Universe did not fit any model at Cartoon Network. The show has been able to break a lot of these barriers, and I’m so grateful for that.

So I feel, now, really lucky that I got the opportunity to make the movie and Future, which already felt like borrowed time. And it really is because the fans were there for this show and so vocal that we were able to continue to exist. I’m so grateful that I got to spend this time in this world and with these characters and with this incredible team. I’m ready to let this particular story go because of that, because I already feel so lucky to have spent as much time with them as I did.

Steven Universe Future finale airs March 27 at 7/6c on Cartoon Network.



Source : TVGuide