I’ve seen a fair number of responses from people who chose to leap in with the movie, and yeah, that sounds like a typical story. It seems to have done its job reasonably well.
People are gonna respond strangely to Steven in Future. Unless one has been reading closely and paying attention, it seems like for many his current problems feel like they’re something new, and they’re alarmed with what happened to “Classic Steven.” (Which… I would submit is kinda the point, even textually?) But yeah, this has been brewing since the back half of season one. As I Tumbl’d earlier:
Steven’s emotional journey in the show really kicks off with that string of four episodes between “Lion 3″ and “The Test”; “Lion 3″ is the episode where Steven first accepts—as a dubious gift from the past—what he thinks is a purpose or goal in life, and thematically “Alone Together” in particular sure as hell does deal with themes of puberty, changing bodies, changing identities. “The Test” is effectively where Steven’s childhood ends, as he decides to take his mother’s words literally and bottle up his own problems to protect the people who should be protecting him.
And then, very slightly earlier still:
People watching Future are seriously, weirdly acting like Steven’s crisis is coming out of nowhere. As opposed to it being this untreated thing that’s been festering since the back half of season one.
Steven has never felt like he has had any reliable people to talk to, and that this was just how it had to be. It was his responsibility to hold everyone else together, and talking about his own problems would just undermine that. He clammed up when he was 13, and sat on the heat.
It’s sort of the one big unresolved thread from the original show: But What About Steven? He’s got his own trauma that he has only ever learned to suppress and just barely manage enough to function under a mounting threat.
Now that threat is mostly gone. The people he was trying to protect are mostly fine. And he’s running out of excuses for not attending to these things he has spent a third of his life ignoring. That he feels are shameful to even harbor. Thoughts that aren’t his to have.
When people act like, wait, where is this all coming from, that kinda illustrates Steven’s point. That is where it’s coming from, right there: the fact he’s been in front of you guys all this time and yet you feel compelled to ask this.
He needs real help, and has since he was little, but no one has ever paid attention until now.
By the end of the fourth season, Steven basically… is more or less suicidally depressed. He can’t find his way out of his martyr complex with a road map. Season five is about him learning to cope a little better, and his dealing with the specific problems that pushed him to that extreme—but he never got help, and bad patterns got locked in young. Crappy teenage Steven is the same Steven. He’s just tired now, and has run out of ways to hide from his ghosts.
(Oh, uh, yeah. If you came in recently, be aware there’s about 100 minutes of Stevonnie you’re missing.)
