‘Steven Universe’ Destroyed What It Means to Be a Hero
The animated show Steven Universe (2013–2019) by Adventure Time animator Rebecca Sugar has always been more than a kid’s show. The cartoon about a half-human, half-gem battling evil monsters from outer space, was rooted in empathy. Steven was the hero not because he was the savior of the universe — though he was that too — but because he responded to those threats with kindness and compassion.
Although not the first empathetic hero out there (e.g., Aang from Avatar The Last Airbender (2005–2008) also comes to mind), the existence of hero’s like Steven is the refutation of a type of storytelling decades, arguably even centuries, in the making. His use of empathy in the original series challenged the very values we think a hero should have.
Steven Universe Future takes this criticism one step further and challenges our need for a singular hero at all.
In media, there is a narrative structure that some controversially believe to be the underlying-template for all popular stories that exist — “The Hero’s Journey.”
Joseph Campbell first popularized this theory in the book The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949). Campbell argued that in a variety of cultures across time and space, there was a meta-trend in storytelling — something he called the “Monomyth.”
It has three essential parts (although depending on who you ask, it has anywhere between nine to seventeen in total). The condensed version is that the hero hesitantly leaves home, has a transformative adventure in a new or extraordinary environment, and then returns home with new knowledge or a “boon” to bring back for the betterment of society. The plot or adventure becomes a stand-in for the thematic and emotional changes that happen to the protagonist along the way.
Joseph Campbell would expand upon this theory in several books (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space (1986), Transformations of Myth Through Time (1990), etc.) as well as documentaries (The Hero’s Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell (1987), The Power of Myth (1988), etc.), but the reason why it has entered the popular lexicon is partly due to our love of a galaxy far, far, away. George Lucas credited Campbell as one of his major influences for the creation of Star Wars (1977). Campbell and Lucas reportedly had a deep friendship, and this publicity, in part, led to the Hero’s Journey’s proliferation within the film and television industry.
Even before the Campbell-Star Wars connection was widely known, Hollywood Executive Christopher Vogler allegedly wrote about the similarities between Campbell and Star Wars while studying cinema at the University of Southern California. This analysis became the basis for a widely distributed, 7-page memo he wrote while working for the Disney Corporation. Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg loved the memo and made it required reading, which is partly why Disney films ranging from the Lion King to Mulan follow the Hero’s Journey template.
Vogler would go on to adapt his analysis into a widely-read book called The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2007), which is considered to be a must-read for anyone interested in learning story structure.
Today, the Hero’s Journey is the default narrative structure in Hollywood. Every major story from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) to Harry Potter uses it, and retrospectively its an analysis that is applied to a lot of old works. Some have argued that Lord of the Rings, for example, is a quintessential archetype of the Hero’s Journey. The same has been said for The Hunger Games series.
While this analysis is prolific, however, it is a mistake to claim that it is THE default narrative structure across all cultures. This may sound redundant to some, but at the risk of sounding obvious:
Oher story structures exist.
Anyone who has seen a Bollywood film knows that it’s possible for stories not to emphasize the plot at all. In the words of academic Sabrina Ciolfi in her work “Popular Hindi Cinema: Narrative Structure and Points of Continuity with Tradition:”
“Returning to the narrative structure of popular Hindi cinema, the first element that strikes and confounds western criticism is the apparent lack of a story — or at least narrative coherence — in the film, which usually shows a somewhat fragmentary structure…In popular Hindi cinema, in fact, the plot is considered to be of decidedly secondary importance among the various ingredients of the film; according to the authors themselves it serves solely a basis for the representation of emotions as well, obviously, as creation of the spectacle.”
The 1970 cult classic Mera Naam Joker (“My Name Is Joker”), for example, is about a clown’s career (Raj Kapoor) and his romantic encounters with three separate women. There are no Empires, Deatheaters, or Capitals to be encountered, only his own emotional turmoil.
Conversely, the plot and emotional development in many “Nollywood” films (a term for Nigeria’s film industry) are considered orthogonal to thematic tensions. In the words of Olagoke Alamu in his essay “Narrative and Style in Nigerian (Nollywood) Films:”
“Due to their status as among the society’s primary mass media, Nigerian films are stabilizing forces that contribute to the maintenance of social order…For these reasons, films display a range of ideological and cultural positions that are consciously portrayed by filmmakers in their stories.”
The focus is not always so much on the story itself, but the values being transmitted.
Other stories exist, Hollywood.
Stories with multiple, disconnected characters. Cyclical stories where characters end precisely where they started. Stories like the sitcom, which are typified with no character growth whatsoever.
There is nothing monolithic about the Monomyth. It’s a vague template that applies to a group of some narratives, but it should by no means be treated as an all-encompassing roadmap.
For this reason and more, the glorification of the Hero’s Journey in film and television is quite contentious. There is a growing movement among creators and critics to reject the Hero’s Journey as the dominant format in Western media.
Steven Universe is one of the latest and clearest examples.
Steven (Zach Callison) has many similarities to the typical Campbellian hero. He is an extraordinary human living in the rather ordinary vacation town of Beach City. He has magical space powers, and throughout the series, he goes on many fantastical adventures.
While many of the elements are there, however, they do not mesh together in the way that Campbell describes. An essential part of the Monomyth is that the hero has a call to adventure that they initially refuse, but then reluctantly heed as they transition from the world of the ordinary to the world of the extraordinary. This step is called the “crossing of the first threshold.”
For Steven, this distinction never truly happens. We meet him already emersed in the fantastical world of the Crystal Gems (Deedee Magno, Michaela Dietz, Estelle) — the rebellious aliens fighting a battle against the imperialist Diamond Authority. They have raised Steven since he was a child, and his magical destiny is not a secret he has to discover from an old wizard, a desert hermit, or a Giant motorcyclist. The local residents are so familiar with his magical powers that within the first scene of the first episode of season one (“Gem Glow”), one of the townsfolk makes fun of his “magic bellybutton.”
Steven’s story is not centered around a journey where he sets out on the proverbial road to stop the Diamond Authority in the same way Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, or Frodo Baggins would do. He may make trips to outer space, strange aliens worlds, and fantastical dungeons, but he always comes back to the small town of Beach City. He is just as likely to commit to helping out the local boardwalk or pizza shop as he is to dismantling the evil Diamond Authority that rules the galaxy.
Traditional heroes, according to Campbell, have to face a series of trials as they go on their adventure during a phase called “the initiation.” They are tested by some force or forces (either individual, cosmic, or societal), and along the way, they gain allies and skillsets that help them overcome the big bad by the time the story comes to a close. Luke Skywalker must learn to use the force to defeat the Empire and is helped by the Rebel Alliance. Harry has to discover magic to stop Voldemort and is supported by the students and teachers of Hogwarts.
Likewise, Steven has plenty of powers that he doesn’t fully understand when the story starts, and part of his journey is learning how to tap into them to defend his friends. He also does gain allies throughout the show slowly, over time.
Still, ultimately his journey differs from Campbell’s in how there is no linear progression leading to a set endpoint where he triumphs over “evil.”
Steven Universe is a story that emphasizes emotional rather than narrative development. Steven’s main journey is reconciling the image that he has of his mother — a woman he initially believes to have been a hero — as he learns more about her manipulative past. She was a member of the Diamond Authority and concealed this truth from the Crystal Gems, and much of the show is Steven dealing with the emotional fallout of his mother’s actions and deceptions.
This emphasis on emotional, rather than climatic storytelling is one that runs counter to Campbell’s masculine conception of a hero. Campbell wrote his template from the perspective of an American white man in the 1940s during the height of the Cold War. It should surprise no one that there was a sexist lens to much of his writing. When we look at many of his archetypical heroes, they are often examples of raw masculine power. As Craig Chalquist, Ph.D. wrote in the HuffPost:
“First of all, the Hero isn’t always a good guy. Gilgamesh, the first great Hero figure in Western lore, hacked down a forest, gave the goddess Ishtar the brush-off, and raped his women subjects. Herakles destroyed his own family. Cuchulainn got into such battle frenzies that he had to be plunged into nine vats of water just to cool off after a fight. He died as reckless as he had always been.”
Steven does not meet many of these traditional qualities. He is comfortable with sharing his emotions. He cries pretty much every episode, and this is never portrayed as a bad thing. In fact, his feelings are linked directly to his powers. He has to be in tune with them to use them correctly, and they are not the phallic swords, lightsabers, or wands of traditional stories. He wields a magical shield, and his chief power is the ability to heal — a traditionally “feminine” power.
The subversion of traditionally feminine and masculine attributes is not the only thing that sets Steven Universe apart from Campbell’s Monomyth. Campbell had a gendered way of perceiving antagonistic forces in general. He believed that womanly temptation was a mainstay of the Hero’s Journey. During the initiation phase, there is a particular stage called the “Woman as Temptress,” where the hero comes across a force that wants to tempt them away from their set path. As Campbell wrote in The Hero With A Thousand Faces:
“But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul.”
This trope problematically links to a long, oppressive history going further back even than Eve from the Bible where women are labeled as the source of all temptation (see Pandora’s box). Campbell believed that the hero was reaching towards something pure, above the material world of man, and that that part of their initiation was overcoming worldly temptations of the flesh.
The “Woman as Temptress” is most viscerally contrasted against the “Atonement with the Father” stage, where the hero confronts the ultimate masculine force that they either have to overcome or reconcile with. Star Wars plays with this pretty directly where Luke Skywalker literally reconciles with his father, Darth Vader, at the end of Return of the Jedi (1983).
Steven Universe blows up this gendered dichotomy by making the majority of the forces — both the “good” Crystal Gems and the “evil” Diamond Authority — one gender. The alien Gem race is entirely female, and the one person who would qualify under the “Atonement with the Father” stage — the person Steven has spent the entire series fighting against — is his mother, and reconciling with her is impossible. As Steven says in the final episode of season 7 (Change Your Mind): “She’s gone.”
Furthermore, the world Steven is fighting for is not some mythical ideal separate from the material (or from “the flesh,” as Campbell would say), but is built on tangible, everyday connections. Steven is not trying to make the world less like itself. He is fighting for us to understand the world — for us to love one another — and that extends to his foes. Steven’s trump card isn’t a magical ring or a mythical sword, but empathy. He talks “the bad guys” out of their worldviews. All of his enemies, even the mighty Diamond Authority, become his friends.
His solution — that of changing other’s minds — is not some divine gift he receives when he “defeats” White Diamond. He has consistently demonstrated this desire from early on in the show. Whether its calling acid-spraying, baby centipeetles “cool,” or throwing a dance mixer for Homeworld Gems, he has demonstrated a radical empathy that has allowed him to connect with even the most hardened of individuals.
If Steven Universe ended with the last episode (Change Your Mind), then I would say that the moral of the story is that we need different kinds of heroes. The manly fighters of yore were products of a patriarchal society that valued aggression over empathy and understanding, and we need to change the types of people we look up to.
With the conclusion of Steven Universe Future, however, the message seems to go one step further: we need to get rid of our idea of a singular hero entirely.
The limited-run series Steven Universe Future is effectively an epilogue to the main show. It takes place following the events of the original series (Steven Universe, and Steven Universe: The Movie, respectively) and focuses on what happens after Steven has peacefully dismantled the tyranny of the Diamond Authority. There are no epic quests or villains to battle. His primary dilemma is adjusting to a world with no existential conflict — a world that no longer needs him to be the hero.
Steven has founded a school for displaced Gems to acclimate to life on Earth, and he is the head administrator, but it’s actually him who is having trouble adjusting to this new environment. Steven has spent his entire existence mitigating the mistakes of the past, especially those of his family.
This is the first time in his life, he has the emotional space to think about the future (hence, the title), and when he looks around, he sees a world moving on without him. His friends have all built intricate lives in between the five-year gap between Change Your Mind and Steven Universe The Movie : his friend’s band breaks up, his father Greg (Tom Scharpling) has become the new band’s manager, former will-they-or-won’t-they-couple Lars (Matthew Moy) and Sadie (Kate Micucci) have split up, Steven’s close friend Connie (Grace Rolek) is heading off to college, and all the Gems have become teachers at the new school.
Steven feels like his support network is drifting away, and, to some extent, it is, but because he is so used to being the hero, he doesn’t know how to ask for help. He instead pushes everyone away. Steven quits his job due to feelings of existential dread and lashes out at his friends. He even makes the rash decision to propose to Connie so that he can follow her to college and not make plans for the future.
These minor stressors lead to magical panic attacks where he turns pink, and his powers activate erratically. When he attends a doctor appointment with Connie’s mother (the doctor, played by Mary Elizabeth McGlynn), in episode fourteen (Growing Pains), she links his panic attacks to the trauma he has experienced while being a hero:
“…adverse childhood experiences, or childhood trauma, can have a lasting impact on how your body responds to stress. This can affect your social, emotional, and physical development. When humans are in crisis, the brain releases the hormone cortisol. Your heart races, your muscles tense…
I think all these experiences have been subjecting your body to a harmful amount of stress, and that’s affecting your ability to respond to new forms of stress in a healthy way. You’ve been dealing with geuine threats from such a young age, your body now is responding to minor threats as if your life were in danger”
Steven’s role as a hero has given him a severe form of psychological stress that is detrimental to his wellbeing. We don’t always think of our heroes in this way, but it’s a common theme running throughout much of media. The protagonist Katniss Everdeen, for example, ends The Hunger Games book series in exile and psychologically scarred.
This type of anxiety happens for people in real-life that we have given the label of “hero.” The rate of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is a type of condition where people who experience a traumatic event feel afraid or stressed even when there are not in danger, is high among physicians, firefighters, soldiers, and more. There is also the risk of trauma that happens from absorbing the psychological trauma of other people (sometimes called Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS)). This is common in other hero roles, such as that of teachers, nurses, and counselors.
We have only recently started to acknowledge the trauma that comes from fitting into one of society’s many heroic roles. When past heroes, both real and imagined, have talked about their trauma, larger society did not always treat them well. The literary character Harry Potter, for example, was routinely mocked in the mid-2000s for being “emo.” As one poster noted in the fan site theleakycaudron.org:
“…a lot of people I’ve spoken to, in person and online, have said that one of the things that they didn’t like about the book was Harry’s seemingly constant anger. I’ve heard many things such as, “He was way too moody’ “He was so ticked off all the time’ “His anger was so irritating’ and “He was such a whiner in this one.”
Harry spent his formative years trapped in an abusive household and then escaped that situation only to become the de facto figurehead in the fight against a homicidal eugenist.
He was under a lot of stress.
When his character reflected that emotional truth, many fans categorized his behavior as “unrealistic” and “annoying.”
We do not like it when our heroes buckle from the pressure of their unrealistic expectations, and despite his support network, Steven has internalized that message. In Steven Universe Future, a series of events (i.e., killing Jasper, assaulting White Diamond, etc.) cause him to spiral out of control, and he transforms into a literal monster. He becomes stories high and threatens to trample the town of Beach City.
Steven does not share his feelings with anyone in time to get help because he is used to being the one who listens — the person who takes on the Secondary Traumatic Stress of others. As Connie says in episode nineteen (I Am My Monster):
“Maybe Steven would care how sad you are because he always puts everyone else’s feelings first! But he can’t do that for you right now because he needs us this time! We all had Steven when we needed him, but the only person who’s never had Steven is Steven.”
The demand placed on Steven caused him to deaden parts of himself in an unhealthy way. In a heartbreaking scene, all of Stevens’ friends ultimately have to come together and hold him tightly until he finally feels safe.
It’s time to do that for the rest of the world as well.
In Campbell’s conception of the hero, the story ends with him returning home to share new knowledge with the world, forever changed by what they have experienced. The new hero reluctantly returns home (“the refusal of the return”), but goes back for the good of society to share their “boon.” It is a self-sacrificing mythos that places the hero’s duty above their own emotional health and safety.
In Steven Universe Future, the opposite happens — he leaves home forever.
Steven heads out on the road to carve out a life where he doesn’t have to take on the burden of saving the world. While he is changed by his experiences (and some hardcore Campbellian’s might argue that his rejection of herodom itself falls into Hero’s Journey territory), we walk away relieved Steven is leaving this situation.
We are also disgusted that he ever had to do it in the first place.
Campbell centers the entire process of the Monomyth on the hero being afraid to start the journey and then terrified for it to end. He assumes that the weight of destiny will propel these characters forward and treats them less like people and more like ciphers. The ultimate emphasis is on how they change over time.
There is never a stage where the hero is given the emotional space to process not just their doubt and fear over the quest, but the pain of their position and actions.
Never a stage where their allies pause to take on the Hero’s Anxiety.
Never a stage where the hero becomes not just one or two individuals, but a community.
Those human emotions of pain and assistance are left for the moments when the pages end and the screen fades to black.
We exist in an age of heroes. The highest-grossing films of all time right now center on superheroes saving the world to fulfill some grandiose destiny. We selfishly put so much on the individual and, collectively, give so little in return. We expect a hero to save us, but real salvation comes when we all come together to help each other.
If we can’t recognize that the current hero archetype is unhealthy in our fantasies, then how can we expect to build a world of real heroes in the here and now?