Lottie

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(I really wanted to do a cover with Neeza, and when I saw Greta Garbo... I knew it was her moment)

This film gives off a haunting show of the darkly satirical exploration of silent complicity and a generational trauma embedded within patriarchal family systems. The story is not solely about a funeral, but a dissection of the social rituals that have both bound and suffocated individuals within a culture that prioritizes appearances over truth. Nyoni constructed a film that is simultaneously intimate and metaphoric. This cinematic act of exorcism reveals a tradition that can mask violence and show how grief itself can be a performance.

The style of this film is a masterclass in tonal balance. Nyoni intertwines humor into tragedy, often using the absurd as a critique of the normal. The visual compositions — long static takes, symmetrical frames, and vivid color contrasts, — evoke both suffocation and ceremony. The surreal imagery that the film projects is like the recurring motif of flooding and the allegorical presence of the guinea fowl, turns the narrative into an allegory of awakening. All the women, similar to the guinea fowl, must learn to sound the alarm, in order to break the silence that the tradition enforces.

Nyoni’s choice of perspective is crucial. She tells this story through Shula’s restrained and observational eyes. Shula is more of a witness than an active protagonist. A conduit through which the audience perceives the absurdities and hypocrisies of the world around her. This much distance would create both discomfort and irony. As we watch the family debate the correct mourning attire or perform elaborate dances for the camera, the film forces us to ask ‘what is being mourned?’, the man, the tradition, or the illusion of moral integrity.

Thematically, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl connects deeply to ideas often discussed in storytelling and film courses: the externalization of the internal, narrative structure through revelation, and the role of point of view in moral storytelling. The film’s first act establishes the social setting and emotional detachment; the second act complicates that world through unspoken memory; and the third act provides catharsis, not through confrontation, but through subtle recognition. Nyoni resists the Western impulse toward dramatic confession — instead, she lets silence do the speaking.

What lingers most is the film’s tone. A quiet outrage wrapped in ritual politeness. The laughter that emerges in the face of trauma feels both liberating and incriminating. Nyoni’s satire is never cruel; it is precise. Her direction forces us to see how systemic violence hides behind choreography, how grief can be choreographed, and how the living continue to dance to avoid confronting the dead.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl situates itself within contemporary Zambia but also resonates across postcolonial African contexts. It reveals the tension between African traditionalism and Western modernity, between individual truth and collective identity. Nyoni’s lens, however, is never anthropological; she avoids exoticizing ritual. Instead, she uses it as a mirror for universal human behavior — the ways in which all societies create systems that protect power and suppress discomforting truths.

The thing rose upon its lowermost appendages, two long trunks that ended in flat, protruding flippers that branched into stubby, grasping mockeries of a sucker. It’s triple-hinged uppermost limbs were similar, but the ends branched into five smaller tentacles, each with three hinges of their own.

I froze, as the thing’s gaze fell upon me and it opened its hideous fish-jaw, filled with thick, many-shaped teeth like white shards of stone, and spoke in a shrill, discordant babble. I felt its horrid dry grip on my flesh, as those hinged appendages closed on me like the legs of a crab.

I felt the heat of its body, tasted its noxious, oily flesh through my touch, and prepared for the end, and all went black as a swoon overtook me.

I awoke, some time later, the cold and comforting water, banished back to the comfort of the sea and the dark. I should be grateful I am alive. I should cast aside the experience like a half-remembered dream.

I shall never again go swimming in search of lights above. The last thing I recall before the darkness took me was my right eye popping free of the thing’s grasp enough to see into the distance for one brief moment.

Oh my girls… oh you’re a powerful beautiful force of nature, and then a mortal brought you down to the level of something human…. Oh my girlssss how I think of you

Here are two things I believe about Steven Universe:

First, Steven Universe has a lot of high-concept science fiction worldbuilding concepts that it is not really interested in engaging with, because it is not what the show is about. These include:

The radical alternate history of the world, including the changed division of the states, the fact world war 2 possibly didn’t happen, the absence of Russia, the cultural fallout of California (somehow!) being flyover the way the Midwest is often treated as in real life. All of these are, like, hugely interesting, and totally ancillary to what the show wants to do, so they’re exclusively used for one of gags. 

The presence of “Roadside picnic”- style depots of abandoned alien technology all over the planet, including in places that teens are capable of casually accessing in some cases, as well as the presence of wandering inhuman monsters that have coexisted with humanity for as long as there’s been agriculture. This is the kind of thing that should have a much larger impact on the shape of culture than it was shown to, and the main reason it doesn’t is because the show is thematically about Steven acting as a bridge between the two mostly siloed worlds- but the world is implicitly big enough that stuff should be happening without him and around him! And yet you never get anyone remotely curious about any of it who don’t use Steven as an entry point.

The occurrence of a massive extraterrestrial war in the show’s backstory, with thousands of superpowered aliens fighting an ideological rebellion against their totalitarian homeworld, culminating in a giant not-qute-but-arguably-worse-than-a-massacre, and including ideological infighting among the “heroic” side about how far is too far. All issues famously better unpacked in a show for adults.

The biology and society of the gems themselves. Generally examined in broad strokes as needed to make the story work, but many of my favorite SU fan works are the ones that do deep headcanon dives into the how and why of the gems- what are gems, how did their culture come to be, what does the day-to-day look like, why do they all have weapons by default, what was their militarization for, what are the mechanics of fusion, why do fusions always have a coherent aesthetic concept if cross-gem fusions aren’t supposed to happen, what are the implications of a society where “wall decoration” is a job that a sentient being is custom-engineered to fill, often digging even further into the horrifying implications of their society than the show itself could get away with.

However.

Steven Universe has a number of emotional arcs, character arcs and trope examinations that work so well specifically because Steven Universe is unironically a show aimed at children. One one level, this is because you have to adapt really mature themes and arcs so that kids will get them and so the suits will let you; on another level you have to pull it off with the constraint of 11-minute episodes, you have to work with the strengths and weaknesses of animation, you have to throw in the flashy stuff that kids watch cartoons for. And that leads to some beats that, in terms of pure craft, are interesting in terms of how they’re executed in the specific context of a kids show.

Rose’s arc, particularly the fact that her death is suicide-coded as all-get-out, and her behaviors are allowed to ripple forward, benefit and damage her survivors in a consistent way in a way that I’ve never seen- in a children’s show.

Pearl’s abandonment issues, rampant projection, complicated feelings regarding Steven and Greg, her treatment of Connie, her difficulty forming an independent identity and the ways in which that hurts the people around her- in a children’s show.

Amethyst’s arc, her guilt simply for being born (and what that’s a metaphor for), everything that’s implied about her dynamic with Greg and Rose in Maximum Capacity, her identity problems and lack of cultural context, all unpacked over the course of dozens of episodes of a children’s show.

Lapis’s bumpy, non-linear recovery arc, including her toxic relationship with Jasper and an excellent approximation of an emotionally abusive relationship with Peridot, all- and I cannot beat this drum enough- in a children’s show. Similarly, Sadie and Lars’s whole thing and how that was given space to breathe and play out.

And of course, Steven himself. Steven’s long term arc is normally something you would find in a show like The Venture Brothers, something that’s willing to play off the tropes of the kid hero while being very much aimed at an older audience, with a level of detached parodic irony baked into the execution (since they’re often unpacking specific characters via expies.) Steven Universe is literally the only children’s thing I’ve seen on TV that, even as it does all the unironically fun adventures and misadventures, also does the work to examine how much being an archetypical wholesome Saturday-morning cartoon kid hero would screw you up, and we watch it happen in real time, and there’s a whole season fully highlighting the damage his status as a kid hero has done to his identity.  And I can’t stress enough the degree to which the impact would be lost if this arc hadn’t been done “in house;” if Steven Universe Future had been done twenty years from now as a deconstructive parody of a nostalgia property, it would suck. It wouldn’t land.

Steven Universe is a show that taught me to meet a story where it’s at, and judge it’s success and failures in terms of what it chose to prioritize, and not what I would have wanted to prioritize had I been writing it. Because at the end of the day, it’s fine to let the high-concept nerdbait setting elements fall by the wayside in favor of prioritizing the character-driven thematic stuff and genre analysis stuff. 

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