One Hit Wonder

This is a pretty major letdown, ngl.

Something that’s easy to overlook/forget because of SU’s saccharine branding is that the non-steven Crystal Gems are genuinely kinda ruthless bastards in the face of genuine threats; they live in an entirely different genre from Steven at the start of the series, and they react to Lapis Lazuli with basically the same vitriol and violence that SU’s detractors often ask for. They would have probably “crushed her head” in the heat of battle if she hadn’t so massively outclassed them, and there’s no question they’d pulverize Burnscar with a similar lack of hesitation if she were to attack Beach City. The show is idealistic; the characters aren’t. You could drop the non-Steven Gems into Earth Bet and they’d attune to the two-faced dirty-deeds-done-in-alleys cape culture without missing a beat. 

But! Steven Universe is a fantasy show, and one of the elements of the fantasy is that everyone who suffers and does terrible things as a result gets to have a second chance. To enable that you need secondary fantasy elements, like, say, absolutely nobody dying when a leviathan-level hydroshaker abducts the ocean, or the thousands of people who were killed and experimented on being starfish aliens who can be painstakingly reassembled, reanimated, and given an eternity to heal mentally and physically, and no humans being permanently killed in the (contemporary) crossfire, and all the doomsday weapons deployed with intent to kill are disarmed in time, and so on and so forth. It’s a kids show so casuality is allowed to contort like that. 

But worm, with the Slaughterhouse 9 and honestly with most out-and-out villainous characters, does have a very similar “what a waste of human life” factor going on. Everyone there is coming from some kind of massive pain, most of them are, like, arrested in their emotional development as children or teens- they’re agentic in their evil and their current terrible circumstances- just like Lapis and Jasper!- but the book is clear that they’re not unpitiable figures. Now, Worm also has a much stronger grasp of the kind of bodycounts in play and also the actual willingness of the layman to forgive and forget such things, and so when things finally do line up for a member of the nine to have a redemption arc it’s only after a set of convoluted circumstances, she’s one of the only ones to make it out despite the nine having many equally-pitiable figures, and she’s still hated and feared, and rather than magically flipping the switch from “maladjusted” to “okay” it’s very clear that Bonesaw is good now literally only because it’s the right thing to do, god knows she didn’t make any friends by flipping and she’s not enjoying herself very much.

But I look at the nine, and I see- you know, they’ve got these simplistic trauma-response motivations, they aren’t really materially benefiting from anything they’re doing, being in the 9 is in many ways its own continuous punishment, and god help me. Sand down their on-screen presentation a little and they’d work pretty well as Steven Universe villains. 

TRAVELER: lmao fuck off no parents ass runt Ill never help an enemy of humanity

SAVATHUN: [wearing unbelievably tight KILL ALL HUMANS t-shirt] *SLAMS DICK ON TABLE* hey old bitch I'm going to die soon make sure to bring me back to life with powers