I appreciate that even in anger, Steven doesn’t end that by saying ‘jerks like you’. I would interpret it as a deliberate choice on Steven’s part. Even in the heat of anger, you still have a choice about what you say and if you’re going to hurt someone.
We don’t know a lot about Lars, but I wonder if there isn’t a similarity between them. They’re both masking pain with distress signals. Lars is to criticise people who demonstrate care towards him. Steven’s, it seems, is to minimise situations and try extra hard to please people. I wonder, really, why it’s Lars whose affection he really wants to win. If there’s something similar in how they were nurtured and cared for that led to this attempt to hide things from people.
I wonder how well Steven’s caregivers are responding to his sadness (if the last fourteen episodes are any indication, the answer is probably ‘not very well’). It’s painful to enter your child’s suffering, and if they aren’t manifesting any obvious problems, it’s easier to assume that all is well. Especially if you have a lot of your own pain to deal with. But the unspoken reality of Steven’s life with the Gems is that he came to them because of a loss. He is grieving a loss he can’t resolve, a mother whose face he never saw, a woman who had thoughts about him he can never know. If these photos we’ve seen are all we have of her, it might be that Steven has never seen his mother’s eyes. Not joy, or sadness, anything human to connect to or that he can use to decide how she might feel about him if she had known him. She’s just this figure of quiet repose. She would probably love him, because why wouldn’t she? She loved everyone and everything. She loved gross moss and stuff that could murder you, so she’d definitely love her own kid, right? Steven would just be one more thing enfolded into that expansive, incredible idea of a remote being who loved endlessly.
It’s really, painfully obvious that Steven’s parents are afraid of emotional vulnerability, and even worse, that the Gems aren’t curious. The cool kids are curious about each other, likes and dislikes and legends and music and shirts. The Gems have betrayed themselves as massively incurious about everything, including Steven. Rose must have cared for this moss for dozens, if not hundreds of years, and at no point did they ask her about this ritual she obviously cared deeply about. And Rose apparently didn’t bother to tell them either. Just like the laser light cannons (although to be fair, it was probably the last thing on her mind during pregnancy). The Gems aren’t emotionally in tune with humans, and they don’t seem to be prepared to deal with their own emotions, let alone even consider Steven might have unresolved grief or helplessness they could help him with. The Gems are Larses, not cool kids. They aren’t ready to gather in a space of openness and honesty and validate each other’s feelings. Steven’s home is a place of judgement and condemnation, and that means, sadly, they aren’t yet people Steven feels safe enough to express his emotions. They’re not ready to say ‘We’re sorry you never got to know your mother like we knew her’.
