I loved Steven Universe: The Movie, didn’t you? Since September 2nd I’ve watched it at least four times and thought about it at least 4 quadrillion times. There’s something about Steven Universe that makes you get so wrapped up in everything to do with their world, and it’s a great feeling. For the first time in 3 years I even had another Steven Universe dream! Every second which I’ve had a pencil in my hand I’ve been doodling Spinel on every scrap piece of paper I’ve had access to, I just love her so freaking much. She’s a fantastic character and a great villain, who completely eclipsed the elusive White Diamond, and I’d like to tell you why.
Spoilers for Steven Universe and its movie! Watch out below!
Part 1 – Introductions
White Diamond
I have a slight issue with the way the Crewniverse writes mysteries for this show. If you didn’t know, the whole show from Season 1 to 5 was planned out from the very beginning, so they always knew they were working up to the Pink Diamond Reveal for the end of Season 3, and the Rose Quartz Twist for the end of Season 5, and yet because they’ve known all along they’ve been planting clues since the beginning. The problem is that as Steven is so immature at the beginning of the series, he never asks any follow-up questions. Even when he went to the moon and saw the murals painted for four of the diamonds, he was only ever told about Yellow and Blue afterwards and he never once asked about Pink or White.
That might just be a flaw of Steven himself, but I believe they write him this way to maintain suspense, because what 13-year-old would really see a huge mural of four diamonds and never ask any questions about them? The Crewniverse doesn’t create suspense by asking questions that can’t be answered, but by dropping basically pointless clues and only asking the questions when the story is ready for them to be answered.
Don’t get me wrong, it does work sometimes, for example when Jasper screams at Steven that her diamond is PINK DIAMOND! the first time her name’s ever said, right before she’s corrupted, but then Steven stops caring again. By this point, his extreme lack of curiosity can’t be answered by it being a part of his personality.
I’m trying to think of examples in the show where Steven just asks the logical questions straight up, but I can’t find any, except for maybe A Single Pale Rose where he straight up asks Pearl if she shattered Pink, starting up a series of events that shook up every aspect of Steven’s life. And at the beginning of Lion 4: Alternate Ending, where the episode starts with Steven trying to find a message in his mother’s tape. Please leave a comment if you can think of any more times because I really think these two times might be it.
For a lot of the show’s mysteries this works fine, but not for White Diamond. The ultimate ruler of homeworld has been showed non-explicitly since at least episode 8 of the show, and was without a doubt shown very explicitly in Season 2’s It Could have Been Great, but he never says anything. I know that a recurring theme in the show is that the gems aren’t the best at telling him about gem history, but to the point where PERIDOT is the one to tell him about the diamonds and at that point basically only Yellow Diamond is absurd.
When we finally do find out about White Diamond, bear in mind she is the FINAL VILLAIN of the main run of Steven Universe — the ultimate boss — guess how many episodes before Change Your Mind she’s introduced in? Five. She is acknowledged as being alive and not just a homeworld myth five episodes before their ultimate showdown. I don’t want to be all moany though, because the Crewniverse can and have gotten it right so many times before. Remember Season 1’s penultimate episode The Return? That had so much build-up. Peridot’s presence was made clear from episode two. The Return is the 51st episode. When she finally does show her face in the 36th episode Warp Tour it’s legitimately chilling. Lapis Lazuli is also central to the Season 1 climax, and she had episodes on her own.
Peridot had at least a good couple of appearances to build-up to the Season 1 climax. White Diamond, the ultimate villain, had one. Don’t get me wrong, it was extremely well done. I remember the chills the Steven Universe Fandom and I collectively felt when she showed up on screen. Her animation, the music and her voice were all absolutely perfect, and yet it just wasn’t enough. Altogether we got about 15 minutes of seeing White Diamond being a villain in the show at all.
Spinel
Spinel doesn’t do anything differently. The Crewniverse must have still been working on at least the end of Season 5 while they were working on the movie, so they knew that Spinel was going to be the villain here. And of course they could have put in a little easter egg somewhere, but it works better with her theme that they didn’t. Because Spinel’s entire theme is being forgotten. She’s a 6000-year-old 6-year-old, who acts like a child, a phase of your life that’s supposed to be forgotten. She’s animated using rubber hose animation, which is essentially completely forgotten now since its glory days back in the 1940’s, surviving only in isolated bubbles like Cuphead. Pink Diamond straight up forgot about her, and they couldn’t have been more on the nose about this: she’s the first gem we’ve ever seen with the power to make Gems forget.
It’s as if all movie she’s saying ‘Pink Diamond forgot about me, so you can forget about EVERYTHING!’.
I know I already pointed this out when I ranked the songs in this movie, but it’s just such an important detail I need to mention again. Everyone knows that in Other Friends she changes from saying it’s swell to meet them to it’s swell to beat them, and it’s a nice detail. But what made her change her mind? It was when Steven asks who she is. It’s when she realises she wasn’t just abandoned under false pretences, it’s when she’s told definitively that she was simply forgotten about. Notice how she doesn’t pull out her Rejuvenator until she hears that she’s been forgotten. It’s being forgotten that enrages her, and pushes her over the edge to make the gems forget aswell.
It makes her story all the more sad. She brought the Rejuvenator with her. She must have had a tiny fear all along that Pink Diamond wasn’t just tormenting her on purpose, but that she had forgotten about her. She knew what she was getting into all along. She was just in denial.
Another thing about the Rejuvenator is that Pearl and maybe even Garnet must have known what it was, and the looks on their faces are haunting when they’re hit by it, and yet Spinel is happy. She laughs like a maniac knowing any second all of her past is going to be erased, and that says a lot about just how miserable she is.
The point I’m trying to make is White Diamond is the Queen of Homeworld. It doesn’t make any sense to introduce her so late. With Spinel however, the Crewniverse uses the fact that she’s never been mentioned to their advantage. Rather than it being a joke that no one’s ever heard of her like they did to the villain of Kung Fu Panda 3, her being forgotten is weaved perfectly into her theme, character, and most of all her backstory, in such a perfect way.
Part 2 – Redemptions
White Diamond
One really common irk a lot of people have with Change Your Mind is how quickly the Diamonds are redeemed. As I said in my Change Your Mind Review, the order of the Diamonds’ redemptions is the exact order of how believable they are. Everyone knew Blue Diamond had it in her to be redeemed, and Yellow loves Pink so much she’d basically do anything for Steven, but White Diamond? Because of her severe lack of screen time, she barely gets any characterisation apart from everyone else’s opinions. So we barely know how she feels about Pink or how she views other gems, or what she even spends her time doing.
Her lack of screen time is best shown by comparing it to Yellow Diamond. First mentioned by Jasper at the end of Season 1 in the height of a thrilling episode, and then praised by Peridot towards the end of Season 2, we actually get to see her in a scene with so much build-up to it there was no one watching it who wasn’t on the edge of their seat. Then Yellow Diamond continues to be a very nearby presence for the rest of the show, whether it’s through all the armies she sends to Earth, when she shows up in flashbacks, THE TRIAL, and especially when she comes to Earth herself to beat the eventual shards of Roze Quartz so deep into the ground they join the cluster. Her best bit of characterisation is by far when Steven catches her singing to comfort Blue and about how much she still loves Pink, and how she’s trying to deal with it by wiping away all the reminders. It hurts.
Looking back, Yellow Diamond is done perfectly. Despite her cold outer shell, her motivations for her cruelty and her catalysts for redemption are laid out very early and very clearly.
White Diamond’s redemption doesn’t rest on her love for Pink however. If you listen really closely during Change Your Mind, you can catch the four or so sentences that attempt to justify her cruelty and build a basis for her redemption. But you do have to have both ears open because it goes by so very quickly. This happens after she’s accepted that Steven isn’t Pink, but instead of taking his word for it, she does it in a marvellous scene where she wrenches his gem from his body, and then has a breakdown when Pink doesn’t come back.
White: I can’t have a flaw, I’m supposed to be flawless. If I’m not perfect then, who am I? If you’re not Pink then who are you? Who is anyone?
Steven: You know, if you just let everyone be whoever they are, maybe you could let yourself be whoever you are too.
White: But I’m not supposed to be like this. I’m supposed to know better. I’m supposed to be better. I’m supposed to make everything better!
Steven: You can. But first, you’ll have to leave your own head.
Sidenote, the way White Diamond pronounces ‘better’ is beautiful. I love all the Diamonds’ accents.
After this short speech, White Diamond stares at Steven with curious eyes, then does whatever he says.
So what’s White’s motivation?
Her cruelty comes from a belief that she’s supposed to make everything better, and she lists off all the things that she’s supposed to do. Who made her think like this? Are all these supposed to‘s based on her own conceptions of what it means to be a leader, or was she placed at the head of gem kind and was told what she’s supposed to do? It’s never made clear. And the lack of a clear motivation is what really ruins her redemption and makes it feel like it doesn’t make sense. If we don’t know why she’s evil in the first place, it doesn’t make sense for her to come round. Fortunately, it looks like we’re gonna get something in Steven Universe Future that’s stronger than White and might be what made the gems in the first place, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
Spinel
Spinel’s Backstory
Everyone loves Spinel. I’ve legit seen like two people on the planet who don’t love Spinel, and compared to the millions who watched the movie, that’s a pretty good success rate. For most of the movie she’s a fine character, taking the backseat mostly while the other gems find their puzzle pieces, being kind of annoying and clingy. If that’s all we’d got from Spinel — as in Steven just had enough, poofed her and asked Peridot to bubble her — I don’t think she would have been nearly as popular. It’s Drift Away that does it. Spinel’s song dedicated to explaining her backstory and why she has it out for Steven so badly.
Spinel would have been an OK character, but the deep connections fans feel with her isn’t because of her happy playful form, it’s because of the deep emotional torment she went through prior to the movie. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go and watch Drift Away. Knowing that Pink doesn’t come back, watching Spinel get closer and closer to remembering the emotional torture Pink put her through (intentionally or not) is so hard to watch. For about a month after watching the movie I would feel a literal pit in my stomach just thinking about Spinel.
But apart from just feeling sad for Spinel, we get to see her backstory. And the Crewniverse treats the backstory in a very different way from most media. First, we see her evil form, then her good form, and then we see the bridge between them. The cause. And it works so well I wonder why more shows don’t do this. It provides a b-plot mystery for most of the movie about why Spinel turned evil, but it doesn’t need to be the focus. Another plus is that we get to really experience happy Spinel outside of flashbacks (which is how it would usually be), and instead get to fully understand the personality she was made with, so when we get her backstory, it all clicks together.
But her backstory itself. It’s so understandable. Not as in the 6000 years part, because none of us could even get close to imagining how long that really feels, let alone beginning to understand it. But being abandoned, that we can understand. And an abandonment on the basis of a lie. An extremely cruel lie (assuming Pink knew she wasn’t going to come back). Honestly, I think it’s enough to make me want to kill someone. That or fall into a 6000 year depression.
Her Redemption
Spinel’s first redemption was extremely rushed. Really everyone could see it. Though Found is a beautiful little melody that does an amazing job communicating what Spinel needs, it’s not enough. I remember my head running through the possibility of this being her real redemption, and honestly, I believed it. I didn’t think she’d turn evil again, yet I wasn’t particularly surprised when she did.
The reason for her turning evil again was perfectly done. She can’t trust Steven with his intentions about using the Rejuvenator. Of course she can’t. Why would she after she was abandoned by Pink? After she was treated like a fool on the basis of a lie for 6000 years? Hats off to Sarah Stiles by the way. She is a top-notch voice actor who perfectly portrays every gram of Spinel’s betrayal and mistrust in these lines.
Spinel: What’s your plan for me, huh? You gonna put me somewhere? You gonna leave me somewhere? You gonna leave me alone?
Looking back, since Spinel is fake redeemed for only about a minute before she turns evil again, it can be hard to understand why they felt the need to put it in the movie. They wanted to highlight how little trust Spinel will have for others now, and to show a sneak peek of the difficulties she’s going to face for the rest of her life.
CONCLUSION
The fundamental thing that makes Spinel a better villain then White Diamond is that we understand her motivation. Who knows why White Diamond is evil? At this point, it’s anyone’s guess. But Spinel has deep emotional trauma because of Pink, which makes her story all the more understandable.
That’s not to say I don’t love White Diamond though. If having a subpar villain was what we needed to get the first 45 minute Steven Universe special with a giant Voltron robot battle against the temple fusion, then keep em coming. I loved Change Your Mind with every bone in my body, and I’m pretty sure I’ve memorised all of White Diamond’s lines. I loved her as a villain, and everything she says is just as iconic now that she’s good.
Really it goes without saying that these guys both needed a redemption so hard, and it feels my heart with joy that this screenshot can even exist.
Who do you think was a better villain; a little jester, or the literal Queen of Gemkind?
– Gingerjumble
Gingerjumble 