In the twenty-first episode of the fourth season of Steven Universe, Steven becomes obsessed with his destiny. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Steven Universe.Â
Trigger Warning: For brief mention of drug use/addiction.
There’s an element of “Lion 4: Alternate Ending” that I could relate to for an entirely unintentional reason. I find stories about missing or absent parents intriguing because I am adopted, so even if these narratives really don’t have anything to do with me or my experience, they often still resonate with me. How do you know what your parents want for you or from you if they’re not around? What if you can’t ask them what they expect of you?
Not every adopted kid goes though that sort of struggle; I’ve met plenty of them who never develop an interest in learning about or reaching out to their biological parents. It’s immaterial to them because they’ve only known the parents who adopted them. Perhaps if there wasn’t such a mystery surrounding my adoption – I still don’t know if what I’ve heard about my biological parents is fact or fiction, rumor or truth – I wouldn’t be so interested. But there’s probably always going to be a part of me that wonders: what was my father like? Why did he abandon my mother? Is he even alive anymore? Where was he from? Does he know my brother and I exist? I happened to meet my biological mother once nearly a decade ago, and I expected that I’d have a chance to have a lot of my questions answered. Virtually none of them were. Years of continuous drug use had taken away much of my biological mother’s memories; she couldn’t even recall the name of my father, what city he came from, or where they even met. Even worse, it was like two and a half decades worth of time had not passed for her. She treated me like a child the entire time.
Is that the same context as Steven within this episode? No, of course not, and even a cursory examination of the plot and Steven’s past shows how my own experience is nothing like his. But it’s a dynamic I recognize, one that’s hard to deal with when much of the world doesn’t have to. I dealt with it recently by obsessing. I became consumed with the idea that if I could research well enough, I could penetrate the odd wall of silence on my mother’s side of the family. My brother and I actually spent three successive weekends plotting to find old papers and documents in my mother’s home that might shed light on everything. We found pieces, much like Steven found “clues,” but the picture that arose was incomplete, and I had to accept that it was, most likely, always going to remain that way. That acceptance is part of Steven’s journey, too. The videotape that Rose Quartz left for Steven felt incomplete because he imagined that there had to be more. Was there a hidden message in what Rose said? Were there clues in the silence? What if the tape itself was another clue?
I wonder, then, if Lion always knew that there wasn’t anything else to the tape, which would explain his reluctance to take Steven anywhere. But this was a lesson Steven had to learn the hard way. He had to discover Rose’s junkyard, which should have been all the confirmation he needed that there was nothing “more” to the message she left behind. He had to find that second tape so that he could discover that the only “secret” Rose kept about Steven’s birth was that she would have named him Nora if things had turned out differently.
It’s nice to have a purpose or a destiny when the world seems confusing and scary. Being able to focus with a goal in mind can be incredibly comfortable. I say this as someone who hates feeling aimless, who tries as hard as they can to avoid ambiguity I know that I’ll forever wonder about what my family might have been like. I also know I’ll never really get anything concrete about the people who created me and brought me into this world. But the gift of life is now mine, and like Steven, I’ll create my own meaning out of it instead of waiting for one that won’t ever come.
The video for “Lion 4: Alternate Ending” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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