Steven Universe Comic #29 (2019) - Outline & Review

The twenty-ninth installment of the ongoing comic series for Steven Universe finds Amethyst in the dumps and Steven desperate to pull her out, only to learn that sometimes people just need to be sad sometimes.

Plot:

While fighting a corrupted gem, Steven notices that Amethyst isn’t her usual enthusiastic self. She seems kind of bored and depressed, even when she gets to use her Purple Puma form to perform a finishing move.

The team agrees that Amethyst seems upset, so Steven’s next mission is to cheer her up. He knows she usually likes eating their favorite foods, so he tries making Amethyst a massive pile of waffles.

But to Steven’s dismay, Amethyst is not interested in the waffles whatsoever. Baffled, Steven talks to his dad about what he can do to help, and though Greg tries to give him some perspective, Steven gets a new idea and decides Amethyst might want music. He plans a concert, inviting Sadie’s band and asking the other Crystal Gems to perform as well. But even though Amethyst responds to the concert invitation and shows up, she isn’t really feeling that either, and doesn’t want to take her place playing drums when the Gems are up.

Everyone else seems happy about how the concert turned out, but Steven is devastated that it “didn’t work.” He tries to talk to his father again, but this time Greg manages to get through to him that he can’t “make” Amethyst happy if she’s just sad right now. Sometimes she has intense feelings and she just needs to be allowed to feel them.

Finally, after Greg helps Steven really understand that he shouldn’t be actively trying to change Amethyst’s feelings–and how being down for no reason is normal and okay sometimes–Steven decides to Amethyst in a different way. He goes around town picking up food and videos, and he makes a nice place for Amethyst to have her sadness.

In the “sad-nest,” Steven has given Amethyst a bunch of stuff she can have while she’s sad, and he tells her it’s all hers to have alone while he stays with his dad and Garnet and Pearl are on a mission. He’s willing to leave her to it until whenever she’s ready, but then she unexpectedly invites him to share the sad-nest with her. She doesn’t want to be alone now.

So of course, Steven agrees, and they spend time together in the nest.

After a day or so, Amethyst speaks up to say she’s starting to feel better, and while she gives some credit to Steven, he acknowledges that he wasn’t trying to cheer her up anymore. She agrees that that’s why it worked.

Amethyst elaborates that she doesn’t know why she feels that way sometimes, and that’s part of the reason she usually isolates herself when it happens–she doesn’t want others to try to pull her out of it or fix it. But this sad-nest thing–and the permission to feel sad–was helpful. Steven suggests they can do the sad-nest whenever she needs to, and though Amethyst is concerned that she might be sad too often, he just comments that they’ll need more videos.

When the other Gems return, Steven and Amethyst let them know what they’ve been doing, and Steven promises that sad-nests can be used for anyone’s sadness if necessary.

Notable:

1. When Steven is trying to cheer Amethyst up with waffles, he says he realized she might be sad because she doesn’t have any waffles after “Pearl mentioned eating.” I’m wondering what that was about because we didn’t see them discuss it or anything, and the scene worked fine without Steven taking any suggestions from Pearl, so I was confused about that wording.

2. There are a couple glitches with Sadie and her band in this. Steven invites Sadie Killer and the Suspects to perform, which means the comic takes place after they’ve established the band, but when he goes to invite Sadie, she’s working in the donut shop. She quit working there when she became part of the band, so I was confused to see her at the counter again.

And later, even though Steven refers to “the Suspects” while inviting “Sadie Killer,” he later calls them “Sadie and the Killers.” In context it didn’t seem like an intentional misspeaking so I’m not sure what happened there.

3. During the concert, Steven yells “Are you ready to rock?” and Peedee replies, “As a matter of fact, yes.” It’s really funny.

4. It’s lovely that Greg knows Amethyst well enough to advise his son to respect Amethyst’s need to be sad. And it’s also good that he modifies the statement to say if it goes on a really long time you can consider getting a perpetually sad person some help. In general, though, letting people have their feelings and not jockeying to cheer them up is an important lesson here.

5. Another really interesting aspect of this comic is the portrayal of Amethyst’s sadness–in this case, Steven kind of pesters her to feel better and instead of lashing out at him or sullenly insulting his efforts, she takes care to withdraw from participating while thanking him anyway. Sometimes people do snap at the ones trying to help them, especially people like Amethyst, but in this case she didn’t get mad about his inappropriate efforts.