Explore, create, and be inspired as we embark on a journey filled with limitless artistic possibilities. The rest of the book is a bunch of adorable Crewniverse art–extras, blog drawings, promos, and gifts to each other. They wanted it for years: The wedding concepts always included the tuxedo for Sapphire and the wedding dress for Ruby.

They didn’t have time to do quite a few stories they wanted time for, like a Rhodonite story, a Lars side story, and Diamond “prehistory” and religion; all of it was put aside for the main arc with Steven. The timeline includes the birth of the Diamonds, the emergence and major story beats for each major character, and some philosophy of the driving force behind each. Rebecca tells the story of driving off a ridge and getting stuck in the desert, comparing this to Ruby’s tumble during her Wild West adventure and using it as inspiration. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform.She also was personally behind the idea of Steven wanting to dump his problems by becoming Stevonnie, and got to work with Etienne Guignard on inventing the Pearl creation backstory with Volleyball. One of the concept art images for the Off Colors features Rhodonite crouching by Padparadscha saying “Don’t worry, I won’t let them hurt you. For the uninitiated, Steven is a plucky young chubster who plays the ukulele and loves catbased candy - and he just happens to be a Crystal Gem, one of an legendary group of warriors which once included his late Mom, Rose. And the fact that props, tools, and even walls and doors could be living was taken from a concept Rebecca thought was horrible from old Busby Berkeley movies, where people were inanimate objects and it was portrayed as lovely.

Most people, if not ALL people, can relate to this, but for those of us with a special relationship with Steven Universe because of queer identity, this hits hard. The eponymous Steven is a boy who--alongside his mentors, the Crystal Gems (Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl)--must learn to use his inherited powers to protect his home, Beach City, from the forces of evil. But it doesn’t have to be anything grand to be something we respect–this show’s authenticity comes largely from how personal everything is, drawn from real-life experiences and incidental truths from each artist’s perspective, leaning hard on childhood and formative experiences. Timelines reveal that early plans for Pink Diamond’s first Pearl originally had her getting destroyed by Pink during a game, and then her destruction was rewritten as a punishment from the Diamonds after Pink Pearl defended Pink Diamond to the other Diamonds. It’s very interesting because she DOES seem to protect Padparadscha in the show, but doesn’t seem confident about it in her final version, even though it does seem like she’d be “programmed” to guard aristocratic Gems because of her Ruby and Pearl makeup.And of course it’s specified that Steven was supposed to get Pink Diamond flashbacks by going to the Palace on Homeworld. The book is titled “End of an Era” for a couple reasons–obviously because it is released after the show has wrapped, but also because Gem history recently ended its “Era 2” and began Era 3–an age of prosperity and peace. The acknowledgment of his battle damage, of his trauma, was necessary and real, and helpful in an important way to the core audience.

K. Jemisin, a well-known science fiction author who’s a huge fan of the show (and wrote a really excellent series that also has a weird geological connection, by the way). And the cover, like its predecessor, is shiny and decorated with a beach scene featuring minimalistic characters–this time it’s the Gems at night in front of the Temple, and on the back cover is a big pink leg ship in a cross-legged pose.

There’s a huge amount of supplemental material in this section so there’s no way I could name it all. The wedding made so much sense to Rebecca and the crew that they couldn’t imagine a wholesome couple like Ruby and Sapphire not having a wedding episode. Drew Green and Maya Petersen, who came on board as storyboarders officially in Future, also weighed in on writing for a “mature” show, how to deal with Steven being a “moral compass” while being sort of unreliable, and what they learned as Crew that they didn’t know as fans.