Let’s talk about Onion

I really liked the episode Onion Gang, and there are some things I wanted to discuss about it. I put them on hold for a while though because I got some asks that were rather ambivalent about the episode and I wanted to talk about them too.

I think Onion is a very complex character and the way many people have been reading him as autistic-coded, to me, is pretty consistent with the behaviour of some of the people I’ve met with autism. I’m not an expert on mental illness, so I hesitate to conclude that he is autistic, in case I make use of the wrong word, but let’s expound on that further and perhaps a more accurate word can be used based on his character description.

Given that, I think it’s best to begin with an analysis of his character before moving on to the implications of Onion Gang. With that said, let’s get started.

1. There is a real difference in how Onion interacts with the world

Personally, I would be one of the last people to label a character who just happens to be quirky as having mental illness, because I don’t think it’s a great narrative to reinforce that mentally ill people can just turn it off when it’s not narratively needed, or a comedic punchline. With that said, I do find Onion’s behavioural patterns very unique. The differences between his and say, his brother’s actions are not perceived, but real.

For one, he very rarely speaks. And who does he talk to? His parents, and I’m assuming, Sour Cream. It’s not a failing on his part to understand that people are trying to communicate with him. He nods, gestures, and at times, flat out ignores when people are speaking to him. It’s just that speaking isn’t his main means of communicating with other people.

He talks to his parents because he’s very comfortable with them. In Onion Trade, for instance, he lets Yellowtail carry him. Vidalia does the same thing in Onion Friend.

Source: SU Wiki

He doesn’t really let other people get physically close to him. I feel he becomes uncomfortable when people get close, but when it’s someone he feels safe around, he likes being picked up and squeezed. 

Because Onion doesn’t seem like the kind of character who wants to be alone all the time. For the majority of the show, that’s how we see him. But this episode has shown us that’s not how he’d prefer it. If it were up to him, he’d always be with his friends. Much like most children his age, it’s the time to be very social and explore the world through his peer group. In the absence of that, he fills his time with a lot of activities he likely copies off television and other forms of popular entertainment.

Notice that Onion is given a lot of free reign with regards to doing things. In many episodes, he’s walking by himself even though it’s late (Restaurant Wars), or doing potentially dangerous things like taking a crowbar to the arcade (Future Boy Zoltron) or riding a motorcycle (Onion Trade). 

It’s not that his parents don’t care. The Yellow Fam is a very loving family. But they are very busy. Yellowtail isn’t home a lot of the time. I’ve covered before how fishermen leave before dawn, because that’s when the fish are out. They come back in the morning or around noontime after their catch and even then YT has to sell that catch. And then afterwards, he’s going to have to sleep because in the middle of the night he’s going to set off again. 

Vidalia has begun to rediscover her own individuality after settling down and having a family. And one interesting thing I’d like to point out is that the other people in Beach City don’t reprimand Onion for his behaviour. They stop him when he’s about to do something harmful, but we don’t hear people lecturing him or saying he’s being weird the way Steven has voiced out. In Too Short to Ride, Mr. Smiley reacts with horror, not anger, that Onion is juggling flaming torches.

Recall that Steven Universe is seen from Steven’s viewpoint. At this point, it’s very likely that the town and its adults know about Onion’s condition. And they’re all helping out in the classic “it takes a village to raise a child” way. But it’s not something they felt the need to tell Steven. The show has never made a big deal about details our society has deemed need-to-know, like race and gender. The town also sees Steven as a child too. It’s easy to forget he’s fourteen sometimes. It may be one of those times when raising Steven to just accept that some people do things differently is better than telling a young person, “Hey, this person is different in a way you can’t completely understand so your fear will just alienate that person from you.”

I think this is further reinforced by how Onion is treated at home.

Source: SU Wiki

In any other household in Beach City, this behaviour would have been chastised or at least looked upon with worry. Vidalia didn’t bat an eyelid at it. This isn’t her being a lax parent. Recall that in Greg the Babysitter, there was a very real fear of her murdering Greg if anything happened to Sour Cream. She’s supportive of her children and attends SC’s concerts, probably acting as the bridge between him at YT at times. There’s no reason to say that she isn’t concerned about Onion’s life. But that’s the thing. For children with autism, you can’t “fix” their behaviour. Many therapists will accustom children to socialising with others, so they can be functioning and can look out for themselves, but they can’t erase his autism. Basically, they’re not forcing him to act like “all the other children.” Onion can be Onion, but he also has to act within a reasonable set of expectations.

Additionally, autism, like many mental conditions, has a spectrum and manifests in many forms. Some people don't like being touched or hugged by human beings at all, but they’re fine with hugs from animals. Some never speak, and communicate though other means. It’s very unique. Onion has shown multiple times that he likes the feeling of squishing things. The ketchup packets he drives over, the mashed potatoes, the bugs, I think he prefers pressure stimulation, and that’s why he often grabs Steven or tugs at him. To Steven, it’s an intrusive gesture. But it holds a very different significance for Onion, and that leads me to my next point.

2. Onion looks up to and cares about Steven

Relationship Analysis: Sour Cream’s Family

I had a lot of feelings coming off watching Drop Beat Dad, and I thought it would be best to explore those feelings through analysing the relationship among the different characters of Sour Cream’s family. Given there are 12 possible 1-on-1 relationships, and 4 relationships involving three characters, and 1 relationship involving all four family members. Math aside, that’s a lot of possible relationships to talk about and for this analysis, I’ll be talking about the ones pertinent to the episode.

So to avoid further boring anyone with numbers, let’s get to it.

1. Vidalia has probably been very neutral about Marty to Sour Cream

The first shot of the episode has Sour Cream cheerfully greeting his mother. And this is one of the indicators we have of his relationship with Vidalia. SC effects a very cool personality. In Onion Friend, when he’s in the zone, he just put up a hand to acknowledge Steven’s presence. But he has a soft spot for his mother, and we can see why. In Drop Beat Dad, Marty hasn’t been around to see SC grow up for at the very least nine years. That’s a long time, and that’s only the time after SC hit his growth spurt. There could be more years than that.

But SC greets Marty pretty excitedly. In fact, Steven has a more negative reaction to Marty than SC himself. Marty knows he has a son, and Marty is fully aware he’d abandoned SC and Vidalia all these years. SC doesn’t seem tense or uncomfortable around Marty, though.

One thing that people have brought up is why it seemed Marty was never forced to take responsibility for SC and Vidalia. He came all the way to Beach City to pay Greg his royalty check, but one popular post that has come up is why he hadn’t paid for welfare or anything of the sort.

Well, there’s a very strong possibility that Vidalia didn’t want to accept any sort of support from Marty. This was her attitude towards him in Onion Friend:

Source: SU Wiki

Vidalia doesn’t like Marty. Given the way Amethyst addressed him, she’s probably talked about with Vidalia a couple of times while they were hanging out. In fact, because it was one of the first things Ame brought up, it was probably a significant part of Vidalia’s life when Ame and Vidalia had started to become friends. This was right after Marty got Vidalia pregnant; he drove away and Greg was just settling in Beach City, getting to know the gems and getting the gems to interact with him as a human being.

Amethyst was always curious about human beings; we see as much in Story for Steven.

In the next few weeks, Greg would go around Beach City and meet new people. In fact, one of the first residents he’d met was Vidalia, when she came out of the van with Marty. So after she’d found out she was pregnant, they’d hit it off, probably bonding over how awful Marty was. And Amethyst would tag along.

After the anger passed, Vidalia is pretty apathetic. She doesn’t like him, but she doesn’t want to know where he is or how he’s doing. She doesn’t care. There was probably a point in time in which she called up Marty and told him, and Marty, being Marty, tried to placate her for a while, make promises, things like what we’d seen in Drop Beat Dad. In the end though, Vidalia, being the quick-thinking person she is, let him go and wanted nothing to do with him. And that’s the answer she gives Amethyst.

I include the next part of their dialogue because it’s clear Vidalia didn’t settle for Yellowtail. She chose him, and she’s happy with her choice. She stands by it.

Source: SU Wiki

She endearingly calls him a fisherman, she’s had another child with him, and they’re happy together.

Source: SU Wiki

Vidalia is a strong woman. She wouldn’t have needed to be with someone. I’m rather certain she could have raised Sour Cream on her own, but she feels more fulfilled when she’s with YT. That’s great for her. Again, she’s not going to let what happened with Marty define her life.

And that’s probably why she doesn’t bring up all his awfulness when she talks to SC about him. Resentment only breeds more resentment. She doesn’t want to burden SC with a fight that isn’t his. For all Vidalia knew, Marty would never come back into their lives after he left the first time, which we know is sometime after SC was born. Even then, he most likely didn’t stay for long periods. He’d be here then gone and the cycle would repeat until Marty finally dropped out of SC’s life sometime around nine years ago.

So SC doesn’t have memories of Marty being awful, because Marty was never there. He believes his “dad” is a busy man in the music world, and he knows nothing about those two things. And this would explain his “fact” that 80% of all Germans make a living as DJs. 

Vidalia most definitely told SC about what Marty did, because their family is very honest with one another. But she’s not going to unload her emotional baggage on him. She’s going to raise her son right and that’s all that matters. That may also be why she was drawn to YT in the first place, which leads to the next point.

2. Yellowtail and Sour Cream communicate a lot

The Cool Kids as CG Parallels (Part 2 of 3- Sour Cream)

Okay, so this series of posts is about how the parallels of the CKs are as the lives the CGs would have been living had the Rebellion never happened.

My original plan was to fit it in one post, but since the first one got pretty lengthy, link to the other posts here): 

Part 1 of 3- Buck

Part 2 of 3- Sour Cream

Part 3 of 3- Jenny

Sour Cream

Source: SU Wiki

I think one thing we’ll always remember about Sour Cream is that he just wants to be a DJ. He’s pretty good at it too. He gets gigs for himself and those gigs are pretty well-attended, just look at the one in Alone Together. He has Vidalia as a mother, who’s pretty open about the direction he wants to take in his career, especially considering she does a lot of art on her own. On the other hand, his stepfather Yellowtail, wants him to be a fisherman, and that seems to be the last word on the subject.

In Joy Ride, he says:

Source: SU Wiki

And DJ-ing is something he’s apparently only comfortable doing when Yellowtail isn't around. In Onion friend, we see how Sour Cream blasts music throughout the house when Yellowtail is out, and Vidalia shrugs it off as a usual occurrence.

So at this point, regardless of what Vidalia thinks of his DJ-ing career, she isn’t as actively intervening. She’s more of hinging on things working out. Yellowtail seems to have the bigger say on his being a DJ. Away from that issue though, when he isn’t as stressed, Sour Cream is laid back and he doesn’t feel the need to talk as much. He goes around Beach City regularly just observing people.

Looking at his colour scheme,

Source: SU Wiki

It’s very similar to Pearl’s. He has the blues, blondes, greens, and they have similar eyes and angular features.

Had the Rebellion not happened, Pearl would have remained just another Pearl on Homeworld. But the reason Pearl joined Rose in the first place was because part of her felt stirrings to be more than what she was, and she saw this opportunity to do that. Even Blue Pearl in The Answer showed signs of individuality, reacting but not speaking when BD and Sapphire were talking. If this were the case, some circumstances in Pearl’s life would have had her begin to desire more than just being a Pearl. She must have had some opportunity to realise that maybe, she was a little better than the other Pearls in working on mechanics. Maybe she was a little faster or a little more graceful than them.

And with that spark, she may have been led to explore these opportunities, but they would have been in very little ways, on her own time, and underground. This is very similar to Sour Cream having to DJ in a warehouse with none of the usual residents of Beach City. In fact, he had to invite his online friends.

Theoretical Pearl’s expressions of individuality would have been more muted, though, because she would have been socialised in a way that would have ingrained her being replaceable. But modern Homeworld has its spaces for gems to interact without as much surveillance. Look at Periodot grumbling about her job in the Hand Ship in The Return.

As pure speculation, I’d like to think Pearl would tinker small devices and store them deep in her Pearl space, like little trinkets. And maybe in her spare time she’d dance, to hone her agility, speed, and balance, instead of just carrying people’s things and storing memories.

(Sudden thought of Pearl opening a dance studio for all the other Pearls. Everyone would wear leg-warmers and do ballet stretches in front of ballet barres and mirrors.)

To end, I have high hopes that Drop Beat Dad will be about Sour Cream’s relationship with Yellowtail. I’d like to think that even in the theoretical timeline, Pearl would find someone who believed in her, and encouraged her individuality. There must be at other gems who saw things the way Rose did, but chose not to rebel out of fear. The thing is, they didn't have the power to overthrow Homeworld, or to escape. But it’s a small pocket of rebellion that they have together. 

So I hope Drop Beat Dad is an episode that fosters that kind of discourse between Yellowtail and Sour Cream, that one can be more than one is destined to be. In this case, it’s that we have to follow the professions of our parents (which is still such a prevalent phenomenon these days, honestly so many children don’t have choices in who they get to be).

Just let him be a DJ, man!