What could Watermelon Steven mean?

Watermelon Steven gave us some potential foreshadowing and sent some chickens out into the world who might one day come home to roost. We can’t be the only ones wondering where this will take us, can we?

The watermelon army

At the end of the episode, Steven’s army of watermelon minions marches off to parts unknown. Presumably they will go into isolation and contemplate Baby Melon’s sacrifice as ordered, but it would be inconceivable for such a major plot thread to be left unresolved.

Will they come in to save the day when all hope seems lost? Will they renounce violence and return? That would be interesting. Where would they stay, though? Steven’s overdue for a sanctuary of his own (his mother’s room doesn’t count). Perhaps they could stand sentinel there.

We just hope that the watermelon army isn’t used cheaply, to showcase how dangerous a new threat is by showing up simply to be defeated.

The twice future king

Time and again we keep coming back to how much foreshadowing the Steven Universe series has. Usually they’re small things that a viewer won’t recognize as foreshadowing until after the episode it “foreshadowed” has aired, but sometimes some pretty obvious bombs get dropped: see Steven’s magical destiny, for example. Is there anyone who doesn’t think the show meant it when they had Connie say Steven obviously had a magical destiny?

Well Watermelon Steven appears to have had another big one. Twice in the episode Steven is referred to as a king: once when Greg crowns him after his victory in the watermelon seed spit-off, and once at the end when Garnet says “spoken like a true king” after Steven’s speech to his watermelon minions.

We know that Steven is going to grow into an incredibly powerful Gem: the rose quartz gem he bears will see to that. Even at this early stage in his development he’s surprised the Crystal Gems and shown himself to be more powerful than the three of them put together. What little we know of Rose Quartz suggests that she was a woman without equal. However, Steven appears to have potential that not even his mother did, considering the incredible progress he made with the centipeetle in one day being more than Rose Quartz could manage over what was probably thousands of years.

Conspicuously, Steven disclaims the title of “king”, insisting that his minions were their own melons. If Steven manages to heal the corrupted Gems on Earth, could they offer their service to him? We hold the belief that the Crystal Gems are responsible for the corruption that turned all of the other Gems on Earth into monsters, so might be understandably resentful, but what if Steven could control them as a result of his healing but chose not to? It would certainly be in character for him.