What we learned from Keeping It Together

Giant Woman was our first look at fusion. Coach Steven followed not too long after (though the intervening summer hiatus made it feel a lot longer) and gave us another perspective. Fusion Cuisine showed us a particularly dysfunctional fusion after that.

It wasn’t until Alone Together that Steven, and therefore we the audience, got a close-up look at fusion. While Keeping it Together didn’t take us that close, Garnet still explained a bit about fusion that makes Alone Together easier to understand.

You forget you were ever alone

When Steven first asks Garnet what being a fusion is like she doesn’t answer, saying that he’s fused before. He clarifies his question, however, asking Garnet what it’s like to be a long-term fusion. Then she answers him, saying that you come to feel like a single being rather than two.

This matches up with a lot of what we’ve observed: all of the other fusions we’ve seen are short-term fusions, with only Sugilite lasting long enough to feel like one being. In that case Pearl even implied what Garnet would later confirm, saying that it was because Garnet and Amethyst had been fused for too long that Sugilite was taking over.

I am myself, and I’m sick of being split up!

So this is another win for paying close attention to the series and trying to piece together a bigger picture from the pieces already given.

Garnet and Stevonnie

Both Garnet and Stevonnie are similar fusions. They come easily because of the care Ruby and Sapphire – and Steven and Connie – have for each other. Ruby and Sapphire, however, have taken the additional step of spending almost all of their time fused together, an option Connie simply doesn’t have, so they experience fusion very differently than Steven and Connie.

In Alone Together Steven and Connie were both confused by the whole experience. Some lines are clearly one or the other speaking through Stevonnie, sometimes to each other, but other times it may very well be a true fusion identity speaking. Stevonnie accidentally used a plural self-pronoun rather than a singular when speaking to Kevin, and Connie’s social anxiety had clearly shined through in Stevonnie’s panic attack.

Keeping it Together had Garnet go through something similar. While she used plural self-pronouns in Jailbreak soon after her reformation, she quickly switched back to singular pronouns. The stress of facing down the forced-fusion cluster Gem, however, very nearly broke her apart. She had a protracted period where two separate identities were very clearly speaking through her, though more from horror than from a desire to communicate.

It will be interesting to see what it’s like if Steven and Connie are ever fused together long enough for the Stevonnie identity to come to the fore, like Garnet’s identity is normally. At this point it appears that we know enough about fusion to predict that it will be a fairly seamless transition, but it would be very cool to see what is essentially a totally new character emerge from the personalities of two very well-established characters, even for an episode.