Here’s something I like.

When Steven’s teaching Peridot about music, he never tries to frame it as, like, this beautiful, abstract artistic experience or anything like that. No, that’s not how Peridot thinks about things. That’s not how she processes information.

He introduces music to Peridot in a way that will mean something to Peridot. Music is a hypothetical mathematical pattern, a system, that feels satisfying when you finish it, and you can use that system to express yourself.

Pearl would have rattled off something about the cultural significance of music throughout history, Garnet would have said something philosophical about the rhythm and the rhyme and all the different moving parts lining up to create an emotional experience greater than the sum of its parts, and Amethyst would have said, “I don’t know what it is. I just know when it rocks.”

Which would all have been fine. Absolutely valid. Absolutely true.

But it would’ve had absolutely no meaning at all to Peridot.

But Steven, sweet little sensitive young man – Steven knows how to teach people. Steven knows how to reach people. How to listen and respond.

And there is never any implication, even slightly, that Peridot is “weird” for liking or processing music the way she does or that her experience is…somehow not as good or as real as the others’. There’s no implication that it’s not normal or that she’s not doing it right. There’s no snide, “What are you, a robot?”

No, they all listen. They chime in when it’s their turn. They support her. They have fun. And at least in that one moment of solidarity, they’re all just kind of…there. Together.

Life and death and love and birth and peace and war on the planet Earth. Is there anything that’s worth more than peace and love on the planet Earth?