The storyboard artist for the wildly popular Cartoon Network show Steven Universe has been hounded off Twitter by fans of the show.
Lauren Zuke explained in a series of tweets that she was leaving the social media platform for good and that being accessible to thousands of people was too much to handle.
According to the Reddit thread on the matter, the harassment seemed to be coming from so-called shippers and those who accused the artist of “queer baiting.”
Shippers, or those on the Internet who put two fictional characters in a relationship and then freak out when it doesn’t actually happen in the show, are a recurring perpetrator of online harassment. It only gets worse for some reason when the fictional relationship is homosexual. In 2013 a WB exec who got harassed because an implied queer relationship in Supernatural didn’t pan out wound up deleting his Twitter account.
Queer baiting is a term used when a show or film teases out a homosexual relationship only to leave the fanbase with a case of blue balls (think Captain America and Bucky Barnes).
But Steven Universe isn’t exactly the best candidate for accusations of queer baiting, as the whole show is basically a lesbian love fest. It is about a bunch of all-female anthropomorphized gems, who fuse together in some kind of coitus metaphor to fight evil gems. (Note: this is my own interpretation of the show after watching one episode. I expect ample hate from SU fans via Twitter.)
Lesbian relationships seem to be implied all the time in the show, but fans were just salty that a particular lesbian relationship didn’t happen. It began when the show aired an episode revealing that the characters Lapis and Peridot had moved in together. A group of shippers were invested in a Amethyst-Peridot relationship, and thought the show runners queer-baited them with implied sexual tension.
The show has been accused in the past of having a particularly harass-y portion of its fan base. A fan artist was driven to attempt suicide after fans accused her of drawing a character too thin.
It’s truly bizarre that a show with such a positive message of love and inclusivity—and that has the most progressive representations of gender and sexual identity on television—would receive this type of backlash from fans. But it’s just more proof that shippers are the absolute worst.
Lauren Zuke did not return requests for comment on this story.
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