Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar spoke on what went into crafting the emotional finale for Steven Universe Future. While speaking with CBR, Sugar spoke about all the potential endings before reaching the series true end.
"Every time I’ve had a chance to spend more time in this world and with these characters I’ve gone for it, so this is a bit of a circumstantial thing," she stated. "The writing was on the wall for the original series, I was told with a fair amount of certainty that we weren’t going to get picked up for more. So I pushed for additional episodes, which eventually became the Era 3 arc and 'Change Your Mind.' That was the end of the story we’d conceptualized in 2012,2013, but in 2015 we started coming up with the movie story."
She continued, "I'd always wanted to do a full movie musical, and we all decided that the only place it could fit would be after the events we'd planned for the original run of the show, so as we worked toward the ending, I was pitching the movie as hard as I could. When the movie was ultimately picked up, the network wanted more show to go with it, which was a big surprise. I was overjoyed, because there were elements of the original story we hadn’t gotten to touch on because we didn’t have room."
"But now we would have to approach these ideas from a new angle, because Future would take place after the movie," she added. "That was exciting -- we had a lot of new crew members for Future in addition to those of us who had been with SU since the very beginning, so we had fresh eyes on the characters in addition to some of our very oldest ideas that still hadn’t found a home."
She also touched on how her personal journey informed Steven Universe all the way to the finale. Sugar came out to her family and friends as as bisexual and later as non-binary while working on the show, and also struggled with her mental health.
"I was hoping when I started the show that telling a coming-of-age story would give me room to grow up along with the characters, and I realized that my experience with my mental health and unpacking what had happened to me was a huge part of my process of growing while working on the show, so it would only be right to let that be the final, big piece of Steven’s growth, too."
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She concluded, "Now that we’ve worked on this story together, I feel like this project would have been incomplete without Future, and I’m grateful to have gotten this extra time, and to have worked with the crew that came together to make Future possible."
The hour-long series finale of Steven Universe Future aired March 27 on Cartoon Network.