Steven Universe is full of plot twists that cause major shifts in the status quo. Throughout the series, characters undergo massive struggles, triumphs, and regressions. Most characters that are introduced as villains are redeemed, and some that start as heroes slowly become villains. Rose Quartz is introduced as an infallible martyr who sacrificed herself for the joys of life on Earth. By the end of the series, however, she is revealed to have been the villainous Pink Diamond who had committed an innumerable amount of atrocities throughout her life. As the show released, fan-writers had interesting reactions to the twists along the way; many even predicted Rose's alternate identity years before it was revealed. Using tags for fluff and angst, diction, and fan interaction on the ways the fandom reacted to Pink Diamond's arc, one can learn when plot twists occur and how the fandom perceives them.

For this project, I scraped the entire Steven Universe fandom on Archive of Our Own on November 9, 2022. After excluding non-English fan-fiction and crossovers, 17,475 works remained. I converted this to individual text files so that it would be compatible with DocuScope, and I created individual spreadsheets of the metadata so that it would be compatible with Tableau. Further, I compiled a list of all major events that happened in Steven Universe and the release dates of major episodes and events throughout the series pertaining to Rose Quartz or Pink Diamond. The following are the methods I used to acquire data for each section: