Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar says she had to fight to get Cartoon Network to allow her to include queer, nonbinary characters Ruby and Sapphire in the beloved animated series.

Sugar opened up in a recent TikTok post about both the inspiration for the characters — alien superheroes who fuse together to form one being known as Garnet — and the network’s pressure to downplay their romantic involvement.

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Sugar explained that Garnet was based on her relationship with Steven Universe supervising director Ian Jones-Quartey, whom she married in late 2019, with Ruby and Sapphire standing in for each of them.

“Ruby and Sapphire are us,” Sugar said. “We were running the show together. We knew at that time — this was 2011, 2012 — that we weren’t going to be allowed to show Ruby and Sapphire in a relationship with each other. So we were trying to figure out a way to have it be a character that you already loved so much that it just could not be taken out of the fabric of the show.”

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Garnet, voiced by British singer Estelle, appeared in the series from its pilot episode, which debuted on the Cartoon Network in 2013. But Sugar explained that she and Jones-Quartey made a conscious decision not to introduce Ruby and Sapphire until the first season finale, keeping the characters “hidden from the network” until production began on the episode in 2014.

“As expected, we got the note that these characters cannot be in a romantic relationship,” Sugar recalled. “I said, ‘They are, they sing a song about it, they’re in love, the song has already been recorded; we can’t take it out.’ And it also was just right, it’s what the story was about.”

Cartoon Network ultimately allowed the characters to appear in the episode, which aired in March 2015. But Sugar said that “from then on, every episode with Ruby and Sapphire was a big uphill battle, but it was one I was willing to fight.”

“I would compromise on other things, but I would not compromise on Ruby and Sapphire,” Sugar added.