So how about yesterday's episodes, huh?

[erinptah]

You know, for a while now (basically since the Lars development) I had been feeling like Steven was getting over-powered, and it was straining credibility.

I...do not have that complaint anymore.

Comments

[erinptah]

The irony is, at the time this guide was released, the show itself hadn't revealed that "Quartz" was an overarching category! The viewers didn't know, Steven didn't know...they could've left that line off of everyone's profiles, and nobody would've thought it was strange.

Then a few months later we would've gone "aha, they were obscuring this technical spoiler about Gem species, how clever." And a few years after that we would've have gone "heyyy, hold on, they were straight-up lying about this major spoiler about Rose."

[full_metal_ox]

Some more (not particularly organized) points, and my apologies for the slow-motion nature of the conversation:

I very much doubt we'll ever get a single definitive account of who and what Rose Quartz/Pink Diamond was/were--that's the whole point about loss and memory, isn't it?

I'd been seeking real-world analogies for Rose; Lawrence of Arabia and David Attenborough, among others, came to mind; now it's looking as if Thomas Jefferson and Rachel Dolezal ought to join the list.

The Pearlception sequence demonstrated a gemologically informed Fridge Brilliance: what, after all, is a pearl but layer upon layer upon layer of defenses secreted in response to trauma? (Steven's addressing the "Pearl within the Pearl within Pearl's Pearl" also--and probably quite consciously--evokes a particular folkloric sort of cumulative storytelling.) A related question: now that Steven has pried out her secret, is Pearl freed from the geas?

The queue of Unfinished Business and collateral damage continues to lengthen--to Bismuth and the Zoomans, we can add the real Rose Quartzes, who found themselves rounded up (and would've been shattered, had Yellow had her druthers) in a put-down-all-the-pit-bulls panic.

(And just how many unintended consequences did Rose/Pink leave scattered around Earth's ecology, anyway? Consider the Strawberry Battlefield and the random crystal animals who keep popping up, for example. An interesting point I've noticed about Lion--who is strongly hinted to be an unintended consequence himself, if his story parallels Lars': the evidence so far is that as a hunter, he stays in his lane, preying only upon fellow crystal animals, such as the basilisk in "Lion 2: The Movie" and the rats in the comics story "Lion's Share"; there is no indication that he poses any threat to humans or mundane animals. As a pet, of course, he's perfectly happy to mooch whatever Steven's eating--see "Cooking with Lion.")

[erinptah]

I wouldn't expect a single objective flashback sequence to cover Pink's history, and of course she's not around anymore to burst out with a long coming-clean confession. But we're getting more and more pieces of information that I'd take as factually accurate.

Rachel Dolezal isn't effective enough to be a Rose-analogue. But the Founding Fathers, definitely. Who better to mount a successful rebellion against the rich white landowning colonizers than a disgruntled subset of rich white landholding colonizers?

Pearl's backstory and composition are all kinds of brilliant.

I'm betting she's not free of the geas, but she's been trying to talk around it for a while. They should be able to have clear, effective conversations about it now that Steven knows what she's talking around -- "oh, you mean X, right?" "[hands-over-mouth nod]"

The mass of bubbled Rose Quartzes were already known collateral damage, even assuming our Rose was one of them. At least they're conveniently on the same outpost as the Zoomans, so a single mission could go break them all out....

What do you mean by crystal animals? There's all the corrupted Gems, which for once I don't think are Rose's responsibility at all -- that's entirely on the other Diamonds. Lion is a whole different thing, an ordinary Earth lifeform infused with magic. Steven himself has made a bunch of unintentional independent entities, from the Watermelon Island civilization to the Pumpkin-dog, but as far as I can remember Lion is the only one we've seen from Rose's era.

[full_metal_ox]

I'm betting she's not free of the geas, but she's been trying to talk around it for a while. They should be able to have clear, effective conversations about it now that Steven knows what she's talking around -- "oh, you mean X, right?" "[hands-over-mouth nod]".

So could Steven wield the authority of Pink Diamond to release Pearl explicitly from the geas? Freeing someone is about as uncorruptive a use of such power as I can think of.

What do you mean by crystal animals? There's all the corrupted Gems, which for once I don't think are Rose's responsibility at all -- that's entirely on the other Diamonds. Lion is a whole different thing, an ordinary Earth lifeform infused with magic. Steven himself has made a bunch of unintentional independent entities, from the Watermelon Island civilization to the Pumpkin-dog, but as far as I can remember Lion is the only one we've seen from Rose's era.

As mentioned, "Lion's Share" from the comic Steven Universe #6 features a couple. The basilisk (page 1, panel 4) has jutting gemstones as dorsal spines; the Steven Universe Wikia page notes that the specimen in "Lion 2: The Movie" died in organic fashion, leaving a tangible carcass, rather than poofing. The rat's eye (closeup in page 2, panel 3) is an amber-toned cabochon.





(Also, I'm betting Amethyst ate the rat Lion brought her.)

[erinptah]

I wasn't sure whether even Rose could still control the geas on Pearl after reinventing herself, although I don't have the stamina to go back and analyze all their interactions to see....

Hmm. I'd heard that the comics aren't always great about worldbuilding continuity -- for instance, they have a story about celebrating Halloween, which isn't supposed to be a thing in this world. So I wonder if the lizard in the show was supposed to be just a regular organic lizard, and the artist for the comic embellished things. (Lion himself doesn't have any gem-type eyes/spines/etc that we can see, either.)

Mostly because, if it was supposed to be a feature of the show, wouldn't it have come up more during the episodes? They've been so thorough about laying early groundwork for so many other things.