Spoiler: Slightly calmer What I, for one, am thinking: Being physically pushed around and intimidated is still legitimately frightening and bad even if the person she tried it on eventually proved to be capable of doing her one better. Of the two people who did each other the most wrong here, one is wracked with guilt and trying to stay away while one is desperately trying to start it all up again. Gee, I wonder why anyone might have a higher opinion of one than the other? I, for one, was not "rooting for" Peridot's redemption until her alliance-of-convenience with Our Heroes made it more or less totally inevitable. I was figuring she'd either have one or become SU's Team Rocket, and that either one had great potential. I figure some kind of redemption, or at least development, for Jasper is probably also inevitable, but it hasn't happened and I'm not going to act as if it's already under way. She is, at this point, a legitimately bad guy and it's not somehow wrong to approach things that way.
Spoiler: long term jasper speculation, also garbage fangirling from a "getting to see more of her in the plot" perspective, i'd like it if she reformed and learned wtf boundaries are and became a piccolo/vegeta type figure with the gems but from a garbage perspective: SHE'S A SCARY-AS-HELL PHYSICALLY INTIMIDATING WARLORD LADY AND NOW SHE HAS A CRUSH AND SHE'S BEING REALLY CREEPY ABOUT IT AND FAWNING LORD HAVE FUCKING MERCY. every bad thing she does just makes me want to bone her harder is what i'm saying. from the perspective of my pants, i want her to be awful and never stop.
Spoiler: Jasper, Tumblr, and strong opinions I'm never going to approve of the Tumblr-esque splitting of "THEY'RE PERFECT ANGELS" and "THEY'RE LITERALLY THE ANTICHRIST" I thought that the mockery was only regarding people who are doing that shit.
i'm here for u, i understand, as a fellow lesbian with a villain fetish. also i still like the JASPER BECOMES PICCOLO theory. i want a montage of her training steven.
Fuck your sapphic-survivor-moon-ocean-soft positive representation bullshit (not really, that stuff's okay in its place): what REALLY makes my motor run is a dyke with big muscles eating puppies and committing war crimes.
I have pudge instead of muscles and I don't eat puppies but I can give you everything else you mentioned!
Spoiler: jasper crush I'm bi but I still relate really hard to 'please give me terrible buff ladies that is exactly what I want'. I have such a crush on Jasper it's ridiculous.
Spoiler: response probably spoilery ultimately: i'm not trying to say that the way jasper acts isn't bad, or creepy, or wrong. she is forceful, violent, and acting like a creepy ex. not really great behaviors, even if that's the way she was taught to be, even if something fucked her up in the relationship. but i don't see her as evil, and there are quite a few people especially on tumblr who absolutely can't even talk about the character without resorting to 'she's 100% evil and is the only person who is doing anything wrong' and that's just.. not correct, really. i don't really care if people don't like her, and was legitimately interested in why people think she is wholly evil and not just SU's typical 'flawed, not perfect, capable of doing better' character. i mean, i don't like lars, lots of other people seem to like him and relate to him. i just can't really feel sympathy there. i understand why and where he might have come from to act the way he does, even if i don't want anything to do with it, so i wouldn't call him 'evil', just toxic. and if people can't feel sympathy or whatever for jasper, who have been abused by people like jasper and can't deal with her.. that's fine oo. and i think it's entirely fair to view how she acts as toxic as well, considering the relationship she was in with lapis was definitely mutually toxic. it's just beneficial to be able to have a conversation about both sides of characters instead of jumping to very black and white 'here is the good person, here is the bad person' discourse. the whole message of this episode seemed to be that the relationship was mutually toxic. and that it was important for lapis to learn that she fucked up but that doesn't mean she deserves to be in it. and hopefully jasper can learn too... eventually. probably away from lapis. i was in particular talking about tumblr's usual discourse, where i saw quite a lot of 'jasper is the sole evil, let's turn a blind eye to the bad things lapis has done, let's also turn a blind eye to the fact that peridot is doing some bad shit just because she's a cute dork, the only one is bad is the one who is outwardly violent' sort of talk.
while i loved the episode i'm slightly disappointed that Spoiler Jasper's gem was intact. i really liked that theory :/