bless y'all for being a haven of sanity,reading your discussion has made me feel less like 'fuck all of this i quit watching this show'
Spoiler: Bismuth and Awkward Moral Points It always bothers me when an issue is supposed to be about a particular moral principle, but there are practical factors that make the moral principle less relevant. In this case the fact, as others have pointed out, that the Breaking Point really isn't a very good weapon. It has charge time. It has to be aimed carefully. It clearly takes significantly more time to use per enemy than Rose's sword. If it's really important to you to kill the enemies, you can do the standard poof-and-bubble thing and then you can shatter them at your leisure. Homeworld uses shattering just fine without needing special inventions.
devil's advocate (sort of not really that's the wrong word): Spoiler but the Breaking Point is (presumably) an obvious parallel to the Diamonds' gem-shattering ability. It's big, powerful, unstoppable, and clearly marked with a star instead of a diamond. It's the "look, you bastards, now we can do what you can: Watch. Me. Kill. You. Back."
Unrelated to anything but: I just remembered cave pearls are a thing that exist and now I desperately need to figure out which diamond court would be most into having a bunch of eyeless albino gollum ballerinas hanging around.
i say white diamond, if you wanna see the no eyes, and blue if you're okay with implied only eyelessness
Spoiler: Considering... Considering that, it might have been turned down because it's less of a weapon and more of a torture/execution piece. It's terrible as a weapon, but putting a gem into something like a mirror or some form of tech panel so they're aware and smashing them with the Breaking Point while they're helpless? That would have been a theoretically viable way of extracting information, or even just killing enemy combatants in a way to frighten and demoralize others. And it's slow recharge time and direct precision that requires you have to get up close and personal makes it a really personal execution tool as well. It's really a depressing and fucked up view of Bismuth's mind at this point, making something like this and trying to justify it's in-field use and trying to play it up as an improvement instead of just a portable guillotine that doesn't really exist except to make other people suffer.
Spoiler: response I really like the idea that Bismuth made it as an execution/torture device instead of as a weapon. All the points that make it ineffective as a weapon make it a really effective torture device.
That sounds like something straight out of Seelie Court more than anything. I am personally hoping for that, and for White Diamond to be alive and have a 'nightmarish fairy tormentor witch' motif to go with Blue Diamond's 'regal and uncaring seer' and Yellow Diamond's '80's businesswoman from hell'.
it's a great excuse to play up the Pearl Schnozz, too: they might not see your dirty business, but they smell everything
I really do kind of like the idea of eyeless pearls being justified with 'objects don't need to see'. I mean, we know they aren't hard labor slaves. They're ornamentation.
Spoiler but shattering was never a Diamond power? It was something any Gem could do. Moreover it's clearly stoppable by moving a few inches sideways.
Spoiler Which is why the Breaking Point really makes more sense as an execution device. Gotta hold 'em down.
Spoiler: bismuth-the-episode; potentially gruesome content I can see going for that, but I don't think the device we saw really hits that mark. For one thing, it's not unstoppable if you're more mobile than a cast-stone target dummy. It's entirely dodgeable. If you're looking for a morale-breaker, you could more efficiently smash the enemy's poofed gems where they lie on the ground. Or break them fresh out of their bubbles and use the shards as personal adornment, like humans collecting ears. Trophy-taking has a long and grisly history in warfare. Of course, I don't think Bismuth, however enraged she was, was prepared to try that; she needed it to be done in the heat of battle. I just feel the point would have been better made if the superweapon had actually been a superweapon, not a glorified- well, like @missoyashirou said, a portable guillotine.
EXACTLY. Plus, just because gem ideas of beauty mostly match up with human ones doesn't mean they have to do so entirely. I could actually see caves and cave formations being a pretty important source of imagery for them. And a cave pearl might even be slightly higher status than a regular one, by virtue of being a true mineral rather than an organic formation...
Spoiler: bismuth i love bismuth so much she's so..........discourse-worthy. has there ever been a steven universe who inspired THIS MUCH discourse within a day of her very first episode if so, i bet it's lapis.
