Yeah they do, and I don't get it :/ like you said, fusing was a self sacrificing move, but it was absolutely her own choice.
Also horrible nonsense idea under the spoiler Spoiler: I'm terrible totally out of the left field, but what if the bismuth looking gem in Lion was a conglomeration of permanently fused gems or gem shards that actually worked unlike what we saw of Homeworlds experiments. Maybe it worked because they agreed to being permanently fused. Idk, just taking what we got from the new episode and using it to try and think of an explanation for Bismuth. Because like, it's not a gem(granted neither are pearls really but they're at least usually lumped in with gems) it's a metal, which I could see as being more/stronger than a gem.
Anyone have a link for Keeping it Together? My source says it has it but it links to Rising Tides/Crashing Skies instead. (I almost thought it didn't have Sworn to the Sword either but it was hidden under a duplicate of Shirt Club. I am mighty wroth, they were reliable before.)
AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh. Thank you but also AAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaah. Nothing about that episode was ok. None of it.
Haha, oh my god I just watched the episode, and Peridot is fucking fantastic, wow. The fingercopter and the wall running and the expression on her dumb little face when she saw Steven. The expressions on Steven's dumb little face when he saw her! Wow. And I mean, yunno. The heartache. I think this episode really cements for me how young Peridot may be. She certainly acted very juvenile. A cursory glance over the tumblr tag seems to have judged her irredeemably malicious, but I don't really see it? For one, she didn't set the clusters up for the Crystal gems to find, or so they'd get attacked or anything. It looks like she did the literal bare minimum of checking on the clusters before skedaddling and just didn't bother to hide them. And her gloating seemed kind of tone deaf? Like she's read the situations as "Crystal Dwebs stopping me from doing my work, but now I have done it, nener nener nener!!!" rather than "haha so you have messed with me, now suffer emotional trauma, muahahaha!" And when she found out the Crystal Gems were there she didn't seem like she was afraid they'd stop her, just that they'd be a bit of pain. If she cared about the clusters, she'd have to have known the Gem's would find them pretty dang easy. She was always determined to finish her work, outlasting all the stuff of hers that got broked, and even standing up to big dumb jerk Jasper, her presumed superior, when she gave the order to turn back. So, maybe she isn't really invested in what Homeworld is trying to accomplish as much as she wants to complete her assigned tasks.
Spoiler: re: lapis I will never get where the whole "Lapis was nothing but an innocent victim baby uwu" mentality comes from. Yes, she was a victim. Yes, she was a prisoner. Yes, she did deserve better. But I think a lot of fanon!Lapis stuff misses the fact that she's got an incredible amount of willpower. Note the state of her gem before Steven heals her, for instance. It's essentially in three goddamn pieces--and once she was freed from the mirror, the only effects a severely damaged gem had on her were weird eyes and being unable to summon her weapon, despite the fact that a sufficiently broken gem is inherently fatal. Compare that to Amethyst in An Indirect Kiss, who only had a relatively small crack in her gem but was implied to be on the brink of death--and it ain't like Amethyst is a passive little weakling, either. And not all of the things she uses that strong will for are good. I mean, she tried to kill Connie (an innocent bystander) and Steven (her only friend). She would've succeeded if Greg hadn't come along with his van. I dunno, this is incoherent but I feel like people saying Lapis is just some innocent baby are missing out on a really interesting character.
That's about what I was trying to get at, said a lot clearer and more concise, @Acey. I'm not even that big a Lapis fan. She's got a kind of intensity to her that's kind of scary to me, if that makes sense. She feels sharp edged in my brain, like I have to be really careful just thinking about her.
it feels like she has been through a lot and will do a lot to survive, you know? i feel like she is sufficiently desperate to be very dangerous.
Exactly, @tinyhydra! I personally adore Lapis (I know, shocking :P), but she's also fucking terrifying. (Actually, I keep drawing parallels between her and Damara in my brain. I have a type, and I have a problem.) Also, seconding the thing about Peridot being really young. Looking at her behavior, she does act less like a dignified adult technician and more like a teenager taking her homework really seriously. And since it seems to be implied that she wasn't alive during the war (at least that's the impression I got), she's chronologically younger than Amethyst, who is pretty unambiguously the gem equivalent of a woman in her early twenties at the very oldest (and probably much closer to her mid-to-late teens). And granted, gems seem to age mentally more than physically, with their physical forms fitting their mental age...but Peridot really doesn't act much older than a teenager. (And now I want a shitty high school AU where Peridot goes super hard in the science fair and will win first place at all costs.)
Yeah, Lapis is really very intense - but it rather makes sense, doesn't it? She was trapped in a mirror, either used as a tool or left alone with nothing but her thoughts, for thousands of years, and she stayed herself and sane. And she's got a lot of rage in her - just look at her escaping. When she talks to the Crystal Gems her voice is just shaking with anger. Actually, that anger that she had then is kind of what makes it so awful when she seems so hopeless on Peridot's ship.
Spoiler: So about Garnet's remarks I wrote down Garnet's gollum-like horrified reaction. R: So this is what the homework thinks of fusion S: We couldn't have known they would do this R: This is where they've been! All the ones we couldn't find! S: Rose couldn't have known R: This was punishment for the rebellion! ...It wasn't just Rose, Pearl, Ruby, Sapphire and Amethyst back then, was it. They probably had allies, friends, in the early times of the rebellion. Only the five of them survived, so only those five have ways to unlock certain doors and paths... But before there were others, taken and shattered, left behind on battlefields and gathered by Homeworlders for experiments under Kindergarten. A long slow torture for the gems who rebelled, until only four or five of that army remained... I mean, that huge armory of Rose's hardly makes sense if she was only arming five. The Crystal Gems won because of fusion, because ("cheap trick for weak gems to become stronger") they used fusion to far greater effect than Homeworld gems knew was possible. So Homeworld sent Peridot to continue the experiment, possibly among other things. Sapphire seemed to feel guilty that they never knew and never rescued them, trying to deflect it with "Rose couldn't have known!" Ruby seems guilty and angry that it ever happened, that it was Home world's retaliation for the rebellion. Hell, maybe fusion has become more (or remained) rare and rigid on Homeworld because of the rebellion's relative success.
Peridot is totally a dorky little teenager- she almost reminds me of Mandar from Dexter's Laboratory. Also I am never sure when to stop using spoiler tags, so if someone wants to give me an idea that would be nice. But there is also spoilers things under this, just to be sure. I wonder if they were just using the shards of crystal gems, or if they'd used any gem shards they could find because they didn't have a better use for them anyway seeing as it was proven using them as near mindless drones didn't work out well(see: Frybo). In that case whoever trapped Lapis in that mirror might have actually done her a favor in the long run. Her gem was so badly cracked it probably would have shattered eventually, and then the shards would have been collected and probably used for those experiments. Speaking of this though I really really want to know the circumstances that led up to Lapis being sealed in the mirror, What did she do to deserve that, if her gem was originally already cracked or not, and who was the one to put her in the mirror... I have so many questions.
I made a SU meta post about Connie and Pearl in Sworn to the Sword. I'd be curious what people think. I know that some people in the SU tag are all up in arms about Pearl in that episode, but I haven't seen anyone address this sooo... hopefully I don't get called an abuse apologist again? *crosses fingers*
Yeah, no, I absolutely adored that mentorship. Connie's a strong kid, and that mix of striving toward her goal with an adult to teach her to take responsibility... Blossomed is the right word. Her eyes were shining. Steven noticed when the big flaw in Pearl's teaching started to get to her, and intervened before it could take root... Things could have gone very badly if he hadn't. And there's good points to be had in the outcry; Pearl is not in a good place to do long term, one on one teaching with anyone who accepts her words uncritically.
I think that, with Pearl, she's not really knowledgeable enough of current human culture to have a good grasp on some things which means that, yeah, she's going to mess up badly and dangerously with the kids sometimes. Like, most of the time she's an excellent parent, and that's with never even having experienced HAVING a parent of her own, and having no cultural reference points for parenting. Annnd then she falls apart because from her perspective Rose has been dead all of 10 minutes and she's still grieving. Or she starts training a kid to be a knight like how a real knight would be trained, including the intense devotion. Like, if you're talking about knights, Connie IS the right age to start and that level of devotion would have made perfect sense and been the ideal... It's just that's not cool anywhere near this century. XD But it's not like that didn't have a function you know? Like, there was a reason loyalty and devotion were valued so highly, and that's explicitly conveyed in the song: "What they don't know is your real advantage; when you live for someone you're prepared to die." I imagine that was a downright strange concept to the Homeworld Gems, but it worked in the Crystal Gem revolution, and it's been a key concept throughout the human history of war and combat.
But don't you know? The only things that matter are the things directly experienced by the average loudspoken fandom member. Historical context or relevance are made up things by ageist jerks to delegitimize our feelings. If we have to consider that others feelings and flaws have reasons then we could make excuses for aaaaaaaany8ody. We already know some things are unacceptable, but we're still figuring out the rules for what, so the best way to show we'll be good and follow those rules is to viciously enforce the ones we perceive. Nuance is like the dark side! Once you start to see the world as grays instead of black and white, you're compromising! Compromise inevitably leads to the triumph of evil!
Off current topic, but I so wish SU was around when I was in taekwondo, because I always thought of songs while i was practicing or sparring, and the first thing I thought of when I heard Garnet's song was just how PERFECT it would be for sparring lol.
