One of my favourite bloggers is doing a series of "thoughts on rewatch" posts for SU! Gem Glow Laser Light Canon Fair warning, her blog is mainly focused on atheism/feminism stuff. It's not like she ends every paragraph of her thoughts on SU with "and that's why God is A LIE", but there are various links in the blog navigation to her atheism-themed stuff, so if you don't want to deal with that sort of thing for any reason, I strongly encourage you to skip.
So I haven't read this whole thread but I just want to say that Peridot is exactly me when I was younger. Like, Rebecca's mental model of how Peridot acts would work as a model of how I acted as a kid. Everything she does reminds me of a specific thing I did. Examples: You know how in her giant robot competition, she expected everybody to praise her at the end because she technically won even though she was being a dick? I remember being at a wave pool with my friends and we were competing to see how long we could stay. One of my friends got lost and everybody was worried, but I stayed out in the end of the wave pool because I wanted to win. At the end, I expected people to be awed at my winning skills rather than mad that I didn't look for my friend. She has her limb extenders. I had a Denver Broncos jacket I wore all the time. I wanted it to be a kind of brand thing for me where people would have something to associate with me, and it also made me feel bigger. You know how she tried to make a joke about her weird word for a hammer even after she upset Peridot's feelings? I have gotten in trouble like a million times for taking jokes too far and trying to be funny when people are upset. When Pearl said "Ugh, another one of her temper tantrums," I could relate. I've heard those words a million times. My classmates just kind of associated me with big emotional outbursts. It always eventually got so they didn't even react. Mom was mortified with me about this. Her suddenly idolizing Amethyst and desperately trying to be friends with her and being a jerk to her? That's every friendship I've ever tried to initiate before a couple of years ago. Especially that guy in high school who in retrospect kind of reminds me of Luka. How about her believing she is superior to pretty much everybody she meets? Oh, hey, it's little me! And how she always has an opinion and will not stop being loud? Well that's actually still me and I think it's great. Oh, and her tone/language/movement when talking about the cluster reminds me of all the times I've freaked out about things and desperately tried to convey to people how AWFUL they were. Like my period. She built a robot? So did I in high school robotics club. You know how she kept going with her jokes even though some of them Amethyst was making fun of her for? I remember joking about shitting myself just because I really wanted people to laugh at things I said and I didn't think about how it could make me look bad. I've done stuff like that a bunch of times. It's like seeing my younger self on the TV screen and that's so weird because when I was a kid, there was like nobody like me in fiction. IIRC most protagonists were well-behaved but sassy introverts who had to put up with the unjust bullying of the loudmouths. And it just makes me tear up sometimes when I think about how Steven actually... likes Peridot and wants to be friends with her. It's amazing.
She's loud and obnoxious and overly emotional and a jerk and she's actually treated like a person. It's wow. Other Peridot things: -even though she's pretty emotional, when she was told that she hurt Amythest's feelings, she angrily talked about how feelings are stupid. That was me. -she hates being called cute and so did I! These days I still think it's kind of negative but that's far outweighed by knowing that people are trying to say a nice thing. -a lot of the mean things she said about Pearl are things I said only with "Pearl" swapped for something like "girly girl." -her disgust at garnet being fused vs my disgust in high school at the very idea of anybody having sex ever The only thing that isn't similar is the voice recording thing.
Can I just say that it makes me super happy that you've found That Character that you just...relate to super hard? Because it makes me super happy. <3
One thing I really don't like is that "shippy" moment where Peridot landed on Amethyst and screamed that it was an accident. It's fueling a bunch of Amedot shippers. Idk I guess I just want Peridot to be aro/ace like me because I relate to her so much. Much better if she has a strong desire for friendship with Anethyst than romance, because I have approached friendship the same way many times. I saw a YouTube video a while ago that said that Peridot can't have a redemption arc that ends up with her joining the crystal gems because her finding her weapon and starting to go on missions would be too similar to Steven. She also can't just go back to home world because then all those episodes about her getting better would be for nothing. The video concluded that she's going to have to make a heroic sacrifice and die because that's the only other option. Now, as much as I love character death and would enjoy Peridot's, I think there's another way it could go: Peridot lives separately from the crystal gems and allies with them sometimes but does not join them. She finds her own mission in life and pursues it instead. Honestly I would enjoy almost any Peridot outcome, though I am a bit worried she'll do something that causes me to not relate to her anymore and I'll "lose" her. People have compared Peridot to Zim and I think when she points out Amethyst's shortness, it's another link to the show. Peridots and Pearls are both shorter than the warrior class of Quartz, and the tallest gem we've seen is Yellow Diamond, suggesting that gems might have a height based hierarchy like Irkens. Note how Garnet is the tallest of the crystal gems as well. I think they will get the cluster out of the Earth right before it finally matures, and then we'll get to see it. This is based on how the show has told us there is a weird and awesome monster and therefore it would be a disappointment not to see it. However, I don't think Rebecca would destroy the Earth, so it's going to come out first.
Won't it not mature if it's brought out of the Earth though, since gems draw power from the planet's soil?
Plus it's really, really big, Not sure you could pull something as large as that out of the Earth's crust or core or whatever without causing major geological trouble.
I repeat my reasoning: 1. Why would Rebecca tell us about a big awesome monster and then never show it to us? 2. I don't think Steven Universe is the kind of show where the Earth gets destroyed. Possible options: -the cluster is already coming to life when the crystal gems remove it -the cluster gets safely removed, but then Jasper throws just enough dirt on it to finish the process -the cluster awakens and destroys the Earth, but then somebody time travels to stop it. -the cluster gets hurled out of the Earth and lands in the moon, where it incubates the rest of the way before destroying the moon -the cluster is purposefully moved to another planet to incubate
Nah, it's incubating gems that basically suck the life out, this is a fusion. A huge clusterfuck fusion that was forced from fragmented gems, which for reasons unknown takes a long long time to fuse and form a single, uh, entity. And in size - the size of the gem cluster itself is probably not that huge, it is probably the manifestation of a form that is huge. With the gems we've seen fuse, even though the mass of the combined gems doesn't increase by much, the fused humanoid form is very big. If the temple is a representation of the fusion of all the crystal gems (rose included) it doesn't take that many gemstones embedded together to make a colossal form. Like, the cluster itself could be the diameter of a tall human's height, and the projected form to make a body is what would tear through the Earth.
Well, from the forced fusion experiments we've seen, it looks like the gem shards are literally intergrowing, so presumably that's why it takes so long - you've gotta get an appreciable amount of mineral growth to cement them together. Who knows if that's sucking life out of the Earth (although presumably not enough to attract the attention of the Crystal Gems) or if that's just bog-standard mineralization. Five thousand years might be a bit quick, i'm not actually sure how long that sort of crystallization/cementation process tends to take, but in any case you could probably swing it if you planted your cluster in an area with a lot of dissolved-ion rich hydrothermal fluid. Also, I'm deeply amused by the idea of just digging down and building a warp pad under the thing, and warping it somewhere. Hell, you could even theoretically send it to another gem planet as a "hello motherfuckers!' although i doubt the CGs would be willing to risk even momentarily reactivating any of the remaining warp pads at the Galaxy Warp, and they've got easy way to do so, with the destruction of all of Peridot's old robonoids.
Well, the very start of the current opening seems to be on the moon, and a couple of the leaked season two episode titles also seem to point to lunar shenanigans...
so I was making a witty reply to the out of context quotes thread when I saw that there is a similarity to steven when the cat fingers took over his body, and the corrupted gems idk maybe some of the episodes where steven loses control and turns into body horror (Cat Fingers, the birthdays episode) will foreshadow a solution to the clustered/corrupted gems and how to help them
I like this, but I don't think it's quite how it works. Peridots do seem to be of low rank, but the implication seems to be, at least from Peridot's comment, that Pearls are barely viewed as Gems--more like vaguely sentient accessories. So I'm guessing Peridots actually outrank Pearls, even if not by a whole lot...and Pearl is considerably taller than Peridot (without her limb enhancers, at least). Garnet is a fusion, and her components are considerably shorter than Pearl as well--even shorter than Amethyst or Peridot, I'm pretty sure. We don't yet know the roles that Rubies and Sapphires play on Homeworld, so they could potentially be of very low rank...or, for all we know, pretty high rank. It's hard to say! (My personal headcanon is actually that, assuming future vision is the norm among Sapphires, they'd be pretty highly ranked, since that'd be a major tactical advantage. Not sure about Rubies, though, and the Sapphire thing is purely headcanon anyway. Also, it's worth noting that rubies and sapphires are both forms of corundum, so they could easily be of equal rank.) So Garnets Georg is an outlier adn should not have been counted. So going by intended height, given that Amethyst is a runt, that would have to mean Diamonds outrank Quartzes (fair enough), who outrank Pearls (duh), who outrank Peridots (unlikely), who outrank Corundums (also unlikely). I think the hierarchy is probably closer to Diamonds > Quartzes > Peridots > Pearls, with Corundums falling somewhere in the middle. That being said, the highest-ranked castes do tend to be significantly larger (when not born "defective" a la Amethyst), so there might be some truth to your theory--and Rebecca is a big Invader Zim fan...
Also, unrelated, but guess who's doing a gloriously fucked up PearlRose-but-way-creepier kink meme fill? >:D #spoiler alert: it me #also tw for abuse and dubious-at-best consent in later chapters #this is gonna go to some REALLY dark places okay
