It’s like a journey from compulsive femininity to embracing her butchness.
Also, it’s kind of like a big 🖕 to Homeworld since they were all about sticking her in dresses and she put on pants at the first opportunity while defying her intended role.
Exactly. To me it feels like everyone saying Pearl can’t be butch because she wears dresses, pastels or what have you are consciously forcing that femininity onto a character that actively chooses to wear masc attire. “She wears dresses in the beginning, and has a bow or a bit of lace so she can’t ever be anything but femme,” ignore the fact that she continually chooses to wear suits and pants and leather and forwent the dress entirely in her casual attire. She was initially dressed up to be Pretty and Cute and Good but she rebelled against that system completely. Just the visual jump from Pink Diamond’s Pearl to Rebel Pearl is huge. I would love to have seen Pearl choosing her rebel attire like >:3 and going for the plain leotard like it’s her most rebellious act yet.
Whether she’s butch doesn’t depend just on what she wears, butch is more than how one looks, but since she took the role as Rose’s chivalrous knight and protector and would ride or die for her femme 4 lyfe ON TOP of saying “fuck dresses and every other expectation this backwards ass society is trying to force onto me, I’m going to be a SWORD FIGHTER and a MECHANIC” yeah I don’t give a shit about her bow.
She was even dressed in men’s court fashion in a flashback! (Although it was Connie imagining her, but Connie knows Pearl well enough to know her tastes.)
I’m hoping her next regeneration’s outfit is just the most obnoxiously fancy pastel tux ever. Like “18th century French nobleman” levels of obnoxiously fancy.
nah that was steven’s imagination, since he knew what she actually looked like back then (from that picture WAY BACK in so many birthdays)
1. I think the robots are only able to detect gems, not identify them. Like they’re build to find and poof/shatter off-colors
2. I don’t think it’s surprising that at some point, Pink realized how horrible and wrong it was to keep humans captive, and she wanted to free them. She basically kidnapped a bunch of people without understanding why it was wrong, and she must have felt disgusted with herself when she finally understood
3. Pearl does still keep her color when she’s transformed. It’s harder to see due to the shading, but Pearl’s skin, hair and eye color is still the same. In Pink Diamond’s case, it might be that Diamonds are more skilled at transforming, and thus they can change the shades of their colors.
4. I have no explanation for this. Maybe Steven’s anatomy is a lot less human than we thought, but other than that, I got nothing
1. That’s a huge fatal flaw, that I do not think would be applied to those sentrys, if it just destroys gems. What’s stopping them from accidentally destroying a diamond, or another important gem? You can;t exactly say it wouldn’t, because it LITERALLY ALMOST DID.
2. Yeah probably.
3. Her hair color is not the same shade of pink as her hair, and neither is rose’s lipstick. As for Diamonds, that’s as weak as an excuse as ‘lol magic’ to explain away plot holes.
4. how baby not dead.
Well, we only see the sentries in the lower levels, so that’s probably where they are. And we don’t see any gems there aside from the off-colors, so it makes sense that the sentries were made specifically to hunt down and destroy the off-colors that were hiding in the lower levels.
Again, it’s hard to see because of the scene’s shading, but even so, when Amethyst shapeshifted into Steven, her hair was a darker shade of purple. And it is really so hard to believe that the most powerful gems would be better at shapeshifting? In fact, this needs to be the case in order for Steven to be born, since Rose had to shapeshift a womb and keep it like that for nine months, and we’ve already seen how tough it was for Amethyst to be shapeshifted into Jasper for not even a day. In fact, remember the episode Cat Fingers?
Steven shapeshifted a bunch of cats on him, in many different colors
1. I think the robots are only able to detect gems, not identify them. Like they’re build to find and poof/shatter off-colors
2. I don’t think it’s surprising that at some point, Pink realized how horrible and wrong it was to keep humans captive, and she wanted to free them. She basically kidnapped a bunch of people without understanding why it was wrong, and she must have felt disgusted with herself when she finally understood
3. Pearl does still keep her color when she’s transformed. It’s harder to see due to the shading, but Pearl’s skin, hair and eye color is still the same. In Pink Diamond’s case, it might be that Diamonds are more skilled at transforming, and thus they can change the shades of their colors.
4. I have no explanation for this. Maybe Steven’s anatomy is a lot less human than we thought, but other than that, I got nothing
pearl made a stand against her homeworld. she was thrilled to be in that fight. even thousands of years later, she romanticizes it the same way she romanticizes rose. she hesitated at first, but her freedom matters to her. nowhere is that more obvious than during gem heist and that will be all.
pearl is MISERABLE in her homeworldian role. being ordered around like this disgusts her, annoys her, and humiliates her. she is NOT content with that. the only part she enjoyed about her old life was pink herself, not the job. it is her belief in her own selfless devotion that drove her. all the way up until “do it for her”, she believed unyielding self-sacrifice was a part of being in love.
in other words – she’s in love with pink, and was in love with the idea of being her knight. not the homeworldian hierarchy.
that devotion wasn’t exactly healthy, but that’s something the show is aware of. that’s why there’s so much focus on pearl’s feelings after rose is gone. she has to be her own gem now. as RS has said, she thinks it’s a “horrible message” to little girls that love will validate you, and that it’s okay to depend entirely on one person’s validation. that’s what pearl’s arc is about. it’s about overcoming that… while also acknowledging that both rose and pearl really cared about each other, and rose wanted pearl to be free.
on the contrary, pearl absolutely RELISHES in being able to tell those who would force this role upon her where they can stick it. she is just giddy with power upon confronting holly blue. this is portrayed as, not just healthy, but badass. we also see this in “last one out of beach city” – breaking laws and norms thrills pearl.
the end of rose was notthe end of that. rose encouraged her to be herself, and break free from her role… but for these scenes, we see a pearl who is completely free from rose. that’s when pearl is at her healthiest. her relationship with rose definitely wasn’t as perfect or wholesome as pearl wanted it to be, but she is a rebel. and she loves it. she is unabashedly herself, and shamelessly a fighter, besserwisser, and lawbreaker. with or without rose attached to it.
Pearl was still loyal to her Diamond, sure, but I imagine she would have justified it in another way. Regardless, she still rebelled against her position in homeworld society and clearly relished in proving gems wrong about what Pearls are capable of.
^ yes. but that loyalty wasn’t as servile as people make it out to be, either. she continued to have a “knight” mentality, but there’s more to it than that. pearl not only became genuinely independent, her own person with her own desires, interests and talents, but she also openly questions rose’s decisions. in “story for steven”, she is the polar opposite of servile – she’s outright judgmental of rose and her choice of human mate. if she felt like a servant, she would NEVER have said that. she would NEVER have tried to sabotage it, either.
pearl and rose are complicated people. yes, pearl had a moment of hesitation. it would change everything… but she was genuinely excited for it. that wasn’t just something rose ‘forced’, that was something that caused her to smile and blush in her own excitement.
these aren’t my words, but i believe someone pointed out that when a girl puts a hibiscus flower on the right side of her hair, it’s a symbol of freedom and not being tied down in a relationship. this is pearl embracing that.
it also explains why rose was never comfortable being pearl’s love. she may have loved her in return, but that’s why she didn’t want them to be an item. not with their history.
i’ve also seen people use pearl’s war trauma as a way to justify their interpretation of her as a “servant at heart”, and… folks, it’s such a stretch. she was traumatized by the fact that she LOST EVERYONE. she regretted that faking pink’s death led to mass corruption. not rebelling in the first place.
“PINK DIAMOND LIED TO GET OUT OF HER RESPONSIBILITIES AS A DIAMOND!!“ “SHE’S IRREDEEMABLE FOR THAT!!” “THE EXPERIMENTS, THE CLUSTER, JASPER!!”
ah yes,
And, for my final trick, the biggest issue I’ve seen people have with Pink/Rose is…that. Ugh. Okay… let’s do this.
Pink Diamond did NOT lie to get out of her “responsibilities” as a Diamond.She lied to free herself and her gems from the idea of Pink Diamond.
^
Specifically this one. Yellow and Blue clung to that idea of Pink long after Pink told them that’s not who she is or wanted to be.
and when they didn’t listen, THIS was her answer.
She wanted to give the Earth to the Crystal Gems–Gems who chose to fight with her, not Gems who fraught with her because she was their Diamond and it was their magical destiny.
If the Crystal Gems were not literally fighting Pink Diamond, then they were fighting a figurative Pink Diamond, and because of that, this “lie” changes nothing as far as I’m concerned; Rose is still the cunning sweetheart who fought for Love and Change, and she’s still the foolish child who never quite got empathy, until her time with Greg.
cartoon network just interviewed rebecca about the new episodes and she said, before them, people thought pearl belonged to rose because rose called her “my pearl” in rose’s scabbard, but that wasn’t the case; only low-ranking gems call their superiors “my x” “my diamond”, but diamonds don’t call their pearls/gems “my x”.
And I noticed how when at first, the room-made Rose is very generic; she does what the room-made Connie did and asks Steven what he wants to do, she doesn’t even try to beat him in the video game, and when Steven wins, she just repeats what he said. Even the way she speaks sounds… off… it sounds kinda fake chipper, like an employee at a store.
Then when they’re playing ball, Room!Rose’s line: “Nice catch, son!” and giving him the thumbs up, is so generic that I’m convinced it’s from a movie that Steven has seen and the room is just making Room!Rose copy.
Her speech afterwards about sports is literally just a tweaked version of the speech about Earth and humanity she gave to Steven in the video tape.
What happens afterwards is a reference to Peanuts, but it might also be from an inverse version of the comic strip that Steven has read.
After all of this however, you can hear a change in Room!Rose’s voice; it starts to sound more natural and she pats the space next to her. In a way, she is deciding what to do next now, not Steven.
Steven begins to talk about how difficult it’s been to live up to the memory of Rose, and how he even thought about dying his hair pink. Room!Rose says that there is nothing wrong with Steven’s hair; that it’s beautiful the way it is, just like Steven himself.
Steven realizes through his phone that there is nothing there (physically), he’s just “talking to himself”. He confronts Room!Rose about all the things he’s learned about the real Rose, and finally he accuses her of only creating him to escape all of the consequences for her actions.
What is interesting is how Room!Rose reacts to these accusations; with how the room generally works, Room!Rose should either flat out deny it or confirm it, depending on what Steven himself believes. Instead Room!Rose reminds Steven about the video tape and asks him if he thinks the things Rose said in it was a lie. Steven says no, but also says that he still needs to fix Rose’s mess.
So, what is the point I want to make? I think it was the real Rose that Steven was talking to, not in the beginning, but towards the end.
Now, hear me out; Rose said in her tape to Steven that she was going to become a part of him. If Rose is still conscious within Steven, she would be able to manipulate the room just like Steven, albeit to a less powerful degree.
In fact, the reason the door to Rose’s room even opened was because Steven’s gem started glowing after he expressed a desire to learn who Rose was. His exact words were: “I just wanna know the real you. Not the you everyone tells me about.”
What really makes me think that the Rose Steven talked to towards the end is the real one, is how she brought up the tape. The real Rose wouldn’t just confirm or deny it, since she would know that that wouldn’t stop Steven from thinking what he does; she needed proof. So she brought up the tape message she made for him, telling him how much she loved him, and asked him if he believed that was a lie.
Another angle you could see it from would be that Rose was genuinely hurt by the idea of Steven thinking she only made him to run from her problems and that she never cared about Greg, Pearl, Amethyst, or Garnet. So, she is honestly asking him if he believes that she doesn’t love him.
I don’t know if any of this is true, but I’ll cross my fingers and hope that it is, at least that Rose is watching over Steven, because it would create the perfect ending for the series; Steven finally talking to Rose. Steven being able to ask her all of his questions and her answering them. And most importantly, Rose telling Steven how much she loves him and how proud of him she is. Letting him know that Rose never wanted any of this to happen, but that she is so happy that Steven could do all the things that she never could.
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