So, that was a shocking revelation that changes the whole show, and makes us re evaluate everything that came before. Thoughts?
Anyone who did not see the May 7th eps “Can’t Back” and “A Single Pale Rose” stop reading.
Whoah.
Answered.
Whoah.
Yeah, Garnet was telling the truth as she knew it, a myth as it turns out.
I get why the PD created her character of Rose to be the rebel leader, but she took it too far and gems died …
Wait … Pearl inside Pearl so on… the Pearl who did the shattering Pearl … my son pointed out that she has all four colors on …
My current next guess. WD is a fusion of the other three and Pearl was the Pearl, WD’s Pearl. Which explains why we have never seen WD. She cannot exist with PD and she cannot be seen as part of PD’s memories (Steven’s dreams).
Now that we know the truth, the hints are quite obvious. I had considered the possibility that Rose was Pink, but discounted the theory for several reasons- wrong gem shape (I never thought that gems could be reoriented, I assumed that gem orientation, like gem position, was fixed), it also seemed too cliched to be used, and lastly, it ruins (or at least greatly complicates) Pearl’s character- suddenly our “terrifying renegade Pearl” is just another Pearl devotedly following her owner. All that talk of choice and new beginnings and freedom are lies. The glee that she had when she told Bismuth that she was nobody’s Pearl is false. She may say nobody, but she means Rose.
Pink Diamond seems to mature over time. From a child throwing a temper tantrum to a teenage runaway convinced her family doesn’t care. I wonder what the real reason she rebelled was? Was it because she didn’t want to rule, or because she wasn’t allowed to rule her way? Or maybe it was just her love of the Earth, and being unwilling to tell her fellow Diamonds. You have to wonder what would have happened if she had tried instead of making excuses and creating a fake rebellion that turned… was the rebellion ever really real? The crystal gems may have rebelled against homeworld, but they still followed a Diamond, even if they didn’t know it. Poor Bismuth. Tricked into fighting for what she hated, even if she didn’t realize it.
Also, poor Pearl. All those years spent pretending to be owner less but really following her owner, then suddenly finding herself what she had only pretended to be… And Pink, running away from leadership, then finding herself a leader anyway…
Show’s not over yet and even if it is only another year they won’t spend all of it in aftermath and filler eps.
There’s more reveal to come. We just don’t know what it is yet.
Pearl’s story in particular is far from all told.
Whoa.
So does the orientation of a gem – for a diamond, anyway – determine their physical form? The PD to RQ transformation seemed to be a bit more than mere shape-shifting. Wouldn’t Steven and Amethyst have fused into something other than Smoky Quartz if the diamond gem properties were more dominant?
And yeah, Pearl is still following the orders of a diamond every time she clamps her hands over her mouth. 
…I was underwhelmed by the reveal. Not necessarily that Rose was Pink…but how they did it.
I don’t see why - Steven and Rose’s personalities aren’t changed by whether they’re quartzes or diamonds, and Rose’s physicality differed only slightly between Pink Diamond and Rose Quartz, so the aspects that actually affect the fused gem aren’t changed.
For obvious reasons, the following ignores Stevonnie.
It’s an interesting coincidence that both of the known fusions involving the Pink Diamond gem (Rainbow and Smokey Quartz) are both Quartzes, but even when we thought she was a Quartz, there was no real reason to believe it was anything other than a coincidence.
Mineralogically, Smokey Quartz is the only different-Gem Fusion whose fused form is the same type as either of her component Gems (Amethyst) - though since most of the different-Gem Fusions are silicates (all except Alexandrite and Malachite), most are going to be in a similar class in a broader sense. (Obviously, Rainbow Quartz seemed to be when we thought Rose was a Quartz, but that’s still only 2 out of a half dozen.)
While it’s difficult to guess what roles the different-gem Fusions would have in Gem society (aside from the Quartzes, which like other quartzes would presumably be mid-status warriors), they don’t seem to match the higher-status component Gems, for the most part - Malachite might (she looks like a warrior), but a) we don’t know whether Lapis Lazulis are actually lower status than Jaspers - they seem to be, but that might just be our Lapis and Jasper’s personalities - and b) given that she was inherently unstable it’s hard to guess what a properly formed Malachite might be like. And Sugilite might possibly - she’d clearly be a warrior, but it’s unclear if she’d have been Quartz-level or Ruby-level (if there’s actually a difference)… But Garnet certainly doesn’t (as a Smart Bruiser, she’d clearly be a warrior, not a noble), Opal and Sardonyx take much more strongly after Pearl than Amethyst or Garnet… Of course, before the reveal, Smokey and Rainbow Quartz would have appeared to match the higher status (and lower status, in Smokey’s case, since both were supposedly Quartzes), but that’s out the window, now.
“i think I’ll keep this cat.”
“She’ll need a name.”
“How about Steven?”
“Too Confusing.”
“How about Cat Steven?”
Time has passed, and I still haven’t gotten around to posting analysis of/reactions to “A Single Pale Rose”.
I’ll try to get it done before the next weeklong Steven-bomb drops on July 2.
The string of episodes is called “Heart of the Crystal Gems” and the promo clip show mostly the team dealing with the fallout of “A Single Pale Rose’s” revelations.
I don’t think PD created the persona of Rose Quartz to lead a rebellion. I think she started becoming Rose Quartz to escape a Diamond’s constrained life, to see how other Gem behaved when they were not in her exalted presence, and to explore her new Colony. Over time, she realized that she didn’t like being a Diamond, realized that many Gems were unhappy in their roles, and came to love life on Earth. Then she decided to use her already-established Rose Quartz persona to start the rebellion.
Agreed, that’s definitely how it reads. Absolutely nothing about it reads ungenuine.
Two-word summary of “Can’t Go Back”:
Poor Lapis.
If so then I am a bit disappointed as the royal taking on a secret identity to explore life as a commoner and to escape the constraints of a royal existence, therein learning more than they bargained for, is so horribly … overdone … of a cliche. I look for more from this writing team than overdone cliches and I think there is more to PD/Rose than that.
Part of the greatness of this show is that they are embracing the essential complex flaws and deficits of the characters, especially of those who are most looked as its heroes, or at least as the most sympathetic ones. They tend to avoid the cliches.
There’s a difference between being flawed, which is what Rose is, and being a complete monster, which is what you’re proposing she is.
You think that is what I am proposing she is?
Not in my head anyway.
I see PD starting as a brat. Wanting a world of her own but once given it not wanting to do the work. Figuring a little faux rebellion would get the others, Yellow and Blue, to excuse her not getting much done and created Rose for that purpose. As a Diamond her perspective was that gems below her were pretty expendable and organics not worth anything. That was what she knew. But as Rose she began to come into her own, to develop her own desires, her own beliefs, other than doing what Blue and Yellow did and being jealous of them, saw beauty and value in the organics, value in gems of lower status, became attached to Pearl (who again I think has more story to tell than just having been PD’s Pearl, “her function” is/was more/other than that, I think), and came up with the plan, a very immature, foolish, maybe a bit romantic and naive, and ultimately tragic, plan, that was intended to result in her and Pearl living unbeknownst to Blue and Yellow on a planet that was not worth the effort.
And then she lived the lie, forced Pearl to live the lie too, always a bit sad, maybe a bit self-loathing.
To me that is not “a complete monster”, it is a character of tragedy, and it is more interesting to me than the cliche.
The kicker of course is that killing her PD/Rose persona off to create a PD-human hybrid containing her essence, her gem, is, we presume, ultimately redemption. As a gem-human hybrid Steven can fuse with Connie and gems. And if my wild speculation is correct, and White is the fusion of Blue, Yellow, and Pink (and note that blue yellow and red/pink light make white light), with Pearl’s function to serve that fusion, then ultimate redemption will be Steven bringing human into that WD fusion as well, with Pearl’s function then being made more clear as a final reveal.
Coming back to “A Single Pale Rose”. Even discounting the big whammy reveal, it was a very effective episode. I’m glad the crew didn’t use the “Inside Out” method of having the different Pearls inside her head represent Pearl’s emotions or different parts of her personality.
There are plenty of videos out there on Youtube stating that the show is contradicting itself and past continuity by the big reveal, but in a board-driven show with a huge amount of episodes (close to 150), there is no way to keep everything completely tight in the continuity. I know some fans who have dropped the show, saying that Sugar had no idea where the show was going and that she pulled the big reveal out of nowhere, a la Lost or Battlestar Galactica. I don’t know where people come up with this, because it’s pretty obvious in hindsight that the Crew has had this in mind from almost the beginning.
If you rewatch earlier episodes dealing with Rose or Pearl in light of the fact that Rose is Pink Diamond, there is a lot you will notice in hindsight. I’m not going to compile a full list, but here a few.
-Rose/Steven’s impressive power set makes more sense now that we know Rose was just not a simple quartz.
-It also explains why Rose’s shield could resist the Corruption Wave.
-Ever wonder why Pearl got so upset that Rose kept secrets from her in “Rose’s Scabbard”? Now we know.
-In the same ep, Rose is actually being literal when she calls Pearl “my Pearl”
-In “We Need to Talk”, Rose thinks it’s a good thing that Greg knows nothing about her past. Also,“I’m not a real person?!”
-In “Sworn to the Sword”, we see flashbacks of Pearl getting poofed multiple times while interceding in Rose’s fights. She knew that if Rose was poofed, the game was up as everyone would see PD’s gem.
Finally, Eyeball of all people was right on the money. In “Bubbled”, Eyeball told Steven that his gem was not a Rose Quartz gem.
See, this is what I’m saying is completely monstrous - the idea that she got Gems shattered not as an unintended side effect of accomplishing a goal, but deliberately, to justify failing to accomplish anything.
- In my version it was supposed to be faux, and was at first. No one was supposed to get hurt.
- In my version PD at that point did not see lower status gems as of much importance anyway.
- At what point did gems get shattered rather than poofed? I think after the fake death and by a time at which she had become committed to the rebellion for real.
As for 3), the battle at the Strawberry Battlefield involved lots of shattering and was relatively early in the Rebellion, being the first major pitched battle of the Rebellion. There’s no exact timeline, but PD’s “shattering” happened relatively late in the Rebellion.
You need to rewatch Rose’s conversation between Rose & Pearl in “Roses’s Scabbard” again and see how that it plays out with your little scenario.
However, what really doesn’t make any sense is your assertion that Pink Diamond started the Crystal Gems because she was lazy and running the Earth Colony was too much work. Blue Diamond told Pink point-blank in “Can’t Go Back” that Pink didn’t need to do anything to establish the Earth colony and defeat the rebellion. All she had to do was be a symbol and her Court and her Gems would have taken care of everything. But your Pink Diamond, who has an aversion to hard work, thought it would actually be easier and less effort to create a fake identity and live a double life, recruit hundreds, if not thousands, of Gems, and manage both sides of a war that ran for hundreds of years.