Maybe since Peridots aren’t made for combat they’re designed to poof faster if they’re being attacked by another gem in the hopes that their gems will be left alone. They don’t poof very easily when taking damage from non-gem sources because its assumed support will be there in a minute or two to help them out during construction projects/kindergarden related tasks.
Makes sense! They’re engineers so they’re expected to take a few hard knocks. Susceptibility to gem weaponry might be intended to prevent rebellion of the technical caste.
Actually… have we seen a gem ever be poofed by something that wasn’t by the direct action of another gem?
Oh woah
amethyst falls off a cliff and only scratches her gem, but gets poofed by jasper’s attack, i think it was a kick or a headbutt? actually, if you think about gems who have taken the most direct damage from other gems, pearl wins so far. she got kicked around like a sportsball by sugillite, one of the very strongest gem fusions, and didn’t poof.
perhaps if technician gems like peridot are meant to buckle quickly in combat situations, pearls are meant to hold up under whatever physical abuse their much, much larger superiors dish out. i don’t think a diamond or high-ranking quartz would be pleased with a toy that snaps the first time they smack it, and doesn’t regenerate for weeks.
imagine younger pearl realizing that how much abuse she was built to take could actually be a huge asset in battle, and let her face down gems ten times her size. imagine frustrated quartzes realizing this too.
Before Steven was born Amethyst used to say ‘fuck’ all the time & so when he was a baby Greg had to sit her down and explain that she has to stop swearing around Steven because he’s young & impressionable
So Amethyst is like “but that’s my favourite word, when will be stop being young & impressionable so I can say it again??”
And Greg is like “uhh I don’t know, 15 I guess? 15 is probably old enough”
“Got it”
flash forward to Steven’s fifteenth birthday and he is woken at dawn by Amethyst yelling “wake the FUCK up Steven it’s FUCKING TIME”
& he spends the entire day losing his mind
Steven: w-what’s happening
Garnet: *deadpan* Amethyst just got her favourite word back
Amethyst: *running around the house* FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
Greg: what’s going on
Amethyst: you said once Steven was 15 I could say fuck again
Greg, who only hazily recalls the conversation in question: ……i DID?
Amethyst: *runs outside* FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK *distant sounds of spooked birds*
Pearl: Steven the *whispering* F-word is a bad word that Amethyst USED to say before-
Steven: I know what fuck means Pearl
Amethyst: *stopping dead in her tracks* WHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATT??
Pearl: who taught you that word mister!!
Steven: um… Lars and Sadie… *mumbling* five years ago…
Amethyst: I’ve been denying myself my favourite word for FIVE YEARS for NOTHING??
Greg: uh even if he knows what it means it’s still not really appropriate for you t-
Payback for not listening to her reasonable speech about Earth’s resources.
honest to god, this is a lot funnier if you pay attention to the plants in the last few panels. I recognize a few of the poisonous plants, but there are also breeds of flowers that specifically smell like rotting meat.
Okay, so let me just type for like an hour straight about this.
Rose Quartz is Pink Diamond. Or rather, Pink Diamond is Rose Quartz. Steven is Pink Diamond. All this time. The entire time.
She faked her death, alright, but I never even… I mean, I’d heard the theory, once before. I heard there was a theory out there that Rose was Pink Diamond. You know what I thought? I thought it was pretty stupid. Yet here we are.
Pink Diamond is still alive, and whole, and she’s been Steven the whole time.
This truly does change everything. Everything. Absolutely everything. I am dead freaking certain I can rewatch this show for the umpteenth time and it’ll all feel wildly different and brand new and absolutely insane now.
I have a lot to say about this. So let’s start at the beginning.
It’s no secret that Pink held some level of love for Humans. If she didn’t, the Zoo wouldn’t exist– and even if it did, it wouldn’t be a paradise. I suppose… It really couldn’t come down to Pink just stopping her colony being made. She may have been a Diamond, but to just put a complete hold on the plans for the super-hub would have tarnished the authority that is so important to the Diamonds. A change in plans means the Diamonds are fallible. Flawed. Yellow, Blue, and White wouldn’t stand for it– heck, they probably wouldn’t even understand.
So it appears that Pink invented Rose Quartz. Our Rose. She disguised herself as one of them, staged a rebellion, and then fought a faux war between herself and herself. Her intention was to give an excuse to stop the invasion and save Earth, but as we saw last episode, Blue and Yellow wouldn’t, couldn’t let her.
“Blue and Yellow don’t care. They never have. This is Pink Diamond’s colony. We can end it here, right now.”
That’s where Pink was wrong. So very, very wrong. Blue and Yellow cared quite a freaking lot. I… I think Pink was expecting to fade from history, and Earth would be untouched, and her fellow diamonds wouldn’t bat an eye at her death.
Instead, the Diamonds came together and wreaked their horrible vengeance upon the Earth. Her Earth. They broke the minds of countless Gems, and they tortured the bodies of countless more in the fusion experiments and the Cluster. So much was the Diamond’s love for Pink that they wrought every horrible torture they could on the Gems complicit in her apparent death.
Pink Diamond could never have wanted that, and I don’t think she saw it coming, either. How could she know the Diamonds loved her? They denied her requests, they spoke down to her, they were cold to her. She saw no love from them, and knew no love from them. She just… didn’t know.
Which makes Rose’s various speeches throughout the series so painful. It’s no wonder she knows the value of love, and recognizing love. She didn’t, and it brought down hell upon everyone around her.
“You’re not what I expected at all,” muttered Peridot.
Pearl paused mid-weld. It had been a few days since Peridot’s meltdown, since she’d contacted Yellow Diamond only to have her faith in the Homeworld hierarchy shattered. Garnet had spent a day calming her down, and they’d returned to working on the drill, so things were sort of back to normal, but Peridot had barely spoken to Pearl since. No smug superiority, no plaintive whining about her ideas, no backhanded dismissals of her ability (which had actually been few and far between since the robot fight, to Peridot’s credit. The little gremlin was trying, and Pearl appreciated that.)
No, Peridot had just…stared.
Not while she thought Pearl was watching, of course. As soon as Pearl glanced in Peridot’s direction, she’d pretend she’d been completely engrossed in her work, but nobody had ever taught Peridot how to be subtle. It had really started to grate, but Garnet had asked her to give Peridot time to adjust, and so…well, she had.
I have a sneaking suspicion that we’re going to get a whole arc about the “off colour” Gems this season. I’m not sure why – Steven Universe just seems like the sort of story where a fifth-act viewpoint shift to a completely different planet where we follow a new group of characters we’ve never seen before and have no reason to care about, yet who will inexplicably become more popular with the fandom than the ostensible core cast is the sort of thing that happens.
(I mean, I’m not saying it’s anything more than coincidence that we’re looking at the environmentally depleted homeworld of an aggressively colonising interstellar empire with a strict colour-based caste system suffering from a reproductive crisis and ruled over by a giant woman modeled after a notable real-world musical artist, but I’m not not saying that either!)
just moving along like everyone else 